Lost or Stolen

 

 

Sat, April 20, 2024, 4:38 am

 Woke up early uncomfortable.  Heat in room was stifling.  Freeze warning issued as cooler temps return to Des Moines with a low expected for the evening around 33 F, so the furnace must have been turned back on.

 Yesterday it was nice and sunny and around 57F.  I rode the bus and walked the remaining mile to HV on Fleur.  The woman behind the service counter was unfriendly when I asked if somebody and turned in a smartphone.  She opened a drawer and said nobody had turned in anything that day, rummaged around some clothes and pulled out one phone but didn't let me look at it.  She shoved it back in the drawer after flashing it in front of me.

But from the brief view of it, it didn't look like my iphone which has been missing 16 days now, disappearing on Friday, April 5 between 10 and 11 am.  It is the most mysterious disappearance as it occurred within a one hour period when I was only in two locations, that store where we had breakfast, and my room at the house.  

I distinctly remember that I had it when I paid for our breakfasts, and it was in my coat pocket from then until I got home.  The funny thing is that there was a weird chain of events when I got home and a familiar feeling of deja vu like I had been drugged or mind altered in some way.  We got out of JW's truck and C started to grab one of the garbage bins in the street to bring it back in the yard.  Then she let go of the cart and just walked into the house.  I then grabbed it and rolled it back into the backyard. 

 I went up to my room and don't remember if I took off my coat or not.  Don't remember if I pulled out my phone and through it on the dresser or not.  Just as I entered my room I heard the recycling truck stop in front of the house.  I went back out and retrieved the recycling bin and pulled it to the back yard.  I don't remember if I had my coat on, but I am pretty sure I locked the door behind me.  Then some thought startled me and I walked to the closet and checked my coat which was hanging on a hanger and the zipper was unzipped and the phone was not there.  

I remember the strangeness of seeing two of my housemates standing on the 2nd floor deck when I first entered the house, and a smart phone sitting on the table on the deck.  I felt very uneasy and only glanced at it.  They were watching me so closely I rushed by and assumed one of them had been sitting on the deck with their phone, and that once again they had set up some scenario to provoke me into some action that they could sit back and watch.  I also felt like it was some sort of test. 

After going back to my room, I heard the Recycling Truck go by.  I went back out to get the blue recycling bin and noticed that the two of them were watching me from the upstairs patio deck as I rolled the cart into place.  I went back to my room via the front door and saw A standing outside his door a few feet from my door.  Again, the whole incident had a surreal quality.  Nobody had said a word the whole time.

But yesterday, returning to HV to check their Lost and Found, I replayed the events of the hour the phone disappeared on April 5.  I recalled JW placing his phone in the middle of the table while we were eating.  When I noticed it, I asked him to put it in his pocket before he forgot about it and ended up leaving it in the store. 

 Later, I thought maybe he was recording our conversation at the table.

 Yesterday, another thought occurred.  I wondered if the phone on the table at HV, and the phone sitting on the table on the deck when we got back acted might have been some sort of hypnotic triggers--reminiscent of what happened to Rob Petri when they invited a hypnotist over to their house for dinner (an episode of the Dick Van Dyke 1960s era TV series I had watched recently)

The other possibility was that they were transmitting a signal that rendered me in an semi-confused or semi-unconscious state.  

Another possibility was that they could have been markers for removing my memory between those two events.  

It's all speculation.  But I do know we have the technology to read temperatures from a distance (technology used during Co-vid) and our smartphones can detect body temperature, movement, pulse and heart rate).  There is no reason to doubt that our phones send out signals as well as detecting signals.  In fact some sensors have to emit signals in order to detect the disruption in them.  

 The semi-conscious state I sometimes experience and suspect as somebody messing with my brain resembles an absence seizure in which you lose consciousness for a few seconds.  Some of our seizure patients at the UI Neurology clinic experienced them.  I tested seizure patients as well as other patients when I worked in Neurology for seven years at UI hospitals.

The fantastic idea of the cell phone on the table being used as a memory marker is an idea I got from the movie Paycheck.  It was a cool sci-fi flick (2003, Ben Afleck) in which this computer engineer voluntarily went into a comotose state for long periods of time, 3 mos to a year, while his brain worked on various computer engineering problems for a corporation.  The corporation, to cover up the reverse engineering they were doing on somebody else's technology, would erase his memory of everything that he worked on between two designated "memory markers."  He would receive a big paycheck--hundreds of thousands--for the work he accomplished, and didn't seem to mind having his memory messed with.

Anyway, this week I finally decided the phone wasn't going to ever show up again and I called it in as lost/stolen.  Tracfone would not give me a credit for the three months service I had paid on it, and they told me I could not re-use the number since it was reported lost/stolen, so the three people I gave the number to no longer have a correct number.  I had the phone for a month or so.  This is the 2nd iphone that has become incapacitated in this house.  The other one, met an untimely demise in the washing machine.  Again, a very unusual circumstance with that feeling of surrealness.

 ==

I woke up and turned off my heater which I thought I had turned off in the middle of the night but evidently hadn't.  I also noticed heat gushing out of the furnace vent and covered it up.  Walked around the house and saw one of the cats in the hall.  Nobody appeared to be up although I had heard footsteps earlier in the hall.  The magnets in the floor of my room have been really strong the last couple weeks. Waking up with lower back pain, and it feels like I have lead feet when I walk around outside now--both physiological effects of the magnets.  But I noticed this morning that the magnets were especially strong in the bathroom.  That's a new one.  They were stronger there than the ones beneath the floor in my room!  (I'm sure they were turned on a couple of years ago when I actually fell getting out of the bathtub.  Not only do they make walking difficult, but when ramped up can create vertigo.)

 They gave me a referral for a bone density test.  I faintly remember this being discussed at my routine physical.  I am wondering if the magnets affect bone density.  It occurred to me that I might be a subject in some sort of experimentation on the effects of gravity.  

----

I was hungry and wanted to make my fruitless trek to HV worthwhile.  So I stopped for a noon day breakfast.  But I didn't have it at HV.  My last two meals at HV have been unfortunate.  A month ago when I was having lunch and watching the Hawkeye women play in a championship game, my small backpack disappeared! 

 Anyways, had breakfast at Perkins.  I don't believe I have ever eaten there before.  The waitress slapped down a special menu on top of the regular menu that featured some fantastic looking gourmet waffles.  But I opted for a smaller cheaper breakfast because I wasn't that hungry.  The senior meal portions were somewhat puny but the two pancakes filled me up and were quite tasty.  They use a different batter than HV or VI that gave it a mild wheaty flavor.  

==============

Have tried to do some more painting after a several month hiatus.  I'm afraid I don't have the focus I had back during Co-vid isolation when I first started painting (2021).  It's my largest painting to date--26"x21".   The blues need to be fixed but I may just leave it since all I wanted to do was decorate the cardboard.  The gigantic box held a car fender JW must have ordered.  This version of Robert Indiana's sculpture is located in the United Kingdom.