The Sex Pistols. AC/DC. Roky Erickson. Daniel Johnson. The Serial Killers. Bruce Haack. Nightmare at Hanging Rock. Anton LaVey. Crispin Hellion Glover. Kids of Widney High. Residents. Lucia Pamela. New Kids on the Block. Frank Sinatra.
Music forensics discovered on the mixtape of the caretaker found dead in the basement of the apartment building – with a magic marker rammed into his eye.
The caretaker found lying in a fetal position and revealed to be a kraken. Each of his tentacles in fact gripping a magic marker.
Had this been a horror movie, the camera would have slowly panned away, slowly up to the ceiling and round back down – with its obsessed, veiny lens pointing at the complex spirograph scribbled with astonishing precision on the floor beneath the squid corpse.
It becomes strikingly apparent when looking at a bus full of high-school pupils on the way to summer camp – that preening is infectious.
Not just when the laundry detergents come out, the rustling billow of hands diving into knapsacks – but the claws, the hands militantly configured into gnat attack-mode, poised above napes of necks and parts in hair and undone buttons on chests and gaping zippers above crotches; all collectively, upon merely a single cue from a pair of students in the front or middle row, flourishing their preening implements and the fingers – man, those fingers – though initially horrible to the eye, the subsequent spate of preening, with insectile clicking and rustling heard above the changed timbre in the chatter, a more subdued and amorous timbre, is touching, it really touches the heart.
To see the whole bus so busily at work, so intimately – preening the fuck out of each other.
Every year scientists flock to the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster to test the radiation levels in the air and in the ground, and every year they report the same findings.
The readings in the soil and air by this time have become rather hackneyed and predictable, but there’s one finding that normally trumps these and in fact, had it not been for this, scientists would by now probably have lost interest in flocking back there every year – at the entrance to the doomed, spooky facility, placed just beside a metal door post, in the toxic shade of a dilapidated awning: a camber pot full of fresh jizz.
Upon the fate of which a UN edict has agreed not to waste the contents of the chamber pot in the puerile care of the scientists – but to donate unspoiled and uncut to Ukrainian sperm banks.
The ease of the act which so far has been demonstrated and cockily flaunted by only one individual, or one type of individual (potential culprits had yet to demonstrate their acumen in this regard) – namely, a middle-aged pedophile.
Shoplifting items from the moon base’s only candy store.
Lunar candy stores proving surprisingly susceptible to the thieving feelers deployed by the pedophile, feelers any earth store or kiosk would be laughingly resistant to, for reasons that have yet to be determined, but enjoying no shortage of evidence to support this postulate – namely, that on the moon pedophiles have the upper hand, or this pedophile has the upper hand.
At least when it comes to pilfering candy.
Pixilated safety razors it is this Nintendo game’s rather challenging objective to wield, and then to administer self-castration.
Bred to cause muffled weeping and/or despair.
100% biological – an impressive feat as far as headgear goes.
The alien facehugger genetically copied from the actual model used in the Alien movies, using a 3D-printer and software developed to guess the genetic makeup of creatures from images scanned into the computer.
In the snug embrace of which facehugger, no one can hear you scream.
No one except the old couple from Kansas City, the only people to ever rhapsodize positively and unctuously about the hole in the ozone layer – inspired by what they called the fraying edges of the hole, at times frilly but mostly on the verge of totally fraying in messy ozone tendrils, a hole they actually claim to be able to see, along with the aforementioned fraying (at times flouncy) edges. Miraculously.
In addition to spending their energies rhapsodizing and composing dirgy ditties about it, the old couple is in the middle of an emotionally taxing property rights trial staking their claim to quasi ownership of the Hole – dirges and ditties they sometimes compose extempore lyrics to on the lawns of people who at the sight of them run for their guns to capitalize on the impunity the state of Kansas has granted them in respect of the Johnsons – singing outside on their laws about (and, many witnesses attest, ‘to’) ‘The Johnsons’ Hole.’
Only to on their return to the front porch, gun heaving breathlessly in their hands, find the couple vanished.
Deep within the fibers of a fresh towel, sometimes not so deep but teetering on the tips of the fibers of a fresh towel – as if in plain view.
The Higgs Boson. The so-called ‘God Particle.’
I guess my roommate, emerging smugly from the bathroom, like a spaceman stepping out through a hatch, steam billowing dramatically around him, had just dragged one of those through his ass.
A man at the STD clinic talking creepily in this caring, whispering voice to a smiley face painted on his thumb. Small clicks heard deep within his nose.
Wet lips.
Porn tulips: more like props than decoration, here in the clinic’s waiting room. The way a hateful idiot passing bumps over one of the props in a fit of hiccups, during which he also exclaims loudly, interrupting the first discussion between patient and thumb-smiley: ‘Whoa! Thank you very much, bitches!’
