I’ve mentioned my favorite art history professor to @systlin a few times, but there’s one story of him that stays with me. So for you, Plant Aunt, I’ve crafted a tale of one immortal spitefully making sure another immortal finally gets his:
The running joke among David’s students is that our beloved professor is clearly an immortal. How else could we explain his small office crammed with illuminated manuscripts, Scythian and Mongolian bows, 3rd cent. Roman gladii, near-Eastern rugs and ancient swords? The way he sighed wistfully in class and told us how beautiful the Parthenon was when it was new and, “not just a damn tourist attraction”? It wasn’t uncommon for us to see him hefting a sword over his shoulder, leather trench coat flapping in the wind, flipping off the head of security who really should have stopped trying by now.
It was also a running joke that our favorite immortal just did not get technology. I worked at our Help Desk for all four years of college, and David would always request one of his students to come and fix his computer.
“This computer isn’t fast enough,” he told me once, polishing an enameled chalice. Google maps was still loading on the page, trying to parse the coordinates he entered. It was likely looking ten centuries too late. “It needs more of that RAM. Really. I could be soaring over ancient Rome like a bird!”
After repeat requests, he got a brand-new Macbook Pro, which he promptly abandoned for his antique slide projector.
“I just don’t get the new technology,” he shrugged. “You can’t get the feel of things.”
That was the only sentiment he shared with his nemesis.
??? someone broke into my grandmas house while she was gone & shaved the matted fur off her cat
i want to emphasize that the cat was the only thing altered here
would also like to add that this occcurred sometime between 11 pm & 9 am. we have no leads. the cat is fine & probably appreciates not having a huge mat on his neck, but, like, that’s a really weird kind of vigilante justice, still
i walk into starbucks and order a pumpkin spice latte with 13 shots of espresso. i tell the barista that i intend to transcend humanity and become a god. i ask for no whip cream
you say this jokingly but i had a customer actually order a pumpkin spice latte with 9 shots of espresso (also no whip) and when i asked her to verify that she did indeed want 9 shots of espresso she looked me dead in the eyes and said “i have 5 kids”
I once had a woman come in and ordered an Americano with 19 shots of espresso. The drink took ages. It held up the line. I asked her why, and she shrugged and said “I just don’t care”. We still talk about that woman. We never saw her again.
new cryptid: exhausted woman at starbucks
Actual conversation I had at register:
“Hi, welcome to [Starbucks]! What can I get you, today?”
“How much is it to fill a Venti with Espresso?”
“I- I’m sorry?”
“A venti cup. How much to fill it with Espresso?”
“Oh. uh. Well, it’d be I suppose… I only have a button for a Quad. I don’t have special pricing for twenty ounces of espresso in a single… drink.”
“Price is the furthest thing from my mind right now. How many ‘add shots’ is that?”
*deep breath of fear* “It’d be a quad with,” *clears throat* “uh, sixteen additional shots of espresso. But, ma’am, I should tell you that the shots will start to get really bitter if they have to sit and wait for us to pull twenty of them-”
“Taste means nothing to me.”
At this point I am truly fearing for my very existence in the presence of what must clearly be an eldritch being.
“Oh. Well, okay.” I put on my absolute best customer service smile to hide my terror and accept that I must face this dragon, fae, or demon with dignity. “We can certainly get that for you! The price will be _____.”
She begins to pay, I shit thee not, with golden dollar coins. We are a block from Wall Street, and this eldritch demi-being is paying for an unholy elixer with golden coins. My life will end soon, I am sure of it.
“Do you still have the ‘Add Energy’ packets?”
My heart began to race at this request. “Yes ma’am.”
“How many can I add?”
Futile though it is, at least I know the rote response to this. “For health reasons, we won’t add more than one per drink and we cannot sell the packets individually.”
“One then.”
I alter the order and tell her the new price. She pays, dumps the change and five golden dollars into the tip box. I write the order on the venti cup and pass it silently to the girl working the hot beverage station. Normally we called and pass, but this was … not something to be spoken aloud.
