my wife picked me up from work and we headed straight to my neighborhood park so my two kids could play for a while before dinner. so, I sit on the bench, watch my kids do some stuff, pretend to be impressed, you know, the usual park stuff.

anyway, I'm watching my kids and I look over and on the other side of the little playground there's some inbred looking family playing with pool noodles. there's no pool anywhere nearby, they're not wearing swim gear (they were mostly wearing rags, from what I could tell), they're just running around hitting each other with pool noodles and using a lot of fecal epithets, from what I can tell. no big deal, they just must be poor and literally the only thing these little vitamin d deficient monsters have to play with is some pool noodles. but they were all so weird looking. the dad took the cake. okay, first imagine a person, a vaguely human creature wearing some XXXL free t shirt, and that t shirt is covered in filth, like there's a whole layer of paste that resembles cheeto dust mixed with bacon grease that has been carefully spread to cover the entire front of the t shirt. then, the same creature is wearing tiny little cut off jean booty shorts. now imagine that the creature wearing that getup looks like john belushi had a baby with sasquatch and then dropped that baby on its head during a coke-up. that's what the dad looked like. the kids looked like mini me versions of the dad. no, not like miniature normal person versions of their hideous wretch of a dad, like the dad had given birth to belushi sasquatch offspring that were also dwarves with rickets and scurvy. then shaved them below the forehead.

so, I'm watching this misbegotten family gawp around the playground like extras from a B movie about inbred cannibals, and then suddenly it gets even weirder. some 10 year old stranger kid who has been sitting on a bench on the other side of the park watching them (maybe with the same morbid curiosity that had struck me) just stands up and runs toward them to join in whatever pool noodle game they're playing. except this kid is shirtless and shoeless, so there's that part too, which just adds to the whole twilight zone feel of this scenario. the kid runs over yelling and screaming and trying to play their game when harry and the hendersons' ugly cousin turns and just thwaps the kid right across the face with his pool noodle, like full on right square in the mouth. you can hear the "pop" across the park. IT GOT WEIRDER. huckleberry finn proceeds to go completely berserk and leaps on the elephantine quasimodo's back like an animal and just starts attacking him. it started to look like that scene from the princess bride where andre the giant is desperately trying to get out of wesley's choke hold until mutant belushi fezzik finally grabs the kid and flings him halfway across the park onto his back, at which point the little urchin screams, cries, and tears off away home.

at this point, before I even have time to react (I mean, all this happens in a matter of a few seconds, of course), ginger yeti is gathering his miscreant brood and their grubby pool noodles and ushering them out of the playground toward what looked like something resembling a 200 year old astro van.

anyway, there's really no point to this story. I just thought it was super weird.