People Watching

I love to people watch. If you’re going to crank up the bass on your car stereo and “throw your arms in the air like you just don’t care” then I’m going to stare with equally unabashed amusement at the spectacle you’re making of yourself.

With the exception of when I can hear your hippety-hop stereo over my own I don’t watch with any sort of malicious intent, but I’m constantly amused at what people do while they’re “alone” in their vehicle.

And as I’ve mentioned before, I’m also amused at what people will put on their vehicles.

The other day on my way to work I saw not one, not two, but three separate examples of painfully stupid things, so I felt the need to share.

1: Have you seen those corner to corner rear window stickers that pick-up trucks have? Generally it’s some redneck with his fluttering flag (yeah, you’re patriotic. We get it.) or Calvin pissing on the FORD logo, but this was a little different. It was the full window treatment of a huge “blessed” Virgin Mary, shrouded in fire, standing under the St. Louis Arch.

Yeah. You read that right—a spontaneously-combusting, pregnant, virgin, the size of Godzilla, standing beneath the tourist hallmark of the most dangerous city in the US. Sweet Moses (who wasn’t pictured.) What do you even say about something like that? I keep envisioning Gamera showing up and the two having an apocalyptic battle of epic proportions.

2: It’s been raining rather non-stop the last few days here in St. Lou, and I always feel bad for those poor saps standing out in it. However, it was really hard to feel sorry for this one guy because he seemed to be enjoying himself just a bit too much.

Like a page out of Calvin Klein’s REJECTED files, this guy—with what would normally be a gigantic afro were in not for all the drizzle—was standing in the cross walk with his drooping pants and equally drooping mouth, blankly staring up into the rain. Now the really odd part was that he had his t-shirt pulled up and was mindlessly rubbing his left nipple.

I was stopped at the light and watched this go on for well over a minute before someone honked at him and his magical moment was broken. I kept thinking “It’s a little early in the morning to be breaking out the ecstasy, isn’t it?”

3: I always find it amusing when I just catch the end of a interesting conversation. You never know how things got to that point, but you just walk in to something like, “… and that’s why my butt hurts so badly this morning.”

Anyway, the visual equivalent of that happened to me while I was at the stop light the other night. An old woman with bulging blue eyes (she very much looked like Grace Zabriskie) pointed an angry, shaking, witchly, finger at the car in front of her and shot out curses with lips so thin and tight, I wasn’t able to read them. Her face turned a reddish-purple as she then took her hands and mimed what looked like crushing a cantaloupe between them.

She then slapped her steering wheel and grabbed a hold of either side for a more full body shake that lifted her up off of her seat.

I swear it was like watching pro-wrestling on mute.

What I found equally amusing was the twenty-something chickedy in front of her who was blabbing on her cell phone and checking her eye make-up in her visor mirror, completely oblivious to the fact that she was having her entire lineage (and apparently future cantaloupe) cursed into an early grave.