My fellow takes the cup, not thinking anything of the minor break with protocol, until she sees the order. She stares at me. “No.”
The woman, which I call her for no other greater insight into her terrifying being is within my grasp, simply stands on the other side and says, calmly but with a commanding tone I expect of Admirals in bad movies, “Yes.”
My fellow barista pales before her task. But we are dutiful, we are true to our task, great though it may be. She sets about clearing the two brand new Matrena’s of all distraction, and sets two tall cups in the ready position. The energy packet is emptied into the venti cup, and the shots begin pouring.
The barista was damn near shaking. This woman’s gaze felt like the fires of the sun. Finally, the shots are pulled, the cup is filled, and the hand off takes place.
Our visiting Incomprehensible takes it to our milk bar and adds a dollop of cream. Satisfied, she proceeds to down what must have been half the damn cup.
Then she smiled at us, like a benediction and I was honestly filled with joy. And horror. She left, and we knew nothing more of her after that.
When I talk with other former employees, we quickly begin talking about “The Company” as if we’d never l, perhaps knowing that part of our soul still powers that awesome and terrible corporate machine. And when I share this stroy, other Baristas at first act shocked but quickly settle and comes the chorus,
“Yeah, I had one like that.”
I made a five shot Americano for someone back in my barista days, and I thought HE was insane, now I’m just agog.
I had a dream I was able to time travel and I went like 10,20,100,1000,2000 years into the future but the instant I went to 4,000 I got stuck in a time dilation jail set up by the American government in the year 3,877 in which anyone that tried to time travel back or forth across May 23, 3877 while on Earth would end up stuck in this time dilation chamber trap to stop time travelers but like it was so crazy and mismanaged because it was legit capturing like every single time traveler ever and the place had only been open for 12 minutes and was already getting overpopulated with nonstop multiple recursive instances of this one other guy trying to break previous versions of himself out of this god damn time traveler jail
that is fucking hysterical and absolutely sounds like something the American Government would set up.
This story is one my best friend and I always end up telling to everyone we ever meet because we’ve legit been traumatized by it. I’ve told the Werewolf On The Cliff tale to pretty much every person I know IRL.
So, as some of you know, my best friend and I are idiots and obsessed with magic and the paranormal. We very often call each other on the evenings or at night to be like “hey, wanna go on an adventure and try to capture a ghost on camera in this creepy-supposed-to-be-haunted famous mansion?” or “hey, I made a list of all the creepy trails in the woods and the countryside around, wanna go there at 1am and see what happens?” or “hey, wanna drive up the hill to the corn field and watch the stars, see if we can see a UFO?” etc etc.
Anyway, we’ve seen a lot of weird shit and a lot of terrifying shit, but THAT ONE NIGHT ON THE CLIFF… that was something else.
As we do, my best friend and I called each other and decided to have a mini road-trip around the surrounding region at night on the summer of 2013. We drove around filming random stuff and having a fun time spooking each other like the idiots we are (the video is still on my laptop somewhere). Then around 1am we decided to go up a cliff in a city by the coast we often go to because it’s pretty. It was very windy and dark so we took our flashlights and I stopped recording because the wind was messing up the audio (and because i didn’t trust myself not to accidentally drop my camera down the cliff). It’s a populated area, there’s buildings a few meters away, a lighthouse, old bunkers from WWII, and apparently a weird facility we never knew about. We first saw the “Private Propriety” and “DANGER do not enter” signs leading down the cliff after a few minutes up there, so we didn’t go that way because we aren’t that stupid. My best friend looked up and said “oh that’s weird, the night’s super dark but it’s a full moon” and indeed the moon was full and gigantic but the light wasn’t that bright. Knowing my crippling (and weirdass) Werewolf phobia, he joked about werewolves being out that night and I whacked him on the shoulder to make him shut up.
