New School Year, odd people, and a noisy cat.
So the school year is starting to gear up.
All of a sudden there are presentations to give, meetings to attend, faculty to contact, schedules to arrange, and various pots of soup to make.
And also, all of the creepy people are loose in Chicago.
I think that this has something to do with the weather. Pretty much no one looks particularly creepy in a t-shirt and shorts, but as the wandering bands of people around my apartment layer up with their winter gear, they start to look just a little more sinister and a lot more insane. The boy has also noted that psychiatric admissions go down at the VA just because of the misty and unpleasant weather that we have been having. Reasons for this are - as yet - unknown, but conjecture suggests that either it isn't worth going to the hospital and pretending to want to kill yourself in order to have double portions of cafeteria food for a few days if it might be chilly and inclement outside on the way there, or (to our best guess) all of the rain in Chicago is actually methadone and would-be patients are merely laying face-up in the middle of parks everywhere soaking up the goodness.
In either case, fewer potentially odd people in there means more potentially odd people wandering around and I believe that they have all decided to hang out on my street. While walking to the Walgreens yesterday, the boy and I passed:
(1) a strange man with a plaid jacket over his shoulders and disheveled hair who kept stooping down by the front right tires of cars in order to touch them and look at them. He followed us most of the way home.
(2) a large old man in a checked shirt and suspenders who held up the line at Walgreens making an impulse buy of a tiny futuristic-looking back massager that was vibrating on the shelf, giving the distinct vibe that this vibe was not for it's intended upper-torso use.
(3) a rail thin man wearing a tan fedora and tan trench that was tied together at the waist, clutching a bag of some alcohol or other and having a distinctly distant expression and a distinctly Nightmare on Elm Street appearance.
Taken separately they were simply the random odd people of Chicago, taken as a group all out in the twilight wandering the 2 blocks between my house and the Walgreens to the absence of all other human beings, it was a little spooky. It's also possible that the gothic fiction has simply gotten to my head.
I'm currently reading the Woman in White and I have to say, there are few totally-repressed-lesbian-love-stories-of-the-19th-century that can shock me, but with my understanding of the euphemisms and social codes of the time, this story is the equivalent of the older lady tossing the younger across the harpsichord in Madame Aristocrat's well-attended salon and fetching the strap-on for the general amusement of the guests before dinner.
Also, there is ugliness and plainness and hideousness, which is the justifiable reason why I get to put this charmingly raunchy work in my dissertation - I love literary studies.
This aura of gothic that has been hovering in my head also led me to assume that someone was dead in my building. You see, there is this cat that has been meowing in what can only be described as a yowl for two days pretty much nonstop, really loud, although it has never made a noise before. So the boy and I decided to take up a minor snooping role and wander around the outside of the building to determine from which window this unholy noise was issuing. I, of course, assume that we're going to find a cat in a window with bloodied red mouth from eating its master (who suddenly fell and hit her head and expired of natural causes). In my over-heated imagination, this would be something out of Poe's The Black Cat, and I would probably have to offer to taken in the cat a-la-Scully and Queequeg in the second season of X-files. After locating the cat, who was, coincidentally, raven black and seemed really upset and yowled at us continually when it saw us from the darkened apartment, we got the landlord and she went to check.
Apparently the cat had been locked up with food and water and such as if the owner were on vacation and it was sitting in the window (thoughtfully open a bit for it) letting the entire world know that it was simply lonely and that it's master was gone (in the leaving sense, not in the dead sense). So, my adventure was ultimately not particularly adventuresome but worked out ok, and the cat has stopped making so much noise so that's ok too.
So, no dead people - only creepy people and my over-active imagination. This probably means that I am now in the proper mindset for proposal writing.
All of a sudden there are presentations to give, meetings to attend, faculty to contact, schedules to arrange, and various pots of soup to make.
And also, all of the creepy people are loose in Chicago.
I think that this has something to do with the weather. Pretty much no one looks particularly creepy in a t-shirt and shorts, but as the wandering bands of people around my apartment layer up with their winter gear, they start to look just a little more sinister and a lot more insane. The boy has also noted that psychiatric admissions go down at the VA just because of the misty and unpleasant weather that we have been having. Reasons for this are - as yet - unknown, but conjecture suggests that either it isn't worth going to the hospital and pretending to want to kill yourself in order to have double portions of cafeteria food for a few days if it might be chilly and inclement outside on the way there, or (to our best guess) all of the rain in Chicago is actually methadone and would-be patients are merely laying face-up in the middle of parks everywhere soaking up the goodness.
In either case, fewer potentially odd people in there means more potentially odd people wandering around and I believe that they have all decided to hang out on my street. While walking to the Walgreens yesterday, the boy and I passed:
(1) a strange man with a plaid jacket over his shoulders and disheveled hair who kept stooping down by the front right tires of cars in order to touch them and look at them. He followed us most of the way home.
(2) a large old man in a checked shirt and suspenders who held up the line at Walgreens making an impulse buy of a tiny futuristic-looking back massager that was vibrating on the shelf, giving the distinct vibe that this vibe was not for it's intended upper-torso use.
(3) a rail thin man wearing a tan fedora and tan trench that was tied together at the waist, clutching a bag of some alcohol or other and having a distinctly distant expression and a distinctly Nightmare on Elm Street appearance.
Taken separately they were simply the random odd people of Chicago, taken as a group all out in the twilight wandering the 2 blocks between my house and the Walgreens to the absence of all other human beings, it was a little spooky. It's also possible that the gothic fiction has simply gotten to my head.
I'm currently reading the Woman in White and I have to say, there are few totally-repressed-lesbian-love-stories-of-the-19th-century that can shock me, but with my understanding of the euphemisms and social codes of the time, this story is the equivalent of the older lady tossing the younger across the harpsichord in Madame Aristocrat's well-attended salon and fetching the strap-on for the general amusement of the guests before dinner.
Also, there is ugliness and plainness and hideousness, which is the justifiable reason why I get to put this charmingly raunchy work in my dissertation - I love literary studies.
This aura of gothic that has been hovering in my head also led me to assume that someone was dead in my building. You see, there is this cat that has been meowing in what can only be described as a yowl for two days pretty much nonstop, really loud, although it has never made a noise before. So the boy and I decided to take up a minor snooping role and wander around the outside of the building to determine from which window this unholy noise was issuing. I, of course, assume that we're going to find a cat in a window with bloodied red mouth from eating its master (who suddenly fell and hit her head and expired of natural causes). In my over-heated imagination, this would be something out of Poe's The Black Cat, and I would probably have to offer to taken in the cat a-la-Scully and Queequeg in the second season of X-files. After locating the cat, who was, coincidentally, raven black and seemed really upset and yowled at us continually when it saw us from the darkened apartment, we got the landlord and she went to check.
Apparently the cat had been locked up with food and water and such as if the owner were on vacation and it was sitting in the window (thoughtfully open a bit for it) letting the entire world know that it was simply lonely and that it's master was gone (in the leaving sense, not in the dead sense). So, my adventure was ultimately not particularly adventuresome but worked out ok, and the cat has stopped making so much noise so that's ok too.
So, no dead people - only creepy people and my over-active imagination. This probably means that I am now in the proper mindset for proposal writing.
1 Comments:
You forgot to mention that the landlord, too, is creepy in an anal-retentive, wound-so-tight-she-might-explode sort of way.
By
Al, at 10:29 AM
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