Thursday, December 17, 2009

Last Night I Was Stoned...I Think



Take a good look at the image above, then start reading (please).
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The Blair Witch Project. Friday The 13th. Halloween. Bride of Chucky...all horror films. None of them watched by me. I'm simply not into horror films, and why would I be?

I've been bumped off my flight, while flying with a child, by Air Canada. I've squeezed a freshly baked Tim Horton's apple fritter and watched the artery clogging oil pour out of it. I once owned and drove an Oldsmobile. I've voted Mulroney*.

I know a thing or two about horror.

Yesterday was a day of rock n' roll for me. I was working at a project in my boathouse. My radio, completely cranked, was tuned to a Saint John classic rock station. Given my druthers, I'd tune it into an alternative rock station but, here in good old New Brunswick, I'm only given the choice of classic rock, teeny pop, or country slop. Classic rock is the lesser of the three evils, so my choice was made. I could listen to CBC, I suppose, but I find that CBC doesn't go well with power tools. Heavy metal needs heavy metal.

Things were going swimmingly until C98 (alternatively called 'Big John' by the DJs, or 'Ready John' by me) played a Def Leppard song. I went into convulsions and dragged my twisted wreck of a body to the radio (ears bleeding). I clawed at the dial until I found a Fredericton spastic rock station (105.3..the Fox). It was just slightly worse than the Saint John station, proven by the fact that a Bob and Doug MacKenzie spoken word song was played not fifteen minutes after I made the switch. I canned the Fox and dialled back to Ready John.

I had three projects on the go during this musical fiasco. My first project involved drilling a hole into a granite boulder. I was making slow progress when, all of a sudden, the boulder broke in half. I don't know much about drilling rocks, so the result didn't surprise me. I was hoping to use small, beach worn granite boulders as door knobs for my nearly completed cabinet which I built. Alas, it was not meant to be.

Project two involved putting a coat of varnish on the cabinet while concurrently trying to do some weight training (project three) in my boathouse (alternatively known as 'the man cave'). The fumes from the varnish were quite strong and at one point I began to hallucinate. While sitting at my weight bench, trying to curl some dumbbells, I happened to glance over at my windsurfer, which was sitting on a wall mounted rack. I began to fixate on the Chinook base plate (see image above) which facilitates the joining of the mast to the board. It looked scarily familiar, but I wasn't sure why at first.

Take a look at the image above, again, right now. Don't read on. Does the image remind you of a fictional character from a movie, or was I simply stoned from the varnish fumes?

It hit me like a rack of lamb when I finally realized that I knew exactly why the base plate looked so familiar. The room fell silent. It looked like that crazy person from the Silence Of The Lambs; a movie which, by the way, I've never watched. What was her name? The girl in the goalie mask. Annabelle Lector?

I think you've got your horror films mixed up, Ian. Perhaps you should watch them, then you would be qualified to write about them intelligently. It was actually Lecter, not Lector. Ell. Eee! See. Tea. Eee! Arrr! And it was Hannibal, not Annabelle. The bad person was a character played by Anthony Hopkins, not Jodie Foster.

And for the record, the goalie mask was from the horror movie Friday The Thirteenth. It also made a brief appearance in the soft horror film National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (one that we have watched together and enjoyed).

Everyone probably thinks that I'm crazy at this point, so let me state my case with a visual aid.


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Pretty cool, eh? You must see the similarities, right? It wasn't just the varnish controlling my thoughts, was it?
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Oh yes, one other thing...
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* I've never, ever, voted for Mulroney. That would be scary.
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