The Diary of A Simple Man

RoboFoot. Who is he? What is he? And where does he come from?

Is he a fearless crime-fighting machine?

No! He's me. For some reason my left shoe now thinks it's hydraulic, or something. Every step I take, it lets out a distinct "whoosh-sss" noise, making me sound very much like RoboCop.

Or possibly the ED-209.

Which makes me feel very strange as I walk down the hallway.

For three days in a row I've seen the same bizarre thing while driving down Social Street in Woonsocket.

There's a guy walking around with two young alligators, one on each arm. Their bodies are at least as long as his forearms, not counting the tails. In other words, these are pretty big, and they are definitely alligators.

The guy himself looks to be in his mid-20's, wears muscle shirts, and looks like a muscle-bound idiot. But that's me being judgemental again.

I wonder if it's legal to walk around the streets with alligators?

* * *
This morning as I was walking down the stairs at Ruggles Station I stopped in shock. Just where I was about to step was a perfect little sparrow lying dead on its side.

So why am I bothering to write about something so mundane?

Because no one else will, and I don't know if anyone else cares.

* * *
Two Saturdays ago I drove with Sebastian to the animal shelter where Teri volunteers. I'd left my wallet in her car, and needed to pick it up. We hung around for a while, and as we were leaving a man came in - dark hair, in his late 20's (I'm guessing), dressed in Casual Yuppie and carrying a cat in a cage. Sebastian and I walked out as he came up to the desk, and once we were through the door Sebastian stopped and looked at me.

"Who was that man?"
"I don't know...just a man. A man with a kitty."
"Is he talking to Mamma?"
"Yes. Come on, Sebastian, we need to go..."
"I don't want him to talk to Mamma!"

It was hideously hot and humid, so I urged him along to the car he continued to talk about that man, and how he wanted him to stay away from Mamma. I noticed that the guy drove an expensive new SUV.

Later, Teri told me the story. It was long and confusing; I may have some points wrong, But apparently this guy had adopted a cat from the shelter about a year ago. He'd come back with the cat a few days earlier (in other words, after he'd had it for a year) and asked to have it put to sleep - it had suddenly become vicious. The shelter people refused to put it to sleep, so he stormed off with the cat. Later, calls came into the shelter from other shelters and veterinarians in the area. The guy was making the rounds, trying to find someone to kill his cat. All of them refused.

Finally the guy came back to Teri's shelter. She was shocked, because she'd known that cat in the shelter, and it had been very sweet-tempered. One of the people at the shelter told the guy that if he wanted to leave the cat there he'd have to pay a boarding fee. The guy stormed off in a rage.

Soon after, someone at the clinic found the cat in its cage. The bastard had simply left it on the ground outside of the shelter to broil to death in the sun. Note that it was well out of sight of the door and any windows, and that this is not a well-travelled area - if some people hadn't happened to come in, the cat could have been stuck in that cage in the sun for hours, and could easily have died.

What this idiot had apparently failed to realize was that his name and address were in the shelter's records. The police had a conversation with him, and he apparently was shaking in his shoes; he claimed he'd told the shelter people that he was leaving the cat there. (Outside. In the sun. Right.) Unfortunately for some reason the police could only warn the guy. By rights he should have been staked out in a box in the sun himself for a few hours.

I must say, Sebastian seems to be an excellent judge of character!

* * *
On Sunday I was pumping gas into the car (on Social Street, come to think of it), when there was a loud crash. A huge old boat of a car had just rammed into the protective barrier in front of the gas pump in the next row, and half of its bumper had been knocked off. The driver got out; he was in his mid-80's, at least. His wife (at least, I assume she was his wife) sat frozen in the passenger's seat.

My first reaction was anger. Teri and Sebastian were in the car, after all, and they were only feet away from the accident scene. Why the hell was this idiot still on the road? Today a gas pump, tomorrow what - another car? Pedestrians on a sidewalk? A group of schoolkids waiting for the bus?

And once again we'd hear that same insane, utterly infuriating excuse:

"I tried to step on the brake, but the harder I stepped on it the faster the car went!"

Here's a tip, Gramps - if you step on something and the car goes faster, you're stepping on the gas pedal.

But as I stared at that aged couple something changed. Looking at them, I suddenly saw them as they must have been forty or fifty ago...like me and Teri, perhaps even with children of their own.

Time plays cruel tricks. They never asked to have their reflexes and senses decay. They may have known that their bodies would fail with time, but until it actually happens you can't really understand it. I'm sure I can't. They seemed pathetic, frightened, tricked. I pitied them, and empathized, and felt a touch of dread - because, of course, the same fate awaits us.

