Nothing got done. Blog posts were not written. My favorite sports teams, the Tigers and the Red Wings, were not properly worshiped. Manual labor (housework) was ignored. The cat was fortunate to be self-sufficient, but the poor dog, who relies on someone (me) to remember to let her back in the house after she concludes her business in the backyard, was forgotten so many times that she now gives me the stink eye and then glances skyward, as if sending a quick prayer to the God of her understanding that my memory will not fail her again, whenever I let her outside.
And it is all Stephen King's fault.
I read my first Stephen King novel when I was thirteen. Of all his books available to me at the time, The Shining seemed to promise the best time, and it delivered. I read it in a day and then slept with an old Donald Duck nightlight for a week, and, many years later, I still regard topiary animals with the deepest suspicion, and I would never permit a hotel clerk to stick me in Room 217 because of the creep factor associated with having to navigate it in the dark and enter its alien bathroom in the middle of the night.
Stephen King's latest novel, Doctor Sleep, takes us along for Dan (Danny) Torrance's journey as he struggles to recover from the traumatic events of The Shining, and gives us new things to be wary of...caravans of RVs travelling the highway at precisely five miles an hour under the speed limit, herds of middle-aged citizens strapped with fanny packs and garbed in T-Shirts bearing slogans that only the AARP crowd can appreciate, and habitually aloof cats that suddenly show an interest in humans that they've previously ignored.
I have not needed a nightlight while reading this book, nor do I need one now that I have finished it, which is good because I cannot find Donald anywhere. But I do have this strange compulsion to keep an ever vigilant eye on my in-laws, exercise special caution on the highway and avoid campgrounds, and hope that my cat isn't a death cat disguised as the family pet.
My life came to a screaming halt while my imagination took a long awaited trip courtesy of the master of his craft, and I have a new slightly twisted way of seeing what used to be ordinary things.
It just doesn't get any better than that.
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