I had fully expected to take 12/25 off and then get back to blogging and writing but my brain decided it wanted more time to play videogames, read comic books and have impure thoughts about comic book and video game characters,
I must be a little more tired than I thought.
So that being said, I plan to start my usual schedule of posting mayhem on 1/4/12.
Thanks for being patient and I hope everyone has an awesome New Year!
...I won't be posting an installment of THE COLD INSIDE this week.
Next week the story will resume as normal.
This guy is one of my better friends out there and I think his work should be a little more widely read. If you haven't done it yet visit his website http://www.theusualmadman.net
From THE WHIRLWIND IN THE THORN TREE
THE SOUND OF GUNFIRE startled him awake, but instead of his bed, he was underwater. Lucidity came at him from every angle, a silent flock of doves converging on his confusion, and brought him to a diamond clarity. A dark and subtle landscape of undulating blue, red, and green materialized from the nothing-world that was his slumber, and the cold water threatened to take his breath away. Somehow he'd gone fromhis bedroom to the brook out back, and shot in the neck somewhere between the two...
WHEN MIKE ELLINGTON WOKE up, he was naked and couldn't move. Not that he was paralyzed--he could feel the cold surface of the table against his back--but he was wrapped in a ton of Christmas lights. His own lights, he realized as he angled his head to look at his bonds. He had been bound to the dining room table with his own damn Christmas lights, the green cords looping over and over and over around his legs, midsection, and arms until he was completely immobilized...
"VERY GOOD, BLANCO," I SAID, praising my subject. I held up another card, this one with a picture of a Bengal tiger on it. He leaned closer, and I could hear his eyes focus more precisely on the card. He seemed to be processing it, and then said, "It is an image of a tiger."...
How do you know when it's love?
Is it that first surreptitious glance across the room, eyes meeting over swirls of cigarette smoke and strains of Wagner thumping in your ears? Is it those first furtive, fleshy fumblings in the alley behind the bar, all hands and lips and straps with complicated fasteners? Or does it come later, reclining comfortably on the couch in a shared apartment, sharing a bottle of wine and your last cigarette as you wait patiently for the next episode of Cupcake Wars to roll?
It's a mystery, parishioners.
But even though I can't say exactly when or how it happens, I know that love is real. I know because I've found it, a love that asks for nothing and gives everything. I've found it in
Riccardo Ghione's 1973 hippie-abducting, mad science-spouting, blood-bottling, ultra-groovy mad movie bonanza, The Red-Stained Lawn (Il Prato Macchiato di Rosso).
Let me tell you a little something about that girl o'mine....
Except that THE MICRONAUTS will always be number one for me!
Micronauts were actually created much earlier in the decade as "Microman" in Japan by a company called Takara but Mego brought them to North America and created one of the biggest brands of the 1970s. Not only were they fun toys that sparked our imagination but Marvel comics wrote one of the best tie in comics ever created to go along side of it. Oh and if you're a fan of Transformers? That's an offshoot of Microman, so it really is an iconic and important toy line...
To read the rest of the list be sure to visit PLAID STALLIONS!
I am on the first of a series of weeks heavy at my day job that will be heavy with overtime.
My brain is fried but I will keep at it as best I cabn.
Thanks for your patience and understanding.
...local brain surgeon and organ-transplant specialist Dr. Krallman (José Elías Moreno) has a problem. His angel-faced son Julio (Agustín Martínez Solares) is bed-ridden with terminal leukemia, and all the specialists at his hospital have given the boy up for dead. But like any devoted father, the good doctor is not about to take that lying down. In an astonishing feat of scientific reasoning, Krallman deduces that the blood of a more powerful creature--say, a gorilla, for example--might be able to fight off the cancer where puny human blood has failed. But since gorilla-juice is clearly too potent for the human circulatory system, he figures he'll need to swap out Julio's heart for an organ of the simian persuasion. Then bang! Roberto es su tío!
It's true what they say: sometimes the simplest answer is the best.
