Tales to Astonish!

I like meat. I love burgers, and sausage, and chicken. I had some really good lamb not too long ago, and no one can keep me away from Bonnie’s Grill in Park Slope. Last night I made some tasty turkey burgers, which were really good (and much healthier than beef). Then, I found this article today:

Scientists Grow Meat

You heard it! Thanks to the wonders of science, the possibility of growing natural, real meat from the cells of animals is coming soon. Not soy, not tofu, but real meat. And millions of pounds of it from a single cell! Bad news for farmers. Good news for the hungry, perhaps, if the science progresses far enough. And if the anti-science mobs don’t decide that nigh-unlimited supplies of food are against God’s will, which they probably will, since anything past 7th-century science is classified as “Probably Satanic. Should be assassinated.”

This has a particular fascination for me due to my obscure memories of the TV show “Otherworld,” which I thought I was totally making up until last year. I haven’t seen it since I was a little kid, but I have this bizarre memory of the family (which warps from Egypt to some kind of futuristic alternate world) eating dinner in their futuro-reality. I would almost swear that they ate meat out of a drinking glass. The image of that dinner in the blue room with the shaggy haircuts is burned into my brain, but since my brain is rather unreliable, I could be totally wrong.

To me, that’s what the future holds: artificially-grown meat in a cup.

Who needs rocket cars when you can drink a cheeseburger?

Is it too early to go home? I want to go home. I’m too goddamned tired.

Helpful lifestyle hint: do not go home and go to sleep right away, if you expect to be able to sleep through the night. It won’t work. You will wake up around midnight and be very pissy that you can’t fall back asleep. At six o’clock, my senses were dulled and useless, like I took too much cold medicine or I’d been trying to watch “The Waterboy.” So I tidied up a bit, then plopped down into my bed where I passed out before I even made it to two sheep.

Then I woke up, my girlfriend called, and I went back to sleep in the span of about fifteen minutes.

And then, late in the night, I awoke. I came to with a special (and unwanted) rested clarity, the kind of hyper-acuity that most people only get when they’re turned into vampires or are test subjects in government experiments. All I wanted to do was go back to sleep, but I could hear the damned walls. I could pinpoint every single pipe hiding behind the plaster, I could tell you who was pissing in which apartment in my building. I could hear the cat mewing next door, the girls upstairs giggling. I listened to the little tinny metal bits in my fans grinding, grinding, grinding against each other. I could hear the heartbeat of the man I murdered and buried underneath my floorboards — thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump.

I tried to turn away from the sounds, muffling the noise with my pillows, but that only made me more uncomfortable and super-aware of the textures of my blankets and sheets and how hot my room was. I also couldn’t breathe, so I figured pillows over my head was a bad idea. The worst part is that I was still sleepy — perhaps my body was rested, but my brain was still exhausted.

So I just waited. And waited. And waited.

And then…nothing exciting happened. I just stared at the ceiling until I suddenly woke up this morning, back in the realm of my normal cloudy senses. In hindsight, I probably should’ve used my hyper-senses to go fight crime or something. I’ll keep that in mind for next time.

A few weeks ago, I was having a discussion with The Brother about books. He’s an avid reader — he reads more than anyone I know, and a peek into his closet reveals a collection that’s worthy of a visit by Dewey Decimal — so I get a lot of my book advice from him. I enjoy reading, but I’m basically a train reader; I read on my forty-five minute commutes to and from work. If I try to read any other time, I fall asleep, or think of other things that I could or should be doing that I can’t do anywhere else or at any other time. I dream of a night where I can recline in a plush armchair with a glass of bourbon and a book, flipping my slippers off the tips of my toes as I loosen the tie on my robe. To date, I have never had one of those nights, because I cannot sit still for that long unless I’m tired, and if I’m tired I won’t make it through more than twenty pages.

Anyway, I was looking for a new book to read on my daily commutes. I was hoping for something Lovecraftian, because I like stories where there are monsters that are described as “indescribable,” “unnamable,” “unspeakable,” and “beyond human comprehension.” I was in the mood for a good alternate-history, or a conspiracy story, something good and pulpy. My brother, in his infinite book-wisdom, sent me a copy of Robert Anton Wilson’s “Masks of the Illuminati,” a story wherein James Joyce and Albert Einstein get involved in a black magick conspiracy with the Rosicrucians and the Illuminated Ones. It’s a doozy.

It’s a really fun book, and it’s written in a bizarre, whacked-out style that takes some getting used to because it’s entirely schizophrenic. Many of the passages devolve into stream-of-consciousness ramblings or nonsense nightmares, so most of the time it makes little sense, and then it turns around and makes perfect sense. Most of all, it makes me want to start a secret society.

I’ve got it all planned out: we’ll call ourselves “The Distinguished Order of the Retropolitan Hours.” Our goal is so overwhelmingly awesome that I can’t even tell you what it is, except that it may or may not involve puppets and good grammar. I can’t even tell you what our name means. I guess we’ll meet in New York, since I (The High Retropolitan) lives here, and it’s got convenient mass transportation for the initiates. We will have sects all over the world, or at least that’s what we’ll tell people until it’s true.

Eventually, once we grow sufficiently in number, we’ll come out as an official religion and convert major action stars and their much-younger girlfriends. When people ask why a religion’s highest-ranking members are called “Atheists,” we’ll just smile at them like we learned in our expensive seminars: slyly, with a touch of “ALL-KNOWING, ALL-SEEINGness.” Then we pat them on the back, and whisper, “Wanna learn the secret handshake?” Then we’ll put out our hand, and when they go to shake it we yank it back and pat down our hair while pretending that we never offered to shake their hand. Such will be our power.

I’d tell you more, but you haven’t paid the registration fees.

I was thinking about doing podcasts.

Believe it or not, this is my entire post. The Lady Retropolitan is on the phone with her parents, and I’m sitting here listening to the radio.

Other things I’m thinking about while waiting:

-Koalas: cute or dangerous?

-I hate that “Cat’s in the cradle” song. Even the covers. They make hate rise in my gut.

-The Lady Retropolitan herself told me that when she wakes up in the morning, she has a — and I’m quoting her — “black, cold, and grizzled heart.” She’s not a morning person. Although sometimes she smiles when I whisper cute things in her ear.

-We’re going to watch “Trekkies” tonight. I was never a ‘Star Trek’ fan.

-I’m starting to wonder if I should rent some of the “X-Files” series, because I kinda like the few episodes that I’ve caught in reruns. It’s amazing that I totally missed the show while it was still airing originals, but I was too enthralled by the incredible “Adventures of Brisco County Jr.”

-I should really call Angela.

-I’m starting to really enjoy red wine again. There was a period while I was a waiter in fine dining that I hated wine, but after three years, I’m coming back around. Alternate: I might just really like drinking.

-Sweet Jesus woman, get off the phone! Dinner is ready.

-Whatever happened to Eagle-Eye Cherry? I liked his song.

-I won my auction for the “Near Dark” soundtrack by Tangerine Dream. It’s awesome!

Time for dinner! Be back tomorrow.

Thanks to my good friend Matt, I am presenting you with my film school animated epic, “The Night After X-Mas.” The picture is shitty, and the audio isn’t stellar — and heck, the film ain’t great — but it’s fun and short and I’m glad it’s digitized now. I made this back in my second year of college in…2000(?), for my Intro to Animation class taught by Dave Hickock. Keep in mind, this was all done old school; everything was completely hand-drawn, painted, and cel-animated like they used to before computers. That’s why everything is miscolored and scratched and dusty and ugly. (Man, just talking about it makes me want to not put it online.)

I spent about two months (maybe a month and a half) pounding this out from start to finish, and if you understand the process of cel animation (working mostly alone), you’ll know how crazy that is. My schedule at the time was: go to class in the morning, go to work in the afternoon, go back to class, two hour nap, work on cartoon until I had to go to class again in the morning. By the time I actually sent the film in for processing, my friend Chris had to help me stand when I went to the post office, and speak to the woman because I couldn’t talk anymore — all I did was sign my name on the credit slip. I may also have been drunk. (I was too rushed to even add credits at the end — and there’s nothing that a film student loves more than seeing his name in the credits as many times as he can make up production titles for. I guess it’s a good thing, now that I’m going by an alias.)

It was pretty neat that year, because a lot of my friends also decided to go the arty way and produce animation rather than live-action film, and we got some great work out of it. Not everything we did was lovely, but it didn’t matter. We had fun.

Anyway, it’s completely safe for work, if you’re bored.

Enjoy!

And here are the credits that I never got a chance to put on: