Send in the Clowns

A small gallery of scary clowns.

Nobody laughs at a clown at midnight. 

- Lon Chaney 

Boltie & Friends

We saw the movie Super last weekend.  It was really great.  It's pretty much what films like "Kick-Ass" were going for, but done right.  Incredibly dark, violent, and funny.  And Ellen Page steals the show as Boltie, the "Kid Sidekick."  Which inspired me to draw this:

"Boltie"

And here is a sketch I did the other day just for shits'n'giggles.

"The Last Crusade"

sketches

Emily got me a drawing tablet for my birthday. And I did these doodles/sketches.

Amanda Palmer:

Bill Murray:

Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks:

Emily:

a mountain goat:

The Sunset, the Stars, and the Summer Sky

Once, the little girl lay in her bed and heard her father come home, and her wide eyes shot to the bedside clock.  It read 9:38 P.M.  She heard him downstairs, trudging through the mudroom, into the kitchen.  She heard the sound of the many bottles on the refrigerator door tinkling against each other as he opened it.  She could picture him clearly in her mind: walking around the shadowy house in his blue work shirt and his brown pants, his hands stuffed into his pockets.  She tried to send him mental messages, shutting her eyes tight and balling her hands into fists, as if this would make her a better human radio transmitter.  She sent messages like Please come up here and I’m still awake!

And it worked.  Before she knew it, his wide frame was a shadow in the doorway of her bedroom. 


“Awake?” he grumbled.  He had a voice made for growling and grumbling and muttering. 


“Yes,” she whispered.


“It’s late, kiddo.”


“It’s not very late.  You’re still up.”


“I’m a big person.  Big people stay up late.”


“Mommy doesn’t.”


“Mommy has a headache.”


“Poor Mommy,” the little girl said sadly.


“Poor Mommy,” her father said sadly.


“Tell me a story.”


“Did your mother tell you one?”


“No.  She wanted to, but I said no.”


Her mother made a living by telling stories.  She wrote and illustrated children’s books, books that featured the recurring character of Hamlet the Neatest Pig.  He was a pig who refused to be dirty like the other pigs and took baths and wore deodorant.  But she did not like her mother’s stories.  She would always turn down her mother’s offers for a story before bed– in the nicest way possible, of course.


“Tell me a story, please,” she said, putting her hands together in mock prayer.


He looked at his watch.  “I’m beat, kid.”


“It doesn’t have to be long.  You can tell me one you’ve already told me, so you don’t have to make one up!”


“Shh,” he whispered, putting a finger to his lips.  “Keep your voice down.”


“Sorry . . .”


He came into the room, the floor creaking under his boots.  He sat on the edge of her bed and folded his hands in his lap. She looked at his hands – hands large enough that they could swallow her head entirely and block out the moon and sun and the sounds of the birds that sang in the cherry trees that lined their yard.  And the fact that he would never do anything like that made her love him entirely.  She loved him in a way that frightened her.  She loved him with a kind of love she had yet to discover words for, and would never really discover words for, even after she had grown up and gone through a messy divorce and wept at her father’s funeral.


“Which story, then?” he growled.  His breath smelled of beer and pretzels.  “How ‘bout the one about the crows in the graveyard, the ones who sing songs that bring back the dead?”


“No,” she said.  “Not that one.”


“The one about the boy who ate the cake made of bad dreams?”


“No.”


“Help me out here.”


“The one about the Princess.”


“Again?”


“It’s my favorite.”


“Okay,” he said.  He moved his head from side to side and she heard a slight cracking sound.  He exhaled and burped and smoothed his mussed hair with his big hands.


“Once upon a Time, there was a Princess.  She was, of course, the most beautiful Princess in all the land.  She had fire-colored hair – like yours, but longer – and she had blue eyes – like yours, but bigger – and she had fair skin and an elegant neck and very nice knees, too.   She was so beautiful that the Sunset and the Stars and the Summer Sky were jealous of her.  She was so beautiful that she could never really show her face in public, because all the men in the kingdom would swoon at the sight of her, and then they would neglect their duties, and they wouldn’t tend their lands, and there would be no harvest, and everyone would starve.  So, naturally, that was a bad thing.”