With the assistance of his slavishly devoted manservant Goyo (Carlos López Moctezuma), the doctor sets about putting his plan into action. Sneaking into the Federal District's most un-security-conscious zoo, the two old men easily purloin a primate and plop its pumper into Papa's poor pestilential progeny, post-haste. In a few hours, the boy is on the mend, the doctor's hypothesis is proved, and the overcrowded monkey house at the zoo has some much-needed extra space...
to read the rest visit MAD MAD MAD MAD MOVIES
Then why browse my PINTREST boards?
I also have an AUTHONOMY page now
After today’s events, I’m unsure whether I should continue my investigation.
I resolved to speak personally to patients, rather than just read files; I had the notion that, if there was some agency working against me - possibly involving the chief of medicine - I should find patients without written or oral accounts. Only those furthest gone have refused to give statements… but I will be the only one to know their stories, and that will put me a step ahead.
I decided to start with the most heartbreaking patient we have. For several months, he has been unresponsive to any attempts to help him. I can’t imagine being in his situation… but I have seen him recently responding to the nurse that takes care of him...
WHEN MIKE ELLINGTON WOKE up, he was naked and couldn't move. Not that he was paralyzed--he could feel the cold surface of the table against his back--but he was wrapped in a ton of Christmas lights. His own lights, he realized as he angled his head to look at his bonds. He had been bound to the dining room table with his own damn Christmas lights, the green cords looping over and over and over around his legs, midsection, and arms until he was completely immobilized...
This time it is a radio play! And damn what a cast!
BLEEDING COOL has the oncomplete cast list
What makes it so funny is the story is quite simple; it’s just been overblown to staggering extremes. Our hero is Nicholas Linnear, improbably-named modern day ninja of caucasian and Japanese descent. Nicholas (and no, it’s never just “Nick”) is one of the more stoic/boring/unmemorable protagonists you’ll ever encounter, lacking much spark. Raised in Japan, Nicholas eventually came to the US (after becoming a ninja, though Lustbader keeps it a “mystery” for several hundred pages), where he apparently got a job at an ad agency (just like Darrin on Bewitched!). Not that it matters, for as it opens Nicholas has resigned his post after a breakdown...or something.
Anyway, it’s all just a convenient setup so that, when we meet him, Nicholas Linnear is a broken man, despite only being in his 30s, sort of living like a bum along the beach outside of New York City. Meanwhile, people around him are being murdered. Nicholas pays no heed, until he meets dropdead gorgeous Justine, who just happens to run into Nicholas on the beach…and several pages later they’re having sex in incredibly overwrought prose. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to get hot beneath the collar or consult a thesaurus...
...Mr Schmidt is quoted by the Daily Mail as telling the German court: ‘The incident happened in May – we were having sex.
‘She was sitting on me naked and I was kissing her breasts. Suddenly she grabbed my head and pushed between her breasts with all of her force.
'I couldn't breathe any more, I must have turned blue. I couldn't tear myself free and I thought I was going to die.'
The 30-year-old said he managed to eventually free himself and fled naked to a neighbour who instructed him to ring the police.
for more read the article at METRO
(Image mostly not related but amusing)
I really mean it, you folks are awesome.
This is us on our first offical date way back in 1992... I don'r know where I would be without her, I don't know who I would be without her...
Shapeless, white, trimmed with lace and roughly the size of his head.
Brett couldn't believe he had forgotten them but there was nothing he could do about it now; the funeral was over and Great Aunt Jill was in the ground. All that was left for him to do now was pack up her two lifetime's worth of clothes and knickknacks for goodwill or EBay, the house was his, finally his.
Still though he felt guilty about the whole underwear thing, near the end Great Aunt Jill had been worried to the point of paranoia about being buried in respectable undergarments. “Please be sure they bury me in my blue church dress and my own underwear. Sometimes the undertakers don't bother and leave you nude under your clothes.”
She had actually said “Nude under your clothes.” And without a drop of irony. More than once Brett had found himself burying his face to make sure she didn't see him roll his eyes.
