Alien Night Club - Show 19?
Alien Night Club <the transcripts>
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Hello, hello, hello,welcome to the show. Show 19! Show 19? Show 19. It may or may not be Show 19.
Welcome. Thank you for being here. I’m happy to be here. The big show after turkey day and Black Friday. Hope nobody got trampled this year over an X Box or a crockpot. A lipstick. A bag of Doritos. Unless maybe it was a bag of Doritos that had a key inside or a special chip or something that entitled its finder to a prize. Like maybe 5 winners around the world would win a first-class, all expenses paid trip to Los Angeles to meet Jay Leno to visit his famous garage stroke car collection and pick out a car. To keep. To have shipped home. To their house. To own forever.
Not sure Jay would go for that but you never know. It would make one heck of a series. Really good content.
Anyway, welcome to the show. The big Saturday show.
Show notes.
Two things thus far.
Two incredible new movies.
The first one is Chris Hemsworth doing a livestream one day when he’s at home in Australia, where he’s from. He decides on a whim to turn on his phone and do a livestream while he gets in his truck and drives a few hours to go do a couple of errands.
But this is Australia. So of course it’s not that simple.
It’s frog season. It’s the time of year when the frogs come out. Millions of them. And Chris even mentions it when he begins driving. He warns us that there might be frogs on the road, but that we shouldn’t be alarmed; it’s alright. It’s a perfectly normal thing in Australia.
And then minutes later, Chris is all like, Oh, there those little buggers are now.
And we see him slow down and lean out the window to show us a cute little frog sitting on the side of the road.
And he’s all like, Cute little buggers, aren’t they?
And he resumes driving.
It’s a beautiful sunny day. He’s on a small, two-lane road with almost no traffic. Tall, beautiful eucalyptus trees line the road, and off in the distance on one side, far away, are beautiful mountains. And it’s so wild and serene and preserved. And you almost feel as if you’ve been transported through time because this is what this land has looked like for thousands of years.
And then we hear a noise. Kind of like…popcorn popping. Slowly at first. And then more.
Chris chuckles and says, Oh look: more frogs.
And we see that the road has frogs all over it. And Chris is running over them. And the popcorn sound is the sound of the frogs being popped and crushed under the tires.
And the road ahead is COVERED in frogs.
And Chris just chuckles again and says, Cute little buggers.
And pretty soon, the frogs are jumping and hopping and they’re hitting the front of the truck and they start hitting the windshield and some of them splatter. And pretty soon, the windshield is a mess.
So Chris calmly turns on the windshield wipers and starts smearing everything around and making it even worse!
So then he pulls the stalk toward him and washer fluid sprays out and the windshield clears enough so he can see. And he goes, Oh, that’s better! And he keeps driving.
But it’s a sea of frogs. And they seem oblivious to the fact that a vehicle is coming. So a lot of them get squished. And pretty soon, the whole front and bottom of the truck is covered in frog guts and frog parts and there’s lots of blood and green shit. And the wheel wells of the truck are full of it. And the tires are full of it. Even though they’re multipurpose tires with deep tread, the tread is now filled with frog guts. And pretty soon, the truck starts sliding around like it’s on ice.
And at one point, it goes almost sideways before Chris can get it back under control. And he chuckles and goes, Slippery little suckers. And then he glances at the camera he’s got mounted on the inside of the window and winks. And the truck keeps sliding around and he says, This thing is no longer cornering like it's on rails. Might have to stop and go down under soon.
And suddenly he begins slowing down. He looks all around, checking the gauges and stuff, trying to figure out why we’re slowing down. And he feathers the accelerator and we hear the engine revving up and we hear a high-pitched sound that we realize is the back tires spinning.
And the truck comes to a stop.
Chris guns it but it won’t move. The back tires are spinning like they’re in mud. Except instead of mud, it’s a sea of frogs. And the tires are kicking up long rooster tails of mutilated frogs.
Chris puts it in Park and shuts off the engine and unbuckles his seatbelt and says, Looks like I spoke too soon.
He smiles and goes, This should be fun.
And then he opens the door and looks down. And it’s a sea of frogs. Just sitting there. With their little throat sacks moving in and out. And some of them are climbing on top of other frogs, trying to mate.
And Chris puts a GoPro on his forehead so we can see when he gets out of the truck and he steps on a bunch of frogs. They get squished under his black boots. Boots that are a cool mix of combat boots and wilderness explorer boots. And they’re in good condition but they’re a little dirty. And you can tell Chris wears them all the time. They’re basically everyday footwear in Australia. They’re his actual boots. Not some costume bullshit used to make him look cool and to sell boots.
He walks gingerly, a bit like he’s walking through a few inches of mud or snow. Or frogs.
And he slips and almost falls, and says, Whoa! They ARE slippery little suckers.
