These Days …
Since I’ve been working for the Post Office I’ve had dreams of delivering mail. The dreams have had the same annoying pattern. I’ll dream I’ve forgotten to deliver a huge stack of mail and I have to make the delivery in my own car. I’ll be frustrated and harried in the dream but I’m pretty calm once I wake up. My waking mind knows I’m in bed. It knows that I never ever leave the station with mail in my personal car.
This week I realized that I hadn’t had one of those dreams in a while. I’ve been doing plenty of overtime but, for whatever reason, my brain hadn’t needed to process it in my sleep. I realized that I hadn’t been having the delivery dreams because my brain has recently started showing me a new version. I’ve now had a couple of dreams in which I’m having to deliver parcels out of my personal car. Big parcels and small parcels and all of them badly organized. There’d been errant parcels in my previous dreams but mostly I was having to deal with mail. I don’t remember having to deal with any letters in the new dreams, just parcels and more parcels.
The parcel dream isn’t an improvement over the mail dream.
I’m expecting that, until or unless Amazon exclusively does their own shipping delivery, the current abundance of large parcels will continue. Folks have gotten used to shopping online. Why go to a physical store when you can order something online? Why go especially when the item is something big and inconvenient? I’ve been delivering a lot more dog food and cat litter. Large heavy boxes.
And, yes, I’m continuing to work some overtime every day. Overtime on my own route. Most days I’m also carrying part of another route. Nine, ten, twelve hour days. I come home tired, eat dinner and we go to bed. My sleep is restless because the knee that I stessed out three months ago is still healing.
I did see a physical therapist about it on Monday. She gave me some stretches to do that have been helping. It turns out that bending your knee is stresses it. It’s supposed to be able to bend but it’s also supposed to be able to straighten out. Sitting with a bent knee stresses the knee muscles. Straightening the leg and stretching the leg and knee muscles helps the whole thing work better. It seems obvious now but I’d been careful about straightening and flexing my knee too much because I was afraid of causing more damage. Apparently my leg is in good shape – the scar tissue around my knee (from an old surgery) has just gotten stiff and needs stretching.
Transmission 04
Wilhelmina Grace found herself floating, drifting. The atmosphere was thick. It felt liquid. There seemed to be some gravity at this destination but apparently there had been no fixed point for the transmitter to use. She was surrounded by objects that seemed organic. She would have thought the objects were parts of a body but they seemed complete in themselves. They moved on their own.
“Perhaps,” she thought, “I am within a body?”
It was a disconcerting thought.
Power Dynamics – The Heap
Welcome to another edition of What The What, the podcast in which I interview some of the more unique personalities in our society. I’m Blane Walker. For the next few weeks I’m going to be speaking with superheroes, those folks with powers beyond the normal. This week we’re chatting with the Heap. We’re here in Portland chatting with her by phone in Newside, Louisiana.
Blane – Hello the Heap! Do you mind if I call you that?
The Heap – I prefer Isabeau. DJ Izzy works too.
Blane – Isabeau Bienvenu was your name before you became the Heap, yes?
The Heap – Isabeau Bienvenu is still my name. I’m still me. I’m just … transistioned into the body of some plant monster thing.
Blane – Okay. Isabeau, how did you become the Heap?
The Heap – I died. I think. It’s kind of complicated. It involved witchcraft and forgotten gods and forbidden tomes and all kinds of crap that I wish I’d paid more attention to before it happened. Also, I was drunk so some of the particulars are fuzzy. My old human body is gone and my spirit, my consciousness, drives this new body.
Blane – It’s not really a new body is it, though? The Heap has been around fighting evil since World Wart Two.
The Heap – I guess. My nieces have done more research on this thing’s history than I have. I’d never heard of it before I became it. I was more into music history than military history, superhero history, whatever.
Blane – Weren’t you in the Air Force?
The Heap – Yeah. Yeah. But the history you learn in the service doesn’t cover supernatural entities. At least the history I got didn’t. Maybe there’s a secret branch that covers this stuff. I don’t know. A German pilot was the first Heap. Baron Von Emmelman. He died in World War One. The Heap formed around his body after his plane crashed in a Polish swamp. Then there was guy named Jeremiah Carter in the Fifties and another guy, Jesus Robertson in the Seventies. Their memories are in here somewhere. I can read them if I try but it’s kind of weird and too easy to get lost so I generally avoid it.
Blane – The other Heaps were all silent. How are you able to talk to us?
The Heap – My niece and one of her friends figured out a way to hook up a speaker with my mulch so I can form words. It’s pretty cool. She’s currently working on a way to use recordings of my old voice so that I can sound like my old self. The current voice is off the shelf. We’re working our way through all the recordings I’ve got of my old radio show to create a vocabulary.
Blane – It’s not what I expected. I know you are a woman but I expected the Heap to sound like Vin Diesel.
The Heap – I know, right? Or a death metal singer. I’ve gotten a lot of double takes when people hear this voice.
Blane – What’s it like to be a superhero?
The Heap – That’s such a weird question. I get it all the time but I don’t know how to answer it. I’m not a superhero. I don’t fight crime or save the world or anything. I definitely don’t wear a costume. I don’t even wear clothes. Sometimes I wear a hat.but someone has to pin it on my head.
Blane – Oh come on. I’ve read the stories. You’ve fought vampires. There was a Nazi golem. That alligator monster.
The Heap – Life is a lot weirder now but I’ve still got regular boring responsibilities. I’ve got three kids to look after. The cat still wants to be fed at 3 am. The strange supernatural stuff is just life. I don’t go looking for it.
Blane – What’s the …
The Heap – Hold on Blane. I’ve got a call coming in from the sheriff. I have to take this.
Blane – No problem I can edit out the break if necessary.
…..
The Heap – I’m back but I have to go. Some dumbass drunk tourist knocked down a telephone pole and the sheriff wants me to move it off the road. Being superstrong means I get asked to move heavy things.
Blane – Thanks for talking with us Isabeau. Hopefully we’ll be able to continue this conversation at a later date.
The Heap – I’d like that. Bye all!
See Y’Alll Next Week!
