Time: Around 9:45 PM
Where: Ward Parkway, in front of my apartment building
Nature of activity: This guy in a white T-shirt walked awkwardly backwards down the street, came to a corner, shuffled around and continued on his backwards way. Real nonchalant. Like, "Hey, this is just my thing, y'know? No big deal, man." Backwards Man wasn't especially adept at what he was doing, although I think he probably had some prior experience. He'd occasionally cock his head to one side to get his bearings. He moved with a strange, chicken-like strutting gait made all the more absurd by his attempt to appear casual.
The last I saw of him he was heading down the middle of the damned street silhouetted by oncoming headlights. I couldn't be 100% sure he was still doing the Backwards Thing, but I'm pretty confident he was. I didn't hear any ambulance sirens so I guess he made it OK.
Walking backwards . . . the next big thing?
Uh-oh . . .
In William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition" the heroine suffers from intense psychosomatic allergies to certain consumer icons. Among these is the Michelin Man.
While I don't have any particular aversion to the Michelin Man, I do have an inexplicable fear of bobblehead figurines. So perhaps it was inevitable that they'd come out with a Michelin Man bobblehead figurine to commemorate Gibson's fictional neurosis and my own uneasy relationship with big-headed statuettes.
The first time I realized I was afraid of bobbleheads was when I was working in a department store tending a display of grotesque bobblehead caricatures of various Kansas City Chiefs. The listless way their heads moved reminded me of a weird dream I'd had about finding a dead alien in my closet. In the dream, the alien's body was extremely slight and the head was bulbous and slack -- very much like a bobblehead. To make matters worse, the department store also stocked these hideous animatronic football players who would lip-sync to Hank William Jr.'s "Are You Ready for Some Football?" Like the Chiefs figurines, the lip-syncing robots had distorted oversized heads.
The whole situation was demonic. I didn't like the way the football robots would wriggle their squat plastic bodies and move their semi-articulated jaws. It was fucking creepy. And people were buying these things. They thought they were cute! There was a sickening dreamlike quality to the whole situation: the same kind of feeling Gibson's protagonist must have felt toward the Michelin Man.
Anyway, it's very good to get that memory off my conscience. Thank you for listening.
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