Xenosthesia.com

Learn and Grow

Once you’ve written it all down, everything you know, you can empty your brain, you can start over. Go back to kindergarten and learn your numbers. Learn how to draw a big letter A and a small letter a. Learn not to eat crayons. Dont even stick them in your mouth.

Maybe you’re a quick learner, you can skip a few grades and jump right into Junior High (some places call it a middle school, though they haven’t bothered to change the sign out front that says John Fredrickson Kennedy Junior High—no wonder everyone who goes there is confused).

So now you’re going to Junior High, named, ostensibly, after a past president, but you’re not there to learn about presidents. This time you want to learn about girls or boys, or whatever the opposite of what you are is. Here in this place, you’ve entered that stage of life when the hormones will make you forget all scholastic facts. What you’ll remember are all the horrendous jokes everyone repeats on a daily and weekly rotation.

You’ll soon grow too mature for all that puerile nonsense. Once you’ve grown mature enough you’ll pack up and move away to college. In college there will be plenty to learn, though not all of it will be what is taught. You’ll be forced to use your powers of deduction and observation. You’ll know to observe all the other students. It won’t take long to see who has the right idea and who is faking it. Some of those wandering around campus are still putting crayons in their mouth or walking about with a mouthful of obscene jokes. These will probably be good to avoid. Avoid the latent thumb-suckers and the pessimists who find sadness in every inch of life. Aim toward the happy crowd, and find out why. Observe their reasoning and employ your own reasoning for yourself. Get along in your new school, get a good degree and move on with life. Make that degree pay. Settle into a healthy life. If you want, you can marry. When you reach the right age, empty your brain and start over.

Legend of the Cairn

Photo by Miguel Arcanjo Saddi on Pexels.com

The cairn, as a cultural peculiarity, is as entertaining as it is clever. It’s purpose, since the beginning of time, is to designate the correct trail.

So, for instance, if you were hiking along a trail unfamiliar to you and the trail forked, all you would need to do is look for a cairn. The idea, of course, is that animals don’t stack rocks, so the game trails would be cairn-free, while the human trails would feature cairns at critical points along the way.

To boost the entertaining factor, there are people who go hiking with the singular goal of putting up cairns. There are those who will spend all day on one cairn, and those who prefer to stack as many as they can along a trail.

Other hikers love to create specific patterns. They have their signature style of creating a cairn. They will stack seven stones every time, or a stack of six next to a stack of three. It’s all determined by their personal creativity.

Because of this, some cairn stackers will look for their own creations when hiking. They also tell their friends what to look for. It becomes a challenge, an added bit of fun to a hike.

If you were going hiking, what sort of cairn would you make?

Cinco de Mayo on Taco Tuesday

It doesn’t get any better than Cinco de Maya on a Taco Tuesday. Check out the spread, then make your own.

Tacos, burritos, enchiladas, empanadas, quesadillas, nachos, guacamole, carne asada, chile verde, fajitas, pollo relleno, chile relleno, tostadas, and so much more is yours on Cinco de Mayo.

In heaven there will be a Mexican food buffet where you never see the bottom of the guacamole bowl, the salsa pours from a fountain, and burritos are every shape and size. Everything at the buffet is exactly the right temperature all the time.

However, until we all meet at the heavenly buffet, there’s Taco Tuesday and Cinco de Mayo.

Angsty Frogs

Born For Dis.

Whenever you come upon an acronym or abbreviation, and that acronym or abbreviation is not defined in any way within the surrounding text, you have my complete and utter permission to invent the meaning. So, if you come upon a BFD, wild and untamed, feel free to start taming it and give it a pet name of your choosing. Born For Dis makes a lot of sense to me…

This is the disclaimer part. You might think I would get in so much trouble for telling you to do this next part, but you’d be wrong, because I actually have zero authority here. If I tell you to write in any book you come across with an undefined acronym, it carries no authoritative weight. You write what you want where you want because your will is your own. But it would be so funny if you were reading some mind-slaughtering textbook and you came across an acronym for an equally mind-slaughtering concept such as FIRFA, the Radar Frequency Act of 2049, and you wrote in the margins “Federally Insured Rabbit Fluffers of America”.

All the underrated Rabbit Fluffers of the world will appreciate you.

You could get even wilder than that, if your creativity demands it.

The same creativity could guide you to insert an Angsty Frog, every time you see someone add an AF to their text messages.

Maybe your friend sends, “I’m tired AF.”

Then you send back, “You’re a tired Angsty Frog?”

Then they send back, “SMH.”

“So Much Hummus? Send More Haggis? Are you hungry or something?”

Then they don’t send anything…for a long time. Don’t worry, he or she is still your friend. Even though you are “Sure To Feel Underrated” and that’s not at all what everyone meant when they sent you STFU, do realize you will always have friends in the Rabbit Fluffer crowd.

Sports Psychic

Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels.com

You don’t have it all.

If you thought you did, then you need to listen to this: In the country of Belize, they have a Sports Psychic. The Sports Psychic can predict how your favorite team or athlete will perform in the next game or the next competition. Using occult knowledge and resources like astrology or bones, the general cast of the game will be predicted.

This is not new. The Romans used similar technics to try to guess the health of their sacrificial Christian competitors and the comparative health of the hungry lions in the same arena. Back then, the Romans did not call it a “Sports Psychic,” rather the job was referred to as Maleficus, sometimes as Incantator, and, if the person was wrong much of the time, then it was Altera Victima (next victim).

Today though, we don’t send lions in after our volleyball teams to see how many survive before the lion is full. We don’t make swim teams swim through pools of poisonous jellyfish and then ask the “Magus” to predict who will complete a lap. We let the muscles and the steroids decide.

However, if you want to add the aspect of the psychic arts to your spectating experience, look no further than the Sports Psychic.

And now imagine how the Sports Psychic could improve any sport. The Sports Psychic could consult with your losing team and convince them it’s not their lack of skill which is keeping them down but the fact that they all wear the same color of socks on the Thursday after a Jupiter moon syzygy. If only they’d change their socks, they might begin to win.

Perhaps the Sports Psychic could align the appropriate spirits to get Tiger Woods back in action. Who knows but the Sports Psychic could predict conditions on the mountain for mountain bikers, line out the days for fishermen to catch the best fish, predict the big waves for surfers, or even tell us if Razer will win another robot battle soon.

***Gilroy “Press” Cadogan, the Sports Psychic, can be found on Facebook and 7 News Belize.***