He puts his hands on his knees and inspects the truck’s tires.
He goes, Oh, well, there’s the problem. Too many frogs.
So he reaches into the wheel well and begins scooping frog guts off the tires with his hand.
And he goes, Don’t worry, we’ll be back underway in a jiffy.
And he goes around to all four tires, scooping out frogs. And his hands are covered in it. And then he goes to the front of the truck and inspects it. He goes, Oh, yeah, whole radiator’s covered in em. If we don’t clean em out, she’ll overheat for sure. Looks like I’ll have to crawl down under.
And without missing a beat, he lays down in the sea of frogs and shimmies under the front of the truck, where he reaches up and begins scooping frogs out of the radiator. And frogs are jumping all over him, on his legs, on his chest, and they’re climbing on his face and they’re climbing all over the GoPro, putting slime on it.
And we hear Chris laugh off-camera and say, Amorous little buggers, aren’t they? Hey, guys! Nice day, isn’t it.
And then he pulls himself up from under the truck, attempts to clean the red and green and yellow and brown frog guts off his hands and goes, That oughta do it.
He walks around to the side of the truck, grabs a jug of water out of the back, and pours some on his hands to rinse them.
And he goes, You guys thirsty?
And he pours the water out all over the frogs and says, There you go. A nice drink during your mating.
And he takes a sip himself and pours the last bit of it on his face and hair. He rubs his face with his hands and slicks his hair back and now he has frog guts on his face and in his hair and somehow he looks even sexier than ever!
He leans into the truck and says to the camera, Well, shall we?
And he gets in and resumes driving.
With zillions of frogs popping all the while.
And a big semi truck comes the other way. And it’s coming fast.
And Chris says, Bugger! and quickly hits the button to put the windows up. And the truck passes, showering Chris’s truck in a WAVE of frogs, like a snow plow plowing dirty gray snow off of the road.
Chris chuckles again and activates the wipers and says, Should’ve seen that one coming, and keeps driving.
But a few minutes later, the wiper fluid runs out. And the windshield is soon covered in frogs. So Chris reaches under the seat and pulls out a weird hood mask hat thing. It looks old. And kinda dirty. And vaguely like a gas mask from World War I.
He puts it on.
And then leans his head out the window and keeps driving.
And pretty soon, the frogs are bouncing off the windshield and landing on him and his frog mask is covered in goo.
And he glances over at the camera and we hear his muffled voice as he shouts from under the frog mask, Didn’t know I’d be doing this when I woke up this morning!
And he keeps driving! Through a sea of horny little popping frogs. And every so often, he reaches up and wipes the frog guts out of the eyeholes of the frog mask.
Wait, I have an idea!, he shouts, and he cranks the steering wheel and the truck fishtails through the frogs and he guides it between the trees and off the road, and it bounces up and down violently several times and Chris’s body is bouncing all over the place and he shouts, Yee-haw, I’m just like Matt McConaughey!
And then we’re out on the dirt, away from the road and the sea of frogs. Chris pulls off the frog mask, gives it a shake, which makes frog guts fly everywhere inside the truck, including onto his face and in his mouth. And he calmly spits the guts out the window, puts the frog mask back under his seat, and resumes driving. And he goes, That’s better. Should’ve thought’ve that a long time ago!
And he shakes his head and chuckles and says, Frogs.
Then he glances at the camera and says, Did I ever tell you guys how much fun I had playing fat Thor? That was a blast. I’ve often wondered what it would be like to combine Fat Thor with my character from the Vacation movie, the guy with the really big…penis. Could you imagine? Fat Thor, Porn Star! Gives a whole new meaning to Thor’s hammer, am I right? That could be the name of the film! Thor’s Hammer. Starring Chris Hemsworth as Fat Thor. He’s a god gone awry, lost somewhere in Van Nuys, trying to make a name for himself as a newcomer in a notoriously nasty industry. Get it? Newcomer? But Best Masked Performer is his favorite film of all time and he may just be a drunken, outcast god with a dream, but by God, he’s going to see it through. All he needs is the love and support of the quirky band of characters he finds himself surrounded with, namely his faithful new co-star, Hanna Banana, played effervescently by the lovely and talented Emma Stone. What do you say, Emma? Would you like to be Roller Girl 2.0?
And then WHAM!
BAM!
BAZOINK!
The truck slams to a halt.
Chris looks around, surveying the inside of the cab. He goes, You guys alright?
And then we see that we’re still moving. Very, very slowly. Almost as if…the front of the truck is sinking.
And Chris goes, Oh, bugger, it looks like I’ve driven us into a bit of quicksand, and he shakes his head and chuckles.
Not to worry, he says, I’ll have us out in no time and we’ll be back underway, brainstorming once more about Thor’s Hammer. Imagine his moneyshots. It’ll be like Reese getting hit in the face with the pig blood in her pig movie. Don’t go away!
