The Fake Life Is No More

But it was fun while it lasted.

The Fake Life

I'm working on a new entertainment blog called The Fake Life with a bunch of evil bastards who just happen to be brilliant commentators on the world of theatrical movies, DVDs, music, comics and many other useful and useless topics. Check it out here, or die trying.

My CHUD.com DVD Reviews - January 2006

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Volume 4
Fear Chamber
Martha's Baking Favorites
Super Bowl Champions - San Francisco 49ers
Big Bad Mama SE

My CHUD.com DVD Reviews - Nov. & Dec. 2005

Martha Stewart's Holidays 2005
Scooby Doo - Ghosts on the Go
Best & Worst of American Idol Seasons 1-4
City of Champions - Best of Boston Sports
Super Bowl Champions - Dallas Cowboys
The Yogi Bear Show - Complete Series

Undo This Mistake - Part 2

He found the near-darkness adding to his growing dementia. The available light coming from the hallway into the room through the four-inch door slot did not reach every corner. Even the wedge of light projected directly against the back wall did little to light the room. With so little light, his eyes could not resist making some disturbing reports of the space he was trapped in. It seemed at times that the wedge of light split off into small streams, and those streams became glowing shapes. The shapes moved in waves of color, sweeping at him over and over. At other times, when his attention drifted, the shapes broke the steady pattern of wave after wave and became more sinister, like ghosts made of light. This usually happened at the edge of his vision. When he began to see something with smoky, outstretched arms drifting towards him and he turned to focus on it, the illusion disappeared. It was best to think of these visions as optical tricks and not hallucinations. Actually, it would be better to not think of them at all, but that was impossible.

Daytime offered some relief. His room seemed to be at the end of a hallway near a window. The light was much brighter during the day and turned the black edges of his room a light grey. He could not see the window, but he imagined that it was frosted glass and several feet from the floor. He had to imagine it, because the day he entered this room had already left his memory. It comforted him slightly to believe that it was an old memory, that he had been in this room for a long time, as if old memories of insignificant things had less value than memories of the important events he had also lost. During the day he could think clearer, of strategies to get out of the room, of ways to avoid starving to death.

It had been dark for a long time now. He slept in small, ultimately restless shifts. He shivered awake at short intervals, thinking that someone was yelling to him from somewhere on the floor. When he sat up quickly on his bare cot and pivoted his ear towards the door, he heard nothing, not even the low hum that exists in total silence. It took a long time to relax again, his mind racing through a hundred different explanations for the sounds that shook him awake.

Suddenly his stomach began to groan. He realized, at the same moment, that a beetle was skittering across the floor towards his foot. Had his stomach started rolling because of the beetle, processing the presence of the insect before his conscious mind registered it? Hunger was not a natural human response to a bug crawling on the floor. There was no taste reference associated with a beetle. It was black, so he thought about the flavor of black things, like olives and raisins. It probably tasted like something halfway between an olive and a raisin, a mixture of bitter and sweet, but with an exoskeleton that would feel like a teaspoon of fingernail clippings in his mouth. His stomach growled again. He would eat the bug even though it would end up making him more hungry.

His hand began to shake as he reached down for it. He had not been thinking about food for at least a day, but now he was consumed by hunger. The beetle was a rare steak and baked potato with extra butter. It was a mountain of steaming rice with chunks of tangy chicken and vegetables mounded at its peak. It was a thick slice of chocolate cake with real vanilla ice cream pooling around it. It was sustenance, and survival. He closed his fingers over the alarmed beetle and brought it to up to his lips. In the second before his opening palm met his mouth, he realized that the creature in his hand was not a beetle.

It was a scorpion. His hand jerked within an inch of his face as the scorpion flipped its stinger into his palm, sending a knot of pain up his arm. His feet kicked sharply in the air, causing the cot's iron legs to screech on the floor as it slammed against the wall. As he flung his hand out to get rid of the scorpion, he saw nothing flying from it. He heard no click against the opposite wall. The pain, as quickly as it had slammed into him, drifted away to a steady throb that followed his pounding heart.

There had been no scorpion, and no beetle. There was only the ascending hunger consuming him from the inside out. His stomach suddenly cramped and doubled him over. He lay on his cot with his knees drawn to his chest, rocking away the pain in his belly. The yellow light smouldering through the steel door was slowly being drained by the grey relief of morning.

Undo This Mistake - Part I

He tried to remember his parents. There was no point in assuming that he didn’t have parents. They couldn’t be more than 60 years old, if they were still alive. Or could they? Anything was possible. His memory problems weren’t normal. Events seemed to be slipping away more quickly every day, as if they were cars in winter skating uncontrollably down an icy decline. No way to stop the momentum now.

He opened his eyes. The same locked room imprinted another set of images of four short walls and a ceiling on his mind. He could remember yesterday and the day before that and the day before that. The universe before that third day eluded him. He could have been in this tiny room his entire life for all he now knew, like a fetus that dies in the womb, gaining every experience from a single, dark space. The only bit of knowledge that pulled him from that darkness was his name. John. He thought his last name was Bellows or Vellows or something similar to that. It didn’t matter. He was grateful to have the name “John” to hold on to. Having a name meant that he existed. He was not just some thought from another insane person’s head. He was really here.

Unfortunately, “here” was behind a locked door without a key, in a ward without an attendant, in a hospital without another single human anywhere within shouting distance. It was quite possible that other people were out there. They could be too busy to answer his calls for help, or too scared to do anything about them. They could be in other locked rooms, unwilling to shout back. They could be so far away that they could not hear him. They could all be dead.

Most likely, though, they were all gone. He had not been taken along when the building was evacuated. He assumed an evacuation because the power was out in his room at night and emergency lights were the only source of illumination visible through the dinner slot in the thick metal door. Hospitals don’t function for days without power. They move the patients to another place with power. He had been left behind because someone forgot to write his name on a log when he had been moved to the isolation ward, and someone else didn’t think to look in the room to see if he was inside. Luckily, the water was still running to his toilet and sink. He hadn’t eaten in three days.

John couldn’t see his father’s face. Did he have a long wispy beard? Without a mustache? That would be unusual. No, suddenly he knew that wasn’t right. He was picturing the top of his father’s bald head resting on the arm of a sofa, with a ring of long, thin hair hanging over the edge. The blank, bald head was not a face, but it illustrated his predicament. Eyes and noses and mouths had been erased by his illness. His violent, mind-quaking sickness. He had been in the room for three days without his medication. Soon reality would give way to madness. Too soon.

My CHUD.com DVD Reviews - 2005

Dracula A.D. 1972
Sacred Flesh
Inside Deep Throat
Z Channel - A Magnificent Obsession
Monster High
Twin Sisters
Over the Edge
Ghostbusters I & II Gift Set