Richard Hawley: For Your Lover Give Some Time
Last night, Q snored like crazy, so I didn’t get any sleep. He’s usually pretty good about changing positions when I nudge him, which stops the snoring just long enough for me to fall back asleep, so it’s no big deal. Last night, he was really tired, so he wasn’t responsive to my nudges, and at one point actually said the word “snoring?” like he’d never heard of it before. It was pretty funny. Anyway, I woke up at 6:30, but decided to go back to bed because I wasn’t going to make it. I slept until 10:00 and made it to work for 11:00.
Side story: Since I woke up late, I decided not to wash my hair, so I ran a bath. In the morning, I either listen to music or watch t.v. while getting dressed. Today, I wanted to put the tv on to break the silence, but I couldn’t find the remote. I didn’t look very hard, because I was in a hurry, and I decided to just accept whatever channel it was already on (we have Tivo, so we can’t change the channel without the Tivo remote). Anyway, I switched it on and got in the tub. The water was running, so for the first few minutes, I couldn’t hear the tv at all. When I turned it off, I was horrified to hear horror movie music (this is precisely the feeling I was trying to avoid [I stopped watching horror movies about two years ago, because I was tired of being scared all the time…to this day, we still have clear shower curtains because I don’t ever want to be caught by surprise in the shower {not that seeing the person with the knife/gun/baseball bat coming will do me any good…I just like to see}]). Anyway, I wasn’t sure which movie it was, so I turned the water on so I could tune it out until I was able to get out and turn off the t.v. When I got out, I took one look at Jennifer Aniston’s face, and realized it was Leprechaun! That movie (as stupid as it is) scared the crap out of me when I was in middle school. To this day, if I’m alone and I sneeze, I say “God bless you” out loud so that I don’t have 3 sneezes with no blessing, because that’s what I thought summoned the Leprechaun (although, after reading the Leprechaun movie Wikipedia article just now, I have no idea where I got that from. Maybe I am confusing it with another movie). I hurried to turn off the tv, then luckily located the remote and switched it to the Today show (sometimes just as scary). Then, I finished getting dressed and came to work. Ha!
Haha! I am like this with scary films too. I share your shower curtain fear. I can’t be in darkened rooms when there is lightning in case I see the shadow of a man with a big axe cast on the wall as the lightning flashes. I hide the big knives in the kitchen overnight just in case someone mad happens to wander in and get the idea, when they see the knife, of coming in to the bedroom and stabbing me to death. I make anyone I share a bed with sleep on the side of the bed nearest to the door, so that they can get killed first and I can make my escape! Haha! Actually maybe I should be hiding the knives from myself, I sound like a colossal lunatic!
In November 1971, a man traveling under the name Dan Cooper hijacked a Boeing 727 en route from Portland to Seattle. After communicating to the flight attendant that he had a bomb in his briefcase, he demanded $200,000 and four parachutes, to be delivered after the plane landed. After receiving his ransom and releasing the passengers, Cooper ordered the pilots to take off and fly to Mexico, but while in the air over Washington state he lowered the rear stairs of the aircraft and jumped out, never to be seen again.
As if his story, with too many astonishing details to mention here, weren’t enough, four months later a man named Richard McCoy Jr. copied Cooper’s crime, but demanded $500,000. Because he bragged, and because he hitchhiked wearing a flightsuit afterward, McCoy was captured. He later escaped from prison and spent three months on the lam before being killed in a shoot-out with the FBI.
That these men successfully carried out skyjackings of commercial Boeing jets and bailed out over the United States strongly suggests to me that the 1970s were awesome.