Still though, Great Aunt Jill was gone, her blue dress was gone and being dragged to church every Sunday at 8 in the morning was over. Brett decided he needed a little fresh air and walked on to the porch. His porch. It was still crowded with colorful plants and drab decorations; it would all go soon in favor of something a little more bachelor-y. It would all be going, the doilies, the precious moments’ figurines the paintings and statuettes depicting the suffering of Christ. He often wondered why there weren't any pictures of Jesus hanging out with his buds- of course he never wondered it aloud, Great Aunt Jill would have had a conniption.
Once he felt refreshed enough and the smell of mothballs was gone from his nose Brett headed back inside. He thought to himself that his life shouldn't have been this way, that at 24 he should have been out and on his own- and hopefully been knee deep in pussy.
But his parents had thrown him under the bus at 12 years old and all just because he had shoplifted, gotten into a few fights and been caught with marijuana at school that one time. Brett barely escaped juvenile detention or boot camp but for the grace of God and his parents' lawyer. When it had all blown over Mom and Dad had shipped him off to his Great Aunt Jill in Elmira certain that she would be able to 'straighten him out'.
He now in retrospect felt that he should have taken his chances in juvie; after all they would have had to let him go at 18. Great Aunt Jill was under no such restrictions.
It took him a little a little while longer to clear out the last of the clothes, for a woman that only seemed to wear six seven outfits her whole life Great Aunt Jill sure had a lot of clothes stuffed into bureaus, dressers and most of the closets. Once that was done Brett started to break down her bed, he was done sleeping in the attic but there was no way he was sharing a mattress with her, even after the fact.
Soon enough the room would be empty and he could put in a waterbed or a widescreen TV, anything he wanted, he could afford it now. Brett remembered his parents dropping him off here to leave him in the care of a relative he only saw at holidays and funerals. A relative he only remembered because of her bell- like shape and dry kisses. As soon as he’d finished waving goodbye to Mom and Dad his new guardian laid down the house rules - no loud radios, no TV but educational programming, no videogames, lights out was at 10 PM and there was no lock on the bathroom door so if she caught him pleasuring himself he would find himself doing Hail Mary's for an hour.
That was when Brett made the mistake of asking her what a Hail Mary was.
A baker’s dozen of Hail Mary’s later she took him to his new room… it wasn’t much more than a bed a lamp and a chest of drawers in the attic. He could hear the wind whistling through the cracks in the attic windowsill and shivered a little in anticipation. His parents weren’t really going to go through with this were they?
Once Great Aunt Jill’s bed was broken down and waiting out on the curb for the trash man Brett made sure all the closets and drawers had been fully emptied. He found a black and white photograph in the top drawer of the nightstand table. It was of his Great Uncle John, who had apparently died a few years after his marriage. Everyone said it was a tragic accident but Brett now suspected it had all been an elaborate escape attempt gone wrong.
Brett tossed the photo and the bible into the kitchen trash, already making plans for his Monday visit with the estate lawyer. Did he want all the money at once? Or did he want it put in some kind of trust that would invest for him and dole out cash like a paycheck.
A really big paycheck. Brett thought as he decided to make a sandwich and have a beer. That’s right Jill, a beer.
He tripped over something on his way to the refrigerator, something tangled around the heel of his shoe. It was Great Aunt Jill’s forgotten funeral underwear, Brett laughed to himself he tossed the handful of cloth into the trash and got to work on that sandwich and beer.
And he didn’t use a single coaster or napkin; it made the meal taste even better.
From the ages 12 to 24 learned a great many things beyond the basic necessities of survival, like keeping the house neat, his manners perfect and how to sneak down into the basement laundry room at 1 AM so he could masturbate. Brett also learned that his parents weren’t coming back for him, that he’d been written off.
No, not written off… sold off.
Brett had found out that for all her frugal living and unwillingness to upgrade to cable TV Great Aunt Jill was rich, not super rich but rich enough to never need anything- rich enough to have family members coming to her with their hands out morning, noon and night. However since she was stingy Great Aunt Jill stayed rich and got richer.