“Naturally.”


“But, at the same time, to deprive the kingdom of seeing such a beautiful sight would be cruel and unusual punishment. So once a week, on Saturday afternoon, the Princess would come out onto the balcony of the castle and just stand there for an hour.  And everyone from the kingdom would come and look at her.  And she would wave to them and they would all be smitten.”


“Even the girls?” the little girl asked, already knowing the answer.


“Yes.  Even the girls.  She was that beautiful.  Anyway, after a while, the Sunset and the Stars and the Summer Sky got together for a meeting.


“‘Something has to be done,’ the Sunset said.


“‘It’s not fair for the Princess to be so beautiful,’ said the Stars.


“‘The people are so taken with looking at her that they no longer stop to look at us,’ said the Summer Sky.


“So they hatched a plan.  Whenever the Princess wanted to look at the Summer Sky, the Summer Sky would fill up with huge, black rain clouds shaped like skulls and daggers.  And the Princess would grow sad.  Whenever the Princes wanted to gaze at the Stars, the Stars would all black themselves out, casting the night in solid darkness.  And the Princess would cry.  And whenever the Princess wanted to watch the Sunset, the Sunset would refuse to set and instead rise up higher and higher until the Princess grew hot and sweaty and got badly sunburned.”


“Poor Princess,” the little girl said sadly.


“Poor Princess,” her father said sadly.  “After a while, the people of the kingdom grew angry.  They complained that the Princess had become too beautiful.  And that her beauty had driven the Sunset and the Stars and the Summer Sky into revolt, and that as a result the crops were growing poorly due to the sun never setting and overheating them or due to the rain clouds that would appear and block out any light at all.  And sailors were constantly crashing their ships, no longer able to navigate by the Stars.   Something had to be done.  So the elders of the kingdom gathered all their gold together and went deep into the woods to the cave where the King of the Wolves lived, and they offered him the gold if he would go and claw the face of the Princess and ruin her beauty.”


“Why would a wolf want gold?” the little girl asked, already knowing the answer.


“Because this was no ordinary wolf.  The King of the Wolves was in fact an infamous thief, who had once robbed a witch. The witch had enchanted him and turned him into a wolf.  She had told him that the only way to cure his curse would be for him to gather all the gold in the world – without stealing it.  It would have to come by him legally.  So the King of the Wolves was, naturally, very eager to take on this job.”


“Naturally.”


“The King of the Wolves crept into the Princess’ bed chamber one dark, starless night.  And as she slept and dreamed of her kingdom the way it had once been – with beautiful sunsets, bright summer skies, and shining stars – the King of the Wolves raised his claws, ready to strike!”


“Then what happened?!” asked the little girl, her voice excited and anxious, already knowing the answer.


“He couldn’t do it!  He was too taken by her beauty!  And he realized that, if he couldn’t do the job, the people of the kingdom would want their gold back.  So he began to howl in sadness.  His howling woke up the Princess.  She sat up in bed, startled, and asked the King of the Wolves what was the matter.  He told her about how the people had hired him to ruin her beauty, and he wept as he told her he could not do it, and he told her about the horrible enchantment that had been placed upon him and how he so badly needed the gold.


“‘You poor creature,’ the Princess said, stroking the fur on his head.  She felt sadness – overwhelming sadness for both the King of the Wolves and herself.  She hated that she had become a source of pain for the people of her kingdom.  And she hated that they wanted to destroy her beauty.


“‘I’d be better off dead,’ she said, and she asked the King of the Wolves to kill her.   He said he couldn’t do that – he would feel terrible about it!  But she didn’t give him a chance.  Before he knew what was happening, she had taken one of his paws in her hand and cut her own throat with one of his claws.  She bled to death! 


“Well, when the people heard of the Princess’ death, they all felt terrible for the part they had played, and they decided to throw her a lavish funeral parade.  They lined the streets with flowers and hung black, lacy ribbons on all the trees.   Even the Sunset, the Stars, and the Summer Sky felt bad, so, for the funeral, the Sunset arranged itself so it was always setting and looked its prettiest – the sky half pink and half dark blue.  And at the same time, the Summer Sky let its sun shine bright – in the part of the sky that wasn’t quite set yet, of course.  And the Stars came out in the part of the sky that was dark, and they were bright and big and beautiful.  The whole kingdom was bathed in an unnatural, beautiful, eerie light. 


