This Is My Brain...On A Bed Of Lettuce Leaves With A Side Of Summer Fragmentation. Would You Care To See The Wine List?

Remember how in seventh grade your health teacher would show you the Before and After pictures of lungs to demonstrate the Horrors And Evils Of Cigarette Smoking?

Good.

Now look at that nice, pinked-up brain on the left there.  There is No Way In Hell that my own personal brain looks like that. Mine is probably purply and twisty and sinister-looking.  Mine is not even a brain anymore; it is a Random Spasmodic Thought Fraughtenor. (And yes, I did just make up that last word because I do feel as if my brain and consciousness are besieged and fraught with thoughts most of the time.)  Does my brain not know that I AM RETIRED?!

Here is a random sampling of how I am beset by my RSTF (see above!):

**My eldest son, Jared, has a...rambunctious Twitter feed.  I read it online and frequently send him emails regarding its content.  Often, I harp about his lax spelling and grammar, primarily because I know that he knows better and secondarily because I know it stems solely from a vast ocean of laziness/unconcern.  He majored in English in college!  Back in June, I could not restrain myself or, rather, my RSTF could not, so I sent him this email: 
Sigh.  Really? An “affect/effect” error on your Twitter feed? Come ON. 
Immediately by return email came this brief missive: 
#thingsonlyyounotice.

**So, I dare any of you to try and escape hearing or seeing any mention of The Royals!!!! when they are on the move or marrying someone or having children or anything.  Rick and I were on a lovely holiday jaunt up to Niagara-on-the-Lake, and of course WilliamandKate!!! were in Canada at the same time.  (This lessened the impact of my presence considerably, I'm sure.)  NotL's historic/famous Prince of Wales Hotel had its red carpet rolled out--literally--every day, even though The Cambridges!!! weren't going to be anywhere near there.  But I digress.  (Oh boy, do I. Wait 'til you see where I end up.)  Anyway, all the Wimbledon coverage was showing the crowd shots of Those Two, and there behind them was Billie Jean King.  My RSTF started working Overtime.  "Holy crap!" I said to Rick.  "Billie Jean is looking really rough!  And with that dark helmet of hair and dark glasses, she's starting to look like Roy Orbison!"  So, I start Googling pictures of BJK and Roy, and then, as I start looking at pictures of Roy Orbison, I notice something even more startling, this:

I know, right?  Do you see it, too?  Charlie Sheen is absolutely Roy Orbison.  (Yet, we all had to wander through NotL, Wimbledon, BJK, and The Royal Family (!!!) to get there, didn't we? Sorry. Blame my RSTF.  So calisthenic.)

**For those of you scoring at home, I am, in fact, fully aware that the brain "brain" in the picture at the top of this post is a fake.  It's a gelatin mold of a brain.  The human brain is probably more beige and not so uniform-looking.  I always used to tell my students that every time they learned a new piece of information, it made a new groove in their brains and that the more wrinkled and convoluted their brains were, the more intelligent they were.  That their brains were like a roadmap of their thoughts and ideas and that the more roads they had, the more efficiently their brains worked because they had more on- and off-ramps to knowledge--more connections/intersections.  The science is complete bullshit, but it sounds wonderful and it worked for years, both to impress teenagers and to make them want to be smart.  Damn, I was good.  Sigh.

Rick says I'm always this scattered and fragmented right at the start of summer break, and our jaunt north did do us both a lot of good. More about that later.  And the wines...always the wines.