Fiction is strange, but reality needn't make sense

Song of the day: Combine Harvester - The Wurzels

So right now I really should be working on the Harry Potter fanfic which seems determined to overtake my life, but I have got to get today's happenings out of my system or I might actually go a bit barmy.

Sometimes, working at a grocery store is kinda boring. There are the bad days, where you end up with that person that's always late and can only be persuaded into doing something with a forklift, and the good days, where there is just the right amount of customers for you to actually get a chance to eat your lunch. And then there are days that are just... weird.

For example last week, when over two days I met two elderly men who both happened to be missing their left thumb. And yesterday when the local vicar paid for his 198 krónu Diet Coke entirely in ones and fives (which takes ages to count and the UK/US equivalent is probably someone paying entirely in pennies.) And that time when some woman threatened to stop doing business with us because we were out of her preferred brand of butter.

And today, when a seventy year old man in a leather jacket and a Mohawk bought a pineapple, talked to me about mathematics, in which he concluded that the only numbers in existence were 1-9, and that Darwin's theory of Evolution was the equivalent of 0. Then he tried to get me to convert to Christianity on the basis that school books were constantly being rewritten but not the Bible (hah.) so the good book had therefore to be correct. He was even carrying a Bible with him. To the grocery store!

And then he swept off. I don't think I can emphasize enough just how strange he was. It was impossible not to be drawn in by what he was saying (especially the math), and then suddenly he just vanished with barely a ktnxbi.

Here, have an alien Marmoset. It makes just as much sense as anthing

else in this post. I am told it comes in peace. 

After sitting dazed for a few minutes, I went back to work, but when the store was conveniently empty, I nearly had a stroke from laughing too hard (note that this wasn't as commentary on anything that he said, but just on the sheer weirdness of something so odd happening.)

Then my mum dropped by, surprised to see me nearly catatonic, but her confusion cleared when she saw the piece of paper he had scribbled on. 'Oh, you've met the Zero-man.'

And it turns out he had had that exact same conversation with her a few weeks earlier, but apart from that, neither of us had ever seen him before. Which makes all this even stranger, because our town is pretty small (only about 13,000 people live here), and I can assure you would not miss a person like that.

Then there is his really weird Darwin argument. So his point the entire time (when we were still in the less surreal territories of math) was the importance of zero... But then he turns right around and asks me if I 'believe' in the Theory of Evolution, with the implication that it is but a toerag and I should get me some 2 Corinthians 5:7.

I am SO. CONFUSED.

I am going to submerge myself in wizarding trivia, and by the time I resurface, the world had better make sense again. Well... at least more sense than it does right now.

Real and unreal terrors

Song of the day: Hallelujah I love her so, with Hugh Laurie


So, not a post on Marvellous People Monday, mostly because I, in my addled state of dealing with finals coming up and also finishing the first draft of my novel for CampNaNo, could not think of a badass of history or the present that had already been lauded for their fantasticness by the masses already. But I am sure I will think of something later, when I'm just about to fall asleep after grueling hours of writing and schoolwork.

Also since there probably isn't anyone reading this I can do whatever the hell I want and nobody will complain.

So I have this weird thing I do whenever I'm walking home at night after dark. I basically start imagining every horrific monster I ever saw in any media ever, and just how badly they would mess me up if I came across them.

 These buggers alone can render me an insomniac for hours at a stretch

I even had a this crazy idea about lampposts coming into life and sort of stretching and turning out to be these giant stick insects that are dormant for the day and come out at night to eat unsuspecting passersby.

What is in this tea?

But I don't imagine these things for the reasons you might expect, to whit scare myself out of my pants because it's fun or because my imagination gets overactive in the eerie surroundings. I do it because it's oddly sort of comforting. Because I know they're just in my head and they aren't really going to turn up, and therefore I preoccupy myself with scary but harmless stuff so that I don't think about the equally scary but actually harmful stuff that can happen to a person walking alone outside at night.

I think it really says something about either the human psyche or the fear campaigns in media (or both) that despite people virtually NEVER getting assaulted in any way whatsoever where I live (well, except if they're on the main street getting outrageously swazzled), that most people are still terrified to go outside after dark. You know, they still do it and everything, but meanwhile they are trying not to have an early heart attack and keel over. Not so much of fear for the darkness itself, but for the things hiding in it.

Or some such stuff. It might just be me secretly having fun attempting to scare myself. I mean, if you can scare yourself with your own stories, you might have an easier time scaring other people. Which is, you know, kinda important when the story you're trying to write is at least partially horror.

I really should write down that thing about the stick insects...