My Life With the Easter Bunny

It may seem funny to us now, but I don't blame kids for being scared of the Easter Bunny. I still remember the first time I saw him. I and my brother were all excited about his coming. Our parents had set us up, tried to explain whole thing. We sat at the kitchen table. Then this giant white shape lurched out of darkness and thumped on the window. It was huge. With the ears it was bigger than any adult. Its eyes were enormous. I screamed and ran from the table.

When it was explained to me, I didn't like it any better. Why did the Easter Bunny have to come here? The next Easter, I complained and whined. I cried. I didn't want the Easter Bunny to come visit. Not here. Not in my home where I felt safe. My father looked quite disgusted. He became angry. My mom, filling her role, gave up trying to explain and took pity on me. Maybe not this year? she asked, looking at my father. My father looked away. I continued to cry. I cried until my mom promised to call the Easter Bunny and tell him not to come. This she did while stroking my head. It's okay, honey, she said. He's not coming. But I don't want him to come, ever, I stated. I knew that now the Easter Bunny knew where we were.

The next Easter was something my parents just did with my brother. It was decided I was not mature enough. I was just supposed to wait in my room until it was all over. I liked my room just fine because I had my Peanuts books and stuffed buddies, but it felt different, heated, stale, knowing that something was going on outside and I that I couldn't, shouldn't look or leave. Just going to the bathroom scared me as I was afraid I would run into my parents or, I don't know, something.

After it was all over, my parents did their concerted paternal best at nurturing me, by heaping shame and not at all veiled aspersions on me throughout dinner. My brother shone by the praise of his performance, but, to his credit, seemed a little embarrassed for me once he had gotten his digs in. There was no reason not to hate Easter.

School was not much better. During the egg roll I kept to the shallow end of the action, applying the schoolyard principle I had discovered and learned at dodgeball that seemed to work universally well for life: if you kept to the sides and acted invisible, you were safe a little longer than the idiots who ran up front directly into the line of fire.

The Easter egg hunt was the worst. Here you were outdoors, highly exposed. Easter eggs and god knows what other deadly traps were underfoot. Sometimes there were even dogs.

Somehow, I survived. Understandably, I hated Easter and the Easter Bunny.

Somewhere down the line, it was decided that I should have a go again. More likely, it was now established that introducing me to the Easter Bunny was good for a rise. So at the mall we went to his little hut. At this age I was proud enough to be goaded into not objecting.

The Easter Bunny had two assistants, older girls, who were rather skankily clad from Hot Topic. Their ghoulish makeup could not quite conceal that they were in the seventh grade. The blonde one with stringy hair seemed to sense my apprehension and gave me a look of concern. She held me close as though to admit we were all a little scared of the Easter Bunny. She smelled of Parliaments, pot, febreeze and Mike's hard lemonade. The way she held my hand was kind and genuine. Her fatter friend just snorted and rubbed her press on tattoos.

Eventually the moment could be delayed no longer. The Easter Bunny gestured for me.

I don't know who or what was in the suit, but it stank. He pulled me on to his knee and handled me like I was a ham. His other hand grappled my friend immodestly. Later, in college, I came to know what that smell was well. It was Jim Beam, Old Gold and days old cum. His breath echoed inside the hollow bunny head. It was wheezy and phlegmy like a flooded chainsaw. He asked the usual questions. I gave guarded answers. At the end of our interview he told me he was coming to our house. And: I'm going to put my eggs in you.

This was enough for me. The fiend had to be stopped.

I hatched a plan with my friends. I kept an egg from my lunch and sealed it inside a juice bottle mixed with water and juice. We buried it in the warm earth beneath one of the classrooms. It was an improvised bio-weapon. It would be ripe by Easter.

I don't recall if we had settled on a mode of delivery. Unfortunately, a rival gang of kids got wind of it, dug out the bottle prematurely and tried to use it on us. They thought that the weapon was intended for them and therefore they were justified in acting preemptively to avert terror. What I could not explain in the principal's office in my slightly stained clothing was the true purpose of the project and my sadness and apprehension that once again, this year, we stood naked and defenseless against a common foe.

Instead, the Easter Bunny came and went as usual, popping out of black Lincoln Continental in a hockey mask, distributing painted eggs and treats and brochures about home invasion.

I hated everything about Easter. I hated the baby chicks that some people bought and what they did to them. I know it was all symbolic, but it made me sick.

I never liked or understood the stop motion holiday specials where the Easter Bunny came to town, made kids strip and dance and then turned them inside out.

