It is the new moon, or thereabouts. Maybe it was yesterday. That wouldn’t surprise Odin. The new moon affects Odin more strongly than the full moon. Also, it’s stealthy. With the full moon, at least you can see the full moon and prepare yourself. You forget about the new moon.
The new moon makes Odin stupid, and he was stupid yesterday. Yesterday was Thursday. The day before that was Wednesday, and Odin was stupid then, too.
The only reason, for example, the only reason Odin didn’t get a ticket yesterday is, the police officer was… I don’t know why. No idea why Odin didn’t get a ticket, but the police officer just warned him. Odin wanted to buy him donuts he was so grateful.
And Wednesday. Odin was out of it, that is, unable to recognize situations in time and avoid them.
Such as: he sat on one of four seats opposite the doors on the street car. Never sit there. Those are the first seats. That’s where crazy people sit, for example.
Of course, crazy people sit everywhere.
Odin sat opposite the doors. At the next stop, all the average people got off but for one young man to Odin’s right. A very wide man got on and sat on the two seats to Odin’s left. Then at the stop after that, an even wider man got on; wider but shorter, with a huge head, small eyes and mouth. In a high voice he asked if he could sit on one of the seats, which were full. The young man to Odin’s right got up to let the guy sit so you had four seats, two occupied by the large man on the left, two by the corpulent large headed man on the right, and Odin squished in between.
The man on the left was looking for something in his back pack, which was beside Odin, and the man on the right was looking for something in the back pocket of his (the man’s) jeans. That is, there was a lot of squirming going on.
Odin thought, I deserve this for not reacting fast enough.
The man to Odin’s right had a caretaker he kept asking where they were; and the man kept showing him a map on his smart phone.
All of them were going to the terminal station, it turned out, where Odin got off, took a passport photo of himself in a photo booth and got yelled at by his wife for making her wait. Odin pointed out that it was still five minutes before the time they had agreed to meet, but that did not help.
So because of things like this, when a cat woke Odin early Friday morning, he did not fight to fall back to sleep. He meditated, and stretched, and wrote and started his day feeling human, if a little sleepy.
The new moon must be waxing, he thought. He did not feel as acutely stupid.
On his lunch break he went to a fabric store and bought black-out cloth. He took public transportation there and avoided uncomfortable situations and found most passengers delightful.
He also found the fabric store delightful in its plain-ness. Just bolt after bolt of fabric and sales clerks running around. One greeted him politely, he greeted her politely back and told her what he wanted and she sent him to the basement.
My childhood, it reminds me of my childhood, Odin thought. The plain functionality. The lack of any intention to delight you into buying more than you wanted was delightful.
The saleswoman in the cellar was from Africa. She gave Odin a choice between velvet, genuine black-out cloth, and another fabric she said another photographer had purchased and hadn’t worked. The velvet looked the prettiest, but the black-out cloth kept giving her shocks so he got that.
You have to like fabric that fights back.
On his way back to the office Odin got some Chinese takeout.
He was going to eat it in the office, but as he walked by the bench someone cawed at him and he was like, I know that caw. So he sat down and all three crows appeared.
He threw a piece of chicken to Muninn, the black one, and Muninn was like, whoa, dude! and Odin was like, sorry, shoulda warned you, it’s still hot. Didn’t realize it’d still be hot.
Then he threw a piece of chicken to Grey #2 but it landed too close and Grey #2 wouldn’t approach that close so Odin had to throw a few more.
In the end, the crows got most of the chicken, or almost half, and Odin had most of the rice and sauce.
That’s why Odin is so sleepy.
What say the slain?
Time travel is real, it’s a thing we all do, recalling the dreams of our child when she was small, or observing the salesclerk at the Kurdish fruit stand and noticing that his hair is grey and remembering when it was black and he’s the same guy but he’s not.
Just like all of us other time travellers.