Day #116

Stacha is wildly imaginative, and can barely control the rushing current of thoughts which cascades around her overactive brain. These gush out her mouth in great bursts, like her Gnostic theory that Earth is really Hell created by a demiurge--but I won't go into that again. She's claimed of late that I was her adopted step-father, her godfather, and that she was my hair-dresser. Sometimes I have to talk to her and calm her down because she gets carried away by her narratives.

Today we read The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg, and Stacha was all over those weird disjointed images. I "read" them the book the first time by just showing the illustrations and reading the captions. She came up with a crazy story about a false God who created concurrent realities and Harris Burdick was the only man who had the key so he was banished, and as she spouted this I thought "man, the story they're going to write has an upper cap of 250 words. Stacha will need 20 times that!"

But then she stopped her story with a little shriek and she said "Mr. Geoff I forgot to tell you! Don't go to the bank. Promise you won't go to the bank!"

"Don't worry Stacha, I only go to ATMs, I never go to the bank," I said.

"NO!" she shrieked. "Don't go to the ATM. My dreams come true. DO NOT go to the bank or the ATM!"

"Eventually Stacha I'll have to get some money," I replied.

"Mr. Geoff you want to live, don't you?"

One hopes to be rational and unconcerned by the ramblings of an overly imaginative child, but the conversation gave me a chill. It was like a few weeks ago when I was touring around Mt. Vernon with a birthday party and we ended up in a gay piano bar on Read St. One of the celebrants, a Pakistani, read my palm and told me I was going to die tragically because my lifeline was forked. One hopes to be rational and unconcerned by such things, but it's just freaky to hear.