Twice Removed

This post was intended for May 6th but WordPress insisted on publishing it this past Thursday. After twice removing it, I have given in since email subscribers have seen it anyway. Today’s regularly scheduled post has been moved to who knows where.

I am a second cousin twice removed from the mystic Edgar Cayce. Before they try to remove me again, I am documenting my gift of premonition passed to me by my Kentucky grandmother Lucille Cayce. My dreams began in high school. As a Junior, I had a premonition about flunking Chemistry. I thought cheating would thwart the prediction but I failed at that too. My Mother’s dream of travelling to Sweden while I accepted a Nobel Prize turned into a nightmare realization that her oldest child was doomed to life as a lawyer. Truth be told (a rarity on this site), my Mom had earlier implemented contingency plans by giving birth to six more children (one at a time) after I was born.

When in college, I had a premonition that my girlfriend since high school was going to dump me. She did so in both my Freshman and Sophomore year, so I was twice removed by two other boyfriends. My Mother thought said girlfriend was making a very big mistake. So Mom and I reconciled and bonded over that truth, forgetting all about the Chemistry experiment that blew up in our faces. I drowned my sorrow on the party circuit and one night discovered an egg salad sandwich buried behind all the beer in the refrigerator. I had a premonition it would make me sick but I had the munchies and poor judgment, so I removed it twice, once from the refrigerator and then again from my stomach.

I grew weary of fighting the premonitions. When I dreamt I would flunk the Bar Exam, I removed myself from the Bar Review course, partied, and flunked. On the second try I was shocked and pleasantly surprised that examiners had removed essays in favor of Multi-State multiple choice questions. My premonitions on answers finally paid off in that Guess for Success environment. One of my recurring premonitions is that I will live to be 100. So far so good. I am 75 but look 85, so I am only fifteen years away and counting on advancements in Chemistry to help bridge that gap.

Garden Party

I found my way home yesterday for the second consecutive time. My memory has improved ever since I began taking ice cream supplements. I knocked on wood to insure that my good luck would hold and asked my wife Mollie to see who was knocking at the door. Nobody was there and she had a long conversation with him. She would not tell me what they talked about because she thinks I cannot keep a secret. Which is ridiculous. The other people I tell are the ones who cannot keep their mouths shut. Doctors are the worst. Every time I confide in them, they send me to specialists who prescribe medicine with horrible side effects. Pretty soon nurse practitioners, pharmacists, and the FedEx guy all know my most embarrassing secrets.

One secret item not found on my resume is a magna cum laude degree I earned from the College of Big Meddling and Criticizing. Big MAC taught me that Nature abhors a vacuum. When I am doing the talking, I am invariably boring people. But if I restrain myself, some other boring person fills the vacuum. That does not mean that I hang with uninteresting people. At a garden party where Stephen Hawking was explaining Einstein’s E=MC squared formula, my eyes glazed over. I interjected that I was working on E=MC cubed but everyone yawned. I gravitated toward the bar and told Jerry Seinfeld that Jane Fonda had a suppository in her left ear. He quickly excused himself to go tell her where her missing hearing aid was.