There’s a meme out there where Netflix says, “Hey you want to watch a 10-hour movie?” and the obvious response is, “Heck, no.” To which Netflix replies, “What if I split it into eight parts and you watch them one after another,” and the response is, “Damn you, I’m in.”
Red and I watched the first part of Harlan Coben’s Stay Close on Thursday night. We were tempted to watch the second part of this weird, twisting and turning thriller, but we thought better of it.
Early Friday night I said, “Should we pick up with part two of that thing we watched last night?” and she replied, “Sure, why not?”
[sigh …]
After watching episodes 2 through 8, we have another Netflix show to recommend to people with a warning they may end up binge-watching. It’s a good cast led by Cush Jumbo as the woman with too many secrets and James Nesbitt as the chief inspector who can’t stop until he’s connected all the dots, no matter where it leads.
That wasn’t what I was planning to write for today, but now it’s 10 minutes before posting time. That’s what binge-watching does.
It has been a sedentary couple of weeks as I have fended off what I insist is a typical winter cold, mainly because I have never had the fever that heralds you-know-what. Perhaps I would be decried as Omicron Superspreader, supervillain extraordinaire, except that I have been working mostly from home and have kept to myself during my forays into The Office.
The main hangover from this cold is an ugly-sounding cough that won’t go away. “OMG,” I hear you whispering, “He really does have … IT! Unclean! Unclean! Take him away!” And now it occurs to me that I’ve become an old guy talking incessantly about his maladies, and so I change subjects.
There is, I suppose, a camaraderie among those who have journeyed to distant stars where humans had never before trod. We recognize each other as we pass in airport concourses, and we nod. If only we were permitted to share what we learned light years from home, but no one would believe us — or worse, we would be removed to a place where we could not harm ourselves or others with our supposed delusions.
I remember the first time I laid eyes on Sol from light years away. “That little insignificant dot in the sky? Why are we so full of ourselves?” The reply to my question was not exactly flattering.
Abducted by aliens? Is that what you think I’m claiming? Ah, if only the truth were so adventurous. Such tales I could tell, of bizarre dark-eyed scientists perplexed by the workings of this fragile mortal coil, probes attached in places I never suspected a probe could be attached. No, it’s nothing like that.
I am bound more by an unspoken code than draconian law. Those of us who have been out there simply don’t discuss it. I wish I could say more, but, as I said, you would think I’m making it all up anyway.
If I could share one thing I learned in my Journey to Far Metaphor — oh, and now you begin to understand — I would say, well, love one another. It’s a platitude no one takes seriously — “Ah, yes, we should, we could, we would” — and a platitude as neglected as time.
But when you’ve seen Earth from such a distance, it seems like nothing is more important.
Summer the puppy loves to have something in her mouth. She is always gnawing on a bone or a doggie toy, and her first move upon going outside is to snag a brown leaf or a twig off the ground to carry about, like a stereotypical hayseed with a toothpick hanging out the side of her mouth.
A month into winter, few signs remain of her namesake. Summer would be a distant memory if we didn’t have a puppy named Summer to warm up the house. Another cold front is swooping in and Thursday’s high is forecast to be in the single digits Fahrenheit. The four seasons indeed. This is the season where the main topics of conversation are how cold it is and who’s got the bug that’s going around this week.
Of course we have had the latter topic droned into us so deeply that it’s not “the bug that’s going around” anymore, it’s just The Bug. That’s all I care to say about that today.
The word came back from doggie daycare that they talk about how kind a dog Summer is. That, to me, is a new word to describe a dog, and it suits her. Summer is a kind young thing, maybe not so much when she’s barking at Dejah because she wants to chew on the toy between Dejah’s paws. Let’s think about how kind Summer can be.
When she is rambunctious, Summer will jump up and wrap her jaws around my arm. She is a dog, after all, and it may be alarming to some people to have a dog clamp their jaws on their forearm. The thing is, Summer could do some major damage to that arm if she applied a bit more pressure, but she doesn’t. When she is wrestling with her older sister, it looks like Summer is attempting to tear Dejah’s throat out, or rip an ear off, and yet no blood is shed and both dogs live to sleep off another day.
Then there’s Blackberry the cat, 14 years of “leave me alone and feed me” attitude. Summer wraps her soft jaws over Blackberry’s head, and the cat bats her clawless paws at the eager young snout, and there is much growling and snarling and gnashing of teeth, and yet no one is injured or killed in the melee.
Of course, golden retrievers are gentle by nature, but they’re equipped with the same teeth and jaws as any other wolf descendent. So, yes, if mercy is part of being kind, then Summer is a kind puppy.
