Potatocide/T1J, Ticks, & emigranTs/An Alkie, Drunk/Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said: The Motion Picture

Monica Lewinsky was walking along a rocky mountain path all by herself, carrying in her arms an enormous Yukon Gold potato, when a man with a machete-sized butcher knife leapt out and attacked her. He tried stabbing her through the potato, but it got stuck in the tuber. After failing to pull it free, he ran away.

* * *

It was the early '90s. The YouTuber T1J

took his dog for a stroll through a boggy grassland. Walking through the long, moist grass, the dog picked up a number of ticks.

Back in town, T1J ran into a Haitian emigrant who spoke little English. The Haitian cleaned T1J's dog free of ticks, free of charge.

The Haitian worked as a cook at a "greasy spoon" diner owned by Vera Miles.

Dilapidated and unsanitary, the diner was failing.

* * *

The end times were upon us. A species of flying, biting insectoids of unknown origin appeared in massive swarms, attacking and draining of life-force all beings they encountered — even ghosts.

One of my sister's drunking buddies, having run out of booze, left the safety of the enclosed shelters to procure more. Contact with him soon ceased, phone and text messages going unanswered. My sister went into a frenzy, intent on venturing out to find him. We were forced to restrain her, heedless of her desperate pleas.

* * *

In the '70s, my mother wrote an adapted screenplay of Philip K. Dick's Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. It was an adaptation in name only; the plot and characters were wholly original. The screenplay was picked up by a major studio and made into a movie starring Yaphet Kotto and Leslie Nielsen.

Kotto's character was the primary antagonist, a hitman hired to eliminate a number of different people. Nielsen's was the decoy protagonist, a detective tasked with apprehending the hitman.

At some point in the film, the hitman sent the detective sliding down the side of a skyscraper to his doom.

No Dogs, No Masters/Witchspin/The Mutant Calicoes Beneath My Garage/Ghost Dad/And the Suns Became as Red as Blood ...

My mother and I joined a plethora of anarcho-communist/anarcho-syndicalist organizations, all of which catered to cat lovers in particular.

* * *

Had a bi/transerotic dream which included witches and werewolves in powdered wigs. I remember nothing coherent about it.

* * *

There was a hole in the floor of my garage. The hole led down to a cave/hollow beneath the foundation. All my cats which had gone missing over the years had gotten trapped down there, where they survived and bred. After nearly twenty years of inbreeding, they were almost all calicoes, and while a portion of them remained attractive animals, another portion was mutated/deformed; one cat had three heads, another had a teeny-tiny head as a result of getting their head permanently stuck in a bottle cap as a kitten.

* * *

The ghost of my father began manifesting about the house. He stayed in bed for the most part, sick as he had been in the months leading up to his death. Though he'd periodically talk to us, I got the sense that this was no sapient Earthbound spirit; this was just a spectral recording, a semi-interactive ectoplasmic hologram, and his true soul had moved on to the next phase of its existence.

* * *

I was in my kitchen, washing dishes, when the power went out. After about a minute, the overhead light came back on, but the rest of the house remained without electricity. I looked outside the window; the sky was black with thick cloud. Showing through this otherwise solid blanket of black, haloed in red, was not one, but two suns.

Swedish Tongue/Back to the Dead/Burtonverse: The Special Edition

It was the '60s and I was in Sweden, on the set of a movie being filmed by Ingmar Bergman. I'd been hired as an extra, but due to an actor's absence, I was promoted to bit player. I was to deliver my lines in Swedish, but not being fluent in the language, I had to recite them phonetically; I flubbed them badly.

On the plus side, Bibi Andersson and I shared a mutual attraction; we spent the whole time flirting and consulting a Swedish-English dictionary to bolster my understanding of her tongue.

*swoon*

* * *

In the near-future, the end times came upon us. The human birth rate had fallen to zero and the souls of the dead were no longer permitted to pass into the afterlife; they remained tethered to their decaying bodies, intelligent zombies which maintained an uneasy, sometimes hostile co-existence with the living population.

