Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Wednesday, October 02, 2002 Several years ago, when Trash worked downtown, she was in the habit of using her lunch breaks to bop over to the Barnes & Noble a block or two over. She’s usually a very punctual person, but if you get her around books, the very fabric of space-time curves away from her and she ends up being forced to struggle free of a temporal vortex that threatens to eject her clear out of the Einsteinian universe. That’s a fancy way of saying she had to rush back to work every once in a while. On one particularly rushful walk back to the office, she found her exit from the building blocked by a small conversational grouping of people standing directly outside the heavy glass door. She wasn’t going to be able to even crack the door open until they moved. She tapped on the glass impatiently. Then she banged on the glass, a little more impatiently. Finally she had their attention. The two women stepped aside. The man turned and made a gesture that Trash interpreted as “Sorry, I’ll move now.” Trash reacted accordingly, and, she’ll freely admit, rather briskly. Unfortunately, the gesture wasn’t a “Sorry, I’ll move now” gesture at all, but a “Hi, how are you?” gesture. That’s how Trash explained the fact that the man’s head was still in the door’s arc when she swung it open and it bashed him on the melon. Trash came out of the door apologizing, explaining that she thought he was moving, she certainly didn’t mean to trepan him, and was he okay? Being who she is, she was able to convey all of this in about three phonemes, whereupon the man said it was fine, and just generally made agreeable and apologetic noises of his own. After an awkward couple of seconds, Trash was on her way. Then she stopped. Froze. Slowly turned around to get another look at the man she’d just brained. That’s [unnamed movie star], she realized. Then she quickly turned back around and kept walking. Think about it: what would you do? Go back and apologize some more, demonstrating that you’re the kind of person who thinks celebrities are more important than other people? “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were famous. Suddenly I’m not in a hurry any more.” But she’d also be saying that [unnamed movie star] isn’t important enough for her to have recognized him before he waved at her. What could anyone do but keep walking? Besides, his two groupies were acting all offended on his behalf, and Trash didn’t have time to deal with them if they decided to throw down. As for the man himself, who was in town shooting Feeling Minnesota at the time, he was pretty classy about the whole thing. When our local gossip columnist spotted him at some do or another a few days later and asked him to explain the welt on his braincase, he refused to explain. Of course, that might have been because he thought it would be cooler to let people think he’d been beaten up by his costar. Now that I think about it, if some chick thumped me with a door because I was too addlepated to get out of her way, I’d probably claim to have been beaten up by a movie star, too. Basically, Trash saw the humor in the incident, even though she felt a little embarrassed and guilty. Not embarrassed or guilty enough to actually go see Feeling Minnesota, mind you. posted by M. Giant 3:21 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:
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