eat rich chocolates and sleep too close to a space heater on Christmas Eve

I live in a Santa Fe style adobe apartment sometime in the not-too-distant future. A couple of guys I play music with on occasion invite themselves over to drink beer and listen to the radio. They arrive and it starts to turn into a party. Some bitchy girls I know from back in high school are there, taunting me and telling me that I won't have any time for drawing when I go back to school for the spring semester.

Annoyed, I walk into the bathroom, stepping over torn scraps of paper and shards of shattered plastic that were left on the floor by a baby or a misbehaving dog. I look into the mirror and discover that I have giant purple welts all over my face, not unlike the scar makeup that I wore with my Halloween costume.

I mindtravel to a sparsely decorated comic book store. A girl I used to date and her obnoxious, unfamiliar tall male friend are there. The friend harasses me for money, taunting me like those girls at the apartment did and repeatedly asking me to give him $42 in cash. I do my best to ignore him. The girl tells him to stop. I turn away from them and when I turn back they have walked out of the store together.

Back at home I'm reading the Something Awful forums. There's a new thread where some guy is describing a bizarre infection he has. His face is covered in lesions -- "space barnacles" -- that resemble brightly colored 7mm rectangular plastic tiles. Each tile has a raised circular ridge on it, like a condom in its wrapper. The guy sounds smug despite his grotesque affliction. He says he also built a kickass computer and got a new girlfriend over the weekend.

Reading that post gave me a weird feeling. I walk back into the bathroom. Oh. Turns out that the forum post contained a computer virus and now I have space barnacles all over my face and chest. I look like the Elephant Man covered with Legos. Looking closely at the tiles I can see veiny red and blue lines running underneath them. It's a highway map, complete with numbers and city names.

Northern Boulevard

Driving in Rio Rancho. Don't know whose car, but it's not mine. It's mid morning or mid afternoon in early springtime. The sun is out but the shadows are long. I pass my mother's car somewhere on Southern Boulevard. Mom calls my cell phone and we chat briefly. We say goodbye; we'll meet at her house later.

Sometime later I turn onto Northern Boulevard, which is developed on the south side (boxy industrial parks) and mostly undeveloped on the north side, save for a couple of plain churches and custom-built homes. I pull off the road, park the car and pick up a library book sitting next to me. It's a cheaply-printed, laminated paperback with an ugly gray cover, no graphics or illustrations, and a title written in a generic Times Roman-like font. Some kind of sci-fi novel self published by a crank author who lived in Rio Rancho until his death a couple years back. I'm studying this book for my own personal research, taking notes about it in a spiral notebook. I start to copy the title, but then I realize that the spine of the book, the front cover and the title page all give slightly different titles.

The Arrival at Isthmorn[? or some other nonsense science fictiony proper noun]
The Ithmorn Arrival
The Ithmorn Arrival: A [something something]

Something like that. Even stranger, the edition of the book that I have is an omnibus collection of three different versions of the novel-- the original, a revised version, and a version re-written by a friend of the author. Confusingly, the different versions are jumbled together, with one chapter of each respective version in printed in succession. Many of the chapters are only half a page long, while others go on for twenty or fifty pages.

Because of the rampant inconsistencies in the text, I give up on my notes for the time being and just begin skimming through the book. The prose is impenetrable, like a Scientology book translated into Japanese and back into English. I have no idea what any of it means.

I look down the road in front of me. Rio Rancho used to be known as a haven for crank science fiction writers. Back in the late 1970s or early 1980s, when this area was empty desert, the author of the book I'm holding was allowed to build a line of small monuments along this street, then a dirt road, immortalizing his insane philosophies. The first one is at the very spot where I've parked. The monuments are squat little structures, maybe 4 feet high by six or seven feet wide, made of beige cinder blocks, like the signs you see in front of call centers and suburban housing subdivisions. Quotes from the book are stenciled on them in white paint. They are small and nondescript enough that you could completely ignore them if you don't know to look for them as you drive by.