Marty McFly had developed an addiction to pizza; he ate multiple slices of pizza multiple times a day every day until he became obese, died of heart disease, and came back a zombie.

He continued eating pizza — old, dry, mouldy pizza topped with human skin.

* * *

Dreamt that I watched alternate cuts of the Tim Burton Batfilms which had been re-edited to better conform with the Schumacher films. Not only had a mention of the Riddler been inserted in Batman '89, but a new scene with Dick Grayson had been placed in Batman Returns; he was Vicki Vale's new boyfriend, and he was shown driving a shape-changing holographic car.

The dream ended on a mortifying note. In a Returns post-credits scene, the soul of the Penguin — reduced back to infancy, back in his gothic baby carriage — was sailing down the River Styx. As his androgynous soul made its voyage along those brown waters, the disembodied spectral head of Tim Curry materialized over it.

Looming large over the carriage, Tim Curry's disembodied head metamorphosed into the disembodied head of Pennywise the Clown, complete with large, burning red eyes. Looking directly at the viewer, me, he showed a ghastly grin of sharpened teeth. For several seconds I had no choice but to stare back into those hideous eyes before I forced myself awake.

Labyrinth of Legends

Once upon a time, there was the Earth.

And on the Earth was Man.

And Man had dominion over every beast in the field and bird in the air and fish in the sea.

Then Man breached the barriers between the Earth and Todash Space,

and the demoniac hordes were loosed upon the Earth,

and the Earth was made waste and empty.

Then the Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea sent his son, Aslan,

to renew the face of the Earth. Aslan planted a glen in the midst of the Waste Lands, and taking the last of every wondrous and holy creature, filled it, setting bars all along the Glen to shield it from the Todash monsters and their minions.

A young maiden was brought to the Glen stables,

(We'll call her Sarah-Lily.)

where she was put in charge of caring for the sacred unicorn, last of its kind.

Sarah-Lily, entranced by the unicorn's purity, came to love the creature.

In the Waste Lands, in the Dark Kingdom, there reigned Jareth — Dark Prince of the Goblins.

(And a million fangirls cried out in pleasure and suddenly climaxed.)

Jareth came to know of the unicorn and the magical powers it wielded. Coveting the beast, Jareth set about appearing in Sarah-Lily's dreams. Speaking to her in velvet tones, he promised all his love and his glory to her if she would but take the unicorn from the Glen and ride out upon it to his castle.Very innocent, just as naive, Sarah-Lily succumbed to Jareth's charm and fell deeply in love with the Dark Prince. Doing as her beloved requested, Sarah-Lily saddled up the unicorn and took it from the stables. A stable boy

(I was wondering when I was supposed to appear in my own dream.)

noticed her slip out with the unicorn and decided to see where she was off to. Keeping himself hidden, the stable boy followed her as she rode through the Glen, out the gate, into the Dead Wood.

Travelling along the path through the Dead Wood surrounded by overgrown, lifeless trees which choked out the very sky, Sarah-Lily soon saw Jareth in the distance. Jareth, atop a black Clydesdale steed, held aloft a scepter bearing a crystal globe scintillating with silver light. As Sarah-Lily slowly approached her prince, mesmerized in his physical presence, the stable boy emerged from cover of the underbrush and ran up to the maiden. Shouting at her, cursing her, he managed to rouse her from Jareth's spell. No longer bewitched by the Dark Prince, she turned right 'round and kicked the unicorn into a full gallop back for the Glen.

Sarah-Lily managed to get back to the safety of the Glen grounds, but the stable boy wasn't so fortunate. Without the speed of a steed to assist his gait, he failed to make it to the gate in time before Jareth called on his magic to close it, sealing the boy off from sanctuary. Chanting an incantation, the Dark Prince cast an unbreakable sphere of solid vacuum over the boy, sealing his fate.