Conversations in My Head

Chinchillas

Chincillas

Ted walked into the pet store. With no hesitation, he opened the front door (the cow bell on the handle ding-a-ling-a-linged), marched past the cockatoo perched by the door (“Hello, I’m not for sale!” it cackled), past the various assorted reptiles and birds (the 2 dozen parakeets were extremely noisy!), past the adorable puppies playing tug-of-war in the makeshift playpen (they wagged their tails but couldn’t understand why he didn’t stop and at least pet them), and went straight up to the rodent section. He ignored the hamsters (which all left their wheels and tunnels and hid in their plastic houses), guinea pigs (whose squeals sounded not unlike a pig’s), and the bunnies (which simply sat and started at him).

Instead, Ted simply stood directly in front of a large, metal cage full of very fuzzy animals with ears that looked like a cross between a mouse and a bunny; short, coarse-but-fuzzy tails; small little front paws that looked remarkably like little hands; back feet like a tiny kangaroo; and big black eyes.

In short, these animals had the face of a guinea pig, the body of a rabbit, and the tail of squirrel.

They were chinchillas.

Most of them were gray, although one of them was white with a gray tail.

Ted stood in front of the cage. He didn’t bend over and examine the cute, cuddly creatures, or try to pet them, or anything. He simply stood there and stared at them. He crossed his arms impatiently.

Eventually, a store employee realized that this person wasn’t “just looking”, but was waiting for assistance.

The employee walked over to Ted and asked:

“Can I help you?”

Ted looked up, reacting as many customers do - like nothing was really wrong:

“Oh, yes, I would like to purchase a chinchilla. The white one, please.”

The employee hesitated. “Well, you can’t simply pick out a chinchilla. They’re very finicky animals, and although these are all handled since birth, and therefore very tame, each one won’t like just anybody.”

Ted repeated, firmly, “I want the white one.”

“Again, you can’t just pick a chinchilla. The chinchilla actually has to pick you.”

“Hm.” Ted bent over and looked into the cage. The chinchillas all turned and looked at him. “Well,” Ted said, “I guess I can deal with that. But I’m confident that one way or another, the white one and I will wind up together.”

“Okay…” In his mind, the employee began to question Ted’s motives. He shook his head. This was his job, it didn’t matter what he thought of a customer. “Well, let me open the cage for you, and you can put your hand in. It may take a moment, as the different chins may come up and sniff you, maybe even nibble you, but the one that stays the longest or jumps onto your hand will be your chinchilla.”

Ted didn’t respond, so the employee opened the cage. Ted put his hand in the cage, close to the floor, palm facing up. Like the employee said, the various chinchillas (including the coveted white one) hopped, walked, and otherwise made their way to his hand, and began sniffing him. They began sniffing and nibbling all up and down his arm and hand, more and more. Soon every chin in the cage was standing on whatever part of Ted they could find, sniffing him, and making very quiet squeaking noises.

Ted’s eyes were wide, but he didn’t move a muscle. He look over at the store employee. His eyes were just as wide, his eyebrows raised. He shook his head, raising his hands in confusion. “I don’t know, this has never happened before.”

“Well,” Ted said, “can you simply remove some of them? Surely if you make some of them move, only some of them will stay.”

The employee gently reached his arm through the small cage door, next to Ted’s arm, and tried pushing some of the chins. They all resisted, but some of them sort of fell off. They immediately got back on. The employee kept brushing them off, but they kept getting back on. The employee got more aggressive, but to no avail.

This ritual continued for about 5 minutes until he finally gave up. He threw up his arms. “I don’t know what to do! This doesn’t make any sense!”

Ted tried to withdraw his arm, but there were so many chins that they were pushing against the cage bars. So Ted pulled harder, and they started falling off, but they kept trying to scramble back on. So Ted simply yanked his arm out, and the store employee quickly closed the door. Ted stood straight up for moment, looking down at the normally docile creatures as they began to gnaw on the bars in their crazed desire to get to Ted.

