Things continue to happen each and every day - sometime without my permission, and sometimes in direct conflict with my explicit orders. You know nothing, Jon Snow - especially not that everything that I tell you is a lie.
So my morning begins much the way I'm certain your own began - with a mysterious phone call at 3:30 a.m. from a string of random numbers which I've never before seen. I wake up to a ringing and think, "What the hell? Did I dream about a phone ringing so loud that it woke me up?" Then my phone rang again. I leaped nimbly (an oft repeated theme in my daily life) from bed into the hallway without ever touching the ground and somehow taking my phone with me. "Hello?" I asked, more worried than perturbed. Silence. "Hello?" I asked again, more perturbed than worried. Complete silence. There is the type of silence wherein whoever is on the other line breathes, or rustles, or rips a gargantuan fart, and then there's the type of silence which sounds like a computer accidentally drunk dialed your phone while attempting to sext the iPad 2 down the street. I attempted to sleep again but my thoughts ran wild - "Is this some half-forgotten nemesis from the past who is attempting to wreak havoc on my idyllic life?" "Is this a friend or brother calling with an emergency who was cut off at an inopportune time?" "Is this a hodgepodge group of mercenaries who are even now lurking outside my house, watching my windows, calling to see if I'm home?" I Googled the numbers but the only information I was able to gather was that they belonged to a Sprint customer in Atlanta, Georgia. Everyone knows that those facts automatically equal drug dealer, so I lay in bed in a cold sweat.
Some of that may be attributed to my recent movie viewing habits. When not watching sadistic and ultra-violent children's movies like The Plague Dogs, I like to broaden my horizons and subject myself to half-hearted horror movies. I'd heard semi good things about the recent effort, Insidious, and, as it cost but a dollar in Redbox, I decided to give it a try. My wife is a huge baby who hates everything even slightly scary (except for roller coasters, which is when she becomes supremely adventurous and I cower in fear) so I waited until my night off, when she has to go to bed early. I tucked her sexy little self beneath the covers, kissed her adieu, got a beer out of the refrigerator, and decided to watch a little bit of the Braves game before I started my movie. I woke up at 2:04 a.m., sitting on the couch, fully clothed, my beer still unopened. Some would look on such a circumstance as an unabashed failure of a night dedicated to The Fun. Not I. On the contrary I realized, as all good children must, that 2 a.m. is a much scarier time than 10:30 p.m. I poured myself a rum and coke, shoved a beer can in either pocket, and descended into the depths of my basement. It was time to get scared.
I, growing up, was the type of child that one might affectionately refer to as, "an asshole." I don't know why I'm this way, but I am. Lady GaGa tells me I was born this way. I always wanted to push the boundaries, test the limits, and expose myself t things that I knew I was unprepared to handle (which explains my lifelong battle with HPV). When I was about 11 years old I stayed the night at my grandparents, who had HBO, and forced myself to stay up until 1 a.m. so I could watch whichever Friday the 13th movie it is that begins with Jason being blown up in a trap set by the military or police. Later a doctor eats his heart, becomes possessed, and things go haywire from there. I believe it's Jason Goes to Hell. That night I tossed and turned, and then finally fell asleep, only to have nightmares that I was being chased by Jason. I ran from home to home, herding my two younger brothers before me and trying to protect them. I'd rush them up into an attic and run back down to bar the front door only to find that everyone downstairs had been macheted to death. I awoke in a cold sweat and spent about four seconds in terror before I realized it was all a dream. I've chased that feeling ever since.
About five or six years ago my girlfriend (at the time) and I embarked on a month long journey to find the scariest movie of all time. We watched, The Exorcist, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Alien, Phantasm, Hostel, Psycho, JAWS, and every other movie we could find on every SUPER SCARY list on the Internet. Let's face it - scary ain't real no more. It's 2011, baby, we know fact from fiction. Out of every movie we watched, only Halloween gave me the heebie-jeebies (and only because of that excellent scene when Michael Myers' mask comes into focus in the closet). Simply put, horror movies don't scare me. I get a thrill out of being frightened. I want to be terrified. They all fail.
I gave Insidious the best of chances. I started the movie around 2:20 a.m., trapped in my dank, cinder blocked, bug infested basement with only my kitten for company. I drank heavily, leaning forward and staring at the screen. I didn't bring a laptop or my phone with me. Lady, I was focused. This movie is genuinely quite good, for exactly 96 minutes. I was honestly starting to get a bit creeped out, but then everything got over-the-top and scary. Listen movie-makers, a husband and father hearing strange noises, checking to make sure his front door is locked, checking the rest of the house, and then returning to the front door to find that it is wide open and the chain lock is swinging back and forth is far, far scarier than some zombie Indian ghost throwing people around a room. Anyway, I needed to pee or something so I ejected the DVD and headed back into the house to finish it. To leave my basement I have to crawl out a window/door and then cross 10 feet of dark early morning stillness to ascend the steps to my house. The night isn't nearly as quiet as we are lead to believe, as bugs and animals of every ilk sing their worship to the moon and screech their warning to we humans - You are creatures of the day they tell us. You are not welcome here. It got a tiny bit creepy, I'll admit.
Fast forward, fast forwarders. I lay in bed this morning, after my phone call, thinking all sorts of things to keep me from going to sleep. Some of those things may have been inspired by Insidious. So anyway, like a good little boy I eventually get up and go to work this morning, only to spy a goddamn raccoon running across a rafter and somehow sliding through a crack in the sheet metal to hide in the ceiling tiles above our offices. Someone swore they saw a raccoon and chased him off last week but evidently the creature only retreated into our ceiling, where he's been stuck ever since. Today was a comedy of errors as my boss and another employee vainly attempted to coax or force the raccoon to ground level and chase him out of the building. I helped them for awhile, staring the 'coon straight in the eyes and attempting to speak with him in a language beyond mere words, but all to no avail. The real problem in this situation (and the problem in almost all areas of life) is that people refuse to do what I tell them to do. When I returned to work, 7 hours after first spotting the raccoon, I asked my boss, who was still watching him climb the rafters, "Do we not have a ladder here?"
"Oh yeah, we do." he told me.
"Well get it out and let's get him down."
"We have a trapper coming this afternoon to try and catch him," he said. The trapper charges $250.
"We have a trapper coming this afternoon to try and catch him," he said. The trapper charges $250.
"Get out the ladder and I'll climb up to one end of the rafters, you force him towards me with the long pole, and we'll catch him."
"He'll attack you. He'll go through you," he tells me.
"I'll throw my shirt over him! I'll hit him with a broom and force him to jump!"
Finally the hidden creature showed his bandit face again and pranced along the rafter between his two hidey-holes.
"Take this long pole and block off the far end," I told my boss. I waited until the monster was far enough along and then raced to to the other end, leaping (nimbly, like I said before) from furniture to furniture until I found myself fifteen feet high and armed with a straw broom. The raccoon charged and I told him, "Oh no buddy, you turn around or jump down." He turned around. My boss, able to follow only partial directions, was waiting for him at the other end, but without the long pole. He watched helplessly as the raccoon escaped back into the office ceiling, ten feet overhead and out of reach. When I left work the foul fiend still pranced among the ceiling tiles, enjoying the air conditioning and looking for a way to escape. Why does everything have to be so difficult?
Listen to me boys, and we'll all sleep better at night.
No comments:
Post a Comment