“They put the Princess in a glass coffin so that as they paraded her through the street all could look upon her beauty one last time.  They marched her body up and down the streets, her glass coffin pulled on a cart by two white horses.  The King of the Wolves was, at this point, very depressed.  He felt so terrible for his part in the death of the Princess that he came to pay his respects.  He walked right up to the horses, but the horses – being horses – were very scared of this wolf.  So they started to scream and kick wildly.  As a result, the cart carrying the Princess shook and the glass coffin fell to the ground.  But it didn’t break--it was very strong glass.  But the Princess’ stomach – bloated from death – broke open, and all of her bright green stomach bile poured out and splashed against the clear coffin for all to see.  And this made everyone sick, so they began throwing up into the streets and onto each other.  Soon, the entire kingdom smelled really, really bad.  Like, just awful.”


“Like Grandma’s house.”


“Anyway,” her father said, ignoring the remark, “try as they might, they could never get the bad smell out of the kingdom--even after they had scrubbed all the puke away.  And the puke had stained the streets a gross yellow color.  And so, with the combination of the death of the Princess and the eternal stain and smell of vomit, there was no more beauty in the kingdom – no matter how clear the Summer Sky was, or how bright the Stars shinned, or how picturesque the Sunset was.  The End.”


He paused and cracked his neck again.  “And do you know where that kingdom was located?”


“No,” the little girl said, already knowing the answer.


“Right here,” her father said, pointing to the floor.  “In Philadelphia.”


The little girl smiled and lay back against her pillow.  “I love that story, dad.”


“I love you,” her father said, and kissed her forehead. 


He rose from the bed and made his way to the door.


“Are you and Mommy still fighting?” the little girl asked, almost as an afterthought.  Her voice was slow and sleepy.           


Her father paused and thought about the question.  “I don’t know,” he said.  “Don’t worry about it.  Your mother is 
just having a rough month.”


“Poor Mommy,” the little girl said sadly.


“Poor Mommy,” her father said sadly.


“Goodnight,” the little girl said, and she was almost instantly asleep.


“Goodnight,” her father whispered.  He shut the door and made his way back downstairs.  He opened the last of his beers and made his bed on the couch and drifted into a sleep filled with dreams he would not remember.

Dead Silence

Puppets! They're creepy.

Dead Silence is one of the best movies about a killer puppet woman ever made.

It's easy to shrug off a film like Dead Silence.  One look at the DVD box art, with a generic ventriloquist dummy having a "shush" monster finger over his puppet lips, accompanied by the screaming headline FROM THE CREATORS OF SAW might give one cause for alarm.  And with good reason.

I mean, have you seen those Saw movies? They're awful.

But James Wan and Leigh Whannell broke away from the monster they created, and have gone on to make some very spectacular genre films.  Their recent movie, Insidious, is one of the creepiest haunted house movies made in the last decade.  And their film Death Sentence was a nice gritty, violent throwback to 70's revenge films. AND it had Kevin Bacon.

But their first post-Saw film was Dead Silence, a movie almost no one on earth saw in theaters.  I guess everyone was busy seeing Herbie: Fully Loaded with Lindsay Lohan that day (note: I don't know if that movie was out then.)

Dead Silence is a throw-back to old Universal and Hammer horror films.  That is, films with creepy class.  You may be saying, "A CLASSY killer puppet movie?  Get to bed, idiot."  But it's true.  This is as classy a killer puppet film as you will ever see.

Mary Shaw and Billy. Not pictured: Jack Nicholson

Jamie is a boy who grew up in the town of Raven's Fair (sounds like a real, non-scary place!) with his wife Lisa.  They now live in New York (I guess), where it's always raining and they always get Chinese food.

Jamie's wife is cute but she would look a lot better without her weird short hair.  Also, her jawbone gets ripped off her face.

