Interlude II: Hungry Gremlins

Okay, y’all know what Gremlins are, right?

And no, I don’t mean those little things in that 1984 movie where they had little things called Mogwai running around, tiny bundles of cuteness that made your favorite childhood teddy bear look rough and tough and homely. I’m talking about those things that pilots tacked the blame to for all the mechanical failures their planes had during World War II. The kind of thing Shatner saw in the 1963 Twilight Zone Episode, Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, or that Bugs Bunny had to deal with 20 years earlier in the 1943 Warner Brothers cartoon Falling Hare.

The kind of thing I’m positive is behind most of what goes wrong with my car, my computers, and hell, maybe even me.

Every time I’ve had to take something to the shop (or the doctor) and seen someone shake their head at me and say “Wow, you know, I’ve never seen anything like this before,” all I can do is picture the gremlins, some little creatures, rubbing their gnarled hands as they grin wide with glee. I envision them doing little happy-dances, hopping and strutting as if they’d just scored a major NFL touchdown when they knew their moms was watching. I see them in my mind, a grinning little group made ecstatic by the utterance of those words, this admission of bafflement from the supposed ‘experts’, all slapping each other on their bent little backs and high-fouring each other in a congratulatory celebration.

Picture NASA’s Mission Control on every successful launch you’ve seen in the movies.

Now make it tiny, twisted, and invisible. Oh yeah, did I mention that? I think the little suckers are invisible.

And hungry. I’ll tell you why.

Here’s the story:

I got out of work one evening last week, and decided to stop by Wendy’s drive-through window on my way by. I had some writing and stuff to try to get done when I got to the House Which Once Was Mine, and I didn’t want to waste a bunch of time cooking myself something to eat, never mind all the time I’d have to spend cleaning up after myself. Much easier to simply pick up a pair of Crispy Chicken sandwiches to eat on the way, right? No muss, no fuss, and it only costs me $1 a sandwich. What more could anyone ask?

So I pulled through the drive-through. Being right next to a building like that sort of captures and amplifies the whistling that still comes from my engine somewhere. It’s usually pretty loud, but in this type of situation it becomes truly obnoxious.

—A quick sidebar about that damn whistle: That’s the gremlins too. It’s a loud whistle that I’m assuming is coming from a hole in a pressure hose somewhere, but I can’t find it. It will whistle loud and clear for a half-hour or more, quieting or even pausing when I accelerate but coming back like shrieking siren when I let up on the gas, and God help anyone who’s standing about when it’s idling. It whistles like this until I stop the car somewhere, intending to put up the hood and listen to the engine, trying to isolate the sound, find its source and finally fix it. The sound continues while I park the car, get out, fetch the rod I use to prop the hood open from the back seat or even the cargo area, pop the hood, raise and prop the hood… and then it stops. Right in front of me, it just stops. Every time. And every time I imagine those crinkly-wrinkly little bastards hooting and hollering, rolling about on their backs and just pissing themselves with thigh-slapping laughter.

If I ever do catch one of these little supernatural saboteurs, things will not go well for him.

End of sidebar. Back to the story—

So I pulled the Whistle-Mobile through the drive through and collected my pair of plain Crispy Chicken sandwiches. I know from experience that they are going to be too hot to eat right out of the bag (This, after burning my mouth and tongue nearly a dozen different times. Hey, I might learn slowly, but I do learn!), so I don’t even try to eat right away. As I drove down the street with my left hand on the wheel I used my right to open the bag, unwrap the sandwiches from their protective paper packaging, and sit them on the passenger’s seat with their lids off, so to speak. I took the top of each sandwich off and let the cool night air have at the batter-coated meaty center of the sandwiches for just a minute. I then put the lid back on one of the sandwiches and happily munched away as I eased the Jeep through evening traffic.

All was right with the Crispy Chicken eating world.