A glance at Sebastian always makes me feel better when thoughts like that press too close, so I smiled at the boy as I got in the car. And before I said a word Teri started talking. Funny, but she'd gone through the same thought train just then!

* * *
Remember a few entries ago, when I took Sebastian to the old-fashioned car show in Woonsocket and a photographer from our local paper took some pictures of him?

The photo went up on the newspaper's website. They claimed that it had been published on 8/7/04, so I ran out that night searching for that day's paper (I only happened to see it on the site at about 10pm).

Every try to find a copy of a local paper at 10pm on the day it was published? It's not easy. Teri called and suggested I hit the local newspaper boxes, but the one I found was empty. Finally I found a couple of copies at a supermarket and bought them both. As soon as I got to the car I flipped through them eagerly...

No picture. Nor was there one on Sunday, nor the day after.

But today, Teri just called me. He's on the front page, in color! She picked up eight copies.

I haven't been sleeping well lately - okay, not for years - but I still dream a lot. Last night was a particularly long and weird one:

Volvo had decided to do a series of reality-type commercials; they were going to put six very different people in one of their new cars and drive them around for a while, filming them. The footage would then be selectively edited. I was one of the six people who had been invited, and for some inexplicable reason I had agreed.

(I've never owned a Volvo, by the way, and I don't think anyone else in my family has, either.)

The driver of the car was the commercial spokesman, very typical of the breed; a microphone and plaid sports jacket, slightly desperate, with great teeth, voice, and hair. Of the other passengers, I only remember two. One was a woman who was going to be married soon. I could tell because she was wearing her wedding dress, a classic white number complete with veil. The bride was tall and very beautiful, with black hair and very fair skin; she reminded me of someone, but I can't remember who. She was also very snotty and spoiled, which makes me suspect that she was based on a memory of someone from my old home town of Westport, CT.

The other passenger was Dave Thomas of SCTV! He was young, about the age he was back when they shot the show. I was dying to talk to him, but he was in the back seat and I was in the middle one, stuck next to that insane bride. We didn't get along, she and I. I couldn't believe that she'd been stupid enough to wear that outfit on a long trip, and soon enough I was proved right. Her dress got stained and torn, and at one point her shoes and lower dress were completely soaked in mud. I didn't have much pity for her, though, because she was a real bitch.

In the meantime the car itself seemed to be suffering an inexorable process of destruction. The spokesman wasn't a very good driver: he kept bumping things, scraping the side of the car against cement barriers and walls. It didn't seem that this was likely to be a successful commercial.

As we were driving in a small city, I was suddenly surprised to see a familiar figure. Standing in the middle of a side road was a man in a white suit and hat. It was Joe Flaherty as SCTV station owner and president Guy Caballero! I was dying to talk to him, but the car wouldn't stop. Moments later I saw Joe/Guy again, this time seated in his customary wheelchair (for respect!). Still the car rolled on.

But eventually the car stopped, and somehow Dave and I were walking in an odd part of an unfamiliar city. He seemed to know where we were, which was good because I was pretty hungry. A lot of the stores and restaurants along the street were either out of business or new and not yet open for business. But Dave led the way to an odd store. I thought it wasn't yet open, but we went in and they were serving...what?

It was bowls of some stuff that looked like large rock-candy crystals in a clear gel of some kind. Service was cafeteria-style, and as we moved along the line we came to a station where the counterman used some sort of blender to stir up the crystal-gel combination into something that looked like white cotton candy combined with snow. It looked delicious.

Dave kept his bowl away from the blender - he said he had always wanted to try it plain. I had mine mixed, though. We found a table and we were just going to have a good chat about SCTV when...

You guessed it. I woke up.

Funny thing, I've dreamed about SCTV (and Monty Python) more than a few times over the years. It's usually pretty cool.

I seem to be having a bit of a nostalgia attack. I blame Tarzan Boy. It's one of those 1980s songs for which I remembered the tune, but not the words, title, or artist. Someone mentioned the title at a game recently, though, and as soon as he hummed the chorus I knew the song - and wrote it down. Man, some of those 80s one-hit wonder songs were the best!

When Teri and I took our old queen-sized mattress out of the house last week, we put it in the trash pick-up area next to our driveway. We weren't thrilled about putting it out there so early (trash is picked up on Tuesday morning), but there wasn't any place in the house where we could keep it.

Strange thing: on Sunday afternoon we went out for a drive with Sebastian. A few hours later we came back, and the mattress was gone!

It's kind of creepy.

Last Friday night I had a dream.

This may sound strange, but I'm a fan of my dreams; they're cool. Even the bad ones are pretty interesting and fun. Fortunately I dream a lot. I've even had some so-called "lucid" dreams, dreams in which I realize that I'm dreaming, which may be the ultimate in dream coolness. When that happens I often can control the dream, which is very fun indeed (I usually fly, if I get the chance).

