Stranger in a Stranger Land

Remember the hex from a few weeks ago? Well, it’s gone, but it’s been replaced by something worse. I think I’m on the wrong planet.

I think it happened the morning of the Chicago Halloween Trade Show trip. The trip itself wasn’t too shabby. We bought some extremely cool and spooky things. And altho the weather was dreadful and did a great job of killing any kind of adventurous mood our group had, we came home safe and sound. And I didn’t have the urge to kill anybody this time.

But something strange happened while we were in the car. I had whipped up a pretty nifty playlist to keep the mood upbeat. Now I have some strange things on ye olde iPod but I kept this particular playlist pretty mainstream out of consideration of the other passengers. By mainstream I mean groups like Smash Mouth, Duran Duran, Kool & the Gang and Prince were included. Familiar favorites, ya know.

All went fine on the way up, but on the way back home I was informed my music was “weird.” Not in a hateful way, but still. I had purposely kept out the Tom Waits, Soul Coughing, cartoon music, Was (Not Was) and the like. But my personal musical taste has been labeled “weird.”

This was one of a few moments during the weekend when I felt like an Earthling visiting Mars.

Back to the strangeness, tho. Two days ago I discovered that very few of my emails had ever made it to their destination. I called my broadband provider and, after talking to a techy for 20 minutes, found out that the Broadband Company and Apple don’t like each other. According to the techy, Apple’s most recently security updates have been so strict with email that this particular company’s software/hardware/hamster running on a wheel wasn’t compatible or something like that. The point is, nobody has been getting my emails for about 3 months. Nice of someone (especially the broadband provider) to tell me this.

The good news is my email is working properly again. The bad news is I was feeling pretty damn lonely, unloved and unwanted for about 3 months... wondering why no one ever responded to me.

But today really is hinting that I’m from another world. One of my co-workers was asking for a good suggestion for the iTunes radio station and I recommended “Fistful of Soundtracks.” When the station came on I recognized the first song and said:

“Oh. Little Green Bag. Reservoir Dogs.”

Two of my co-workers looked at me like I had lobsters crawling out of my ears.

*blink* “What did you say?”

“The song is called ‘Little Green Bag.’ It’s from the movie ‘Reservoir Dogs.’ It’s played during the opening credits.”

*blink blink* *look at each other, look at me*

“Oh, come on. Yall’ve never seen Reservoir Dogs?”

The lobsters must be getting bigger. They’re not even blinking any more.

“Reservoir Dogs. Quinten Tarrentino’s movie before Pulp Fiction.”

“Nope. Never seen it.”

Ok. That’s it. Somebody switched planets on me. What the hell? Please tell me that’s there’s somebody in Loserville or Southern Indiana-Hell that knows what the fuck Reservoir Dogs is. And knows the song Little Green Bag. And won’t get weirded out by John Lee Hooker.

If not, I need to scrounge up some cheap airfare to get the fuck off this imposter planet.