My first sandwich finished before I was even half-way to my destination, either geographically or hungrilily… hungri…hungrilililiy… Uh… before I was even half-way to my destination with regards to both geography and appetite, I reached over to take up the second sandwich. I found the main sandwich, rough batter scratching at my hand as I grazed across its naked top. My fingers found the far side of the sandwich, scrabbled uselessly on the empty wrapper they found there and moved on. My hand patted, poked, scratched and searched, but found nothing on the seat next to me other then the uncovered half-a-sandwich lying on its open wrapper.

There was no sandwich top.

I pulled up to a red light, nosed in close behind the car ahead of me, and flipped on the dome light so I could scan the seat next to me with my eyes, intending to quickly find the elusive top-half to my sandwich bun, reconstruct my dinner, and commence the eating portion of this Crispy Chicken, all by the greening of the traffic light above.

There was no sandwich top.

I sighed, flipped off the dome light and scooped up my topless meal just in time to hit the gas and move along with traffic flow. Obviously the damn thing had slid off the far side of the passenger’s seat, slipping silently down to wedge itself between the seat and the door, probably coming to rest on the slightly nasty floor carpet waiting down there. No only was it out of reach and sight, there was no way I was going to eat it now. I shuddered at the thought of what might be lurking in that carpet, just waiting for the chance to attack my unsuspecting digestive system, slapping me in the bowels with all the delicacy of a wrecking ball.

No, I thought, taking a bite of my oddly bread-light sammie, that one’s lost to me. Best just to make due.

Which I did. For nearly two-thirds of the way to the house. Then I pulled over to the side of the road, got out and walked around to the other side of the Jeep. It was bugging me, hell, it was driving me crazy that I hadn’t gotten to eat my whole sandwich and I wasn’t sure why. The sandwich had been in the center of the seat, after all, not shoved over near the edge; so how in the hell did the top half of that bun slide off the far side of the seat?

I opened the passenger’s side door.

There was no sandwich top.

I got on my knees and looked in front of the seat, under the carpet mat over there, on the floor behind the seat, even down between the seat and the center storage area, where the seat-belt buckle array is anchored.

There was no sandwich top.

I got out a flashlight to carefully double-check each of the places I’d already searched before jamming my head down onto that nasty floor carpet to look under the seat, wedging my hand in as far as I could to probe the small spots my light could not reach just in case Wendy’s buns respond to different laws of Physics and motion that the rest of the world does…

There was no sandwich top. It had disappeared from a closed and moving car with me sitting right there beside it, completely oblivious.

Impossible!

Unless…

“Gremlins,” I hissed, getting to my feet to slam the passenger’s door before stalking around to get back behind the wheel. I could practically hear them in there, hiding in the unseen recesses of the vehicle, slapping each-other’s backs and rolling on the floor with laughter. At least, rolling on the floor with laughter when they weren’t stuffing their pudgy, misshapen little faces with my dinner! I pulled back into traffic and drove on through the night seething with anger, radio off and listening hard for any sound, any hint of a sound that might have been the laughter of the world’s tiniest terrorists, the world’s smallest saboteurs.

Gremlins.

They exist.

They mess with us on a bigger scale than anyone out there realizes.

And they like bread.

…and to any of you out there who might be thinking, as others have thought who’ve heard this story first-hand, that I might — might— have accidentally scooped up both sandwich tops and unknowingly eaten both of them with the first sandwich: Preposterous! The odds of someone as observant as I am accidentally eating two tops with one sandwich have got to be astronomical! To suggest that I might… Well… seriously? I mean… seriously? And after you’ve seen/heard my cogent and articulate explanation of what really happened to that bread?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m just on my way down to the Jeep with a Kaiser roll.

And a mousetrap. Let’s see y’all laugh at me once I show you one of their little invisible asses.

Well… not ‘show’, exactly, I guess… but… aw, hell…

Talk to you later!

Interlude 1: Savage Dust Bunnies

Interlude One--

Here's the story:

So there I am at that house again — the house I know I always have to be careful at because it’s under guard. It’s patrolled.

Patrolled by… things.

