Swan: Madame, Swan here. I want you to answer a question for me.
Madame: Yes?
Swan: What would you give me for a starring role in a syndicated sitcom?
Madame: Anything you wanted, sweetheart.
Swan: Anything? Would you give me… your spot on Hollywood Squares?
Recommended listening: The devil is real and spent the better part of the 1970s programming celebrity variety hours as summer replacement series.
Status update, 2024:
The Vampire: Actuary for a major insurance corporation.
The Ghost: Middle school guidance counselor.
The Werewolf: Sells souvenirs made from painted shells in Myrtle Beach, S.C.
The Clown: The Tri-State Torso Ripper, still at large.
Recommended listening: Tick tick tick.
If you’ve wondered what I’ve been up to during my long hiatus from this site, the answer is “trying to enjoy and reconnect with things without feeling like I have to mine them for content.”
What kinds of things?
A lot of shit from first three decades on earth, where imperfect memories and rosy nostalgia needed a reality check. Videogames, comics, books, music, and midden pickings such as Deadly Lessons…
…a 1983 ABC made-for-TV movie with an incredible cast and some dubious decisions.
Donna Reed! Ally Sheedy! Larry Wilcox! Diane Franklin! Bill Paxton! Rick Rossovich! It’s as if the Love Boat crashed into a Hemdale movie production!
Mostly though, it’s an odd artifact of what happened when the made-for-TV movie hunger to bite some cultural trend — in this case the “slasher at an all-girls school” horror thriller — grappled with the need to square things with the wholesome-ish standnards of prime time network TV.
No gore. No titty flashing. No cuss words or anything within the same galactic sector of a R-rating. Just a whole lot of familiar faces going through the bowdlerized motions as genre cliches demand.
In short, it’s a fucking hoot and a half.
Recommended listening: Welcome to the house of fun.
Last time I tried this, I ended up in the ER.
So let’s see how things go this time around.
Recommended listening: Some rockabilly thunder from Down Under from an artist who has since gone on to be a synth-goth Kylie.
Two weeks back from yesterday, I went to urgent care to get some antibiotics for a tooth infection. Part of the process involved having my vitals taken, which resulted in being told that my heartrate and blood pressure were at IMMEDIATE HEALTH RISK levels.
They wanted to call an ambulance then and there, but I said I’d wanted to consult with my primary care folks before making a decision. So I signed some liability waiver forms, went home, and gave my general practitioner’s office a call.
…and thus ended up taking an ambulance ride to the ER down the road from me.
The Nurse Practitioner at the ER told me it was asymptomatic (meaning that I felt otherwise fine) hypertension, which was serious but also not worth the three ring panic circus that likely exacerbated the problem at hand. I got set up with some meds to bring my numbers down and an appointment with my GP two days later, who put me on a couple of other prescriptions.
And, in a couple of hours, I have to go and check-in to see how things have been progressing.
None of this was unexpected. This shit runs in my family and I assumed blood (pressure) would eventually tell. The brusque confrontation with my mortality was a bit of a trip for a day or so, but there’s nothing to be done that I’m not actively working on right now.
What did run me through the ringer, however, was my body trying to adjust to the blood pressure meds while also going through a stiff antibiotic regimen. It knocked me on my ass for the better part of the week, and also left me craving popcult comfort food over Spooky Season tricks and treats — less The Blob and I Drink Your Blood and more The Soup and I Love the 1990s (BBC version).
My Halloween mojo has make a comeback over the past few days, but I’d already written off hopes of salvaging this year’s countdown.
Such is life, with maximum emphasis on “life.”
Recommended listening: …unless it’s your physical manifestation on this plane, in which case you should probably observe a proper preventative maintenance routine.
A decaying relic, kept in a mockery of life by foul alchemy and a perpetual state of rage born of ancient esoteric grudges?
Oh, he’ll do just fine in these parts.
Recommended listening: More regional ghosts.
It’s not as if things could get any worse out there, so why not?
Recommended listening:
Vampires and werewolves may be frightful, but they lack the gnawing existential elan of the terrors of parenthood.
Besides all the anxieties about perils which might afflict your offspring, there are more subtle chills — namely the recurring fits of angst over whether the example you’ve tried to set or lessons you’ve tried to impart have found any purchase within the child’s psyche.
The feeling peaks during the kid’s adolescent years, with their surly, eye-rolling onslaught of oppositional behaviors and acts of pointless rebellion. It’s a script as old as time and countless words have been expended to explain how expected and unremarkable these behaviors are, and how they’re part and parcel of the maturation process, but that received wisdom does do a lot good as the process unfolds and shitty teenitude is in full flower.
“Where did I go wrong?” you wonder. “Did they pick up anything we’d tried to lay down for them over the years?”
…and then the kid goes and sneaks a kitten into the house, and you realize that all your behavior modeling wasn’t just pissing into the wind.
Like mother, like daughter.
Recommended listening:
The unconvincing gorilla suit was a staple of stage and screen dating back to at least the late 19th Century.
Need an exotic menace for an old dark house? Someone to send a slapstick ensemble into a state of comedic terror? A zany bit of zest for a struggling sitcom? Just throw someone with the right dimensions and pantomime chops into a tatty looking ensemble of faux fur, visible eyeholes, and disturbing pleather plates representing the chest and abs of the Grade Z ape.
That such a sorry assemblage could be a thing of wonder of menace might seem like a mystery, but the short answer is “because audiences were acclimated towards accepting it,” — at least up until the second half of the 1960s, when the astounding practical effects in Planet of the Apes and 2001 brought the simulated ape game to a whole new level.
Old school gorilla suits hung on in comedic circles for a while longer, though even those had embraced the new technology by the dawn of the 1980 outside everything except low grade kiddie fare and the deliberate affectations of Jim Henson’s workshop.
That’s why I was both delighted and surprised to discover that “Hatred Unto Death,” the main segment of the final Night Gallery episode, served up a classic simulated simian in May 1973.
Because nothing screams “terror” like a creature you’d normally see swooning over Mrs. Howell’s perfume, chasing around the crew of the Seaview, or trying to talk Serena into changing him back into Darrin Stephens again before Samantha gets home from shopping.
Recommended listening:
“One look at his bookshelf and I knew the relationship was going to be a non-starter.”
“I don’t blame you. Sounds like a huge red flag.”
“I mean, he had the Teasdale translation of the De Vermis Mysteriis, for Dagon’s sake! Couldn’t even spring for the Armitage edition! And his copy of the Necronomicon looked like it came from a mall bookstore!”
– overheard at the Happy Shoggoth Taphouse, Innsmouth MA
Recommended listening:
