Normally, when the phone rings even my brain quickly analyzes the data and says, “Jared, that’s the telephone, pick it up and put it to your ear.” Mere moments ago this happened. My friend Angel’s brain effectively told her to push the right numbers to make my phone beg for my attention. The whole process worked flawlessly. But not so much earlier this morning.
I was not very near the phone. I was very far away. About 180 miles to be exact. I was in my childhood home reading the blog of comedic actor Ryan Reynolds. I’m not even sure if he really has a blog, but yesterday I had been talking about how he was pretty funny in the movie “Just Friends,” so he got to show up on the third floor of my family’s oversized log cabin. The one we built between the years of 1979 and 1999. The one that robbed my siblings and I of a childhood. And still it is not finished. But most of us gave up after twenty years of waiting for carpet and real stairs.
Anyway, I was at the top of the second set of ‘temporary’ stairs that my father had installed just so we might get to the bathroom without jet propulsion. And there I am in the top floor of the house with my recently deceased mom and I’m explaining to her how I’d more like to live the life that Mr. Reynolds blogs. He parties, skis on a regular basis and even hangs out in one of my personal favorite towns, Durango, CO. At this moment arose some plumbing issues in the aforementioned bathroom but they’re too strange to mention here. Of course, at the least opportune time, when the toilet is acting up, I hear the phone start ringing. I start running for it and fall off the edge of my dream and land squarely in my bed in Englewood, CO. It is about here when my brain has a hard time telling the rest of me what to do with the phone.
“Well, can we expect you?” Asked somebody with whom I’d apparently been speaking.
“Well, uh,” I paused hoping he could fill in a few blanks. I could feel his apprehension growing. Like for whatever he’d called me to do he was rapidly regretting thinking I was the man for the job. I had to forge on without his help. “Well, it depends. Where is it that I’m expected?”
This, I think had been a blow to the man’s integrity. I heard him take a deep inhale the way you do when you hope to inflate with extra patience.
In a voice that clearly expressed his strain to remain civil he reminded what he had told me while I was back home with my mom and Ryan Reynold’s blog. “The seminar. The one where you’ll learn to sell your own house, the seminar I was just telling you about.”
And then, perhaps realizing that I just might be very vulnerable to suggestion, he stepped back into business mode and assumed the sale. “When can we expect you?”
My brain finally fully downloaded the whole picture. All of the pixels fell into place. I fully realized I had once again answered the phone, and despite being asleep, insisted that I wasn’t. This habit is due to one rebellious cerebral sector that insists on going it alone whenever the phone rings. The majority of my gray matter is busy soaping up Jennifer Garner or sending me to high school in my underwear and this cocky bit of cranial tissue runs off to play receptionist. And it's not nearly qualified to do so.
It was about to sell my house in my sleep.
I cleared things up with whoever had the luck of having me come up on their automatic dialer. He didn’t show disappointment with my rejecting his offer. Instead went right back into his spiel of how much I could save if I would just agree with everything he had to offer. In a bid to display that I was not the drunken sucker he thought I was I started to actually articulate my words. Consciousness helps in doing so. I very clearly told him no. To him it might have sounded like my better educated and much healthier caretaker had replaced the invalid who’s always buying timeshares and life insurance over the phone.
That smarter me told him I had no idea what the other guy said but we both had to go. I hung up and from my pillow stared at the ceiling. I wondered if I’d ever finished a conversation without waking up. Some Army recruiter is finishing up the paperwork for my tour in Iraq. Distant friends and relatives would be telling others “I spoke with Jared the other morning. It sounds like he’s really slipped.” A worker in China is putting the finishing touches on the biblical figures I agreed to buy.
Now if I could just get that rogue phone-happy part of my mind to make calls. After a few minutes of disjointed conversation I could get out of anything. And just go on sleeping like nothing ever happened.
Sunday, March 26, 2006 at 09:19PM 
I have a feeling this one wouldn't be as controversial. Unless, of course, there's not enough nudity. 
President's wife, Lynne. 