I make my way up the walkway, moving quickly but cautiously. I need to move right along, but I’m still trying to avoid any inadvertent sounds that might trigger an attack. I tuck my mail bag tight against my hip, swiveling like I’m doing the bump to avoid scraping on the bushes to either side as I pass by, placing my feet carefully rather than just clumping along in my big winter boots. I’m holding my breath, listening, trying to pick up any sign of where they are, hoping they’re in the house somewhere, not lounging by the mailbox, either hiding in the bushes or concealed by deck-furniture, just lying in wait to pounce.

I hate it when they do that.

Sometimes they lunge at the big plate picture window along the front of the house as I walk by, their ferocity shaking the very walls of the house as they thrust themselves toward me again and again, slaver coating the window before each terrifying beast as it sprays from their open, howling jaws — jaws filled with sharp and savage teeth. When this happens I try not to look directly at them, try not to make inadvertent eye contact: they take that as a challenge, increasing the ferocity of their display until I begin to doubt that the house itself lacks the strength to contain them.

The house, which even now stands silent, looking almost vacant in its stillness.

They can’t fool me.

I know they’re there!

I have the mail all sorted and together as I approach the mailbox, fastened as it is to the railing of the rear steps. It’s bundled together in one hand, rolled into a sort of tube that will slide easily and, more importantly, soundlessly into the waiting mailbox. I lift the lid with the back of my fingers, a smooth, practiced motion I make with the hand still cupping the mail. The lid rises. I swivel my wrist, push my hand down, release. The bundle of mail, one smooth catalog wrapped about the outside, slides into the box with all the sound of a light breeze gently nudging a stalk of grain.

Success!

I pivot on the balls of my feet and begin to make my way back the way I have come, the steps already marked out in my head, the path already clear of obstructions as well as anything that might wake the sleeping beasts.

Behind me, the breeze nudges the raised and balanced mailbox lid with all the force it would use against a stalk of grain.

The lid, of course, slams down with a report like a cannon.

Within the house the beasts awaken.

Bellowing, shrieking, snarling with rage at the prey that nearly got away, that dared to make its way into their territory and think it could get away with it, they come through the house. I can hear them, the sounds of them, getting closer and closer. I could run — should run — but instead I stand there like some poor damsel in distress in the old movies about the Mummy, or the Creature from the Black Lagoon, those women I used to think were so stupid, used to yell at the screen ‘just run, run and you’ll get away from that slow thing easily, what are you standing there for run!’ But just as they stood there, paralyzed by horror, mesmerized by fear, so stand I waiting for the monster to get me.

The pet door built into the back door of the house thumps once, twice, and they are outside with me, separated from my flesh by a mere fence, a fence they sprint the length of, snarling and slavering. Looking for an opening. Looking for a way through.

A way through to me.

I watch them run, horrified by what I see before me, a pair of otherworldly things, creatures not found in any zoo you might visit, Animal Planet special you might watch or taxonomy you might find. These are things straight out of a Stephen King novel, something found only in our own nightmares, only these nightmares have refused to be left on the pillow in the morning, defied our efforts to shake them off upon waking like water sluicing from a duck’s back as she leaves a pond, left to dry, evaporate, and be gone. These beasts have followed us into the waking world, and from the look of them they’re hungry.

Dust Bunnies.

Balls of fluff like you’d see under your sofa, or maybe your bed, tiny tumbleweeds of dust and hair and God-knows-what that blow hither and thither across our floors and up our hallways to collect on our stairs and in our corners, only to be swept up and thrown in the dustbin. Vacuumed up and thrown out with the trash.

These Dust Bunnies, however, move.

Breathe.

Hunt.

Somewhere, somehow, they’ve been given a terrible, monstrous life, whether by the hand of Man’s science or some perversion of God these things live, and I can not look upon them without feeling a shiver of fear that runs through me to my very soul.

Huge compared to their mundane brethren they remain small in our world, barely a foot tall, but they seem to gain stature through their rage and ferocity. Like Tribbles on steroids, out of control with rage, these nearly featureless balls of fur and dust and whatnot race up and down the fence on what must be rudimentary legs, puffballs of spite, snapping at the very wood that stands between us, protecting me from their savagery.

