SpongeBob torments me in the night. My daughter bursts into my room . “Daddy what are you shouting? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, I’m fine,” I say. “Go back to bed.”
With my wife on isolation is another room, only half the bed should be disturbed, but I have torn off the covers, upended the sheets and left them in a jumble.
It is SpongeBob’s fault, of course.
SpongeBob, aka Corona, aka Covid-19. He torments me at night, that nasty germ.
This SpongeBob doesn’t talk like the one my daughter used to love on TV. No, he makes a high pitched, half animal, half robot sound as he waves his arms and runs after me.
In my dream, I am on the basketball courts at Wolcott Park. Two beautiful basketball courts laid out and to end. Basketball courts without rims of course, as the mayor ordered them taken down weeks ago. I stand on the court without a basketball. Instead I hold a blanket, with which I try to capture SpongeBob by leaping on him, but he always manages to escape my grasp. I think I have him, but then he is free and pouncing on me, I kick him off, but he just bounces right back off and comes at me again. I pounce, I have him in the blanket, we wrestle, he gets free and is on me, and I kick him off again. Apparently this is not a silent movie, but the talk of the household the next day.
“What were saying, Daddy, what was going on?
“Sponge Bob,” I say.
“Not again.”
“Yes, again.”
My wife, behind her mask just shakes her head, and tells my daughter. “Your father is a tormented man.”
Yes, I am. But one night I am going to get that little f---er.
