Back In the Woods
I’ve long heard that people who have traumatic experiences can often flash back to them if they encounter certain triggers. Today was the first time this ever happened to me, and oddly enough, it was in a video store.
Four or five years back, I was on a cruise held by Party Poker. I got in an elevator on the top floor (10th if memory serves me) and was going all the way down to the bottom. An older gentleman got in right behind me and immediately started yammering on about God only knows what. He spoke so quickly and for so long that I began to wonder how he managed to do so without choking.
It was a cruise elevator, so it moved slowly and stopped at pretty much every floor. It was probably only a few minutes, but the ride seemed like an hour. I think it had something to do with the “a watched pot never boils” principle. A watched douche bag never shuts the hell up.
The older man finally stepped off on floor 2 and one of the ladies in the back said “he’s so down to Earth.” I can’t imagine the look I must have given her, but it had to be a mixture of confusion and hatred. She seemed to notice at least the first part of the mixture, because she looked at me and said “That’s James Woods.”
“Who is that?” I asked.
“A famous actor.”
I’d never heard of him, so I asked her what movies he’d been in. She rattled off one movie after another that I’d actually seen, and yet I didn’t recognize either his name or his face until finally she mentioned that he was the dad in The Virgin Suicides. I realized immediately that that role, a somber, unassuming math teacher, must have been the biggest stretch of his career.
So today I was in the video rental store, picking out a game, which is in a small, tightly packed room off to the side. I was sandwiched between two stereotypical obese lower middle class soccer moms (who looked just like every single person I saw on that fateful cruise) debating between Mario Party 8 and Super Smash Brothers Brawl, when I heard that voice. I looked frantically for the “open” button and fought back panic before realizing I was on dry land in the Wii section of a Family Video. And then I realized that James Woods wasn’t actually there, it was just a voiceover for a talking penguin in some kid’s movie.
I stepped outside and the sun was shining.
May 12, 2008 at 1:04 pm
Please stop posting stuff like this. I laughed so hard, people at work had to check on me!
May 12, 2008 at 1:24 pm
Ha, awesome.
May 12, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Inevitably he was talking about 1.) his IQ or 2.) his schlong. Luckily, you probably caught him in the midst of a coke binge.