Thought I’d start a random story since I haven’t written anything in a while. This is straight from Rory’s Story Cubes, although I wasn’t able to get a picture of that this time.
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Once upon a time there was man named Jim. He was a happy sort of fellow. A little carefree, or at least that’s how people viewed him. He smiled a lot, unfortunately for Jim his smile had that weird slightly skeptical look to it, making people question whether he was smiling or confused often.
But Jim didn’t know this, nor would he have cared either. He was rather proud of his “It doesn’t matter what others think” mindset. He liked to take adventures and chances and didn’t have a lot of stability in his life. He had his friends of course, they stayed put, and put down roots, but Jim liked adventure. Even if it was dull adventure. He moved several times in his adult life. Enough to learn the truth about himself. Wherever he moved too ended up extremely similar to every other place. He went out several times a week, whether just for coffee or for a drink, had a few places he loved to eat, and had one or two hobbies that got him outside often.
That was his life, that was his routine, and he was ok with it. It wasn’t the big adventures in stories he had read. He loved to think someday he’d have one of them, but he knew better. He was the guy who everyone referred to as a wanderer (although he lived in each city for a year or more), and he was the guy who had “crazy adventures” but those were all details. Day to day, year to year, his life was pretty predictable, and he was ok with it.
Jim lived in Arizona right now. He didn’t have close friends or family here, but he had a large plot of land he rented, a small house (more of a shack) on it, and a lot of time. He worked at the home improvement store in town a few miles away. It paid well enough that he could live comfortably, but he was exactly ‘making bank.’
Jim passed his time away reading and hiking. He liked that sort of thing. He listened to horrible late night radio talk shows (Coast2Coast AM was his favorite) and spent a lot of time just staring at the stars next to a small camp fire in his backyard. This fall’s experiment for Jim was a sweat tent. He wanted to call it a lodge, but Jim wasn’t that great at building this sort of thing, and his enthusiasm exceeded his reach often. It was more of a canvas TeePee with a hole in the top and a small wood stove with stones on top to produce steamed heat. One of his neighbors called it a crappy sauna, and Jim didn’t really think he was wrong.
Tonight Jim was relaxing in his “sweat tent” with George Noorey in the background talking about some sort of alien appearing somewhere. Jim just like the openness of the show. Anyone could talk about anything. Aliens and conspiracies were his favorite shows. He laid in his tent thinking how where he was living was where that stuff should happen, alien invasions and the such, but he knew it was all made up crap.
“Still fun… fun to think about” Jim thought. Just then an arrow came shooting through his tent.
Confused, as anyone would be in this situation, Jim left his sweat tent to see what the hell was going on. He had been in there for several hours so when he took his first step he immediately fell flat on his face. He called this wobbly feet. It happened often. Others usually said their feet were “asleep,” but Jim was certain his feet never slept. He had whole cartoons and stories about how his feet went off and had adventures without the rest of his body. Hence wobbly feet. And wobbly feet left Jim half in half out of the tent.
Thankfully his face was the half out of the tent, and when he finally was able to look up he saw a little gray man staring him. An Alien. An Alien with a Bow and Arrow. That had shot at him.
It would have been hilariously funny if not for the fact that wobbly feet left Jim face down in the dirt and he swore that as he was looking through the dust he saw the alien laughing at him.
As Jim started to get to his feet he saw the alien slowly ascend through the air. Before Jim could reach him he was as high as Jim’s house and when the alien was at tree level it looked down and waved at Jim.
Jim scratched his chin in absolute confusion, and watched as the alien disappeared from sight.
“Messed up,” Jim said to himself. “Guess it is time to stop using the sweat tent.”
