Wednesday, January 10, 2018

Things That Make You Go Hmmmm...WTF?

Audience participation time!

I'm going to tell you a true WTF story from my very own life. If you like it, offer up your own in the comments, and in a follow-up post I'll rate them for WTFness. OK?

Exactly.

Here goes.

From 1990-1991, during the last year of Jeffrey Dahmer's infamous killing spree in Milwaukee, I lived about a mile and a half from the apartment where he carried out his deeds - basically a straight shot up 27th Street across the viaduct. At one point he picked up a future victim at a bus stop near Marquette University, where my ex was attending graduate school - very likely the same bus stop where Ex stood every day to catch the bus home.


At least Dahmer kept his freezer full of bones neat and tidy.
I can't even find a bag of corn in mine.

Ol' Jeffrey was finally arrested about a month before we moved back to Texas. Last year Precocious Daughter and I visited Milwaukee - my first time back since 1991. I didn't take her to see the vacant lot that used to be his apartment building before they tore it down. It would have felt creepy.

So there's my WTF-brush-with-infamy anecdote.

Let's hear yours.

3 comments:

  1. Let's see.

    I've watched actual literal terrorists in action.

    I've faced down a mob.

    I've fallen into a river twice in five minutes.

    I've seen live maggots bring removed from the scalp of someone with pemphigus vulgaris.

    Once, when I was in college, a friend was informed that his father was deathly ill and not expected to survive. The train back home was cancelled that very day for done emergency. So with great difficulty he bought an air ticket and flew back. The plane crashed and everyone was killed. His father recovered and lived another twenty years.

    That's all I can manage on the spur of the moment.

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  2. I believe Bill just did the comment-section equivalent of a well-deserved mic-drop and his experiences remind me of a story a friend of mine told me about the time he was in a train station and saw someone get beaten to death by a mob. And my first response to stories like that is always, that’s horrible, but my second response is always an incredibly inappropriate, Why can’t I see stuff like that?, but on the bright side feeling that way is about as WTF as you can get.

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  3. I'm sure I have some, but I tend to save them for my blog when I think of them.

    The thing is, I stumble on so many weird things at work when I can't really react that sometimes, days later, I think, "Oh, I forgot to think about that later. I almost forgot it at all!"

    I've never faced down a mob, though.

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You're thinking it, you may as well type it. The only comments you'll regret are the ones you don't leave. Also, replies to threads make puppies grow big and strong.