Key Lime Cove Chronicles: Part Three

I’m taking you with me.

Toukey’s Big Deluge: The Reckoning Prelude: Paradise Lost Propers

Sundown.  Expressway.  The sky is a murky post-pink peach.  Indigo clouds smear up from the western horizon, appearing very much like the monsters that awaited us at the edge of a world we once considered flat,  bringing nighttime in the hems of their gowns.  In the darkness below, snaking chains of alternating red and white lights coil around the I-94/134 cloverleaf .  They slither  this way and that across an unseen landscape.  From the lower deck of a preposterous aquatic amusement contraption, a bottom-heavy Eve regards this rush hour serpent and the darkness outside the cathedral-sized water park windows through her water-speckled Buddy Holly glasses.  

The Key Lime Cove Chronicles: Part Two

Hunting for “MONNNNN-sters”

RipTide Reef Arcade“With 8,000 square feet of fun, crafted in age-appropriate zones, there’s interactive fun for everyone.”– KLC Glossy Propaganda

After a towel-down, a wardrobe change, and a dinner of contraband homemade pizza, we took Mabel to the RipTide Reef Arcade.  All of the elements connoting the Vegas zeitgeist (minus the alcohol, hookers, and Cirque Du Make It Stop) are evident at The Rip: the onslaught of flashing lights, pulsating “ooncha ooncha” club beats, the fabulous prizes.  The mission statement of The Rip is simple: play games, win tickets, trade the tickets for unbelievably cheap, eminently breakable prizes.

The Key Lime Cove Chronicles: Part One

At Crossroads Of The Crossroad’s Crossroads

We are lost under layers of winter wear. We scurry headlong into oncoming squalls churned up in a dark, frigid place so lonely and terrifying that the wind itself had to flee it, screaming. We look directly at a counterfeit sun, coin-sized, washed-out, and utterly worthless.  It is summarily dragged down like the token at the end of a cosmic window shade. We make our way home into a premature darkness and we know we’re on our own. We exhale clouds of warm, damp life—so quickly dissipated in this climate of unrelenting mortality. In the outlying fields, where the suburbs and the jolly Christmas lights end, the furrowed rows of plowed-over cornfields are braided with wisps of snow and sinister black soil. Even the barren trees seem given over to dark thoughts:   the grasping neuron-like branches wave helplessly in the wind, clutching shreds of  dappled winter sky. It is winter in the Midwest, and make no mistake: it is a bitch.

My Daughter, The Tortured Artist

If you’re this brilliant, you can smirk all you want.

Mabel turns 4 this week.  When she was first born, it did indeed seem like yesterday.  All parents say this, and it’s absolutely true.  I remember her; all slick-faced, her squirming little body swaddled up tight in a hospital blanket, screamingscreamingscreaming like a banshee burrito.  She was clearly pissed, and who could blame her?  To start out as a sparkly dream of life, flitting about the infinite cosmos, only to end up cold, wet, and naked in the burbs is pretty much the let down to end all let downs.

Seasonal Affective Disorder Diorama

“‘Tis the season to be jolly!”

Winter sweeps off the misty surface of Lake Michigan like a witch hanging ten on a devastating blank white tsunami.  She shrieks the veneer of cheer off all in her path, casting a shadow over all existence from which there is only brief relief.  Today, the sun came up at 7:11 AM and is estimated to flee in terror at 4:22 PM.   As I write this, it’s a “balmy 26 degrees”, to use the buck-up-buddy vernacular of the morning DJ.  I button my cardigan to my chin, crank the volume knob and drown out the dark, arctic dread within me with the Boston classic “More Than A Feeling”.  Didn’t the dude from Boston commit suicide not too long ago?  Freaked out, I kill the live-streaming dinosaur rock and turn on the space heater.

It’s Seasonal Affective Disorder time!   I’ve resisted formal diagnosis like a gazelle resists the jaws of the lion, but anyone who’s seen that Zoloft commercial could witness my annual transformation from spritely pain-in-the-ass to taciturn bundle of  sweaters and know the score.   Unconvinced that the pharmaceutical industry knows what’s best for my neurotransmitters and too poor to experiment with phototherapy, I’ve resorted to the following home remedies to help me evade the cold, deathly curse of the Winter Witch.