And as far as Brett could figure it that was why he was stranded in Elmira because his parents were trying to win Great Aunt Jill’s heart and cash by giving here the one thing she never had.
A son of her own to take care of, and dote on and emasculate
It didn’t matter how many times he begged to come home. It didn’t matter that at every family gathering he felt himself drifting further and further from the emotional orbit of his parents and siblings until they started to treat him with the same kind of cool affection they’d reserve for a third cousin.
Or a Great Aunt.
Now that she was gone relatives were less reluctant to visit Great Aunt Jill’s house and they were all amazed and alarmed at how much the place had changed in the three months since her death. 1940’s era wallpaper and linoleum? Gone. Religious iconography? Gone. Threadbare non-leather furniture? Gone. Cool bachelor lifestyle?
Well he was working on that.
Of course when his relatives did come to call, the conversations always ended up reaching the subject of Great Aunt Jill’s fortune. How much did she leave? What was he going to do with it? Could they borrow five hundred dollars to get their car out of the impound lot?
Brett quickly discovered that the only thing better than having relatives beg you for money was saying no- especially his parents. He wondered sometimes what left them more stunned, that Great Aunt Jill had managed to live for as long as she had or that boy they had given to her had somehow managed to wheedle his way into the entire inheritance.
“Do you want to come up for a while?” she asked.
The question sent Brett’s pulse rate soaring, her name was Melanie and she was an assistant librarian. Which Brett assumed meant that she hadn’t quite mastered the Dewey Decimal system yet. Although personally he didn’t care if she had a job gelding horses because she was cute, easy to talk to and interested in him.
It was only their first date but somewhere between dinner and the show they’d gone from hand holding to kissing. He hadn’t planned to take things too quickly but Melanie had plans of her own. Once they were alone in her apartment they wasted no time in finding their way to her bedroom. Shoes off, their bodies rubbed together, they panted nonsense words to each other between the kisses.
Melanie wasn’t his first, but this was the first time when he had been alone with a woman and it hadn’t felt furtive or clumsy. Brett peeled her clothes away, slowly, savoring every moment of it. Her blouse and bra landed on the floor, he nuzzled the nape of her neck his hands exploring.
This girl was something, really something but he couldn’t quite imagine himself spending the rest of his life with her. But what as that old saying? That every girl was practice until the right girl came along?
Well as far as Brett was concerned he was going to practice the shit out of this girl.
Once he had exhausted himself with the possibilities of her exposed breasts Brett reached down and undid the zipper of Melanie’s skirt. By the time he had it off her she was cooing his name. Brett felt his body begin to tremble with anticipation, this was it. He hooked his fingers in the waistband of her panties; they were exactly the kind of panties he would have expected to see an assistant librarian wearing- shapeless, white, trimmed with lace.
That thought was like a splash of cold water in all the wrong places. He looked back up the length of her hoping it was a trick of the light but no.
She was wearing panties just like Great Aunt Jill’s, a thick asexual square of fabric that covered her from crotch to navel.
“What’s wrong?” Melanie asked.
“I don’t feel so…” He dressed clumsily, jamming his feet back into his shoes and throwing on his jacket, “…I’ll call you.”
“What’s wrong?” she called after him but he was already halfway down the stairs.
What’s the matter with me? Brett thought as he sped home, You blew it, and over what? Some underwear that she was going to let you take off her anyway?
But it was more than that, seeing that underwear had made him suddenly conscious of the woman again, of all the restrictions, stress and head games. He had spent the last six years of his life taking care of her and waiting for her to die. There was no way he was going to let Great Aunt Jill go to a nursing home so her estate could be nickel and dimned away to nothing so he had played nursemaid- but playing nursemaid had left him with images of the woman’s anatomy floating in his subconscious.
The sight of those panties had brought one too many clumsy bedpan cleanups to mind.
