Laughing in the Tortured Presence of Delightful Anguish

I do not know who created this image, but whoever did it is, in my mind, a brilliant artist and thinker. 🙂

Blue Lights, the BBC police procedural set in Northern Ireland, is annoying in the infrequency of available new seasons and episodes. We completed Season 3 last night (on BritBox), which had six episodes. Each of the six episodes was released at least a week apart in the U.S., meaning viewers had to either wait a week (or more) between them or wait until all had been released to binge-watch. Because we had watched Seasons 1 and 2 on an incredibly rewarding binge-basis, we jumped at the first opportunity to start watching Season 3. We did not wait to binge-watch it, though. A maddening mistake. Now, we have to wait until at least late 2026 to begin watching Season 4, which will not begin filming until early 2026.  If the distributors of the series had even a shred of human decency, they would speed production, in the interest of people with terminal lung cancer who are facing  an uncertain future. Gallows humor.

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Somewhere on the outer fringe of my mind, I feel the edge of a mostly-hidden memory of last night’s dream. It involved anger, my two dead siblings, my late wife, a faulty home security system, and a woman who was involved in a client association (not sure who she was, nor which association). The woman and the client and my own company all had accounts at a common bank. I strode across the roofs of Chicago skyscrapers, one step per building at a time. It was another disturbing dream, complete with a cold, early-morning sweat. I hate such intrusions in my head! My acquaintance, David, who commented recently about his similar stressful dreams, knows the source of such nightmares; now, if only someone could tell me ways to prevent them.

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I feel icy crystals of blood in my arteries and veins. Blood must freeze at temperatures much higher than does water. But maybe it’s not blood crystals. Maybe, instead, I feel the hulls of tiny hematological ships scraping against the tubular channels as the ships pass through. Somewhere along those miles of shipping lanes are canals, the flows within which are controlled by locks. The locks, you see, adjust to control blood pressure. When the pressure rises to potentially dangerous levels, shore birds poke their long, probing beaks through the surface of the vessels, relieving pressures and gently stroking the tubes with their delicate feathers. This is the kind of truth that Kellyanne Conway discovered when she went searching for alternative facts to confirm truths that, to her, seemed self-evident.

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His creativity cannot be located. It was last seen as it plunged into the frigid waters off the coast of Newfoundland, followed by a murder of whales and a pod of crows. Spotted by a sunbeam, the caravan was then trailed by daylight for immeasurable miles, until dusk showered the travelers with darkness, stars, and scorn. Scorpions scurried across the southern sky, preparing for battle with an Achilles heel. And then, God created enchiladas, awash in  African spice and mental anguish. Suddenly, after a laboriously long year of plotting and planning, and after a lengthy exposure to flames as hot as the sun is hungry, a tub full of tuna  sashimi was declared cooked and ready to thaw. Mermaids, their muscular legs as soft and short as a granite California redwood, marched in unison to the sounds of trumpets firing rounds of cotton candy into a swamp filled with solemnity and fresh gravity. After a lifetime of worry, he found his creativity, buried between the folds of an empty steel blanket in a pool of empty space that extends well past the end of forever in all directions. Everything else was no more than an abbreviation; a symbol for nothing is the absence of anything.