At the time, I thought he was just a thoughtless jerk, but upon reflection, the truth has dawned.
I went to the YMCA at lunchtime, as I normally do. Years of slumping in my chair in front of my computer at work haven’t refined my physique in the manly and attractive way I thought they would. I’ve reached the point where even John Basedow, fitness celebrity, would refuse to help me make my head look freakishly large on a tiny yet muscular body. And John Basedow says he can help anybody.
So, in an effort to enlarge my head without the expert guidance and tutelage of John Basedow, fitness celebrity, I’ve been going to the local YMCA on my own. My results have been less than spectacular so far – not one person has commented on my freakishly enlarged melon. I’ve persevered, though, because I understand these things take time.
At any rate, I was pulling into the parking lot, thinking head-enlarging thoughts, when I noticed something strange about one of the cars already parked there in the first row. (The parking lot at my Y is in rows, so two cars can park nose-to-nose in each row. This is important.) Anyway, the car I noticed seemed too short, somehow, like part of it had been chopped off. I took little note of it at the time.
As I went down the next row, looking for a good parking spot (it doesn’t pay for me to park TOO far away from the door, because walking across the entire parking lot – a distance of AT LEAST 100 feet – can cause me to pass out from exertion), I saw the car again, and realized why it seemed so short: The driver had pulled forward too far when parking, and was taking up two parking spaces. Obviously a jerkwad of the highest order. Plus, it was pretty close to the door of the Y, a primo spot, so the jerkwad was preventing another car (maybe even mine!) from getting a close-in parking place. I decided if I had to pass out while walking to the door of the Y, I’d try to pass out close to that car, so my not-yet-freakishly large head could maybe graze the paint and scratch it or something.
I finally found a parking spot, grabbed my gym bag, and headed toward the door, which wasn’t TOO far away, but much farther away than I wanted it to be. Since the offending car was quite close to the door, I had to pass it on my way in.
It was while I was walking past it when the true jerkhood of the driver struck me. He hadn’t just pulled too far into one parking space, taking up two spaces; no, he had pulled too far into the parking space WHILE STRADDLING THE LINES.
Now, I’ve seen line-straddlers before in parking lots … they’re irritating, but sometimes you can sorta understand how it happened. Especially if it’s one of those thyroidal SUV monster things driven by a little 95-pound soccer mom. She can’t even see over the dashboard, especially while nattering away on her cell phone, so parking is really a problem for her. Bless her heart.
I’ve also seen the pretentious snits who intentionally park diagonally across two adjacent parking spots. Invariably these people drive expensive foreign cars, and you can just tell they think their car’s exhaust don’t stink. I usually run into these cars with a shopping buggy four or twelve times on accident.
But this was the first time I had seen someone line-straddle AND pull forward too far. This guy was taking up FOUR PARKING SPOTS. I would have said it was geometrically impossible to do that if I hadn’t seen it with my own two eyes (which someday will rest in a freakishly large head, if I can just keep working out).
The sheer selfishness of the whole thing stunned me as I was walking past the car, and I stopped for a moment to look at it. (Plus, and I have to be honest … I stopped to catch my breath a little bit. Hey, I had to park a LOOONG way away, and my gym bag probably weighed six pounds at LEAST.) The car was a plain, nondescript thing, gray, somewhat blob-like, with nothing to make it stand out at all. Apart from the way it squatted smack-dab in the middle of FOUR PARKING SPOTS.
And that’s when I realized two things: 1) the car was still running, and 2) the driver was staring at me through the windshield.
He was a lumpy thing, sorta hunched behind the wheel. He was just sitting there, not doing anything, not moving, not exhibiting any sign at all that he was aware of breaking at least 31 different parking lot rules. At the time, the only thing I could think of was that maybe he was waiting to pick up a friend at the Y. I just shook my (not-yet-freakishly large) head and continued on into the building.
While I was working out, though, my thoughts kept turning to that car, and that guy, and the way he had parked. At some point, it occurred to me that I couldn’t really visualize either the car or the driver … they were just grayish blobs in my memory. It seemed odd that I couldn’t remember something that was so strange to me not 20 minutes ago.
It wasn’t until I had gotten back to my office that a few things began to click for me:
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The lumpy guy in the car bore an AMAZING resemblance to the mound of mashed potatoes Richard Dreyfuss made in that excellent alien documentary “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”;
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People who see aliens often claim not to remember exactly what happened, which leads me to believe that the aliens zapped them with a forgetting ray, and that could be why I can’t remember specific details about the car or the driver;
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Aliens who visit the earth and want to remain incognito wouldn’t use their spaceships to run errands like picking up a friend at the Y – they’d use generic, bland, unassuming cars that people wouldn’t remember; and
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(and this is the clincher, if you ask me) If an alien was going to beam down from his mother ship, he’d want a good target to aim for, so he didn’t accidentally beam into a volcano or next to Britney Spears or someplace equally tragic, and if you look down at the intersection of four parking spaces from a mother ship, they look JUST LIKE THE CROSSHAIRS FROM A SNIPER SCOPE. A perfect beaming target. And the alien, using special advanced alien technology, beamed down and hit it perfectly … just like bulls-eyeing womp rats in Beggar’s Canyon back home.
So obviously, I saw an alien the other day. Now I’m trying to figure out how I can get some publicity out of this. I’m thinking if I can get on CNN, or maybe even the cover of Weekly World News, fitness celebrity John Basedow will see me and help me with my workouts.