The signs continue for the next couple of miles down the road, one every hundred yards or so. I stop at each one, cross-checking them with the corresponding passages in my book and still utterly failing to understand they're supposed to mean. Then I get to a place where the soil on both sides of the road is being churned and flattened by bulldozers, preparing for the construction of a new housing development or a box factory or something. The signs beyond this point have been destroyed. Soon they will all be gone, and no one will notice.

I take Northern the rest of the way down to Highway 528, make an awkward left turn and then drive north toward my mother's house. I pass hesitantly through a flashing yellow stoplight. Then I hear sirens approaching from somewhere behind me. Helicopters pass overhead. Fire engines go by as I pull over to the far right side of the road. The radio tells me that there's a massive forest fire somewhere up north, started by an electrical mishap. The implant in my brain begins playing a TV newscast about the fire. A pretty, airheaded anchorwoman says that the fire is the fault of some collectivist farmers. Somehow I know that this is false propaganda.

Last.fm chart in crisis

My Last.fm Top Tracks Overall chart has just updated, and there are a bunch of weird songs on here that have just been flung into the tops spots after I downloaded them and listened to them a few times. They don't really reflect my tastes at all, and some of them seem to have sexist or racist overtones in the titles...My but this is embarrassing.

America's cookie crisis/Who Framed Roger Rabbit: Director's Cut

For years the U.S. government has propped up the domestic cookie industry with large subsidies. Now Congress has taken away those subsidies and the cookie market is collapsing. Cookies are expensive and hard to obtain. While discussing the issue with my mother and sister, I joke that we should join the evil corporate ConAgra/Globo-Chem cookie collective so that we may continue to receive cookies. The very suggestion makes my sister angry.

* * * *

I'm watching tonight's FEATURE PRESENTATION on the local TV station: Who Framed Roger Rabbit. In a scene early in the film Eddie Valiant is standing on a street corner in 1930s Los Angeles. He witnesses a murder and calls the police, using the designated police code for murder. I'm incredulous that Valiant would actually know this code, until I remember that it was previously established that the Valiant brothers used to be police officers before they became private detectives.

A commercial break or two later, the film has flashed forward ten years, to 1947, when Eddie is talking to Roger in his office. Roger uses some coarse language in reference to women. There is no mention of his wife Jessica.

don't make me 'splain myself

I hate my new job so much that I keep calling in sick and going for walks in the park instead of working. I wouldn't even care if I got fired, except that I was referred for this job by my old bosses Lucile Ball and Desi Arnaz, and I don't want my poor performance to reflect badly on them.

Bank Error in My Favor

I get an unexpected refund check for $46.XX from someone. I check my bank account and find that it's twice as big as I remembered it being. This is great.

a missed opportunity for questionable toys

The Penny Arcade guys put out a podcast a couple weeks back discussing cool after-Thanksgiving Day sales. As I'm listening to it I'm sorry I hadn't heard it before the holiday, because someone had a pretty good 1/2-off deal on Watchmen action figures that I might have taken advantage of. I'm not familiar with some of the characters that Mike and Jerry are talking about, though. "Cherry Soda"? "Ax Battler"? Alan Moore must be spinning in his grave.

The NYYAAAARRRest Story Ever Told

I'm standing in a holodeck with my dungeon master, discussing the hypothetical powers of a Big Bird kaiju. He calls one up that is enormous and terrifying, charcoal gray with glittering gold veins and pterosaur wings. Big Bird's familiar face is locked in a pupil-less grimace, like some ancient stone god, and he screams like Godzilla as he glides over a simulation of a 1960's Japanese port town.

The rest of the players show up for tonight's game session. We're role playing a anime-style adventure. The DM has programmed the holodeck to transform us into a group of futuristic bounty hunters, à la Cowboy Bebop. I'm a bushy-haired film noir type in a shabby suit, and there's a burly cyborg, an annoying boy genius, a treacherous femme fatale and a goth-y android girl. The corrupt corporate kleptocrat rulers of the solar system call us a "terrorist cell," and we do what we can to bring them down, one by one.

Tonight's mission is a raid on a massive space station casino that's controlled by the mob. Our group has split up into three teams, leaving the android girl and me alone in an elevator. She seems depressed about something, so I make some kind of lame joke. She laughs weakly, then tells me that she has just initiated a sequence that will erase her own mind. She promptly drops to the floor, eyes vacant.

