One time, when I was working at a summer camp as a specialty staff, my coworker/roommate who I barely talked to and barely knew randomly pulled out his switch and asked me if I could do a part of Celeste he was stuck on. I said sure, and did it for him, but then asked why he asked me in particular. He just said I ‘seemed like the type of guy to have beaten Celeste’. I haven’t started socially transitioning, so I don’t know where that vibe came from, and I still think about it
Was at my parents house, walking down the stairs and stopped to look at a picture collage. I saw a picture of my sister from when she was in high school with a friend that she had been close to but my sister had moved out of state and they parted ways maybe 10 years ago.
I thought, wonder what she’s doing.
I’m home alone just reading and there’s a knock at the door. It’s was my sister’s friend from high school who randomly was in town and decided to stop by my parents house to ask about my sister. She proceeded to tell me how she was doing.
Every so often on long road trips I’ll stop in to a walmart and wander around to get snacks and shake out my legs, and then completely lose track of space and time. I’ll be looking at a wall of gatorades and realize I don’t know what state I’m in, what year it is, where I came from, where I’m going. I’m simply in wal-mart. The wal-mart. The wal-mart that exists at the confluence of all possible wal-marts. The ultimate liminal space, the place where reality melts in to impossibility.
It’s a shame that we’ve become so inured to the superstore because they are such strange and surreal places. If you put a medieval peasant in one for 15 minutes they would go back and found a whole new religion
Been there, totally get it. There’s a lot of small towns you can drive through that give the same feel, as well. Once you get away from the metropolises and surrounding suburban sprawl. Like they’re all trapped in the architectural styles of decades past that the present day has forgotten.
I know there’s a stereotype about american walmarts, but holy shit were they weird when i used to tour. 3am, in between towns, just going in to grab some microwave food and chips, and it felt disorienting. Just the most bland lighting possible with the bottom rung of society wandering its aisles, looking for the next cheap hit of fat and salt, slowly being ground down by life itself. Absolutely wild to an outsider like me.
A comrade once mentioned being in contact with a FOIA lawyer and I just on a whim asked them if it happened to be Ryan Shapiro who is also an acquaintance of mine and it turned out it was him. I guess it’s not really that weird cuz Ryan is one of the best at what he does.
I was on a road trip through going through Arkansas and got pulled over. The cop searched my car and called in a K9, had the K9 reached my car it definitely would have ruined my day. A mangy stray dog ran out of some bushes nearby and jumped into my car, it started eating all my funyon trash in the backseat. The cop was walking his dog up to my car at the time, he looked at the stray and just said, “I’m not going near that thing,” then turned around and left.
When I was like eleven or twelve, I went door to door selling popcorn as a boy scout fundraiser. It was like 8pm on a summer or fall night and I knocked on one door in the suburbs near where I lived and after a second, I heard the sound of someone rushing up some stairs inside the house, I guess from the basement. The door opens and there’s this guy with long rubber gloves on looking frazzled. “Yeah??” “uh hi im from boy scout troop whatever and were selling popcorn to raise–” He looks back down the stairs that he came up and then back at me and says in a panicked voice “Listen, could you come back another time? I’m right in the middle of something…” “uhhh okay–” Door slams and I hear him pounding back down the stairs. I never did go back to that house