All Brett wanted now was to get home and get blind stinking drunk- he would have gone to a strip club but the closest one he knew of was in Utica. Police lights flared to life behind him. Oh what the Hell is this? Just because I have a red sports car and I’m going… He checked the speedometer …40 miles an hour above the speed limit.
“Shit.” Brett pulled over to the side of the road and tried to remind himself that he had a clean record. This was nothing. He would look back at all this someday and laugh.
The officer asked, “Sir do you know how fast you were going back there?”
Brett shrugged, “Pretty fast? Sorry?”
“Could I get your license and registration please?”
The license was in his wallet, the registration was in his glove compartment buried under the old Burger Clown paper napkins, owners manual and CDs. He pawed through them, tossing Night Ranger and Limp Bizkit’s greatest hits onto the seat beside him.
The napkins were all stuck together somehow and they all came out at once when he pulled at them. They were so old that they had become smooth to the touch and shapeless…
…and white.
…and trimmed with lace.
Brett screamed.
It took one ticket, field sobriety test and car search before the police let him go home. He wasn’t sure how the panties had gotten there but Brett figured he must have pulled them off Melanie when he ran from her place.
The gentlemanly thing would have been to keep them to return to her but Brett couldn’t bear to have the things near him. He tossed them out the window of his car as he made his way home at a safe and reasonable speed.
A month later Brett was a jittery and teary eyed every moment of the day. His newly swinging bachelor pad was had become a slovenly ruin… even by the low standards set by bachelor pads.
Wherever he went he found them. He found them when he was folding laundry, when he was reaching for something to towel off with and even that one time when he was in the psychiatrist’s office they had fallen out of a magazine along with all those subscription cards!
Great Aunt Jill’s panties hounded him at every turn.No. He thought, No just her panties… it’s her, she’s haunting me.
And Brett thought he knew why.
“Please be sure they bury me in my blue church dress and my own underwear. Sometimes the undertakers don't bother and leave you nude under your clothes.”
So she wanted her damn granny panties did she? Well he would see to it she got the damn things. Brett was sure he had everything he needed; flashlight, shovel and a crowbar.
He would have preferred not to go on such a dark and stormy night but he’d caught the panties lounging insolently on the dish rack and knew it was now or never.
It was a little after 1 AM when he reached the cemetery, a half an hour later he found an out of the way spot that he could use to sneak in. The cold rain soaked him to the skin, the thunder and lightning disoriented but he found Great Aunt Jill tombstone soon enough.
The storm had left the ground soft for digging but it was still a long backbreaking process. Every time he thought he was making progress one side of the grave would fall in and he would have to start again.
When the coffin was uncovered he took a moment to rest, the parts of his body that weren’t clammy and cold were sore and aching. He wondered to himself if it would be enough to just leave the granny panties in the coffin with her or if Great Aunt Jill really expected him to slip them on her.
Well I’m here. I may as well go all the way. He grabbed the crowbar and started to pry open the coffin lid. He cursed himself for getting such an expensive casket but eventually his persistence was rewarded with the sound of wood cracking. Brett opened the coffin.
The stench was worse than he could ever imagine both rancid and stale, bile filled his mouth, his eyes water. He forced himself to finish the job, there was no turning back now.
He reached into his jacket pocket but the panties weren’t there.
He tried the other. Still nothing.
“No.” Brett said as he checked each pocket a second and third time, “Oh no no no no…”
They were gone.
Did they… escape?
Scrambling out of the grave Brett looked all around the open Great Aunt Jill’s final resting place for the scrap of cloth.
Nothing. Nothing at all. He thought, Are they back at the car? Did I leave them home? What am I going to do?
Then Brett realized and he started tearing at himself, the crack of thunder swallowing his choking cries.
The next morning the cemetery caretaker ran into his office and dialed 911, “I need the police down at Morningside Cemetery. Someone dug up one of the graves and there’s this young man lying dead just a few feet away. Yes he’s dead. I know a dead man when I see one but you wouldn’t believe what he’s wearing…”
“To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.” ― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
