Mistaken for Reality

 Why didn’t they notice the burning trash can? 

I should’ve been watching the road, but I couldn’t turn away. The fire could be seen down the block, yet everybody who walked by acted as though they weren’t passing through garbage smoke. Uncle Sam spun his cardboard arrow as two speed freaks chatted on a nearby bench. A preacher in a cowboy hat continued to shout through his megaphone from across the street. He was speaking Spanish, so I don’t know what he was ranting about. I’m guessing it had something to do with Jesus or aliens. 

Maybe I was imagining it. Sometimes when I see people they appear to be undefined lumps of post-grade epidermis rot. They click their tongues and belch out noises that sound like words. Could this be one of those times? Or is it possible that our world is littered with mirages, shape-shifters and deceivers? 

It doesn’t matter one way or the other. Seeing is believing and what a person sees is a blank slate colored by their perceptions. The cerebral filter that takes a puppy and distorts it into a CIA tracking device creates the entire universe. There is no external reality. There is only the Great God Perception. 

What would you do if you worked with a bunch of Nazis? Would you goose-step and arm-wave your way to the water cooler, hoping to homogenize with the counselors at Camp Concentration? Would you tuck your Star of David necklace into your shirt and pray its shape doesn’t bulge in the fabric? Or would you look those gassers in their cold blue eyes and cleanse them with an AK-47?

The latter option was chosen by Michael McDermott. Though McDermott was  physically located at his office in Wakefield, MA on the morning of December 26, 2000, he perceived himself to be in Hitler’s bunker during the 1940s. An angel, possibly the Angel of Death disguised as St. Michael, convinced him that he could have a soul, enter God’s kingdom and destroy the Third Reich all before his first coffee break. Hopped up on angel word dust, McDermott walked into his place of employment and opened fire on his SS co-workers, killing seven in total. At one point, he heard Hitler’s thoughts coming from the accounting office, which prompted him to give the two Nazi number-crunchers inside a bullet shower. With the slaying of six Nazi henchmen and the big, sour kraut enchilada himself taken care of, McDermott knew his mission was complete. He was arrested upon his return to the office reception area, though he testified that he had actually died from an overdose of vodka and pain killers in a Berlin police station. Despite a jury convicting him of seven counts of first degree murder and rejecting his claim of insanity, McDermott still skirted the consequences. Only necrophiliacs can punish the dead.

The threat of a Nazi empire may be exterminated, but breathing a sigh of relief would be preemptive in a world infested with Communist phantoms. Faith in God under the claws of a red dragon is ridiculous, but ghosts? Yes, that’s perfectly logical. A woman in Feidong, China found this out when she attempted to cut through an alley on her way home. Somehow, she remained oblivious to the narrowing passage and wedged herself between the two buildings. The unidentified woman was trapped for seven hours because the the occupant of the dwelling believed the screams coming from their walls to be the supernatural mating call of a Commie ghost. Since ancient Chinese secrets are whispered and never yelled, I’m sure the resident assumed the ghost was someone who starved to death during Mao’s Great Leap Forward. Honestly, who wouldn’t be terrified of a ghost spending its eternity trying to raid their fridge? Groceries are expensive! 

Indeed, sounds are often confounding, but can a person incapable of making verbal noise get their message misinterpreted? This was the case for Terrance Daniels, a deaf man from Burlington, NC who was stabbed with a kitchen knife over supposed gang signs. Daniels was using sign language to communicate with another deaf man when Robert Jarell Neal mistook the conversational glad-handing for gang signs. Neal crip-walked his way over to Daniels and stabbed him with a kitchen knife. Thankfully, Daniels lived to hand over his testimony to local authorities. 

Though most people would probably consider Neal to be a shit-skulled imbecile, I’m sure the sight of two men in their forties engaging in dueling shadow puppet theatre is enough to discombobulate even the smartest of dimwits. What I can’t understand is why he used a kitchen knife on someone who was clearly not a slice a bread. This is the one thing we may never understand. 

From sounds to gestures and beyond, the daylight hallucinations keep coming from all corners of the globe. In Kent, England a group sixty school children were evacuated from a pool because their teachers spotted a pedophile in a nearby cubicle. Much to the dismay of the instructors (and the laughter of everyone else) the leering child molester was actually a prosthetic leg. Seeing a lifeless, non-organic limb creeping around the corner is enough to make any school official suspect a kid plunger is taking inventory of slippery children. According to the head teacher, the situation was handled in accordance with school policy, which, to me at least, raises several questions regarding the number of sexual assaults committed by fake body parts in England. 

Who’s to say they were wrong? Maybe the world’s tiniest pervert was living inside of a hollowed out leg. Did they even check? No. But to be fair, I don’t mind this sort of hyper-protective freakout. In fact, the British can condemn any artificial limb they want if they agree to reduce their liberal use of the word “rather.” 

Speaking of potential sexual assault, a fifty-year-old woman named Veloz was arrested and held as a man in America’s brainless boner state, commonly referred to as “Florida.” After being apprehended for cocaine possession at Miami’s international airport, she was declared a man at the inmate sorting center in Miami-Dade’s county jail. Though she was arrested and booked as a woman, it was declared that she had male genitalia, which could mean anything from the inspectors needing a new pair of glasses to Veloz possessing an abnormally long and veiny clitoris. Whatever the cause, Veloz was thrown into a male facility with roughly forty walking throbsicles. Veloz was harassed intensely during her 10-12 hour stint, though she was not physically harmed, which makes me wonder how a woman detained in a men’s jail would feel about not getting raped - relieved or insulted?

