Your Logic Does Not at All Resemble Our Earth Logic

[scioscribe]

I'm trying to think of some of the most banally baffling lines I've come across in fiction, lines where the component parts are all seemingly normal but just come together in a way that makes you think you and the author live on different planets.

My all-time favorite is "Rats scurried over his hands and face, but he ignored them." No, he didn't. Not in my world, buddy. Maybe if he were a professional stuntman or rat trainer, but otherwise, I don't care how stressed you are, you're paying at least a little bit of attention to rats crawling across your face.

What made me think of this was recently encountering "Cops go through girlfriends like veal cutlets." My attention was immediately derailed by trying to figure out how many veal cutlets these people are going through. More than I am, presumably. I desperately needed follow-up on this, maybe with a series of thinkpiece articles. Veal Parmesan: Surprising Popular with Cops?

EDIT: Rachel reminded me of another gem: "...I, who had refused for years to let the husband in Paris realize his lifelong dream of photographing a scorpion in my vagina."

Comments

[rattfan]

Re the rats scurrying over one's face and being ignored. Hm. As a longtime rat owner, in my experience they never just scurry, they always stop and nibble. There's always one with an eyebrow fetish. [Back to normal programming now]

[scioscribe]

Then he definitely shouldn't have been ignoring them1 (Though now I'm contemplating an alternative to getting my eyebrows waxed.)

[rattfan]

It's like stabbing yourself with pins all along your eyebrows :-) Nobody can ignore that.