JMalrix

Evenin’’ Goofies!

It’s your resident nighttime traveler coming to you live from the road. Yes, I am traveling *again*—I know, I know, the math isn’t mathing based on how much I swear I don’t do this, but here we are✌️😅🤷🏾‍♀️🤷🏾‍♂️. This time, I’m the one behind the wheel, driving back from seeing a good friend. There is a whole separate post coming about the absolute chaos of my latest adventure very soon, but right now, I’m using this time to talk about my subconscious, because my brain is currently cooking with ingredients I didn’t even know were in the pantry.

They say a writer’s mind is a beautiful, mysterious tapestry, but I am here to tell you that mine is just a highly unstable ecosystem. Last night, I had a dream that started off with an emotional curveball. I woke up, in the dream world, to the sound of my mother’s voice coming from another room. She was just chatting on the phone, casual as you please. Now, my mom has been gone for seven years, so hearing her voice instantly set a really specific, heavy mood. But before I could even process the weight of that, the dream logic decided to pivot directly into a tactical home-invasion crisis. I looked downstairs and discovered that my house had been breached by a bear and a monkey. Not a metaphor. Just a light brown, African-looking monkey and a whole, literal bear chilling in my residence.

Naturally, my engineering brain kicked into high gear. I rounded up some friends to help run a tactical animal-removal operation. We managed to politely escort the monkey outside first, but the bear was a whole different level of logistics. Our first thought was to just shoot it through the bedroom door where we had it contained, but instead, we decided on a non-lethal, high-risk routing plan. The strategy was simple: clear everyone out, open the front door, open the back door, and create a straight, unobstructed runway for the bear to exit the building. It was a beautiful plan on paper.

Unfortunately, my friends are terrible at tactical execution. Just as I opened the bedroom door to unleash the beast, one of my buddies panicked and closed the back door. Suddenly, the bear had exactly one exit route left: the front door. Which just happened to be the exact spot where I was standing.

What happened next was pure cinematic trauma. This massive bear bursts out of the room, completely corners me, and hangs over my body ready to completely take me out of the game. I pulled the trigger on my gun—and got the classic, nightmare *click*. No ammo. I braced for the end. The bear swiped at me with giant claws and miraculously missed. And then, instead of turning me into a human shish kabob, the bear reached out and vigorously squeezed fresh lemon juice all over me. 🫠🫠🫠

I woke up entirely confused, deeply relieved, and slightly offended that my subconscious didn’t even have the decency to let me be a regular meal. I wasn’t an adversary; I was just a piece of fresh seafood that needed a little proper marination before the feast. I am still processing the emotional whiplash of going from missing my mom to being lightly seasoned by a grizzly, but at least I survived the kitchen.

I’m going to keep my eyes on the actual road now before a real-life deer tries to garnish me. Stay tuned for the trip update soon. Until then, stay safe, watch out for citrus-wielding wildlife, and brush your teeth.

From goofiness with love,

JMalrix