You see, one night, the couple receives a package in the mail.  In said package? PUPPET.

"This reminds me of that old poem!" Lisa says.  "About the woman who had puppet kids and was a ghost!" Okay, she doesn't say exactly that, but close enough.

Anyway, Jamie goes out to get take-out (don't they deliver in New York?) and in the time he is gone, all the sound in the apartment drops out and the puppet kills his wife and the soundtrack screams at us.

Jamie is now a suspect, and Donnie Wahlberg, playing a cop who is constantly shaving, doesn't believe him when he says the puppet is to blame.  Lousy cops, they never suspect the puppet.

Get off the floor, Mary Shaw!  Everyone wants to see your puppets!

Jamie goes back to Raven's Fair to bury his wife, where we learn he has a bad relationship with his father, played by Bob Gunton.  Bob Gunton is a fantastic character actor who has never played a nice man in his entire career, so you just know something is up with him...

Jamie later learns of the legend of Mary Shaw.  She was a ventriloquist who had no children--only dolls.  And I guess she was pure evil.

Years ago, during her act, some fat boy points out that he can see her lips moving, which causes Mary Shaw to have a violent verbal argument with Billy, her puppet.  Later, the fat boy disappears.  Everyone blames Mary, and they kill her. Good job, townsfolk.  Way to let mob justice rule.

Mary stressed in her will that she wants to be TURNED INTO A PUPPET for her funeral.  I shit you not.  And yes, it is as creepy as it sounds.  Puppet Mary is truly terrifying looking, and the filmmakers do a fantastic job showing her in lightning flashes.

What does this all have to do with Jamie?  Why is Donnie Wahlberg always shaving?  Is it even legal to turn someone into a puppet for their funeral?  How the hell did Mary Shaw make all of those dolls?  Why didn't anyone see this movie?

This is not a perfect film.  Some of the acting is wooden (NO PUN INTENDED LOL JK LMAO GET IT PUPPET/WOOD?), and the ending feels a bit abrupt.  But this is a solid little creep film, and if you haven't seen it (and since this movie made 4 dollars at the box office, and that money was from me, my friend Joe, and some guy sitting behind us in the theater, chances are you haven't), you should give it a chance.

I think the man sitting behind us in the theater summed it up best when, at one point during a big reveal, he yelled: "A LOTTA PUPPETS!"

Saturn in Retrograde

Temperatures in Philadelphia reach 95 degrees by 7 a.m., and I end up running into Harry at the train station.  I am in town for a conference, and he is apparently going to work – dressed in a suit that doesn’t quite fit him. 

            

“Judy, what are the odds?” he laughs, and I notice there are old coffee stains on his sky blue tie.

            

I smile, hoping the humidity hasn’t destroyed my hair.  “What are the odds, indeed?”

            

“What are you doing here?”

            

“In town for work,” I say, holding up my brown leather bag as if to drive home the point.  We both chuckle, though I don’t know why.

            

I try to remember his wife’s name: “How’s . . . Jessica?”

            

“Jessica’s great,” Harry says.  He has taken out his BlackBerry, and he asks for my number.  I take out my BlackBerry and ask for his, and, once our numbers are safely tucked away in each other’s pocket, we agree to have dinner tonight. 

            

“Bring Jessica,” I say, even though I don’t mean it.

            

“She has to work tonight, sadly,” Harry says. 

“Aw, that’s too bad,” I say, trying not to smile too hard.

Later, the sun has slowly started to sink behind the skyscrapers, but there seems to be no sign of the heat letting up.  In my hotel room, I obsessively pluck my eyebrows and apply and remove five different shades of lipstick until I get the right one.  I try to dress light, and I make sure to wear open-toed sling-back heels, because I remember that Harry liked those.

I meet Harry at the restaurant, a little place called Rouge, right across the street from Rittenhouse Square Park.  We have to wait twenty minutes for a table.  Most of the seating is outside, so we have to stand on the corner of the street, watching other people eat at their small tables.  We don’t talk to each other at all during this period.  I notice that all the waitresses (there are only waitresses, no waiters) are young pretty things dressed all in black.  I imagine they are all college students, working here in their spare time, and I cannot help but hate them.  They have tattoos on their arms, and tacky jewelry hanging around their necks, and they all look incredibly bored.