Their terrible high whining cries cut through the air, a dark sound filled with menace, reminiscent of bus air brakes squealing or nails dragged on a chalkboard. The long cries break down into a series of shorter, staccato squeals of indignation, barks of anger that hurt the ears and turn the bowels to water as I back away from the fence, wracking my brain for something, something I can give these small white demons to appease them, to somehow satisfy the incredible want, the need that fills their piteous barking so they might stop hounding me for…

…waitaminute. Barking? Hounding?

I stop backing toward the street, take a half-step closer, leaning down slightly, squinting to see through the fence pales at the small shapes flashing by…

Son of a bitch. Those things are…

…dogs?

Huh. Imagine that.

Talk to you later!

Busted!

I was at the House Which Once Was Mine, visiting with Handsome. I was lying on the couch in the TV room doing a little reading while he played on  his PlayStation. As often happens, his mother had already gone to bed and was sound asleep. As also frequently happens, I dozed off for a while. I’m used to this, though, and I have an alarm set in my phone for his bed time. Well my alarm went off and I woke to find myself all alone in the TV room. I got up and moseyed out into the hall and peeked into Handsome’s bedroom. There lay the boy, already in bed without having been told, looking weary of body and sleepy of eye.

“You already going to bed?” I asked, ever a Master of the Obvious.

“Yeah,” he yawned, curling over, pulling the blanket tight in under his chin as he nuzzled deeper into the pillow. “I’m tired.”

“Okay,” I said. “Get some sleep. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

“Okay,” he sighed, though I could barely hear him. He sounded at least half-way to Dreamland already. I shut off his light, shut off the light in the TV room, and left, shutting off the rest of the lights in the house as I went. I got in the Jeep and headed for home. I was heading for home to get ready to go to the Queen City Kamikaze Con in New Hampshire the next day. I had to go pack all the books I was going to try to sell in one of those plastic three-drawer towers I’d bought to act as a ‘sale case’. All I needed was to lie it on its back and wrap it with one of the packing straps I keep in the garage at Handsome’s house, and—

“Aw, crap!”

I had forgotten the very packing strap I needed to finish packing up all my gear. I had gotten almost all the way home but there was nothing for it. I turned around and let my headlights lead me back to Handsome’s House. As I followed them into the driveway, I noticed something odd.

The lights were on in the TV room in the front of the house, and I could see a flickering effect… the kind you see if someone’s watching television.

Or playing a PlayStation game.

I remote-buttoned the garage door open and grabbed the packing strap I needed from its hook on the wall and threw it in the Jeep’s backseat. Then I went upstairs to see what was going on. The dogs barked at me, giving me away, but I got all the way upstairs, across the kitchen, and was just stepping into the hall outside the TV room when the door opened and handsome came out in a rush. He was looking back into the room he was just leaving, being sure to slap the light switch down and kill he lights as he left, and stopped just short of running onto me chest-to-chest.

“Oh! You scared me,” he said, in a voice that was a far cry from the nearly comatose tones he’d been offering when I was leaving the first time — at his bed time. He started to slide past me, heading for his room, which was just the next door up the hall.

“Really?” I raised an eyebrow, then my wrist. “I probably wouldn’t have scared you if you’d been asleep like you were supposed to be about—” I made a show of looking at the watch on my wrist, “—forty minutes ago.”

He turned back to me and if looks could kill his face still would have said “aw, crap, I am so bagged!”

“I wanted to talk to my friends,” he said, making the smallest of gestures toward his PlayStation III. I know he’s a part of a whole on-line community through that thing, and I also know some members of that community, his friends, are in different time-zones around the world.

He had faked going to bed, faked being tired, so that he could talk to his friends, playing with them as late as he wanted.

I thought back to myself when I was growing up. Had I ever dared to disobey my parents like that? Had I ever had the gall to pretend to go to bed, only to ignore my prescribed bed time and stay up until I damn well felt like going to sleep?

