JULY 2nd - It's Like a Switch



Imagine you’re in the dog days of the summer in the south. What’s that? You are in the dog days of summer in the south? Fair enough. But imagine it’s 1843. I have you there, don’t I? Cause it’s not 1843, and if you think it is, you, my friend, have been seriously abusing smelling salts or have the amazing ability to exist across multiple planes of time, which would basically make you Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen, except with the added ability to exist in the past, which incidentally is impossible because it opens up the possibility of paradoxes--I saw it on late night PBS. But I digress. We were setting a scene. 1843, July 2nd, Charleston, South Carolina. A powerful thunderstorm begins. There’s wind. Thunder. Rain. Wind. Alligators. Wait what? That’s right, I wrote alligators. Apparently a two foot gator was taken for a ride by the storm and dropped down on the corner of Wentworth and Anson, essentially making it rain an alligator. One E.L. Pinckney was responsible for breaking the news. Of course no one actually saw the alligator drop from the sky and land in the street, but there were witnesses that came face to face with the creature. It seems that all of them came to the logical conclusion that he must have fallen from the sky. I’m not one to believe that the media just fabricate stories, but I did see that Stephen Glass movie where Hayden Christensen played Stephen Glass so I have my eyes open. By the way, Hayden was much better as a smarmy, lying newsman than as the genesis of one of the greatest villains in movie history. I still don’t understand how he went from hot-headed, kind-of-a-spoiled-brat Anakin to Mass-Child-Murderer Anakin. Maybe he was like Sylvester Stallone in Over the Top when he turns his hat around and becomes a machine. Didn't see Hayden wearing a hat though. Damn. Thought I solved it. But getting back on point, I’m not accusing the good folk of Charleston, SC of making things up to go viral (the story was reprinted in New Orleans and New York), but I’m staying pretty skeptical here. But maybe, and I'm just spitballing here, the storm also brought some hallucinatory pathogen that has effects similar to peyote and dosed all the alligator seers. I’m not sure how common shared hallucinations are, but I’m pretty sure someone suffering from the effects of peyote is fairly open to suggestion. But then again, no one was doubting the alligator’s existence, so perhaps my peyote hypothesis is a bit hasty. Maybe an alligator really did fall from the sky. I mean it was in the in paper. And I found it on the interwebs. It has to be true. Right?

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