We went to the end of the cliff and directed our flashlights down to check if we could see the waves crashing down, but it was too dark and all I saw instead were glowing red eyes reflecting my light back at me. It was a few meters back down, the cliff wasn’t a sharp drop and had a slight tilt to it so it’s not like something was climbing up the side. It was just there. I called to my best friend and told him to look down, asked if he saw what I was seeing. He did. The eyes kept looking at me, slightly moving. We thought it was a cat or maybe a fox, startled by the light and scared to move too much, until it swiftly disappeared to the right. We didn’t think much of it, like I said, a bit spooked but convinced it was a cat, even if the eyes seemed a bit big and too red.
Not even a full minute passed until my best friend shakily grabbed my arm and said “someone else is here”. I looked up, and at our right, up the cliff at least 30 meters (98 feet) away from us, I saw a very tall humanoid figure appear from behind some shadows. “Apparently we aren’t the only ones going for a walk at 1:30am in this area” I thought, until my best friend (who has a much better vision than me, that’s worth mentioning, i’m fucking blind y’all) said “I think it’s coming towards us”. And at that moment the figure started fucking running EXTREMELY FAST in our direction, and we didn’t think twice before running away back to the car. My best friend looked behind him while running and the figure was still running towards us, which.. if you’re a well balanced human or a human at all, you probably wouldn’t do to people already screaming and running away from you. Its running was messy and weird.
Still screaming like babies, we made it into the car and of course he fumbled to find his keys while I was yelling “THIS IS HOW THEY GET US IN HORROR MOVIES, THE CAR NOT STARTING AND THEN THEY JUST JUMP ON THE WINDOWS OUT OF NOWHERE”, I still restarted the camera around that time. I still looked up to see where the figure was right as my best friend managed to start the car and drive away. It stopped, still in the shadows, so much closer and still impossibly tall. (edit: rewatching the videos, it apparently disappeared just like that and I didn’t look to check). We just drove back down the city. We puzzled every pieces of what had just happened together and like normal, well-adjusted adults, we came to the conclusion that a werewolf just chased us. Because fuck logic and also, full-moon and glowing red eyes, duh.
And that’s the story of how we almost got murdered and totally deserved it for being idiots. A week later we walked through an entire forest at night. We’ll never learn.
Okay, found the videos. Again, it’s only the before and after and there’s not much to see. I had to DL a shitty editing program real quick so because it’s the trial version there’s a shitty banner on it. I did what I could and it’s not much but for everyone who asked, there you go!
When I was in high school, I was the part-time henchperson of a Mad Scientist.
I’m not exaggerating about “Mad Scientist”. “Riley” (Name changed for his family’s privacy) was a former Medical Doctor, as well as an artist, microbiologist, pilot (as in, designed and flew his own experimental aircraft), magician, computer programmer and musical composer, and had an outbuilding attached to his house where he kept things like his hand-made 3D printer, electron microscope and drone-dirigible assembly devices.
Riley had ALS and was eventually wheelchair-bound, so by 2006 I was being called in on the odd school night or weekend to go out around FoCo and the surrounding mountains. “I need a younger set of legs and someone with no fear of heights” He’d say. Being that I was a very boring child that had no interest in sex or drugs and always called when I was going to be late, and that Riley was a trusted family friend, My parents trusted me to go out at like 9PM and come home at 2AM on a Tuesday.
…To do things like scale locked fire escapes and climb around on rooftops that we DEFINITELY did not have permission to be on to do things like install speakers and bluetooth broadcasting devices at strategic points around Old Town so that if you download the right app onto your phone (I’ve got it backed up somewhere, I’ll post it when I find it) , you can walk around town and be exposed to the ghostly, extremely shady side of FoCo history for his 2007 Halloween project.
We did get caught by the cops but I was 17, short and white as goddamn mayonnaise so when the cops asked me what I was doing “It’s for a community art project!” actually worked.
My favorite Mad Science Project was in 2009, Gallus rostromegalus.
