Art by Milosaurous
It’s 11:11 p.m. Sometimes it’s 12:12 a.m. Sometimes it’s
3:33 or, maybe, it’s 4:56. These are clock
times which snag my imagination. They happen mostly the dark hours, when I
wake up, look at the glowing dial, shake my head and stagger off to the bathroom, or to
let the cat out, or to wander around the house for a bit until my old joints
unkink sufficiently so I can go back to sleep. I suppose I shouldn’t waste time
thinking about whether these readings mean anything, but the problem is that during the 60’s
I dabbled in numerology, and that even earlier, sitting on the floor to the off-stage
right of a Barbadian bar, I read books about ancient aliens visiting earth, prehistoric
collisions with Venus, or African tribes who knew all about the invisible-to-the-naked-eye-dwarf
companion of the blue giant star, Sirius. I’ve been soaking in this
other-worldly, one-brick-shy-of-a-load content since I was a post war child,
with predictable results.
Whenever I wake up I always look at the clock, and because there
is usually some variation of what I take to be a “meaningful” configuration, I’ve
begun to imagine these are messages—from somewhere, about something. Don’t ask
me what, although I’ve spent plenty of nights wondering. Are these omens, messages
from a hitherto uncommunicative universe?
Will the TARDIS land in my bedroom?
Is
an escapee from some hideous Lovecraftian dimension with three long fingers and a long snaky snout waiting just
behind the door?
Is my ship--long awaited--about to come in?
Or is it all simply a series of unrelated events, just “random
chaos ”(as one of my friends has it) which would be, in my experience, business as usual on this particular plane.
~~Juliet Waldron
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