Three Straight-Ruled Ledger Staves

After eat­ing some­thing that did not sit very well at all with me and toss­ing and turn­ing with fair­ly lurid dreams last night, I’m not sure why any­one hasn’t caught on that Ebenez­er was absolute­ly right about the cause of his apparitions.

“A slight dis­or­der of the stom­ach makes them [the sens­es] cheats. You may be an undi­gest­ed bit of beef, a blot of mus­tard, a crumb of cheese, a frag­ment of an under­done pota­to. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, what­ev­er you are!”

Indeed. And he awak­ens as if no time has passed on Christ­mas morn­ing, because it hasn’t and the whole thing is but the fret­ful con­jur­ings of a trou­bled bel­ly dis­rupt­ing the peace­ful ratio­nal­iza­tion fac­to­ry of the mind, one long indi­gestible hallucination.

Now, if all our phan­tas­mago­ria were so full of moral rec­ti­tude more of us might wake up from the fever dream of food poi­son­ing bet­ter peo­ple. But it takes an accountant’s mind to have such a neat and tidy dream sequence in three straight-ruled ledger staves.