Ted looked at the employee, then turned around, and marched out the door. Past the adorable puppies, past the assorted reptiles and noisy birds, past the big cockatoo (which cackled “Goodbye! If you come back I’m still not for sale!”), and out the door, the cow bell of which jangled angrily.

The store employee simply stood there, staring after him. He turned and looked at the chins. They had quickly, surprisingly, calmed down, back to normal. They were going about their quiet ways, eating, chewing on cardboard, and climbing around the different parts of the cage. He shook his head. “Maybe my intuition wasn’t wrong about that guy after all…”

House Music

Norm turned on his all-house music system. He needed something to help him focus while he worked, and although he would be working primarily in the study, he wanted to take advantage of this one opportuniy he had to play HIS music over the sound system. Normally, his wife and kids would insist on playing that cheesy country music throughout the whole house, and there was nothing he could do about it - he was outvoted!

This time, however, the family was visiting his parents-in-law, and he was going to play what he wanted. He grumbled. He paid good money for this system, and did all the work himself to install it, and he never even got to use it.

He put in the soundtrack to that new thriller movie that he saw with his guy friends (his wife refused to watch it with him - she thought it looked like a stupid movie). It starred two popular actors, a man and a woman, as they awoke from cryogenic sleep to find themselves in an country theu didn’t recognize, and then trekked across a foreign, post-apocalyptic landscape filled with unknown terrors and paranoid groups of human survivors.

Norm really like the soundtrack, because, for the most part, it was very ambient in nature, and provided a unique atmosphere for getting thought-intensive work done.

The music began with the swell of an orchestral string section, then shifted into a brooding, slow-moving piece accompanied by ambient piano and harp.

He spread out the paperwork from his big work assignment across his desk in a very organized fashion. He didn’t sit down in his cushy office chair, but instead leaned on the desk with both of his hands, intently studying the notes and figures on the paper.

An hour later, the papers were scattered chaotically, and some of them were on the floor or in the wastebasket. Norm was sitting in the chair with his left elbow on the desk and his left hand on his forehead. In his right hand was one of the papers, which was completely filled with pencil scribbles that had erased, re-written, and then erased again.

The movie soundtrack was in the midst of a moving piece that accompanied a scene in which the main characters were being chased by wolfmen and vampires. Norm was seriously considering taking a break when this track was over, so when the hammered percussive section died away into tense, sustained string chords, he set down the paper he was holding with a sigh. He spun his chair around, stood up, and stretched.

He was in the middle of a big yawn when he heard a strange noise in the living room. It sounded remarkably like a door being shut, which didn’t make any sense, because his family was gone and no one else had a key to the door, which was always kept locked.

He froze, and slowly put his arms down. He peeked his head arouund the corner of the room’s doorframe, and he heard the noise again. He slowly looked down both ends of the hallway, but didn’t see anything. He heard the noise again. It seemed to be coming from the living room, where the door to the house was. Was someone trying to break in?

Quietly, Norm grabbed the wooden baseball bat that Norm always kept in the study, even though his family never understood why. Then, while the movie soundtrack continued continued to play its tense, subtle music throughout the house, he began to tiptoe down the hall towards the living room.

The noise started happening more frequently now, like whoever it was who may be trying to break in was becoming more frantic, more determined.

Norm’s heart was pounding in his ears, almost in time to the now building music that he was only barely aware of. He clutched the bat tighter in his hands as he emerged from the hallway and into the main room of the house. The TV was off, and so were all the lights, except for the one directly above the front door.

The sound had stopped, but now he heard something rustling by the door. He couldn’t tell for sure, but he thought it was coming from the bush just outside the door. He swallowed and moved closer to the door. He’d never encountered a burglar before, but he wasn’t about to let one break into his house.

The music was almost at its highest point now, with every string instrument (and even parts of the horns and percussion) playing repeated notes in a steady rhythm, getting louder and louder.

Norm reached a trembling hand out to grasp the door handle.

Just as the music built to a deafening crash, a small, black figure dashed out from behind the couch and leapt at Norm’s face.

