Grand Adventure in Foreign Policy
Prologue
It was a warm summer evening, just after the sun had set on the West Coast of Canada. The temperate weather had me walking back to my apartment without my Roots pullover on, and I had stuffed it in my backpack. My pack was chock-a-block full of my personal crap, work papers and a large bottle of Evian that I had not yet cracked open. I was a wee bit cranky from the long day of being in the office planning labour action against one of the Employers, who had not been negotiating in good faith during the Collective Bargaining process. Entrenched Employers were rapidly becoming the bain of my existence.
That migraine that I could feel sitting on the edge of my brain all day was now making itself comfortable in my right frontal lobe. I had all my meds on me, but I just wanted to get home and then take them, so I could go to bed and sleep the damn thing off. Good god, I needed to book a facial and massage first thing in the morning. A day to pamper myself and do some much needed stress relief. Maybe, if I was up to the challenge, I would take a yoga class in the afternoon. When life became a series of weeks where one worked for the weekend, it was time to step off the wheel and take time for oneself. I had passed that point a couple of weeks ago. If I had to argue with one more union local president about the necessity of a strike, I was going to lose my mind.
I stepped onto the gravel path leading through the copse of trees and what one laughingly called a 'garden', leading to the door of my building. The path was not well lit and I kept telling the building manager to put up patio lights. I had the strongest feeling the whole set-up was a mugging waiting to happen. Walking along the path, just under the canopy of branches, I was trying to shake off the feeling something bad was going to happen. I scanned the garden between the trees, looking for any sight of impending conflict. My inner eye suddenly blacked out. I sensed my spirit fall into the void. That was the red-alert call that Big Trouble was about to happen. My steps sped up, as I tensed, ready for the assault. A breeze suddenly came up, shaking the leaves above me. The breeze blew into a stronger wind and then I heard the crack of a branch above me as it tore away from the tree and fell. Damned thing smashed me right on the back of my head! I crumpled like a deck of cards to the ground and as my vision greyed, I knew I couldn't stop from passing out.
I felt like I was falling, and had a terrible case of the bed spins. Wind rushed past my ears and my stomach turned. This, I thought, was a seriously ironic case of Alice down the rabbit hole. Having gone skydiving on several occasions, I was trying to figure out how far the fall was, but I couldn't see anything and I wasn't sure I was cognisant to anything real or relevant. Oddly enough, my headache wasn't noticeable and the injury I must've sustained to achieve a blackout wasn't demanding any type of attention. Being brain damaged must have its advantages, I figured. After an indeterminate amount of time, I felt a thud as my body seemed to have achieved touch-down. Sentience faded away like the sound being turned down on a stereo. Everything fades to black, as they say in the movies.
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