And he climbs out of the truck, is immediately up to his waist in quicksand, and begins sinking. He looks over at the camera, at us, and goes, Oh, it’s actually kind of warm. I’ve never actually been in quicksand before but it’s actually not that bad.
He looks around, grabs a hunk of rope out of the back of the truck, fumbles around back there for a moment and then looks at us and says, Looks like I’m going to have to go down under. He retrieves the frog mask from under the seat and pulls it over his head. Be right back, he says, and takes one last great gulp of air, pulls the frog mask over his face, and disappears into the quicksand.
And then all is silent.
For an eerie, disconcertingly long time. Like…SEVERAL minutes. Seemingly much longer than you could hold your breath under water without some serious David Blaine world record breath hold-style training, let alone while fumbling about whilst buried in quicksand.
But then Chris pops up out of the quicksand, way over there in front of the truck and it’s like, how the heck did he get way over there?
And he goes, That oughta do it! Oh, wait, how do I get back? Looks like I’ll have to have another swim. Or…I could walk.
He climbs out of the pit of quicksand, effortlessly, walks around to the truck, leaps onto the rear bumper, climbs into the bed, and then through the open driver’s side window and into the driver’s seat. He puts his seatbelt on and says, Safety first.
Then he starts the engine, puts it in reverse, looks over his shoulder, and begins backing out of the quicksand. He says, casually, I rigged some branches under the tires with the rope, tied a couple of simple box knots, and away we go!
And just like that, the truck is free!
Chris hops out, retrieves the rope, ties it up neatly, tosses it into the bed, and resumes driving. Now, he says, where were we?
And somehow, covered in frog guts and frickin quicksand, he’s more charming than ever!
A clunking, foreboding mechanical sound begins emanating from the truck, somewhere near the front.
Uh-oh, Chris says, checking the gauges.
The truck sputters and dies, rolling to a halt out in the dirt, in the middle of nowhere. Chris tries to start it. The engine won’t turn over. It won’t even crank.
Oh, I was afraid of that, he says. Looks like the frogs mixed with the quicksand to create the world’s most distasteful oatmeal and some of it got into the engine. Looks like she’s done for. But that’s okay, we’ll just have to walk. I’m sure a helpful motorist will be along any minute now to give us a lift.
And Chris takes a look around and all we see for miles and miles and miles, which is to say kilometers and kilometers and kilometers, is vast wilderness. Quicksilver shimmers in the distance, making it impossible to judge distances. The sun is climbing higher and higher into the sky, threatening to bake the ground below and everyone and everything on it.
And Chris says, You know, what we really need is a Kalahari bushman to come along with some salt so we can feed it to a baboon and then follow the baboon to a nearby source of fresh, clean spring water. Maybe we could even bottle it and Jason Mamoa can provide the aluminum cans so we aren’t having to use any of those blasted single-use plastics. And we can donate all the proceeds to that bloke cleaning up the great Pacific garbage patch. Because we really do need to get that thing cleaned up. Have you seen the size of it? I reckon it’s almost the size of Texas! I hear Will Ferrell’s doing Talladega Nights 2, by the way, only this time he’s going for Formula 1. Should be a riot. Classic fish out of water story. And then, after the plastic is cleaned up out of the ocean, we can shift the water money to helping native people of Australia, because a lot of them haven’t got anything to drink besides Coca-Cola. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Coca-Cola as much as the next guy. But let’s be real, everyone needs to have the option to drink clean water in addition to a nice ice-cold Coke. Don’t you agree? I mean, maybe they’ll choose the Coke. On a hot day like this or perhaps while they’re having a nice lunch, a Coke might be just the thing. But a bottle of water now and again wouldn’t kill you.
Anyway, you guys get the idea. Hijinks ensue. Chris is in a survivalist situation Bear Grylls would love and no matter how bad it gets, he just chuckles. He encounters a pack of dingos and because he’s such an alfa, they all become his friends. And they all hunt together and he cooks some game over a campfire. And then a nice kangaroo family comes along and one of the momma kangaroos recently separated from her baby, her little joey, because it was time for it to go off on its own, so she and Chris snuggle to keep warm during the night and she lets him sleep in her pouch.
And eventually he gets back home and he’s a mess and his family’s all like, Where have you been? Are you alright?
And he’s all super casual like, Oh, yes, fine. Truck broke down. Had to spend a night out. You should’ve seen the stars, it was so beautiful. Now, let me tell you about my next big tentpole summer blockbuster film: Thor’s Hammer.
And then we all laugh. We are laughing and joking.
Okay, so that’s the first one.
The next one is…very different.
