(type: funny, bizarre ... a second person account)

Ed: I met Felicia at a bar last week and knew that such a well-traveled person would have to have a hum-dinger story for me. I was right.

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Felicia has never "gone wild," at least not in the sleazy late-night-TV sense. But in her 25 years she has done a great deal of traveling, spending no less than a month every year in myriad locations east and west of the US. Most of these adventures have been made solo, but her 2002 trip to Europe included her best friend Tia, and unfortunately for her, it also included two boys named Matt.

Tia had a boyfriend back home with whom she was hopelessly in love and (much to the annoyance of Felicia) was constantly fawning over (read: daily "no, I miss YOU more" phone calls). During a train ride on the final leg of their three month backpacking trip, the pair met the aforementioned Matts, both of whom had the same birthday (Felicia and Tia also noted that they had never seen anyone get up so many times to "primp" on a train, and that they carried a disproportionate amount of luggage). It should also be noted that one of the Matts in question bore a striking resemblance to Tia's loverman. Jot this down for later reference.

As it turned out, the two pairs were both destined for the small coastal town of Lagos, Portugal. The Mattsey Twins were apparently tolerable enough to room with, because the girls agreed to do so when it became apparent that their limited funds and hotel options made such a sacrifice necessary. Their lodgings were the top room of the home of a sweet old woman who spoke not a word of English (did I mention that none of the travelers spoke a word of Portuguese?).

Fast forward a couple of nights and the foursome managed to get themselves thoroughly drunk after some chain margarita guzzling, which in turn led to a face sucking contest between Tia and her boyfriend-shaped proxy. By this time Felicia had had enough, so she left the house and ambled toward the pier. Once she got there she realized that she desperately had to pee, and since there were no facilities nearby, she eased down a ramp leading to the water, dropped trow and bent over to relieve herself. And fell in.

Needless to say, Felicia was not a happy camper. She had no desire to rejoin the company of the annoying trio, so instead she walked down to the beach, where she draped her soaked jeans over the bow of a boat on the shore and laid down in the sand to wait for them to dry. And fell asleep.

Felicia woke up the next morning with half of her face buried in the sand and the other half thoroughly sunburned. And her jeans were gone. And her wallet was in her jeans. And so was her house key. So dressed in nothing but a shirt and panties (don't forget the vertical sunburn), Felicia walked back through the small, conservative town of Lagos on that beautiful Sunday morning, eliciting countless "for shame" head shakes from the local churchgoers (no doubt they assumed she had gone wild the night before). Add one more shame stare from the little old innkeeper, who had to have not one but two new keys made because, naturally, Tia had also managed to lose her key on the same night (though probably in less bizarre circumstances).

It has to be assumed, since so many more daring travels have followed, that Felicia at least learned to be more careful with her drinking. And her pants. And her sleeping locations. And maybe her roommates. No Matts. Ever.

Posted by Whit at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(type: bizarre ... a first person account)

Ed: This sob story has to be told. I'll be as brief as I can. Grab some popcorn.

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My dad and I left at 12 PM EST for the Nashville Airport, where I would be starting my trip home from a long holiday visit. In the security line in front of me was, I noticed, a very sexy brunette in nice clothes. I caught a brief glimpse of the side of her face and thought to myself, "That looks kind of like that actress whose name I can't recall," which I immediately dismissed, because why would that particular actress be boarding a plane in Nashville, Tennessee by herself? But then, after I went through the metal detector, a security person was bantering with her and I heard her trademark goofy laugh, and just before she turned to walk away, she looked back at me with a smile on her lovely, unmistakable face: Cameron friggin' Diaz, boarding a plane in Nashville, no former 'N Sync members in sight. For what it's worth, Timberlake's family apparently lives in TN, which sheds a little light on the appearance.

I wish I could continue the story with Miss Diaz's presence and tell you that we sat on the plane together and were soon making lots of little Diaz-Gurley babies, but that smile was unfortunately the last shred of Hollywood glory I got. Things went downhill from there.

The first-leg flight was the most turbulent that I had ever been on, so much that I started to worry about the integrity of the plane. But no big deal, we landed safely. The second leg was fine aside from the little boy beside me spilling half a drink in my lap. No big deal, I didn't get too wet. My girlfriend picked me up from the airport, then broke up with me on the way to her house. No big deal, I had seen it coming - we were on the same page - and knew the relationship wasn't going to go on forever. So after we discussed that for a few minutes I asked her if I should just head home instead of spending the night, to which she replied, "Well, yeah, I think so." By now it was 11 PM PST and very cold outside (the 40 minute trip home would be on my motorcycle), but no big deal, I drove out here in the cold, I can deal with one more freezing ride, bundled up in every insulating garment in my suitcase. But things continued to go downhill.

Or more specifically, they went uphill more than I would have liked. The battery on my bike had not been working well when I drove out here a couple of weeks ago and I knew that there was a good chance it wouldn't start, which of course it didn't. My now ex-girlfriend does live on a hill, though, so I figured roll-starting it would be easy. Wrong. The push up her driveway was soon to be followed by a push up a slight but long incline that I hadn't factored into my analysis. Nonetheless, it did finally start and stay started once I got to a significant downhill. Yay!

Oh, wait - I needed gas. I knew it was on empty when I drove it here but I was so cold then that I didn't want to bother gassing it up. So I rolled into the first station I came to, revved the engine for awhile in an attempt to charge the battery, put my card in the pump and put the nozzle in the tank, which proceeded to pour lots of gas into my hand and onto my tank because it had a leak (we bikers have to hold onto those stupid spring-loaded nozzles that CA pumps are no longer legally required to use but still have). No. Big. Fucking. Deal. I looked everywhere for paper towels, but there were none. Waited a few minutes for the two people standing in the cashier line in front of me to conduct their business, got paper towels, paid $.75 to wet the towels at the air/water pump, cleaned everything up, and... the bike didn't start. It did, fortunately, roll start just fine when I coasted out of the parking lot. "I'm home free!" I said to myself.

If only.

Just before I got onto the interstate, I started to worry about the things I had stuffed in the outer pocket of my pack. The pocket was only fastened by velcro and I was worried that they might fall out at highway speeds, plus I wanted to fasten the top button of my coat. So I stopped on the shoulder to correct these things, which turned out to be a colossal mistake. Moved things from outer to inner pockets, fiddled with the button for 2-3 minutes, then just as I was about to get back onto the bike, I heard "putter, putter, putter...," then silence. The bike died again.

I was on a hill, though, and I figured I'd be able to get it going again without too much trouble, but I was very wrong. After repeatedly pushing, turning the key and dropping the clutch to no avail, I finally rolled the bike the wrong way down an on-ramp onto the nearest street. No hills in sight. Rolled it into a liquor store parking lot and asked a cop if he had jumper cables. Nope. I had no choice but to call the ex.

She thought but wasn't sure that she had jumpers. She arrived twenty minutes later, and after rummaging through the random junk in her trunk we determined that she didn't, so we drove around for a few minutes looking for an open gas station, which we fortunately found in only two tries, and bought cables. Jumped the bike with no problems, which is the only thing that had gone right since Cammie-Di (she likes it when I call her that) smiled at me. Spent the next half hour frozen to my bike, and finally rolled into my garage at about 12:30 PST (15.5 hours after I had started my trip, but who's counting?). Got to bed at about 2 after catching up on mail. Woke up with a sore back from pushing a 450-pound motorcycle around.

But I have to admit, I feel great now. The trip from hell is over and I'm finally back home in sunny California, ready to take on whatever not-big deals confront me in the new year.

Posted by Whit at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(type: bizarre ... a first person account)

Ed: Yeah, I know, things have stagnated on this site, but I still maintain hope that somewhere down the road it will pick up speed. I couldn't let this fairly recent event go unpublished, it's just too weird.

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I've been an avid snowboarder for several years now, and more often than not, my trips to Lake Tahoe (three hours away) are day trips. I had embarked on one such trip this past winter when a singularly bizarre and initially frightening event shook up my morning.

It was about 6 AM, and I had just stopped my car in front of my friend Melissa's apartment, a relatively clean residential area right outside of Haight-Ashbury, to pick her up. I pulled out my cell phone and dialed her number, then realized that someone was reaching for the passenger door handle. Initially I assumed it was her, but... it wasn't. It was a dude. And he had sat down in my car and closed the door. He looked at me with a smile and said, "hey." I looked at him with a blank stare and said "hey" back. Then Melissa answered her phone.

"Hey, Whit," she said.

"Hey," I said timidly. "I'm... here."

"Okay, I'll be out in a second," she replied, and hung up.

I turned the phone off and looked at the dude, who was just sitting there. He didn't necessarily look like a homeless person - maybe a little on the scraggly side, but certainly not a degenerate. I had initially assumed I was being car-jacked, but I didn't see a gun or knife in his hands. So I looked at him and said, "What are you doing?"

He looked at me with mild surprise and said, "I thought you were picking me up."

A bewildered, incredulous look swept over my face as I said, "no!"

"Oh!" he replied. "I'm sorry, sorry," he said as he climbed back out of the car. As he was doing so he noticed my snowboard in the back seat. "Oh, you're going snowboarding!" he said.

Me, still incredulous: "Yeah."

Him, still oblivious: "Okay, bye." And he was gone.

I can sum up my feelings on this event with three words, and I can assure you that I have never been more sincere in using them: what the fuck? To this day I cannot fathom why anyone, hitchhiker, hooker or otherwise, would be so sure of a driver's intentions that they would get into a stranger's car in a nice neighborhood without at least checking to make sure that's what the driver had in mind. It will forever remain the stupidest and most concise unsolved mystery of my life.

Posted by Whit at 09:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(type: bizarre ... a first person account)

Ed: Although I don't feel like any of my own life stories are as remarkable as most of the ones I've been posting here, I decided it would be silly for the creator of a story-based site not to include a story of his own.

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I had an encounter with a special kind of freak not long after I first set foot in California. I had finished doing some shopping one day in San Mateo and was waiting at the bus stop when I saw a man exit a building across the street with a large radio slung on his shoulder, yelling back at the building as he walked. Now, keep in mind that this is broad daylight on a fairly hot, sunny day, at a large intersection. The man had spiked red hair and was dressed in a black leather jacket, black jeans and white high-tops. His radio was blaring the Eagles. He wandered a few feet to the right, paused for a minute in indecision, then started back the other way, heading toward the intersection, where he waited for the light to change. "This is not a good sign," I said to myself.

He started to cross the street. Oh, no. The intersection was filled with, "Welcome to the Ho-tel Cal-iforn-ia..." Please God, don't let that asshole sit down here. But indeed, he stepped onto the sidewalk, turned toward me, walked over and (oblivious to the fact that anyone else was present) sat down, radio in his lap. I stared straight ahead.

To suggest that this person was hopped up on something would be to suggest that water is wet. He was sweaty, shaking and behaviorally incoherent. He fiddled with the tuner, trying to find a station he preferred, but the volume was on max, so I was treated to a lovely barrage of full-bore static in between radio chatter. Finally he found a station he liked: the same station. Must have been a marathon, because now they were playing, "New Kid in Town." This drugged-up, red-headed punker dressed in black I-don't-give-a-shit garb apparently loved his soft-rock ballads from the 70's so much that he had to crank that volume to the max. In fact, he loved it so much that after a couple of minutes of staring into space, he was compelled to stick his fist in the air and scream, "RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!" I swear I'm not making this up. I, of course, was doing my best during all of this to sit perfectly still and hope that he didn't grab my neck and tell me to make the dancing zebras go away.

It was apparently then time for a nap. Further evidence of his being unaware of my presence was the fact that, despite our bench being plenty long, he laid down in my direction. The paper cup that I had been drinking lemonade from earlier still sat beside me, and his head happened to come down right on top of it. He tried to lay his head down a couple of times, not comprehending why something was poking at the side of his head, then turned, saw the cup and knocked it to the ground. I managed to scoot over a little bit just before his head leaned against my hip. *shudder*

Finally, the bus came, and fortunately for everyone on it, Freak Show Red did not need a lift. I looked around a bit for some recognition of my torment, but of course no one on the bus could have known what the nut-job on the bench had been doing for the past ten minutes. Oh well. At least it was over.

Posted by Whit at 12:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

(type: bizarre ... a third person account - this is a story that happened to one person and was told to me by another person the night I decided to create WSB)

Ed: I hate to include a third-person story, but not only is this a really good one, it's the first story that I actually collected for this purpose (well, it was also to make conversation with the author). I wasn't given any names, so I'm making them up.

: : : :

Marcus was vacationing in Mexico when he met another U.S. traveller, Maria, a cute chick who liked him enough to take him into the hot tub, where they... you know. Just before the you know commenced, Maria set her valuable Cartier watch on the side of the tub. Eventually they ended up in her room, at which point Maria realized that her watch was gone. She asked Marcus where her watch was, to which he replied "What watch?"

"You know what watch," she said. "The one you stole." Marcus assured her that he did not steal her watch, so they went back down to the hot tub to see if it was there, which of course it wasn't. Before long they had the entire hotel staff searching for the watch, to no avail.

The next day, Marcus was walking on the beach when he saw a woman scanning the sand with a metal detector. He walked up and asked her if she had come across a gold watch. She asked him to describe it, which he tried to do, and then she put down her detector, walked out into the water and started digging in the sand. She pulled up a canister of some kind and brought it back, opened it up, and... handed him a gold Cartier watch. Bizarre, to say the least, but unbelievably fortunate.

Not so fortunate was the coincidence that Marcus, the man who Maria was sure had stolen from her, now had the watch. He couldn't very well give it back and expect her to believe that he had never stolen it, so he asked a hotel manager to do so and say that he had found it. Maria was so grateful that she gave the man a $5000 reward.

Posted by Whit at 05:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)