You're a sexy bitch, 2011. I'm glad to be in you.
You guys hear that? It's the sound of me rapidly losing readers because I chose such a terrible sentence to start out the year. Just awful. BUT, there is nowhere to go but up now, right? Well I hate to disappoint you fine people, but 2011 will be full of lateral moves here on j.Bowman Can't Sleep. I've taken a few weeks off (you have know idea how draining writing this thing. If you guessed "not at all", perhaps you do have an idea). If you've been waiting for a new post, well chill out, I just did 20 in December and I do perpetually nap. By the way, I would like to make a solemn vow right now that I will NEVER write about another Christmas movie again. That being said, I hope you all look forward to my January series "13 Days of Submarine Movies". But for now, it's 5:30 am, I got my Vegetable Thins and my skim milk going, and I'd like to start this month off as I would any other, by expressing an irrational fear and giving more ammunition for my enemies to use against me. It's gonna be a good year.
One new thing I learned to fear this month for no apparent reason is something I never directly thought about until recently faced with it. For the longest time I just carried on with my life not noticing how secretly terrifying it is. I believe it to be a harbinger of doom and ask all of the sleepless knights who read this, if the moment presents itself, to put an end to this blight of goodness and all things considered awesome. Of course I'm talking about miniature dollhouse furniture
Things should be the size they are supposed to be. Straight up. Extremely detailed miniatures freak the bejeezus out of me. My bejeezus levels used to be off the charts but I worry after this post they will be critically low. Granted there have been some pretty irrational fears so far, but none as unsettling to me as miniatures. I played with Army Men as a kid, which was fine and I enjoyed immensely. Not only did that not freak me out (they were just pawns I was using to fight my battles fo-....oh) they served a purpose. Fighting miniuature Nazis/melting. I never told him how awesome I thought it was, but I'd like to give props right now to my brother, j.Revolver Bowman for the incredible authenticity he'd add to those battles by taking red paint and a small, fine tipped paintbrush and giving some of the soldiers battle wounds (some of which were incredibly fatal/through the eye). He even took off some limbs of the less fortunate plastic infantry. "Saving Private Ryan" had nothing on j.R.B's graphic creativity.
But as I said, tiny army men never freaked me out. It's hard to be threatened by some of those guys, especially the one who was always on his cell phone.
The miniatures that really get under my skin are the ones that are eerily accurate representations of full sized things. Dollhouses and specifically furniture. I'm not sure what started this fear for me, perhaps it was when Beetlejuice was bombing around that tiny town in that movie...I forget what it's called. For some reason I just don't trust things that are that small and that precise. It's like nobody really pays attention to anything that small so if all the miniatures existed for a reason, we wouldn't know until it was too late. I also have a fear that perhaps one day a witch or a warlock (I'm not sexist, could be either) might cast a spell on me and make me tiny. Tiny enough where I would be quite comfortable having my dinner here:
I think a large part of my fear is that I find it hard to believe that someone would go through all the painstaking efforts to make these as detailed as possible. That is a pretty useless skill. And I should know, I have plenty. Essentially you are really, REALLY good at making furniture...just with a crippling low amount of raw materials. But still, why? Nobody is ever going to open that hutch up there, but someone went through a lot of trouble to make sure it opens. WHY?! There just has to be a nefarious reason for it. Things should be the size they are. I don't mind models that are used for construction purposes. It's just those tiny replicas of what is in those model buildings that are so unnerving. For some unholy reason, people build a perfect representation of the world we inhabit, only tiny and untrustworthy. Or do they? Such detail warrants suspicion and theirin lies my next irrational fearpoint about mini dollhouse furniture.
Rick Moranis/Science
I've been afraid that this asshole, or someone like him, has created a machine already that can shrink things and people. I can picture it now (partially because I'm a lunatic). I'm walking along, enjoying my regular sized life and all my regular sized things when a van pulls up beside me. A sketchy dude tells me he has candy for me, I yell "stranger danger" and then tell him to fuck off. Another van pulls up and a guy offers me a free puppy, same deal. Then another van drives up (I kinda have a fear of vans too) and nobody even asks me anything, the back doors just swing open and this guy shrinks me for no good reason.
I fear as a result of that, I will one day inhabit a world I'm not supposed to, and nobody, not even me will notice because everything looks so...normal. Only smaller.
Look at that shit! Someone either went through all the time and precision and made sure the stovetop was just PERFECT. Or a witch/warlock/scientist/rick moranis just pointed something at it and BAM! Tiny and creepy. I don't mind all things that are small per se. LEGO stuff for instance. That is perfectly fine. I don't have any issues with LEGO because although I can recognize what it's trying to be, it's got a cartoony feel to it and it doesn't look exactly like something from my living room was shrunken. Sure LEGO is small, but it's also unrealistic.
It seems the more ridiculous the fear the harder the explanation is, but I don't really care. It's my fear, it's my curse to live with and my shame to admit. And although it freaks me out that I might get somehow get shrunk small enough that the mini furniture would become regular sized furniture, there is another, even stupider side to this. When I'm regular sized, small, methodically authentic furniture makes me feel like a giant.
"But j.Bowman, being a giant would be awesome...also, you're quite handsome".
First of all, thank you. Secondly, being a giant would not be awesome. Think of a few "Giants" that aren't Tim Lincecum and tell me things worked out really well for them.
Aside from that freak of nature up there, things never work out for things that are too big. So that's why I don't like feeling like a giant when I encounter wee furniture. Because as a giant you either get:
Dumped/Killed
Bodyslammed/Molested
Quad Lasered by 2 Nerds, Bill Murray and a super cool black guy.
Having to take orders from Stan Van Gundy
Continuously recast
Forced to hang out with a gay giraffe and...some sort of weasel in a dunce cap.
Giants have a rough go of it. Horrible horrible things happen to them and as a result, I'm very VERY uncomfortable around anything that makes me feel like a giant. That includes broccoli, mini umbrellas that come in drinks sometimes, and motherfucking dollhouse furniture!
Oh, and I'd also like to point out that the only thing Rick Moranis is worse at than science is parenting. I referenced above how he built his fancy shrink ray in that movie that scarred me as a child and probably had a hand in cultivating this fear. BUT they did a goddamn sequel, and you know what happened? He made one of his kids into a fucking giant!
Someone should really take that guys science license away. Oh, and his kids. Take them too. Even though on the poster for the second one, he's all shrugging like "Yep, I'm terrible at science" but I can't look at it without hoping this kid drops the deuciest of deuces on his head for all the size crimes he has committed.
So there you have it, the first post of the new year. And to be quite honest, 2010 was the most important year of my life and there are many things that happened that will resonate for a long time. I've always felt the most important thing in life is "impact". Things should matter. And in 2010 some things finally started, some things finally ended and some things were finally made clear. However if you think I'd continue my "bowmentum" from such a year by getting serious, growing up and becoming a more thoughtful and sophisticated writer, this post should cement one fact:
2011 is going to be the stupidest, most riduculous, idiotic and "time-wastingest" year in the history of this blog. And I couldn't be happier about that. 56 posts, 10 months and over 7000 views later, I haven't stopped having fun for a second. Let's keep this bitch rollin'
Thanks for Reading
I have to say, I felt slightly mislead when your Twitter plug, "If you hate tiny things, you might like this", wasn't about Midgets. However, many of your reasons for disliking tiny furniture apply to my fear of Midgets, so I approve. I got your back.
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