The Old Man Who Likes to Kill Children

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He lived behind the school, my fellow first graders said. In the overgrown yard of trash and weeds, facing the play field. He was purple, had a shotgun, and picked off kids that got too close.
It seemed plausible. There was evidence. The distant jar lid was, in fact, a the badge of a hall monitor he cooked and ate. The sun bleached BBQ potato chip bag was the last meal of some careless kid. The doll's head? It wasn't really a doll...!
A scaly, gall infested tree guarded his fortress. It had a menacing scowl and a sap oozing eye that glinted in the sun. A rusty barbecue stood in the distance, waiting to smoke the next victim.
We'd sneak up to the yard in groups, looking for evidence. Looking for him.
"There he is!" someone would shriek. Or perhaps "I see his gun!"
Everyone screamed. Everyone ran. We'd escaped serious peril. Fooled him again!
I reported him to the yard duty ladies. A purple kid snatcher! They didn't believe me. At the time, I couldn't understand why.

Nina

Nina is my niece. She's ten months old and trusts nobody. Visitors and strangers alike get the "Who the hell are you!? Stay away from me!" look.
I was just like her when I was little:
Strangers were scary! It was unnerving when a they got in my face. Who were they? Sometimes they smelled: mothballs, coffee breath, hairspray, to much cologne... Why did they have to get so close?

Are You Dreaming? Part II

So we usually don't recognize we're dreaming.
Sharks fly by, teeth fall out, you're back in school (and probably late for the test), the room fills with water. Wait! you think. Is this a dream?...
A chimney dances a jig. A fireplug melts.
...Nah.
It seems that there are some tests you can run, mid dream, that give more reliable answers. I snagged them off Wikipedia's article on Lucid Dreaming.

• Read something, look away, and read it again. Letters change in dreams.
• Flip a light switch. In dreams, the light usually stays on or off.
• Try to stick your finger through the palm of your hand.
• Look in a mirror. Dream reflections are wonky
  

Maybe I'll try them.

Are You Dreaming? part I

Ever been in a bizarro dream, wondered if you were, in fact dreaming...
...and concluded that you weren't?
I do this.

Louis Wain Tribute

This started accidentally.
I was fooling around with painter. At one point I thought That looks like something Louis Wain would paint. I steered it in that direction.
Louis Wain drew cats. His cute anthropomorphic ones made it to postcards and calendars. His zany, psychedelic wallpaper-looking cats were often used to demonstrate how mental illness (he had schizophrenia) affects art.
p.s.
The correlation between his mental deterioration has been exaggerated.

The Spigot and the Damage Done

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At a recent social gathering...



Thanks a lot, Leaky Spigot.

Fake Smile

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Ever have someone flash a fake smile at you?
The "say cheese" smile where the mouth grins and the rest of the face is frozen?
This freaks me out. Why the fake one? I wonder. Do they dislike me? Are they secretly wishing they could strangle me?

The Ugly Canary

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"If you all have awful voices," joked Mr. Orangethorpe, "Then I guess everyone will be in Vocal Ensemble,"
Mr. Orangethorpe, my eight grade music teacher, forced everyone to try out for his elite group of singers. One by one we had to solo "My country 'tis of Thee."
Nearly everyone got in. I didn't.
Vocal Ensemble got to sing the fancy songs. Stuff in French and Italian. Pretentious craziness like Geographical Fugue:

Trinidad!
And the big Mississippi
And the town Honalulu
And the lake Titicaca!
The Popocatepetal is not in Canada rather in Mexico, Mexico Mexico...

Us riffraff singers were included in the regular choir. We sang stuff like
I can't Sing Purty but I Shure Sing Loud:

Each time I sing up high I crack the chandelier,
The dog runs and hides
and my brother shakes with fear.

I hated Ensemble. Hated the way it separated me from the others. Hated the way it turned my peers into fops. Hated the way it singled out the six or eight of us with awful voices.

By ninth grade Ensemble was gone. Mr. Orangethorpe said you could either play an instrument or sing in the choir. I played the flute that year.

Morningmare

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I'll sleep in, I thought, when I saw what time it was. I deserve some extra rest.
Big Mistake.
It was one nightmare after another. Monsters. An angry Mastiff with huge teeth. Scary puppets. Moaning alarms. Buzzers. Attack machines. Bugs. Being grabbed, dragged and shaken. I'd wake up terrified, calm down, then drift off into more freakiness. It was ridiculous.
So much for extra rest. I should have gotten up and watched T.V.

Super Elastic Bubble Plastic (from Wham-O)

It was a tube gloop. Multicolored gloop.
According to the commercial, just put some on the end of a straw (provided) and you can blow beachball-sized balloons which "last and last!"
They didn't tell you it smelled like rubber cement spiked with insecticide. Or that any balloons you made would be runty lopsided blobs. If you were lucky you'd get something the size of a baseball. Rough it up and it'd deflate, shriveling into a scrap of gunk. The texture reminded me of peeled skin after a sunburn.

What was I doing wrong? Was it a skill I lacked? A special blowing technique?
Where were the big balloons from the commercial?

Now, decades later, I think I've figured it out. I should have been sniffing the fumes. Then maybe I'd see big floating blobs.
p.s.
thanks to Sally C. and Linda for inspiring this post.

Joxer the Scary, Part II

My dorm neighbor Joxer was arrested and jailed. He'd stolen scales and equipment from the science lab. He was expelled.
Two years later he was back. His family pulled strings.
Rumor had it that he was a drug dealer. Was he? I didn't think he had the responsibility.
Joxer liked matches. His idea of fun was clipping the heads off of "strike anywhere" matches and stuffing them into a ping pong ball. It exploded when it hit concrete.
His downstairs neighbor (he had an apartment now) barked at him for being too noisy. Joxer's reaction? When his favorite song came on the radio he'd stomp dance and slam a broomstick into the floor.
I was roped into playing monopoly with friends at his place. Joxer chomped 3 Musketeers bars and slurped vodka from the bottle. He got bombed and practiced karate moves. On his wall.
"Everyone be quiet! I have to concentrate!" he ordered. Bam! His fist slammed into the wall. "I have to get it just right..." Bam! Bam! He kept punching it. Soon plaster covered the floor, the wall had holes, and his fingers were broken where he hit the stud.
I don't know what became of Joxer.

Joxer the Scary, part I

People have been asking about the Unusual Guy.
Here's the scoop.
There seemed to be an unofficial contest between my dorm neighbors about who could be the craziest, most subversive nut.
Joxer was the winner.
He kept vodka in his room and drank it straight every morning.
He drank Chloraseptic too (Cherry flavor). He drank it like coke. His idea of fun was catching moths and injecting them with the stuff. One afternoon he bolted down the hall yelling "I caught a lizard! I'm gonna inject him with Chloraseptic!" I thought lizards were cute and couldn't stand the idea of someone hurting one, but what could I do? Get between that nut and his syringe? He was bigger than me, and surrounded by goons egging him on. I stayed away, but thought about the lizard for a long time.
The lizard survived. It became his treasured pet. I didn't get it. There he was, buying a heat brick and live crickets to for a creature he had originally captured to mistreat. Maybe he liked to watch the crickets get eaten.
Then the police came. They, slapped on handcuffs, and hauled him out of the dorm...

Inner Beauty

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Ever notice that people who won't shut up about "inner beauty"

1. Don't have outer beauty
2. Don't have inner beauty either.
   

Unusual People

I've known some unusual people.