You bet your ass. Only I’d not done it for a PlayStation, but to read books until 2 or 3 in the morning. Yes, I was just that geeky.

Handsome was still looking at me with an expression that said he thought he was in serious trouble. I checked my watch again, the made my own gesture in the direction of the PlayStation.

“Go on. You have 20 minutes. Just be in bed by 10:30 — and stay there this time, okay?”

He brightened right up, gave an excited little bounce and started toward the machine. He’d taken only a step or two before he turned back.

“How did you know?”

“Easy,” I said. “I used my Father Sense. It’s like SpiderMan’s Spider Sense, but it tells me when you’re up to no good. I was driving home and it was buzzing like crazy.”

“Come on, Dad, seriously?”

“Okay,” I grinned. “I forgot something and had to come back, and there was the TV room light, visible from the street.”

I reached out and touched him lightly on the chest.

“Busted.”

He laughed.

“Okay, I’m leaving again,” I said. “Now, I’m not mad, and you’re not in trouble, but will you do me a favor?”

He raised his eyebrows at me.

“Don’t do this too often, okay? You’re on vacation right now, so there’s no school to worry about, but if you go back and you’re not getting up in the morning and your teacher says you’re all grumpy and sleepy in school, I’ll know why.”

I tapped the side of my head.

“Father Sense, remember?”

I patted his shoulder and nudged him toward the game.

“Go on, you’re running out of time. Just don’t abuse this, alright?”

He nodded.

“I won’t.”

Hey, I was a kid once myself, and part of me still is — quite a big part, actually. And I trust him.

Besides — *tapping the side of my head* — Father Sense. Remember?

Talk to you later!

New Game

So you all know the Northeast was hit with a bit of a blizzard a while ago. Just a bit. A little more than two feet of snow, not counting the huge drifts the 45 mph winds threw around. There was shoveling, snow-blowing, terrible driving conditions, empty store shelves — I mean, it was not a lot of fun.

But what was fun?

Handsome and I went sledding.

Zipping down the hill.

Trudging back up to the top.

Zipping down.

Trudging up.

Down.

Up.

Down.

Rest.

I started to be all about the resting portion of the whole sledding experience. I’m going to be 44 years old in a couple of months (or 56, depending on who you talk to and what kind of a mood I’m in), and I recently caught a humdinger of a cold. After a few of those trips back up the slippery slope I was seriously starting to feel like a tired old man.

Who am I kidding? I was a tired old man!

I began rolling off the sled at the end of each run to lay flat on my back in the snow and take a bit of a break. The breaks got longer and longer. Handsome sledding away while I lay there looking at the sky, feeling the cold penetrating through to my backside and the back of my neck.

One time I looked toward the hill, expecting to see Handsome either hurtling down the slope toward me or waiting in line for his turn to do so. I thought I would at least see the back of him as he climbed back up, orange plastic sled trailing along behind him, but I didn’t see him anywhere.

I sat up, looking about, and quickly spotted a flash of orange off to my left. I saw his sled nestled upside-down in the snow, but I didn’t see…

A gloved hand came up on the far side of the sled, rising up from the very ground, cupped palm filled with loose snow. As I watched the wrist flicked, flipping the snow over to land on the turtle’s back of the upturned sled. Curious, I walked over.

Handsome had wormed himself into a body-shaped impression in the snow and pulled his sled over on top of him. He had one hand thrust out into the sunlight and was slowly trying to cover the sled with whatever snow he could reach. I watched for a moment as my son tried to bury himself in the snow like it was a summer day at the beach, then shook my head, incredulous.

“Are you serious?”

The hand stopped moving, and from beneath the plastic shell his voice sounded strangely hollow.

“Uh, yes?”

“You can’t do that.”

“I can’t?”

I shook my head.

“No. No way. We don’t have time for you to do all that blind, with just one hand. Why didn’t you ask for help?”

