Ronnie's Freaking Skull

Here's me, sitting at my desk, at home, missing out on Sunday, because I need to grade papers. Blammo. I don't even want to talk about it.

I did some laundry. I was able to squeeze that into my schedule. We have a nice laundry machine set-up in the basement of our building, so I took advantage of it and put my dirty laundry inside the machines and let them do what they were built to do.

I can't believe people can build certain types of stuff. Like laundry machines. That's impressive. I could never build a laundry machine that actually works. I could build one out of cardboard that's just for show, but I couldn't build one that actually performs a function. Some people are so smart. Probably because of MIT. MIT gives people the ability to be brilliant and make stuff.

I used to work at MIT. (Temp job status, nothing permanent or full time.) It was a fun place to work. I attended a couple of lectures, if I do say so myself. I know stuff that you might not know, because of those lectures. Did you know that MIT is famous for having a lot of food trucks around campus that sell inexpensive meals? I didn't learn that from a lecture. I learned it from walking around the campus. They used to send me on little missions, where I had to drop off documents at different buildings.

My favorite place to go was this one department where this guy Ronnie worked. Ronnie had had a lobotomy a few years back, so he had an interesting disposition, and a bad wig. He was like Phineas Gage, but the opposite. Instead of being angry and bilious, he was unusually affable and sedate. He seemed really medicated. He worked at the front desk in this particular building, and he had all these knick-knacks that were perfectly arranged in his workspace. I would enter his department and we would say hello to one another, and then he would walk me to whomever I needed to deliver the document(s) to.

One time, as we spoke, face to face, a ball of lint flew out of his left nostril. It was funny, because the lint, coupled with the vacant look in his eye, made it seem as though he were rotting from the inside out. Then, a spider crawled out of his wig and walked across his face while he was speaking to me. He was unaware of the spider, and I didn't know how to tell him it was there, so I just listened to him while the thing traversed his visage. He eventually felt the spider and wiped it off his face, but I don't think he knew he was wiping a spider off his face. I think he thought it was a gnat or a stray hair, or something. Ronnie's head was like a haunted house. Ronnie was a gentle man with an empty attic of a skull.