I love the radio and other things

Moving across the radio bands in the middle of the night I heard some guy on a half-hour infomercial. He sounded enthusiastic and informed. Probably an actor. If not, then the entrepreneur himself. I didn't listen a half hour, but I knew the format. Whatever they pay for, that's how much time they get. The salesman was talking about pharmaceutical grade fish oil pills. He said these capsules are rated ninety per cent. This is the kind of thing fish envious of. Most fish aren't rated ninety percent. I lasted about a minute with that.

Then on the all night program called Coast to Coast people were calling in to say whatever they wanted to talk about. I heard a caller tell about a guy walking down the street with a pile of LSD in his pocket. It began to rain, the drug got wet and absorbed into his system. For the next two years the guy thought he was a glass of near transparent orange juice, always worried about getting knocked off the table and spilled. One day someone bumped into him and he died. Doctors said it was a heart attack.

At this point I took of my earphones and put down my radio and had a dream that I was lying in bed not listening to the radio, just kind of sleeping, when my Aunt Irene called me from downstairs. She called me a couple of times but I didn’t answer. There were a lot of people down there. I could hear them.

Later I decided to go down there anyway for some of the good food. I was going down in my underwear, I figured that would be okay, then I thought my wife wouldn’t like it so I put on a pair of large white Bermuda shorts that were in my drawer. I never saw them before, but they fit.

Downstairs my aunt Irene was all worried. It had something to do with the catholic church and our neighbors when I was a kid, the Steinmetz family. Something happened in the sixth century and the Chinese were involved and that meant they definitely couldn’t be in a regatta. My friend, a Steinmetz, had recently retired as a college professor of chemistry, never took to sailing, and I wondered what this had to do with a regatta and the Chinese in the sixth century. I never got anything to eat.