Thoughts at two a.m.

Some ideas: It is snowing. My snow shovel is locked in the crabby next door neighbor’s garage because she had borrowed it. The garage is locked with a padlock. I know how to pick a warded lock with a skeleton key, so I open the lock and slip inside to search for the shovel. While inside I hear the sound of her studded tires crunching on the driveway. She had often accused me of being a thief, so I pull the door shut and hide. She finds her garage door unlocked and, because she always locks it, phones the police while waiting in her car outside her garage. The worst thing: I damage an expensive work of art in her garage when I try to hide. The artwork is entitled, “Buffoon,” and looks much like me. She commissioned a famous professional artist and now she believes I broke in to her garage to damage the piece.
Idea #2: A true story: My nephew phoned me to say that he visited my brother who had terrible chest pain. This story ends a month later with us packing up his things because my brother had died on his kitchen floor. He had lain there perhaps a week, maybe two or three, and his body had decomposed, inflated, deflated. My oldest son scraped his uncle’s remains off the linoleum. Then he phoned and asked us to come.
Idea #3: This one is just plain stupid: The Texas governor is afraid that our President is training Navy Seals to attack him. Wait. That’s not fiction.
Idea #4: A man’s child hits a baseball through a neighbor’s stained-glass window. Fortunately he retained a very good lawyer. The man, not his child. The window’s value is astronomical. The child’s hit was champion quality. It would have been a homer in a professional baseball stadium.
Story idea #5: I move to a strange city to a job as a hospital pharmacy technician. My first day the pharmacy manager brings in a photographer for a publicity shot of new employees. I would pose as a patient so I am given a gown and, after removing my all my clothes except shoes and socks, I am taken down a hall in my backless gown to a vacant patient room and put to bed. In the photograph a newly hired nurse appears to be taking my temp.
After several pictures everyone quickly exits. As I climb out of bed a nurse’s aid enters the room, sees me, and informs me that she had just made the bed and she is furious! Perplexed, I explain that I just had my picture taken, but she only gets more angry. I hold the back of my gown with one hand and walk to the pharmacy window. The pharmacist will not let me into the pharmacy because he doesn’t know me. I am arrested by security for indecent exposure because I am not ill and have no doctor. I have no identification, no telephone, and I cannot remember the address of my new apartment. I am totally panicked.