View from the North 40: Following the trail from A to TP

For as long as I can remember, my brain has been wired to notice those moments in life when two things that are entirely not connected to one another occur at the same time, like when the furnace turns on at the same moment a train whistle blows.

Why, with so many elements that govern when a furnace might turn on and when a train whistle might blow and none of the elements having any ties whatsoever, why in all the world would those two things occur at the exact same time?

Train whistles rarely blow as they pass by and my furnace hibernates through the summer, so the odds are stacked against this simultaneous occurrence. Certainly my furnace and the train do not exist on speaking terms. They don’t know each other at all.

This phenomenon is not like two people walking side by side and tripping over the same crack in the sidewalk — that’s more like having two lights wired to the same switch.

It’s not like something getting spilled or someone getting bumped while I’m telling a story — I always talk with my hands in motion like they’re orchestrating punctuation and connotation as the words fly from my mouth, so these hands are destined to leave carnage in their wake.

And it’s not like two similar movies being released at the nearly same time, like “Antz” and “A Bug’s Life,” “Tombstone” and “Wyatt Earp” or pretty much everything to do with the Marvel and DC Comics rivalry. This twin movie release shtick is all about two studios in competition in a way that will allow them to feed off each other’s hype. That is a business model, not a mystery.

One time, I was riding a nervous green-broke horse, and she spent a good 10 minutes trying to work up the courage to go check out a startling new cattle feeder out in the neighbor’s pasture. The horse finally got brave enough to stretch her nose forward and touch the feeder — at the exact same moment a gunshot went off about a mile up the coulee from us. How the rodeo scene did that happen? And why?

Is the world just a computer simulation with only so many lines of code to be written, so the rare and overworked execution commands have to be shared among events? I. Don’t. Know.

I really don’t know, but I’ll tell you this: Over the years that I have been writing this column, I’ve come to recognize something else about my brain: It sees connections through time and story lines.

My brain gets very happy when it solves the puzzle, sees the path from point A to B to C and so on.

That’s not to say I’m a conspiracy theorist — I’m too fond of logic, facts and credible sources for that — but I understand their attraction to the trail they follow and the storyboard they concoct.

Our global supply shortage, for instance, has created a supply problem with disposable diapers.

Ironically, just before this news struck big in the major news outlets we started seeing semitractor-trailers hauling diapers running into some bad luck out on the roads. A diaper transport semi caught fire and burned up its inventory on I-15 near Butte July 23 — one day after a semi dropped a load of diapers onto I-45 in a rollover incident in Texas.

The fear of a diaper shortage is real — definitely when both CBS and FOX agree on it — and it’s easy to think that parents will just have to go back to cloth diapers like in the old black-and-white photograph days.

I ask you this, though, what about the adults? Are they going to have to waddle around in an adult-sized 12-ply flannel nappy? I ask on behalf of all adults of a certain need, but also on behalf of the astronauts. Yes, our astronauts.

The astronauts in space, whose toilet broke down on Space X over the weekend and they had to wear adult diapers until they touched down on Earth Monday. Maybe they could’ve made due with cloth diapers in Neil Armstrong-era suits, but these sleek new spacesuits don’t leave much room for under-layers. Plus, and I’m just speculating here, I don’t think the giant, stabby, fail-friendly “safety” pins would meet OSHA-approval in a spacesuit.

So this disposable diaper shortage is a problem. I think we’re seeing an uptick in diaper theft, as well, especially since prices have gone up.

I mention all this not because I have any compassion whatsoever for other people’s diaper plight, but because I read in an Oct. 27 UPI article that a semi lost hundreds of rolls of toilet paper on I-880 in San Leandro, California. At this point my brain started thinking about last year’s TP shortage and the fact that I just paid about a dollar a roll for TP a few weeks ago.

Now, I don’t normally go shopping on Black Friday, but I might be making an exception this year so I figured I should warn folks that I will be making an aggressive run with my cart as a battering ram on the way to the TP aisle if I see that it’s on sale this year.

I will use my elbows as weapons.

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You have been warned at http://wwwlfacebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .