One of those moments when clouds cast shadows over the valley while the mountain remains sunlit. It looks so surreal when that happens. (This picture doesn’t really do it justice.)
Roanoke, Virginia.
A truly bizarre thing happened to me this afternoon. I was walking through a parking lot and smelled smoke — then discovered it emanating up from the the dried mulch in one of those divider islands that separate the sections of the parking lot.
I promptly stomped on it — but it wasn’t enough. The first tiny triangle of flame flickered into life at my feet.
I nearly panicked, then successfully stomped out the nascent fire — and then I tore into the mulch bed looking for any more signs of it. Then I just hovered and stomped for a while just to make sure. I must have looked like a madman to other people in the parking lot. (And there were several.) Or maybe like someone playacting Godzilla.
Life is weird. The fire’s genesis is a mystery. (I was expecting to find a cigarette butt, but there were none to be found.) Maybe it was ashes from a cigarette smoked by someone who’d already departed the lot?
This is the first time I’ve seen one in the wild.
If you’re my kind of weird, then you immediately thought of the Landmaster vehicle from 1977’s “Damnation Alley.”
Hey, gang — I got my first movie review published! Thanks so much to Managing Editor Sand Pilarski at The Piker Press for letting me share my take on Alex Garland’s “Civil War” (2024).