The world's most powerful laser.
Stationed, proudly, in Coney Island.
The favorites to do exceptionally well in the hundred meter race at this year’s Special Olympics:
The Russian corpsicle; the stop-motion lump of tofu from Indonesia; a bunch of noise selected from primordial radio signals from the Big Bang; the horseshoe lady magnet; the unmanned transporter; the zebra; the Swiss cheese lamprey; and the cocky and perhaps all-time favorite from the USA who always, to the crowd’s inexplicable delight, waves goodbye to the other runners with his robotic arm.
The only one really expected to lose in this race, Fred, if I may venture a guess, is the dildo.
The dildo, yeah. Whom of course everyone’s expecting to this year again lose orientation and start drilling vertically down through the tartan toward the center of the earth?
That’s the one, Fred.
The smiley face on the thumb of the man in the STD clinic waiting room actually intelligently and coherently talking back.
Really. It’s one hard rule that I live by.
Said a member of the Brigade of Surrogate Wives. I fucking never imagine, pretend, or in a small moment of weakness even speculate what it’d be like to be the real, magnificently and heroically impregnated, wife or girlfriend or shag hag of the cad whose sperm I’m incubating.
Never.
For that, dear comrades – that’s a reeeeeeaaaallly dangerous fantasy to indulge in.
Oh my dear bionic ear trumpet – if only I could squeeze you in a bit deeper so you wouldn’t hit people in the face on crowded subway platforms. Many a night I lay dreaming, thinking what if you were to be replaced by a normal, copper, brass, or whatever, ear trumpet, one I could wield at my own convenience and place in my ear when I needed, and only when I really felt I needed, to hear something someone was saying more clearly? Like sometimes I couldn’t quite hear what someone was saying and I didn’t especially have the desire to hear clearly? Know what I mean?
Ah.
And yet … you’re like a part of my brain now. You’re bionic. Which means you’ve essentially melded with my biosphere. With my biospherical head, yo. You’re half brass or copper or whatever – actually I’m not sure what material the part of you that’s not directly part of my brainmeat is – and so therefore, my dear ear trumpet, I suppose I’ve bonded with you. In more than just a physical sense. I feel emotionally really connected to you. If, for example, someone tugged at you, humorously – in jest – on the subway, and it could’ve been the same person I’d just knocked in the face with you, like in a sense he has the right to tug at you meanly and mockingly, well … then it would be rather like if I had huge ears, right? Like I couldn’t be blamed for having huge ears. And if I then went and accidentally knocked someone in the face with them, and they then turned around and pulled at them, I guess in that situation, I’d still be sort of justified in feeling kinda miffed about that. Like, sure, I knocked them in the face with the ear, but it was an accident, and really I can’t help having these large ears. So the crime and the punishment don’t match up. You know what I’m saying?
Ear?
In the back of a pick-up truck. A mannequin. Androgynous. Blonde hair. Square jaw. Could be a girl or a guy. No tits to speak of. No penis or especially bulgy female hips.
The typical Austro-Hungarian idea of ‘pretty,’ to be sure. Or handsome.
Since retired from window-posing for the H&M and other clothing outlets, now en route, in the back of the pick-up truck, to fulfilling huge goals set before it by an embittered retired clothing retailer as a champion competitive eater.
Advancements in robotics that would automatically be billed outré if they didn’t incorporate one of the following, indispensable features.
This being after the apocalypse, whereby a certain robotic fashion needs to be abided by. Indeed robotics in this science fiction dystopia has to adhere to a strict regimen of fashion etiquette. E.g. foremost, the reckless, inaccurate, unpredictable, autonomous, Tourette’s-like karate chop de rigeur among humanoid specimens. Meaning the arm of such a specimen would execute a perfect karate chop – but at a point in time neither the cyborg itself nor those around him could forecast.
What post-apocalyptic weaponry is concerned, a lot of rust and a lot of wool – draped over parts prone to getting hot against a bare, scaly torso.
The rather rapid drop from vogue of actual humanoid robots shall be compensated for by the tedious, time-consuming rehabituation of robot dinosaurs to the strange, blighted, Mars-like surroundings. But where the arm of a perfectly-functioning (i.e. old-school) robot risks the creature too great social shame, a program needs to be installed that brings off two effects particularly when clubbing fake, stuffed seals in the red, sinusoid dust, for sports: the dilated eye is the first. Eyes in correspondence with the actions not of erratic karate-chopping arms but perfectly functioning arms, need to dilate visibly and dramatically, when clobbering to fine fluff counterfeits of pre-apocalyptic adorable furries. And then there’s the mandatory shaking of the fist angrily at the scorched sky effect your old-school, unmodified cyborg needs to learn or be programmed to master convincingly.
