lost time incident 80 – a class act

a rose, a perfume bottle, the text: LOST TIME INCIDENT 80

lost time incident 80
Greetings, fellow sophisticates. Wrap yourselves in your vat-grown, cruelty-free mink fur stoles and make yourselves comfortable. Sip freely from your vat-grown, cruelty-free champagne as this newsletter unfolds. Take some time out from updating your will to leave all your assets to your pets and enjoy a completely different sort of odd behavior:

BEHOLD!

I’m in the middle of a two week “stay-cation”, which is why I have time to loll about mid-day on a Thursday composing a newsletter. I had booked this time off a while ago, thinking that inspiration might strike about what to do with it when it got here.

Well, it got here. And my plan of “not planning for it at all” reaped the expected harvest. I’m on my couch. Technically “relaxing.”

And since idle hands are the Devil’s Playground, I figured I may as well bother you, the reader.

So. What are YOU doing?

Go ahead and speak your response in the listening radius of any microphones you may own and I’ll pay a social media entity a few dollars to forward me your answer. <– Ha ha, suck it Black Mirror! This dystopian stuff is easy.

Anyway, on the off chance you haven’t already read everything I’ve ever written, here’s a few short things I’ve written for the season (he writes, as if he’s not writing Halloween-appropriate stuff all year).

 

halloween tips for farmers
1) Append the prefix blood- to all your crops for October! Bloodcorn! Bloodsoy! Bloodtatoes! [Please do not use this fun tip with rapeseed]

2) October is the only month all year when it’s okay if your scarecrow comes to life! Maybe loosen its ropes a little! Give the scary little straw-spook a fighting chance!

3) If all of your hens speak in one voice of the End Times, change up their feed mix. Roll them back to grower feed ’til they settle down.

4) Scythes! MORE SCYTHES! 5) Leave candy by the tractors. Do not look at the tractors.

 

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 in the house

3. Communicate to those living in the house a fraction of your quivering discontent by wailing and appearing during lightning strikes

Serves 8

 

monster adjacent financial advice
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.

 

[relatable content for good children late edition 29.09]

    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.

 

ending theme song
Oh, hey there! You caught me trying to end a newsletter. If you’d like to see more of this sort of thing, there’s an archive available on my own website, signalstation.com. If you’d like to see less of this sort of thing, there’s an unsubscribe button below. We offer an entire range of options for the discerning reader and that’s what keeps us at the top of the regional newsletter customer service rankings! We’re here… for you!

Thank you for your support! You have all earned one (1) participation ribbon for making it this far! Wear it proudly.

———————-
I                             I
I                             I
I              I              I
I                             I
I  participated  I
I                             I
I                             I
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/

—Michael Van Vleet

Hey! Did you enjoy reading this? But did you find yourself thinking “Dang, if only this sort of thing were delivered directly into my inbox so I didn’t have to spend time on a website as if it were still the 90s or something!”?

You’re in luck! You can subscribe to the LOST TIME INCIDENT newsletter and finally class up your inbox. 

BROKEN HEART ADVICE TIME with DRACULA

Dear Dracula,

My romantic partner has been offered a job that will take them far away, but I’m not at a point in my career where moving with them makes sense. Can long distance relationships ever work? Or should I convince them to turn the job down if they’re serious about us? Any advice?

yours,

BAD TIMING

—
Dear BT,

I don’t mean to sound like an exotic parrot, and I give this advice in my column a lot, but here’s what you should do: Spend some “me time” thinking things through yourself, somewhere without distractions. Ideally in a castle in Europe, hosted by a Count. I can have someone pick you up.

-D.

goth

heck yeah I went through a goth phase

i spent three years as a stark blasted tree hovering over a moor, and let me tell you: many a woman in a sheer nightgown fled past me, in the shadow of the foreboding mansion that hovered over the landscape and held its dark secrets close

ethical blood shopping

Every blood magic practitioner appreciates the convenience of store-bought blood, with its EZ-Open containers, the measurement marks down the transparent side, etc.

But not enough thought goes towards the employees at factory bloodworks, often underpaid, often working in areas of uncertain/fluctuating gravity, financially responsible for their own flensing works.

Please read labels and support small batch sources when possible if you can’t procure your own in sufficient quantities.

HALLOWEEN TIPS FOR FARMERS

1) Append the prefix blood- to all your crops for October! Bloodcorn! Bloodsoy! Bloodtatoes! [Please do not use this fun tip with rapeseed]

2) It’s the only month all year when it’s okay if your scarecrow comes to life! Maybe loosen its ropes a little!

3) If all your hens speak in one voice of the End Times, change up their feed mix. Roll back to grower feed ’til they settle.

4) Scythes! MORE SCYTHES!

5) Leave candy by the tractors. Do not look at the tractors.

BOO-berry pancakes

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

Microautobio: a suburb in the 90s

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.

Halloween Costume Idea (w/ Urine)

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.)

10th Month

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!