The school psychiatrist lead to a regular psychiatrist and liked her just fine. I didn't mind talking about myself. What bothered me was that thing coming into our home. Now, in addition to little pastel candies and chocolates, I had itsy little pills to eat every Easter.

My parents worried about my propensity to get up in the dead of night and walk around the house. It was really nothing to worry about. I wasn't sleepwalking. I was a light sleeper and it was good just to have a quick check on things and make sure the house was secure. This habit really paid off one night.

I didn't hear anything when I awoke. As usual, I walked around the living room, the familiar furniture still having the blurry patina of a dream. Perhaps I would sneak in some television. I was not sure at first what I was hearing, or if there was anything to hear. It was just around the edge of my ear, like a buzz that was there and not there. It could have well have been just my sleepy head. I stared at the sliding glass doors. They were unlocked. The sound bounced off them to my ears. Moaning. A woman moaning. It was my mother.

I edged towards my parents room. The horrible sounds grew louder. I could call the police, but it would be too late. I got a cleaver from the kitchen, the kind my father used to cut up whole chickens.

When I opened the door, it was him. And it wasn't even Easter, not yet.

I was just a little kid, but I wasn't stupid. I knew I only had one chance to save my mom. I had seen horror movies and Easter specials. I went for the neck.

The bunny head turned and screamed my name.

My father made it as far as the hall before collapsing. The suit front was soaked with blood. My mother screamed and screamed. I ran over to see if I could help him. My father's hand was at his neck, but I had cut good. He could barely speak. What he said was: I'm proud of you, son.

It was then I understood the true meaning of Easter and the Easter Bunny.

I'm a father now. Now it's me who pulls on the rabbit skin and stands outside the window with the little baskets full of eggs and chocolates, fake grass and broken glass.

They have to learn. To grow up. The world is terrifying and horrible, but they don't have to just take it. This is the gift we give our children, the only way we know how to protect them.

The Brain Remembers and the Heart Lies

I don't like to indulge in nostalgia because it tends to confirm the hypothesis that the present is the only form of life possible and that our memories are projections, screen memories.

Bear with me, however.

I recall as a child that the much anticipated Saturday evening television was preceded by an interminable overture that my parents enjoyed -perhaps yours too, for that is what I am trying to determine.

The show, as I recall it, was old-fashioned and nostalgic -even for my parents. Its songs seem to originate in some infinite pastel colored past, some deep racial memory of superannuated sing-a-longs, past a screen of time made from the flux of popping champagne bubbles and soft music. Youthful faces of Mormon uniformity in matching outfits sang slowly in all-too perfect harmony at a pace that slipped behind dirges and foghorns, pleasant, beaming ditties that could be sung through a mouthful of teeth without ever missing a smile or taking a breath. The show itself was named after its gently accented and genteel host. 

I mean, of course, The Singing Brain.

The mature series never started with the Singing Brain himself; he mainly introduced the acts. By then people had gotten comfortable with his appearance in his tank (as comfortable as they were going to be, anyway) and the careful orchestration and skillful direction of the show created the willful illusion that the brain could see and hear, engage in playful banter and tender duets.

ʼ"Well, if you're so smart, you tell me which came firs!"

In reality, of course, the brain was wholly isolated, deprived of any sensory input, its seemingly flawless ability to integrate, interact and intermesh with the external world being explained wholly by the principle of epiphenomenalism.

The other challenge the show repeatedly faced, according to Wikipedia, was lighting the brain, as directors struggled with numerous unique problems involving the albedo of the tank, the need for a clear focus on the camera subject without making the dinner time audience nauseous and the ever-present potential risk of damaging the brain's tissues by overheating.

Nonetheless, every show ended as its premiere had, with the brain singing one its signature solos, a strange song, to be sure, plangent and affecting, a singularly original composition of a mind entirely freed and quarantined from all stimulus and feedback, entirely a priori and alienated -and yet human, all-too human.

Toward the end of his solo he would be joined by his old chorus, in the full dress uniforms of their departments and lab coats. I always wondered if the scientists and generals who has created the brain enjoyed their brief moment on the stage. They never appeared in any other segment. I like to think they kept on out of sense of obligation to their lonely creation. Though the stage was ringed by singing siblings in identical golden curls, it was Lockheed Martin and the technical staff at Groom Lake who were the brain's only true remaining family.

