Prompt: What do you enjoy doing most in your leisure time?
Leisure time? What the hell is that?
If I’m not working, dealing with family matters, or answering calls and texts from work in my “time off”, I’m struggling through my anxiety to fall asleep.
There’s a nice wall over there that the people with leisure time can feel free to line up against. I promise to make some time to see that. Won’t take a minute and they’ll find the experience a blast…
Prompt: Name an attraction or town close to home that you still haven’t got around to visiting.
As a bit of an astronomy buff, I was chuffed to learn that one of these stellar bodies was only a plane flight away!
My only concern is that I’ve heard it’s impossible for visitors to escape from this black hole. Our any black hole, for that matter.
Prompt: List five things you do for fun.
Call in sick to work.
Leave work for home at the end of the day.
Turn off my phone so work can’t reach me.
But lottery tickets in the vain hope I’ll win and not need to go to work anymore.
Fantasize about being stuck on a deserted island with no civilization and no cell phone coverage…so work can’t reach me.
The normal sorts of things we all do. What about you?
Prompt: If you could make your pet understand one thing, what would it be?
That’s easy.
“Stop licking yourself there! It’s unseemly!”
Prompt: Write about your first name: its meaning, significance, etymology, etc.
You want the truth about my name?
You can’t handle the truth!
We live in a world that has people and those people have names.
Who gives them those names?
Who’s gonna do it? You? You, reader?
People with my name have a responsibility greater than you can possibly fathom. You weep for men with lesser names. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know.
That their names, while tragic, probably saved lives. While their names are grotesque and incomprehensible to you, they save other people from having those names.
You don’t want to know about my name because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you wish you had my name, you need to have my name.
Prompt: What’s your dream job?
Could you be more specific?
I mean, in last night’s dream, I was Batman, pretending to be a depressed member of a team of American teachers on loan at a Hogwarts-style school as part of an exchange program (programme?).
But that was just in the last of my dreams last night.
Not to mention all the other dreams I’ve had over the course of my life, most of which involved an occupation of some sort.
And that one nightmare involving cannibalism… Couldn’t eat for days after that one.
[Shudder]
So I really don’t know how to answer that question.
I guess I’ll stick to last night’s dream, where my American colleagues and I were dealing with entitled upper-class British gradeschoolers.
Right proper little terrors, they were.
I bore more than a passing resemblance to Christian Bale (so a bit of a step down for me) and was pretending to be so overwhelmed with grief that I couldn’t leave my chair, let alone my room.
But another American teacher quit, utterly overwhelmed by the poorly behaved students, and the team leader was forced to call for me.
When I say poorly behaved, I mean truly poorly behaved.
A loud, chest-high mob of writhing indignation and giggles.
Almost to the level of cannibalism nightmare.
(In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if the dining tables they were swarming around were festooned with human flesh!)
The dream ended with me holding a candle while wearing a glowing crystal skull over my head. I walked past the entrance to the crowded dining hall, and all the rowdy students fell silent.
In terror of the ghostly apparition.
Not quite Batman, but it worked.
So that was last night’s dream job.
Prompt: What makes a good leader?
Tall.
Insanely handsome.
Incredibly smart, bordering on genius.
Yet grounded and modest, capable of humility when called for.
Basically, the dashing fellow I see every morning.
In the mirror.
I do not seek this office but will serve if called.
Prompt: If you could un-invent something, what would it be?
Social media.
No hesitation. It’s a cancer on society.
Just like this blog…
And imagine the increase in productivity and the decrease in whinging that would come with the removal of social media!
Prompt: Can you share a positive example of where you’ve felt loved?
There was this pretty young lady at the airport who was really nice to me.
She was sympathetic when I told her I was all alone in a strange place and invited me to join her and her friends at their communal home.
Everyone was so nice and friendly and hugged me a lot and offered encouragement.
The place was bright and shiny and full of flowers, and the Revered One, who guided everyone to true happiness, was warm and friendly too.
Signing over all my worldly possessions to the Revered One seemed a small price to pay for such happiness and community.
Three months later, my family broke in, kidnapped me, and paid a specialist to deprogram me over the course of several weeks.
That’s the moment I felt truly loved.
ian m dudley 