I knelt in the snow beside him and started scooping loose snow over him with both hands.

Snowballs, crusty chunks, loose snow, I piled it all on and around him. Soon handsome had been reduced to nothing but a low mound in the snow, the tips of both boots protruding slightly, dark against the blinding landscape.

“Hang on, I’ll be right back,” I said.

“Okay,” came the voice from the mound.

The looks on people’s faces as I walked away from my buried son and climbed into the Jeep was priceless. How were they to know I was just getting in to get my phone so I could make some kind of pictorial record of our new game? How were they to know I’m a Horror writer?

I love playing “Shallow Winter Grave”!

Talk to you later!

P.S. -For those of you currently wearing a concerned expression: 

The boy was fine. I'm not a complete idiot. He wasn't under so much snow that he couldn't get out, and what with the sled being on top of him I could leave him a window to see out of. Or even wave for help if he needed it.

...and I did love taking this creepy close-up of his staring eye.

Talk to you later!

It's All About How You Handle Pressure...

So, here’s the story:

There I was in Colorado, just a ways south of Denver, the former home of Mile High Stadium. That becomes important later on, I think. Even now I’m not sure.

I was on a visit with my friend SB, and we were out and about doing a few errands. She had stopped at an office she had to run into for a moment, and I opted, as Handsome so often does, to wait in the van while she went in. She exited the van and hot-footed it across the parking lot and into the building. I sat there for a moment just contemplating my hands.

Now, the hands of anyone with a physical job can take a beating, but the thing about the postal service jobs is that you have to handle a whole lot of paper. The thing about paper is that it’s dry. And the thing about your hands is, if you go around handling something that’s pretty dry all the time, your skin gets dry. It’s called “dessication”, but that word always brings to my mind movies about the Mummy. In those flicks they always refer to the Mummy as “a dry, dessicated corpse” — at least until he gets up and starts walking around chasing after women like a hormone-riddled college boy on his first Spring Break, the only real difference being that the Mummy moves like an octogenarian who just had a really bad enema—

But I digress.

My hands were dry. SB was in the building and I was in the van. I pulled out a bottle of lotion I’d brought from home - peppermint scented, I use it a lot - that has a kind of pop-top. You press the part of the lid that says “press”, and it pops in, popping the other side out, opening the bottle and allowing you to squeeze a controlled amount onto your palm.

Unless, of course, you take that bottle, seal it up at sea level, then take it oh, say, a little more than a mile into the sky. But I didn’t think of that.

Not yet.

So I tapped the contents into the top of the bottle in a move that will remind anyone who knows a smoker of someone ‘packing’ the cigarettes before opening the pack. I aimed the bottle at my left palm, and pressed where it says ‘press’.

Pop!

The lid snapped open as the contents, unbeknown to me, were apparently taking advantage of the change in pressure to expand and force its way out of the bottle all in one go. The whole contents. In one go.

Lotion flowed out into my cupped palm, actually streaming over and across my hand, nearly missing when it finally arced downward.

“Oh! Oh! Holy @%$!!” I yelled, suddenly an R-rated Arnold Horshack (kids, ask your parents, they’ll tell you) as I looked for some way out of the van before the mess overflowed my hand. I looked at the door handle, well recessed into the door and impervious to any kind of elbowing I could manage. I looked at the window button. No love there, the van was off so all the power windows would do was sneer at me.

I looked back at my hand. Half the bottle had made a break for it by then, and the other half was crowded at the opening, still pushing and shoving to get out like they were at a Great White concert (Kids? Parents). A tiny ocean of lotion was quickly outgrowing the confines of my hand and I needed to get out of there before I wound up having to shampoo SB’s seat thanks to my own little ‘Mr. Science’ experiment on changing pressures due to altitude!

Thinking quickly (well, I thought at the time it was quickly) I shoved the bottle at my mouth and held it with my teeth as I yanked the handle and shouldered the door open. I staggered out into the parking lot and whipped my hand toward the ground, sending a very full handful of lotion to spatter the tarmac like a bombing run from a well-fed seagull.

