Adventures of Tomorrow Experienced Today

                  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.

   "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. 

Random Thoughts With No Meaning

                In a bit of carry over from my last post, let's start with Red Foxes. I watched a movie yesterday - wait, let's back up. Yesterday was just a marvelous day from stem to stern. There's no real reason, except that it wasn't a crappy day, so it counts as a good'un. Maggio had to take a drive to go shop and meet with a friend (girls will be girls) so I sat on the couch for a few hours and caught up on a few movies in my Netflix Instant queue (guys will be guys). I watched the silent film, "The Passion of Joan of Arc" (yes ladies, I'm both handsome and cultured) and then put on, "The Plague Dogs" while I baked a pizza. The book, "The Plague Dogs" is by Richard Adams, who famously wrote, "Watership Down." I watched that movie as a kid and it's famous for (at least) two very creepy scenes. A) When the schizophrenic psychic rabbit Fiver has a vision of the fields around the warren being covered in blood, and, B) when some other rabbit (Bigwig, perhaps) gets caught in a noose and flies are congregating around his bloody garroted neck. "The Plague Dogs" is desperate to recreate this sort of success by being a child's movie that is not in the least bit appropriate for children. The plot follows two dogs who escape from a lab in Great Britain and try to survive in the countryside as they are hunted down by practically everyone, as it is feared that they have been infected with the Bubonic Plague. Or, as I described it to Margaret when she got home and asked what I was watching, "A cartoon movie about dogs where they draw their penises, balls, and buttholes." (both sentences are equally accurate, and appealing, descriptions).

Yes, this is a kid's movie.

            The Truth: In this movie, a dog shoots a man in the face with a rifle. In this movie, two dogs and a (RED) fox, chase a sheep off of a cliff to its death. In this movie, a (RED) fox chases a man off a cliff to his death. In this movie, men in gas masks repeatedly jab white rats with giant needles. In this movie, two dogs sleep in an incinerator full of the bones of dead animals, and only awake when a dead diseased terrier gets thrown on top of them. This movie ends with the two dogs swimming across the ocean, escaping from soldiers with guns who are waiting on shore, heading toward what can only be death by drowning. I used to think that I would force my son to love my favorite kid movies - The Iron Giant and The Rescuers Down Under. I've changed my mind though, I think I'll make him watch The Plague Dogs and Watership Down on a loop, to ensure that he'll become a sociopath.

             So, there's this commercial on the radio. I listen to the radio a lot, as I love all dying forms of art, and I pay special attention to commercials. There was this one on AM radio a few months ago for a local gun shop (yes, this is Georgia, we have those) that began by comparing President Obama to Hitler, and ended with another reference to Obama and the slogan, "Let's Shoot For Something Better." I briefly considered recording it and sending it to some news organization so they could be outraged against it, but soon realized that doing so would only make the local wildlife flock to the afore(slightly)mentioned gun shop like wildebeasts to a watering hole. Anyway, there's this commercial on the radio lately that I just have to record (the only problem is that I don't know the commercial is coming until it starts, and by then it's too late to record). It's about penile enhancement, or a viagra substitute or something, and it's amazing. I'll describe it to you from memory, as best I can. The first line is, "If you're a man, please listen to me." Now, this line may seem simple, but it's actually the best piece of acting since Daniel Day-Lewis in, "There Will Be Blood." Imagine an alien who has recently learned English and can speak only in monotone. The director (of this commercial) tells him, "Say the word, "please" with desperation. Just imagine what a supremely desperate person would sound like and pour all of that emotion into the word, "please." You can use your regular monotone for the rest of the sentence." Basically you'd have to be there to understand. The commercial continues and the listener slowly realizes that it's an ad for some new fangled boner pill ("If Viagra and Cialis have let you down, try us" is a great selling point). The real money shot comes at the end of the commercial, however, when Doctor Hornsby (okay, pause. His name is what makes me think that this commercial is a joke. Really, a penile erection doctor whose names is two tiny letters away from, "horny?") says, "If you don't have a positive reaction right now, right in my office..." (this isn't 100% accurate but way closer than you might assume). Wait a gol durn mutha lickin moment - this guy, a doctor, in a commercial, on the radio, is telling you that you should come to his office, take his pills, and get sprung right there, right now, with Doc a'watching. These are the reasons I love radio. Not only that, but if the pills don't work you get them for free. Why someone would want pills that don't work, I don't really know, but that's the reward offered.

               So I was in Wal-mart yesterday doing a little grocery shopping and noticed a man I see in there on a regular basis. He's disgustingly obese and rides around on one of those electric grocery carts buying his groceries. In my mind, electric grocery carts are what is wrong with America. They started out as a way to help the elderly, infirm, and crippled, get around stores. This seems nice enough but has two fatal flaws as a premise - 1) People who are too crippled to walk don't go places where they are forced to walk without bring along a wheelchair or walker. 2) Grocery stores shouldn't be giant warehouses that take ages to walk around. Anyway, once these mini-go-karts were made available people began using them. What did these people do before? Never go grocery shopping? Of course they went grocery shopping and they managed to survive without these karts. Now, however, people who used to push their karts around see an unused electric kart and think, "Hell, why not?" I see people on these things all the time and most are afflicted with the same ailment - obesity. This whole kart thing is some sort of metaphor for welfare queens or something - it's meant with the best of intentions but certain people take advantage of the commodity, forcing stores to add more and more karts, which means more and more people who don't need them will use them. In another fifty years we'll all be riding karts around the stores.

              So this fat guy (who may be reading this now for all I know) who rides the kart around is fat, southern, and white, which means he must be at least two more things - patriotic and religious. He swaddles himself in a giant American flag shirt (or perhaps an actual American flag) and some sort of tent like sweat pants that must have more elasticity than a trampoline. Yesterday he was talking to someone he knew about religion and said, "I'm not ordained by my church though, I'm ordained by Jesus." Jesus and the Hamburglar both. Now let's be clear here - I am definitely judging this guy. They say you can't judge a book by it's cover (something I find to be patently untrue - I can almost always tell what kind of book I'm looking at based on the cover. A cover is designed to represent the contents of the book) but I'm not judging the contents of the man - I'm judging the cover. He may be (and there's no reason he can't be) the nicest and sweetest and most generous fellow (I know he's generous when it comes to loading his plate) in the entire town, but that doesn't mean he's not disgustingly fat. I realize our society is becoming fatter as a whole, especially among the poor, but that doesn't mean there shouldn't be a stigma attached to it. Here is a picture of a sideshow freak from the year 1900. People used to pay money to see this guy because he was so fat. I see at least a dozen people fatter than this every single day. God help us all.