Paternal Proxy

In which our Hero realizes that his success as a Proxy has been so successful that past parental mockery has actually traveled through time to smack him in the face

It is as I’m tying a towel to a clothesline rigged in the basement to use capillary action to draw water out of a bucket so that I can keep the humidity of the house from dropping even lower than it already is that I suddenly have an out of body experience, and a much younger me is watching my much younger father creatively assembling some other technological abomination and thinking, “Why don’t you just buy the thing that does that?” but past father and present me are thinking the very same thought, that we need a solution now, and anyway it’s a waste to buy something for a temporary fix because a plumber is coming to fix the busted feed line for the humidifier so really, this is actually a very logical and highly practical solution, just like all the other wet towels hanging from doorknobs and hooks and lintels all around the house.

But present me is scowling, at past me for pointing out the absurdity, at time-independent father for the dementia that I’ve clearly inherited undiminished, and at the array of damp-cotton-towel-based humidifiers that I have been faithfully re-moistening every few hours or so for the simple reason that my mother is coughing because of the dryness of the air. The more towels, the better my score.

All I need now is a manilla-envelope hat and I’ll pretty much be him.