Albinos, Criterion Closet, Garbage Truck
Great news: You can now pay me for articles (which you may still continue reading for free!) You get the chance to be a good person. It’s up to YOU to decide if you will take that chance. The only people judging you are yourself, me, and Albanian Jesus. Albanian Jesus has a crowbar and he looks really scary.
A
Albinos- A subspecies of translucent human that is particularly vulnerable to the sun. Albinism is a genetic mutation, and awareness of albinism as a possible human epidermal phenotype is not intrinsically understood by human children. This often results in Little Timmy tugging at his mommy’s blouse with one hand while pointing in the direction of an albino with the other and asking, “Mommy, what’s wrong with him?”. If an albino hears this, they are likely to become pissed off and turn a distinct reddish hue, made all the more visible in contrast to their milky white skin. “I thought I saw a ghost, but it turned out to be an albino, which was somehow scarier but in a different way because now I’m like walking on eggshells so as not to offend him because he interprets any comment about his appearance as a threat.”
C
Criterion Closet- A little room with floor-to-ceiling shelves of classic movies on three walls. The Criterion Closet YouTube channel shows videos of celebrities and film folk selecting movies that served as inspiration for them in their careers, that opened their eyes as to some new cinematic concept, storytelling direction, or cinematographic approach, or that they just simply enjoyed viewing. If selected to enter the Criterion Closet, the video would capture half an hour of me throwing DVD’s off of the shelves and asking repeatedly, in a louder tone each successive time, “Where the fuck is Mr. Bean’s Holiday?”. When 95% of the films are on piled up on the floor, almost to the height of my waist, and it becomes evident that they probably don’t have a copy of Mr. Bean’s Holiday, I would exit the screen in a huff. The camera would stay trained on the closet for 10 excruciatingly silent minutes, during which time I would drive over to a thrift store and purchase used copies of both Mr. Bean’s Holiday and M. Night Shyamalan’s Avatar: The Last Airbender. The final shot of the video would feature those two DVD’s being tossed onto the movie heap as audible groans and, “no, no, please god, no” can be heard coming from all the sound people and cameramen in the background.
G
Garbage Truck- It’s 6AM and you’re enjoying your final moments of cozy bliss before having to get up and face the grim realities of the working world. You stayed up extra late last night watching YouTube videos of wood-turning, which you initially picked because you thought they would bore you and ease you to sleep, but instead you were left wondering how in the world they were going to fashion a bundle of 250 colored pencils into a topographical atlas, so you binged a 3-hour film documenting the process. You hear the rumblings of a large vehicle somewhere outside on the street but try to ignore it, burying your head in your pillow. The noise grows louder and more intense until it sounds like it’s inside the room with you. The clanging of metal pots and pans, the sharp clash of empty beer bottles knocking against one another, the wretched guttural chorus of loogies being hawked up by gruff men whom society has rejected. It’s the garbage truck making its weekly rounds. They’re taking longer than usual, and there’s no chance you’re going to fall back asleep now after being awoken by this most cacophonic chorus, so you go to peer through the blinds to see what’s really going down. Standing in your driveway is a garbage man with a metal baseball bat lined up about twenty feet from the back of the garbage truck. Another garbage man to the side of the truck winds up and throws a broken jack-in-the-box at the batter, who bashes it into the pile of trash in the back of the truck with a jarring CRASH! You then turn to look at the garbage truck driver, who is standing on the perch outside the driver side door above a mound of discarded Sun Chips bags, those little explosive popper things you get from a joke shop, and rubber chickens that SQUAWK when you squeeze them. He leaps from the perch and lands a devastating people’s elbow on the pile, producing the decibel equivalent to a ballistic missile striking a townhouse in Kharkiv. You swing open your front door and stride over to the truck purposefully to give these hooligans a piece of your mind. As you approach, they clamber back into their positions on the rear flanks of the truck and speed off down the street. You shout something obscene but it gets swallowed up by the sound of the truck motoring away. One garbage man flips you off while the other sticks his tongue out and dry humps the side of the truck. Just then, the recycling smart car pulls up. It is covered in Jill Stein bumper stickers. A woman in a thrifted shawl with little round reading glasses exits the vehicle and smiles a glorious, restorative smile at you. A smile that grants you newfound appreciation for the day ahead. She bows at you, then at the recycling bin, then daintily begins removing the cans from the bin one by one with her supple white leather gloves.