Only after the fact did it occur to me that, had there been an observer in that parking lot with me, say someone in another car somewhere, all they would have seen was the van start rocking, maybe heard me shouting, then seen me explode out of the vehicle to throw a fistful of goo on the ground by the rear bumper. (Kids… uh… never mind.)

But I digress.

At dinner that evening with our friends DH (female), DP(Male), and LC(female), I decided to share that little story. I even brought the little bottle with me. DP and LC were laughing, as was SB. DH, however, leaned forward to pick up the bottle and take a closer look at it. She then leaned over toward LC and held the bottle up before them.

“One,” she said, popping the bottle open with the press of a thumb.

“Two,” she said, sliding the thumb forward to pop the bottle closed.

“Open.” She thumbed it open.

“Closed.” She thumbed it closed. Then held it out toward me so I could get a very good look at what she was doing.

“One.” She popped it open.

“Two.” She popped it closed.

“One,” she began again.

“But,” I interrupted, “if I’d just done that there wouldn’t have been a story!”

“Two!” she finished, then stared at me.

“Uh,” I said, “…I panicked?”

Did you ever just feel stupid? I did.

Talk to you later!

The Wasteland

A lonely wind blows through the concourse, rustling our hero's shirt as he stumbles along. He stares about with wide eyes, looking for someone, anyone, but finding no one. He passes banks of seating, all empty. He walks up to counter after counter, sometimes walking right by, sometimes coming close enough to lay a hand upon the polished surface before finding the 'manned station' to be unmanned. The fluorescents are bright and unrelenting, without even a hum or flicker to relieve the monotony. The floor is spotless, the carpet clean, empty seat after empty seat smooth and new-looking. Terrible muzak pumps out of the overhead speakers, just loud enough to be hard to ignore, on the very edge of familiarity as if they've taken a popular song and twisted it, adding in horn sections that should not be there, string solos that should not be anywhere, until the once familiar is now almost unrecognizable, until listeners spend their time piecing it together bit-by-bit, finally coming just to the edge of recognizing the tune – and then having some bizarre auto-drum track suddenly come to fore in the 'song', smashing the listener's concentration and they lose the thread, again and again, each near-miss acting as a mental ram, forcing them deeper and deeper into a pit of despair and madness.

Is this the opening scene of some post-apocalyptic movie? Did our hero wake from a coma to find the world had changed while he slept, the entire populace replaced with hordes of ravening undead all waiting to fall upon him as the last bit of warm moving food they'll ever see? Is he some time traveler, lost in a future he was trying to avoid, nuclear disaster having forced the human race to move underground and devolve into pale, large-eyed cannibals? Is our hero, in a word, screwed?

Nope. It's Logan International Airport at quarter of six on a Sunday morning as I start my trip back to Colorado for the week. I checked in, got my boarding pass and made my way through Security, all without seeing a single other passenger. Since I walked away from the (strangely cheerful and helpful) people at the Security checkpoint I haven't seen a single soul. I've walked past four gates on the way to a fifth without seeing anyone, and it's starting to freak me out. I have been though this airport many times: sometimes it's been uncrowded, empty seats here and there, but it's never, ever been completely empty before. If I've ever wondered what surreality felt like, now I know.

This is it.

The terrible Muzak on the outside is competing with the Twilight Zone theme I'm hearing from inside my head, and I'm starting to wonder if I've accidentally wandered into the waiting room known as Purgatory … or maybe Hell. This Muzak is truly, truly bad, and what with the strange and total isolation …

I have to take a seat, I have to catch my breath. I try, but I can't. I can't catch my breath and my heart is racing like a car engine being revved up out of control … oh, crap, I think I'm having panic attack …

Oh, wait. A door just banged open off to my right, a custodian thrusting his cart out into the corridor. Back the way I've come I see two Security officers coming this way, and … wait … yes, in the distance beyond them is a passenger, another passenger, walking this way towing a wheeled carry-on like a small dog being forced to go for a walk.

