Rainy day redux vol. four: Wear it Well

From 2006 through 2009, I was a regular pop culture columnist for the now defunct Cleveland Free Times. The following "Rainy Day Woman" column ran on Sept. 9, 2007. 

An Open Letter to the Person who Stole my Hat

You shitbag.

Go ahead and say I asked for it, that this is what I get for leaving the windows of my Mini Cooper open in the Famous Footwear parking lot. Were you teaching me a lesson by reaching in and grabbing my red and white bucket hat from the driver's seat headrest?

Erin O'Brien and hat in Mini Cooper

The Mini and I don't ask for much. We don't take more than we need. The hat looked good on me and when I wasn't wearing it, it looked good on the Mini. There was even a tiny Mini Cooper pin on it.

Who steals a floppy hat that you couldn't sell for a half-dollar at a garage sale? Did you take it just to be mean? You didn't take anything else, not the stack of CDs or the $5 in the ashtray. Nope, just the hat. Too bad it wasn't full of lice.

I hope that hat makes your coffee cold and your ice cream hot. I hope you have a squeaky little dick or saggy boobies or an embarrassing body odor problem. I hope that hat brings you bad luck. I hope...

Wait.

Maybe that's not quite right. No, it's not; it's not right at all. That's not who I am or who I want to be. Let me try this again. Let me take it from the top.

Erin O'Brien and hat, 2005

Here's a secret: I believe in magic. Not the rabbit-out-of-the-hat sort or the kind that compels skinny weird chicks with black hair to do chants and buy vials of patchouli-scented oil, but the sort that really delivers. My magic says if you don't clutch your money too tightly, you'll always have enough. It makes your cat purr and your dog's leg pump the air when you scratch his belly.

There is this shitty holiday cartoon Frosty the Snowman. The animation isn't very good and the music is irritating, but just five minutes ago, when I was typing about a squeaky little dick, some of that magic I'm talking about wafted over me and made me think of that cartoon. I won't go over the whole plot, but it's about a shitbag magician who can't do any magic and probably went around taking worthless stuff out of Mini Coopers when he wasn't failing at doing shitty magic. One day he throws his magician's hat away and it blows in the wind and lands on this dorky snowman. The effing snowman comes to life and dances around and makes all the kids happy.

You've got a hat and I believe in magic, so what the hell, why not try it? Go ahead, put the Mini Cooper hat on. Think of it as taking the "e" off of "hate." Presto! You're left with a hat. Don't be shy. Slap it on. I'll wait right here.

Anything happen?

Did your hair grow 2 feet long? Did you instantaneously become ticklish? Did you get the urge to sit cross-legged? Or blast Iggy Pop and dance madly backwards? So do it.

Do all of it.

Look at the grocery clerk's name tag and say, "Clara is a wonderful name." Why not? It's true. Smile at the crunchy old bus driver. I promise he will smile back. Abracadabra! He is beautiful. Gimme 50 cents and I'll show you how to make it rain M&M's.

No, no, don't take the hat off now. You're just getting started. Take a big breath, fill your lungs all the way up. Then close your eyes and let it out as you open those peepers slowly. It's not your imagination. Euclid Heights Boulevard really is a rainbow. Coventry is a pot of gold. The old shoeshine man is Frank Sinatra and the lunch waitress is Bettie Page. Of course those are real diamonds sparkling atop Lake Erie in the sunlight. Why don't they sink, you ask? It's the magic, you doof!

Calling you doof is more fun than calling you shitbag.

The falafel sandwich you're eating as you walk down West 25th Street tastes like the best thing you ever ate because it is the best thing you ever ate. And even though that guy sitting on the step can't play a tune to save his life, drop the change and crumpled-up bills from your front pocket into his guitar case. Now turn the other cheek, baby, and I'll give you a kiss.

I can't stop laughing either.

Blow out all the candles or find a glittering star. Make a wish. But the flickering flame and star are just for show. The power is in the wish.

What? You already knew that? Then the mojo is really smokin'.

Hey. I've changed my mind about the whole thing. Go ahead and keep the hat. When you're ready (don't worry, you'll know when you're ready), slip it over your driver's seat headrest. Leave all the car windows open while you go buy a new pair of shoes. Maybe you'll bring a snowman to life in Cleveland in September.

I just did.

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And now for a little gift

Whether you do it now or after Cindy Loo Who has eaten all her Who Pudding and gone to bed, find some way to carve 25 minutes out of the holiday whirlwind and watch this:



I love how Sunny Williams floats around the International Space Station--one of our most advanced accomplishments as a people--describing things such as the mechanics of going "number one" and "number two" in space. I love the way the Station is as messy as my office. I love the way her hair is standing straight up like crazy halo and the way she giggles. I love the way this tough brilliant astronaut is dressed like a camp counselor who forgot to put on her sneakers. I love the way she makes me feel welcome inside something I never could have imagined: a tiny Soyuz TMA-05M spacecraft.

Most of all, I love the way Sunny delivers that most elusive of gifts at a time we need it the most: a healthy dose of belief in humanity.

Merry, merry.

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~~with special thanks to Clair and her Gram~~

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Enchanted on the Strip

Dazzling street performers in front of the Venetian Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip, Dec. 8, 2012.

View full resolution images here.

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Bad Universe indeed

This strange rock landed in my mailbox in July 2007. The following text accompanied it:

On February 12, 1947, a chunk of nickel-iron the size of a minivan came screaming in from the north traveling at nearly 15 kilometers per second--54,000 kilometers per hour. Trailing smoke and flame, the meteoroid underwent vast pressure as it rammed through our thick atmosphere. At a very high altitude it began to break up from the force.

The pieces hit the ground and spread out over a large area. Named after the area they fell, thousands of Sikhote-Alin (sick-OH-tee uh-LEEN) meteorites have been found.

What you are holding in your hand is a piece of metal that was once deep within the core of a planetary-sized body that was destroyed by the impact of another planet-sized body 4 billion years ago. It orbited the Sun, relatively untouched all that time, until that fateful day in 1947. It's a piece of outer space brought to Earth in a fiery, violent decent.

And now it is yours. Enjoy.

Enchantment rained over me. I inhaled, traced the line of my lips with the meteor fragment. I clutched it in my hand and felt it thrum. I wore the fragment around my neck for awhile, but found it too overwhelming. Now it hangs from a window crank to the right of my desk. Talk about your perspective ...

The man who delivered unto me four billion years of daily encouragement is one Phil Plait, whose new TV show Phil Plait's Bad Universe will premiere this Sunday at 10 p.m. on the Discovery Channel.

I am beside myself with joy over this.



Sunday night shall come, as have the four billion years before it. I'll sit here in the west with my impossible shard from Phil's universe. I'll nod to the priest in the north, the ghost in the south, and to the jester in the east. Then I'll wink to all of them, click a tiny button and watch as my buddy Phil beams in from the west and into my family room.

I believe in magic.

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