Creepy

Last night as I lay in bed, somewhere between sleep and reality, I remembered a creepy coincidence.

A year or so ago, I got a call from a friend. He says, in a kind of halting and disturbed, though not scary, voice, "I...just...got...the...STRANGEST...voice mail." I jumped in, as I was cooking dinner, and said with a funny voice, "Was it Samuel L. Jackson telling you there were snakes on a muthafuckin plane?" giggling gleefully as I delighted in my own funny.

"YES."

Because I was still laughing at my own cleverness, it took me a second. "Wait. What. WHAT? WHAT THE FUCK?!"

And so it turned out that, as a part of the marketing genius for said shitty movie, you could spam a friend with the voicemail recording of Samuel El Jackson bitching about snakes and planes. I swear I didn't know about this, much less send the spam. But I've always understood, even today, that my defense is practically nonexistent. Really...I just thought it was the most bizarre thing I could spout off in the moment. Who the fuck knew it would be true?


A few months later, I was talking to said friend again. I started the conversation with, "You'll never guess who I ran into tonight." I expected him to answer with the name of a long-lost classmate or some such.

Instead he says, "Luke Perry."

I froze, expecting to blurt out "No! Guess again!" and put him through his mentalist paces. But I was completely fucking gobsmacked because I'll be damned if the answer really wasn't Luke fucking Perry!


I talked to him tonight and told him about falling asleep and randomly thinking about how creepy this was. He was nonplussed. In part, I think, because he might still think that I sent the random voicemail marketing to him. He claims that the Luke Perry answer was, in his mind, searching for the lowest-level celebrity he could think of.

I argued, "But I said 'You'll never guess who I ran into!'" His response was that the phrase alone implied celebrity status, and since I wasn't excited, it was lowball. I think he's full of it, thinking that these are truly creepy conversations.

"It was dismissed as a coincidence," he said, sounding bored with my rant.