People.

I sigh. All is right with the world once more.

I think I'll take a nap.

Talk to you later!

P.S. - Seriously, it was the easiest time I've ever had, probably will ever have getting through the airport, the security... but I was so freaked out by the sheer emptiness of the place I called my mom just to make sure I wasn't dreaming.


P.P.S. - Roll Poll Results!
Did you vote? I did. 

And the winner is...*drumroll* ...

Over, with a solid 100% of the vote!

So apparently the friends I was arguing this point with can go $#!% in their hat! They should have voted!

Thank you to everyone who voted in the Roll Poll! I'm sure I'll have other stupid questions for you to help me with in the future. 

P.P.P.S : And for those of you who've actually read this far, here's a little bonus, just for you! It's a silent movie parody of the "battle" between The Hulk and Loki from the movie "The Avengers". I think it's pretty clever, and, honestly, I can't see that scene from the movie without laughing -- so here you go!

Off the Cuff, or Utter Crap?

I spent a good part of this week (lunches, anyway) writing a lengthy post about some pretty stupid crap happening at work recently. I finished it this afternoon, went back to read it over, and said to myself Holy #%$#, this is utter crap!

Was I really going to give you six pages of me bitching? Really? Wow, what did you ever do to me?

Soooo... I scrapped that week's worth of work, and started from scratch a little while ago. 

You see? I love you all that much.

So instead of my well-crafted bitching you're getting two off-the-cuff Funny Handsome Moments and one stupid question to answer.  Please take part in the poll... everything I've read about having a good Blog says that audience participation is key.

So participate, dammit!

Okay... here we go...

~ ~ * * ~ ~

Funny Handsome Moments:

• Sitting down to put on his shoes, he placed his sneakers on the table next to him. He spoke to me for about 30 seconds, then began to look about the room, a blank expression on his face. When I asked what he was looking for his blue eyes widened still further, and he proceeded to point wordlessly at his sock-clad feet. Not only had he lost the sneakers he'd put down right next to himself, he'd gone blank for the moment on what they were called.
• I was making dinner, Handsome was helping. He added the milk and butter to the potato flakes and stirred them up, adding more flakes as needed until the mixture was judged to be the right consistency. While he was stirring, the corn came out of the microwave and was put in a bowl on the counter, and he had to step aside for a moment as I took the pork chops from the oven, resting the broiler on the stove top next to him.
  The potatoes being done, Handsome stuck the mixing fork in the pot and stepped around me as I was pulling plates from the cabinet, and went into his room. The door closed, and I heard the sounds of his PlayStation game commencing. I strode over, opened the door and planted myself right in front of his television.
  "You just made the potatoes, right?" I said, leaning down to make eye contact.
  "Right," he said.
  "And you were standing right there when I took out the pork chops and pulled the corn out of the microwave, right?"
  "Right."
  "And you saw me getting out the plates we're going to eat off of, right?"
  "Yeah. Right."
  "And after all that, are you telling me I actually have to come in here and tell you dinner's ready?"
  He stared at me for a moment, in wide-eyed thought, then offered a weak smile and, apparently, the correct answer.
  "Yes?"
  
  
  Oh.
  My.
  God!
  
  
  ~ ~ * * ~ ~
  
  
  And now for my stupid question: Are you an over or an under?
  
  
  What am I talking about? 
  
  
  Toilet paper.
  
  
  When you load up the roll, how do you load it? Over or under? I've actually had arguments with people about this, so I just thought I'd ask. 
  
  
  You out there! Yes, you! The WYMOP reader! Are you an over or an under?
  
  
  
  
  
  Please, help me answer this burning question by tossing a vote into the poll to the right. My 'Roll Poll', if you will. And if you think this is a stupid question, I'd just like to remind you of a certain saying we've all heard again and again:
  
  
  There are no stupid questions, only stupid people.
  
  
  That's it for this week. Do your thing, enjoy your life, and watch your ass while you're making other plans!
  
  
  Talk to you later!