"She killed herself!" I yell, grief-stricken and pissed off.

The tragedy of the goth-droid's suicide causes the already fragile bonds of trust and camaraderie between our group's members to disintegrate, and so after a bit of infighting we agree to disband forever. I solemnly slip the girl's cracked anime goggles in my pocket as a memento, but I could care less if I ever see that irritating computer hacker kid or the rest of them again. Thus concludes our RPG campaign.

After the other players have left, the DM shows me a second version of the Big Bird kaiju he cooked up at some point during the game session. This one is kind of disappointingly small compared to the first one.

Dr. J. Teller's posse grows by one

It's a cold, cloudy morning in late November, and I'm riding a gold motorcycle on the freeways of Los Angeles. The motorcycle is actually on auto-pilot, so instead of worrying about not killing myself I'm free to concentrate on the scenery. I pass by a Los Angeles landmark, the place underneath a massive interchange where you can see the uncleared remains of an overpass that collapsed during its construction. It's now overgrown with green creeping vines.

In my mind I play back memories of the night before, when I was speeding along a dark highway in the farmlands far from the city, watching yellow and blue flames consuming the trees by the side of the road.

I arrive at the hotel, and as I dismount the bike I find a key on the ground. I put it in my pocket, making a mental note to turn it in to the clerk at the front desk in case someone comes looking for it.

My mother is already waiting for me at the hotel. The tournament is about to begin.

* * * *

Walking outside my apartment (still in Los Angeles), I see a strange piece of graffiti on the sidewalk. It says, "DR. J TELLER HAS A POSSE." I have no idea what it means, so I go inside and look it up on Wikipedia. Inspired by what I learn, I draw more of the inscriptions in purple chalk up and down the street.

* * * *

It's the week of Christmas in Albuquerque, sometime in the early evening. The streets are wet with recent rain. I'm driving my mother's car because she's out of the country, visiting my sister in Japan. I'm stopped at a red light on Monte Vista Boulevard when I see police cars pass somewhere behind me in the rear-view mirror, lights flashing.

building a mystery

I have just arrived at my mom's house for a visit when she tells me that my sister just called to say that she was abducted, and is being held prisoner somewhere in town. Mom seems concerned, but strangely not quite concerned enough. I take it upon myself to call Nina back to try to find out where she is. I have to walk out into the back yard in order to get signal and so the dog doesn't bother me. Eventually, in a halting and awkward conversation, I am able to glean from Nina that she's locked in a basement, but she doesn't know the address. She doesn't seem all that upset either.

I try to suggest to her that she call 911 so the emergency folks can trace her cell phone's location, but my signal starts to cut out again at that very moment. When the signal returns I can suddenly hear the voice of my sister's abductor on the other end, saying something to Nina. He speaks with an obvious twang, a stereotypical hayseed/old prospector voice. None of his words are distinct enough to make out, except for an address: 2023 Thomas Ave.

I run back into my mom's house, wondering to myself whether I'll be prosecuted for assault when I beat the living shit out of the old prospector, and I scribble the address down on a scrap of paper before I can forget it. I read the address back to my mom, and she shows me that this new location fits perfectly into the empty spot on the map for the Lost Experience Season 4 Reality Game we've been playing!



Cut to a scene from the Lost season premiere. A group of castaways are in the process of stealth-raiding the old prospector's station. Am I there with them or am I watching it on TV?

The character of John Locke has been replaced with a thirtysomething pale bald man in a neat charcoal gray suit with a blood red tie. Despite the fact that this man is replacing my favorite character, I'm growing to like him. He seems to be an ex-assassin or something, but with an incongruously pleasant, easygoing demeanor.

Someone in the raiding party makes a wisecrack involving the word "Hell," like "see you in Hell" or something. This causes Nu-Locke to burst into goofy, nervous laughter, thus supporting my theory that Nu-Locke is actually Satan.

Lost Season 4 begins February 2008.