It was always hard to predict when this final solo of the brain would end, because of its musically (and mathematically) unfathomable structure. Perhaps this regular uncertainty helped explain why the show seemed to go on forever -the producers had to accommodate the brain's indeterminate number and cut the show accordingly. Above all, they had to bracket the end of the show with a prerecorded farewell, rather than the violent pleas for death that the brain ended all his performances with.

Of course, everyone knew that the brain wanted to die and begged for the release of death almost constantly -especially people in the industry. It was an open secret among professionals on Ventura Boulevard. It even made the air on the show a few times: oh, grandpa, the girls would laugh.

By the time of The Far Out Brain Show, however, the brain had stopped singing, per se. Its contribution now consisted of scripted artificial dialogue, that it often flubbed, and long, bizarre stream of consciousness monologues whose appearance had prompted the retooling of the show. Eventually the show was basically just these opaque and inscrutable soliloquies that sounded like Samuel Beckett characters arguing about Whitehead while reading lottery numbers and directing air traffic accompanied by freaked out acid rock on a stage where the brain seemed to float through the groovy oil projections with the go-go dancers.

It was hard to follow, even for the turned-on set, as the brain would simply blurt out NUMBERS ARE REAL ENTITIES; PEOPLE ARE NOT during a “Mother Goose” skit (copied from The Goodies) with Ken Berry and the cast would basically just try and rap along: that's heavy, man. Soylent Green is people, too.

People (real or not, soylent or not) began to wonder why the show was still on the air; my parents, anyway, stopped watching. The loyal viewers of the show, however, remained: cognitive and mathematical scientists, radical psychiatrists and, for reasons still unclear, members of the intelligence and diplomatic communities.

The singing brain's performances, however, continued to decline and rumors of organic damage or drug abuse began to circulate. People said the brain had difficulty remembering people's names and appeared “bloated and disheveled.” 

A reclusive and paranoid brain in a dingy tank

Perhaps this was to be expected: it was, after all, the longest continually publicly performing brain on public record. The Soviets supposedly had a “harmonizing cortex,” but it shrunk and died and never performed publicly.

When a suddenly youthful and invigorated Singing Brain returned to the stage with catchy tunes and ribald banter, the brain's longterm fans sensed fraud. Indeed, Fake Brain had none of the genius or otherworldly charm and talent of the original, being hired largely for its looks.

The photo that broke the hoax. Note the different part in the central sulcus.

Yet for those who knew him, the Singing Brain had earned its rest and were glad for it when it moved out to New Mexico. The albums it eventually produced there are now widely hailed as prefiguring much of ambient and low liminal post-human post-music today and there is a great deal of interest in the scientific and military communities for these and other lost masterpieces. There is hope that a complete catalog might be reconstructed, but its surviving wife and son have been reticent about releasing any further “brain music.”

To his credit, Fake Brain continues to this day to perform a loyal, if derivative act at the Sahara. It is, however, an imitation done in the sincerest flattery and as a true art. As Fake Brain writes in his memoirs, I Am Not The Singing Brain, there's something about the Singing Brain's music that “people with bodies will never fully understand.”

The Grapes of Mars

Unable and powerless to circumvent his miseries, daunted, discouraged and unable to face reality, in short, feeling depressed, he manually checked his medprinter for updates and patches. There was nothing, but he hacked out another dose of Mexipro. Dimly he wondered how many other people were downloading the same hacks. Considering that low responsiveness and drooling were common social mannerisms today, he supposed many, but stopped thinking about it because for the time being his hands had become useless again, which would have embarrassed him, because his pants were open and his penis out as he had been planning to masturbate, but fortunately the ameliorative effects of his anti anxiety meds saved him from undue distress and self-reproach about this. Instead he just sat there quietly, marveling at the feeling of the air conditioning on his balls at the public library and wondering at the number of gray pubic hairs he had, while thousands of tiny computers patrolled his bloodstream and brain, reporting that he was nominal, a-okay, all systems go.




Sadness was always present. The lonely city wants you. And yet it was as distant as the picture of a sad kitten taped to a wall.




A cloud of birds or drones fluxed overhead. He blew on his coffee and realized with alarm that it had frozen, as though with super breath. Then he recalled that he had ordered a frappuncino. He also seemed to holding a slice of pizza that was still warm. He wasn't hungry now, but he realized he would probably go along with it, this being a positive adaptation he had learned to make. Perhaps it had been a good idea at the time. Perhaps he was starving. He wondered if he had any money left. The cloud above his head coalesced into the image of a woman fellating a high speed train. So they must be drones, advertising. Though advertising what, he wondered?

Advertising today made his head hurt. It was best not to look at it. For instance, as he passed and alley, he saw it had been redecorated as the barracks to a concentration camp. Inside, imprisoned children were torturing each other, in some horrific parody of the order of the camp itself. What could that ad possibly be about, he protested inwardly (Gap Kids). Gone were the days when celebrities just became robots and kicked dogs and this made you buy panty hose. Now everything was infopresent, confusing and disturbing. Madison avenue, after much research and collaboration with b/RAND had found that ultra low liminal signals worked best and so now every commercial had a hypnogogic pitch and people went about trying to shake brand awareness like trying to forget a bad wet dream.



In the third generation of post-human advertainment a lot of stuff happened that probably shouldn't have. After the MIT Robotic Conference/Mount Holyoke Massacre, people had pretty much given up on the project of emulating or simulating human intelligence in any way. For researchers, "human intelligence" now seemed a completely discredited idea for men and machines. As for everyone else, there was considerable public opinion against the idea of another bridal expo being skinned alive.

However, if AIs no longer feigned any pretense of mimicking or having any sympathy with or similarity to human intelligence, it somehow became the vogue among humans to adopt a lot of the mannerisms and patterns exhibited by their betters. Many human CEOs tried to emulate the catastrophically effective and ruthless decision-making patterns of the AIs, as popularized in AI authored titles such as The Pink Stick, inscrutable book of aphoristic numbered advice that read like the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus Markov chained to the Tao Te Ching.

The results, of course, were worst human decisions since the excesses of the Caesars or Peter III, without the excuse of the cruelty serving some purpose or at least reflecting organic damage and impaired decision-making ability. It did not really matter, of course, since trading programs had effectively established their dynasty for several decades now, though it would yet be hundreds of years before mankind realized what those programs were actually calculating and why.

It was about this time that McDonald's ceased to be a restaurant chain that made some pretense at serving some kind of comestible, and became a franchised setting for certain experiences, being in effect, a chain of miniature theme parks on every corner. This was an ideal arrangement as a heavily medicated populace found such an environment appealing and usually needed some sustenance and often shelter as much of the population no longer had homes or knew where they were.

As fully automated, environmentally controlled, self-sufficient retail food and healthcare vendors, McDonald's were all that many people needed.




Bad dreams were everywhere, like that giant bloody lawnmower he saw last week that ate up a whole street protest. It was, he thought, a particularly disturbing piece of public performance art. At least he hoped to god it was. Artists today wanted to wake people up and try and get people interested in reality again. But like everyone in his generation, he felt like reality was like a bad parent: it just nagged you and told you were wrong and no damn good and wanted you to do and be interested in countless things that weren't interesting. And what you wanted was inside, in the deep dark comfortable of your room. What you wanted was something familiar, like an episode of Death Camp Cuties, you watched over and over again, the one porn clip that always got you off like a favorite song. You wanted to go home. Like every astronaut, you just wanted to go home.

These were not hallucinations, he knew. He had plenty of experience with hallucinations. The post mission recovery doctors had put him on a steady diet of LSD, ketamine, PCP, neoyote and k generation hallucinogens to help him adapt to life on Earth. He had hallucinated vividly for what he was told were days. From his perspective, each moment was longer than a lifetime, or the lifetime of the universe, having always been and always will be. Conversely, it was just as short, having no duration at all. The effect, however, was therapeutic: time and space, cause and effect, self and other-of all these things he was temporarily relieved, almost approximating his (non) experiences on Mars. Sometimes he had imagined himself back on Mars. Sometimes he thought he saw the future. The future was boring, but he was too drugged to take his eyes off it.

The hardest part was language. Mars was an aphasic asemic environment. Or rather, language was a thing on Mars and things were language. Mars itself was a prayer wheel whose every rotation affirmed total cosmic indifference.

His interest in pornography was related. It had no real narrative; it was endlessly iterative. Contrary to any romantic illusions to the contrary, in sexuality and orgasm there was no principle of individuation. It was like the phenomenal world of Mars.



Thank god for frappuncinos and scrip kiddies and blacknet. Scoring wasn't harder today than getting spam or viruses or pron. The main dining room was a kind of dormitory for cocooned homeless people. All was quiet: they were well medicated and neatly tucked away like a landing team in the hyb hub aboard MCS R-1. He walked through briskly, but quietly, through the airlock to the playplace and exercise deck.

