STORY TIME! I hope this fond memory of mine with entertain you in your sick time!
Okay so there used to be this tv show on (Animal Planet??) about Sasquatch hunters and my friends and I were in 8th grade and thought this was the funniest thing ever. So we never missed an episode of these nuts running around claiming that heat maps of deer in the night were actually bigfoot. My friend's birthday rolls around and her parents decide to give her an "adventure" instead of a gift. Her dad finds some guy who lives two hours away from us who claimed that in the early 80's, he saw bigfoot while camping with his friends down the street from him house. So her family drives us to this guy's house and my two friends and I are like what the the hell is this? We pull up and this guys house is a literal dump. I specifically remember these stolen looking horses that looked like they had been ripped out of a merry-go-round and dumped on this guy's front porch. Trash, rotting furniture, and general shit are lining this guy's porch and my friends and I gave each other the most unreal look and decided that we wanted to go home. In that moment of my life, I knew that I was going to die. My life had flashed before my eyes and I KNEW that we were pretty much dying together. Her parents insisted we go, and we did. They came in with us and we met this guy whose name I don't remember. This guy was so fucking wacky. He was some like 55 year old guy and we were his first pay day in 25 years.
We walked into his sitting room and the air was thick and so smokey that you can hardly see the next room over. The place fucking reeks of cigarette and the first thing he does is firmly ask my friend's father, a non-smoker, not to smoke in his house, because he "hates the scent of cigarette". He invites us to sit down on the dusty sofas and we all decline. The walls of this room were lined with VELVET wallpaper and framed newspaper articles from 30 years ago. There was a desk and no computer. He made it clear that he did not believe in computers. This guy went on about his glory days and his old investigator job and all of his fucking friends. After he mentioned any of his old friends he would say, "and I investigated that guy, he turned out to be a bad man". He went through all of his old friends and said this for everyone. What the fuck? I don't know. The guy kept talking and talking and talking. He pulled out fucking photo albums and told us stories about nothing. At one point, his elderly mom walked out of the smoke to say hi. We pieced together that it was her house. She said hello and as she walked away she muttered, "He's been very excited for today, he couldn't wait to take you all to the site". We all shuttered. I squeezed my friend's hand. What serial killer doesn't live with his mom? One of the frames on his wall was HUGE and had a giant brown blob that looked like it was colored in with brown marker and he beamed with excitement when my friend asked what is was. For an interview, "I drew this myself. It's Sasquatch". One of my favorite points was when he told us that he got interviewed by the local newspaper about 20 years ago and they were in his bedroom, which is apparently covered in pictures of female body builders. He chuckled at his own memory, and "the journalist made note of it". "That's why I'm single" he said, "I only find female body builders attractive" and he waved a framed picture of a woman from a magazine in my face. We stood there for an hour and fucking fifteen minutes as this nutcase talked about his entire life, in detail, and his obsession with Sasquatch. I could go on forever, but anyways, we go outside.
My friends and I held hands and this guy walks us down his street and into the woods, and for some reason, he was dressed in explorer clothes from his the tip of his fedora to his shoes. He walked ahead of us with my friend's dad and my friends and I were walking with her mom and giving glares. There was some sort of small pond in these woods and this guy walked us all around it to show us where he was camping and where bigfoot stood. On the way back, the squatch hunter and my friend's dad were far ahead of us. The was a rather large branch on my right and I walked straight into in, which made a pretty deep scrape on my leg, and I fell down with a thump. This fucking guy WHIPS his head around and he yells "BIGFOOT" and there is just me laying on the ground with bloody leg. He is so utterly disappointed that all he found was a bleeding 14 year old that he just turns around and keeps walking. My friends help me up and we keep walking. When we get back to the guy's house, he invites us in but we decline. The moment we got in the car, we all let out a sigh of relief. I have no fucking clue how we made it out of that guy's house alive. Sorry that was so long. It probably would actually be funny if I got to tell you in person. I hope you feel better soon!
This is us before we walked around the pond. We were also all in middle school.
HOPE YOU FEEL BETTER OP