Thursday, July 18, 2013

An Extremely Pleasant Shopping Experience

     I flew back into Salt Lake City this past Sunday, and since I've been gone for the past six-ish weeks, I've been trying to spend some more time with my family, to catch up, you know?

     Yesterday my dad and one of my brothers decided that we were going to go browse around a bit in the local thrift stores.

     Gross. Just kidding. I don't like the phrase "thrift stores."

     We went to several... Deseret Industries locations.

     Sitting in front of one of the stores we visited was this man. Now, mind you, I don't have too much of a problem with homeless people. A lot of people think that every single one of them actually has a house, but they're too lazy to get a job. In some cases this may be true, but I like to think of it optimistically.

     I feel that I should give some information on him so that maybe you can envision him later. Don't worry, I wasn't checking him out, I just noticed a couple things. Now, this man had those sleeve tattoos that I'm starting to see more and more on people. I think he may have had ear piercings, but I'm not sure.

     None of this was the strange part. Now, this is where I make the assumption that he's homeless. He had a little cardboard sign leaning next to him on the wall, left there as if it didn't matter for the moment. Alright, homeless people take breaks. Ok.

     He was rocking back and forth, making slightly muted tones similar to the ones heard in the "Ring of Fire" scene of Finding Nemo (wah-hee wah-hee wah-ho-ho-ho), and snapping his fingers.

     Once inside D.I., I asked my brother what he thought of the dude. He just looked at me with a quizzical look and replied, "What dude?"

     "The one sitting out front of the store?"

     "What are you talking about?"

     "The man... he was rocking... oh, just go look outside. He's to the right of the door."

     He gave me another weird look, and then he just figured he'd get it over with. I watched him walk outside. He looked right, and then he looked left. He DID, in fact, look. I'm not crazy.

     He came back and said, "There isn't anybody out there."

     I looked for myself. He really was gone. Being the older sibling, I didn't want to come off as a total loser, so I said the logically thing.

     "Heh. Heh. Made you look?"

     I think the way I said didn't come off as confident.

     We returned into the store, both of us trying to forget that weird ordeal. I went about looking for t-shirts, just for the heck of it. I actually managed to find some nerd-ish ones, but they were a couple sizes to big. For example, one contained this poem.

Roses are #FF0000
Violets are #0000FF
All my base
Are belong to you

Note: for those of you who simply think that that was bad grammar, it technically was, but it IS a reference.

     That would've been amazing. But alas, my weird proportions didn't allow it to be.

     I continued to browse alone, when I detected movement RIGHT next to me in my peripheral vision. I glanced over, and it was that homeless guy staring straight into my soul. He wasn't just standing next to me, he was full-on RIGHT there with his body turned towards me.

     Since that was just a glance, I had looked right back at what I was doing. This was the first time in my life that I actually did a double take. When I looked back, he was simply looking at the t-shirts on the rack. Five feet away.

     A little scared now, I went to look at a different rack. This time, I didn't see anything out of the corner of my eye. Instead, I heard a noise.

     A guttural, clicking/hissing noise was being emitted directly behind me. I spun around, expecting it to be like the double take, where I'd see briefly and then he'd be gone. So, I assumed I would hear something, and then there wouldn't be anything.

     I was wrong. There stood the man, again with his body turned towards me. Instead of staring into my soul, he was giving me this glare of pure evil. His head was angled slightly towards the ground, but it just added to the effect.

     That's not where it ended. He continued to make that awful sound, which was eerily similar to the sound that the Silence make.



     Needless to say, I got the freak out of there. I went and found my dad and brother, and didn't leave their sides until we left the store.

     Moral of the story: Some homeless people are fakes. Others are real. Some, a very small portion, are secretly demonic slenderman-ic aliens that want to kill you.


     Some people will point out that even if he was a Silent (the singular form), there's no way that I would remember him. But remember, no one else actually saw him, so it very well may have been some kind of Silence cousin. In disguise. 

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