He felt relatively safe in the fortification of the playplace jungle gym above the soft sea of mulch of recycled condoms, sex toys and military vehicle tires. There was only one approach up the ladder and an easy escape out the slide. He had stayed here before.

He reached inside his bag for the bottle of DISK ERASER Schnapps, but found it has been replaced by the pizza again. He lifted the pizza to his mouth. Alarmingly, someone had already taken a bite out of it. He looked at it, puzzled at who would do such a thing. He was struggling to compose the appropriate arguments for a refund, when the same faculty of reasoning informed him that it was a reasonable supposition that the teeth marks were his. It would be reasonable to bite the pizza again and see.

His forensic bite, however, overtook the original. Looking at the new impression he had no idea how the former impression looked. He supposed they were similar. It occurred to him to spit out the new mouthful, but he noted that he had already begun chewing it. Information had been destroyed.

Or had it? Each chew added new information, shifted the orientation of the original pattern. But the teeth that made all the patterns were the same. The photons that struck him from the sun came to him like angels to report that the sun was still there eight minutes ago. The universe was drowning, seething with information, all the way down to the quantum foam that was not sure what to say. God spoke. God spoke continually. There was simply no instant in which all of his remarks had bearing. The reality was just this speech, endless speech.

This inner sermon was interrupted by his gag reflex. He suddenly felt something hard scraping the inside of his mouth. At first he thought it was perhaps crisped cheese or crust, but it had too many sharp sticklike extensions. He could almost feel the jointed legs and the hair on the legs. The chitinous crunch of the shell filled him with instinctual horror. He spat it out.

At first he thought some insect had accidentally landed on his pizza. Then a flash fire of anger: someone had put it deliberately on his pizza. He could see them reaching in the flaming oven and putting it on, grinning, thinking of him. He is looking at the chef’s face gloating at his malicious prank, in a reverse shot, as though from inside the oven, as though he were inside the oven somehow, the imagined chef looking down at him, mocking him, just as the launch crew gave him the thumbs up as he lay buttoned down on the couch during pre-launch.

To his horror, however, the masticated shape he had spat out moved. It curled and uncurled, wrapped in spit, marinara and saliva softened flecks of crust. It clasped and unclasped like the fist of a newborn, as though adapting to the atmosphere outside his mouth. As he watched, it seemed to flex and change shape in its shell. It seemed to be evolving from unpleasant to scary.

As the colorful feathered hairs shot out of its body, like a barnacle feeding, he recognized it. It was a Martian grape.

But Martian Grapes were an exclusive topping, very expensive. And how had the pizza guy known of his mission to Mars?



Aresologists, exobiologists, and sidereal psycholinguists are quite of different minds as to the unusual qualities of the Martian "grape" and what makes it so compelling and incomprehensible.

Some neurological research suggests that the Martian Grape causes mild aphasic damage to the language centers of the brain on contact. This is offered as an explanation of why human subjects find describing the taste of the Martian grape so difficult and, further, why human subjects repeatedly fail to state correctly whether or not they have ever tried it before. This latter explanandum draws considerable criticism from Aresologists and philosophers of language, who maintain that the memory and speech problems presented by the Martian grape are a product of its asemic qualities.

The debate between asemanologists and asemioticians continues to this day. It is certainly worth noting that from an exobiological standpoint, the Martian "grape" is actually a para-psuedo-animal with crustacean, vermoid and pseudo fungoid characteristics. The creature is notable in that it seems to pass through several radically different forms during its life cycle and seemingly in no particular order.

[comparison to meterology and ufology]

This has led to some radical Aresologists to maintain that the Martian grape is not one, but several different species that are either mistakenly conflated into one creature, or actually "inhabit" the same body at the same time, Aresbiology being based on the hypotheses that this and spontaneous generation are possible and the proposition that metempsychosis is a well-formed and valid concept.

More conspiracy-minded authors even maintain that Mars biology is entirely the product or by product of human engineering from a secret NEU/NUN prohibited facility allegedly in the dew farms of the Labyrinthus Minotaurus, sponsored by YUMCORP, owners of Pizza Hut Plus.





From his command module aboard the Mc Donaldland playplace. He made his way across the gantry of the bouncy suspended bridge to the module with the slidy pole and turny wheels. In its modular construction, it reminded him very much of MCS-Recovery One: Great Savings America.

This platform was the Mars Lander/MSAM-MAV. It pitched over the red sea of the recycled foam below. Now he was EVA on the ladder about to have his Neil Armstrong moment. Mars, dammit.


He walked down the street with his arm up, pinching his elbow. Without a screen he only had the SUI, the somatic bodyware to interface with his instream printers: press and hold, press and hold. With his arm in this position he supposed he must look like an unmedicated schizophrenic, just another homeless person with his private rituals and meanings, as opposed to a trained veteran astronaut whose body was equipped with n-generation nano-pharmacies to keep him healthy and optimal at all times. There must be something wrong, however, because of all the blackouts and headaches.

He supposed that some blackouts were normal when the frontal lobe apps needed rebooting after upgrades. They usually scheduled these for deep sleep. Now that he could not connect to the med server, he supposed that some blackouts were inevitable.

He shuddered, even though he stood in direct sunlight and sweated in his coat. The wool wicked the sweat away. The multiple layers were like his Mars surface suit, but bulkier in Earth’s gravity. He wore them here for much the same reason: a hostile environment that could be scorching at day and freezing at night.

As on Mars, he could survive indefinitely with only his suit as shelter, provided he could locate resources. That is how he had survived on Mars, outlasted the others. But who had put the printers in the chapel? The Martians?

Then as now, he needed patches and upgrades to keep his suit working.

The narrow alley reminded him of the crevasse in the labyrinth where the Martians had their chapel. It was dark, wet and narrow. The graffiti on the walls was just as colorful and illegible, but it carried the same meaning as all Martian language: I am here. The world is all that is the case. But another world is possible.


NEXT POSTING BY

11 APRIL 2011

๑๑ เมษายน ๒๕๕๔
 

The Ambassadors of Extinction

They came as royalty, in the form of the great saurons that were their heraldric metonyms; they came as we had found them, titanic fossils of bone that staggered over our explanations, teeth so great and deep, they made creation a million years older with their grinning their last supper, which said to us: eat up, eat up, nothing lasts forever.

In this form they came and howled and screamed, which was their only benediction and message: nevermore. And behind that roar, more void than a night after the last stars, came a pattering of echoes like rain, now faster, now slower, but never stopping, the screams of everything that was that now wasn't, extinctions that were our own and those we had never even imagined, rising, rising, until now ever present like a cascade of static, like the roaring a vast infinite cataract, until the sound of extinction was everything, the material of the universe.

At this our best representatives, though prepared for this, though steeled, blanched. They fell away, pecked to death by dodoes or trampled by trilobites. I alone remained. To this chaos, I pronounced: this is a bad dream.

To which the answer came in my own swift voice: yes it is a bad dream, a very bad dream. And it never ends. It has already forgotten you as it drops you back into your bed, to awaken in your smallest of small lives, with your tiny unmemorable death.

To Serve All Mankind

Introduction

Perhaps the most intriguing questions we face as an entire species is the question of extraterrestrial life. Given everything we know about the universe, its size, relative occurrence of elements, planets and types of stars, life should be a common enough phenomenon. Yet, throughout the entirety of our history, alien intelligence continues to shun and avoid us.

The answer as to why is beyond the scope of this simple essay. Perhaps it is for reasons wholly alien and beyond us we shall never fully comprehend. Instead, this brief guide intends simply and more humbly to summarize what little we do know about alien intelligences, their characteristics and what they taste like.
 

Greys
 

Simple Foil Will Prevent This Kind of Overcooking

Among gourmands, Greys are the most prized, the taste of their flesh having a seemingly limitless range depending on the organ, how it is prepared, how it is harvested and the affective and cognitive state of the Grey as the flesh is harvested. 

People today are most familiar with "Grey sashimi"(technically Ikizukuri) a cuisine discovered quite by accident during an early technical interview. The skin of the Greys varies enormously in flavor, from the calamari like tastes of the thorasic region, to the robust mackerel like taste of the upper arms and legs, to the sweet eggy taste of the anal and cloacal regions and the mild musky custardly tastes of the face, which are exceeded in deliciousness only by the "Cadbury egg" like delights of the pupil-less staring eyes, with which they are usually served.

 This is no doubt due to the role the skin plays as the organ of ingestion and excretion for the organism. The Greys literally spend their lives marinating themselves in tastiness, which accounts for their incredible range of flavors.

 

Reptillians/Draconians
 

Reptillians taste exactly like they appear, like big tasty lizards. It's anyone's guess as to whether these yummy interlopers are more popular as entertainers, world leaders, queens of England, or simply delightful snacks.

