Talk of the Town Ernie Anderson
You can’t make me
Boy, now I know how teenagers feel when their friends pressure them to do crazy things like smoke cigarettes, get tattoos or wear culottes. The night when the northern lights were on display last week was one big exercise in peer pressure. All I wanted to do was sit at home and watch “American Dad,” but no. Every single body on Facebook had to post dazzling photos of the aurora and if you didn’t look at them and make nice comments, they’d show up at your door to thrust their phones in your face. “Look at my piiiictures!” they’d wail. “Aren’t they preeeetty?” It finally reached a point where that woman I live with demanded that WE go out and get our OWN photos of solar rays slamming into the magnetosphere, or whatever in blazes was happening up there. And so out we went and now my phone is crammed full of terrible photographs that I’ll never share on Facebook because if I give in to that type of pressure, next thing you know I’ll be wearing culottes. And I don’t even know what those are!
It’s nice to be appreciated
I have this woman who leaves phone messages for me from time to time about various columns I’ve written. She starts every message with “Normally, I can’t read your stuff because I never understand what the @#!!@# you’re talking about, especially in your Talk of the Town column, which never makes any #$!@#! sense!” She then went on to say she actually liked my most recent column, but by then I was sobbing aloud so I didn’t hear much of it.
Drive-by
The other day — the day of the stupid northern lights, now that I think of it — a pair of birds whizzed by my head, one on each side. They came so close to me, I could feel the wind from their flapping bird wings around my ears, I swear. My response to this was to duck and yell “Hey!” at the avian hoodlums, as though they were a pair of juvenile delinquents who had just bashed my mailbox. I don’t know what went wrong with the earth’s magnetosphere, but they better get that fixed quick. It’s making the birds mean.
Seriously, though
Do you guys think I’d look good in culottes? My spring wardrobe is feeling a little lackluster lately.
The big one
It’s street sweeper season. Every time those big machines come rolling down the streets late at night, I hear them and automatically assume the tanks from an invading foreign army are finally rolling in. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve leaped over the back of my sofa, performed a quick barrel roll and came up in a defensive fighting posture. I also yell “Hey!” which really puts the fear of ‘Murica in the hearts of the invaders.
Comments are not available on this story.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
