Zombie Spaceship Wasteland (11 page)

Leatherface, Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Pinhead, and Freddy Krueger are, essentially,
Zombies
who want to turn our world into a
Wasteland
. Jason and Pinhead each, at one point, end up on a
Spaceship
.

The
Matrix
films are about a hero, Neo, who doesn’t realize he’s a
Zombie,
and also doesn’t realize he’s living in a
Wasteland,
until he’s awoken by Morpheus, who de-zombifies Neo by bringing him on board a
Spaceship
.

* * *

Every teen outcast who pursues a creative career has, at its outset, either a Zombie, Spaceship, or Wasteland work of art in them.

Looking back on it now, I realize I’m a Wasteland. A lot of comedians are Wastelands—what is stand-up comedy except isolating specific parts of culture or humanity and holding them up against a stark, vast background to approach at an oblique angle and get laughs? Or, in a broader sense, pointing out how so much of what we perceive as culture and society is disposable waste? Plus, comedians have to work the Road. We wander the country, seeking outposts full of cheap booze, nachos, and audiences in order to ply our trade. I’m amazed we all don’t wear sawed-off shotguns on our hips.

The Zombie, Spaceship, or Wasteland “work” is conceived of during the nadir of puberty—a grim, low-budget film about the undead; a vast space opera; or a final battle for civilization in a blasted wasteland, where the fate of mankind is decided by a shotgun blast or a crossbow.

Turns out I had two Wasteland works in me, and I wrote them both freshman year of high school. The first was called
The Shadow Dogs,
which I figured I’d publish in paperback, like a Stephen King novel.
^*
It involved— I’m not kidding—a future where mutant dogs had taken over. They were basically tall people with dog heads. The hero—I can’t even remember his name—wandered the wasteland with a cool wrist gun and another sidearm that I basically swiped from
Blade Runner,
which I still think has one of the coolest movie guns.

Hey—why do the heroes always “wander” the wasteland? Wouldn’t you at least have a plan to get somewhere with water or food before you started hoofing it? Even desert nomads don’t “wander” around pell-mell, assuming they’ll hit an oasis just before dropping dead of thirst. Is it the alliteration of it? “Wander the wasteland”? I guess “Take a well-thought-out, purposeful trek through the wasteland” lacks that movie-trailer punch.

Anyway,
The Shadow Dogs
. I spent the first eighty pages of the novel equipping my main character. I’m not kidding—he started with a bolt-action rifle and a knife, and then he killed some people and took enough canned food and other trinkets from them to trade for the wrist gun and
Blade Runner
gun. Once I realized I couldn’t think of any cooler guns for him to acquire, I lost interest in the book.

The other one was called
Cholly Victor and the Wasteland Blues,
which I wrote in installments and planned to do as a massive graphic novel. Cholly Victor was a near plotless library of everything I was obsessed with at the time—
The Road Warrior, El Topo, Eraserhead,
Richard Corben, nuclear fears, and spaghetti westerns. Holy God, was it a piece of crap. But I got it out of my system. It ends with my hero, Cholly, a shotgun-wielding wasteland scavenger, defeating a mutant, flayed-lamb robot warlord, and then continuing on down a piece of broken highway to the mythical “Westcoast.”
^*

My own life didn’t even come close to my defeating a robot warlord and setting out for Westcoast. In reality, I got sick of doing jokes in front of the zombies at the local comedy clubs. I moved to San Francisco. In a used Jetta, not a spaceship. And driving cross-country wasn’t “wandering the wasteland,” but Utah came close enough.

^*
Not to be confused with jocks or athletes—a distinction beautifully laid out by Sarah Vowell in
Take the Cannoli,
a book very much worth your time.

^*
The spaceship in
Battle Beyond the Stars
has huge breasts and a woman’s voice!

^*
Stephen King, who was the first person I ever read who could meld perfectly felt, mundane life with cosmic horror, later published the
Dark Tower
series, a huge Wasteland epic that tied together most of his novels, which take place in our “real” world. And I’m pretty sure he got the idea in high school. If he didn’t, I would like him to lie about it to support my thesis. Thanks, Steve!

^*
Cormac McCarthy won the Pulitzer for
The Road,
about a father and son making their way for a mythical coast after an unnamed global cataclysm. But Cormac’s hero didn’t have a four-armed, bandolier-wearing mutant Kodiak bear sidekick, did he?

The “winged baby basket” drawing on this Chamomile Kitten™ greeting card was the secret sigil of the “dacianos,” or “freak makers.” These were Gypsy baby thieves who, at the behest of bored royalty, would kidnap low-born children and make them into freaks for the amusement of the prevailing royal court. They were grown in jars that splayed and warped their limbs or had their soft skulls gently pressed into squares; there was no limit to the myriad variations that could be wrought onto a developing human infant.

