Along very similar lines - I was in Kashiwazaki, Niigata, Japan, teaching at en English school. Our classroom had a big picture window that looked out the back onto… a drainage ditch. Schoolkids would walk to and from school along those ditches, so I was used to seeing them walk past my class. What I didn’t expect to see was one of the girls, about 8-10, stop, drop her pants, and take a pee, there in front of God & everybody.
Then there was the time in Mississippi where I saw two guys shock-fishing in an aluminum boat.
Dammit! This had made me think of a movie where two guys are in a fishing boat and one of them is lighting dynamite and throwing it into the water. The other guy is all horrified and protests loudly. The first guy says something like, “Well, did you come to fish or talk?” What movie is that?
I was leaving work and stopped at the stop sign and there it was. It was standing on the lawn of a company. I mean a wild turkey sitting the middle of a lawn in an industrial parkway struck me as kind of strange. There are no woods around or anything. It was just standing there in the open.
Heh … I was kind of that guy driving the truck once. Many years ago I was driving up Fall Creek Parkway towards 96th Street and came over a hill and around a corner to see a petite chestnut horse in the middle of the road. Luckily, traffic was dodging it, but I figured that things could go terribly wrong in the blink of an eye. So I pulled off to the side of the road, and another lady (in a big red SUV) did the same. We were kind of at a loss for what to do, but we figured that catching the horse was #1 on the list. Thankfully, it had trotted into someone’s nice lush green lawn and was enjoying a bit of brunch. I have minimal horse handling experience, but enough to feel comfortable around them and keep out of trouble. Luckily, the little mare was friendly and curious enough to want to sniff my outstretched hand, and she was wearing a halter. Score! So now I’ve got the horse … what next? The other good samaritan had a cell phone and was going to call the police non-emergency number when we saw a middle-aged lady jogging up the side of the road toward us. It wasn’t the horse’s owner, but at least she knew where the horse belonged. So we started walking down the side of the road with the red SUV right behind us, following carefully and with her blinkers on.
We got the mare (Princess Jasmine) back to her woefully inadequate home safely. When I got home, I called Animal Control on the owners, as well as a local rescue organization. Unfortunately, Indiana’s animal care laws are pathetic and vague, so nothing ever happened to the owners, and the rescue people couldn’t convince them to give her up or sell her to them. I often wonder what happened to Princess Jasmine. Poor thing.
[hijacking my own thread] Avarie, dahling! Long time, no hassle. How’s hubby and sprout?
[/hijack]
Another one to add to the mix.
I was in the LA area on business, headed to Pt. Mugu on gubmint bidness. We were going up the Pacific Coast Highway somewhere around Malibu. Expensive area, and tight on land, so all of the houses were as close to the highway as legal.
We passed one place with the garage door up, and there was an OLD geezer doing garage type stuff plainly visible from the road, wearing nothing but tighty whities.
A few years back, I stopped at a local pizza/sub place for lunch. This particular restaurant shared a fair-sized, enclosed vestibule with the adjacent clothing store, and in the vestibule were the requisite gumball machines and a few arcade video games. As I waited for my sub, I saw a young man playing one of the video games. A young Amish man, complete with straw hat and suspenders. It was, how shall I put this, surreal…
You oughta see them plummeting out of a helicopter onto a busy shopping mall. Oh, the humanity!
Driving past an apartment complex, I see a guy standing by road holding a sign that read FREE RENT 1ST MONTH. Not really strange, except for the fact that he was dressed in a chicken suit. Still wondering what a chicken has to do with an apartment complex.
Never thought I’d see the view outside my windshield while belted into an upside down pick-up.
I saw one walking down the sidewalk outside of a cheesy tourist shop in Kissimmee, FL. He didn’t seem phased by me (or Mrs. Homie) in the slightest. Even when we tried to shoo him out of our way, he just stood there. We had to walk around him.
I live in downtown Lafayette. My apartment is in the back of a house on a lot that’s adjacent to (and owned by) a Catholic church. One day I saw a wild turkey walking along the driveway shared by my building and the church school’s service entrance.
I’ve seen a hawk being harassed by a crows (or ravens, I don’t know enough about birds to classify them properly). Hawks are built for soaring and diving, not so much for maneuverability and rate of climb. The first time I saw this, two crows were screaming abuse while diving and dodging around the hawk, pecking at his wings and back every once in a while. The hawk’s body language said, “Well, shit, I didn’t expect to have to deal with this,” as he got the heck out of town. They didn’t let up until he had some decent altitude.
