A Flying Dog Haunts My Dreams

Lila P. Dogg is old. She would probably take offense to that, but she’s a dog, so I can talk all the shit I want because I’m 90% sure she can’t use the internet and 80% sure she can’t read.

I wrote about her vet adventures a few weeks back. She has chronic kidney disease and is taking roughly the same amount of blood pressure medication that I am, but she’s doing okay. She enthusiastically ate 1 can of prescription kidney food then refused to eat anymore of both the prescription dog food AND the previous food she used to love. I now have to home cook her batches of Dr. Gironimi’s Extra Fancy Kidney Food for Dogs and blend it up so she doesn’t have to chew so much.

It’s Whisper Quiet!

I used to watch a lot of infomercials. Still would had the market not shifted. The insidious nature of the infomercial is that you can watch it and laugh at it for its hilarious deceptions and ridiculous turns of phrase, but still kind of want a pasta maker at the end of it.

This is how I feel about turning 40. The difference being that I actually did turn 40 and I have yet to buy a pasta maker.

Before I saw Ron Popeil’s children make chocolate pasta on stage, I had never even considered the idea of making my own pasta or even the actual origins of pasta. For all I knew, its various shapes were grown in a field and harvested by men dressed in overalls, dodging barrels thrown by an ape as they jump through fields of linguine. I didn’t even eat a ton of pasta, but the idea that I could make my own was fascinating to me, even if it seems like the machines barely made it through the damn infomercial, let alone whatever Fruit Loop and Hi-C pasta concoction I would have forced it to process. Still once I knew the pasta maker was possible, I very much wanted the pasta maker, no matter how shitty it actually was.

Once again, the similarities between turning 40 and the pasta maker are evident.

One could be forgiven for thinking the pasta maker would never produce rotini in the same way one could be forgiven for thinking I’d never hit 40. Though me and the pasta maker both make inhuman noises as we struggle to complete our questionably useful tasks, we soldier on regardless until one day the pasta stops and we’re both just empty shells and useless accessories—me with my vibrating, mucus removing vests and the pasta maker with it’s bagel making attachment—our parts barely worth harvesting.

I’m not much of a celebrator which means so far being 40 feels a lot like being 39, which felt a lot like being 38, etc. Seems like the market for Over the Hill items has mostly dried up, which is a possible side effect of the increasingly Sisyphean nature of “the hill.” I don’t know when I’m going to die, but I can pretty much guarantee I’ll be working until I do. All the effort of pushing the stone up while still sliding into the grave, baby!

Still, I’m surprised at how much I wanted to add 40 to the collection of years I’ve been. Not enough to attempt a Demolition Man-style cryofreeze on myself, but enough that I didn’t start writing this until after I turned 40. I may not be superstitious, but I’m also not going to set the universe up for a decent punchline.

In any case, the reaper didn’t come in my 30s or 20s or teens. Instead I’ve reached an age where it is no longer possible for me to die young but instead I will expire at an age that will be much more than anyone expected of me and everyone will be able to say “he used to be real sick” or “at least he can breathe now” or whatever they’ll say once my final act is written, probably in my blood upon the rocks after I miss my jump over Snake River Canyon. Or maybe I’ll make 50, who knows?

A Somewhat Related Video

Many Years Ago I made an edit of two of my favorite things: the Ronco Pasta Maker infomercial and televangelism. I think it was the first video I edited on an iPad, but I’m too old to remember now.

Two Other Birthday Related Posts

I wrote my book Can’t Eat, Can’t Breathe and Other Ways Cystic Fibrosis Has F#$%*d Me roughly 10 years ago and I started a website to promote it around that time. I recently imported the archives from that site into Substack, so allow me to highlight two posts I wrote when I was in my 30s.

One is about the last act of my 20s and the other is a list of birthdays and whether or not they are significant. I stopped the list at 40, which feels ominous now, but I assure you I was just lazy then.

Coven

Though I just made a big deal about not being a celebrator, I did do one thing to mark the occasion of my birthday: I released an album.

The new All Hallow’s Evil album “Coven”—pronounced with a long “o” in the Mark Borchardt tradition—is now out on every major digital music platform. I can assure you it’s very good, but even if you don’t want to listen to it, I’d very much appreciate it if you just let it play on every device in your home that can play music. Here’s a bunch of links: https://linktr.ee/allhallowsevil

Things I Like

I saw Enter The Dragon when I was very young, 5 or so. My parents had just gotten divorced and me and my mom had moved into a trailer with her friend and her two kids. I did not have a lot of space to myself there, which was tough because I was born a stuff lover and I’m not happy unless it’s piled up all around me.