I had a dream I enlisted in the Navy this morning, by the way. Meaning I had the dream this morning. Not that I enlisted earlier today in the morning. And they put me on a ship out in the ocean. Which makes sense because it’s the Navy. Which I guess makes sense. It’s similar to me being here. On a ship. Out in the great unknown. Enjoying a brand new experience.
Anyway, back to the other project.
It calls for a female lead.
But who?
Who?
It’s a dual role. That’s first. So she’ll be playing two versions of herself. Her normal, everyday, walking around drinking cappuccino while thinking about buying a new vibrator self…. And her alter ego, shall we say. A somewhat darker version of herself.
Here’s an initial shortlist, just off the top of my head.
Anne Hathaway.
Aubrey Plaza.
Margot Robbie.
Or Jaime Pressley.
Any of them would be great. For obvious reasons.
And I’m just thinking aloud here. Not trying to exclude anyone. It’ll probably wind up being someone I totally missed but shouldn’t have because it was so obvious.
So.
Another amazing option would be…Angelina Jolie.
Again, for obvious reasons.
Anyway, let’s move on to the project and the role. And in time the person best suited to the role will become apparent.
It’s a regular New York day. Jeans and tee shirt weather. Warm but not too hot for a really good, far too large, cup of coffee.
This show, presented as always, is brought to you by Bear Claw Coffee. Really good coffee and cool mugs for people with big hands. And now back to the show.
I NEVER would’ve thought being a whore would be so much fun and would feel so good.
Anyway….
It’s a regular New York day. Or maybe a West Hollywood stroke mid-Wilshire stroke Melrose Place kind of day. I never watched that show, by the way. Kind of had my fill from 90210. And Our House. With Wilford Brimley being a dick. Which is why I was shocked and impressed to see what he did in The Firm, which was great. Getting beaten to death by Tom Cruise wielding a briefcase. Classic.
So.
She’s walking down the street, coffee in hand, the perfect bag on her shoulder, no real plans for the day. Probably a big salad at some point. Maybe four or five orgasms. Not sure how yet. She has a Sybian she loves except that it’s so loud. She’s always afraid her neighbors can hear it. So she’s been taking it into the bathroom and using it on the floor while the shower runs. Which makes it hard to relax for two reasons: she’s afraid of wasting water and she’s worried about getting electrocuted. Like, imagine going out that way. Fried through the vagina. Yikes. Could be one epic origin story for a super hero stroke heroin stroke villain.
Fried through the vagina.
It makes my balls hurt just thinking about it.
Imagine a cult of hundreds of people who gather in a compound and on the big day when they’re going to ascend or whatever, commit suicide like idiots, they all get naked, straddle a Sybian that’s wired for sound, if you know what I mean, and then the head dipshit throws a big, overly-dramatic lever like in a movie and everyone’s genitals get suddenly hooked into the grid after a quick call to 9-1-1 to say goodbye.
Imagine being first on the scene and going in there. Seeing that. Imagine the smell.
You would NEVER recover from that.
No wonder cops and firefighters and paramedics and EMTs drink. I would, too.
Anyway, on a lighter note, maybe she DOESN’T die. She just turns into Electric Vagina Woman. Like Jamie Foxx in the Spiderman movie when he falls into a vat of eels.
The weirder the origin story, the better.
But that doesn’t happen. But she’s afraid that it will. Even though she’s kneeling on the bathroom floor, well away from any water. It’s not like she’s got a big long piece of crap dollar store white Chinese extension cord plugged in and draped across the sink, toilet, shower, and decorative water feature on its way to powering the fairly strong electric motor connected to the silicone penis-covered, highly-conductive metal rod inside her vagina.
We’re a little off topic.
On her way to the dildo store – Dildoes R Us! ? – she passes a dispensary. Always one to appreciate a new strain of herb, she goes inside.
It’s like Needful Things in there. Creepy but irresistibly alluring.
She chats with the shopkeeper while she shops, browsing the display, reading descriptions, trying to decide if she wants to float away, maybe do some astral traveling, or if she wants couchlock. She’s not feeling particularly harried or stressed so she opts for the former, via a nice Sativa.
And the shop owner is all, How about this one?
And he she they – it? – pulls a box from out of nowhere. Naturally.
Our hero stroke heroine inspects it: White Widow.
Ooh. Dangerous but sexy. Alluring.
Sold.
She taps her smart watch on the thing and she’s out the door and on her way home, ready to commune with the White Widow.
She gets home, smokes, takes a shower, starts tripping balls while still IN the shower, gets energized in a way she never really has before from weed, and feels an intense, wonderful wave of creativity.
And horniness.
So she turns off the water – because fuck the neighbors; metaphorically – and dries herself.
And jumps on the Sybian. She takes every inch of that thing and wants more. She cranks the dial to maximum.
