Quietly Thinking

Quietly Thinking

by Mark Lyons

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

           Sally and Mark are quietly watching TV – some Romantic Comedy. They are thinking in their heads at the same.

            Mark: “Wow, I am sure looking pretty fit. I guess that 5 minutes of extreme Parkour three times a week is paying off. And I can still eat anything I want! Cool!”

            Sally: “Mark’s looking a bit chubby around the middle. Like “exercising” a couple of minutes several days a week is going to work. He needs to eat more lettuce and less carbs.”

            Mark: “My thick, luxurious hair may need to be cut in about a month. No reason to mess with a good thing!”

            Sally: “He sure needs a haircut. About a month overdue. His hair keeps getting thinner and whiter if you can believe that. It’s happening even as we watch TV.”

            Mark: “I really need to get out there and apply my expert-self-taught-from-hours-of-watching-DIY-shows-on-PBS skills and work on fixing the back fence. I’m thinking that I will start by nailing a bunch of 2 x 4s into the existing 4 x 4s and pickets while tying some rope at the end of each 4 x 4 and pulling the rope taut and tying the other end of the rope to sticks I hammer into the ground with my burnt orange UT hammer. Then if I rig a pulley system using one of two of my bowling balls as the weight to keep the fence upright when the wind blows from the north and use my other bowling ball held in reserve to bolster the fence when the wind blows from the south, it will work. It’s cheap, terribly effective, and worthy of any show on PBS.”

            Sally: “Maybe Mark will take a look at the back fence and figure out that trying to fix it is beyond his limited skills. He’s probably come up with some Rube Goldberg contraption to fix it that somehow involves a hammer.”

            Mark: “Next time I am at the store, I am going to get a really hard jigsaw puzzle. I mastered that 24 piece one with the farm animals in just under a week. I really think I could have done it faster except the outline indentations of the animals kept throwing me off.”

            Sally: “It is getting close to jigsaw puzzle time. He works on that puzzle about an hour each night. I had to help him with the last puzzle – the farm animals. Maybe I can suggest that he get an easier puzzle the next time he goes to the store.”

            Mark: “I am crushing the social media platforms out there now. My thumbs are getting callouses from all the texting. The last time I checked, I was following 10,487 people on Instagram. Amazing! My Tik Tok video now has a total of 103 views! I’ve got almost 10 friends on Facebook! I don’t think I can start a Twitter account yet. I would have to divide my time between too many platforms. Can’t let my focus be diluted. My followers and friends wouldn’t like that. What a popular guy! Retirement is so great!”

            Sally: “He needs to watch out for his thumbs when he is texting. Auto-correct isn’t working for him.”

            Mark: “Those emoji crew socks from SammySocks Etc. really look good on Sally. She is rocking them! Whoo-Hoo!”

            Sally: “I really like my emoji socks from SammySocks Etc. I do look good in them!”

            Mark: “Does she end up with the former boyfriend from high school after leaving home and going to the big city where she makes a fortune as an ad executive and then comes back home to run her father’s worm farm and refalls in love with the former boyfriend who is now the owner of a coffee shop/laundromat but not before she sees him hugging a woman who later turns out to be his long lost sister and they have a brief falling out until her dad sets her straight and tells her that she needs to go fight for him? I did not see that coming!”

            Sally; “Good ending!”