Skip to main content

Someone Finally Visits


On Thursday, I’ve been married for two months. See, I am a good husband; I remembered my anniversary—I bet my wife isn’t even aware of this, since she’s always busy with stupid science study groups (that’s an alliteration for my literary friends), which is where I’m at right now. Woo…anyway.

In those two months since we’ve moved to Arkadelphia—for those familiar with my former hometown, think Goobertown on steroids, really, really cheap steroids—we’ve received exactly two visits from the outside world: my parents and her parents. My friends and cousins have abandoned me, but who can blame them? I wouldn’t drive four hours either for an old married couple, a rundown apartment, and some critters.

However, we finally welcomed our first visitor this week. Well, we didn’t exactly welcome him, but we did have a foreign mass enter our domain. Here’s how the visit went down. I was playing Madden 09 on Wii online and my wife was doing homework on the couch. It’s about ten o’clock, I'm minding my own business, relaxing before bed (actually probably screaming at the top of my lungs—my wife says I morph when I play Madden), when I hear the doorknob rattling. Honestly, I thought the door was locked, my wife says it wasn’t, but the next thing I know I hear the door open and slam close. I paused my game, looked over at my wife—we just sat there. I could see a warped mass in a white shirt in our glass oven door.
"Hello."

At this point, I’m getting visions of Jack Nicholson splintering the door with an axe, sticking his face through the fractured panel and saying, “Here’s Johnny.” (If you don’t pick up on that reference, YouTube “Here’s Johnny.”) Anyway without a knife/baseball bat/pistol/large blunt object to bludgeon the “Hello” Guy with, I just continue listening and waiting for him to make the first move. One…two…three seconds pass, and the door opens and closes, again. With the intruder safely gone, I’m not frozen to my seat anymore, so I rush to the door and watch the “Hello" Guy nonchalantly stride ten feet across the hall and enter the adjacent apartment.

OK…well, I really didn’t and still don’t know what to say. My wife suggests that maybe he was drunk (at a Christian college?!). Maybe he was being funny (or ignorant). Who knows. I can deduce the same amount of reason of the “Hello" Guy as I can going with my wife to water her beans. Yeah…

Comments

twhaynes said…
I would say his odds of being drunk at a Christian College may be just as high, if not higher, than at a public University. Especially since it's a Baptist school and he was trying to be incognito about it.

Glad you didn't get murdered.
Anonymous said…
Watering the beans wasn't that bad. And I think the poor idiot was just confused. Maybe he was visiting a friend and got the wrong door. Either way, it's not that big of a deal. We should have invited him in. Maybe he would have been your friend. :)
Anonymous said…
I'm thinking he was either drunk, walked into the wrong appartment by accident, or all of the above. Who knows. People are so weird sometimes.

Popular posts from this blog

It's Just a Little Puppy

There are a lot of things I said I  wouldn't  do in my life that  I've  done. I said that I  wouldn't  quit exercising regularly after I stopped playing sports, that I  wouldn't  be a hack writer all of my life, and that I  wouldn't  be working a part-time job at 27 with two useless college degrees. Luckily these are things I can still change. This weekend I will do something that I can’t undo. When my wife and I go home for Christmas, we will choose one of these four puppies: Having a dog  isn't  that big of a deal. Having a dog live IN my house is a big deal for me. You see, I like a neat and clean house. Being married and cleaning up after two people has required enough adjusting. A puppy living inside will challenge the very core of inner neat freak. I’m also allergic to a plethora of things. Dogs? I have no idea—I will find out shortly. With that in mind, here’s a list of things concerning my dog that ...

The Paragould Daily Press: Is Paid Content the Beginning of the End?

Every few days I read the Paragould Daily Press , my hometown newspaper—a newspaper I worked at as a sports writer for four years—online. I’m never looking for anything in particular. It’s just part of my routine: every morning I skim national, state, and local news for a few minutes. However, when I visited the PDP today, a few things were different. First, the website had been redesigned (and not in a good way—it takes talent to clutter what little content the PDP creates). More importantly, you now have to buy a subscription to read the paper online. This isn’t about having to pay for content (I’m sure the PDP has heard plenty of negative feedback from its online readers already); I understand what the PDP is attempting to accomplish with this move. The move to paid content was inevitable (I remember sitting in a staff meeting and discussing this very matter over five years ago when I was writing for the newspaper), as it will be and has been for much larger publications. Ne...

A Quarter-Life Crisis

I’m having a quarter-life crisis. It’s a real thing ( I think), and it’s becoming increasingly more relevant in our society as the stages of development continue to evolve—the stage of life between 18 and 25ish is now being called “arrested adulthood” or “emerging adulthood,” just to name a couple of theories. Children no longer leave home at 18 to find a job and start a family. Instead, after graduating high school, “pre-adults” (which is a stage that actually lasts longer, until 30 or so, according Kay Hymowitx) struggle with extended periods of schooling, relationships that have become convoluted because of technology, and an economy that makes it difficult to get started and find a path out of debt. Now we start our adult lives in our mid-to-late twenties, already cynical and disillusioned with the process. By the time we find a partner and a job, we immediately begin questioning if we’ve made the right choices. We ask ourselves if we wasted the last four (or seven or more) year...