Tag: creepy

On being creepy

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

What you are looking at is the foliage in between our house and the house behind us. There’s a fence buried in there, and until yesterday there was a shitton of broken branches as well. That tree that is more or less in the center of the picture lost a couple of big branches during a storm last week, and while the tree itself is in their yard, the branches all landed in ours.

I don’t want to hear anything about the condition of my lawn. I hate green things. This is known.

So anyway: the way the rules work in Indiana, it doesn’t matter who the tree belongs to; if some shit falls in your yard, it’s your problem. And the branches were still attached to the tree up top but were way too high for us to reach so we had to call out some tree guys. I got an estimate on Monday and they took me by surprise yesterday by calling and telling me they were on their way. I was a little worried that they’d have to go into the neighbors’ yard for part of the job, so I figured it was at least polite to let them know that the work was being done– and, again, given the density of the plant life between our house and theirs, it was reasonable to believe they hadn’t even noticed the branches had come down.

Problem is, because of peculiarities in how my neighborhood is laid out, it’s either a good ten minute walk or an actual ride in my car to get from my front door to their front door. And the guys were on their way, and I’d literally just gotten “on their way” from the dispatcher, so I didn’t know if that meant “five minutes out” or “they’re coming from Dowagiac and they’re gonna grab lunch along the way,” so actually leaving my house to go talk to them seemed kinda problematic.

But lo! Standing in my back yard (I’d been doing yard work, as it turned out) I realized I could hear people in their back yard! A conversation! Multiple people! Okay, cool– I can just talk to whoever that is over the fence, right? No problem.

Well, except for, again, the dense foliage. I walked over to the fence and tried to figure out who was in their back yard. Complicating things: this house has what seems to be a huge cast of rotating teenagers and I rarely see the adults– they either have an enormous family, are constantly letting the kids have friends over, or are fostering a bunch of kids. So it was probably going to be kids in the back yard– and it sounded like teenagers– and, what, do I start the conversation with “Go get your dad”? Or do I just tell them and assume a sixteen-year-old is an acceptable vehicle to deliver the message “there may be strangers in your back yard soon”?

I do not normally suffer from social anxiety– I’m a teacher, for fuck’s sake, I stand in front of people and talk for a living— but I discovered quickly, standing in my back yard, that I had no idea how to begin a conversation with a stranger who 1) would not know in advance that I was even there and 2) would absolutely not be able to see me for a moment or two after realizing I was there and talking to them. I mean, how do you start that conversation?

“Excuse me! Hi, I’m over here, in the bushes. It’s your neighbor!”

(They do not know my name and I do not know theirs. It’s 2024.)

Yeah, it was gonna be awkward.

And then, still not sure exactly what I was going to do, I got closer to the fence and found an appropriate spot where there was at least a chance they would see me.

So, um, I’ve left out the part where they have a pool in their back yard? And I’d heard them but not seen them yet, and there hadn’t been, like, splashing or anything. And what I was greeted with once I’d put myself in a position of being able to see my neighbors was a high school-aged girl, in a skimpy bikini, and what I can only assume was her boyfriend, shirtless and in a bathing suit. He was sitting in a beach chair, and she was … enthusiastically twerking on him.

A whole lot of thoughts went through my head really fast, and I decided that under those circumstances I was not terribly interested in being hi-I’m-in-the-bushes guy. I retreated, as far as I know without detection, and decided that they would figure out that there were people in my back yard cutting down branches when they heard the saws, and that if I actually needed to talk to them, I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.

And that’s how I got arrested for being a Peeping Tom, your honor.

The end.

Facebook PSA

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

Forgive me if you’re seeing this twice, but given how FB’s stupid algorithm makes sure that no one sees everything it seemed best to put it in more than one place: I accepted a FR from a guy named John Johnson yesterday or the day before because I generally accept them from anybody on Luther’s account– if I don’t recognize the person, I assume they’ve read a book or met me at a con, where I hand out bookmarks with my FB page on them.

Well, one way or another this dude appears to have gone through my entire friends list and sent friend requests to everyone. Initially I thought it was just the women but that appears to not be the case. I looked at his account and he literally had no friends who were not connected to me. I have unfriended and blocked his account, and am currently playing the but why? game.

God, I hate Facebook.

