The Year's Best Schlock! Horror 2013

In case your craving to consume has not yet been sated, Gavin Chappell of Schlock! has assembled another gang of motley misfits and miscreants for The Year's Best Schlock! Horror 2013.

My despotic tale of datura and desire, Mr. Baron Samedi, is included.

Dinner Parties, Sino-Indian Relations and Bulgarian Prostitutes - Notes from a Traveler

In a recent edition of Notes I indicated my staunch refusal to learn the most basic phrases in foreign languages – however this is not entirely true. 

Abroad, amongst foreigners, I refuse to speak anything other than English but at home, amongst polite company, I am given to the occasional quotation, clever turn of phrase or et patati et patata documenting, my, if you will, touha cestovatelská. 

I have frequently used the aformentioned phrases although not accurately, as I do not know what they mean.

I would recommend all self-respecting travelers to crash a dinner party, family reunion or baby shower in order to corner a vulnerable guest and establish your inherent authority by relaying tales of travel (preferably to Europe) - salted and peppered, of course, with enchanting local vocabulary...

 

The most family friendly of the two results for "blow up doll" on Wikimedia Commons

Through the years I have entertained a long, strange and frequently dangerous game of one-upmanship with Ricky Rakubian, a charming rogue whom I consider the sub-continental Chuck Borgia.

As competing playboys, adventurers and generalized international misfits our long and storied rivalry started as mere schoolboy shenanigans but peaked in 1973 whenever a blow up doll prank nearly resulted in a second Sino-Indian War...

The 14th result for "clip joint" on Wikimedia Commons. Sexual pleasure mechanism, marijuana paraphernalia or German laboratory equipment - you be the judge

I cut my teeth in the Yakuza clip joints of Kabukichō, and as such have become something of a consultant for several well-known organized criminal organizations in the management of quasi-illegal fleshpots and titty bars from Chongquing to Burger King.

For the occasional exotic concubine, I, of course, rely upon the services of my resident procurer, Sven Svensen of the Stockholm Natural History Museum – however I understand that the casual tourist is not able to afford the monthly charges of a licensed, reliable and experienced Swedish procurer.

I would suggest caution in approaching the dive bars just a hop, skip and a jump away from the touristy parts of Western European cities – if the watered down cocktail and Russian bouncers aren’t enough to warrant a red flag, the Bulgarian and North African beauties who show an immediate and unrealistic interest in you should be...

Worms in the Ear

My latest exercise in the eldritch, Worms in the Ear, will appear in an upcoming edition of Under the Bed magazine.

If, like me, you enjoy the holiday season but are not willing to rabbit punch the elderly or trample strangers for the latest Cabbage Patch Kid, take note - each issue is available to be purchased in the safety and security of your own home on your Nook or Kindle for just $3.99. 

The third search result for "trample" on Wikipedia

Improvised Bludgeons, Expired Condoms and the British Broadcasting Corporation - Notes from a Traveler

International alcoholics, take note - polite society would frown upon passing out with a bottle of whiskey within reach, and yet I can more than vouch for its efficacy as an improvised bludgeon…

If you find yourself coming-to in a foreign land hungover off a nasty drugging (whether unsolicited or self-administered) you likely will have lost items including but not limited to money, shoes, passports and visas.

As your local embassy will be of little use, I would personally recommend the lost art of pick-pocketing on public transit – namely, the tried and true “newspaper method” in which a carefully positioned paper (preferably The Sun or its local equivalent) obscures hands roving through your neighbors’ pockets and purses. 

I recently liberated (and later utilized) a book of matches, Kč 700, a piece of butterscotch hard candy and an expired condom from the coat of a vulgar Belgian on the tramvaj in Prague using this technique...

The personal ad columns have long since been a perverse frontier inhabited by those sad and lonely hearts who dare to dream. And yet, as I recently found after some measure of embarrassment, “BBC” as found in the personals does not stand for “British Broadcasting Corporation”...

Missed Connections

This is a Missed Connections ad by Anonymous, presumably a 35 year-old woman from Oklahoma City, haunted by her former lover, Carlos. I present "Carlos, I'm giving up the ghost" in the interest of saving this bit of found prose poetry from the Craigslist dung heap of oblivion.

Carlos, I'm giving up the ghost. - w4m - 35 (oklahoma city)

The banana project was not enough to lure you in, and I want to be sad. I want to conclude something more than you giving up on the dream. My best guesses are as follows:

Perhaps you met an untimely doom via a boa constrictor, after he had smothered you in ketchup.

Perhaps you were found out by an exorcist, or a ghost hunter. I'm wondering if they have your voice on tape somewhere, I'd like to hear the gurgle and scratch against the back drop of white noise.

Perhaps you were eaten by a plump man on an elevator, after he had mistaken you for a cookie.

I feel as though it always goes back to the state of cookies, the shape of cookies. Shapes of all things.

It's highly likely you were bored by my previous letters, and allowed Horatio to devour you. His mouth was always a prison, I am not sure how well of an escape plan that would be. The halls are too quiet without you, my teeth hurt from too much sugar. I will start cursing the sky in your name, only to have forgotten the curse songs minutes later. After all, it is a fast food, give me candy, now now now type of world.

My universe is shaped like a broken wine bottle, and defending it seems useless. I find myself getting letters from women who hope I will call them Carlos, or men who desire me to treat them like a dirty muse. I am not sure what that even means, I am not much of a sadist, and dirty? Dirty things like mules, and goats tend to make me seek solace in warm water. I will not throw tomatoes at anyone while they are tied to an oven.

I keep washing my eyes, and hands hoping to rid myself of your memory. I must be a proper masochist, a longing marionette. I have done all of this dangling by myself, written songs about tad poles in remembrance of you. My nostrils caught the smell of bourbon, and it made me wonder how you had met your end. Poe would be proud, I thought. Or he would be disappointed, let us hope your story was not like one of his terrible poems. We all have terrible poems. Sometimes we are the terrible poems.

I have never stolen kisses, or danced to acid jazz. I have died a thousand times to the echo in her voice, every day is a little death.

I dreamed of a wolf on my front porch, though I do not really have a front porch. He sat splinters in his paws, jaw agape. He reminded me of nights I have spent wondering, determined to sleep thirty minutes less. I have run out of clever ideas, I do not know where you have gone or why. I presume you have found another woman to haunt, to send your suave prose to.

I hope wherever you have gone, the ether is lovely this time of year.

I will continue to write letters, until I have run out of ridiculous things to wonder about. This will surely be once I am dead-and-gone. What is death anyway? Just a little weight loss.