about robot

On gentle April evening in 2006, I find myself out beyond Golden Gate, just north of the Farallone Islands, at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, inside my son’s talking-robot alarm clock. Somehow this once four-inch high Chinese-made novelty is now a hulking twenty-foot version of itself and able to withstand the crushing pressures of the ocean’s depths.

I try to gather my wits. The last thing I remember is chasing a red, over-stuffed, occasional chair through the dark bowels of a tramp steamer moored to a crumbling dock on the western edge of Alameda Island in San Francisco Bay. I don’t remember how I got there and I only vaguely recall the loud voices attached to rough hands that put an abrupt end to this inexplicable pursuit. Later, after ship is underway and heading out to sea, those same hands summarily toss me from the ship’s quarterdeck and into a helpless, headlong plummet through the crisp, night air to the frigid waters below.

Now, unconscious, I begin a long, drifting decent to the ocean floor and a sure death. That’s when I start to regain awareness and find myself in the robot’s pressure-equalized interior. Somehow, the robot begins produce enough oxygen to sustain me. Just as I begin to grasp my bizarre circumstances, intense lights emanate from the robot’s eyes and stab through the darkness to reveal the underwater terrain before us. We begin to move. I grab for anything to hold on to and hope for the best. Unfortunately, I get the worst.

The accumulative effects of my concussion, the numbing cold, and the intense compression is just too much for my frail body. During the robot’s long slog eastward along the bottom of the Bay, I die. In response, the robot expels now-unneeded oxygen in his interior and replaces it with a mixture of rare and exotic gases extracted from the sea-water around us. This action serves to preserve my decorticating remains. Later, back in Alameda, robot revives me by means of an experimental chamber he discovers secreted away in a building on the now-defunct Naval Air Station nearby.

I’m still unclear about what initiated the strange occurrences on that fateful Spring evening, but robot (as he likes to be called) tells me that he traced it back to a rouge muse, disguised as a broom in the corner of my studio. He said he took care of it. Anyway, I’ve put all that behind me. I’m back to living my normal, humdrum, life on Mirasol Avenue. Even though I owe robot my life, all he wants, in return, is to live here with us and help out around the house. We welcome this (although there is a scale proviso [he's got to be able to fit through the doorways]) and, now, I’m happy to say that he is a valued member of our family. I mean, when he is not doing something like mowing the lawn or walking the Chihuahuas, he likes to maintain this blog. So enjoy.