I’m always surprised when the unexpected happens, even when I expect it to. I keep my eyes peeled, my senses keened, tuned into the strange, unusual and hilarious. The weird is everywhere, and as always, I have this knee-jerk reaction to question what it means.
For example, what are the implications of a sealed Fortune Cookie wrapper, without the Fortune Cookie?
I find the prime location of weird happens at Oquirrh Lake, aka, Daybreak Lake. In the past few weeks, I’ve stumbled across a homemade ramp used to launch a bicyclist off a dock and into the murky and mold-filled water (See video at the bottom of the post!)
I’ve come across a metal object, a cutout of what I assumed was a badger, stuck into the wet sand of North Shore. Its intention, I think, was to keep ducks from pooping on the beach. From the piles of green sandy shat, it did not work—although my dog, Zoey, was interested in the metal thing, and introduced herself by sniffing its backside—in which the badger didn’t have the decency to sniff back!
A metal-bending artist has rendered Baubled-Martian peoples in the act of exercise in various lake locations.
This summer, I’ve traveled a bit and found the strange there as well. Take, for instance, a total time warp. After a three-hour drive to Moab, we stopped at a Taco Bell (Or DelTaco or Taco Time—I can’t remember, they’re all exactly the same) and Nathan emerged from the car, hair in a nineteen-eighties style making me think of the caption, Who Wore It Best, him or the lead singer of Simply Red?
In Moab, I passed a cemetery with a spine-tingling sign outside its gates: Recycle Center (and an arrow leading the way)!
What about the six-legged insect discovered in the parking lot at the base of the Delicate Arch? It was flesh-colored on its belly and had an exoskeleton on top. Was it an arachnoid—a spider missing two legs or a scorpion without its tail? Or was it a red-desert alien? Nobody knows!
But I can find strangeness just as easily from my couch. On Pinterest, I discovered a photo of a woman. At first, I couldn’t put my finger on what was odd about it. Was it the clothes she wore? Her sunglasses? And then I saw it; her feet had been removed, and new ones had been pasted back on and wrongly!
I guess the moral of this post goes something like this: instead of Forest Gump’s “stupid is, as stupid does” is my mantra, “weird does, as weird is”? If so, what does that say about me?
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