Spooky stuff

I finally finished Stephen King's "Under the Dome," a 1,072-page monster of a novel not only capable of door-stopping the main entrance to Helena's St. Helena's Cathedral, which has doors big enough to let God and all his angels in at the same time, but perhaps the door to Fort Knox itself. The book is typical King, although in my opinion it is better than most. You don't get GREAT LITERATURE from the guy, but name me a more natural storyteller. It is, at heart, an allegory, albeit with spooky and scary stuff. I will tell you no more, in case you want to check it out.

But in King's case, spooky stuff has weird and entertaining causes. In my recent case, spookiness turns out to have a readily understood reason, fully explained by the state of my rather sadly dim and rapidly disappearing brain cells.

My spooky stuff involved my car. It was, if not exactly blowing my mind, at least pissing me off. I am in the habit of locking my car when visiting stores, etc., but I don't want to do so after pulling into my garage, leaving the vehicle quite safe. But, damn it, I have kept going out to the garage in recent weeks and finding my car doors locked anyway. I assumed I was mindlessly locking up the car out of habit, senior-moment(s) style.

(Yet, somehow, I knew I wasn't. Spooky!)

Then, today, a light bulb lit. (Not a jump-out-of-the-bathtub Eureka! moment, nor an Einstein Hey! Relativity! moment, but more of a Norwegian slap-on-the-forehead Oof-Da! moment.) I recently had been carrying a fingernail clipper in the same pocket as my keys. As I moved around, it was setting off the radio signal to lock up the stupid car.

(Last summer I had managed to set off my car's panic button in much the same way. But, hey, when you're a slow learner ...)

That's one of the things I like about King, as much as I have to skim so many pages: he makes the mysterious interesting, while in real life most mysteries are just dumb.