NIGHT GALLERY

Sometimes I feel like I was raised in the Twilight Zone and graduated to the Night Gallery. It’s a writer’s curse, living with an excess of imagination.

All trouble is big trouble, or what’s the point?

Like last Wednesday or was it Monday or . . .

You remember. It was a dark and stormy night.

Because I am not quite eighty years old and my insides are starting to quite possibly, liquefy, I get up in the dark of the night to visit parts of the house that are not my bedroom to dispense liquids. Okay, I had to wee.

On the dark and stormy night in question, I had just toddled back to bed, tucked myself away, and started to drift off when I heard something—something other than the moan of raccoons as they arm-wrestle each other over leftover gristle in the trashcans. Instead, it sounded like raccoons using a walkie-talkie, and it was weird.

Under the covers I tensed. Had I heard a raccoon walkie-talkie? Or was hearing walkie-talkie noises a symptom of my liquefying brain? I bolted upright in bed and cocked my head to the side like a curious poodle. I listened harder. 

Dark wind whipped. Stormy rain slashed. I heard another new sound. It was eerie, mechanical, and tinny. Honestly, it made me think of the Star Ship Enterprise transporter or a trash compactor. I scrabbled through my sheets for my cell phone.

Flinging myself from the bed, I jammed into the corner next to the open window. Branches scraped against glass. Greasy raccoon fingerprints glinted on the window in a flash of lightning. Wind banged the hedge that needed trimming. 

Clutching my cell phone, I crouched—smaller, tighter, more.

Outside, a radio voice crackled in the night: thieves or space aliens or creeper bandits mumbled. It was impossible to make out their evil plot.

Whispering, I said to no one, “Man oh man, the thieves are getting sophisticated if they’re using walkie-talkies.”

The weirdo space noise came again. I wedged harder into the corner. My finger hovered over the nine on my phone. I muttered, “This is it, killed by walkie-talkie toting super alien creeper villains or raccoons.”

Suddenly, softly, another possibility came to me. Chagrined, I stood up, turned off the phone, shut the window, and crawled back into bed.

In the morning, I wandered outside to where my two-year old grandson’s “Mighty Midget Spider Man’s Ride and Push” was parked and turned it off.

Spider Man’s tinny voice chirped and faded.

What? 

It could have been walkie-talkie toting super alien creeper villains—any writer with half an imagination knows that. 

Linda (Big Ears) Zern 

ONE TO MAKE YOU LAUGH. ONE TO MAKE YOU THINK. ONE TO MAKE YOU CRY.

Come see me at the Symposium, January 31st from noon to 4pm, at the Saint Cloud library. Books for sale. Authors to see. Signatures to get. Fun to have.

A Brief History of my Time on the Internet

We moved to a state I hated some years ago. It had north in the title for a reason. I survived the snow and ice by floating in a steaming garden tub like a lily pad and writing emails describing my garden tub lifestyle. In the beginning, I sent my emails to a couple of friends and some relatives.

One of those relatives sent an email back and said, “Quit sending me these damn silly emails.” That’s when I knew I was on to something.

My mission statement became: Block This! 

Over the years the email list grew and grew. Then MySpace was invented and someone said that I should get hip and get a Space that was mine, but I heard that MySpace was just a bunch of teenagers hiding out from their parents and complaining. 

Sure. Sure. I complained a lot in my emails, but I tried to keep it highbrow grousing and not ‘he said, she said’ whining. I mean . . . I wrote about real problems like Japanese beetle infestations and cabin fever crimes of passion. 

Then someone said that I should have a website, write a book, run some ads, and cash in. “Even the terrorists have websites,” they said. 

I looked at my computer, flipped it on and then flipped it off and thought, “I need to find some terrorists to help me get a website.” Three years later, I fired my IT staff (my computer analyzing husband) and tracked down a do-it-yourself website for making websites.

Then I was told that I should have a blog, since weekly emails sent to a trillion people really qualified as spam. Groaning, I went into blog mode. Too late. By the time I was blogging the mere mention of the words blog or blogging made people hunker down inside their hoodies and pretend to be reading their texts or looking at Bonsai kittens grown in bottles.

Okay. Now it’s Twitter and Instagramming and Linked In and Createspace and Smashwords and . . . everything needs to be connected to your dazzling hand held Fancy Phone and . . .

I traded in my old obsolete phone for a new dazzle phone and the lovely young man at the Fancy Phone Hut checked my data and said, “Well, you have ten catrillion super bytes available to you, and you’re using ONE.” He snickered. My IT staff (my computer analyzing husband) laughed right out loud. I fired him again. 

But I keep right on writing those “damn silly emails,” once and twice a week for sixteen years, and navigating every single learning curve thrown at me by technology and the Internet. Why?

Because talking to myself gets old; that’s why.

Linda (Block On) Zern