Thursday, February 05, 2009

Minor world altering random events.

Recently I was "tagged" by a friend on Facebook to reveal 25 random things about myself. I usually eschew such things, but as favor to this Facebook friend, I exposed a bit of myself by writing of 25 random things. Below are three of them.

If you choose to read them, pay particular attention to numbers 3 and 24. They have been a lifetime source of guilt for Dada.

3. A day before a formal dance I'd asked my girlfriend to, I still didn't have anything to wear. I prayed for a way out of it. Later that morning, we learned JFK had been assassinated. The formal dance the next night was canceled! (I'm so really, really sorry John. For you, and all of America.)

11. Very young, my mother entered me into a Hollywood baby contest. I won the blue ribbon for "Personality Baby." Some weeks later my parents were summoned by a major studio to bring me in for a screen test. The telegram arrived late after being forwarded to my family in Oregon where we had just moved. My life has been mundane ever since, resulting in me ultimately taking up blogging.

24. On my way down from hiking a glacier, totally alone, I decided to pause and throw a Canadian dollar into one of those deep blue-green crevasses. For a coin that wouldn't be discovered by anthropologists for thousands of years hence, I decided to make a wish for world peace. Reconsidering at the last moment, I exchanged the $1.00 Canadian for a 25 cent piece. As a result peace never happened, which probably explains why anthropologists, thousands of years from now, won't discover the $0.25 Canadian I threw in a crevasse on the Athabasca Glacier in 1989 -- most likely because there won't be any anthropologists alive then.

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(Dada anecdote to #24 above: Later that same day, I heard the news of a man who had fallen into a deep blue-green crevasse on the glacier. Having a sack lunch with him, he managed to survive until rescued. But Dada has wondered for almost 20 years now about this man's misfortune. Perhaps my guilt of being too cheap to secure world peace for a buck was unwarranted. Perhaps that man fell in the crevasse trying to retrieve my quarter. And succeeded! Who knows, maybe world peace could have been realized for 25 cents if that bastard had just left that damn quarter down there!)
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1 comment:

D.K. Raed said...

Due to global warming, the Athabasca is melting and retreating about 6-feet per year. World Peace may be near at hand, even it was purchased for 25-cents Canadian!

ps, you are so funny ... the future anthropologists will be less interested in your coin than the detritus of your passing; ie, a stray kleenex, a lost button, candy bar wrapper, shoelace ... jeez how much stuff can one hiker lose on a glacer anyway ... from this they will determine that humans of this era covered their noses with cotton and tin foil and carefully placed a mysterious round object in each nostril in some kind of fertility rite involving a long string (the plastic tip on the shoelace end was a dead giveway since it was made from that unbelievably rare substance, oil) ... they are still looking for the other round object because the Shah of America has promised them an extra large piece of clean ice if they can find a matched set. The Shah was greatly taken with the button material (another extremely rare oil product) as well as the mystical 4 holes which are aligned so perfectly as to surely signify an important universal truth.