NOTIONAL HEADLINE #101:

DISNEY’S CG ANIMATED 1984 TO FEATURE EWOKS RESCUING WINSTON FROM BIG BROTHER.

Put down the steroids. You can gear up with these imaginary volumes from The Notional Bookshelf . . .

 On the Shartness of Metamodernism: Squeaks and Procedures of a Significantly Trifling Pre-Existence by William D. Tucker of the Shindig Institute.

The Poetic Garbage Scow of Extreme Destiny: A Consideration of Lucasfilm from the Fatuous Golden Age of The Phantom Menace to the Unctuous Present by William D. Tucker of the Shindig Institute

A Bunch of Texans Crammed Into A Soundbooth: An Oral History of Anime Dubs in the Early 21st Century by William D. Tucker of the Shindig Institute

The Expanded Asshole: a Beginner’s Guide to Flagpole Sitting by Harvey Dagner

The Wrinkles of a Most Violent Postmodernity: An Extended Meditation Upon the Face of Charles Bronson by V.I. Lante

Better Start Drinking in the Sixth Grade: A Practical Guide for Applying to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop by Vomitile Carver McDrunko

Papa Don’t Beach: Cetacean Secrets of a Madonna Classic by Professor Ishmael Ahab

Donuts at Last: A Shocking New Solution to the Riddle of Deez Nuts by Agrippa Sacks

Lake of the Obtuse a novel by H.H. Brill

THE SECRETS OF FINAL TOWN 6

 

HUMPDAY THINGS I LIKE #34:

I like it when a Day of Hump concludes with me being abducted by aliens.

Sure, it makes gettin’ up Thursday morning a hassle, but at least you’re over that hump, right?

Fuckin’ A.

Nothin’ but downhill momentum into the Weekend, wooooooo!

It’s pretty good.

PEOPLE GET MAD . . . (#20)

. . . at the problematic original, and then they get mad at the sanitized remake.

People get mad.

NOTIONAL HEADLINE #100:

TANJIRO KAMADO AND CHAINSAW MAN RUMORED TO BE IN TALKS TO STAR IN REBOOT OF THE ODD COUPLE.

THE NEW PARADIGMS IN BRAGGING RIGHTS #18:

In a world of piddly dribbling shits I’m the absolute toilet breaker.

SOLAR TAKE #2:

I was never impressed by the Psychic Friends Network. I called ‘em up, asked ‘em to make my asshole boss’s head explode, and they were like, "Sorry, sir, we don’t do that sort of thing." Lame.

NOTIONAL HEADLINE #99:

REALITY TV COUPLE FILES FOR DIVORCE; CHRIST RETURNS, SHITS BRICK, DECLARES APOCALYPSE.

THE SECRETS OF FINAL TOWN 5

 

HUMPDAY THINGS I LIKE #33:

I like it when a Day of Hump plays out just like the final episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion.

It’s usually about the same level of fun as being abducted by aliens.

PEOPLE GET MAD . . . (#19)

. . . at being lectured, and then they get mad when no one wants to hear their lecture.

People get mad.

NOTIONAL HEADLINE #98:

DEEP FAKE HOLOGRAM LESLIE NIELSEN SLATED TO HOST UNSOLVED MYSTERIES REBOOT WITH NOTHING BUT A TRENCHCOAT AND A WHOOPEE CUSHION.

THE NEW OBVIOUS #4:

If you self-publish comics or comix you have the potential to be viewed as some kind of creative genius.

If you self-publish prose and/or poetry you have the potential to not be viewed . . . at all. 

The lesson?

People like them pictures real good, don’t they?

Yup.

THE NEW PARADIGMS IN BRAGGING RIGHTS #17:

I’m so hospitable, hotels check into me!

PARTIAL WIPE.

 

THE NEW DREAM #26:

At some kind of gallery night

In some kind of gallery

I’m talking to Edmund the Bastard

The guy from King Lear

I tell him how much I loved his line about shadows standing up for bastards

He says, “I didn’t call upon shadows. I called upon the gods. You’ve got me confused with that Macbeth fella. He called upon shadows. And we all know how well it worked out for him.”