In a way – trickily – that doesn’t seem practiced or, for that matter, preprogrammed.
First in, last out.
That’s Allen. When he uses the bathroom of his flat, where he lives alone, somewhere in Brazil.
Bearing what has instantly become a burden, in his trench coat. The terrorist’s paralyzing fear of cylindrical objects due to their occult influence on his ticklishness. The pipe bomb in his trench coat, walking through the airport, in this case offering much cause for concern – not just the sudden violent involuntary attack on his own ticklishness by the terrorist, thereby setting off the bomb, but the sweat punching out on his face, making him look very suspicious. And then some. His trench coat too – which is to say, his trench coat in combination with the sweat beads make him look mighty suspicious indeed, he knows.
Which only worsens the problem, knowing this.
Since while usually people are provoked to hilarity via the prods of carefully aimed digits, this terrorist’s nerve endings vibrate uncontrollably when stroked by smooth round surfaces his brain, after intuiting the surfaces’ cylindrical form, finds itself being freaked out almost more than the nerve endings themselves because the way it is with some people with birds, who want to jump out of their skins and run away screaming at the mere sight of birds, so it is with this terrorist in respect of cylindrical shapes.
Translating facial expressions into DOS code on a computer monitor, the electrodes plugged into the face of a subject in an office chair also interpret hot flashes – manually administered by technicians wielding nunchucks.
A slideshow of expressions and epidermal glows and abrasions, later on arranged into descending stages of beaten-up-ness in the creation of this, the ultimate DOS game.
The rather large spectrum of reflexes of villains’ hammers, hacksaws, and tendrils – also articulated with DOS code in what is to become a game later described by Gaming Weekly as ‘The clunkiest piece of shit I’ve ever played – but addictive in a way only seeing Chuck Norris with a birth defect clobber bar patrons with his flipper hand can be addictive.’
The slow grueling process of rehabilitation with a Lego prosthesis.
Ferdinand disliked the way his technician scribbled on his clipboard after politely ordering him to attach the Lego arm, and to grip the gymnastic bar whose circumference exactly fit into the Lego hand – and hated the way his scribbles became more frenetic, accompanied by studious ‘hmms’ and ‘ahs’, when Ferdinand struggled to detach the hand from the bar, or when his arm in the process dislocated at the shoulder, the two Lego knurls sometimes totally leaving their holes.
As if Ferdinand had now done something wholly profound or newfangled, the technician frowning to himself in wonderment and often failing to notice Ferdinand falling to the floor through the parallel bars on which he’d been supporting himself until catching him in the process of grumpily and cursingly climbing to his feet.
The technician’s eyes widening with fright.
In vain, totally – the villagers’ hope that the smallpox outbreak would be at least staunched by the magma flowing in huge leaping waves down the mountain’s slope.
When instead it was only relayed further downstream, to other villages, in virtually unspoiled form, by it. In fact the magma seemed rather to preserve the contagion.
‘Like my grandfather’s spittle,’ one villager mused – referring to the Twinkie he’d obtained from a Western traveler more than two decades before, and had decided instead of eating, to preserve in a Perspex tube filled, for reasons he never cared to ponder but was smart enough to ascribe to the Twinkie’s preservation, with his grandfather’s spittle.
His grandfather, who was known throughout the village as the most alkaline man.
And that’s when, without further ado, Alfred grabbed the Nintendo console and decided, before commencing to play, to get an emotional breakdown.
An attention-grabbing self-help book.
The rarest of its kind – being totally absent illustrated drawings.
At the fair, the most lucrative stand – of all the kiosks and stalls and shops and even the rides – from which its products sold like freaking hotcakes.
I.e. The Rumor Mill.
Far from outright deriding the old couple’s behavior vis-Ã -vis the ozone hole, scientists and politicians and crackpot visionaries have rather been entertaining the same idea themselves – the cancerous nothingness within the ring of frilliness stirs in one an instinctive, parental sense of ownership.
A talented concept artist like him would’ve been far more popular if he didn’t let luxury and recreation get in the way of his work.
To just take his jet-ski footbath as an example – the whole idea smacked too much of self-indulgence. The artist’s self-indulgence.
He led what little remained of his fans to pleasure beaches of the mind too distant and personal even for them to follow him to.
The manicurist frowning at the suction cups on her customer’s fingers.
The only – but officially the most boring – ‘movie’ in the village.
Time-lapse footage of the Twinkie decomposing in a vial of unbelievably alkaline old-man spittle.
Headless washed-out SCUBA poltergeist. Epiphanous but otherwise uneventful day in the subterranean dumpster. Bad guy.
Whose shrimp feces makes up the entire ecosystem of consumerism. A society born of ogre matchmaking.
