Blue As Omega Man

There are a couple of old sci-fi movies out there based on a short story by Richard Mathieson from the Fifties dealing with a guy who survives some sort of plague or chemical war and finds himself the last "normal" human on earth. Vincent Price and the the great scene-chewer himself, Chuck Heston, took turns playing this guy who finds that everyone else, that's still sort of alive, have been turned into creatures that sleep during the day and only come out at night. Our hero is the only one with immunity from the disease and somehow feels compelled to go out during the daytime to dispatch the mutants in various and sundry ways (wooden stakes, fire, bullets, etc.). In the original story and the Vincent Price movie version, the lonely guy begins to realize that HE'S the stuff of nightmares for the new inhabitants of the Earth, their boogeyman, their monster-in-the-closet to scare mutant kiddies for all time to come as the mutants catch up to him one night when he gets sloppy.

There might be a good reason why I've always liked the story and the two movies ("Last Man on Earth", I believe, was the Price version; "Omega Man" was Heston's), the sense that maybe I'm the only one who thinks the way I do, who sees the world through my particular set of lenses. It might actually explain a lot about my life, why I have such a fascination with wondering how I'm perceived by others and why I seem to so easily offend folks that I deal with, both on the business and the personal level. Maybe I'M the mutant, the one who has a different take on things than everyone else; perhaps my ideas and views are the ones out of touch with the mainstream.

Heaven knows that I've had an impact on literally hundreds of thousands of lives over the last couple of decades doing what I do for a living. It makes me wonder if I'm the bogeyman, the source of nightmares for a bunch of folks out there. Well, the bright side of being the bogeyman is that you're certainly memorable.