Wait are you serious

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy3 Comments

This is what the Red Cross thinks infants look like, apparently:

Screen Shot 2018-06-13 at 7.44.08 PMScreen Shot 2018-06-13 at 8.56.49 PMScreen Shot 2018-06-13 at 9.09.08 PM

My God, this online CPR thing is taking forever.

In which people are dumb and I am a people

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics11 Comments

I just Tweeted nearly this exact phrase, but it’s still true: it’s nice, sometimes, to be able to deal with a piece of nonsense by just saying Bite me.  I kerfluffled yesterday a bit; this particular kerfluffle doesn’t specifically involve me but I’m seeing a lot of reaction to it:  Gee, a Slate piece says something plainly dumb and stupid (in this case, “adults should be ashamed to read Young Adult lit“) in order to act as bait for clicks.  What a surprise.

Real simple: bite me.  I could go longer, mostly along the line of you write about books for a living and I still read more in a month than you do in a year, or I’ll read what I want, but they all boil down to “Bite me,” so:  Bite me.

All that said, let’s talk about The Fault in Our Stars.

One of my students (an actual teenage girl) turned me onto John Green earlier this school year and I’ve read all of his major works, TFiOS first.  I had to specifically deny her a field trip (the fact that the book opened June 6th made that a bit easier) but I did make some comments to the effect of it’s possible that we might just somehow end up at the same showing at the same theater, somehow, because that happens.

I’m not seeing the movie.  I was into it for a while, but it turns out that the movie has ruined the book just from the trailers and I’m not super interested in giving it more chances.

Let me back up.

One of the interesting things about reading books is that you can create shit in your head.  Now, this allows you to selectively ignore certain details about books if you like; sometimes this ends up revealing things about you that you might not like– for example, all the outcry about Rue being black in The Hunger Games when Rue was, uh, black in The Hunger Games.  Now, I wasn’t bothered by Rue.  The movie I wanna talk about is The Green Mile.

You remember that one, right?  Stephen King released it in monthly installments, they ended up casting living enormity Michael Clarke Duncan as John Coffey, and he went on to have a fairly impressive Hollywood career until dying way too young a couple of years ago.

John Coffey was black, right?  There was never any doubt about that, and my reading comprehension ain’t bad enough that I managed to miss that detail.  It woulda been kinda hard.  But John Coffey lives in my brain.

The actual visual of Michael Clarke Duncan– enormous, bald, blaaaack Michael Clarke Duncan– dressed like an escaped convict, cradling two dead white girls, in 1932, completely killed my ability to watch the movie.  Because John Coffey doesn’t survive that scenario under any circumstances.  Period.  It took the visual to drive it home just how ridiculous it is that they find this dude with two dead, naked little white girls and they’re all just okay, let’s bring him in and find out what really happened.

In Louisiana.  In 1932.

Nope.  John Coffey is shot to pieces and lynched on the spot and the movie’s ten minutes long.  Him surviving arrest is less realistic than his magical healing powers.  And quite possibly less likely.

Didn’t catch on to how ridiculous it was until I saw it, though.

Okay.  Back to The Fault in Our Stars.  Here’s the trailer, give it a watch:

I’ve got some issues here, y’all.  They start with the casting and they sorta spread out from there.

First of all, I don’t know where they found this kid to play Gus or who the hell he is– and I refuse to look– but were they casting for creepy motherfucker when they found him?  Because this guy reminds me of no one in the world more than Dylan Klebold, and I’m pretty sure mass murderer wasn’t the vibe they were trying to go for.  He may as well have “date rapist” tattooed on his face.  He’s creepy.

And then, from this man who scans “creepy” from the jump, before he speaks, we get lines like:

“You trying to keep your distance from me in no way lessens my affection for you.”

and

“All your efforts to keep me from you are going to fail.”

This is supposed to sound… romantic?  I think?  And I think maybe when I was reading it in the book it… succeeded, somehow?  But holy shit does hearing a dude actually say that, especially a dude with this guy’s stalker-ass sociopath’s flat affect, turn the line into an incredibly clear signal that says run, run far, and run now, and do not stop running even when you think you are safe.  

That’s– God, especially that last line– what somebody says to you right before you file the restraining order, girls.

And suddenly I really don’t want to see a movie that is supposed to make me celebrate these characters’ love.  NO.  He’s creepy and the movie should be about how she runs away and he accidentally trips into Mr. Wu’s hog pen.

Now that’s a movie I’ll pay to see.