Does your brain ever do that thing where it just completely goes off on one, usually about something so random or obscure or plain dull that you’re left wondering how on earth you managed to get on that train of thought, let alone stay on it for so long? No? Ok, well it usually happens to me when I’m particularly tired and my brain’s ability to process anything is a little lower than usual, but for some reason it’s unable to shut down so it just keeps bumbling along, trying to keep itself entertained or something. I don’t know. It’s like it wants to stop but can’t be bothered to hit the off switch so it carries on, starting to sound more and more like one of those myriad battery-operated toys which make a noise of some kind that just start to gradually slow down, decreasing in pitch and speed until the sound produced isn’t really recognisable, just a kind of jerky drone. It’s kind of pathetic.
A recent brain fail of mine as I was lying in bed trying to sleep, ended up with my brain having run on for about half an hour going on about car parks. I mean seriously, car parks? In fairness, I was pretty tired - in the past 48 hours I'd travelled to London and back, had a job interview, and then worked a 7 hour bar shift that finished at 02.00, so I should give my brain some slack for its lameitude, but still. Car parks?
It was randomly fixated on a thought I'd had whilst in a car park in a city I was visiting a little while back - I'd had one of those horrid flash-moments of disorientation because I knew I wasn't in the city where I live, but my surroundings seemed exactly identical to places at home. And then I'd been like 'duh, you're on a car park roof top, how different can they be?' It was this particular exceedingly uninteresting thought which somehow managed to occupy my brain for a full thirty minutes. This is why I call it a brain fail. It's like my brain thought it had found some really deep and meaningful metaphor about things being so very similar whilst being minutely different. This is definitely a case of over-processing.
It's also just very flawed because a few months ago my mother and I had a car park experience like no other (and yes this post just got to the exciting part - you must have wondered if there was going to be one in a post predominantly about car parks). We did that foolish thing of taking a car to the city centre in the evening (en route to the cinema, I think we saw Jane Eyre which was of course glorious), and then been frustrated by the lack of affordable parking. In the end we had to pay MILLIONS of monies to park because we wasted so much time driving around trying to find free parking that we had to park in the shopping centre car park by the cinema in order to not miss the film. Now this car park was evil. I'm serious, it was genuinely in-and-of-itself malevolent.
It was one of those underground ones which are always a bit creepy anyway, especially when there are only about two cars down there in all of that vast, cavernous space. Plus we couldn’t find any pedestrian exits so we had to walk back up the ramp that we drove down and hope no-one came to run us over. So at this stage it was just ‘mildly creepy’, it could even have gotten away with just ‘atmospheric’. It was when we came back, at 22.30 or whatever time the film finished that it started acting out on us.
First was the adventure in finding the car. Both mum and I had thought that we'd parked in the first section over to the left, so when we couldn't find our little Fiesta there it was a little unsettling. All was soon well though, because we have one of those keys that you can press a button on and it unlocks the car, causing the indicators to flash at you - very useful for finding cars in cavernous dark car parks (though I’m not sure that’s the designated purpose of these flashy lights… meh). So we thought we were ok: we'd found the car, ergo safety.
But no. I mentioned that this car park was actively malevolent; it kept us in there for a long time. We drove off, following the exit signs as normal people would, but the exit just didn't appear. Now, in a car park with only a handful of cars throughout its halls, it's quite easy to tell when you're in a place you were in only five minutes ago, because you go past that exact same wonkily parked Corsa and that other green car that you saw back then. So either there's some secret society that leaves messages for it's members by parking their cars in particular patterns or you're going in circles. I'm fairly certain that the secret society thing isn't true, so that means that we were going in circles despite having followed the exit signs as though our lives depended on it. Evil-car-park was directing us in circles.
Mum, isn't really one for panic but I, with my apparently overdeveloped imagination, was all 'Aaaahh, this is totally and utterly a scene from a horror movie! Aaaaah!!' So my eyes were getting wider and wider; the feeling of creepy was ever-increasing; I couldn't stop looking around wildly and everything was just fever-pitched.
