My brain, large scissors and a fat kid rolling down a hill

I wish I had an off-button attached to my head. Not one of those standard buttons that stick out, mind you. I mean, I wouldn’t want to turn my brain off by accident. Just imagine, standing in line at the grocery store or the bank (okay, maybe not the bank. Nobody goes to the bank anymore) and you just scratch your head and all of a sudden it’s lights out. But if I could get a button on a time switch, or something, that would be perfect.

You see, my brain refuses to turn itself off after I’ve gone to bed. Even when it’s been more or less non-functional all day long, it suddenly springs to life once I’m horizontal.

It’s especially when the brain-ball of wrinkly gel starts to imagine repetitive movements that it becomes impossible to stop. Last night, for example, I started (for some reason) to think of a kid on a swing. It went back and forth, back and forth, refusing to stop. So I had to think up a pair of huge scissors to cut the swing down. But then the fat brat started rolling down the hill. Obviously I had to place I rather large rock in his path. There was a muffled splat and then the situation was under control. This time...

So… Does this mean I’m weird?

Would I shoot you? Why, of course not...

A few years ago, I read a Garfield strip where Garfield's owner asked him and his not-so-furry canine bud if they wanted to go for a walk. It went something along the lines of "Do you wanna go for a walk.... Do you?..... Do you?..... You wanna go walkies?.... Do you?..... Do you?" and so on and so forth. All the while, his pets were becoming more and more frenzied, until they turned on him.

Then, last night, there was a story in the news about some guy in Bosnia who had been out fox hunting (shame on him) with his dog. He'd been minding his own business, when he suddenly heard a shot and felt a sting in his leg. He turned around and saw Man's Best Friend with its hairy paw on the trigger. They say that he might have to amputate his foot. I bet he was one of those walkies-people and his pooch knew how to hold a grudge.

Then again, if I had some weirdo following me around wherever I went, collecting my poops, I'd probably shoot him, too...


Pic of pug by Chance Agrella for http://www.freerangestock.com/details.php?gid=&sgid=&pid=1460

Goddess with lovely temple dog needs religion

…with its own temple somewhere warm and sunny. Preferably with a great view overlooking the ocean.
Must be monotheistic. None of that sharing-the-glory-with-some-hairy-greek-in-a-bathtowel-sort-of-thing.

Gloomy looking robes with large hoods, mysterious chanting and large, booming bells are encouraged.

Colourful, bed sheet-like outfits, singing accompanied by silly bouncing and the ringing of cutesy bells will be punished by immediate beheading.

Some missionary activity expected.

Good possibilities for crusading involved.

Lookie - I'm Nicola Tesla

Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.


A minister's son from Simljan in Austria-Hungary, you were precocious from an early age. At three you could multiply three-digit numbers in your head and calculate how many seconds visitors to your home had lived. In awe of your older brother Dane, you shot a pea-shooter at his horse, causing it to throw him and inflict injuries from which he later died. This tragedy haunted you ever after. You frequently suffered bouts of illness with hallucinations throughout your life. During one affliction of cholera, you encountered the writing of Mark Twain, with whom you were later to be close friends. Later, another, this time mystery, illness inexplicably heightened your senses to a painful extent, only relenting when you hit upon the idea of the alternating current motor.

You developed an aversion to human contact, particularly involving hair, and a fear of pearls; when one would-be lover kissed you, you ran away in agony. Later, you insisted that any repeated actions in your day-to-day life had to be divisible by three, or, better yet, twenty-seven. You would, for example, continue walking until you had executed the required number of footsteps. You refused to eat anything until you had calculated its exact volume. Saltine crackers were a favourite for their uniformity in this respect. In the midst of important work, you forgot trivial details such as eating, sleeping or, on one memorable occasion, who you were.

Your inventions, always eccentric, began on a suitably bizarre note. The first was a frog-catching device that was so successful, and hence so emulated by your fellow children, that local frogs were almost eradicated. You also created a turbine powered by gluing sixteen May bugs to a tiny windmill. The insects panicked and flapped their wings furiously, powering the contraption for hours on end. This worked admirably until a small child came along and ate all the creatures alive, after which you never again touched another insect.
Prompted by dreams of attaining the then-ridiculed goal of achieving an alternating-current motor, you went to America in the hope of teaming up with Thomas Edison. Edison snubbed you, but promised fifty thousand dollars if you could improve his own direct-current motor by 20% efficiency. You succeeded. Edison did not pay up. It was not long until you created an AC motor by yourself.

