due to market forces we are forced to rebrand this account: we are now a recipe blog
today: BOO-berry pancakes
you will need:
a box of pancake mix
a source of clean water
to have passed beyond the veil of this life yet remain, to have become a shimmering curtain fueled by unfulfilled desire
1. knock that pancake mix box on the floor
2. open all the taps
3. Get the living to sense even an fraction of your quivering discontent by wailing and appearing during lightning strikes
serves 8
There’s trails in the woods behind the community college and the cross-country team runs back there after school, but after dark it’s you and your friends and the gathering gloom among the trees, alone together.
There’s a meadow of tall grass, the setting for a rumor: That the guy who picks on you in band was once caught in that field having sex with his girlfriend.
And why not? The eternal teen mystery is: Why isn’t everyone having sex all the time, if they can manage it?
There was a lake, but who cares, because what can a teenager do at a beach you can cross in four strides? So the preferred hang out was the one Burger King near the highway on-ramp.
The Burger King was on “the wrong side of the tracks” where my friend Lee lived. We’d spend our paper route money on Little Debbie snacks and 2-liters and watch rented VHS tapes like CYBORG ’til we were vibrating.
Or up in Lee’s room, he’d swing his nunchucks while U2 played. Child of divorce. Yup.
School dances: To Young MC’s Bust A Move, we half danced and half made fun of the concept of dancing ’til a slow song came on.
Every Rose Has Its Thorn and suddenly you’re demurely touching the hips of a girl you were brave enough to ask, and you get in a few dances and now maybe you’re dating?
Which just meant awkward phone calls where their parents hand the phone over, and it’s you and a girl and there’s no soundtrack to cover the fact that you’ve got nothing to talk about.
Go out into the woods. Just stand there. Wait.
Your costume is coming.
You will need:
Deer urine
A pack of wolves
Apply deer urine to yourself. Outrun (or don’t) the pack of wolves.
Instant “Urine Trouble” pun-based costume. (You may have to explain the joke to others.)
Ah, October! The falling of leaves! The chilly breezes! The one month of the year you remember that your childhood home had a basement and why can’t you remember that fact year round? How could you have forgotten the basement and its low, steady calling? The mushroom fug? The whispers?
OCTOBER!
I squirt a bit of dish soap into a bowl, and as it fills with water an old friend appears.
The Imp of the Perverse (an internal voice attuned to the inappropriate): “Aww yeah… get that water reaaaal slippery.”
A 2nd internal voice: “Don’t do that.”
The Imp (escalating): “Daddy likes his water real… /slippery/.”
2nd: “Ugh.”
A 3rd internal voice: “I could post this.”
2nd: “No! You’re giving it what it wants!”
The Imp: “Drink the soap water.”
[it don’t] END
There’s no money to be made in stitching together parts from purloined bodies and using a tower-based lightning system to imbue them with life. The real money is in catering to the hobbyists who want to make their own monsters and selling them starter kits, supplies and how to guides.
More than half will never even make a single monster. They’ll spend money just so they can imagine themselves as the sort of person who stitches together and animates monsters.
[artist credit: @rapidpunches]
[img 1 – A picture of a fancy pistolero in sequined finery]
THEM: kin shoot wings off bugs at 100 paces, each shot a timed Morse code compliment to a passin’ fancy lad or lass or both
[img 2 – A picture of a soaking wet gunslinger with drooping hat]
ME: bullets squeeze out mah pistol like toothpaste to the ground like phbhphbphb
a wastrel child of no consequence: Hooray! It’s Halloween season! I want to parade about as a ghost and eat sweets!
you (a good child): A season? Nay. At every moment be aware of the skeleton within you, the aeons that came before you and the aeons that will come after you. The years that will crush even the memory of you. No candy can sweeten this knowledge, put it is pure and true.
Oh great. Now, on top of all my other problems, I find out the Pharaoh has ordered my name and likeness removed from the whole city, so every statue of me has had its face chiseled off overnight and the guy I get my coffee from in the morning is pretending like he doesn’t know who I am.
—
Oh great. Now, on top of all my other problems, the ship I was hoping to take to The Isle of Night has been boarded by pirates and they say that I’ll only be set free once I’ve grown a beard on behalf of their cutlass-wielding monkey mascot who has thus far been unable to grow his own… and I just shaved before boarding so that Neptune would take me for a humble man!