OK, people, I’m here! Where is everybody?

We have the meeting every Monday morning. They’re almost always late. Sometimes only a few of them show up. They’re such wackos. I have to have at least ten of them if we expect to have a chance at winning this week’s game. Half the time, the ones that do show up forget something, a line, a shape, an article, a verb… Sometimes, whole phrases. I see a couple strolling in nonchalantly, giggling to themselves about something or other. (They all think they’re so damned funny.) I see some other stragglers, too, coming along behind the first two. That’s five so far. They look like they’ve been out all night, maybe slept in their clothes. When they get closer, I notice a couple of them even smell bad. How the hell can I work with these bums? Four more coming in. I get them all to line up for inspection. A few of them don’t look that bad, but I can see I’m going to have to deal somehow with the others. I take the worst of them aside, try to get them presentable. They need to be cleaned up, washed and scrubbed. Everybody gets a clean shirt with the team logo. I guess they’ll have to do. Still, there are only nine. I can go with the nine, but our chances of winning are pretty slim as it is, even with a full team.

It’s almost game-time. I’m going to have to make a call. I hate to do it, but there are a few past team members kicking around out there with not much else to do. Some of them were pretty good, in spite of previously being on a losing squad. It wasn’t their fault. There are a lot of unpredictable factors at play once the game is underway. So, I make the call. I remember one ex-team member in particular, one of the piano-bar guys. He might work out this time around. I call, he’s there, like I knew he would be. He comes right over.

I look them all over again, one more time. Maybe three of them show promise, four if you count the piano-bar guy. So here’s what I’ve got this week: Two guys at a bar, a guy at the beach with his kid, a guy sitting in an easy-chair, one on a couch taking a nap. There’s the piano-bar guy, a lawyer, two scruffy-looking doctors, and a pig. This is the best I can do this week, so off they go to New York City, to compete with a couple of thousand other hopefuls. I wish them luck. Even though most of them are losers, I can’t help but feel proud of them. My guys. Maybe they’ll come back with a trophy. It’s happened before.

My Uncle Spike has been at it again.

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For some time, I had been working on my formula, which I intended to be a means for people to escape their mundane or unhappy existences and exchange them for happier lives. The results of my experiments hadn’t met with much success. I probably shouldn’t have tried it on myself, but I’d already lost a couple of assistants and had run out of volunteers.

One of my assistants became convinced, after imbibing my formula, that she was an actress in “La Dolce Vita”. She kept offering me pony-rides around the lab. She would trot around the room on all fours, whinnying loudly in Italian. This activity passed after a few hours, but she continued to make intermittent blowing noises while flapping her lips and kept pawing the floor with her foot. I found this very irritating and after a day or two finally had to let her go. I watched her gallop happily away down the street, her nostrils flaring and her hair flowing behind her in the wind.

Another assistant had reacted by hallucinating that he was a refrigerator, and stood stock still for several hours in a corner of my laboratory making periodic humming noises. Occasionally, he would complain that I had left his door open or that it was too warm in the room. I noticed his breath actually seemed a bit cold when he spoke to me. As was the case with my other assistant, he recovered after a while, but not completely. He hung around for another day or two, during which time he kept offering me food. Then, few days later, he said he was going out for some freon and never came back.

I continued to tinker with the ingredients of my potion and one night decided it was time for another test. I was out of guinea pigs and I realized I would have to drink it myself. After jotting down the time on a notepad in front of me, I downed my new mixture in one gulp.

At first, I detected very little change, but then I began to get dizzy and lightheaded. I scribbled a few notes, but my handwriting was becoming illegible. Then I blacked out. I have no memory of what took place next. Even now I have to consult what I can read of my old notes in order to re-construct events.

When I came to, I was indeed a different person. Gradually, I became aware of unaccustomed thoughts filling my brain. Gone were the mathematical formulas and calculations that used to consume all my attention. They had been replaced by doctor jokes, plays on words, and hundreds of variations on the line, “Honey, I’m home!”. My notepad at this point switches from my written scientific observations to doodles of talking animals and people with big noses.

I had become a cartoonist.

Unlike the experiences with my assistants, my new condition never diminished, in fact, it seemed to intensify. I had hoped for something more along the lines of becoming a movie star or a gifted poet, however I found I rather enjoyed drawing funny pictures. In time, I found a way to make a living at it. Though my new brain is good at making up gags, it lacks its old science skills and I’m no longer capable of producing an antidote, so, even if I wanted to, there’s no going back.

All things considered, I was lucky. This is much better than some of the things I might have become. I could have been a bloodthirsty dictator, a fire-hydrant, an insect, or the entire Republican Party, not to mention a kitchen appliance or an actress who thinks she’s a horse.

I had that recurring dream again last night, the one about the river of ideas in the back yard. In the dream, it’s morning. I get all dressed up in my fishing outfit: Jeans, hip boots, work-shirt, a vest with numerous pockets full of fishing gear, and a hat with strange-looking fishing lures stuck in the hatband.

When I’m ready, I open the back door and step out onto my deck. In the dream, the deck is more like a dock, and I go to the edge, where the river is rushing by. I sit down in a swivel chair I have out there, affix one of my lures to my fishing-line and drop it in the moving water. I fish for quite a while, usually, before I get a tug on the line. I spend the time between nibbles gazing into the sky or around the yard.

A jet moves slowly across the blue expanse, rushing toward some distant place. In the yard, bushes need attending to. A drought has turned some of the plants brown. I really should be…

My fishing rod twitches a little, then bends toward the surface of the rushing water. A bite! Often, my dream only allows me a small, undersized fish, which I have to throw back. Occasionally, I get legitimate ones, though. They fight like crazy sometimes, but they’re no match for me, a veteran angler. By the end of the dream, I often have three or four big ones in my creel by sundown.

I head back inside and clean my catch, put them in the refrigerator.
I have some dinner, then, and go to sleep.

And that’s when I wake up.