We finally sit down at a tiny round table and our waitress brings us water.  We have a nice view of the park, which is overflowing with people.  Teenagers jump on their skateboards, girls sunbathe in bikinis (even though the sun has almost set), and people walk their dogs.  I sip the water and pray the sun will go down faster so the heat will break.

“So, how have you been?” Harry asks.  “Married?  Kids?”

“Yes on both counts,” I say.  “Well, kid – singular.  A son.”

“That’s great.  Really.  We have two girls.”

“Fantastic,” I say, smiling.  We order our food and our wine, and the food is good, although on the greasy side.  

The wine is terrible.  I don’t say anything, and I regret getting it because it makes me extra warm.  Harry is rambling on and on about his family, and he tells me his wife is an English teacher and that she has a PTA meeting tonight.  How utterly boring that must be.

Harry is still handsome.  Not as handsome as he was in college, when he was in fabulous shape and always sporting a five o’clock shadow.  He’s clean-shaven now, and a little pudgy, but he still has those high cheekbones, and he still has those deep-set eyes.  I continue to smile at his banal existence, and then I drop the smile – afraid that I’m smiling too much.

“So, what about you?” Harry says. “What about your life?”

I tell him my husband Mark is a doctor (a lie; he is actually an accountant) and I tell him my son Cody is a straight A student.  (That’s also a lie; in fact, Cody has been getting in a lot of trouble recently for fighting at school, and we had to attend a parent-teacher conference last month because his art teacher discovered that he had drawn page after page of women with their heads cut off in his art journal.  “Boys will be boys!” had been my only statement at the conference.)

Absently, I slip one of my shoes off and begin to rub my foot against Harry’s leg under the table.  This stops him in the middle of one of his dreary sentences.  His mouth hangs open and he raises an eyebrow.  I smile seductively and continue to rub my foot against his leg, sliding it all the way up to his crotch.  I keep expecting him to tell me to stop, but he sits there stunned.  Then he downs his entire glass of water and asks for the check.  He pays for both of us and I don’t object.

Walking through the park, the sun has gone down, and fireflies twinkle around the grass.  Someone is strumming a guitar somewhere, and someone is talking loudly on a cell phone.  The air is still warm; but not humid.  Harry and I don’t speak the entire time, and we leave the park and cross the street.

“Is your room near by?” he asks suddenly.

“No,” I lie.

“I . . . I don’t know what we’re doing . . .,” he mutters.  All the joy has gone out of his voice.  His words are clipped and strained, and he is sweating.  “We shouldn’t . . . .”

“We shouldn’t, you’re right,” I say, and then I lean in and kiss his neck.

We duck into an alleyway by two old brownstones, and he presses me against the wall and we begin kissing violently.  He paws at me, and I tear at his hair, our bodies soaked in sweat.

“Fuck me; here, now,” I whisper in his ear, and he is hiking up my skirt and I am unbuckling his belt and it isn’t long before he is inside me, but it is not at all like I remember.  It’s weak and it’s sort of sad, and I can hear he is crying.  Sobbing, actually.

“Oh, stop,” I say, angry.  “Just stop.”

“I’m sorry—”

“Stop, god damn it.  Just forget it.”  I am pushing him away, pulling up my panties, hating the universe. 

“I just—”

“Just stop.  Forget it.  Thank you for dinner.”

“Judy—”

“Please, if you say another word I’m going to start screaming,” I snap.  I am out of the alley and walking back to the hotel, with Harry calling after me.  I continue to walk, not looking back, and he does not follow.  But I get lost along the way, and on the corner of a street I see that a filthy homeless man is looking at me.  I start screaming at him.

“What the fuck are you looking at?” I say, pulling strands of hair out of my eyes.  “You filthy fucking slob.  What are you looking at?  Get away from me.  Get away!”

