Bedtime Stories

 
When my children were small our night time routine was a lot of reading, reexamining the day, plans for the next day. Normal end of day things. Sometimes we skipped the reading and told our own stories, often these started easily enough but then turned into the fantastic and silly. The three-headed monster suddenly has twenty claws on each paw and shoots lasers from its butt (this seemed to happen in a lot of stories). I was thinking about all those eccentric and amazing stories today as I tried to understand the story, I read at bedtime last night.

It was the transcript from the call from the Cheeto and his “team” made to the Secretary of State from the fine state of Georgia (disclaimer here, I’ve been through Georgia a few times, it’s a solidly okay state, but I wouldn’t want to live there). Which is funny because that is actually touched upon in the story/transcript. The Washington Post now has an article up, à la Dear Abby: So I (65, M) got a telephone call from an older acquaintance in a position of power (74, M) that includes this: “Then he started to go on and on about how it was unlikely that anyone could ever move back to Georgia and legitimately vote here again after previously leaving the state? Which, I understand there are things in our electoral process that are pretty wacky, but the concept that somebody might want to move back to a state seems like a very weird one to latch onto as definitely untrue. But he kept going on about it. Literally, he was like: “How many people do that? They moved out, and then they said, ‘Ah, to hell with it, I’ll move back.’ You know, it doesn’t sound like a very normal … you mean, they moved out, and what, they missed it so much that they wanted to move back in? It’s crazy.”
 
But the entire transcript is full of conspiracy, lies and sadness. Sad that other cognizant humans, men and women, would join this madness and that the Secretary of State, Brad Raffensberger, would stay on the line that long for a spam call. I wouldn’t have. I may, or may not have, had fun with spam calls. Once, a young man called to tell me that my computer was in danger based on the IP address. After we covered the computer, don’t have one; the TV, I’ve never seen one; or the radio, what’s that? He called me very silly and we both laughed.

If anything good came from last night’s reading, it was thinking of bedtime in a land far, far away when I lived with a prince and a princess and we ruled over the kingdom of stories.