The corvids here are bloody huge, about the size of a small to medium sized hawk, but still…
Recently I watch Infamous, the story of Truman Capote and how he came to write In Cold Blood, on HBO. Although I’d already seen it a couple of times, I didn’t remember exactly how it ended.
This time, the last thing I saw was Sandra Bullock (playing Harper Lee) speaking about how once an author produces his or her first hit, everybody’s waiting to see what’s next. IRL, Harper Lee never repeated her first success with To Kill A Mockingbird. I’m not even sure she ever published any further work. At any rate, Sandra Bullock is on the screen saying, (paraphrased):
At this instant, the screen went black and the TV went silent. It turned out that our cable service was interrupted, but at the time it looked like the movie was supposed to end that way. Because I thought the next word out of her mouth was going to be “nothing”.
While at a “zoo” in Brazil, I saw this bird of some sort in a big cage. It was looking kind of distressed and squinty-eyed. Just then, an egg falls to the ground, the bird lifts it head, flys down, pecks it open and eats it.
I saw a chicken actually crossing a road. It was on Idaho Ave in West L.A., between the courthouse and where the bail bondsmen’s offices are. I was just driving along, when a rooster ran across my path.
While I feel confident in assuming that his purpose was, essentially, to get to the other side, I still don’t know how he came to be anywhere near there in the first place.
I feel the same way about the attacks on public transit in Madrid and London. Although 9/11 was more costly in terms of human life, there’s something especially horrific about blowing people up while they’re using a transit system that millions of people use every day. As bad as 9/11 was, I suspect that most New Yorkers had never been in the WTC if they didn’t work there. But a huge number of them do use the subway every day.
This past summer and fall I got into a really bad cycle of coming home from work, falling asleep in front of the TV, then getting hungry around 11 o’clock at night. Plus, that’s when the cigarettes I refused to smoke in my condo would start calling to me to take a drive. So I’d run out to Jack in the Box or somewhere and get a little bite, have a smoke on the way, and be ready for another good nap when I got home.
One night, after I’d locked my door behind me and was making my way to the car, I heard a rustling sound and turned to see, standing in the middle of the street not 20 yards from my front door in suburban Charlotte, a deer.
He stood still, looking around, then saw me. We regarded each other for a few seconds, and then more rustling sounds, and two more deer joined the scout. He looked over at them as if to say, “Don’t worry, he’s cool, he lives here.”
Then, with the little clicky-slidey sounds of their hooves on the blacktop of the street reminding me of new Sunday School shoes on the kitchen floor, they were gone, disappearing between two buildings on the other side of the street.
This morning as I got to work a fire truck and a police car blocked off traffic at the intersection next to my building. As we watched, an ambulance pulled up and waited while they landed a freaking helicopter in the middle of the intersection. Eventually they transferred a person from the ambulance to the helicopter and it took off again. Then they all pulled away and two minutes later everything was completely back to normal. Now there’s something you don’t see every day.
My husband had a deer sighting last summer, I wish I could have seen it. He said he looked out the window to see 2 huge bucks walking down the middle of our street in the afternoon broad daylight! He said they were both 8 or 9 point bucks (meaning full antlers). We live in an urban area right in the middle of the city so a deer sighting is a rare occurrance indeed. He said it felt truly surreal to see them…of course no one thought to grab a camera!
Speaking of our neighborhood, I used to have to witness the startling sight of our odd neighbor doing yard chores in nothing but flesh-colored diaper-like panties. (Yes, I said panties.) He would cut the grass in them, water the lawn, work on his car. A portly man with long gray hair in back, bald head on top…it was not a pretty sight. Once he had a garage sale and greeted his customers in these panties. (thankfully he moved!)
Also, a few weeks ago, sitting at a stop light on an overpass that was clearly a work zone, I see a wisp of a girl jogging slowly right past the asphalt trucks, backhoes and other heavy lifting equipment. She couldn’t have weighed more than 100 lbs, skinny as a rail and looked to be about 16 years old. She seemed oblivious to all the construction around her, I couldn’t help but think how dangerous that was jogging right thru there!!
Years ago when I was living in a small town & visiting my (ex) MIL at her cafe, I was looking out the window at the corner traffic light. Plain as day, in the passenger seat of a semi at the stop light was a blow-up sex doll in slinky lingere. I was young, so young and sheltered back then…
When I lived in a trailer park out in the country in good ol’ Nebraska, I woke one morning to find a deer tangled up in the fence. The deer had crossed a field, railroad tracks, highway, the yard fence into my plot then got caught (?)trying to jump the next fence out of my yard. It was dead when I found it.
