Hopping Over the Cracks in Reality
Cracker had taken to avoiding me at work, and that was fine. If he wanted to eat his bologna and cheese sammiches in the confines of his shitty Kia during lunch break, more power to him. Some folks preferred to eat accompanied by the music from their Spotify list rather than the snide remarks and laughter of a half dozen comedians posing as machinists and welders.
His latest cryptid video on YouTube garnered over a hundred views resulting in six comments, both records for Cracker’s Cryptids. Five of those comments came from eagle-eyed patriots who observed, correctly, that the blurry images of Bigfoot seemed to be wearing a commemorative 2023 issued Vietnam Veterans ball cap. And a pair of jorts pulled up as far as that medicine ball of a belly allowed. And, also, those were definitely blue and gold New Balance sneakers on his feet and sweat socks coming up just below his knobby kneecaps. The sixth comment remarked upon the uncanniness resemblance to a white Forest Whitaker the Polish Hammer harbored.
All in all, despite the triple digit views, it was a black eye for Cracker, and the controversy apparently affected his standings in the cryptid community, and, somehow, it was all my fault.
“I got disinvited to the South Carolina Cryptid Conference,” Cracker said when he finally controlled his emotions long enough to initiate a conversation with me in front of the snack machine.
“I don’t give a fuck.”
“Lyle Blackburn is gonna be the keynote speaker! If I could’ve scored an interview with him, it would’ve helped legitimize my YouTube channel. You set my cryptid dreams back five years, at least.”
“I’m just not sure how you could have mistaken my eighty-year-old, live-in, father-in-law for a cryptid. Especially after I told you it was Milt. Did you not hear him continually muttering how Coach Moore has nowhere enough talent on his roster this season to be in the running for another National Championship despite the boosters throwing good money after bad.”
“All right, number one, it was getting dark, okay? Shadows have always been known to play havoc on a cryptid hunter’s perception. That’s just accepted fact. Two, I’d just smashed like two Blue Hawaiian Monster energy drinks and I was jittery as hell. They’re delicious as all get out, but they’re hell on my nervous system. You should have stopped me after I drank the first one. And, furthermore, there’s absolutely no research backing up your claim that Bigfoot can’t be a college football fan.”
“I’m not refuting that. I’m just saying realistically speaking, a Bigfoot native to Northern Alabama would, in all likelihood, cheer for the Crimson Tide rather than Michigan. That’s all I’m saying.”
“I know it’s counterintuitive but let me say this before we close the subject forever. There’s been a rumor going around for quite some time that there’s a chupacabra out of New Mexico who lives and dies by the Toronto Maple Leafs, okay? Now, what would a cryptid outta the southwest desert know about Canadian hockey?”
“Well, you got me there.”
Cracker McCracken nodded his head, smugly.
“In a lot of ways,” Cracker said, “the mysteries of the world are being ground into paste and smeared all over the internet. I just want to position myself at the forefront of it. Is that too much to ask.”
“Indubitably.”
I thought about this last conversation with Cracker probably more than I should have. I’d like to believe in more than I’m presented with on a daily basis. That being an endless grinding cycle of manual labor, the endless overtime somehow married to the fear that the work will soon dissipate, and the factory will soon shut down leaving me unemployed and incapable of paying my bills. When Cracker presents a picture of a lizard person peering out from between some fallen branches in the woods, but it looks suspiciously like a box turtle photographed at a weird angle, I don’t want to be the one to tell the jackass he needs to quit squirting that CBD oil into his vape pen, or whatever the fuck these kids are doing to get their kicks this day and age. But I find myself being that guy. Cause I’m fifty years old, and the miracles have all run their course, leaving me deeply unimpressed with all of it.
My imagination is now limited to worst case scenarios and how they might affect my children, who are all grown now and discovering for themselves that all the Bigfoots of the world are usually half-demented eighty-year-olds confused as to why all their ninja movies can’t just be streaming on one service.
When I was a child coming up in the eighties, I was scared of everything. Demonic clowns, masked serial killers, nuclear holocaust, marauding mambas, all seemed plausible possibilities ushering in my annihilation. Every creak in the house’s floorboards was a wandering spirit angry at its sudden demise and looking to take its post-life aggression out on an anxiety-ridden Polack kid. Every lightning strike was sure to induce the tree outside my window to reach in and impale me on its skeletal finger branches.
I can’t remember the day that fear of monsters gave way to the low-key dread that I was somehow unlovable and destined for failure, that if I didn’t get my shit together, I’d end up living under a bridge and panhandling quarters outside the local IHOP. But they sure as shit did. The plausibility of a possessed doll biding its time under your bed carries little weight compared to the mortality of one’s parents and the certainty one day you will be alone in this world.
Financial ruin haunts my dreams, now. I don’t know a single person who wouldn’t be strangled out by a three-thousand-dollar car repair bill.
I drive to work twenty minutes every morning through the most rural back country Alabama roads you will find this side of the Wrong Turn film franchise. 4:15 in the morning, while the majority of the locals sleep, almost every morning, I’m making this drive. Often times, I’d wish I could see something otherworldly, magical, supernatural. Anything. The ethereal figure of a farmer’s wife drifting across a soy bean field where her house once stood three generations prior. The gnarled silhouette of a man become beast in the silvery light of a full moon. The jittery, dancing walk of a scarecrow given momentary autonomy to menace some dumbass kid who stole its special pitchfork. Fuck, man, I’d even settle for a discombobulated eighty-year-old, live-in, father-in-law wailing and gnashing his dentures at the porous nature of Michigan’s defensive line rather than the relentless nothingness, the monotonous groove of space and time moving me inexorably closer to the cancer, the heart disease, the aneurysm that will stop the wheel from spinning for me altogether.
Instead, I’m out here dodging deer, intent on fucking me over with three thousand dollars’ worth of collision repair.
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