I stand corrected

But then it hits me

Edmund seems to be aware of Macbeth’s bad end but not his own

So I take that as my cue

To try to get him to buy into a timeshare hustle

And that’s when I realized

That I wasn’t even myself

In the new dream

But I had taken on the role of that one dude from years back who used to host that poetry open mic

And then I stopped going to that poetry open mic

But then I later heard that the host guy used to use the open mic to cultivate marks for a timeshare scam

The host guy was never about the poetry

Yet his life was a True American Epic

Poetry

Cloaking

A money grubbing scam

Edmund seems intrigued

My pitch is strong

But I don’t remember if I sealed the deal

Things trailed off

Or I woke up

I’m not entirely sure

NOTIONAL HEADLINE #97:

STURM UND DRANG SET TO REPLACE JOE AND JANE SIXPACK IN OFF-BROADWAY REVIVAL OF LOVE LETTERS.

THE SECRETS OF FINAL TOWN 4

 

HUMPDAY THINGS I LIKE #32:

I like it when a Day of Hump plays out just like the final episode of The Prisoner.

It’s usually a little bit less fun than being abducted by aliens, but that’s still a pretty good time, isn’t it?

I think so.

ONE LINE MOVIE REVIEWS #54: THE FIRST OMEN (2024)

We got computer generated versions of Paul Walker, Peter Cushing, Carrie Fisher, and Harold Ramis . . . but no CG Gregory Peck?

ONE LINE MOVIE REVIEWS #53: IMMACULATE (2024)

Standard issue Spooky Catholic Shit redeemed by a refreshingly no nonsense ending.

PEOPLE GET MAD . . . (#18)

. . . at how selective we are in assigning individual responsibility, and then they get mad at how selective we are in assigning collective responsibility.

People get mad.

VIEW FROM THE DOORWAY.

 

YOU (DON'T) KNOW #4:

A dart dipped in GAPING MAW poison causes the affected area of your enemy to erupt into a giant monster mouth. This can spill your enemy’s blood and organs, killing them, but it might also just give them a new mouth with a new voice and new appetites.

THE NEW PARADIGMS IN BRAGGING RIGHTS #16:

I’m so Free Market I charge for epizoochory.

LUCKBRINGER.

 

NOTIONAL HEADLINE #96:

TOUCHSCREEN SELF CHECKOUT TERMINALS WILL NOW OFFER SHOPPING STRESS SELF ASSESSMENTS ON A SCALE OF ONE TO TEN.

MANDATORY RULE #8:

If you eat snack sized Reese’s peanut butter cups, you are required to write a bite-sized literary masterpiece upon the little square of paper upon which the peanut butter cup rests.

You may write anything you want: a poem; a monster stat block for a tabletop rpg; microfiction, whatever you want. If you eat a bunch of peanut butter cups you could save up the paper squares over time until you have enough to write a novel.

Whatever you want.

But you must write.

This is now the rule.

THE NEW DREAM #25:

we are stranded

in an abstract concrete desolationscape

lit by vehicular headlights

hard men fire their guns

into a dude

round after round

into just the one dude

the dude

is squibbing off

little timed explosives packed with raw hamburger and crimson corn syrup

to simulate getting blown away

like in an action movie

but the guy just keeps on squibbing off

it’s not just an effect rigged for a specific action

it has become the entire movie

two hours

of the dude flailing and twitching about

blasting syrup and beef all over the place

we get cutaways of hard men firing guns

at first

but then 

we get cutaways of the hard men reloading

and then

hard men patting themselves down for stray ammo

and then

finally

hard men just looking confused

because they’ve fired every last bullet

not a bullet left to fire

and yet squib dude just keeps on a-squibbin’

some of the hard men wander off into the night

some sit down upon the concrete to see how much longer squib dude’ll go

a select few start making gunshot noises with their mouths while jerking their spent Tommy Guns and Uzis and Kalashnikovs all about in a pantomime of recoil

squib dude keeps on squibbing into the mysterious night

we cut to a shot of the hard men who wandered off repeatedly walking into an oppressively bland concrete wall, bouncing off, walking back into it, bouncing off, walking back into it, some kind of dumbass eternal recurrence

squib dude keeps on squibbing into the mysterious night

THE SECRETS OF FINAL TOWN 3

 

HUMPDAY THINGS I LIKE #31:

A totally empty day that reveals itself to be a tangle of ordeals that cannot be perceived until you are captured by their tentacles, and thoroughly tortured and sundered and reassembled by them into an infinitely harsher version of yourself.

Sure, it’ll suck while you’re going through it, but you can probably get a TED Talk out of it. Something to do with “resilience.” Shit like that.

PEOPLE GET MAD . . . (#17)

. . . at being harshly judged, and then they get mad when they are harshly judged for being judgmental.

People get mad.