It’s rumored that the dacianos lurk on the outskirts of society today, always ready to snatch a fresh, wriggling bundle of “merchandise” for use in secret, subterranean “freak theaters” to entertain bored celebrities after they endure protracted, soul-crushing events like Oscar, Emmy, and Tony award ceremonies.

Forever on the lookout for pregnant bellies, couples attending baby safety classes, or
anyone
purchasing a birth announcement card, the dacianos wait.

They wait.

We hope this Chamomile Kitten™ greeting card has helped spread the joy you feel welcoming your wee one to the world!

The playful “bunny and egg basket” illustration on this Chamomile Kitten™ greeting card is taken from a German book of children’s holiday folklore.

According to the story “The Hare Who Went Forth with Unborn Chickens to Fatten the Children,” the King of Rabbits was becoming worried about the world’s dwindling rabbit population. Keep in mind this story was written in 1713, when a plate of boiled rabbit, sauerkraut, and dandelion tubers was the most prized “treat” among rural children.

The Chicken Emperor, gloating over the demise of the rabbits (the archenemies of chickens, at least according to the story), had decreed that his hens produce twice as many eggs so that the chicken populace could fill the soon-to-be-vacated niche the rabbits inhabited in the world.

But the King of Rabbits had a trick up his sleeve. Switching all the new chicken eggs with white stones, the rabbits boiled the unborn chickens in their shells and then painted the eggs bright colors. They left these brightly colored eggs, along with eggs made of chocolate, in festive baskets in the children’s homes while they slept.

The visual association of bright colors and the taste of sweet chocolate, all in egg form, created an insatiable hunger for eggs in the children of the world. The story ends—like most German children’s tales—with one animal cursing God and the horror at the heart of the universe, while another animal performs a happy, demonic murder dance under blue moonlight.

We hope this Chamomile Kitten™ greeting card helps you have a “hoppy” Easter!

The shamrock etching on this Chamomile Kitten™ greeting card was taken from the preinked outline of a tattoo. The tattoo was worn on the inner thigh of Fyn “Finn” McManus, a legendary brawler in early nineteenth-century New York. His capacity for alcohol, vomiting, and fisticuffs earned him the nickname “the Whiskey Abyss,” and one of his favorite pastimes included “parading.” “Parading” was his own pet name for drinking his age in ounces of whiskey, and then walking down the sidewalks, randomly punching and eructing on passersby. Several attempts by local constables to prohibit this practice proved unsuccessful, until an amiable foot patrolman—his name lost to history—hit upon a novel solution.

When McManus’s customary pre-parading cry was heard as he left whatever tavern or blind tiger he’d just completed his “age/ounce” ritual in (the cry being a variation of the phrase “
A-cummin there ta make soup bowls a’ faces and fill ’em with chowder!
”) the local police would spring into action.

Gently guided to the center of the street, McManus could land blows and launch effluvium at whatever “pedestrians” he perceived to be in his path—invariably, horses and the carriages they pulled.

McManus met his end on the balmy evening of May 2, 1912, when he mistook the Happy Cat Tooth Powder mascot painted on the front of an onrushing streetcar for a bartender who had recently refused him service. McManus charged and promptly disappeared in a spray of knuckles and vomit.

We hope this Chamomile Kitten™ greeting card helps you safely and soberly celebrate the “wearin o’ the green”!

The mortarboard-and-tassel flourish on this Chamomile Kitten™ greeting card is a fun optical illusion. While the image
appears
to, indeed, be the traditional headwear of the successful college graduate, it is actually an inverted and reversed “tunnel mouth” design. Designed by mini-malist painter Skaate Inskviln in 1901, the tunnel mouth was, according to a self-published monograph, a “dream conception” of the entranceway to “a world that is a path.”

The painting, called
The Road of Quench-less Striving,
was first shown at a small Swabian university in 1903. More than fifteen students, all on the verge of graduation, began experiencing insomnia, severe gastric distress, and bleeding pupils after viewing it. The painting has never been shown again.

However, one of the students who suffered eight months of insomnia wrote an opera shortly after being released from a sleep disorder clinic. Titled
I Have Spent Eight Years Learning from the Lives of People Who Truly Broke Free from the Strictures of Higher Education and Actually Made Their Lives What They Wanted While I Have Failed to Follow Their Example, Will Continue to Fail, and Will Die Unmourned, Confused, and Fat,
it was never performed.