She gets higher and higher, with that thing deep inside her, until she feels her teeth vibrating. Thoughts of accidental electrocution are snuffed out by a newfound COMPLETE lack of giving a shit. If she gets fried, let them find her there in the bathroom, impaled on a sex toy. There are worse ways to go.
And go she does.
To a galaxy far, far away.
Somewhere over the rainbow. WAY over the rainbow.
And she suddenly finds herself in the mountains. Hiking, apparently. Not in the 127 Hours sort of way. More like the Reese Witherspoon Pacific Trail hiking successfully sort of way. Void of falling into a giant ham machine and getting the worst facial stroke pearl necklace of all time.
And soon she comes upon the opening of a cave.
And even though she – and we – are well aware that caving solo is beyond stupid, she goes in. With thoughts of The Descent in her mind. Albino cannibal cave people are probably already following her scent.
After walking for far too long into an elaborate cave system big enough to drive heavy equipment through, she comes upon a massive opening, the center of the cave, the place she was obviously meant to find.
And it’s full of spider webs.
It’s a jungle of webs. Giant strands big enough for her to walk on. And they’re everywhere.
She doesn’t want to be cocooned and have her blood sucked out like Elijah Wood in Lord of the Rings.
What’s he doing these days?
She continues walking, deeper and deeper into the great cavern.
She soon finds herself on a bridge. She looks down. She sees bones. A lot of bones. Human or animal? Best not to think about that. Those round things down there are definitely just big mushrooms.
But she continues walking.
And soon she feels a light breeze, a gentle wind, as it blows through the cavern, touching her skin like an invisible caress.
Some of the smaller curtains of webs flutter.
She is not alone.
She hears a chittering. A sound she’s never heard before.
But it makes her think immediately of spiders.
WHO’S THERE?! a voice calls out.
She whirls around, searching for whomever said that. The voice is familiar. But gravelly and raspy and…
Big.
WHO ARE YOU?!
It…it’s me, she calls out. Her voice sounds pathetic and small to her ears, lost in the vast womb of this cavern.
This…nest.
WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?! as a giant spider falls from the sky and lands in front of her, dwarfing her completely.
A woman…with the body of a spider.
A spider…with the body of a woman. A nude woman with long hair and eyes that burn and shine and glow like laser light, even though she’s a spider creature and is probably ancient and has no idea what a laser is.
The spiderwoman stroke womanspider approaches, coming closer…and closer…and closer.
Until she is close enough to strike. To reach out and grab her, seizing her with 3 or maybe 4 over her 8 long, spindly, oogie-looking but still somehow sexy legs, and wrapping her in unbreakable white silk pulled out of her butt gland.
But she doesn’t strike. She says, Don’t you knock? What the fuck? I was in the bathroom, TRYING to, ahem, take a shower, if you don’t mind. Who are you and what are you doing in my house?
And our heroine is like, Uh, um, uh, derrrr….
And the great spider queen comes closer…and closer…and closer.
Until they’re face to face.
And they look at one another. Face to face. Eye to eye. Into each other’s souls.
They’re the same.
The spider queen is naked from the waist up and her hair could use some attention. But her boobs look amazing and even though her lower body is a giant freakin SPIDER, she’s super hot.
And dudes everywhere will want to do stuff with her when they see this movie. Women, too. Probably most people will. People on all parts of the spectrum.
Because our hero and the spider are one and the same.
Literally.
It’s the same actor. Playing opposite herself.
Which is why casting is so important.
Who can play both the roles?
Who is willing to use cannabis, get high as fuck, climb onto a Sybian, and journey to see the White Widow in her den?
To visit with her over and over?
To get very nearly lost…
…In the Den of the White Widow.
Would you guys like to see that? Would you watch that? Would you put $100 million into that? Would you go to the theater to see it or only streaming?
I have no idea what happens after that, by the way.
Maybe the White Widow spider queen helps her and gives her advice and they become girlfriends and they hang out all the time and stuff. And maybe the White Widow begins to manifest in her real life, in quote unquote irl. I-R-L. In. Real. Life.
In good ways, at first. But eventually in ways that are perhaps somewhat…controversial?
And people who know her start to get all kinda weird or whatever, as she becomes more…assertive.
And some of them don’t like it. And some of them even start talking shit. And some of them drop her. Ghost her. Et cetera.
Which is what happens when you become your true self and begin heeding your higher calling, which takes you to a place where everyone’s everyday mundane bullshit no longer entraps you. They’re not able to entice you into their web. Their web of drama. Self-defeatism. Pathology derived from and still controlled by unresolved past trauma.
And astute viewers will see the irony.
She goes into the Den of the White Widow, a LITERAL spider who can LITERALLY spin webs and who could LITERALLY – the very definition of literally – ensnare her in her web.
And our hero’s so-called friends are the ones actually doing it and getting pissed off when their guile is no longer effective.
Funny how that works.
And thus begins the journey of self discovery.
Have you guys heard about people nowadays who don’t like going to the movies because the screen is too big and it freaks them out and they don’t like it? So they only want to watch stuff on the TV at home, or the laptop or the tablet, or their phone.
That’s crazy. To me, that seems nuts. I can understand but I also disagree big time. A big screen is part of the experience. In a way a smaller screen simply cannot give you. You see things on a movie screen that you don’t, won’t, and probably can’t see on your phone. I’ve watched things on my phone or laptop and then watched them again on a big screen and had a different experience.
The point, I think, is to get over it. Go to the movies. Learn to enjoy it. Through voluntary exposure. And, over time, you’ll come to love it. You won’t understand how you used to hate it and how you used to prefer watching stuff at home. Because except for the insane prices and the possibility of there being rowdy assholes who ruin the movie, except for those two formidable factors, going to the movies is superior in every way. Even if you have your own home theater. You’re still missing the community aspect of the experience. Of being out in the world. With people. Your fellow Man. Doing something together. Sharing an experience. Such that we’re all knitted together.
I think that’s part of the problem back on Earth today. Everyone is compartmentalizing and tribalizing and identity politicking and it’s destroying Humanity.
And by the way, if you’re posting fake pics of UFO’s online, make sure you give them the appropriate attribution. In other words, tell everyone what it is and say that you’ve heard various descriptions of UFO’s and so you made this because you wanted to see if anyone has ever seen one like this.
That’s much better than being a big fat liar liar pants on fire asshole fucking douchebag trying to fool everyone for the sake of clicks. Sullying the very real, very profound notion of UFO’s and whether or not Humans are alone in the Universe. Because, as Arthur C. Clarke, the famous novelist, once said: Either we’re alone in the Universe or we’re not; either possibility is terrifying.
Also, if you’re married and you guys are having sex maybe once a month, that’s normal. In my opinion. I think twice a week is a lie. An outright lie. That we all tell in order to maintain appearances instead of being honest and speaking the truth and getting to the bottom of why you guys aren’t doing it.
You used to do it. Right?
What changed?
What do you think about when you think about him or her?
Are you perhaps a bit angry or resentful or sad?
Those are three of the most common confusing and shameful emotions we feel when we face challenges in life that we go through with our partner. Particularly when things get tense. Tempers flare. We feel as though we’re not being heard. So we eventually start to pull away. We stop being playful. We stop being happy around them. Or we notice they’ve stopped being happy around us. All of our interactions are very automatic and often a bit tense. Because one of you is cranky. You’re tired. What kind of tired varies. It might be merely sleep deprivation. In which case, hooray! That’s an easy fix. And it means that there’s not even a problem. You’re just so freakin tired that getting home and taking off your clothes and taking a shower and putting on something comfortable and getting into bed to sleep is all you can think about.
A strong desire to sleep is appropriate.
Have we talked about this? It seems like we have.
Or perhaps we will in the future. So this is the deja we’re going to vous later. When we get deja vous in like a year from now, it’ll be because of this. This moment.
And if it’s not merely a strong and appropriate desire to sleep, talk it out. Make a time when you can be alone together with no distractions. And talk it out. And listen to each other as a friend. Not as a competitor. As a friend. A close friend. Their closest friend. And they are yours. You guys are supposed to know everything about each other. Right? So when did you guys stop communicating?
It was probably a slow process that happened over time and across the span of many discussions, disagreements, and flat-out fights. Screaming matches. Times when it just keeps getting worse every minute with every sentence that is spoken. And every time you think, I can’t believe what I’m hearing and this is serious bullshit and this is perhaps the most angry and hurt and upset I have ever been with this person and it can’t possibly get any worse.
And then it does.
It gets worse.
It does.
And now you’re having thoughts of airfare and luggage and destinations and do you pack first and just drive to the airport and book a flight when you get there? Or should you go to your laptop and book it first and then pack and then go to the airport?
You don’t actually do either of those things. And later you feel bad for having thought them.
Because you’re still there. Still together.
But now there’s a crack in the Faberge egg of your heart. Of your soul. There’s permanent damage.
The trick is not to let that poison the rest of you.
Because if you let that happen, if you let yourself put on the Victim uniform, you’ll never take it off. Because Love is allergic to that Victim uniform. The two are not compatible. And Love will stay away. And then you’ll be left with one thought: Leave.
And you will.
Quick or slow, we don’t know.
Quick is moving out and finding an attorney that day and filing the next day. That’s quick.
Slow is staying and faking it and dying of cancer seven years later. Whereas if you’d left, you could’ve gotten a job on a cruise ship and gotten paid to sail around the world having the best time and the best sex of your life.
But instead you’re going to do chemo three and a half times and be literally miserable on the rollercoaster of misery.