Post-Apocalyptic Domestic Dispute

Roommate Joe busts me for leaving a half-gallon container of Blue M&Ms Juice in the trunk of his car, where it has leaked into the upholstery and potentially damaged sensitive components. I attempt to argue, but it's hopeless. I cut to the chase and offer to help him clean it up. He hands me a bucket and sponge, grabs a pink My Size Barbie™ suitcase full of miscellaneous supplies we will need, and we head outside.

It's the middle of the night, and the parking lot of our apartment complex is filled with an ever-growing crowd of surly homeless people, milling around and camping between the cars. A white-bearded fellow who looks vaguely like a 1990s sitcom character actor is sitting up in his sleeping bag and mutters "look at those white hosers...one of them's got a Barbie thing.." Not in the mood, I turn to him and stare deeply into his eyes as I impersonate a lizard-man, shifting my posture and obscenely flicking my tongue. He lies back down and pretends not to see me, and starts to mutter about something else.

Mini Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming

I'm a very short man with long, scraggly red hair and a face like a shovel. I look like a diminutive Sideshow Bob, or a shriveled Kenny G. And I'm wearing an orange jumpsuit because I just snuck* out of prison to ask Janeane Garofalo for bail money. Because she's a bail bond agent, or used to be. We have some history, her and I. I'm standing in her studio apartment and she's lying on her bed reading a magazine.

She coolly regards my request for bail money, but somehow the conversation turns personal. She starts talking a mile a minute about how much she loves Paul McCartney, and offhandedly remarks that she wants someone to love her like "all saints." That's a strange idiom.

"What did you say?" I ask.

"I said I want someone to love me like all saints.." Her sentence trails off because I'm making out with her now. She reaches up from the bed to play her music collection on shuffle, and though I'm having sex with her within a minute or two, she's still talking about her canon of rock history.

*Blogger's spell check says the word "snuck" is wrong, so I looked it up on Dictionary.com, where I learned:

Snuck has occasionally been considered nonstandard, but it is so widely used by professional writers and educated speakers that it can no longer be so regarded.

So eat a dick, Blogger spell check!

Nick Sportsinterviews

The NBA Finals are in full swing, and only one game remains to determine which two teams will go on to the Super Bowl, basketball's most prestigious event. I'm walking through the Utah desert to join my roommate Joe on the Atlanta Falcons' team bus. I'm not sure why we're there. Maybe we're sports writers or something. Jesus. As I walk up to the bus I see a cute red-haired player in a yellow Mary-Marvelesque basketball uniform talking to her teammate about the giant oversized shoes they just bought.

I get on the bus. Joe is chatting up female players and repeatedly getting shot down, sitcom style, but he laughs it off, perhaps just trying to fuck with with them in a figurative sense. I say something about the girls outside and one of the player dudes says that they listen to "shitty public domain hip-hop," whatever that means, and that they don't play on the main team with them. Well then.

A conversation is struck up between myself and an affable, pleasantly geeky player, and he invites me to play video games with him sometime or something. I jokingly tell him that if he's as superior to me in a recreational capacity as he is in his professional life, I'll be completely devastated. During the course of our conversation he slowly transforms into Andy Dick dressed as Steve Urkel. Unnerving.

Worst Waiter Ever

I've got a new job working at an unfamiliar restaurant. I've never worked in any sort of food-service job before. I get dropped off at the back door for my first day, already in uniform, and I ask a dour, middle-aged woman in the unrealistically large break room whom I'm supposed to report to for instructions. She says I should just go start waiting tables and figure it out for myself. So I wander into the dining area, which is mostly empty right now, and try to figure out where everything is. A fat lady sitting by herself immediately spots me and begins asking for things in an impenetrable accent that might be Haitian or Central American or something. I promise her that I'll figure out who can help her, and try to also glean her table number as I pass. After a couple minutes of wandering I still haven't located the kitchen, and the fat lady is becoming increasingly agitated.

timestream adventure

[I found this written on a post-it note in my bedroom sometime in late August or early September 2007.]

