Many people dislike stories that sound too “coincidental” because they seem preposterous. There’s been a few times that I got pegged for making up stories like Chunk in the Goonies but I assure you that I wouldn’t waste my time writing about these instances unless they were entirely 100% true.
“Who would make up a story like that?” – Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver) in Ghostbusters.
It was a almost a month ago when I decided to relax, have some dinner, and watch a dvd. That night I was in the mood for Scorcese’s After Hours since I hadn’t watched it since I was young. That’s the kind of movie I like. It’s a film that doesn’t really have too much of a plot, it’s more about the string of events that happen to the main character. It’s so easy to get wrapped up in it. It’s similar to Desperately Seeking Susan (also starring Arquette!) where the bored housewife inadvertently gets tangled up in another woman’s life. Being in these bizarre situations always turns out to be entertaining, but I wish my life occasionally took on excitement like that. In the past I’ve often written about how nothing exciting ever happened where I grew up. I’ve even had dreams of having exciting things happen in my neighborhood because my subconscious must’ve been so starved for excitement! I guess watching After Hours appeals to my desire to have more personal excitement.
The following photo doesn’t really elude to having something “exciting” happen to me, but it can definitely be classified as weird!
Either the person who did this was a huge Wizard of Oz fan or this is a piss poor attempt at graffiti. The building I work in has a massive amount of underground parking. For the most part it’s kept clean, and there’s not much to worry about when you head to your car. There’s not a lot of shady stuff going since the security is super high. About 2 days after I watched After Hours I walked through an area of the parking garage that I rarely ever traverse. I had to escort a visitor to a section of the lot that isn’t as jam packed with cars. Out of nowhere I looked over at one of the concrete columns and I squinted my eyes in disbelief. I was momentarily shocked at what I saw scrawled on this column: “Surrender Dorothy” was written in an extremely random fashion. There must’ve been a hundred columns in this bi-level parking garage and none of the other columns had any graffiti or markings on them.
I immediately told my friend Steve about this weird coincidence. “OK, what’s the big deal Jay?…It’s from Wizard of Oz!” I knew full well that the wicked witch wrote that in the sky to freak Dorothy out. “No man! I just watched After Hours!” Steve didn’t quite grasp my correlation, so I almost spelled it out for him in the sky. “You see Steve….” Marcy, Rosanna Arquette’s character, told a story about her husband. He was obsessed with Wizard of Oz and when they had sex on their wedding night he would scream Surrender Dorothy every time he came. “Instead of saying something normal like, “Oh, God,” or something normal like that.” – Marcy
What does this all mean? Well if I knew the answer to that then I wouldn’t have posted this entry. Out of all the thought provoking stuff you could tag on a concrete column! Off the top of my head “Dan was here ’87” was always popular. Oh, and I can’t leave out the Slayer logo. It’s very possible this person was simply a hardcore Wizard of Oz fanatic or they worked for the Wicked Witch and they were just letting us all know that her spirit is still hunting Dorothy. Another scenario is that the person could’ve been a huge After Hours fan and it’s been there since the movie came out in 1985. Perhaps it was a guy and he had just seen the film. He was getting some oral action while leaning against the column and decided to carve Surrender Dorothy into the pole as he completed his mission. Maybe back in ’85 there were some people who actually started yelling that as they reached their moment of bliss?
Here’s a couple of other entries relating to my weird but true “coincidental” stories.
“Yesterday”: An Unexplained Occurence
and