95.3.10- Nightmare Report: MAJOR LEAGUE HORROR

Yesterday afternoon I was sitting here trying to concentrate, attempting to finish a Conspiracy writing job (literally -- a forward for THE BIG BOOK OF CONSPIRACIES), rather frustrated by the constant interruptions that go with office-in-the-home, when my wife sweeps into the room with two very obviously gay guys that I'd never seen before in my life. I know plenty of gay SubGenii, and they're just regular guys. Well, aside from being SubGeniuses. But these two fellows were PINK gay guys, the kind that all dress alike and talk alike and are really obnoxious about the whole thing. They and my wife start rooting around in the pile of tapes on my other desk, and yanking open the file drawers. She doesn't even introduce them, just says, "Don't let us bother you, we're only looking for a tape." They're scattering HOUR OF SLACK source tapes everywhere. Irritated, figuring I might as well give up on trying to work, I get up and say, "Well, tell me what you're looking for, 'cause there's thousands of tapes, and I doubt if you'll be able to find it." The gay guys snicker, like I'm so out of it. She says, snickering too, "Oh, it's one of mine. You don't KNOW about THIS tape." And they laugh at me. Then I hear more voices downstairs, and people coming in the door. I shoot a killing look at my wife and she says, "Oh, I just invited some friends over... you stay right where you are and keep working." They snicker some more. I'm freaking out, but trying not to get ugly about all this. I try to say something friendly to these guys and my wife acts kind of nervous, like there's something I'm not supposed to know about... I'm HOPING that it's something like a surprise party for me and not something TOTALLY WEIRD. But I go downstairs and it IS totally weird. The house is full of skinny, giggling gay guys, all with the haircut and the mustache, and they all look like they might have cancer or something. Not AIDS -- cancer. Some have costume masks on. One comes up and starts yabbering at me in a giggly fashion -- he's wearing a mask that at first makes it look like he has a big olive for a head. But on closer inspection, I see that it's made of some kind of bread dough. It almost looks like it's been BAKED onto his head. He has real olives where the eyes should be, and they're surrounded by toothpicks imbedded deep into the dough. It's not done very artfully; the facial features, made of toothpicks and olives, are very sloppy and unbalanced. I can't see any eye-holes in the mask but he can somehow see me. He and the rest are all subtly mocking me. And they all seem so DISEASED. My wife is making me furious... I keep trying to get her to tell me what this is all about and she just snickers some more. I'm "creeping out" MAJORLY, and decide I've had enough, and storm out the door, striding in a blind rage down the street. I want a cigaret REAL BAD and I'm starting to think about maybe a quart of beer, too. I find myself near the elementary school in my old neighborhood. There's a convenience store nearby, but it's closed. In fact, the street is deserted. None of the usual hookers or gang members are anywhere to be seen. Then I realize that the stores have all changed. They're the same battered, run down buildings, with trash piled up in front of them, but the names have changed. The ad flyers in the window aren't in Spanish anymore, they're Arabic or Korean or something.

And my legs aren't working quite right. I'm starting to feel sick. I decide I'd better go back home and try to straighten this mess out. But... I can't remember which direction to walk in. I start to panic. How can I be LOST? I've lived here for 15 years! I try to calm down. For some reason I can't walk very fast. Each step is not exactly painful, but I just can't get my legs to move fast. It takes forever to get to the corner where I can see the street signs and figure out which way to go. It should be Munger Street up there and then I'll be able to figure out which direction Victor St. is in. But it isn't Munger. It's... (something smudged out)-"cleats" Street. I can barely see that it used to say Hypercleats Street. This is INSANE, I think, and start to REALLY panic. I try to head back the other way to find Munger, but it takes a gigantic effort of will just to raise each leg and take a step. It gets worse and worse. The panic is becoming unendurable. I keep seeing that hideous olive-head baked-on tooth-picks-in-the-eyes mask. I discover I can't move at all, I'm frozen in position on this deserted alien street. MY MIND STARTS TO SHATTER and of course then I wake up, panting, panicked, sweating, wrapped up in sheets, INDESCRIBABLY RELIEVED that it was just a nightmare.

What a classic. Everybody conspiring against you, disease, drug urges, homophobia, trying to run but something slowing you down to a syrupy, slow-motion pace... WHEW! BUMMER! And I very rarely have nightmares. In fact, I rarely remember any dreams at all. But the morning before, I'd awakened from vivid dreams of flying. And the night before that, it had been sexy dreams.

