Thursday, October 10, 2013

It Is Nigh on Impossible to Go Unobserved These Days

Do you ever have the feeling you're being watched?

I don't mean like that time my mom went to Hardee's for breakfast with her old lady friends, and one of them swore that every man in the place was undressing her with his eyes.

I don't mean like when you sit in your family room that might have been called a rumpus room back in the fifties if the house had existed way back then, and get up to walk to your mailbox, and find three bags of hedgeapples on your porch.

I don't mean like that time my youngest future stepson finished eating a Halloween Dum Dum at the tender age of five, and jabbed the stick down into the soil of his father's large potted plant, then nearly jumped out of his skin when I asked, "Are you supposed to do that?"

I don't mean like when your apartment has a peephole that is just a hollow tube with no lenses, and your strip of masking tape has dried up and fallen off the inside of the door.

I don't mean like that incident when you were working overtime at your unemployment office job near the Bevo Mill, filing happily to your heart's content, earning an hour of extra pay approved by Bob, you supervisor, while waiting for your husband to get off work from his butcher-product-producing job at Vandeventer and Tower Grove, and looked up and saw a man with his face cupped in his hands and pressed against one of the full-length windows.

I don't even mean like the time you were all alone in a high school gym and the doors to a storage room opened by themselves, revealing a short white figure in the recesses of the dark interior.

Nope.

I mean like when you're sitting at your desk in your classroom, happier than a pig in excrement, plugging away at your busywork while your students take a test, and just...have...that...somebody's-watching-me feeling. Because looking over your shoulder is this:


Thank goodness he was on the outside of the glass. What next? Some crazy Hunger Games mutation sent to track my every move?

Universe, I shake my fist at you and your conspiratory ways!


7 comments:

  1. Holy God, that creature is huge. It towers over the telephone lines!

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  2. It's like Mothra, and Mothra has skipped the "binge" part and has instead only purged, purged, purged...

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  3. A fifty foot tall invading alien. Run for your life!

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  4. Is this one of Rodan's cousins? Not that you'd know who Rodan was. Sheesh that would scare me, too.

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  5. Goes to show you what happens when you let the mosquitoes eat hedge apples. You just THOUGHT insects didn't like them.

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  6. Well, finally, high speed internet!

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  7. joeh,
    You should have seen the cars I made The Pony trim from the picture! This critter could have crushed them handily. Alas, I do not conspire to put unaware drivers' license plates on the information superhighway.

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    Sioux,
    Well, thanks for painting faux Mothra with the anorexic brush, Madam. Now he will have body dysmorphic disorder. I thought he looked fit and trim, clinging to the vertical glass. I'd like to see you hold yourself up there, Madam, to look over my shoulder for eight hours while standing on your head on a 90-degree incline. Faux Mothra must be fit as a fiddle to maintain that pose all the live-long day. He's just right. Not fit-fat, not fit-thin. Just fit.

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    Stephen,
    But what about the children? Who'll watch the students I abandon? Oh. Wait. You probably meant for them to run with me. Now I have to make sure that there's at least one of them I can outrun.

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    Linda,
    Rodan...Mothra...aren't they just giant Japanese city-crushing creatures? Hey! My BFF Google tells me that Rodan was a frequent flier. I had thought he was like a cross between a dinosaur and a bear, stomping his way down avenues like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

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    Leenie,
    They are crafty. "Please, please, whatever you do, don't make me eat a hedgeapple." Experts at reverse psychology. Or ygolohcysp, if you will.

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    knancy,
    The sun even shines on a dog's butt some days.

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