This Magazine Would NOT Want to Know "Where in the World" This Issue was When the Picture was Snapped

There's another bit of weirdness that happened last week. I've been holding out on you. The upstairs walking and dance-clubbing and bed-flopping have settled down quite a bit while I'm sitting in my basement recliner watching TV. However, I found something out of place in the NASCAR bathroom right next to my dark basement lair.

Let the record show that Val is a night owl. It is rare for her to go upstairs to bed before 2:00 a.m. Some nights it's 3:00 or 3:15. Before going up, I make a pit stop in the NASCAR bathroom. Also let the record show that...um...Val has some reading material available in that room. After all, Hick is rarely down there, so it's kind of like Val's own personal library.

Nothing was amiss when I was last in that facility when I went to bed Sunday night. My mornings start anywhere from 8:00 to 9:30, depending on when I wake up. It's not like I feel the need to set my alarm. It's not like I go to the casino every day. I putter around and head to town by noon. I usually get back downstairs about 1:30.

As you might imagine, a woman of Val's years, taking medication for her blood pressure, and drinking a 44 oz Diet Coke every afternoon, is sure to make use of a NASCAR bathroom every day. Several times. When I was there on Monday afternoon, uhhh...sitting, my eyes were drawn to the counter directly across from my throne. We had it painted by my cousin's wife when we built the house. It's an air-brush rendition of a race track, with various cars. Also on that counter are many of Hick's collection of NASCARs. Hick is like the Bubba Gump of NASCARs. He has big cars and little cars and Hot Wheels cars and Matchbox cars and Racing Champions cars and Winner's Circle cars and Hardee's kid meal cars from the Days of Thunder (forget Tom Cruise, did you know Robert Duvall was in that movie?) era, and clocks, and several signed pictures of Greg Biffle (from tool show appearances), and even a couple of books.

It just so happens that Val had left a magazine on top of one of Hick's model NASCARs. She doesn't read every time she goes in there. That magazine had been sitting for a while, face down on that cardboard-and-heavy-duty-cellophane box. The magazine's position went along with the shape of the box. Both are rectangular. Long sides with long sides. Face down, because that was how I closed it up and laid it over there. Yet now, it was askew!

Sure. That magazine could have slipped off the box. It happens all the time, when something lays with nothing disturbing it, and gravity gradually pulls it a little every day, and then the frictional forces can't hold it anymore. However...friction losing the battle with gravity usually does not result in slippage that rotates and flips the object over.

Pardon the dust. It's been there way before the pages of that magazine were ground into pulp. I feel no sense of urgency to dust Hick's NASCAR memorabilia in a basement bathroom that only I use. And the BandAids have been there since I sliced my thumb along with an onion a while back.

I have no idea what happened to cause this relocation of the magazine. All I know is that it was not like that when I went to bed Sunday night, and it WAS like that on Monday afternoon. That Monday was my sister the ex-mayor's wife's birthday. It was the morning Genius found out his laptop had suffered a malfunction due to housemate coffee, which he texted me around 4:00. There could have been an earthquake, I suppose, that I slept through. Hick was not down there during my waking hours. So I'm not sure what might have caused this periodical to flip.

We did have a situation in that bathroom before, when The Pony was still living at home, with the light coming on by itself. And, as told on my supersecret blog, a certificate and car falling off a shelf in the presence of The Pony.

Anybody know if a poltergeist has a tiny bladder?