Tales to Astonish!

Someone remind me to get that review of Todd‘s new book “Being Good” up and posted. Sheesh, I’m a slowpoke.

It’s coming soon, I swear!

Am I the only one that really wants to see Slither?

Even though it looks like a complete rip-off of one of my top five movies of all time, Night of the Creeps, I still want to see it. Actually, I probably want to see it because it looks exactly like Night of the Creeps, except it has the guy from “Firefly” and the other guy from Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. I mean, hell, there just aren’t enough movies about slithery alien slugs crawling into people’s brains and turning them into hideous zombies. There was that movie about Enron that came out last year, but generally speaking the alien slug zombie movie is pretty rare lately.

Just thinkin’ about Night of the Creeps makes me all nostalgic. Nostalgic for the era where Cannon and Tristar seemed to be catering to my personal idea of what the home video market should look like: shelf after shelf of movies about alien monsters and cyborg strippers. Those were some good times, indeed.

Anyway, back to work for me. Have a nice weekend, ever’body!

Tom DeLay’s most recent diatribe on the war on Christianity got me thinking: what next?

I mean, after us heathens and non-believers succeed in our secret-but-obvious battle against over 80% of the nation’s citizens — who we shall overcome, rest assured — where do we go from there? Clearly, there’ll be an occupation in the country while the atheists and secular jews “recondition” all the Christians by making them take short “cultural trips” to the American coastal cities, but it would be such a darned waste to just disband or underutilize our unique moment of non-believing solidarity. I think that we should get a secondary plan together for afterwards; we need a new target.

Since the holiday of Christmas was the first to fall, I say we continue with our event-destroying plan and check Arbor Day off the list; there are enough trees already. There are too many perfectly good views being ruined by unsightly leafy vegetation. Plus, Arbor Day just tracks dirt around everywhere. After we get rid of some of the excess trees, we’ll use them to have some kind of pagan bonfire just to screw with people’s heads; perhaps we can also use it to burn some of the bodies from the millions of children that we murder each year.

The world will tremble after Arbor Day falls, but in case it’s not enough to finally crush the human spirit I vote that we immediately take advantage of American fears and strike where it hurts the most: the family. Actually, we’ve already destroyed that, so we’ll have to go a step further and tear apart the only thing that remains: being single. We’ll force everyone into a same-sex marriage, and then immediately divorce them, forcing each to pay alimony on their newly-torn union to the cold, faceless, atheist state. (That’s us.) We’ll use the revenue to create a hideous monstrosity of a national science program, with the general intention of creating bizarre animal-human creatures for our own amusement. Perhaps, if funding allows, there’ll be some sort of chimera arena where we can pit our godless animal men against one another, kind of like a cross between Gladiator and The Lion King.

And maybe some snack platters. Those are good.

Oh, it will be a wondrous day when our plan finally comes together! The three percent of Americans that identify themselves as non-religious SHALL RULE!

I wear my sunglasses at night so I can, so I can keep track of the visions in my eyes.

Got a problem with that?

Every evening, after my apartment building’s elevator dings and the door slides to the right, I step onto the green of my hallway’s carpet. Two steps later, I pass a pea-green door marked 3G. There’s nothing inherently special about the door that makes me think about it; it’s no different than 3H or 3F, or any of the other eight or nine doors on the floor, all looking identical. The thing that makes me slow my steps every night is that there are envelopes on the doorstep.

Sometimes, the building’s superintendent leaves letters from the board in front of everyone’s door, and on occasion some mis-delivered mail will make its way to the proper recipient’s apartment. It’s not uncommon for me to find an envelope or two every month waiting for me on the floor. The thing about the mail for 3G is that there’s a lot of it, and it doesn’t move. Since about two or three months ago, it’s just built up, letters slid halfway underneath the door, piled on top of other letters and other envelopes.

I live far out in Queens, and my building is more or less chock full of old people. And not just old, but really old. I guess the advances of pushcart technology and heavily-accented profanity have vastly extended the average lifespan of Queens-dwellers, because some of the people I live with can probably remember Dracula’s bar mitzvah. That’s why I worry about the mail in front of 3G — it makes me wonder if there’s a corpse living down the hall. It’s certainly not outside the bounds of possibility.

I’ve never seen anyone enter or leave apartment 3G, or ever heard anything going on inside, but that’s true for all but two or three of the residents in the hall. I’ve also never smelled anything coming from behind that doorway, which, you know, is something I think about on occasion when I shuffle by. I also occasionally think about the perhaps-deceased coming back as the vengeful undead, but I try not to because I’m not fond of explaining to my neighbors why I have to sprint to my door and nail it shut after I come home every night.

It once occurred to me that the resident might be on some kind of extended vacation, or perhaps a hospital stay, or something like that, but wouldn’t they have informed the super in that case, instead of letting bills and notices stack up? I guess the only way I’ll ever really know is to knock, and listen very, very closely. And be prepared to run, should the hungry teeth of the once-living seek my flesh.