06/18
timestream adventure
i get 5 keyboard stands
(offer 1 me friends)
1 parallel kim dies-- aaron gets form letter

broken headphones

I rolled over in my sleep onto my $20 Sony headphones, snapping them in half. I'm feeling pretty bad about this, but then I remind myself that this is a dream, and my headphones aren't really broken.

explosions in the sky

At work in the Shadow Kingdom call center. I had to leave the floor to ask someone a question, which meant I had to leave the building and walk across a field of twisted, rusted metal under a massive freeway interchange, to a ratty retail store in a strip mall a few hundered yards away.

I go into the store through the back entrace, into a messy conference room/lounge area. I get my information, and as I'm leaving I can see a salesman and a customer sitting at a plastic table, discussing something.
I walk out of the store the same way I came in, emerging back into the the field under the freeway. Golden sunlight leaks in between sequoia-sized pilons.
Something happens up above, and a cement mixer comes tumbling over the side of the freeway structure. It seems to fall in slow motion. This causes a chain reaction pileup, and soon other cars start raining down, along with broken glass and flailing human bodies.
I try to make myself feel concerned about the immense human suffering that must be happening, but instead I just find myself entranced by the beauty of the spectacle.

sister's funeral/creepy new boyfriend

My sister is dead, I don't know why. I'm at her funeral, outdoors. There are trees, people wearing black. This is sad.

* * *

A female friend brings over her new boyfriend, some creepy looking dude whom she claims has a "muscular" sex organ.

inappropriate sharing at the picnic

I'm at a picnic or barbeque or some kind of outdoor party with friends. For some reason the conversation turns to a girl I used to know in high school, and I unexpectedly blurt out that I still have a crush on the girl, despite the fact that we haven't spoken in years, and I hadn't really thought about her much in months. My friends are bemused by this non-sequitur, and I feel strangely elated to have gotten it off my chest.

Snakes and Samurai on a Plane

Lethal snakes have been released on board a commercial airliner. In the confusion, an executive of the Turner Broadcasting corporation and his entourage of evil samurai bodyguards take control of the plane, declaring martial law and forcing the pilot to land on a tiny, uninhabited island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. As the passengers mill around on the beach and tend to the wounded, the executive makes a speech commanding them all to "swear allegiance to Ted Turner." The samurai line them up and direct them to sexually service them or else be hacked to pieces.
One of the passengers is a lone samurai who happened to be flying on the plane with his two young children. He prays for forgiveness as he solemnly decapitates them with his katana in order to protect their honor. He does not weep.
Meanwhile, nurse Juliana Margulies explains to someone else that she has found a crate of Dubble Bubble bubble gum in the cargo hold, and she believes that it may be useful as an antivenom to treat snakebites. However, she is also concerned that the bubble gum may contain a "blood pox," which would be deadly.

Goober

I'm playing a computer game. It's a simulation of a family soap opera, kind of like The OC. I'm playing the part of the teenage son. The current plot involves a psycho killer lurking in the neighborhood. One day I find a knife on the kitchen counter, but because the game is set to PG-mode, the "blood" on the knife is just peanut butter. A day or two later, there's party going on in the house, and I'm just wandering around by myself looking for clues. I find another, bigger knife in the kitchen, this time covered with huge globs of peanut butter and jelly.

I hear the front door open. Mom and Dad are home. They walk into the house together, laughing, arms around each other. As I watch from the kitchen, the broom closet door swings open, and a crazy-eyed, scruffy vagrant stumbles out, muttering to himself, looking disoriented. He pushes past my parents and walks out of the house. Mom and Dad are quiet as this happens, but as soon as he walks out their eyes are wide with terror and they move away from the door. Seconds later the nut returns, emits a feral growl and begins slashing away at Dad with a ten-inch knife.

I lose awareness of my body, and am helpless to do anything but watch and listen to my parents' screams. The knife goes in and out of Dad's body over and over again, each time at a different, novel angle, and prompting a subtly different scream or gurgle from my father, but because of the game's child-protection there is no blood. The blade comes out of Dad's body clean and shiny each time, even when it goes all the way through his neck and comes out the other side.

The slasher, up until now wearing some sort of shabby sweatsuit, suddenly runs into a closet and emerges a second later in an ill-fitting Superman costume. He yells that he wants to feel my father's "death-spasms," then resumes his attack. Hysterical with fear and rage, my mother tries to fend him off by bludgeoning him with household appliances. At one point he stumbles and falls head-first into the toilet, but he keeps getting back up with some kind of bezerker, possibly drug-induced endurance. After several minutes of this, I see my father's body start to seize up and shake uncontrollably.

wargame

I'm playing an HO-scale miniature wargame with little clockwork ships and soldiers. A model harbor is built on a real pool of water, and the ships are able to cruise across the surface under their own power. The simulation is similar to the video game Advance Wars, except that the pieces all move simultaneously, in realtime.

My opponent is a megalomaniacal stranger who has just chased the entire home fleet out of the harbor with his attack ships. He gleefully sings to himself that the operation was "specially designed for the S.S. Nile," which I notice is the name of the very fast ship at the forefront of the attack. He and I both circle around the model harbor, contemplating our next moves without speaking to each other, without even looking directly at each other.

I walk next to the now-empty coastline and spot a single tiny policeman standing near a lighthouse. If I can get him to walk to the seaport a couple feet away without him being spotted by my opponent, I'll be able to reclaim the port and use it to manufacture more naval units. Peering over my shoulder, I surreptitiously tap the policeman to activate him, and I try to use my body to conceal him from my opponent's view.

Rush '08

CNN reports that Rush Limbaugh has formally announced his candidacy for President of the United States in the next election, although he's actually been saying he intends to run for several months on his radio program.

No Compassion

I'm at an unfamiliar bar. The obese, crusty old man behind the counter sneers and gives me shit as I try to close out the tab on my credit card. I fantasize about coming back and throwing a Molotov cocktail through the window later.

Sometime after that I'm chitchatting with a girl in my AP English class. It's the beginning of our senior year in high school, and I am completely unmotivated. She one-ups my school angst by reminding me that both of her parents were killed in an accident a year ago. She's certainly getting a lot of milage out of that, I think to myself.

when badgers attack

I'm on a narrow concrete path somewhere in Corrales, with a cottonwood-lined embankment on my right and a chain-link fence on my left. I am sitting down, riding on a flat wooden plank mounted atop a small set of wheels. I am using my hands to propel myself, perhaps because my legs don't work. I am trying to escape from a group of mangy, angry badgers that are chasing me. At least, I assume they're badgers. They actually look more like skunks, except they're entirely black and they don't have faces. I'm not going very fast because I have to keep turning around to beat back the badgers as they try to jump on top of the plank and bite and scratch me.

After I woke up I decided that I should have done what Captain America would do: roll off the plank and use it as a shield to defend myself against the badgers, then turn it into a weapon to beat them to death with.

toiletkittencam.com

While housesitting for my mother, I find a litter of tiny white kittens is living in and around a leaky toilet in my mother's bathroom. The kittens have an extremely popular webcam site.

thanksgiving is closed please delete your bookmark

I'm working at the shadow universe call center when I get an e-mail message telling me that my family is calling me to the reception desk "immediately." The urgency makes me think that some kind of calamity has occurred, but when I get out there I find out that they just came by because they wanted to have Thanksgiving dinner at the call center.

My mother and my sister go inside, but my father has to get something from his car or something, so I walk with him into the parking lot. My dad used to work here also, but I don't know if he knows where we were planning to sit, so I take him in my car over to the west entrance, closer to where we'll be eating. He tries to give me steering advice as I pull into a parking space, but it just stresses me out and makes it harder for me.

I walk Dad into the building, to the tableclothed dinner table that Mom and Nina are presently setting. Then I go to use the men's room, whereupon I discover for the first time that all of the call center's restrooms have back exits leading to secret passageways that connect them to each other. I'm not really sure what purpose the passageways serve.

sometimes I put the sleep on

A woman impersonating my mother tells me my problem is that I spend too much time in her living room and that I sometimes "put the sleep on, but aren't none us of ain't got a taste for that on occasion." By which she means that I sleep too much sometimes, but who doesn't want to?

less decayed than I would have thought

My back molar on the top left side comes out without much stuggle. As I examine it I see that it's in better condition than I thought it would be, which is sort of a relief because I was expecting all kinds of rampant decay.
I look at the empty space in the bathroom mirror. It doesn't look big enough to accomodate the new molar that will be growing in, and I wonder if I'll need some kind of orthodontic procedure. I wish I hadn't just declined dental coverage from work.

Spanish Inquisition Gari People

During the days of the Spanish Inquisition conquistadores used to chase people, subject them to on-the-spot heresy trials and then execute them. A group of maybe a dozen helmeted soldiers on horseback would run down a hapless alleged heretic in an aqueduct somewhere, surround him menacingly, read from a Bible or something, and then kill him with their swords. I solemnly reenact this tradition by eating little people made from jelly-filled rolls of gari (picked ginger) out of a little dollhouse while listening to pertinent quotes about predestination being read to me from the gospel of John and other sources. The gari-people and and the dollhouse all look like they're based on designs from an old Final Fantasy game.

When I bite into the rolls a sickly-sweet red jelly leaks out, reminding me of the blood of the people killed during the Inquisition. It's not very appetizing, but I feel like I have to complete the ritual out of respect for the victims.

Hercules 3:16

I wonder what the passage "Hercules lit up his cigarette. Go, Hercules, go!" looks like in the English Standard Version of the Bible. I should look it up.

chipped canine

I have badly chipped my right canine tooth. It's now about 3mm shorter than the left one.

David Jonhouse/sleep paralysis/Congressman Forbes...

I'm watching the episode of The Simpsons with the Rugrats crossover. You know the one. Suddenly a guy I used to know in high school is standing there in the room with me. I seem to recall that his name was...David Jonhouse? I tell him that it's funny that he's there, because I had just recently had a dream about a guy from high school whose name I had forgotten, but I think it was actually him.

He's digging in his wallet for cash to give me, as a belated birthday present. He hands me a twenty dollar bill and continues to fish out ones, and puts them on the table in front of me. I hand the twenty back to him, saying "No, no, keep it....or else tell me when your birthday is so I can give you something in return.."

Then David Jonhouse walks out of the room without saying a word. I assume he's looking for the bathroom. I follow him out into the hall, and before I can stop him he walks into my sister's room. I hear yelling, and I run into the room to see that he is attacking Nina. I jump onto Jonhouse's back, attempting to dig my heel in and snap his spine. He yells but is not seriously injured.

I pin Dave's arms behind his back as if I'm going to handcuff him. He drops something from his hand. It's one of my They Might Be Giants shotglasses, full of tequila. I pick it up with my free hand and march him out of the room. Then I knock him in the forehead with the blunt end of the shotglass, and threaten him--

"You know what I'm going to do to you?"

"Oww! No..."

"I'm going to tie you up, blindfold you, gag you--"

"Gag?"

"Yeah. And I'm going to leave you in the garage...and that's all."

I place special emphasis on the last part, to make him understand that I intend to leave him there to starve to death. This makes him start to weep pathetically. In reality, although this guy scares me, I still feel bad for him and I'm already thinking about calling the cops to come pick him up.

"That's why you don't fuck with my sister," I say, hitting him again with the shotglass.

* * * *

I'm watching Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within while browsing websites dedicated to UFOs and conspiracy junk. Then I wake up in my bed, totally paralyzed. I struggle to yell out or move my arms, but my body is completely unresponsive. I start to hear the muffled chattering of voices all around me, speaking in some unfamiliar tongue. Then the sounds fade away, my mobility returns, and I sit up in bed.

* * * *

Congressman Steve Forbes is appearing on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Stewart is very old, or perhaps wearing makeup, because he is mostly bald, with scraggly white hair where there is hair remaining.

Forbes is in the middle of a rant about how bad grammar is one of his pet peeves. After a minute of two of listening to this, Stewart interrupts him and asks him about how he was recently the object of a "T-1 censure" from the House of Representatives because a young girl was able to accurately describe his genitalia as resembling a "small elephant's head." The audience turns angry and starts booing Forbes when they hear this.

Forbes, caught off guard, looks terrified for a moment, then turns contrite and says, "Well, the truth is I acted like an A-1 jerk."

