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Singular visions than have stayed with you

Started by shoulders, April 29, 2022, 07:28:35 PM

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shoulders

In Romania in March (Sibiu, if you would like specifics) a vagrant approached in what was possibly the most piteous shambling state I've ever seen. Every article of clothing, or rather material on him was reduced to a few flaps of rags, not only flailing a little bit, but barely serving any purpose whatsoever. Bare torso and legs with underpants fashioned from what looked like bed sheets. Not only did he stand out on the street, you could have picked him out from space. Bald head (turns out you do see a bald tramp, biggy) a decade of tan and ragged beard. It seems impossible somehow that he hadn't managed to obtain some replacement clothes, but who knows his story. Feral stench, but I respect that.



To a far less apocalyptic extent, I just saw a very small vicar-like middle aged white man carrying two half pints of stout in either hand across a bar room to the snug, presumably where his tiny little family are, all consuming scale models of food and drink.


Your go.

QDRPHNC

Went into a convenience store once, hugely obese man in there. He turned to look at me and for a second my brain couldn't process him except as a cartoon. He looked like something from Ren and Stimpy painted onto the real world. I mean that literally, it was strong enough to be a hallucination except I was completely sober. I blinked and then I saw he wasn't a cartoon, but a man.

bgmnts

In Nepal I saw a starving dog guarding it's own shit from a pernicious pack of pigeons.

Guarding it's own fucking shit to eat because it was so emaciated. Grim.

Bernice

I was 8 years old, we were in Tesco, saw a man with no nose. Just a big old hole in his head. Probably wouldn't be so horrified now, being a more worldly and sympathetic character. But I was too young then to countenance it in a spirit of anything but naked horror.


neveragain

I've mentioned it once on here before but, as a child, in the foyer of a since-demolished cinema on a windy day, I happened to look out through the glass doors just in time to see a hat being blown in front of the building. This was followed closely by a ginger wig. And that was followed by a fat bald man, chasing them both.

Butchers Blind

When I was 7 our music teacher collapsed at the piano, unconscious. After about a minute the rest of the class looked round at each other until one girl asked the others if we should get the headmistress. Another minute passed before another child did. The music teacher died of a stroke.
That image of her slumped at the upright piano has stayed with me.

shoulders


Video Game Fan 2000

There used to be a rough sleeping guy with red wine coloured tumours all over his face that I used to see regularly. One time I was on the bus, I saw him try to get on and as he was about to climb the last step he looked at us all inside and then decided not to try to get on. He stepped down and as he did the bus driver closed the door right in his face. Whenever I hear mention of homelessness, very often that face looking into the bus that comes to mind first.


Elderly Sumo Prophecy


The Mollusk

I once saw two cats shagging while a third one watched.

Cold Meat Platter

Gentleman of the road with his trousers round his ankles wiping his arse by dragging his anus across the cobbles and down the hill between Potterrow and Chambers Street in Edinburgh. Just next to the Museum, late 1980s, maybe early 90s.








hamfist

A corpse on the M62 having thrown himself off that high bridge near Huddersfield, his blue woollen socks just there in the road.

WhoMe

On holiday as a kid, maybe in Lanzarote, a young girl tried to pick her younger brother off a wall along a concrete path. She grabbed him around the knees, which were around head height and tried to lift him down. Obviously most of his weight was above her head so she toppled backwards and fell. In my mind they fell for about ten minutes. The brother must have got an arm in front of his face because when he hit the ground he was in shock and cried, rather than being cracked open. Could have been horrendous. The memory of that randomly comes back to me quite often.

Mister Six

#16
Quote from: bgmnts on April 29, 2022, 09:29:53 PMIn Nepal I saw a starving dog guarding it's own shit from a pernicious pack of pigeons.

Guarding it's own fucking shit to eat because it was so emaciated. Grim.

Grimmer for the pigeons if it wasn't so fucking stupid.