I was home from college for summer, and Riley had been messing around with Rotational Physics and had managed to make Giant (24’ x 18’) extremely realistic Chicken eggs, weighted and everything so that if you picked one up, it would feel like there was a heavy yolk wobbling around inside. They’re amusing all on their own, but after leaving them in the slash pile from spring cleaning, Riley realized they had POTENTIAL.
So we went around getting permission from a few businesses and the art museum, and I spent a few nights making plausible enormous chicken feathers in Riley’s lab out of grass, acrylic glaze and some other odds and ends laying around, and filling up the back of my mom’s van with as much of the backyard slash pile as fit in there, then drove out in the middle of the night to set up giant nests for the eggs, strewn with feathers and surrounded by Traffic cones and orange construction mesh and signs from the entirely fictitious “Department Of Fish And Wildfowl, Specious Relocation Division”
(an incomplete nest on the steps of Fort Collins Museum of Art)
(signage, responsibly warning people to stay away in case of giant chickens)
Riley even made QR codes that linked back to an obviously false Wiki- if you scrolled to the bottom, the page was covered in feathers and after five minutes it would start to make chicken noises.
People. Went. INSANE.
Crowds turned up to take selfies with the nests and Riley tracked down literally dozens of tagged photos captioned “IS THIS REAL????”.
Someone wrote a very worried and not terribly facetious-sounding letter to the editor concerned that Giant Chickens were roaming around FoCo, something that big could hurt someone! There was an entirely-serious-sounding counter-letter that we Humans have clearly invaded this majestic creature’s natural habitat, where are they SUPPOSED to make their nests, huh?
Multiple people called the police to report having seen the elusive Gallus rostromegalus up in the hills or skulking around downtown. Reports claimed it was anywhere form five to twelve feet tall, with dramatic plumage and an eerie, yodeling sort of call.
A few nights after installing each nest, we went back, collected the eggs, and left broken ‘eggshells’ and extra down feather around each of the nests. One of the nests was put up at the local Garden Center and I remember one of the assistant managers coming outside just after we finished the ‘hatching’ and shrieking “OH GOD I THOUGHT THOSE WERE FAKE THEY’LL GET TO THE TOMATOES SOMEONE CALL THE POLICE!” That woman would later become my manager when I worked there for a summer, though she never made the connection between me and The Chickens.
Riley passed away in 2015 after a good and well-lived life, and was kind enough to leave me The Eggs in his will.
It was a truly splendid bit of ruckus, and I miss him terribly, and I very much treasure the memories. And the Eggs, which I am absolutely going to inflict on some unsuspecting neighbors at some point, in his honor.
(If you’ve enjoyed this story, please consider donating to my Ko-Fi or Paypal so I can support myself telling stories, thank you!)
Nyquil fucks me up every time I take it and furthermore, has the audacity to make me forget what fucking happens every single time. Since taking it at about midnight last night, My day:
Woke up at 4-6 AM and apparently did the dishes
Fiance gets up at 8:00AM, allegedly has fully cognizant conversation with me about his plans to stay late and tutor classmates. I don’t remember even being awake.
at 9:32 AM, my Dad called me and i had a 23-minute phone call with him that I have no recollection of, but apparently I spent most of it discussing the merits and drawbacks of the various tablets my mother is interested in. I was mad about how expensive updating storage capacity was for most of them.
Felling way more sober than I actually am, attempt to drive to school at 10:12. and spend enough time confused why my keys aren’t working on my car that my neighbor actually comes out of his apartment to ask what I’m doing to his car. I decide to stay home.
10:40: Send emails to professors to tell them I’m in no shape to be in class. I think I am eloquent. Upon opening my email later I realize I’ve sent them emails with the subject line “fuckt up” and message: “sorry, love you.”
Benefits of going to a small college: they know I’ve got exciting drug reactions already and are sick as well and reply with “I understand and hope you are feeling well soon, here is today’s lecture slides” and “lol” respectively.
~11- 12:30 : Get lost in neighborhood walking dog. In my defense, it’s 99% off-beige generic prefab housing on nonlinear-bordering-on-noneuclidean streets and Charlie had no interest in going home either.