Like Veloz, a bearded woman whom I shall refer to as JJ was also mistaken for a penis smuggler. The bearded wonder was at a prestigious karaoke bar with a friend during the misidentification. I can only assume she was there to sing ZZ Top’s greatest hits. A man they had been arguing with previously in the evening returned to the bar and shot them both to death. It’s been said that the longhaired man mistook the beaver-faced JJ for a dude, which may have triggered jealousy and, subsequently, the raging spurts of shotgun blasts. 

Although I find it somewhat hypocritical for a man with long hair to doubt another person’s gender, my hatred of beards leads me to blame the incident on JJ. Seriously, how hard is it to shave? Not hard at all. I do it everyday without incident. Besides, people with beards look like they have a bear’s ass on their face. Also, beards are magnets for stray french fries. Those fries could feed the needy, but instead they’re trapped in a bushy layer of facial laziness. Did we learn nothing from the Irish Potato Famine?

Clearly, girls who look hairy get shot. This was the case for a nine-year-old girl in Pennsylvania who was mistaken for a skunk on Halloween. She was hiding by a nearby hill during a party, possibly foraging for grubs, when a family member spotted her from a distance. Apparently, they were confused by her black hat and white tassel. The unidentified relative, who was astoundingly sober, fired their shotgun towards the hill, nailing the human polecat in her shoulder. 

Since this occurred during the evening and at a distance, I seriously doubt her costume caused the mistake in species classification. The real culprit is and always has been the powerful stench that all children possess. I’ll bet they could smell her all the way from the porch. Kids smell bad and I’m sure this child was no exception. If I had my way, all pungent humans would be classified as wild and expendable animals that could be hunted without permits. Imagine what a better world this would be if hippies, crust punks and people with glandular disorders were shot on sight. 

If distorted perceptions ever needed a helping hand, they would certainly find it on Halloween. It’s that special time of year where urchins beg for sweets, women adorn themselves in strumpet attire and nobody is what they seem. Mostafa, a seventy-five-year-old man from Marina Del Rey, CA illustrated this point when he sat dead on his porch for five days without being disturbed. Mostafa had shot himself in the eye and though his corpse was slumped over  patio furniture for nearly a week, neighbors mistook his lifeless husk for a leftover Halloween decoration. It’s important to note that during the week there was a heavy amount of rain, which, at the very least, helped to wash out the bacterial decay from his inverted peeper. 

According to one of Mostafa’s neighbors, “He looked fake. It looked like somebody had thrown a dummy over the back of a chair.”

This story is downright ridiculous. How could these people actually think Mostafa’s corpse was a seasonal ornament? His name was Mostafa. People don’t use props from The Lion King as Halloween decorations. Children’s movies aren’t scary. This is especially true if they’re filled with talking animals. The circle of life continues, just not for Mostafa. 

Let’s keep in mind that lions are rarely mistaken for other creatures. The same cannot be said for monkeys. In the village of Gezhai, China a woman spotted what she first thought to be a rabbit eating cucumbers in her apartment. I’ll ignore my sick curiosity regarding the numerous cucumbers lying around her home to focus on the matter at hand. Regarding her discovery, the woman stated:

"At first I thought it was a rabbit, then I was shocked to see it had an alien face."

Supposedly, her and several of her neighbors thought an alien had travelled light years to eat cucumbers. They can hardly be blamed. Countless sci-fi movies have depicted star travelers sailing the cosmos, destroying humanity and setting up colonies on Earth, all while snacking on cucumbers. Once they gave the alien peaches, however, it would eat nothing else. Everything seemed normal with the peach-scarfing space monster until scientists informed the villagers that the creature was actually a hairless, malnourished monkey. Foiled again! I suppose if we want to make first contact with extraterrestrials, we’re going to have to setup floating cucumber and peach orchards just above our atmosphere. 

If we’ve learned nothing else, it’s that monkeys are nature’s great deceivers. A Pittsburgh woman named Constance discovered this when she gave birth to a stillborn baby weighing less than a pound. The staff at Mercy Hospital bundled the bungled baby in a blanket and left it with the morgue. A security officer cleaning the area thought the blanket was empty and sent it down to the laundry. Funny thing is, when you wash and dry a human fetus a monkey arrives to take its place. It must be something in the detergent. Or maybe it was because the hospital used the same laundry facilities as the University of Pittsburgh, which was experimenting on monkeys at the time. Constance was presented with the ape fetus and told it was her baby. She got a lawyer and persisted until the hospital admitted their mistake, persuaded in part by nine experts from around the country who confirmed that the supposed washed and dried baby was actually a monkey fetus. Personally, I would’ve went bananas (insert rimshot sound effect). 

A disheveled bag lady once told me that I’m not who I pretend to be. She was right. None of us are really what we advertise. We masquerade as normal, everyday human beings, which is the most bland form of existence imaginable. Every mind is a cacophony of random images, smells, sounds and sensations that collide into a clustered jumble. We then desperately try to form structure out of the meaningless chaos. If the universe between our ears is so vast than why settle for being a typical human? Human beings are loud, stupid, ugly and their asinine opinions places unnecessary weight on my eyelids. We can be so much more. Yesterday I was a nineteenth century serial killer stalking the streets for fresh organ meat. Those churro vendors were not amused. Today, I’m an alien war criminal exiled to this spinning dirt farm of a planet. I’m hoping the enemy rescue ship will swing by to pickup myself, my wife and our leopard child. With any luck, they’ll come soon. In an hour or less I could be something or someone else. Maybe a vampire squid. I don’t like to swim, but “Vampire Squids” is a great team name. 

Go Vampire Squids!