Serial Saturday Doesn’t Update
As the headline of this blog suggests, there is no new chapter of my FNAF fanfic today. I tried (admittedly, not very hard), but with a week to go before I leave on my roadtrip that ends (not permanently, one hopes) in surgery, things are understandably rather hectic here at the Smomestead. And I had a choice today between staying home and working and meeting that deadline, or going out with my family to the spooOOOooky flashlight tour of an historic museum here in town, so yeah, I sloughed off my work ethic and skipped out the door. Well, rolled out the door in my chair, but the person pushing it was skipping. Or maybe tripping over the brick sidewalks in ye olde historic museum district. Either way, it was a good time.
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We rolled up on an appropriately towering castle-like structure surrounded by an appropriately imposing iron fence and partially curtained by the gnarled branches of an appropriately spooky tree. It was easy to imagine how gloomy it could have been in a thick fog or by moonlight, instead of the blinding blue-white autumn sky we presently had. I kind of wished this was more of a ‘scary history’ tour. This is exactly the sort of creepy old building I’d love to wander around in at midnight, if that sort of thing wasn’t trespassing, which is illegal, which means of course that I have never ever done it. R Lee Smith is a law-abiding citizen who strongly discourages my readers from doing things that are awesome but nevertheless unlawful and extremely unsafe.
I digress.
We live, like, ten miles from this place, apparently, but none of us have ever been there before, despite the fact that we are all major museumophiles, owing to the associated fact that it is smack-damn in the middle of the city’s most metropolitan area and we are all even more major metropoliphobes than we are museumophiles. Also, parking in the city when you have a wheelchair is more hassle than pretty much any museum is worth and I don’t care how awesome it is. In this case, we were warned that our destination had no attached parking whatsoever, but was what they laughably called wheelchair-friendly, or at least, I hope they were laughing, because I sure wasn’t. Once you got past the uneven brick sidewalks and curbs that ‘open’ into one of those two-inch-deep channels perfectly, and I mean PERFECTLY, designed to pitch wheelchair riders out on their faces in the street, you arrive at an historic building whose nod to accessibility includes a couple ramps and an elevator…oh, and also a two-inch-tall ‘lip’ at most of their doorways perfectly, and I mean PERFECTLY, designed to pitch wheelchair riders face-first into the glass box protecting your priceless century-old silver-plated epergne. However, for the most part, we got around all right, and despite some spine-jarring stops and a LOT of narrow turns, I had a blast.
Because the ground floor and the top floor (which had access to the bell tower, which was not at all wheelchair accessible) were full of other museum-goers, many of them with very young screamy kids, we started off more in the middle of the museum. The first thing I saw when I rolled off the elevator was this majestic portrait of an unnamed bison.
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As this next surgery approaches, I have found myself thinking a lot about my last one, specifically my prolonged and profound morphine-induced visitation with a magical talking bison. Seeing this handsome fellow so unexpectedly, like he’d come out to greet me, was heartening. Rolling around the corner and seeing the taxidermied head, not to mention the historic photos of all those dead bison who had been shot and skinned and left to rot on the plains in such numbers that we nearly wiped them the hell out in a single generation…somewhat less heartening.
That wasn’t all the museum was about, though. Most of it was (loosely) Victorian-era artifacts, which is always fun to look at. I keep thinking maybe someday I’ll write a steampunk novel. So we had a pretty good time, rolling around, looking at hand-carved furniture and stiff-backed mannequins modelling dresses with a million buttons and a replica drug store with shelves full of pills and unguents to cure distemper, ague and female lethargy. They even had a whole section of terrifying toys, including a wall of ‘beautiful’ (i.e. super-sugar-frosted-haunted) dolls, whose hand-sewn dresses and painted porcelain faces perfectly capture the dreadful ennui of what life must have been like back in those days if you were rich enough to afford one.
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This baby doll drinks nothing but the tears of the working class and laudanum.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, I had a good day. So while I’m sorry that I couldn’t get it together in time to make sure I had a new chapter of my FNAFic ready to go this week, I have to admit that if I had it to do all over, I’d do it all the same. There won’t be a chapter next week either, as I’ll be on the road, and maybe not the week after that, depending on how I’m recovering. But I will be back as soon as I can get my head together and think in words again instead of pictures (and mind-movies starring talking bison). See you soon(ish), and if I don’t get another chance before then, Happy Halloween!