12:30-3:00: Wall
3:00 : phone alarm goes off and I suddenly realize fiance was supposed to be home an hour and a half ago. Fly into immediate panic, try to find phone to call him and/or the sherrif becuase he’s obviously dead in a ditch or something. I am holding my phone the whole time.
3:16 : Fiance gets home, I cry like a bitch, the dog also cries, everyone has a really bad 15 minutes.
3:33 : Realize I haven’t actually ate or drank yet today. Immediately consume a quart of apple cider and plate of taquitos. Make pork chops and potatoes and don’t stop talking about what happens if a werewolf has sex with a dog while shifted the entire time.
4:00: pass out on couch to the soothing sounds of Mario Oddesy
1AM: Why is it thursday?
The moral of the story is that you should always write down any drug reactions and label medication you should take with a large index card that says “DO NOT TAKE THIS IT FUCKS YOU UP THEN YOU FORGET” in large, friendly letters.
This is written for @gallusrostromegalus who is sick and apparently really enjoys chickens, so. Fair warning that you are going to read about my family and chickens. I don’t normally write stories on tumblr, so here’s hoping you enjoy the narrative despite the shoddy storytelling.
To begin, I should start with my mother the Undercover Hippie. I spent a good portion of my childhood thinking my mother was normal because she didn’t dress in tie-dye, but as an adult, I’ve realised there are several things that marked my mother as one of those Boulder Hippies. The types that aren’t really Hippie in the seventies sense, but more in the ‘making questionable health and lifestyle choices because it is the newest Organic Idea going around.’ Notable occasions on this list are the time that she filled the brownies with wheat germ and made them crunchy, the time she brought my east-coast-city-child cousins on a camping trip, and the time she got chickens.
Chickens, in and of themselves, are reasonable things to own. Usually. However, my mother wanted them for eggs and began by taking the childhood fort (which most of us had grown out of) and turning it into a chicken coop. By chicken coop, I mean she stuck some boxes in it and put a fence around it, and patched up the hole in the side from A’s Enthusiastic Ninja Punch, and the hole in the other side from C’s Peephole Experiment, and the last hole from my own childhood Cannonball, and both windows, and then got chickens.
My mother is the sort of learner who just starts a project and then learns as she goes. While she knew they needed food and basic heating, she was otherwise a bit naiive.
For example, it turns out L, my sister, is terrified of chickens. My mother apparently didn’t know this (Mom, I don’t like the idea of chickens) until the chickens (Mom, really, do you think we have to have chickens, because they have beaks, and I got pecked once) actually got to the house (OH MY GOD GET IT AWAY. GET. IT. AWAY. GET IT AWAY GET IT OFF GET IT OFF GET IT OFF!!!!).
Additionally, Mom forgot that chickens can fly short distances and the fort has a loft and thus made the interesting mistake of not wiring off the top areas of the roof. On Day One she had to knock on the neighbour’s door and ask if she could retrieve her chickens from their yard.
Eventually, after many phone calls, Mom got a handle on chicken care – by which I mean she passed the project onto my chicken-enthusiastic younger brother, who adored them. Not only did Mom have chickens, she had Happy Chickens who were more than pleased to make Many Eggs, and the family chowed down happily.
W, my chicken-enthusiastic younger brother, explained chickens to me this way:
Chickens have a hierarchy, so you have to have a rooster. They’ll start pecking each other and it’s a mess, but roosters kinda keep them calm, though roosters can get aggressive if the hierarchy gets disturbed, so you have to keep the roosters calm. This isn’t really hard, except that if you have to have a rooster, you’ve got a chance of eggs getting fertilised, and we want to eat them, so you have to go out and get the eggs every day, unless you want more chickens, and there’s a limit of how many chickens you can have inside city limits.
All of which seems perfectly reasonable, and was perfectly reasonable, until Mom decided to go on a fortnight’s holiday with my younger brothers, including W.
This left L in charge of the chickens.