I realized what had happened. The chain of events... I worked until midnight last night and finally finished the article I'd been working on. My badly needed pay was basically earned. Everybody was asleep but I wanted to celebrate, but since the Red Chinese had apparently intercepted the latest shipment from Tibet, there was NO 'FROP. Hasn't been for days. (Thus the dreams -- frappy is a dream suppressor, and all the bottled-up classics had come tumbling out each night.) I thought, by god, I'm gonna go get me a damn BEER. I don't usually drink at all, just on special occasions, so I went out and got me that damn quart just before the stores closed, and came back and started going through alt.slack, on which I was far behind. I got to reading posts and marking the good ones to save... came across the stupid Buck and Black stuff, responded to that with a quart of beer in me, which I KNOW better than to do... I dread looking at that stuff this morning... this went on till 3 in the morning. I've been working until 3 almost every night this week, and I always have to get up at 7 to take kids to school. I usually try to go back to bed and catch up on my sleep, but I always just lie there vibrating and thinking bad thoughts, so I end up getting up again, drinking a jug of the blackest, greasiest high-grade coffee imaginable, and working. So the onset of exhaustion has been approaching.

That nightmare was a warning. Time to SLACK OFF. But best not think about any more quarts of beer. The new frappy shipment will probably get through this weekend. Everything will be FINE. I've got some GREAT material sitting here for the HOUR OF SLACK so I'll probably mix a few shows today. But I just had to work that hideous nightmare out of my system, and YOU-ALL are the VICTIMS.

And I guess I went to bed feeling kind of guilty. Guilty about the beer, and about talking about Buck and Black when they're not on the Net, so it's a little like talking behind their backs, even though they started it. Can you believe it? The Sacred Scribe of THIS SIN-MONGERING CHURCH, feeling GUILTY for having a BEER and for flaming two self-evidentially flaming assholes who were telling lies or delusions about me in public, to begin with. Actually, Buck isn't LYING, he's just grossly mistaken. Uh-oh, I'm doing it again. CUT!

One weird thing -- when I finally crashed last night, somewhat drunk, just before I fell asleep, I couldn't stop thinking about those Hot-Headed Naked Ice Borers. What DynaSoar said about red-hot pokers taking a long time to melt even one inch into solid ice is right. And it FINALY STRUCK ME... DUH! That was the APRIL issue of Discover magazine... the biologist who reported on these creatures was "APRILE PAZZO." DUH DUH DUH. I wonder in which language it is that "pazzo" means "fool." (Italian?)

Funny how long it takes for these things to SINK IN sometimes. Funny at which TIMES they finally sink in.

DUH DUH DUH.

The great and powerful EVIL PALMER VREEDEEZ of the LIES FOUNDATION got back to the States from France yesterday, where he's been working on a new Freak Bros. comic with Gilbert Shelton. This means that once he's over his jetlag, I can start getting all the good SubGenius artwork back from him, start posting the digitized stuff, etc. I also have to pester him relentlessly to get him online properly. He's in San Francisco, and we need to find him the best local Internet access server. Any Bay Areans out there who can speak from experience about the various PPP servers available there? Email me. Alt.slack needs Vreedeez. He's right up there with Nenslo in terms of sheer clarity of HATE POWER. AND he's got the ART STASH!

Palmer visited Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam... the lucky bastard... He and Shelton saw not one but TWO ELECTRIC DOBBSHEADS on buildings in Berlin. One was a huge (15' wide) screen-printed, backlit vinyl Dobbshead hanging on an apartment building... no explanation. The other was the "logo" of a coffeehaus called THE WRONG FRIEND. He met Jimmy Page... says The Black Crowes are into "Bob"... visited R. Crumb, who said, "Oh, is that SubGenius stuff still HAPPENING?" when Palmer gave him a Revelation X... said that the Parisian Clench tunes in to alt.slack a lot. (!??)

Sacred Agent Jane Browne has been trying to sell the SubG books to European publishers for awhile now. There's a Japanese publisher, but the project seems to be bogged down... 5 translators have committed sepuku in shame... Sven Serrano, our man in Osaka, says he offered to help, but they were at a complete standstill. Palmer's German friends have been trying to do a German translation of the Pamphlet, but they say it's damned near impossible. All they can do is try to capture the ATTITUDE. There's no German word for SLACK, for one thing.

Heck, Philo and I had trouble just doing the ENGLISH translation!

What else...

DEVIVAL NEWS

None on the horizon until July, which is probably good, because there's work to do here. Of course there's the New, Improved X-Day Pilgrimage to Portland, and it probably will be a good one this time. It couldn't possibly be worse than the first one. I'll be at DragonCon in Atlanta in July, but I don't have the dates handy. I will NOT be at Starwood. Instead, I'm showing old PreDobbs Stangfilms and PostDobbs Videos at the Chicago Underground Film Festival, July 22, I think... details to follow. That should be a real big PARTY, actually.

Supposedly, SUNSite has started broadcasting THE HOUR OF SLACK on the Net by now. <http://sunsite.unc.edu/wxyc>
For Hour of Slack info:
<http://sunsite.unc.edu/wxyc/slack.html>
My equipment isn't good enough to recieve it yet... can anybody report how it sounds?

Speaking of which, I'd better shut this rambling down and go start producing those new shows before my kids come home.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Stangenstein's Mobster

Back to document index

Original file name: Nightmare Report

This file was converted with TextToHTML - (c) Logic n.v.