Who Carries a Shrunken Head?

Part of the fun for this vacation for DM and I is to get out and take pictures. We started by taking some at the pizza place on Saturday night. I got a few at karaoke on Sunday. Today, DM and I went to the oil change place to have my car freshened up before the trip up north tomorrow (new oil, tire rotation, and refills of the regular fluids). After that, we picked up my fried harddrive from the mega electronics retailor (who was unable to recover anything*), and then it was off to my dad's for a bit.

After my dad's, DM and I decided to head to the Mississippi River. There is a nice park along the river in Fridley. It is a place I've gone at least 50 times over the years and always left feeling relaxed. My family took our dogs there for playtime in the river. Anytime our family had visitors from the Post Soviet states, we would take them to this spot to see the Mighty Mississippi. I love going down to this spot and listening to relaxing music, writing in my notebook, and taking pictures. With a vacation devoted to photography in mind, I brought DM down to the river to check out the scene.

What we have both realized since is that our adventures together are always stranger than our adventures alone. We've both met interesting characters in our lives, but none are quite as interesting as the ones that find us when we are together. Wild nights happen when we go out. We have such stories as "How Did I End Up on a Date with Pete?" and "The Best Night of Karaoke Ever!" And now, we can sit around a laugh about, "Who Carries a Shrunken Head?!?"

As we approached the landing, there was a man walking away from the river. No biggie, right? Wrong. He stops us and notices our cameras. Here is the beginning of the dialogue (with our thoughts in italics).

SHG (you're get it in a minute): Taking pictures?
B (me): Uh, yes.
SHG: Want to take a picture of something cool?
B & D (DM): *Quiet, stalling* Oh dear Lord, please, please DO NOT whip out your member.
B: Um...
SHG: It's museum cool.
B & D: Uh...
SHG: It's a shrunken head!
B & D: Oh, thank God it's not perverted. Oh, wait, this is just weird.

He proceeds to show us the shrunken head (and yes, we did take pictures - for proof for this post and to hopefully keep the crazy man settled so he didn't try to kill us.) He started talking in a stream of consciousness about politics, religion, terrorism, 9/11, his son, his father, his uncle (who may or may not have played the keyboard for the Monkees), how we needed to document the conversation as proof that he was there, how he was throwing hair from the shrunken head into the river, a tree, Iraq, Iran, his name and it's origin, George Bush Sr. and how he was the head of the CIA, and how he needed to make a demonstration. We were hoping that we were not part of that demonstration.

After twenty minutes, he finally wandered away. He only returned once to talk about this tree that is rather cool looking and then he wandered away again. There were no other cars and I'm pretty sure he walked quite a distance to get to this spot. We're supposed to look him up, but I don't think that's going to happen. Ever. He was in his fifties and his manner of speaking was only slightly coherent. He showed no signs of alcohol or drug use, but his composure suggested a disorder that abnormal psych students may study.

But honestly, who carries a shrunken head? And who does it in a baseball cap? See:



Dana took these:


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*Good news however. I did lose some Word files and about a 50 pictures, but my music files were not lost. I was able to recover 3,000 songs (which some were backed up) by acquiring a software program that pulled my songs from my iPod to my laptop. Yeah! I HEART Bryan McDonald for telling me about this wonderful piece of technology.