Unsolved Mysteries

There are portents and omens abounding, oh yes. There are peculiarities and metasynchronicities; there are rips in the space time continuum and general weirdness is at an all time high.

The remote control for my TV/DVD player has reappeared after being, apparently, on vacation for almost 10 months. Not only that, but it heralded it's reappearance in this plane by causing not one but two substitute "universal" remotes that had been procured to replace it to break down. To backtrack a bit, the original remote that came with the TV vanished completely and utterly sometime early last fall. We searched and searched and turned the house upside down; there was wailing and gnashing of teeth, and one sibling was driven to accuse the other sibling of absconding with it and taking it to school for nefarious purposes or maybe just because sibling #2 is notoriously absentminded about what exactly is in said siblings backpack at any given time. Finally it was assumed that the demon hound had eaten it whole, although it was unlike him not to leave shredded remnants around. So we bought a universal remote, which more or less worked.

Then, in the last week or two, this universal remote suddenly died and couldn't be resurrected and I bought another one. It absolutely refused to work at all, so, using my vast resources of arcane technical knowledge, I decided that the electric eye type answering gremlin thingy in the TV that responds to the invisible ultra ionic magic zapper beam from the remote was, clearly, broken and the TV would, thus, either have to be replaced or taken into the TV repair shop. I suspected that the cost of both options would be roughly equivalent, so, naturally, I didn't do anything except stop watching The Lost World, which has left my evenings empty and bereft. I hate not being able to watch people fight dinosaurs and giant bees; it's just so. . so. . lonely. Then the other day when I was cleaning up for the party, I found the original magical remote. Sitting in plain view on the end table in the living room. Just sitting there innocently as if it had never been lost. Now, I am not Martha Stewart or my mother, we all know this, and yes, a fairly thick level of dust has been known to establish itself on my household surfaces, but even I dust more than once every 10 months, and I swear to you on the proverbial stack of bibles that that damn thing was not sitting there last week, or, indeed, at any time since it vanished. It's a big clunky hideous brown remote, for one thing, not a sleek black fashionable remote like all the others in the house, and it has toothmarks at one end from an encounter with the demon hound. But there it was; here it is again, and, more to the point, it works like a charm, so it must have disabled the other remotes when it snapped back into existence from the 9th dimension. There's no other explanation.

In more unsettling omen news, on Saturday, as I was cleaning up party detritus (it was a fabulous party, by the way, and the cleanup wasn't even all that bad, yay) I kept walking past a stick in my path. Every time I saw it I kind of jumped, because this was one of those snake appearing sticks that at first glance looks distinctly serpentine. Finally I got fed up with jumping and then saying, oh, that's just that stick, so I picked it up (after, okay, poking it several times with another stick to make sure it was, in fact, a stick and not a snake, not that I have any major problems with snakes, but I do like to be forewarned before I actually handle them) and threw it towards the weeds/trees/bushes/jungle that make up the back end of my yard. Where it caught on a branch and somehow became supple and draped itself over the branch, just as a snake would have done. I just added a picture, so you can see I am not kidding. It's still there. I think it kind of broke itself in two but not quite, and managed to hang itself up on that branch that way, but I am here to tell you that there are few things in this world more deeply creepiness inducing than picking up a stick that looks like a snake but feels like a stick and throwing it - only to have it behave like a snake. Cold shivers ran up and down my back and I heard the distant clanging footsteps of the gods as they moved, impenetrable and obscure, through their fabled halls. Well, no, actually, that didn't happen. What happened was I said, Holy Shit, and stood there staring at the stick/snake for a while and then shook myself and came inside and did my level best to forget the whole thing while simultaneously wondering what, if anything, this Meant.

So you see, weird shit is going down and magic is afoot, or whatever that annoying pagan bumpersticker says. Be on guard. Carry a rowan twig, or an amulet, or perhaps a .22. And if you know what my remote has been doing on another planet for the last ten months, I'd love to hear about it.