Friday, December 24, 2004

My mother received some gifts from her coworkers, and one of them freaks me out inordinately. It is a travel game, like the magnetic chess that was once taped to Blue Thunder's ceiling. This is weird enough already, because there is no reason to think that my mother would want a travel game. Already, the explanation must be pretty strange. She was perhaps shopping at a hobby store for Crimmas decorations, tripped out on shrooms, when she remembered that she needed a gift. Her claw hand grabbed a travel game, and the next day she was still starry eyed and hazy from the shrooms, so she didn't realize what a strange and inappropriate gift it was. That's not reasonable, perhaps, but it is conceivable (proof: I just thought of it). Here's the kicker, though: it's travel tic tac toe. A metallic cylander with nine holes, and two sets of wooden pegs, one blue and one red. And a two-page rule book. For tic tac toe. This rule book freaks me out over and above the coworker, because someone had to write it, and someone else had to ask that person to write it, and there must be a shop somewhere that printed it. It's like something out of David Lynch. I can see Agent Cooper buying one for his cousin, the camera lingering over the felt box that stores the travel tic tac toe with the little glossy label that says "travel tic tac toe." Now, if the coworker's child had made this thing in shop class as a final project, I would be somewhat comfortable with its existence, but as I've already described, that didn't happen. So the existence of the thing is creepy enough. Then there is the problem of what was going through the coworker's head when she decided to give it to my mother. I fall over crying when I try to think of this. My mother says that the woman, whose name is Diane, happens to be one of her more intelligent coworkers. A quiet woman, but when she spoke to her, she seemed okay (which is more than she can say for most of her coworkers, who are rabid Bush supporters, and foreward vicious ill-conceived badly written e-mails about the tax code, and the people Clinton offed, and that sort of thing, and probably joked about the election to make my mother feel bad, and who cackle). If anyone has insight on this critical issue, i.e. the gift, please tell me, because I'm cracked up about it. I'm thinking the world is not even approaching logical if this sort of thing can happen.

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