But I've had a few nightmares, too. Most are still not too bad - there was one with a bunch of vampires that was pretty wierd - but once in a very rare while I get one of those really nasty ones, the kind where you wake up shaking and sweating.

Parenthetically, if you ever have a dream like that, and are worried that it will become a serial dream - that is, you've woken up in the middle of the night, and are afraid to go back to sleep because the dream might continue - I have a very good piece of advice for you: have a glass of water. I used to have serial dreams a LOT when I was a kid, and had some long and scary nights. Somewhere I read that a glass of water changes your dream state, and it really worked for me. It's also a good idea to go to the bathroom, if you need to. Physical discomfort can translate into nightmares when you're asleep.

Anyway, it was Friday night and we were on the road in Fishkill, NY. We were staying at a Hampton Inn. And I'd forgotten to take my Zantac.

While I slept, acid churned in my stomach and I dreamed:

I lived in a city, but it was no city I knew from the waking world. But I did know this: some thing was killing people, killing them horribly, inexplicably. Bodies were found in advanced stages of decay, rags of flesh hanging from bones, which had been seen alive and well only minutes before. Others were found torn to pieces. The city was engulfed in a rising cloud of terror. And I was the only one who knew who - what - was responsible. Because as far as I could tell, I was the only one who could hear and see him.

And not even I could see and hear him all the time.

This much I knew: a deep and incredibly evil laugh, like nothing even vaguely human. And a form, perhaps fifteen feet tall, that seemed to be made of dead things. Things that had decayed, gone through a woodchipper, and then been sculpted into a humanlike form. It could appear and disappear at the blink of an eye, pass through walls, suspend the laws of physics and reality at will...to everyone but me he was utterly invisible, and my attempts to warn others had had the predictable result. The police suspected me.

I'd been taken up to the sixth floor of a huge police building in the heart of the city. Five plainclothes detectives were in the room with me: three men and two women. There was an envelope of evidence on the table in front of me. As they began to interrogate me I knew what was going to happen: there was no way I could make them believe me, and there was no point in even trying. I had to pretend that I didn't know anything about the murders at all.

But as I tried to convince them huge dead fingers came rising up behind my back, six-inch-wide fingers made of chunks of bone and flesh. They grabbed my head and began to tear it off. I fought it desperately, shaking my head violently, almost spasmodically, trying to get free. For an instant I saw what the detectives saw: no hand at all, but simply a suspect who was flailing his head around like a (homicidal?) maniac.

When I finally broke free, the fingers withdrew with the sound of hell's laughter, a laughter I knew only I could hear. I looked at the cops and sighed. There was no hope.

"You didn't see anything, did you?" I asked. They stared back at me, and the answer was plain in their eyes. "Yeah. This is what I do," I said bitterly. "I throw big fits. For fun."

And then the thumb of the creature came up over my shoulder and made a hideous puking noise, spitting a large dollop of its own putrefying essence onto the table before it disappeared again. The vile stuff began wiggling around on the table, slowly vanishing bit by bit, and suddenly I was filled with an unexpected hope.

Because every cop in the room was staring at it.

"You see?" I asked, "you see it?!" One of the female detectives nodded, her eyes nearly popping out of her head. Everyone started talking at once.

"Hold it, hold it!" I said. "We need to-"

"Stop it. Stop DOING that!" said one of the women, her voice high and hysterical. She was staring at the envelope of evidence. It was shaking like a leaf in a hurricane, and inside it new dead things were scurrying around like the damned. They had thought I was psychic, and that somehow I was using my power to cause the apparently supernatural elements of the murders.

"I'm not doing that", I said, "he's here."

There was an enormous flash of lighting and thunder as the lights in the room went out. His impossibly deep laughter came echoing up from below. Some of the detectives screamed. A strange light began to glow through the curtain of the large window. I went towards it and saw shadowy shapes standing, leaning all around the balcony. As I pulled the curtain aside I saw that they were skeletons, and I knew that they were what he had left of some of the police from downstairs. As I watched, red lights slowly began to glow in their eye sockets. I didn't know if they would move, but I pulled the curtain and turned back to the five police in the room.

With dreadful certainty I said: "Everyone else in this building is dead."

And we all knew he was coming for us next.

At that point I woke up, fortunately.

It was an incredibly real dream, very sharp and detailed (all of my dreams are in color). But here's a funny thing: terrifying as it was, it really wasn't that bad. I've had dreams that have scared me far more, even though the details were much less frightening. It was almost as if it was a movie I was watching, somehow, and the fear was the sort of fear you have at a horror movie. So I didn't wake up screaming or sweating, just with an overwhelming urge to tell Teri about it all.