As long as the virus isn’t transmissible through ingestion, bring on Soylent Green!
First dream of the year, at least that I can recall, was about a missing girl whose suitors seemed to care less about her mental health and whereabouts than their own poor experiences with her: David Barreiro complained about being led on, and another character I felt was based upon the Terry Silver baddie in the latest season of Cobra Kai (whose six hours or so I binged in half that time by skipping the through the new kid’s subplot) continued to pursue revenge wearing special clue-gathering spectacles. Me, I was looking for a Lego car I had left in her place, which I eventually did inside a box or coat pocket; it wasn’t a set piece but built with standard gray and clear bricks and carried some sentimental significance.
In the other, I had been married previously, twice in fact, and never formalized our divorces, though my last wife was decent enough not to make it a big deal.
My habit of reaching for the phone upon waking and checking my latest messages, even with nothing more to them than the daily spam that’s swiped to the trash, seems to be affecting my recall of any richer narrative from the streaming service of my subconscious, but because there must be something to the lingering remnants, please indulge me tracking them here:
I was from the future, and as in that Bradbury story “A Sound of Thunder”, time travelers like me and former co-worker Karina had to keep to a path of shiny stones on the grounds of a party held at a fancy home in the country
A small white mouse presented itself as a pest, and as all I had was a plastic knife, I tried futilely stabbing it, then pressing it down with the blade, which only resulted in its body stretching unnaturally as it escaped, though each time it successfully did so, the poor thing appeared to be growing weaker
A previously unknown actor at a nearby table in the restaurant had just landed the role of Batman and we were congratulating him, recommending he prepare to be mobbed outside. Our group had to make do with Mr. Robot Rami Malek who himself had been cast in a smaller production as Nightwing
You would certainly hope it was the voice actor (who gives off a strong King vibe) or Pérez’s almost-as-old version revisited in the recent con episode, because I had the glorious girth from a more virile age underneath
Squid Game! The Among Us part of it, however, not the Fall Guys—I was dressed in the green track suit but wandering the “back end” and avoiding detection by the guards with some slick moves like waiting before stepping out of the elevator; in my arms was a child, and though I was able to get the family back together, the game masters blew up our house but I would survive by having been standing in the door frame and keep up the fight
The wife and son were in an SUV but it was a stick and she kept sliding back
A Flex Mentallo-looking villain with electrical superpowers was beset by a more than a dozen regular people with lesser ones, including Rick Moranis, and the sheer number of little shocks had him on the run; even his last-resort Zangief spinning fists held them at bay only because the low-budget special effect required everyone else to stay still while he was sped up
Fell asleep on the couch in front of the TV, which became a newer monitor mounted higher up and repeating a short speech by a topless redhead, but after so many plays 老婆 asked me to turn it off without noticing her, and stopping that one switched to another video with her cosplaying as Red Sonja
Woke up to news about someone dressed as the Joker stabbing passengers on a Tokyo subway, then dreamt about Rashida Jones as a female version of the character, with plenty of charisma, and a first-person perspective from a squad of armed law-enforcement agents descending upon her from the air
We were on our way out of a parking garage and the wife goes first, sliding down a passage to the lower levels, but lands on the concrete noticeably uncomfortably before getting up and continuing, while I was held up above by columns of sinewy shapes and a growing crowd of men, one of them a former co-worker I lost contact with and didn’t have time to catch up, though another fellow was causing trouble and prompted a gay slur
My father was driving us in the car and insisted we could make the tight corner down the stairs, but I doubted it and worried about getting stuck
Triggering my fear of heights as it did, I was fortunate enough to find myself already at the top of series of comically tall escalators and told Angie that we were at the highest point inside the vast marble-lined artificial cavern, though I could see others to the side taking people even further upward
Juan, who helped clean up the office and did odd jobs in the warehouse, retrieved my spiral notebook, which had at least one page of handwritten passwords, and couldn’t tell me specifically where he found it, despite my attempt to explain the security risk (and maybe offload some of it on him); meanwhile, Amit, who led IT at a later employer, asked me to assist him with a login issue unbecoming of his position, though jeopardizing all our company data with the janitor likewise reflected poorly on my worthiness
It’s been a while since I had this dream, and the details might as well be on the dust accelerating my disintegration, but I had to get rid of the Stargate episode I kept bookmarked because it reminded me of the clever workaround of new portal technology that allowed travelers to go to and fro their destinations even with the requirement that someone on the other side enter at the same time. (It’s probably the introduction of the Mario-themed warp pipe to Animal Crossing that triggered this one, or the most recent use of the long-running idea that we’ll only get across the vast distances of space with tickets to the subway from our parents—though the Expanse has been great, especially the Star Blazers-like naval battles.) Dream logic logic being what it is, however, I’m no longer able to discern challenge nor solution; maybe it was finding a different volunteer back home to allow the return trip? Carter sure was a quicker thinker.