Now successful, you set up a small laboratory, with a few assistants and almost no written records whatsoever. Despite it being destroyed by fire, you invented the Tesla Coil, impressing even the least astute observer with man-made lightning and lights lit seemingly by magic. Moving to Colorado Springs, you created a machine capable of sending ten million volts into the Earth's surface, which even while being started up caused lightning to shoot from fire hydrants and sparks to singe feet through shoes all over the town. When calibrated to be in tune with the planet's resonance, it created what is still the largest man-made electrical surge ever, an arc over 130 feet long. Unfortunately, it set the local power plant aflame.

You returned to New York, incidentally toying with the nascent idea of something eerily like today's internet. Although the wealthiest man in America withdrew funding for a larger, more powerful resonator in short order, it did not stop you announcing the ability to split the world in two. You grew ever more diverse in your inventions: remote-controlled boats and submarines, bladeless turbines, and, finally, a death ray.

While whether the ray ever existed is still doubtful, it is said that you notified the Peary polar expedition to report anything strange in the tundra, and turned on the ray. First, nothing happened; then it disintegrated an owl; finally, reports reached you of the mysterious Tunguska explosion, upon which news you dismantled the apparatus immediately.
An offer during WWII to recreate it was, thankfully, never acted upon by then-President Wilson. Turning to other matters, you investigated the forerunner of radar, to widespread derision.

Your inventions grew stranger. One oscillator caused earthquakes in Manhattan. You adapted this for medical purposes, claiming various health benefits for your devices. You found they let you work for days without sleep; Mark Twain enjoyed the experience until the sudden onset of diarrhoea. You claimed to receive signals in quasi-Morse Code from Mars, explored the initial stages of quantum physics; proposed a "wall of light", using carefully-calibrated electromagnetic radiation, that would allegedly enable teleportation, anti-gravity airships and time travel; and proposed a basic design for a machine for photographing thoughts.

You died aged 87 in New York, sharing an apartment with the flock of pigeons who were by then your only friends.

Ridiculed throughout your life (Superman fought the evil Dr. Tesla in 1940s comics), you were posthumously declared the father of the fluorescent bulb, the vacuum tube amplifier and the X-ray machine, and the Supreme Court named you as the legal inventor of the radio in place of Marconi. Wardenclyffe, the tower once housing your death ray, was dynamited several times to stop it falling into the hands of spies. It was strangely hard to topple, and even then could not be broken up.

Monkeys swimming in a circle

The class that I was… uhm… blessed to be a part of from the age of seven to fifteen, consisted of 25 monkey-brains (and a small handful of normal people). That’s right; monkey-brains. I honestly think that they all escaped from a lab, or something. I once saw a documentary where a bunch of scientist were doing research on monkeys. One of them was given lipstick and a large mirror and immediately began to smear its face with it. That’s half of the girls in my class, right there.




But I digress.

Once a week, our teacher would herd us all into a pool where we were supposed to swim around and around in a large circle. It didn’t take me very long to realise that this was a tremendous waste of time, since there was no way to swim in a circle with close to 30 people without being kicked in the face by the idiot swimming in front of you. Neither could you increase the space between you and the aforementioned idiot, without whacking the moron behind you (not that that necessarily was a bad thing). So I ended up trying to find a mode of swimming where I wouldn’t be kicked or kick, yet at the same time stay floating just enough so that I wouldn’t drown. It would not stand. And since I’m not a monkey-brain, I quickly came up with a cunning plan.

I scratched my thighs, legs and arms and claimed to be allergic to the chlorine in the water. And my teacher actually believed me (I guess that might made him a monkey-brain, as well). So from that day on, I spent every swim class in a little, green room with a book. Nobody kicked me, and I didn’t have to swallow a bunch of icky water that 30 other people had wriggled around in. The room also had a window, so that I could watch the other poor bastards as they swam and tried (mostly without success) to avoid flying feet and arms. Perfect.

Could this strategy be transferred to gym, I wondered? And indeed it could. I had a wrist injury. I didn’t fake it. It actually required surgery at one point. Our teacher was fairly strict about his students showing him reports from home when they were going to sit out on the oh so fascinating rounds of volleyball or football, which was all that the classes consisted of. All of the monkey-brains thought that both these things were tremendous fun. If they could chase a ball for a couple of hours and then go into the locker rooms and inhale half a can of hairspray (and in those days they had the kind of spray that looked like dust if you used to much of it), they were perfectly happy.

