Aluminum

The dog is snoring loudly from his spot in front of the kid’s bookshelf.  He stops momentarily, wakes, and looks around to me, trying to figure out why my fingers are click, click, clicking over the keys so damn late at night.  He licks his paws, loudly, until I tell him to stop, and then, he curls his head tightly into his thigh and goes back to snoring.

I sit here, click, click, clicking through links, and posts, and videos, reading, responding, browsing–avoiding.  I should be asleep, or at the least, washing the dishes, but I’m doing none, and neither, and wasting valuable time of anything else.

I contemplate my weight in recyclables–which I know makes no sense–but I wonder, were I made of metal, or plastic, or glass, how much I’d be worth if you crushed me down like so much aluminum foil and sold me to one of those places that pays for your used cans.  What would my value be, then?

These days I sometimes feel like that said same tin foil–a shiny side, and a dull side–a lame conductor of electricity, unable to do more than reflect the heat from another source–crinkly and malleable, able to take on the shape of whatever you fit me to; to line, to cover, and contain.

Leftovers.   Doggie bags.  Swans full of bread and the last tasty dregs of an expensive meal.

I remember watching Pee-Wee Herman’s TV show, way back in the day;  how he would get all giddy about finding a piece of tin foil.  He would straighten it out flat, and then haul out his impossibly gigantic ball of aluminum foil and add the piece to the ever growing shell of the shiny-dull boulder.

“Ha! Ha! That’s soooo cooool!” Pee-Wee would shout in that half high pitch, half growl dork voice before switching into his trademark high pitch Man-Boy tones.

He would wave and holler “See ya later Giant Foil Ball!” before rolling the unwieldy aluminum sphere back to it’s unseen hiding place–just off camera–before moving on with the show, and the next piece of artful non-sense.