You can’t go out wearing that!

Rain, rain, rain and more rain. And after that, it’ll probably start raining again. My house is right next to a great big parking lot. Nobody ever uses it, so the clever politicians decided that there’s no point in maintaining it anymore, and it’s since been reduced to a collection of very impressive cracks and holes.

Before it started raining, it snowed for a while. Then the rain turned the snow into ice and the parking lot into a skating range, basically. A skating range with large pools built into it. As I walked across it to get to the bus stop, I tried my very best not to slip’n slide directly into one of them. I haven’t bathed in a puddle since I was a kid, and I can’t quite remember what it was about getting my pants full of muddy water that was so hysterically funny.

The morning bus was bursting with teenagers on their way to school, as usual. I don’t get that trend where guys wear pants that only cover the bottom half of their ass. And I really don’t understand wearing half-ass pants with white underwear in the rain, especially if you’re planning on doing a lot of bending over. I’m not interested in looking at either one of these guys' bums for at least another ten years, and probably not even then.

That’s not to say that I don’t have some strange things sitting in my closet, also. I have this huge belt, for instance. It’s got a bunch of gold plates on it. Someone gave it to me as a present once, and I’ve never worn it, because every time I look at it, all I can think is “heavyweight champion of the world.”

Then there was that period in the mid nineties, when I had the animal print outfits and ridiculous plateau shoes. Not to mention men’s shirts and big hats.

I’m hoping that in another ten years, I’ll be able to look back on myself without blushing from shame.

Hat pic by brndnprkns for www.Flickr.com

The right sunglasses to wear in an alien invasion

Some friends and I were bored, and trying to figure out what fascinating things we should do with our time, when we stumbled across an old movie called “They live”. It was an early Carpenter film from the late eighties. The review said that it was a story about a guy who discovers an alien invasion, which he has to fight off, using a “machine gun and a pair of special sunglasses.”
This sounded so earth staggeringly silly (if that’s a word), we had to see it. How could we miss the opportunity to learn what sort of sunglasses you’d need in case of an invasion from outer space? We like to dress the part, after all.

In the movie, the main character, John, finds a pair of magical sunglasses, which enable him to see the true form of aliens (kinda skeletal with great, big bulging eyeballs) that have dressed up as humans, as well as the subliminal messages they use to control the planet (because they never bothered to read any of the articles on how subliminal advertising doesn’t work).

In a situation such as this, one might think that it would be a good idea to keep a certain degree of discretion. You know, not get caught by they psychotic aliens, and that sort of thing. I’m sure John thought of this. He probably thought long and hard for that whole second it took him to run up to one of the aliens, and tell it exactly how butt ugly he thought it was. Obviously, the alien didn’t take it very well. In fact, he used his special wrist watch (lots of special stuff in this movie) to call all of his alien buddies, who chased poor John up and down the streets for quite a while.

The review also said that John became the reluctant leader of the alien resistance. This was pretty much because everyone else were gunned down, leaving him the only member still standing. And yet, John was the reluctant leader. In the end, the resistance – John, that is – manages to stop the invasion, and the earth is safe, once more.

Strangely enough, this didn’t turn out to be one of those horror films that kept me awake at night.

(Pic by Aaron Logan for www.lightmatter.net)

Run, Forrest! Run!

Last Monday I took up running. That's right - running. As in "Choochoo goes huff and puff up and down the hills".

I wasn't planning to run, I really wasn't. Just like every other night, I put on a top and a pair of jeans and took the pooch for a walk. The dog and I both suffer from the same condition: we have a bunch of energy that we just don't know what to do with. The dog is taken for a couple of walks, and she seems happy. As for myself... Well... I pace back and forth a lot.

So there we were, walking down the street towards the woods, and I just couldn't seem to get rid of that over-energetic feeling that I get. So I walked a bit faster. It didn't help. And that's when it happened. All of a sudden, my legs were running. Both of'em. I don't mind telling you, that I was a bit surprised. They just kept right on running for an hour or so. If I'd known they were going to do that, I wouldn't have worn jeans.

I always thought that this form of exercise looked absolutely horrible. Everytime I see someone running, they usually sound as if they have some sort of painful lungdisease, eating them up from within, and they're quite often a bit purple-looking. Surprisingly, it wasn't that horrible. No terrible diseases grabbed a hold of my respirational system, and even if I had turned purple, nobody would have seen it because

a) it was dark out, and
b) I'm the only person in Hellhole, it would seem, nuts enough to go running in the woods after dark.

(Picture "Moon over rust farm" by Ctd 2005 for www.Flickr.com)