Humanity remains firmly divided, however, on the best way to prepare Reptillians, whether deep fried, as in American South and China (where they are typically eaten whole), chopped into a hearty stew or chowder as in Russian and English preparations, or fermented with milk as in Mongolia. One thing is for sure, with burrito al draco, guacomole and hot sauce is a must. 

Whether they have crossed the enormous sleeping distances of the stars to rule or exterminate us, the shape shifting flesh of the Reptilians is lean and high in "good fat" (though also containing some "bad" gamma particles).
 

Nordics

 

Despite their appearance, Nordics taste surprisingly like chicken

Sasquatches
 

As robots, sasquatches have no real taste. Their tough external hide, however, is bioengineered and tastes like a mix of naugahyde, Corinthian leather and tofurky.
 

Mothmen
 

Light and peppery, Mothmen aren't for everyone, described even by aficionados as somewhat like spicy Doritos covered with snuff, spices and rubber eraser shavings.

 

However the odd taste and difficulty of preparing Mothmen hasn't kept them off the menu, but rather has led to some the more complex and delicate recipes on post contact menus, particularly for sublimate soups.
 

Funk Lords
 

In a word, funky.
 

Nagas
 

The flesh of Nagas is suitable for curries and other tropical preparations. However, its consumption is generally discouraged. See also, Wub, Martians.

The Wild Asses

Are all female. They bray and cuss in the dust. They fall on the ground and roll in great clouds of obscurity. Here there is nothing, and it hurts the eye. The asses knock about, in pointless inscrutable games. They are obstinate and willful. This place is nothing more than a plate of dust, which they occupy as some unprovoked protest, as though their constant tramping upon it kept it from rising into the sun.

Once a year they disappear. Their oasis is heaven, where they drink the blue waters, where there is food in abundance, where a kind wind blows and nothing contests their presence, for heaven is empty, entirely empty.

The wild asses are allowed this privilege, alone. For they are the only creatures, that, given the privilege, invariably return, stubborn, unpersuaded.

My Favorite Pixar Movies

It’s time for me to admit an innocent pleasure: I’ve loved just about every film made by the experimental film company, Pixar. Many of my readers could have probably guessed that I have a soft spot for Pixar films and have no doubt throughly enjoyed many of the same films themselves with their friends and family. However, so throughly enjoyable are these films that I want to take this space and acknowledge some of my favorites, in case you missed them the first time around or at least so we can have the pleasure of considering them yet again, together.

Toy Story

I loved everything about Pixar's first film and its Pirandelloesque scenario of “toys” exiled into some terrifyingly meaningless limbo. “Buzz” Lightyear is an astronaut whose rational, positivistic outlook is challenged when he finds himself imprisoned with a menagerie of fantastic creatures in the incomprehensible alien landscape of a giant child’s bedroom. 

This film begins the cycle of “collapsing allegories” where bewildered protagonists encounter seemingly symbolic characters  (such as the cowboy Woody, voiced by Clint Eastwood, who claims to be in Hell for the prostitutes he killed). Yet the further the narrative progresses, the more problematic interpretation becomes, until an overdetermined semiotic saturation point is reached and the hypernarrative implodes into a purely asemic cinema.

Favorite Moments

• Mr. Potato Head’s Oedipal ocular castration
• Woody’s “tears in rain” speech
• “Hell is other Toys” –Woody

Discussion

This wonderful picture also made film history, being the first feature film to be rendered entirely from direct neural imaging from the director’s John Lasster’s brain. The control process by which the director’s vision was rendered by slave brains was at this point quite crude, which accounts for the film’s relatively low resolution and the occasional images of the director’s mother’s nude breast, typical of early ENGRM films .

A Bug’s Life

This is by far the least popular of Pixar’s films, no doubt because it is Pixar at it’s most nihilistic, depicting a brutal class struggle that eschews any Marxist soteriology in favor of an unending Master/Slave dialectic. A devastating and brutal film, even by Pixar standards, which presents the mind numbing reality of mass death as well as any documentary on genocide, well before its notorious final shot, which reveals the action of the film and the new “triumphant” hegemony of the ants as taking place on the face of the dead child from Toy Story. Men, gods and any kind of normative ideals are killed for mere senseless sport in this film, on a scale that is incomprehensibly vast and meaningless: truly, a bug’s life. 

At the same time it has, I think, the most catchy songs of any Pixar picture, composed and performed by Bruno S, who has the title role as Flick. 

