The things I think about: tasty humans

This is an idea I had years ago that I wrote up, but didn’t do anything with.  I think I wanted to do a series of these blogs, but never wrote any more and this just got buried under all my other half-finished blog posts.  I recently discovered it, and figured I might as well use it.

I think this is a really weird idea and someone – possibly me if I ever get around to it – could make a good story out of it.  But here goes.  What if, one day these aliens (We’ll call them Aliens X) show up and announce that after scanning a human with some medical device, they believe these other aliens (Aliens Y) would find humans tasty.  Aliens X would then ask if they could purchase some human meat to sell to Aliens Y to see if they find it pleasant and would like some more.  Now Aliens X are not evil.  They don’t want to gather up humans in their prime and send them to a slaughterhouse, all they are asking for are medical waste and donated corpses.  What I was thinking about, was if Aliens Y do find human a delicacy, would people sign contracts so that when they die, Aliens X would pay their families so many Galactic Credits per pound?  Would there be a market?  Would you sign up for it?

Jim Trump? Donald Jones?

A couple of months ago, when I stopped for gas, I saw that someone had put a sticker on the pump, and someone else had ripped most of it off.  When I saw it, my first thoughts were, Why did someone make a sticker of Jim Jones and stick it on a gas pump?  Then, after a few seconds of thought and with the help of a second sticker that had different parts of it ripped off, I figured out it had been a sticker of Trump as the Terminator saying, “I’ll be back.” I groaned, and pumped my gas.  I didn’t think to get a picture of it.  The last time I got gas, I ended up at that same pump, and I did take a picture of the sticker, with a bit more of it ripped off.

Apparently, unknown to the magats, if you put sunglasses on Trump, he looks like a notorious cult leader.  Of course, Trump without sunglasses is a notorious cult leader.

He is a real cat

I live on the small farm I grew up on, and for the majority of the last forty-some years, we’ve had barn cats.  Basically, we feed them, but we hope they supplement their cat food with mice.  Well, our last cat had died and we’d gone without a barn cat for a year or so, when one night two or three years ago our dog was barking up a tree.  With my flashlight I saw a strange cat up the tree.  I took our dog in and told my dad there was a cat around.  Over the next few weeks we saw it a couple more times, so we started leaving food out for it.  And over a couple of months, it got used to us enough that we could pet it.  My dad managed to pick it up and see it was a boy cat, so my mom gave him the name Tommy.

We don’t know where he came from.  It’s possible someone didn’t want to him anymore so they dumped out in the country, it’s hard to say.  He is friendly, and will rub up against our legs, or our dog, but other times he’ll be real skittish. 

At first, we fed him in the barn, but we eventually moved to feeding him in one of our sheds.  It’s closer to the house and easier to get to in bad weather, not to mention far less drafty than our old barn.  He has some boxes and old pillows to sleep.  We also keep some chicken feed in the shed, and we hoped he’d keep mice out of it, but it turns out he isn’t much of a mouser.

Anyway, around last summer he started disappearing for a day or two.  I figured he was just trying to find a girlfriend.  These disappearances happened maybe once a month or so, and usually only a day or two.  Back around the beginning of December, he was away for three or four days.  I was starting to get a bit worried, when one night I went to get some chicken feed and he was back, but with a bit of a limp.  So I gave him extra food, and hoped he’d stay where it was dry and warm and heal up, especially since we were supposed to get a storm that night.  But the next morning he was gone. 

Some two weeks later, without seeing him at all, I feared the worse.  Well, I think it might have been December 31st, I went to feed our chickens.  But we were very low on chicken feed, and I figured I could stretch it out a couple days with this quarter of a bag of cat food we had no use for.  I got a full scoop of the cat food and went out.  The chickens all gathered around me, so I sprinkled a bit out, then went to throw some potato skins into our compost pile.  When I came back a minute later to put the rest of the cat food in for the chickens, there was Tommy walking across our driveway, without any limp.  I called him and he came running, and I put the food in for him.  As he ate, I told him he must be a real cat: he found out I was giving away his food so he came back.

Later, I found out that my dad had seen him a couple of times in those two weeks.  We don’t know if someone else was feeding him, because he seems a bit fatter, but for some reason he must prefer staying on our farm.

A black and white cat sleeping on a sunny day in the fall.

Random Story – The train snuck up on me

This is just an odd little story from my life.  And there’s a bit of backstory to get to the story.

I grew up on a farm and one of my favorite things to do was to go for a walk around the pasture to just let my mind wander and to think on things.  But I could only do this during the day because, well, pastures can be uneven and filled with things you don’t want to step in.  This wouldn’t be a problem, but I’m also a bit of a night owl, and there are plenty of nights I would have liked to wander and think on things.  So when I went to college, I was happy to find these things called sidewalks.  I would often head out late at night to wander around town.

At one point in my wanderings, I came across this intersection of a couple quiet streets.  The memory of the desk scene from Dead Poets Society came to mind about looking at things from a different perspective.  I had crossed many streets, but I’d never stopped in the middle to look around, or stood in the middle of an intersection.  So I did, and it does give an odd view of the world.  As I said, these were quiet streets, and the few times a car did turn my way, I had plenty of time to get out of the way, so I was never in any danger.

A few years later, I got an apartment in a town I’d never been to before.  A few blocks down from my apartment, there was a train track.  One block over there was a bridge over the track, and a couple of times I managed to be there right when a train went below me, which was interesting in its own way.  Now, this wasn’t a main track, I think it might have just been a sideline that went to a factory, or something, so there was only one or two trains of maybe a dozen cars a week.  Not being a busy train track, they didn’t have gates to block the road.  Meaning, whenever a train came through, it came to a stop, and the police or maybe just the conductor on the train would make sure traffic stopped and then the train would slowly go through the intersection.  I think I only saw how they did it once or twice, and this was over twenty years ago, so my memory on this detail is a little fuzzy.

Anyway, not long after I moved, I went for a walk late at night.  I went over the bridge, and went down a block or so, before turning and heading back up the street my apartment was on.  At some point during this, I remembered standing in the middle of an intersection, and I realized I’d never stood in the intersection of a road and a train track.  Now, this street wasn’t so quiet, so as I walked towards the intersection, I kept looking over my shoulder to make sure no cars were coming.  I walked out into the street, and stopped in the middle of the road and the middle of the train track.  I looked down the street the way I had come for a few seconds, then turned ninety degrees to the right and looked up the tracks.  After a few seconds, I turned ninety degrees and looked up the street.  A few seconds later, I turned ninety degrees and THERE’S A FUCKING TRAIN FIFTY FEET FROM ME!

About thirty seconds later, once my heartbeat had slowed to somewhat normal, I just started laughing.  The train was parked there, it wasn’t going anywhere.  The reason I hadn’t noticed it, walking up the streets, was because I kept checking over my shoulder for cars, and there was a building that blocked just enough of the view that you couldn’t see the train until you were almost at the tracks.

So I got a good laugh out of the train that snuck up on me.  And that’s probably the closest I’ve gotten to giving myself a heart attack.