By the way, have you guys heard about Misery?
Holy fuck.
It’s a new ride that Disney is building. Or planning to build. The biggest, fastest, most ambitious, most expensive theme park attraction ever conceived. Everyone says they’re batshit for even thinking of it, let alone actually building it. But word is that they’re going ahead with it. They have the land in Florida. They have sufficient space. I guess there’s still some deliberation as to which park to add it to. There’s talk of building an entirely new park. The others are so crowded, especially Magic Kingdom. On a typical Summer Saturday, you can barely walk there. It’s like that Star Trek episode where there are so many people that they’re all bumping into one another constantly. So bad is the overcrowding on the planet Kirk and his crew encounter.
By the way, you can see where the minds of the 60s and 70s and 80s were at the time, terrified of overpopulation. Which is wild considering the death and obliteration of World War Two were a mere fifteen or so years in the past. Much of Europe and Japan were still in ruins.
And they went so hard on the population control that they overcorrected and now a crash is coming. Oops.
Say Byebye to Globalism. And the low-priced, readily-available goods everyone has gotten so accustomed to having at their fingertips. It’s gonna go back to being like it was in the 80s. When stuff was hard to get. There was less choice.
Anyway.
Does the new ride sound fun?
Would you ride it?
Some people will ride anything.
Other people won’t ride anything.
I’m somewhere in the middle. I like a good coaster but typically avoid things that spin. And simulators. I can’t do simulators. Ten seconds into the Minions ride at Universal Studios in California, I was sick. So I had to sit there with my eyes closed until the ride was over and everyone got up and filed out to the right, to make way for the new batch of riders filing in from the left. And I was nauseous the rest of the day. It ruins me. It absolutely ruins me.
Nevertheless.
Full disclosure, I have not decided if I’ll ride it. And I’m not totally sure I want to. I mean, I definitely want to. But I don’t know if I’ll ever get the chance. And if I do, I won’t know if I’m going to actually ride it until I’m standing there looking up at it.
It’s the world’s wildest maglev coaster. It’s not even a coaster. It’s more like a bobsled run. In a little ride vehicle with up to five other people. Three rows of two. And it gets up to three hundred miles per hour in the straights. And it pulls up to eight Gee’s in the turns. It measures your blood pressure and goes faster or slower depending on how well you’re taking the Gee’s and how close you are to passing out. So it’s an adaptive real-time thrill attraction. And it’s big. Because it lasts up to five minutes. If you pass out or start to, it’ll slow down and stop. But if you’re enjoying it, it will go as fast as possible for as long as possible.
The ride is in support of their new movie Misery, by the way.
Have you heard of it? Everyone is talking about it. It’s not out yet. But it will be. There’s already much to-do about the title. Some people like it while others think they should change it to something happier. Something more attractive, given that it’s going to cost a few billion and is going to be there for a hundred years or more. Hopefully.
Speaking of hopefully, have you watched Black Butterfly?
Imagine this: You’re President of the United States and one afternoon you’re in the White House dining room enjoying a cup of coffee and a light snack while you read your daily afternoon briefing and all of a sudden all Hell breaks loose with people running into the dining room to tell you that North Korea has launched a nuclear ICBM and it’s on its way to DC and it’ll impact in 26 minutes and you need to get to the bunker and approve the counter-strike, and you have six minutes to do it, what would you do?
Approve the counter-strike as planned? Because that is the current policy. Launch on detection. As soon as the satellites see a nuclear-tipped ICBM blast off and the trajectory is tracked to a likely target, the US launches its own ICBM’s to wipe out whomever launched the incoming missile.
That’s the standard procedure. Deterrence. No one launches because they know — they know – it’ll lead to their own death and the destruction of everything around them.
If they don’t care and they actually want to die, as some people do, this deterrence is nothing, it doesn’t exist for them. So those crazy fucks must never be allowed to have such a weapon.
But here’s the thing: You, as POTUS, could say to stand down. You could choose not to launch. To take one for the team. Rather than scorching the Earth and killing almost everyone on it.
Would that be an act of true benevolence?
The impulse, obviously, is to counter-strike and kill whoever is trying to kill you. Trying to kill us. And there’s logic in that. I get it.
But what if you didn’t escalate? Would that be better for the world? Better for everyone on it? Better for the Earth itself? Because nuclear winter harms everyone.
Imagine if there was no counter-attack. Much of D.C. and everything around it is gone.
Which is so heinous and shocking and horrifying that of course you counter-strike with everything you’ve got because fuck whoever did this.
Or: You don’t. You don’t make a bad situation worse. Imagine it’s 50 years later. The event is over. The offending parties were dealt with. Decisively. D.C. is largely cleaned up and rebuilt. The worst tragedy in human history. Worse than Pearl Harbor and Nine Eleven combined times ten. Not to minimize either of those things, of course; of course; but simply as an objective scientific measurement of scope, of scale, of size, of severity, of how bad it was, the D.C. strike dwarfs them and everything else. Far worse than Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by the way. Far worse.
So much so that the bloodlust for revenge still runs deep.
Afterwards, the whole world condemned North Korea and the leadership was all arrested and hanged and South Korea took over North Korea and now it’s all simply Korea. Administered by the United States, of course.
And all nuclear weapons were dismantled.
If there can be a silver lining, that’s it.
Because everyone saw, with their own eyes, what those things do. Seeing a test of a nuclear weapon out over the ocean from miles away is one thing. You can watch the Castle Bravo test on YouTube right now if you want to. It’s terrifying, by the way, and you should probably watch it if you’ve never seen it. Everyone on Earth should watch that video. The scariest part is that when it goes off, you see this massive orange fireball and you think, Dear God. Because it’s so big and obviously powerful. But that’s only the beginning. That’s the blast that fuels the actual blast. Because then the fireball gets bigger. And brighter.
I wonder if you can feel the heat.
I once drove late at night from Hollywood to Las Vegas by myself to go visit a friend. And I was out near Barstow someplace, in the middle of nowhere, when I drove past a car fire. Two people were standing on the side of the road watching their Jeep Grand Cherokee burn. It was fully engulfed. Like a classic car fire like you would imagine or would see in a movie. And all the other traffic was still flowing, still driving, me included. We were all moving to the left lane, the fast lane, because the fire was on the right shoulder. The police weren’t even there yet. No fire trucks or anything. So over the course of about 30 seconds as I suddenly realized everyone was getting into the left lane and I got that little adrenaline rush, I quickly saw why. The car fire. And I was thinking, Oh, shit, what’s happening, is this safe, is anyone hurt, is it okay to keep driving, what should we all be doing, should we all have stopped already, oh man it’s getting close, it’s right there, oh my god I’m driving right past it, wow it’s so bright, it’s so, so bright, and oh my God it’s hot.
That was perhaps the thing that struck me most. Literally. After I saw the two people standing a safe distance away, watching their poor car burn to a crisp, I felt the heat. Again, literally. Even from across two lanes of asphalt plus the shoulder, I felt it. The heat came into my car, my little convertible, and warmed my face. It was startling how hot it was. And how bright it was.
And then I was past it. For me, it was over.
For those people, I imagine they had to call a tow truck and the fire department and the California Highway Patrol and they had to get a ride to somewhere. Back to where they came from? Were they driving from Ell Ay like me? Or were they going home to their place in Vegas? Or somewhere else entirely? I can’t know.
The point is that that intense amount of heat I felt on my face was from one little car fire.
Imagine Castle Bravo, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated by the United States. Fifteen megatons.
Megatons.
Fifteen thousand tons.
The atomic bombs dropped on Japan were measured merely in kilotons. Think about the difference between eight kilobytes of RAM versus eight megabytes of RAM. Big difference, huh?
The Hiroshima bomb, named Little Boy, was 15 kilotons. The blast killed about eighty thousand people. About another hundred thousand died over the next six months from radiation poisoning.
The Nagasaki bomb, named Fat Man, was 21 kilotons. It exploded in the sky over Nagasaki. About 40,000 people died almost instantly.
That’s the one saving grace for me, by the way. If this shit ever goes down en masse, I hope I go quickly. A white blast of light and heat in a thousandth of a second. One second I’m fine and the next second I’m vaporized, having never had time to even understand what was happening.
Anyway, Castle Bravo was viewed from 30 miles away and the people there said it felt like a blow torch was applied to their bodies. It was that hot.
Like I said, it’s so big and so powerful that it uses a nuclear blast to trigger the actual bomb. This trigger is called the Primary Stage. The Fission Trigger. For Castle Bravo it was never publicly stated but it’s believed to have been about the same size as Fat Man, or about 15 kilotons. This then triggered the Secondary Stage, the Fusion Reaction that was the actual bomb. The Primary Stage had to be big enough to compress and heat the secondary stage, which contained the fusion fuel, the lithium deuteride. Which was so big that it knocked people over 30 miles away and almost knocked the observation aircraft out of the sky. And made them feel like a blowtorch was being pointed at them.
And the fireball keeps going up and up and up. And then the big white ring appears in the sky. Freaky.
So when it happens above Washington, D.C., it’s even worse.
Anyway, the point is this: How would the world view America if she didn’t retaliate? How would she view herself?
This is the plot of Black Butterfly. It cuts back and forth between the history, the development, the tests, each test getting bigger and more powerful and more terrifying, and the current present moment with the reaction as the ICBM is approaching DC.
And on that note, that’s our show.
Thank you for coming and goodnight.
Remember to tip your waitress.
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