As I’m screaming, I can see the utter sadness in his glassy eyes, and I can imagine the life he had once – a dead wife, children who won’t speak to him, some sort of terrible trauma that made him the way he is now.  And though I am overwhelmed with sudden sympathy and pity, I can’t stop screaming.  My words explode out of my mouth in rushes, and spittle begins to fly.  I scream obscenities until he staggers away. 

I start to softly cry, because it’s too hot and I have no idea which direction my hotel is in.  My phone rings and I answer it without looking at the caller ID.  It’s Mark.

“Hi hon!” he says.  “How’s Philly?”

“Hot,” I say flatly. 

“How was the conference?”

“Oh, the usual.  Nothing too exciting.  How are you?”

“Okay.  Miss you.”

“Miss you too.  How’s Cody?”

“Well, that’s sort of why I was calling . . .,” Mark says, his voice unsteady.  “It’s . . . it’s not a big deal, I don’t want you to worry.  But Cody . . . had a problem earlier.”

“A problem?  What—”

“You know the Wilson’s next door?”

“Yeah . . .”

“Well, he...I don’t know.  He says it was an accident.  But he killed their cat.”

I close my eyes and lean against a building.  A hot wind blows by, scattering trash and empty bottles down the block.  I am silent.  Mark is still talking:

“—an accident.  He swears it was.  But, well, they were pretty upset, and they called the police.  And the poor cat – oh, Judy, there was so much blood.  Cody got it all over his clothes – they’re ruined.  I had to throw them out.  But, you know—”

I can feel myself coming unmoored.  I can feel the hot city night pressing into me. And at the same time, I can feel nothing.

From The Dust Returned

For you were made from dust, and to dust you will return

--Genesis 3:19

source

Hot Cat

Cronenbergia

Melancholia

I felt a chill...

This might be the scariest ghost video I've ever come across....

Shub-Niggurath

Ever Their praises, and abundance to the Black Goat of the Woods. Iä! Shub-Niggurath!
Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!

--H.P. Lovecraft, Dreams in the Witch House

Image source Some pretty awesome masks on this site.  I might be purchasing this (cash permitting)

Whale

I’m starting to get sick again, but please don’t tell anyone. 

I can feel it the very moment I wake up, and I groan inwardly and try to fall back asleep.  But I can’t.  I never can.  So I slither out of bed, head first onto the floor.  On the floor of the bedroom I notice a crumpled pair of skinny jeans, a pair of Ugg boots, several crushed cans of PBR and an empty bottle of Goldschlager.  Raising my head to look back at the bed I see the bare back of a girl, small and harmless looking.  My diseased memory plugs in the information, and informs me that her name is Candy, and she works at Emporium Galorium, which is the only arcade in town that stays open all year.  I met her last night while I was playing skeeball.  She kept telling me I couldn’t smoke in there, and I kept lighting up.  I was still there at closing time, and she told me I had to leave.  I asked her where she was going. 

“Home.  Bed,” she said, with a coy smile.  

“I have a bed, at my home,” I said.  This was the best pick-up line I could muster in my current state of being, but she is a fucking 25 year old local working at an arcade, so she didn’t need much convincing. 

Now, as I pull on my jeans, I notice a large Star of David tattoo on the flesh on the back of her neck.  I run a finger across the black ink as a test, because I am seized with a sudden terror that she is dead; that at some point during the night, while we were tearing the sheets off the bed, I got too rough and snapped her neck, or suffocated her, or--

She stirs slightly and rolls over to her one side, still asleep.

I dress quietly, and head out of the bedroom.  I have no idea what time it is, and it doesn’t matter because I have the day off.  

I’m out of cigarettes, and this won’t do.  There is a drug store on the corner of my street, but I resolve to not go there, because I had called in a prescription for a refill of my medication over a month ago and have yet to pick it up.  

Throwing on my jacket, I notice a small envelope on the kitchen table.  It has my name written on it in the unmistakable scrawl of Richard, my roommate who lives on the top floor of the house.  My head hurts too much to read anything, so I leave it untouched and I’m out the door and there is a thick fog covering the world.  The ocean is roaring down the block, and the cold salt air makes me stiffen up.  

The song Silver by the Pixies is stuck in my head right now.