Now, my mother is not a reasonable person, so if you’re just now wondering why Mom left the chicken-terrified child in charge of the chickens, it’s because mom is either an idiot or an arse. I’ve still not decided to this day which one she is, so we’ll leave it at that. But regardless of Mom’s motivations, my younger sister is now in charge of the chickens. She can’t get within a few yards before wanting to burst into tears, but also has a Big Heart and doesn’t want the chickens to die.
The chickens need to be fed and watered.
According to W, several things had happened when he got home and took charge of ‘his’ chickens again.
On day one, L had attempted to feed the chickens, and upon entering the coop had been met by the Rooster, who, not recognising her, had immediately gone into Protective Mode. L had fled the coop, dropping the food but leaving the door open. This led to L calling the neighbours in a panic asking for a Group Hunt for the Chickens because she was too terrified to round them up out of the yard. A friendly neighbour put the end of the hose into the water trough so L could just turn it on instead of going in.
L had fed the chickens every day by taking a bucket about the right size full of feed and tossing it into the coop. Not just the feed – the whole bucket. W had to pick up 12 different containers because after L ran out of buckets she just started using old yoghurt containers and whatever else she could find. The chickens apparently didn’t mind being bombed with buckets full of food, just ran out of the way and then attacked the containers until they got their due.
L didn’t fetch the eggs, not even once, which meant that now W was a full eight chicks over the city limit, and had to give six more to some friends in the foothills who weren’t in city limits and could have as many chicks as they wanted. He ended up keeping the eight chicks and bargaining with the neighbours that they could have free eggs, provided that if the city Chicken Inspectors came by, the neighbours would tell the Chicken Inspectors that W was just caring for their chickens while they built a new coop or something.
By the time W, L, A, and my mother left to live in Swaziland (another story altogether), my brother had ten chickens over the limit, all extremely pleased and contented with life, until L went Anywhere Near The Coop, at which point they would all start shrieking like the dickens and running out of the way of any impending Food Bombs, except for the Rooster, who would puff up and start attacking the fence in preparation.
Anyway, the point of this story is Don’t Leave L In Charge Of The Chickens, with side morals of Don’t Buy Pets You’re Not Prepared For and Don’t Fuck With Roosters, and also I hope you feel better.
This is DELIGHTFUL and a fairly solid example of why I don’t intend to own my own (Beyond already owning a dog with an impressive prey drive and No Damn Sense). Was you mom ever part of the Fiber Visions Guild, becuase she sounds an awful lot like one of my mother’s friends who moved to somewhere in Africa a few years ago, but I can’t remember right now.
I want you to know that your storytelling is not shoddy at all!
In fact I was glued from beginning to end and I would have gone looking for your equivalent of a Family Lore tag if the premise did not suggest there was none to be found.
His best friend in high school was hearing impaired and he learned to communicate with him using ASL though he says he’s a little rusty now. I think the same friend encouraged him to get into acting when he was about 15 years old.
Not about being deaf but…
When I go to conventions I carry a totoro named Percy around with me. A few years ago we got the chance to meet Tom Hiddleston, Sebastian Stan, Anthony Mackie, Chris Hemsworth and Chris Evans. When I went in for the picture, I was a little off because my wife wasn’t with me so I sort of stammered out asking the guys to hold Percy while I found a place to stand. (I’m 5’4, everyone was bigger than me) Sebastian recognized him from 2014 when he almost signed it and we got this amazing picture:
So he wanted to hold Percy and all but snatched him from my hands. Anthony Mackie was like a child going “totoro totoro!” And snatched it from him declaring HE was going to hold it and after a few seconds of this, Chris Evans grabbed it, put Percy in his lap like he was their dad taking away a favored toy. It was the best Captain America moment ever. I can’t find the picture for some reason but it’s cute as hell
“em this gonna be
weird but i just sat down on the toilet and then james called and hes on
the doorstep. could you let him in? beware, he’s dressed as freddie
mercury,”
Steel Phoenix Studios 