* * * *

I'm watching a video of Genesis performing "No Reply at All" in front of a live TV studio audience in 1981. The camera pans over the audience, and it's a weird collection of sketchy looking people, all male, mostly in their 20s and 30s, some with thick Coke-bottle glasses, some with big ugly scars, some with eyepatches. They look like the sort of audience you'd see in a Mad magazine cartoon, or a gang of post-apocalyptic marauders. One of the scarier-looking guys stands up during the performance and shoots a young man in a military dress uniform who is sitting near the front row, an off-duty US Marine. Later, I'm reading a Internet message board thread about the incident where some troll is badgering the deceased man's grieving mother, asking why he wasn't serving in Iraq at the time instead of being at the Genesis show.

* * * *

I'm at work in the shadow-universe call center. I ask a senior specialist (a floor supervisor) for help with something. She's a cute, bespectacled girl in her mid-20s, tall and voluptuous with sandy blonde hair. She comes over and clumsily sits down in a chair near me. She invites me to take some candy from a bowl she's holding, then leans in close to me and puts her arms around my neck.

* * * *

Dad asks me to join the church that the rest of my family has joined, saying that "We get a discount there."

White Debbie my love/the Staunton

I have an ongoing romance with White Debbie from Sealab 2021. She is pregnant with my child, and we travel through time together like "Doc" Brown and Clara Clayton in Back to the Future Part III. But there are many suitors competing for Debbie's affection in different centuries, and at times I think she is unfaithful, which makes me jealous.

* * * *

I have a new motorcycle, classic-styled with chrome, dark red and white trim. It's called "the Staunton," and I ride it around on the waterfront at sunset, zooming between boats over the narrow wooden planks. I zip past the open dining area of a tavern on the pier, and as I'm going by, Bender, I guy I know who happens to be sitting at a table there, mischeviously tries to snatch the striped scarf that I'm wearing. He fails to catch it, but then I narrowly avoid hitting a small boat that's lying on its side just in front of me.

magenta beam

As I lie in bed, I am suddenly struck by a harsh but not-quite-painful tingling sensation, as if my brain was being boiled or agitated somehow by a beam shot into it from somewhere outside. It seemed to be magenta in color (even though I didn't actually see anything), with a wavelength of somewhere between one and five millimeters. It lasted for about four seconds and then went away.

it's not plaque

Someone is telling me that plaque is not the real cause of tooth decay.

Elvis considers his options

A bald, middle-aged, chain smoking man with a long, gray, ratty moustache has been stalking and terrorizing me (me, Elvis Costello circa 1994) for months, watching my every move and coercing me to steal things for him with threats and beatings. It has got to the point where every time I leave the house, day or night, I pretty much expect him to appear and beat the shit out of me. I think that he might be a well-known engineer at a recording studio a couple blocks from where I live, but I have no proof. Besides, I'm not at all confident that I could provide a description of the man good enough for someone to spot him before he finds me and kills me.

Right now I'm in the frozen foods section of the supermarket, mentally berating myself for not turning the tables on the man before it got this far. Knowing that it's only a matter of minutes before he finds me again, I fight my terror to crank the wheels in my brain and try to come up with a way to defend myself.

It occurs to me that I should be carrying a weapon. I made a feeble attempt to fight the man once or twice before, and it just ended with me being beaten especially badly. Still, I'm convinced that a well-chosen weapon used with maximum viciousness is my best chance at neutralizing him.

I'm in luck: someone has left a pair of scissors sitting in the freezer case. I pick them up and conceal them in my pocket, blades open, with a hand tightly wrapped around the handle.

I imagine how it will go down. I will lash out with the scissors as soon as my stalker is within range, and he will block with his arm, causing the blade to make contact on his wrist. At this point I can use my free hand to shut the blades on his wrist, bracing with all available leverage to try to sever his hand, or at least a major artery, causing blood to go everywhere.

Then I realize that it will appear to the witnesses in the store that I attacked a strange man without provocation, and then I'll be prosecuted for assault.

I imagine a different scenario. I make a quick jab at the man to surprise him, and while he's momentarily stunned I run away, calling out for help. The man then walks up behind me and slashes my throat with a straight razor.