A Profound Red Light

Who’d have thought that light could be profound? Not me. I always thought profound was to do with the nature of thoughts or concepts but nothing to do with physical things. Not that light is very physical, but is has got something to do with the physical realm. It’s not thought. It’s tangible. It can be perceived by one of the senses. Sight.

I raised my fingers from the keyboard. Dry. I need to drink more water. But I’ve already been to the loo a dozen times already today so surely I don’t need to increase that! I raised my arms and tousled my hair. Needs cutting. I keep promising myself that I’ll get around to it. But who am I kidding. I can’t be bothered with the mess I make. Seems like I need to vacuum the whole house every … Wait, what was that? Vacuum? Heck, that’s something I don’t have to do! I got me a new robot vacuum cleaner last week and so …

Yeah, look at that grin on my face. Look at the way it reaches my eyes and takes a little of the tiredness out of them. See how my mood’s more elevated now. This is ace! I can cut my hair and let it fly as far as it wants to because the robot’s gonna go and get it. My grin would become a wolf. It’d be proud.

So this vacuum. I’ve not experimented with it much. It’s just had a couple of runs out – once upstairs on the carpets and once downstairs on the wood. It does a really good job on both. How do I know? Well, because it comes back full of fluff and dust – that’s how. And that little robot goes everywhere! It even spends time walking around under the table and chairs in the dining room – the clearance is just right.

And talking about experimenting – well that’d mostly just be crazy stuff like putting bears on it and riding them around whilst videotaping them for posterity and the world to laugh as the robot tried to go under the bed with a jockey on-board and knocked the poor bear flying. Funny? Well, I’d laugh. Heck, I’m laughing now just thinking about it. Less funny would be putting a cup of tea on it and trying to get the robot to deliver it to someone in the next room. One detour under the couch and that’s going to get very messy!

I need to start circling back to the start now in order to round this off so ‘scuse me a mo while I read the first couple of paragraphs again.

Hmm. Light. Profundity. Scratching head. Robot. Okay, I can see how the chain went. Let’s see, how can I finish this off? Well, the robot has lights on it: blue for charging, orange for needs juice. Nothing red about it though. Also – not a heck of a lot of profound here. Phoo. How about if we introduce anther element into the mix. Red light. Okay, how about Red Light District. Can that be profound? Well, I suppose so. But how?

He paused and stares into his inner distance. It’d be difficult to stare into any other kind of distance here. White walls keep the autumn chill out but also keep the distance-seeking gaze in too. Phoo. Okay, let’s go with this then:

He plopped his fingers back on the keyboard and started typing again. Hair, robots, self-indulgent thinking and bedtime. And as he typed the word bedtime the lamp clicked quietly to itself plunging the room into what would have been a profound darkness except for one thing: a red light blinking unsteadily on the smoke detector:

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