And then we found the exit.
Talk about anti-climactic. I mean, yeah I was relieved and felt a little sheepish (as I should, plus yay for use of the word 'sheepish'), but at the same time it was disappointing. I think I'm going to at least partially lay the blame for my temporary insanity on having just seen Jane Eyre and witnessed the creepy of Bertha Mason, but there's definitely a large-ish part of me that says the car park itself is just evil. Seriously.
It was randomly fixated on a thought I'd had whilst in a car park in a city I was visiting a little while back - I'd had one of those horrid flash-moments of disorientation because I knew I wasn't in the city where I live, but my surroundings seemed exactly identical to places at home. And then I'd been like 'duh, you're on a car park roof top, how different can they be?' It was this particular exceedingly uninteresting thought which somehow managed to occupy my brain for a full thirty minutes. This is why I call it a brain fail. It's like my brain thought it had found some really deep and meaningful metaphor about things being so very similar whilst being minutely different. This is definitely a case of over-processing.
It's also just very flawed because a few months ago my mother and I had a car park experience like no other (and yes this post just got to the exciting part - you must have wondered if there was going to be one in a post predominantly about car parks). We did that foolish thing of taking a car to the city centre in the evening (en route to the cinema, I think we saw Jane Eyre which was of course glorious), and then been frustrated by the lack of affordable parking. In the end we had to pay MILLIONS of monies to park because we wasted so much time driving around trying to find free parking that we had to park in the shopping centre car park by the cinema in order to not miss the film. Now this car park was evil. I'm serious, it was genuinely in-and-of-itself malevolent.
It was one of those underground ones which are always a bit creepy anyway, especially when there are only about two cars down there in all of that vast, cavernous space. Plus we couldn’t find any pedestrian exits so we had to walk back up the ramp that we drove down and hope no-one came to run us over. So at this stage it was just ‘mildly creepy’, it could even have gotten away with just ‘atmospheric’. It was when we came back, at 22.30 or whatever time the film finished that it started acting out on us.
First was the adventure in finding the car. Both mum and I had thought that we'd parked in the first section over to the left, so when we couldn't find our little Fiesta there it was a little unsettling. All was soon well though, because we have one of those keys that you can press a button on and it unlocks the car, causing the indicators to flash at you - very useful for finding cars in cavernous dark car parks (though I’m not sure that’s the designated purpose of these flashy lights… meh). So we thought we were ok: we'd found the car, ergo safety.
But no. I mentioned that this car park was actively malevolent; it kept us in there for a long time. We drove off, following the exit signs as normal people would, but the exit just didn't appear. Now, in a car park with only a handful of cars throughout its halls, it's quite easy to tell when you're in a place you were in only five minutes ago, because you go past that exact same wonkily parked Corsa and that other green car that you saw back then. So either there's some secret society that leaves messages for it's members by parking their cars in particular patterns or you're going in circles. I'm fairly certain that the secret society thing isn't true, so that means that we were going in circles despite having followed the exit signs as though our lives depended on it. Evil-car-park was directing us in circles.
Mum, isn't really one for panic but I, with my apparently overdeveloped imagination, was all 'Aaaahh, this is totally and utterly a scene from a horror movie! Aaaaah!!' So my eyes were getting wider and wider; the feeling of creepy was ever-increasing; I couldn't stop looking around wildly and everything was just fever-pitched.
And then we found the exit.
Talk about anti-climactic. I mean, yeah I was relieved and felt a little sheepish (as I should, plus yay for use of the word 'sheepish'), but at the same time it was disappointing. I think I'm going to at least partially lay the blame for my temporary insanity on having just seen Jane Eyre and witnessed the creepy of Bertha Mason, but there's definitely a large-ish part of me that says the car park itself is just evil. Seriously.
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