Norm fell backwards, dropping his bat. The figure was behind him now. He whipped around and saw -

Inque, the family housecat.

The cat was playing with her catnip mouse, which would explain why she was acting in such a strange manner. She was jumping and clawing at invisble things at the air while she still held the mouse in her mouth.

Norm swore. He clambored to his feet, grabbed the nearest throw pillow off the couch, and threw it at the cat. The cat retreated into a back room of the house.

Still breathing heavily, Norm picked up the bat and trudged back to the study. The CD player built into the wall had ejected the soundtrack CD, as it always did when it finished playing something.

Norm stared at it for a moment. He picked up the CD, and then the CD’s case that had been sitting on the desk. He studied them both for a moment, then threw them in the trash.

driving through construction

Bob, Dan, and Ken are riding in a car down the interstate. Bob is driving, Dan is in the passenger seat, and Ken is in the back seat on the driver’s side. As they’re driving, they run into construction. It doesn’t really slow them down, but Ken is rather keen on the concrete barriers bordering the road.

“Those barriers have weird flixible thingies attached to them,” he said, indicating the yellow, plastic objects sticking up about 3 feet in the air. They were attached every foot or so.

Dan cocked an eyebrow. “I bet it would be real fun to stick your arm out and hit them,” he said.

Bob shook his head. “Please don’t. I don’t want you breaking your arm.”

“That’d be a weird one to explain to the paramedics, eh?” Dan chuckled.

Ken thought for a moment, then rolled down his window. Bob started to protest, but Ken reached out the window with his fingers spread wide.

“What are you, twelve?!” Bob shouted. But try as he might, Ken actually couldn’t reach the flexible plastic guards. “I bet I could reach ‘em with a stick!” Ken said.

“Well it just so happens we have one!” Dan said, grinning. “My hiking stick, it’s sticking up in the back!”

Ken unbuckled himself and clambered over the back seat, reaching into the station wagon’s hatch.

“Oh no you don’t!” Bob insisted. He tried to find an opening to move into the right lane, but it was filled with other cars, the drivers of whom seemed oblivious to his turn signal. “We’re probably breaking at least a dozen traffic laws right now,” he muttered.

Ken managed to grab the hiking stick from the back, and, much to Bob’s chagrin, he stuck it out the back window, holding it by its molded rubber handle to maximize grip and reach. The plastic guards began to slap against the stick, making a very noisy rhythm, and waving in the stick’s wake.

Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere (as they usually are), blue and red lights lit up behind them.

Bob groaned. “Oh no…”

Despite the busy traffic in both lanes, Bob managed to navigate across to the right side of the interstate, rolled to a stop, and put his window down. Ken had reluctantly rolled up his window after retracting his plastic-smacking stick.

After the police car stopped behind them, there was an indeterminate length of time which seemed much longer than it needed to be, and then a husky, brim-hatted officer walked up to the driver’s side. Speaking in a slight drawl, he then asked the question:

“Do ya know why I pulled ya over, son?”

The use of the word “son” made Bob’s throat tighten, but he made himself swallow. It just made it more awkward.

“Well,” he started, “I would guess it’s cause my friend Bob here was smacking the plastic things on top of the concrete barriers with a hiking stick.” I sound like an idiot, he thought.

“Oh, it was him, was it?” the officer gestured to the man in the backseat. “Hell, I thought it was you, and I was gonna give ya a warning to cut it out!” He laughed. Bob forced a laugh in response, and the other two men in the car followed suit.

“Listen, if it’s the guy in the backseat, I ain’t gonna spoil your fun. Just be careful you don’t ruin your nice thing-a-ma-jig there!” He gestured to the hiking stick that Ken had been ineffectively trying to hide.

Without another word, the cop climbed into his patrol car. Bob was afraid to drive away, but the officer turned off his lights and drove away after a short moment.

The three men just stared at each other. Then, in silence, Bob started the car back up, drove back across the lanes of the interstate, and rolled down Ken’s window for him.

Dan and Ken grinned at each other, and Ken happily stuck his stick out, and started smacking the plastic thingies again.