I wander to the convenience store at the other end of the street--in the opposite direction of the drug store.  The convenience store is right at the ocean front, and as I exit and tear open my fresh pack of American Spirit cigarettes I can hear loud voices over the screaming ocean.  Even through all this thick fog, I can see a large crowd of people huddled on the beach.  I don’t really care much what they are looking at, but I don’t want to go back home and have to read whatever bullshit Richard has left me; or worse--talk to Candy, so I cross the street onto the beach, sand instantly getting into my shoes.  Seagulls are exploding with laughter over head, and I wonder absently why they don’t fly south for the winter.  

The closer I get to the shoreline, the more people come into view, and then--like a curtain parting on a stage--the fog rolls away enough for me to see what everyone is looking at.  A dead, beached whale lays at the waterfront, its slick black body resembling oil and its mouth agape and  bearing tiny stone-like teeth.  There are several bloody gashes all over the body of the whale, as if something had attacked it.

People are muttering nervously, and I swear to god some of them are even crying, sobbing into their hands or onto the shoulders of their loved ones.  A kid, maybe fifteen, is taking a photo with his cell phone.  A younger kid, maybe five, runs a finger across the corpse before his mother swats his hand away, and he begins bawling uncontrollably, even though it was clearly not that hard of a slap.

An old man smokes a pipe and says, to no one: “Maybe a shark got ‘em.”

Seagulls keep landing on the whale and picking at it, and people keep shooing them away, which causes the gulls to squeal, outraged.

There is a very pretty girl near me, dressed in jogging attire, and silent tears are streaking down her high cheeks as she remains transfixed on the whale.

“It’s so...beautiful...,” she whispers.

My head aches, and I already know that when I go back home the note from Richard will tell me he has moved out and will forward me the rest of his rent, and I already know that Candy will be gone, having stolen all of my bootleg copies of The Wire.

On the foggy beach, someone none of us can see is screaming wildly, their voice hoarse.  A gull pecks at the wide eye of the whale.  Someone laughs softly.  The teenager takes another cell phone pic.

I’m starting to get sick again, but please don’t tell anyone. 

The Thing on the Doorstep

"There are horrors beyond life's edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man's evil prying calls them just within our range."

--H.P. Lovecraft

Heads Will Roll

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone."

--Shirley Jackson

image source

Some Devil

The Dark Knight Rises IN MY DREAMS

I had a dream last night that I was watching The Dark Knight Rises.  This isn't the first time I had a dream about it either, because I am obsessed and also a boy-man.

Anyway, in the dream Dracula was the villain. Yes, Dracula.  He had a cape, fangs, the whole deal.  Dracula apparently was sucking blood in Gotham City, and Batman had to stop it.

Anne Hathaway, as Catwoman, was only in one scene in the dream movie.  In the scene, she is getting changed into her Catwoman costume in front of a mirror, and her mirror reflection is talking to her--asking her why she does what she does.  Also, she has bruises and scars all over her back. Why?  Who knows! She's Catwoman, and I'm sick.

Almost immediately after changing into Catwoman she is arrested, and Batman comes down to the police station to bail her out of jail.  And he says "Don't let me catch you doing this again." And that is the last time she is in the "movie".

The end of the "movie" has Batman going all the way to Transylvania to confront Dracula.

The whole time I am watching this dream movie, I am thinking three thoughts:

1. At least Talia isn't in this...

2. When is Bane going to show up?

3.  This is terrible...Nolan really dropped the ball...

So Batman and Dracula meet in Dracula's castle--in the courtyard--and Batman says something along the lines of: "You're coming back to Gotham--with me--for justice, Dracula!"

And Dracula laughs and says "I don't think so!"

Dracula claps his hands, and out of the shadows comes Bane.  Yes friends, in my dream movie, Bane is Dracula's bodyguard.  Why Dracula would need a bodyguard--don't ask me!  Ask my stupid dreaming brain.

Batman and Bane begin to fight, and at that point my alarm woke me up for work.

My first thought on waking up? "Thank god that was just a dream and not the real movie..."

Side note: In the dream-movie, Dracula was played by Viggo Mortensen.  Good casting, dream. He'd make a pretty good Dracula.