“And as you can see, quarterly projections should match our three month projections based on the current weight of the Canadian dollar…”, his voice droned on further, soon to be setting a record for the world’s longest sentence and therefore worthy of stopping this meeting and placing a call to the good people at Guinness.

Eventually it would become a sort of unintelligible and uninteresting ambient rumble like that of a clothes dryer just a few days past its extended warranty. Just beyond that point, all would be lost as this quarterly company review would be lost into the recesses of time along with all whom participated. After that it would hibernate for a short while only to return to extract additional minutes from our lives to offer to an endless void of never ending spreadsheets and awkward ice breaker questions.

My mind, or more importantly my focus, was once again captained by the ever present Admiral Henry Driftwood. He was beginning the process of casting us away from the safe harbor of this current moment. With the old bearded Admiral at the helm and the winds at its sails, the old ship would soon find itself on the shores of a much more interesting topic.

Hank was an experienced sailor but that didn’t mean he was a particularly good sailor. The gentle waves often made him sleepy and would amplify the lure of his cozy captain’s hammock.

He also didn’t like fish as while delicious, they were terrible conversationalists. Over the past thirty-five years at sea he had fried up quite a few that were either terrible listeners or obnoxious narcissists. All he wanted was a scaly friend that could put up a decent challenge at a game of chess and that could also breathe oxygen without dying.

“Aye! Guess what!” He yelled upwards to the cloudy sky above. It’s how he usually communicates directly to me. It was better than the rare occasions where he would show up as an imaginary friend and intrude on something nice like a date or a dentist visit.

“I think we should go east and visit that island that had all those movies you liked when you were a wee lad. Why, we could even look up some online documentaries about the last days of the movie rental industry while we’re there!”

When he does this whole talking to the sky thing, that’s how he’s able to bring me down onto the ship. He had a lot of ideas of things to do other than what I needed to be doing and most of the time, they were awesome enough to explore.

This appeared to be one of them.

“There ya are!” He was quite happy to see me and promptly pointed over to a rope. He wanted me to begin rigging the lines to catch a breeze.

We sailed for about an hour, away from the ominous grey clouds of the meeting and towards an island lined with bright blue-leaved trees with lemony yellow trunks. Time moved differently on the sea, where minutes could be as long as hours or as short as seconds. It was unpredictable and difficult to track.

“Now quick, help me wind up this extra rope on the deck,” he barked as he prepared us to sail into the island’s tiny port.

I was a bit transfixed with the scenery, this particular island was full of fun stuff to do.

“Hey now,” he got louder to break my concentration. “Help me wind.”

Help “me wind”. That sounded a lot like “rewind”, as in that red lettering that would be stamped on VHS tape boxes at the video store. “Be kind, please rewind” it would say. They usually charged a fee if one decided not to be as kind as they liked.

I wonder if anyone at the meeting has ever forgotten to rewind a movie back then? If they did, there’s probably an interesting story that would follow it. I’d have to ask, like right now. It couldn’t wait.

I leapt off the stern of the ship and landed on the back of an aquadoodle, a large orange dolphin with of a dog-like demeanor. It let out a salty squawk as it went into turbo mode and took me back into the grey clouds of the present moment. Once we got within range of the gateway back to the meeting, the aquadoodle launched into the air and flung me away.

Things quickly came back into focus as I regained my bearings in the meeting room. Gary was still talking about annual budgets and the air still smelled like someone in the adjacent room was microwaving a cinnamon roll.

“Hey, does anyone remember movie rental stores? Remember having to rewind the tapes or they’d charge extra? Did that ever happen to any of you? I mean, isn’t it crazy that we had to do that?” A series of rapid questions, all quite important to me for some reason, made their great escape from my talking hole and into the meeting.

Everyone stopped and turned to me, not as entertained as I had anticipated.