Many critics denounced the film’s unrelenting nihilism, which they felt particularly inappropriate for a film aimed at children “who ought to be learning the optimistic truths of dialectical materialism” and counter to the spirit of solidarity, in favor of a “decadent fashionable pessimism." 

Monsters, Inc. 

Pixar’s adaptation of Max Ernst’s Une Semaine de Bonté is cinema at its most Sadean. Udo Kier is at his most lovable as Scully.

Cars

Set in the world of Gary Numan and his Tubeway Army, Cars is as much a tribute to Bunuel in its structure as Kubrick in its content. Gary Numan stars as Numan, a former astronaut who ostensibly suffers from post-mission amnesia, who now hosts an award winning children’s television show whose theme is “things have faces and we wipe the faces off.”

Dissatisfied with his job and his icy sadistic relationship with Nico (played by Deborah Harry), Numan circuts the city looking for “forensic clues that are the condition of the possibility for an antinomial murder yet to happen.” When he discovers that his bosses are just giant cockroaches (Trent Reznor and Marilyn Manson, in cameos reprising their roles from A Bug's Life) he quits his show and takes a caretaker job at the Overlook Hotel. 

Even though it is not clear that anything happens at the snowed in resort (anything that wasn’t going to always already have happened anyway), Numan is arrested and sent to an unusual prison apparently run by the Residents. After the eyedrops and maze of naked women have their salutary effect, Numan is released into the Marines, where he becomes a donut-eating crack shot who assassinates the President. For this he is immediately given flowers and award and the camera pulls away for its final shot of Numan being applauded by an audience of Numan clones on a planet where Gary Numan (or rather, anthropomorphized cars that look like Gary Numan, as all the characters in the film are indeed rendered as anthropomorphized cars) are the only form of life. 

Favorite Moments

• Numan teaching children that the face in the mirror is a stranger and you should not listen to anything it says.
• David Bowie’s cameo as Grady.

Discussion

In many ways the negative critical response to this film documents its success as a film where “identification with the action on the screen is questioned, indeed rendered impossible. Cars holds a mirror to its audience, but its audience are a bunch of fish or sapientless lichen and see nothing” ( “Asperger’s –the movie” Unwatchable Weeky).

It also marks the only collaboration to date between Randy Newman and Gary Numan.  

Finding Nemo

In this feature length adaptation of Heidegger’s  Gelassenheit  (“Discourse on Thinking”) an amiable little clown fish goes in search of his lost child, encountering many lovable characters along the way whose illusions about life and existence are utterly destroyed. 

Favorite Moments

• The surfer turtle dude who talks for a solid thirty minutes, recounting each of the films of Ingmar Bergman before dying of a deliberate on-screen heroin overdose.

Nemo: Then what are we to wait for? And where are we to wait? I hardly know anymore who and where I am. 

Gill: None of us knows that, as soon as we stop fooling ourselves.

Pixar had already acquired a reputation for uncompromising and relentlessly existentially honest children’s films that were only sometimes appreciated by the general public. As one exasperated reviewer related their child’s reaction:

“Why, mommy? Why? Why? Why?”

“Why, what, dear?”

“No, mommy –why.”

The Incredibles

Another bold and outrageous film that dares to ask if a family with extraordinary abilities should be limited by slave morality. With Alejandro Jodorowsky as Zarathustra. 

Ratatouille

Pixar’s most conceptual film is an esoteric meditation on the process of its own becoming. Remy the rat pulls on Linguini the idiot's hair to control his actions, just as director Brad Bird yokes the slave brains that animate and render the film in an unholy creative union that is beyond pleasure and pain. 

Even as someone who embraces cinema and expression at its most extreme, the idea of a rat cooking food for people is just unbearable.  

WALL*E

This film tells the story of its titular robot who is no sooner released from a robot insane asylum than walks into Bier Himmel where EVA is being mistreated by her robot pimps. As the pimps treat everyone universally badly, WALL*E and EVA escape to Post-Consumer Earth, which is a wild wasteland, having been fought over in successive atomic wars by apes and men.

Things look up for the couple as WALL*E gets a new job on an extermination team, retasked by Starship Troopers as a mass grave digging machine. However, things turn for the worse as WALL*E’s superiors are revealed as to be themselves giant cockroaches. EVA returns to prostitution and the Earth is destroyed. 

This was unfortunately Bruno S. final film, as his brain was destroyed by filming.

All these wonderful family films are included in Pixar: God is Dead: Everything is Permitted, A Collector’s set, in 10 discs or Rights Managed Recoverable Memory Engram Concept.