In one of them I was visiting my friend Mike's parents house up north, a place I have never been. For some reason I had one of my cats with me. Mike's mother also had a cat (Which they never did) and it was not getting along with my cat. So Mike's mom let out a sigh of resignation and said she would 'have to fix' this. So she goes down into a basement and returns with some sort of dusty old contraption. It looked like a cross between a cage and some sort of mechanical metal toy that might have come from the 1940's. She placed my cat in it, wound a rusty old key, and the entire device started to clackity clack and whirl. Then to my horror the machine suddenly let out a large electrical discharge that reduced my cat to a small puddle of green goo. I was horrified. However, after a moment the goo began to bubble and take form and it eventually returned to the shape of my cat. However, it looked like my cat, but no longer had his personality. I found the entire setting to be rather eerie.
I had a second dream about a stone witch that came to life in the back of a tractor-trailer truck. But I'm not getting into that.
I was getting bad reception on my gray market Korean satellite dish receiver the other day, so I started fudging with it to try and reclaim my vanished channels. Much to my surprise all my channels vanished only to be replaced with a whole new set of stations, including five porn stations, several movie stations including 'showtime beyond' which is the sci-fi channel of movie channels, and BOOM. I was most pleased with the reemergence of BOOM. This is the cartoon station that the cartoon network USED to be, before they started manufacturing their own cartoons. Dozens of old half forgotten and failed one season cartoons of the golden age of Saturday morning cartoons.
Last night I cheerfully watched 'The Robotic Three Stooges'. It was stupid, pointless, not very funny, head scratching, and thoroughly enjoyable. I need to check the listings to see when the 'Smurfs' come on. I miss me some Smurfs. I want to see the episode where the purple fly bit the smurf and turned him purple and made him yell G'NAPP! And lash out in a rage, biting other smurfs and thus infecting them. It was smurf AIDS.
At the end of this month I may be taking an impromptu vacation to my plot of land in the Adirondack Mountains. My dad is currently up there clearing out some land for a cabin, and my mother wanted to go but she did not want to leave the house alone with cats that needed to be fed for a couple of months. Finally we found out Alan would not mind staying in a big house with air conditioning and a pool for a couple of months. So she is driving up there, driving because she has to take the big black wookie that walks on four legs that she claims is a dog. And she wants me to go with her because she is 'old' and is worried about a blood sugar attack or whatever on the drive up.
I am not looking forward to the drive. I used to go to school in Rochester and I drove my vw bus up and down from New York several times. Each time the ride got longer and more boring. I am not looking forward to it at all, although I suppose I will be looking forward to camping in the Adirondack Mountains for a couple of days. Commune with my land. Build a drinking shack. Hunt a Yeti. All that fun stuff. I guess for the ride up I'll buy me the entire season of some television show and watch it on my Mighty Morphin Power Rangers portable DVD player. Maybe I'll get 'the greatest American hero'.
Come to think of it, she did not ask who was going to feed MY cats for a week. Anyone want to live in my house for a week? I have BOOM on tv.
Only two real plans this weekend. Ride my bike out to find, and take photos of, a 'Secret' graveyard that Alan claims to have spotted in Sanford, and to go to the West End and guzzle several $10 bottomless supertankters. I am going to try and go for a record. It's nice to have goals.
2026 Update
Cranking the time machine to late May 2007, where a gray-market dish rejiggers the channels and the Smurfs contract something viral.
Nineteen years ago the entertainment ecosystem was held together with coax cable, squat gray receivers, and sheer audacity. You could trip over a knock-off Korean dish, wiggle a connector, and emerge with a full replacement channel menu and no clear idea where any of it came from. That's not a bug; it was the frontier. Now we pay separate subscriptions for every scrap of media, everything is algorithmically recommended, and 'fudging with it' means clearing your watch history or arguing with a password reset. The portable DVD player you'd load up with 'The Greatest American Hero' has been replaced by a phone that knows your taste better than you do. Saturday-morning cartoons are a cemetery, though their ghosts wander onto streaming services. The $10 bottomless supertanker? Good luck finding that outside a museum diorama. And yes, they still make cartoons about viruses, but nobody calls them Smurf AIDS. The machines don't turn your cat into goo, they just recommend you a wellness podcast. I miss the clackity-clack.
“2007 Ed, did you really think 'commune with my land, build a drinking shack, and hunt a Yeti' was a vacation itinerary, or was that just your way of not having to feed your own cats for a week?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2007 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, I’d like to say it was a bold vision of mountain manhood, but honestly it was about 60% not wanting to feed the cats and 40% wanting to drink cheap beer in the woods without having to look at my own roof. The Yeti hunt is just an excuse to wander around with a hammer and feel useful. And the drinking shack? That’s not a plan, that’s a lifestyle. But yeah, the cats were definitely part of it. Moxie gives me this look every time I open a can of tuna, like I owe her something. A week of that and I’d be the one reduced to green goo. So sure, call it an itinerary if you want, but I’ve got a graveyard to find and some supertankers to guzzle first. Priorities.
