You know those random thoughts that hit you out of nowhere? The kind of one-line brilliance that shows up when you’re staring at the ceiling before you fall asleep, or while you’re semi-catatonic in the shower, or drunk off your tits and talking shit with friends? Ever tried writing those down? I did, in the notes app on my phone, and the result is a strange archive of ideas that, stripped of their original context, I can no longer explain, nor even recall having. I have selected some of the strangest and attempted to make sense of them. These are their stories.
Wrath of Santa
The beauty and mystery of this one lies in its brevity. It is asserted with such powerful simplicity that I almost feel guilty for not remembering why the hell I would write it down. I like to imagine Wrath of Santa was going to be an excellent, festive horror movie, in which Santa grows tired of his life of servitude to spoiled children who pay him only in milk and biscuits, and uses his magical powers of time travel, omnipotent surveillance and home invasion to exact his revenge on a society that has banished him to the north pole. Some key scenes in this movie would probably include: a reindeer head left in someone’s bed as a warning; a family huddled in terror as they hear heavy footsteps on the roof and the ominous scraping of a candy cane shiv in the chimney; and of course, Santa booming “HO HO HO” as Mrs. Claus arrives with a trio of thuggish elves to get in on the action. I think this one was probably worth noting down after all.
Fabulous Aesthetics
Alright, this seems like a step down. This sounds like, at a stretch, the name for an awful gym. The kind of gym you go to one time because it’s down the road from your place, so it’s sort of convenient, but when you get there the staff are very overbearing and are making plans to train you and shouting a lot of fitness slogans, when what you really wanted was to jog quietly in shame for 20 minutes so you could feel good about going home and remaining on the couch for the rest of your life. The Fabulous Aesthetics gym has no dim corners and all the treadmills face a big window onto the street so everyone passing by is acutely aware of how out of shape you are. There is a pub across the road so people can watch you pretend to like exercise while they drink beer with their friends. And don’t forget, you only went to Fabulous Aesthetics in the first place because it was in your neighbourhood, so those people in the pub probably know you from high school.
Reasons I Can’t Find A Roommate
This entry actually did come with a tiny extra piece of clarification: “I like to be naked, a lot, and not in a good way”. With so much more information than the others, I can at least see what I was getting at here, but it clearly wasn’t good. This appears to be just a record of a sad, reflective moment in my life, when I considered who would possibly live with me and decided my frequent nudity would preclude literally everybody. I wasn’t actually looking for a roommate, so this was definitely just introspection, knowing that someday this would become a problem. I wish I could say I don’t know what I meant by that “not in a good way” part, but I do. If Seinfeld taught me anything, it’s that there is good naked and bad naked, and bad naked will drive people away. What I truly can’t understand is the simple fact that I thought it belonged, as an idea, in the same place as Wrath of Santa, which was obviously a work of genius.
As a sort of ‘highly commended’, here are some others that were either too clear or too obscure for me to attempt:
- “Was the hair of famous people a black market in Harry Potter?”
- “Are Johnny Depp and Nic Cage the same person?”
- “No Homes or Gardens: The Lifestyle Magazine for Homeless People” [This one seems insensitive and not very clever]
- And simply: “Dick Bloat Rap”
I thought this would be a sort of fun, interesting exercise in imagination, but it felt a lot more unsettling to deconstruct these weird relics than I expected. Unfortunately, there is a lot more where that came from, in the erratic depths of my phone, just waiting to be told.
For more struggles of people who are bad at exercise, check out the top 10 Awkward Moments at the Gym. Or, if “bad naked” doesn’t sound like a serious issue to you, have more of a read about First World Problems.