EDIT: I feel a bit bad for saying this about a poor dog. :(

Kelvin

#17
I've mentioned it before, but years ago I was in a plane flying out from New York at night and there was a phenomenal lightning storm happening over the city. I was sat at the window right next to the wing, and as I looked out there were bolts of lightning hitting the conductors on the tips of the wing, and below, I could see the whole of New York city stretched out, lit up by its usual night-time illuminations, but also constant bolts of fork lightning that were striking at the tallest buildings, all across the city. It was like the end of Ghostbusters, or some some other apocalyptic Hollywood film.

The airborne sight of those bolts hitting the city every 10-20 seconds will undoubtedly remain the most awe-inspiring image I see in my entire life, but even youtube doesn't seem to have something that resembles it. The closest I can find is this video, which captures the style of lightning, but not the scale of the city, or the frequency of the strikes: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCjkOnnoPbo

At the time, I remember thinking I should maybe close the window "screen", in case other people got nervous about the lightning hitting the wing. But in the end I just felt I had to look out and soak it in, because it seemed so obvious that I'd never see anything that impressive again.





ProvanFan

Quote from: Mister Six on April 30, 2022, 02:34:39 AMGrimmer for the pigeons

Nick Grimshaw exposes the dark side of pigeon fancying

PlanktonSideburns

Amazon robot furiously grinding on a copy of John Virgo's autobiography like it was a hornet that menaced it's child

Four identical eighteen-wheelers in a row at four in the morning somewhere in the outskirts of Manchester Airport, each one with an identical looking pair of crossed legs sticking out of the window, each with an identical little pile of  streaming chicken bones on the pavement an arm's width from the cab. Looked like someone had copied and pasted them

Train hits magpie, kills it. Magpie friends and family surrounds station, mournfully singing a song for its departing soul. Song finishes, five minutes pass. Magpies eat dead magpie

All these classic moments Will be gone, like KFC down the drain

shoulders

Quote from: Cold Meat Platter on April 29, 2022, 11:10:27 PMGentleman of the road with his trousers round his ankles wiping his arse by dragging his anus across the cobbles and down the hill between Potterrow and Chambers Street in Edinburgh. Just next to the Museum, late 1980s, maybe early 90s.

Sorry, how does everybody else clean their shitty arse?

Catalogue of ills

Gary Elson, considered one of the hardest kids in school and a few years older than me, crossing a road while holding his motorcycle helmet. He tripped and fell full length - a single tin of marrowfat peas spilled from the helmet and rolled down the road. Something about the domesticity of the peas, and the pratfall that revealed them, levelled him in that moment.

purlieu

Jeremy Beadle cleaning chewing gum from underneath tables in my school hall.

buttgammon

A shirtless heroin addict aimlessly jabbing a needle into his blood-streaked arm on a packed rush-hour tram.

shoulders


JaDanketies

Hay-on-Wye, walking through the countryside under an illuminated walkway and the Milky Way streaking across the sky like some NASA picture

Or an early date with my fiancee, where we went to 'The Temple' which is (widely known as) the highest point in Manchester in the middle of a summer rainstorm, and we had it all to ourselves, and we looked at the clouds dancing over the city

The Mollusk

A bit of Pot Noodle juice spilled on an electric hob plate, jiggling and morphing into various blobby shapes, sizzling and dancing but never spilling off, just gliding about like a Flubber ordered off Wish, a gelatinous brown bit of Terminator goo too far from its scummy host to locate or rejoin with it, trapped in the hot parameters of the plate while track 1 off Aphex's Melodies From Mars played on a nearby stereo.

jobotic

Driving to Legoland and coming off the motorway near Heathrow. Presumably due to our velocity, the plane's velocity and the angle that we viewed it, a plane coming into land seemed to be stationary in the air, suspended above us, for what seemed ages.

Is there a word for that phenomena?

Zetetic

Sort of tied up with parallax, I guess, insofar as objects that are further away move less in your field of vision, for a given displacement in space.

I imagine it also depends on it being difficult to judge how high up a plane is (and so how far away it is from you), unless you're extremely familiar with how big they are, and not having other reference points when you're looking up at the sky (either for judging distance to the plane, or even exactly how much the plane is moving in your field of vision).

Pink Gregory

trapped in a victorian christmas decoration shop while one of the most violent and sudden rainstorms I've ever seen rages outside