Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Things That Go Bump

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One morning last week, a metallic crashing noise woke me before my alarm had a chance to.  It was still darkish outside.  The clock read "6:00 a.m."

My first thought was that my AC unit had fallen out of the window.  (I still haven't installed it properly, post-move.)  I lay there, trying to decide whether I thought that was hilarious or horrible. The line between the two is pretty thin at 6:00 a.m.

When the crashing noises continued, though, I realized it couldn't have been the AC.  My second thought was that it must be a homeless person, pushing a dumpster down the street and hitting it with a baseball bat. (Clearly. Had to be.)

But the noises sounded too close to be on the street, two stories below.  And they weren't stopping, and I wasn't sleeping, so I decided to investigate. I quit my bed, crept over to the window, and peered out into the darkness.

There was a man, standing six feet away from me. 

Crap-on-a-stick, I said (or something like it).  I hadn't expected to see a person hovering outside my third-floor apartment. A shocked second later, I remembered that a billboard space is attached to the exterior of my building. And this man - wearing a white hard hat with a light attached - was not levitating but rather standing on a small ledge, plastering over the old billboard poster with a new ad (this one for a Spanish-language cooking show, Hombres En La Cocina!)

Mystery of the metallic noise now solved, I went back to bed.  But couldn't get back to sleep, because changing ads proved to be a loud business.  So I lay there pondering why this business needed to be done at dawn, when the ad man needed to wear a fancy hat to see, and this girl needed earplugs to sleep.  Could it not have waited til 9 a.m.?

Wait, don't answer that.  Just remind me - who was the one that wanted to wake up in a city that never sleeps?

Oh yeah.  That was me. 

Folks, sometimes dreams really do come true.

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