Would you like whipped cream / sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought?

When I am out and about, I am as often as not listening to an audiobook on one of my vintage mid-aughts mp3 players. At some point I started referring to them as my “stories,” as in “I’ve got my running clothes on, I just need to find my [GPS] gadget and my stories.” They keep me on a steady drip of narrative that is both intellectually rewarding and pleasantly anesthetic.

Often, I turn on the stories as I’m about to leave a public place. There is a slight delay between starting the device and when the audio kicks in at whatever semi-random place it left off, so as I begin to actively listen there is often an abrupt transition from the ambient conversations of people nearby into the recorded text. Naturally, this conjunction is almost always meaningless, ungrammatical, and immediately forgettable, something along the lines of:

“…and so we told her, you need to clear that closet space out, or”/ “shins, the sergeant’s advice had proved to be a blessing.”

or

“…sorry, but we’re all out of the poppyseed, but I could make it on a” / “-udying a small manual of anatomy, and peering occasionally at a bone which lay on the piano.”

So I was startled as I left a coffeeshop a few hours ago to hear an anonymous fellow human and the reader of my current audiobook conspire in a perfectly formed sentence:

“My son had a vasectomy years ago, and they” / “used his perfection as a stick to beat me with.”

Part of my brain doesn’t grasp that this sentence is just a random conjunction, and has been skittering around ever since trying to come up with a plausible backstory. The rest of my brain is finding this all highly entertaining.