Then one day when I had forgotten to bring my gym clothes, I discovered that the same rule didn’t apply to me. The coach seemed to assume that it was because of my poor, fragile wrists. I had started to feel that if I had to catch another damn ball, I would break someone’s face with it out of pure frustration and boredom, so I couldn’t let this opportunity just slip away. From that day on, I never had gym again. Nobody questioned it.

I did read a lot of books, though. And I got a B.

Monkey and a duck by Scottobear for www.Flickr.com

Philosophical thoughts and bunny slippers

Today is about as exciting as watching my half-dead rubbertree plant try to decide on whether it should attempt another growth spurt or just wither away once and for all. I know, because that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing.

Personally I gave up on a final growth spurt eons ago. I’ll just have to live with having hit my peak at 5’2. This, of course, is no problem if you’re living in, say, China, but here in good, old Scandinavia it basically means that I frequently visit the salon to get my roots dyed, since people spend a lot of time looking down on the top of my head.

The practical thing about this situation, is that very few seem to pay much attention to my footwear. I could probably get away with wearing fussy bunny slippers. The kind with really long ears. I once had a pair or doggie slippers that my mum got me for Christmas. They were oh so comfy, plus that they made excellent playmates for the pooch when I wasn’t using them. The three of them could sit and talk for hours on end. They were very close.

At some point of the morning I started to contemplate such fascinating philosophical questions like whether or not life can suck and blow at the same time. If so, wouldn’t that be confusing for the person inhabiting that life? What would you wear for a situation like that, anyway?

Maybe bunny slippers.

Tag

I’ve been tagged by Jocelyn, so I will now present you with a list of weird things that have happened to me in the past. Six things, to be exact. Now, since this whole blog, more or less, is about weird things that have happened to me, it won’t be that much of a change. Change is bad, after all. Everyone over the age of 70 knows that.

I am completely incapable of remembering my first of anything. Well, with a few obvious exceptions, of course. My first day of school? Not a chance. My first visit to the circus? Nope. It’s as if my brain needs a certain amount of repetition in order to make an event worth remembering. Not that the school-thing hasn’t been repeated a gazillion times, but I’ve already mentioned something about my presence of mind in classes, haven’t I?

My first kiss: One of the few firsts that I’m able to remember. Mostly because it was horrible. I was five years old and in the woods, playing with the boy who lived next door to us, and he wanted to kiss. Since I couldn’t come up with anything better to do, I said yes. He then tried to make my teeth cave in, using his lips. Afterwards he wanted to kiss me again, and I ran like never before.

A lovely barbeque: my friend, Tommy, and I decided that we wanted to have a bbq. It seemed like a very adult thing to do, and we were, after all, nearly eight years old. It was high time we started doing grown-up stuff. The fact that we didn’t have any food didn’t face us at all. Who needs food when you have large bits of Styrofoam? We had a strong suspicion that our parents would interfere with our brilliant plan, should we be seen while burning something, so we found a perfect hiding place underneath his father’s big truck. Of course someone ended up seeing the smoke and they completely freaked out. Just because we were underneath the gas tank. Talk about being overly sensitive.

Thorboy: he was my doll. I hated to play with dolls when I was a kid. Thorboy, however, was an anatomically correct boy doll. That’s right – he had a little thingy. Not only that, he came equipped with a little bottle which you could fill with water and use to feed him. The water would then run through his little doll body and out of his little thingy. In the end, I ran so much water through poor Thorboy, he rotted on the inside and my mum threw him away.

When my alarm goes off in the morning, I have to press the snooze button twice, otherwise I feel like I haven’t fully enjoyed my morning snooze time. However, that means that I don’t get up until 20 minutes after the alarm goes off for the first time. Sooo… I now set my alarm 20 minutes earlier, just so that I can push the snooze button. Yes, I know I’m sick.

Sometimes, when I’m feeling domestic, I bake doggie cookies (yes, there is such a thing). Baby porridge is a key ingredient in these little culinary canine delights. Also, my dog has a baby toothbrush – right now it’s a purple one in the shape of Barney the dinosaur - for when I need to clean her teeth (that guy who claimed that there was nothing like the smell of napalm in the morning, never woke up with a dog breathing on him). One day I met this lady by the grocery isle, who had apparently snuck a peek into my shopping basket on previous occasions, and she starts talking to me. Suddenly she asks me about my baby. My brain tries to run away screaming. In stead I simply say that I’ve never had a baby, offering no explanation to the baby stuff in my little, blue basket, although she looked very curious indeed (Hellholers are very curious people). She probably thought I was going to eat it myself. Serves her right.