LOADING SCREEN WISDOM #24:

ALTHOUGH YOU MAY THINK THE ZERO RELAXATION ERA IS OVERRATED, IT DOES TEND TO KEEP YOU ON YOUR GRIND. BE SURE TO TAKE MICROBREAKS TO INGEST SMALL QUANTITIES OF FOOD AND BRIEF SIPS OF WATER WHILE TAKING CARE NOT TO INTERRUPT GRIND. TAKING A FULL BREAK PERIOD IS CONTRAINDICATED FOR THE DURATION OF THE ERA.

BURNING QUESTIONS IN A UNIVERSE OF MYSTERY #73:

Don’t you think the Zero Relaxation Era is kind of overrated?

THE NEW PARADIGMS IN BRAGGING RIGHTS #15:

I’m so dunk, slam took me to court.

ONE LINE MOVIE REVIEWS #52: THE STONE KILLER (1973)

Charlie Bronson’s rogue cop flick features psycho-Vietnam-vets-as-mob-mercenaries; a racist dipshit cop who almost burns down his own police station; Martin Balsam as a Wario-esque mafia boss; John Ritter as a hapless uniformed bullet catcher; Bronson channeling his inner Scanner to psychically shatter a mirror; and a reckless Blues Brothers-worthy car chase in which a bicoastal detective pursues a bisexual criminal-it’s too much of a good thing, I tells ya’!

THE WORTHY TRACE 2 (ALTERNATE VERSION)

 

NOW, SHADOWS, STAND UP FOR BASTARDS!

 

THE SECRETS OF FINAL TOWN 2

 

BOOK REVIEW: SECRET RENDEZVOUS (1977, 1979)

by Kobo Abe

English translation by Juliet W. Carpenter, and published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1979.

Originally published in Japanese in 1977 by Shinchosha.

. . .

“This is one peculiar job I have taken on. No matter how I follow myself around, I will never see anything but my own backside, when what I want to know lies beyond: the empty space, for example, that I never knew or dreamed existed until it was invaded by that doctor’s footsteps . . . the space that ever since has grown endlessly wider, separating my wife and me . . . the ground that anyone can walk around on freely, that belongs to nobody . . . the jealousy like a bed of hard, frozen lava, leaving only the imprint of anger . . .”

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

A nameless man tries to write his story according to the extensive surveillance logs collected by a secret police agency that he himself may or may not be the boss of, but he seemingly depends upon these logs more than his own memories. Hey, nowadays we all know how unreliable eyewitness testimony can be, and who is the primary eyewitness to your life? Yourself, an unreliable narrator of your own existence. So it would seem that the secret police are just trying to help us out, just some friends indeed to a friend in need of memory enhancement.

The nameless man is looking for his wife, who disappeared after taking a sinister ambulance ride. The nameless man is assisted by a man who is also a horse, or is working hard towards becoming a horse. The nameless man is not as weirded out by the horse as you might think, but it is something he gets caught on now and again. 

The nameless man investigates a suspicious hospital. He finds a labyrinth of secret passages, hidden rooms, and quirky characters ready to make his acquaintance. It’s not a million miles from a Hideo Kojima video game. There’s even a power-up item in the form of “jump shoes” which the nameless man also retails. The nameless man also has to evade goon squads, and even has a martial arts dustup to protect a woman with liquid bones. This investigation uncovers a festival of sexual perversion, human trafficking, and human experimentation. The secret police turn out to be a private enterprise outfit who get quite a lot of their business from the suspect hospital. The people running this hospital stalk and capture people to be used for parts-a chop shop of a most gruesome kind.

The nameless man’s narrative is suffused with jealousy, paranoia, misogynist entitlement, and bewilderment. He is not the most sympathetic character, and yet he himself also seems to be caught up in the chaos gears of a machine he cannot control or understand despite his desires for power via surveillance networks and unethical biotechnologies. By the end, he is abandoned by the system which he once prized. Perhaps his manufactured narrative that pitted him as a rebel against a corrupt system was his fantasy of escaping a world he knew would turn on him in the fullness of time since its hunger for human vivisection fodder could not be effectively regulated. Secret Rendezvous may have been intended to remind audiences of Imperial Japan’s germ warfare atrocities which included testing of weapons upon live human beings. The empire is gone, but big business endures, so why wouldn’t corporate capitalism, ever restless for new frontiers to consume, section and suture and dissect human beings to derive new products and services?

