So you know how when you get into a repetitive kind of thing even when you get bored you can't stop because it's almost trance-like? Yeah. I'm stuck on my MM email right now. I've winnowed down 76 pages of email to 45.

Can't. Stop.

I found two emails that spark great stories for the possible future memoirs. Here's one of them.

"Hi, Isobel,


How would you like to ride a flaming, flying dragon?

It would be done using green screen techniques and a virtual reality dragon model.

There's more...!

Please give me a telephone call < > so we can discuss photoshoot ideas and details.

I would prefer to speak with you direstly rather than through impersonal and inefficient computer communications.


Thanks a bunch,

*name*"

So, dutiful model that I am, and intrigued by the "flying flaming dragon" idea (nerd) I called him.

Oh.
My.
God.

You know how when someone is a little out there or kind of weird we're like, "oh man, he was crazy" and we don't really mean it? Yeah. This guy was actually, legitimately crazy...and coming from me who has had a serious mental disorder since 19 or 20, that means a LOT.

The call starts out fairly normal, but within a few sentences I realized that this guy was not of this planet any more. It was so fascinating to see THIS level of crazy from a rational-sounding person who was allowed access to technology like the internet and a telephone. For the rest of the phone call and the rest of the week I found myself thinking that if he had revealed that he was really from Earth 3 and not our Earth 1 that would have made sense.

Now, I am a scientific person, but I'm not all up on the most recent scientific breakthroughs, so when he started telling me (using very real, actual scientific words) about the latest in VR technology it sounded interesting and I listened. I asked him some very pointed questions because the items and technology he was talking about weren't commercially available (at that time) and I wondered how he could have been using them. He told me that he was a physicist and computer engineer who had retired and was now working on computer and VR stuff. This also made sense. I asked him what he'd worked on in his career (because I LOVE physics), and he started talking about how he worked on some regular physics stuff, some chaos theory stuff, satellite tech and the he started talking about how he worked on some new scientific breakthroughs .....that haven't been made yet.

His terminology and lingo were all correct, but he was talking about breakthroughs that we're years away from making. The items that he was telling me he was using to make his photos have just now been released, two years later. This guy was talking about things that wouldn't happen for years but using then-current events for his examples, like finding Saddam with the satellite that he'd been a part of programing. My own mental disorder reacted to his by going, "well clearly this all makes sense because we are talking to someone from the future." and so I stayed on the phone with this lunatic for HOURS chatting idly about breakthroughs in science from the future as though we were simply 7 years or so ahead.

I am not a phone person, so every 20 minutes or so I would try to get off the phone and he would say something else that would twerk me back into the conversation. It was like being in the black hole of crazy. A few times I could hear a female voice in the background. She sounded worried and was clearly begging him to get off the phone. In the end he decided that he would hire me for several days to create this dragon shoot of his for which he would pay me a generous sum of money. I never heard from him again....and I'm fairly sure that I'm glad that I haven't.

Do you want to know something REALLY weird? He's still online. Still active as a photographer. He has some pretty cool "hot girls in nature" photos, but no flying, flaming dragons, and all the models look sort of worried.