Off The Bat

To help alleviate the recent spate of social stressors with which I have been beaten mercilessly about the head and shoulders, I have been attending a meditation circle on Tuesday nights.  I have common sense sufficient to understand wine just won't cut it.  Alcohol is, after all, an amplifier and drinking to excess is not going to make me feel any better.  That has not stopped me sipping the occasional glass of merlot whilst watching 'The Chaser', firing off answers at the television at the same time as  fielding questions from my youngest along the lines of, 'Mum, when are you going to go on this?' 

I've been enjoying the meditation, and am getting better at clearing my mind as I sit on my chair in the living room where it is run.  The person who runs it is an old school friend.  Usually I have some difficulty clearing this old scone of mine; it's thoughts and worries and anxieties all whirl and tessellate like a crazy old kaleidoscope.  But last night, I swear I 'left my body'.  I sat with my eyes shut and could feel my physical shell slumping over in my chair, and in my subconscious I wondered was I going to end up actually landing on the floor with a thump and disturbing the quest for inner calm of the other women in the room.  No, seriously, that's what I thought was going to happen; I was going to land on the floor in an ungainly heap in front of all the others. It would be just like the time when I was twelve, and my older sister and I were on the rotor at Luna Park.  For those of you not au fait, the rotor is a circular room that spins with the speed of a frenzied tornado, and the floor drops away, leaving you pinned to the wall with the centrifugal force.  You can edge your way up the wall if it is your wish, and for some odd reason I decided to work my way up higher than anybody else.  That was well and good, but when the room's revolutions lessened in intensity, and we slid down the wall, I was still about three feet from the floor when the spinning actually stopped, thus causing me to belly-flop onto the floor where all I could do was grunt, 'Ooof!' When relaying this later, my sister said, 'Bing had a most ungraceful descent.'  However, my concerns last night were unfounded, and I managed to somehow stay on my chair before 'returning'.  I had hoped I would return to Sofia Vergara's body, but - alas -  instead ended up back in my own.

Yeah, so I returned home feeling pretty good.  I made my kids' lunches for today, and sat down to play on my iPad.  In my peripheral vision, I thought I noticed something flickering in the kitchen.  I put it down to shadows, or a moth.  Then my oldest son cried out, 'What the hell?'  Something flew from the kitchen into the lounge room, and did a few laps around at ceiling-height.  'It's a bird!' my son declared.  Then he had a closer look, as I was frowning at whatever it was, and hoping it wasn't what I feared, but - and I'm not making this up - my son confirmed it: 'Hey, wait - that's a bat!'  Yes, the back door was open, and somehow or other a baby bat had become separated from its flock and flown into our house! 

In a fit of cowardice, I squealed like a bitch and ran into my bedroom, issuing instructions from behind the door to get the bloody thing out and not let it anywhere near where I was.  My brave, or more likely amused children opened the front door and the creepy creature flew out, and hopefully rejoined its flock.  I have a sufficient level of the milk of human kindness in my veins to have felt some concern for the fucking thing, after all, it must have been frightened.  That being said, it still creeped me out to the 9th power.  I do have some Black Sabbath among my music collection, but that's the closest I had to hand of the bat's natural enemy: Ozzy Osborne.  Not that I would allow him to chow down on a bat in my house. 

The inner calm I had achieved at the meditation circle was just - poof! - gone when that horrible thing flew into my house.  Next week, I shall ensure the back door is shut if there are bats circling overhead.