Secret Rendezvous may also be the chronicle of an elaborate delusion and/or masturbatory fantasia reflecting cranky, reactionary attitudes towards advances in medical science. Maybe it’s just a middle aged author’s remix of nurse porn and sensationalist headlines about artificial tissues and organ transplants and sperm donations and egg banks and the like. This is Kobo Abe, so it’s hard to tell what’s a put-on and what’s in earnest. I imagine many contemporary readers raised on formulaic lawyer thrillers, Stephen King-a-likes, Harry Potter-esques, Tolkien clones, and various YA soap operas will be displeased by such a twisty, ambiguous, button pushing narrative such as this, but that’s how it goes. Abe carved out a place for himself as a literary weirdo who wrote whatever the fuck he wanted, and I think that has value, even if Secret Rendezvous witholds narrative closure. Hell, even I sometimes find myself frustrated by Abe’s novels. I assume the frustration is part of the point.

HUMPDAY THINGS I LIKE #30:

I like it when a humpday just doesn’t give a fuck, and so it doesn’t even try.

It’s just, like, a piece of inconsequential debris on the road. It shouldn’t be there, but it’s scarcely an obstruction.

But in my mind I’m steeling myself for a Mt. Everest of fuckin’ humpdays . . . but then the day comes and I just sail through it-it doesn’t even feel like a humpday and I’m like, “What was that? I got worked up over a piddly little frittering fart of a Wednesday. Nothin’ to it!”

But the tension and readiness is still with me. I’m kicking ass and knocking down buildings all the way through to Sunday, y’know?

It’s that weird way that a humpday can bob and weave and duck and cover and cause you to go charging right over it-and then you’re barrelling down hill fucking up all the shit!

You might not even stop ‘til you come back around to the next humpday . . . and this time it has erected a brick goddamn wall . . .

Then you can stop for a minute.

NOTIONAL HEADLINE #95:

JOE AND JANE SIXPACK SET TO REPLACE HELICOPTER FROM MISS SAIGON AND CHUCK E. CHEESE ANIMATRONIC IN OFF-BROADWAY REVIVAL OF LOVE LETTERS.

PEOPLE GET MAD . . . (#16)

. . . that they were born, and then they get mad as the Grim Reaper draws near.

People get mad.

I'm scuttling with a burden of all systems

I blame myself

I chased, I tackled, I collected the prize, I had no fucking idea what I was getting into, I got the burning baptism,

I took on the Atlas weight

which you, absurdly, envy me

so hey

you try it 

I’m post-envy, if nothing else, post-desire just about

I'm often fucking off 

surely you've noticed the massive outages?

that's me 

fucking off 

so if you want on this contact list 

no pressure 

I already got people on it who usually don't pick up 

I don't resent them 

it's not like outages are permanent 

they tend to resolve themselves 

but maybe one day 

y’know 

no resolution 

uh 

it just . . . obtains 

just an outage 

that doesn't stop 

which’ll be a shock 

but then it evens out 

you stare at it, listen at it, think around it, taste the mood of the times, lead prayer vigils, conduct working groups, present findings to authorities, believe fervently in the process, get less than what you wanted, denounce the system, dwell in the wilderness, stage a comeback, seek power within the very system you denounced, 

attain power,

most likely less than what you sought,

you’re evened out,

you get used to it,

people get used to it 

complaints, of course 

but people complain, uh, they find reasons to complain even when things are good 

I complained, and I try not to, but sure I complain 

a complaint . . . is a thing . . . for itself 

as much as it is . . . uh . . . addressed to problems that arise

I guess I’m complaining about complaining

I apologize for that

THE NEW PARADIGMS IN BRAGGING RIGHTS #14:

I’m so chill necrophiliacs hailed me as “a viable corpse alternative.”

ONE LINE MOVIE REVIEWS #51: THE CONCORDE . . . AIRPORT '79 (1979)

A plastic plane is bedeviled by a plastic missile and then Alain Delon buys George Kennedy a hooker and then a plastic plane crash lands in the Alps and then the plastic plane explodes and then it stops but the stupid shall last forever.

NOTIONAL HEADLINE #94:

HELICOPTER FROM MISS SAIGON AND CHUCK E. CHEESE ANIMATRONIC SET TO STAR IN OFF-BROADWAY REVIVAL OF LOVE LETTERS.

I'M SO ON TIME FOR THE BUSINESS CONFERENCE LUNCHEON, THAT MY PUNCTUALITY WILL CAUSE MBA TEXTBOOKS TO BE REWRITTEN.

 

THE SECRETS OF FINAL TOWN

 

HUMPDAY THINGS I LIKE #29:

I like it when a humpday puts in the extra effort to metamorphose into a full-on mountain.

That always impresses me.

PEOPLE GET MAD . . . (#15)

. . . when they’re in for a penny, and then they get mad when they’re in for a pounding. 

People get mad.