Morty, the Undead Lobster
Post by: Diesel on March 31st, 2008 | File Under UncategorizedI'm still pretty busy with work, so all I can offer you today is this little anecdote from my youth. On the plus side, I think I've convinced Grundir to come out of hiding and fill in for me on Wednesday. I think he's up to something. Anyway, here's the story of Morty the undead lobster. Enjoy.
For simple cheap entertainment, few activities can top messing with drunk people.
I’ve never been a big drinker, and in college my smartass friends and I used to amuse ourselves by going to parties and talking over the heads of our inebriated fellows. I guess it made us feel superior, making fun of people to their faces without them realizing what we were doing. Kind of a stupid way to entertain yourself when it comes down to it, but at least you don’t end the evening puking in some stranger’s wastebasket.
My all time favorite experience of garnering amusement at the expense of drunken partiers happened a few years back, when I went on a snorkeling trip with a college friend in Florida. After a few days of swimming and snorkeling, we drove down to Key West on Labor Day weekend.
Key West is a strange place any day of the year, and on Labor Day it’s like a miniature Mardi Gras. Throngs of drunks fill the streets, drinking and smoking God-knows-what and generally wreaking havoc. My friend and I found a nice restaurant where we could get some steak and lobster and enjoy a few beers. We were seated in a crowded patio area, right up against a picket fence that ran along the sidewalk of the main avenue through town. The drunken throngs milled past only inches from our table, which was a cheap plastic thing with a half-dollar-sized hole in the middle where an umbrella could be placed.
My friend, whom I’ll call X, ordered the lobster. Part of the fun of getting a lobster is, of course, moving its little claws and antennae about and pretending to make it talk. Hi there, I’m Morty the Lobster! How you doin’? That sort of thing.
X discovered that if he put his fork under the table and stuck it up through the umbrella hole, he could, with just a slight movement of his wrist, make the lobster’s antenna wave wildly. Seeing the potential for entertainment in the situation, he situated Morty so that from the street it was impossible to see the hole in the table.
We sat there, sipping our beers and chatting as people milled past. Suddenly the dead lobster’s antenna jerked spastically to life.
Two young women, having seen the antenna twitch, stopped abruptly at our table. “Oh my god, did you see that?” One of them said. “Your lobster moved!”
By this time X had gracefully pulled his hand out from under the table, and sat there with both hands in view, regarding the women skeptically. “I don’t think so,” he said.
“Seriously, I saw it move.”
X poked at the lobster, which had clearly been boiled and mostly eaten. It didn’t move.
“You ladies been drinking?” I asked.
They erupted in nervous giggles.
“You must have imagined it,” X said.
They kept eyeing poor dead Morty, expecting at any moment that he would spring to life, but he never did. He just lay there, lifeless, in a pool of butter. Eventually they gave up, shaking their heads. “I could have sworn….”
After a few minutes we tried it again, hooking another victim. And another. And another. We must have sat there for close to two hours, messing with the heads of dozens of befuddled partiers. We were merciless, insisting that there was absolutely no way they had seen what they claimed to have seen. We never let on, and nobody ever figured it out.
The funniest thing was how differently men reacted from women. Usually only one person in a group would notice the lobster’s unnatural movement, so the noticer could take the safe option by pretending not to have seen anything, or they could risk being embarrassed in front of the group by claiming to have seen a dead lobster move.
The women, God bless ‘em, generally did a double-take and then stopped dead in their tracks while they tried to sort out the mystery of the undead lobster. I don’t know if they were oblivious to the fact that they were about to be mortified (ha!), or if they just didn’t care as much about being embarrassed, or if they were just naturally more curious than the men.
The men, on the other hand, tended to do a double-take, maybe slow down for a second – and then keep right on walking. Were they less gullible than the women? Did they assume that it was some kind of prank? Maybe, but that’s not the impression I got. To me, it looked like they were just as stunned as the women, but they were damned if they were going to claim to have seen an undead lobster in front of their drinking buddies.
You couldn’t help but admire the women (and occasional man) who stood there insisting in the face of logic and our stubborn and condescending denials that they had seen a dead lobster move. I could tell that some of them walked away still convinced of the reality of what they had seen. Maybe some of them still secretly ponder the day they saw the undead lobster of Key West.
Drunk people are fun.
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If I keep posting later and later in the day, eventually I'll be posting really early the next day, so you have that to look forward to.
On top of all that, I continue to have car troubles. I picked up my car from the shop yesterday, drove a mile and a half in the direction of Mountain View, and then stalled by the side of the road. Evidently my alternator is bad – which is precisely what, despite having the mechanical aptitude of a seven year old girl, I suspected the 
It seems as if every time I darken this blog with my ominous visage, I must first apologize for my long absence. So once again, flesh-bags, I must express my regret that I could not enlighten and terrify you sooner.