It’s good enough to stand on its own, even for viewers like me who aren’t necessarily subject to the period nostalgia (I did wear the fuck out of those pants in high school), but I can imagine the frustration if I were by these licensing blackouts imposed on Netflix. The measures are more reminiscent of “White Christmas”, aren’t they, but my mind went first, as it is prone more so than ever nowadays, to my favorite Black Mirror, which does take me back—and forward—how fulfilling would the soundtrack at San Junipero be without Amazon’s reach, or if the arcade required subscription to multiple gaming services?
Seems it’s been five years since I last revisited this staple of my youth (and I find myself more curious about my circumstances when I did than what I left of them; hence the new tag); maybe by measuring the intervals I can determine the rate of my regression, though in this case the catalyst was the Shout! Factory channel on Twitch, which airs two episodes of the program weekday afternoons to all of a dozen viewers. It’s hard to stay focused on a traditional broadcast, complete with commercial breaks for their catalogue, when the Animal Farm that’s America is being addressed by other streamers, and there’s not even anyone in the chat. Wanting to see Sarah Douglas naked again, I opened Season 2 and found a story I couldn’t remember but seemed pieced together from various Star Treks. Title coincides with the final season of the satisfying Dark series on Netflix, who’s sure to remake it themselves. Small talk from Maya while resisting the urge to mate with Koenig on her study of “Comparative Universal Theology” is reminiscent of Serling or Seuss: “An interesting thing, we [Psychons] managed to find our God, creator of this universe, to find that He had a God, who created a bigger one.”
I didn’t notice it as a kid, but boy, is that shift in tone for the second season ever so noticeable. The gloominess of their predicament is gone, and they seem to all but forget about the day’s events after that last commercial break before the end credits—to bring myself up to current events (because of that IP issue at home), like DC movies “v” Marvel’s. That refreshed theme reminds me a lot of recent music from the BBC, and make no mistake about it, the Alphans aren’t pussies anymore, even if their weapons work on aliens only 5% of the time.
Thursday night we “took advantage” of Disneyland’s failure to scan our third and last ticket use, so we went in for another miserable wonderful few hours, most of them spent in line for annual passes for the family fan and her companion; it was finally our turn for the next window, and a Black fellow about a foot taller than me whose name tag read ERIN, Grand Marshall, demonstrated a glaring breach of queue etiquette by pulling us to continue waiting at newly-opened kiosks on the other side, behind at least four more groups of people. I held myself back from going Larry David on him for fear of getting us banned from the park for life, at least until our transaction was settled, but by then they stopped accepting customers, and I just wanted out of there.
The next night when the boy got the first of what’s sure to be a lifetime of stitches, his ER doctor was the almost too-good-to-be-true-sounding Erin Prince, M.D. And so conscious was I of this coincidence going into my slumber Sunday, I dreamed of being reunited with old 大姐 Ellen (close enough) Liao.
My sad long weekend came to a close with Yahoo! Screen’s Other Space, which I can’t tell is meant to be centered around the MST3K reunion or Milana Vayntrub’s tight uniform, but either way isn’t sustaining the programming once Community’s done, not with jokes like this, where the robot doesn’t get Karen’s name right:
Season’s over as fast as Sherlock’s. At one point I felt the parallels with Lost, too, but the arc’s looking less curved as the gang moved on at the end. These motley castaways may seem the more likely, but maybe six episodes weren’t enough to make them promising. Then again, had JJ been in charge, the CDC doc might’ve been on the verge of a cure (which doesn’t strike me as too great a challenge for a facility equipped with a Tony Stark-like computer), but killed by one-handed Merle, whose ravenous rampage would only be stopped by the surprise return of the father-and-son team from the beginning.
Hulu has them all, for free. Stupid Philistines, I was once willing to pay for them in laserdisc boxsets!
Wait long enough and everything will eventually be scanned or screencapped. And this from the same network the TV happened to be left on the digital tuner when I switched over from an increasingly pointless late-night EXP session. The episode was actually “Don’t Open Till Doomsday”, one before the ludicrous bee fantasy, but the teaser was sufficient to jog my memory of many an early morning spent in the colorless glow of the romance in them all. Telling of some historical perspective that I will always rate “The Man Who Was Never Born”, for example, over my own generation’s beloved Terminators (and Harlan Ellison claimed his stories had been ripped off), and found nothing yet—though alternate realities comes close—to get over the escapism of the “Fun and Games” concept.
While I’m not a big fan of the artist’s eye, I won’t deny the artistry. I figure it’s only a matter of time before computers can do this in real time to beautify video chatters, but what if someday the processing could be overlaid directly onto our visual cortices? It’d be Shallow Hal—9000! People could let themselves become those Wall-e fatties or worse, as long as everyone was in on it.
It’s good enough to stand on its own, even for viewers like me who aren’t necessarily subject to the period nostalgia (I did wear the fuck out of 
Seems 
