Plastic Implosives (Random Thoughts)

A fun thing to fantasise about:

Imagine a really scary movie character and then imagine visiting that movie’s universe but having godlike invulnerability and powers. Imagine the reaction of the scary character when they try to do their thing to you and it doesn’t work. Just to pick an arbitrary example, Anton Chigurh shoots his bolt stunner at your head and it has no effect. You totally no-sell it. Then you get to scare the guy who has no conscience or compassion. Heh heh.

A joke that was too obscure: “My cat likes sitting on pizza boxes. I hope my Macintosh LC can take the weight.” So I re-wrote it as “My cat likes sitting on pizza boxes. I just wish he’d let the delivery guy take it out of the bag first.” That one worked.

I read a badly-written article about Bill Cosby planning his comeback now that he’s out of prison. It said “Playing Cliff Huxtable, his TV wife on the comedy show Phylicia Rashad caught some major heat when she celebrated Cosby’s prison release.” Did you know Phylicia Rashad played Cliff Huxtable? And not only that, but Cliff was his own TV wife on the show? Really! That’s what it says!

While composing an online reply about faux-retro zines, I re-read my four April Fool’s issues of BCSFAzine, in which I simulated the typography of 1982, 1984, 1986, and 1988. They’re even better than I remembered! Sometimes it feels like it was written by someone else, even though it was me, five short years ago.

Money as a Psychic Cushion

Recently I was remembering a bad day from the mid-1990s. I’d had a fight with a friend and had walked away from him in a random direction, just to be going away from him. Like a homeless movie character, I found myself wandering through an expensive patio restaurant near the London Drugs in the centre of town, depressed. And I happened to meet another friend who was eating there.

This other friend’s older brother was with him and he looked prosperous. He looked like 1980s Bruce Willis, a yuppie on casual Friday, with sunglasses, a shirt with a money pattern, faded jeans, and imported beer. They invited me to join them. I hung out there for a while but I don’t think I ordered anything.

Now this would have been a good time to treat myself to a nice meal and maybe even a movie afterwards, just to soothe my feelings over that fight earlier. But I was unemployed at the time and didn’t have the budget for spontaneous splurging like that. So I just had to sit there and feel left out while surrounded by better people having a better time.

That’s one reason why it’s a good idea to keep working and have a steady income. The problem was, throughout the 1990s, I was always underemployed. I worked about five to seven months out of each year.

Sometimes, it was because of the recession. There wouldn’t be any jobs at all for several months, not even basic minimum-wage McJobs at gas stations or convenience stores or fast-food restaurants. Or else I’d get an OK job, but then get laid off when there wasn’t enough work.

And then some jobs were really bad jobs I was glad not to have for long. Door-to-door sales comes to mind. Like the Smiths said: “I was looking for a job and then I found a job, and Heaven knows I’m miserable now.”

What’s even worse is that when you’re poor, you get extra depressed, so that’s when you really need the morale boost that comes from treating yourself. But that’s the worst time to do it, financially. God forbid you get a credit card during one of these periods. You can rack up hundreds of dollars of debt just trying to do the normal things that everyone else does, like put gas in the car and go for a drive, maybe stop somewhere for a burger.

Maybe I should have been on disability all those years. It’s hard to say if I could have convinced them I was qualified. Those five to seven months when I could find work proved that I was capable of supporting myself…in theory. But I did have persistent barriers. Depression, low systemising intelligence, arthritis, having to pee every 15 minutes. It’s not like I was a functional person. Plus I still could have worked part of the time. You just declare the income, and they deduct it from the next cheque.

And then I would have had the steady cash flow to be able to survive the occasional bad day.

I’d just have to be careful not to have more bad days than I could afford.

Random Nostalgia

The Powers of Matthew Star (1982). I just watched two episodes of it on KVOS-TV AKA MeTV. One of them had Louis Gossett Jr. in a dual role as his regular character Walt Sheppard and as a criminal who happens to be Walt’s exact twin. Naturally the police arrest Walt for the crimes of the doppelgänger and Matthew has to catch the crook to clear Walt’s name.

Not a premise I would normally find enjoyable. I usually hate stories where the hero is wrongly accused and has to scramble to exonerate himself. But this one was fun for some reason. Maybe it was the touches of humour scattered throughout the drama. Maybe it was the guest stars: Carmen Argenziano (with hair!), Dick Durock (as a human!), and Stuart Pankin (as Alex Henteloff!). Maybe it was the groovy synth and guitar soundtrack.

The other episode had that plot that happens in every show sooner or later: the characters get to visit a movie set! In this case, the straight-to-cable flick Zombie Letterman is being filmed at the high school where Matthew is a student and Walt is a teacher. Matthew’s old friend is a rookie stuntman and is willing to do stunts that are too dangerous. If you guessed Matthew has to use his telekinesis to save his friend’s life during a stunt, you’re right.

I liked how they tricked me in the opening, even with my years of TV-watching experience. For starters, I hadn’t looked at the title or summary, so I didn’t know this was an episode about show business. However, I still might have guessed it from the fact that the episode starts with a girl showering, and a guy in a rubbery monster mask comes in and scares her, and then she laughs. That’s normally the moment when they pull back and reveal it’s a movie set and a director yells “Cut!” and that’s what I would have expected, except…

The girl was one of the regular characters, so I figured “Well it can’t be that they’re going to pull back and reveal it was a movie set, because that’s a regular cast member. So this must be real. Maybe that’s Matthew playing a prank on his girlfriend. I hope not. I don’t like the idea of him barging into a girl’s shower.”

Then they pulled back and revealed it’s a movie set and a director yelled “Cut!” Wait, what? Did they just break the fourth wall and admit the whole show is just a show? No—because it turns out the regular character had been offered a bit part in the B-movie! Ha! Well-played, show.

Thanks, that’s my time! You’ve been a great audience! Try the veal, it’s here all week!