Long ago, when I worked for a video store–I had bills to pay and some karma from a past life to work off–one of my colleagues was a guy named Pat. Pat was one of those slyly humorous slacker geeks with an encyclopedic knowledge of everything from D&D arcana to obscure comic book characters.* One day he told me that he’d once successfully convinced a PE teacher to excuse him from running laps by claiming to have been stung by a triffid. The best part was when the teacher said sympathetically, “Yeah, that can be painful.”<\/p>\n
I really miss Pat.<\/p>\n
*In fact, one of the first times I was made to literally fall down laughing was one time when I was trying to remember the name of that monster that sits outside of Egyptian Hell and eats peoples’ hearts (I didn’t say I wasn’t a geek too), and I asked Pat if he knew. Without missing a beat, he said, “Phil.” I said, “Phil<\/EM>?” He said, “Yeah. I don’t remember his last name; you work with a guy for a couple thousand years, you get friendly.” I asked, “You used to work with Phil? What did you do?” He smiled and replied, “I used to oil the little scales.” As I was leaning against the wall, cackling, he continued, “I had to quit, though. There were union talks, and they said that I’d have to wear the head of an animal. And that wasn’t so bad, but all they had left was a budgie.” Which is when I fell down. But I digress.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Long ago, when I worked for a video store–I had bills to pay and some karma from a past life to work off–one of my colleagues was a guy named Pat. Pat was one of those slyly humorous slacker geeks with an encyclopedic knowledge of everything from D&D arcana to obscure comic book characters.* One […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}