One thing I did have is two sets of nunchucks, made out of wooden dowels and cheap chains by the divorced dad of the kid I was sharing a room with. It was the 80s, so giving kids melee weapons was seen as good for their development, even before the Ninja Turtles brought it mainstream.

I had mostly forgotten about those nunchucks until re-watching Enter the Dragon last week. When Bruce Lee started beating ass with those nunchaku, I came real close to buying a pair as a birthday present to myself. The only thing stopping me is that I’m too old and tired to explain any potential injuries to the ER. Also, I just bought an air conditioner, so there’s not a lot of room in the bank account for surprise hospital bills right now.

Eating Copies of Food and Wine for Sustenance

I like leaving the house and I like seeing new things, so that means a good portion of my memory space is taken up by time I spent in stores. I vividly remember walking into Electronics Boutique and coming across Road Avenger for the Sega CD, then asking the suited salesperson if it was actually good and mulling over the purchase for at least 30 minutes (intro was great, game was fine). There’s a warm place in my heart for the fake red pen “hand writing” on the Kaybee Toys clearance price tags. Some day as the last neuron fires in my brain, I’ll tell some Kia-sponsored elder care A.I. about the time I found Machine Gun Joker and Harley Quinn figures in a Bradlees that was going out of business.

But when I think of the Borders magazine section, I think about how my body would often run out of gas while perusing the stands, stranded next to polybagged copies of Easy Rider magazine, lacking the internal combustion to produce enough energy to get in the checkout line or even just go to the car.

I used to spend a surprising amount of time reading magazines at Borders. Not enough that I personally killed the company—I did my part by using my credit card to buy monthly import issues of Terrorizer and Computer Music at premium prices—but I’d say my visit:buy ratio was hovering somewhere around 5:1.

It was far away, but somewhat near the laser tag facility I worked at, so I’d often treat myself to a visit to the bookstore for making the 30 minute journey to spend a couple of hours telling kids and surly teens to not run in the laser tag arena.

I found the magazine section fun, because it seemed full of possibilities. Honestly, the whole store seemed like a well of knowledge to me, but the magazines seemed easier to drink. Like if I decided I wanted to be a bike guy, I could pick up Mountain Bike Action magazine or if I wanted to be an insufferable prick, I could pick up one of the various skeptic magazines. Again, I hate being outside, so it was the prick’s path for me. Please don’t ask me about ghosts.

But on many occasions, it would be time to leave and I just couldn’t for some reason. Like all of a sudden Car and Driver magazine would become really interesting to me even though my car was a 4 speed Toyota Tercel that handled like a Mario Kart and the process of approaching the exit line felt like following the instructions for assembling a shelf purchased off of Amazon from one of those companies that seem to pull the letters of their name out of a hat. Possible, but difficult.

If I wanted to crawl up my ass with a lightly plausible explanation as to why I often stalled out next to the racks of Cosmopolitans, Vogues and Cat Fancy magazines, it would be because the brain uses a lot of glucose and my undiagnosed Cystic Fibrosis Related Diabetes meant it was feast or famine. There’s a good chance that my blood sugar was at a hilariously low level and my lack of drive was my brain saying “let’s see you get out of this one without my help” as the exit to the store seemed to do a Hitchcock zoom away from me.

Though perhaps I was just tired. My health was not great and my prescriptions were not plentiful. I probably wasn’t getting as much sleep as I should, because I never have. I dislike going to bed and I dislike waking up, which is a bad combination. Or maybe my body just craves a life amongst the magazines, learning “20 Things You Didn’t Know About Your Blackberry!” and reading about the latest in digital cameras until the march of progress claims me too.

The DMV

Going to the DMV is like an anxiety dream where you are back in school and there’s a test and you’ve been studying your chemistry day and night, but it turns out the test is on Geography. Unfortunately, the DMV is real.

I recently did a lease buyout on a car, both because we ended up getting a great deal on it and also because I kind of wanted to see if I could figure out how to do a lease buyout. It unfortunately means I get to register a car at the DMV for the first time in 8 years.

Connecticut DMV works by appointment only, which is convenient in that there aren’t really any lines, but less convenient in that they’re usually booked a month out. I spent a lot of that month studying up on the registration process and making sure I had all my paperwork in order.

Long story short, if you car is newer that 4 years old, you don’t have to do emissions, but that’s calendar years not model years, so when I brought my paperwork up, the very nice lady made a lot of “hmmmm” noises and lightly shook her head. She called a co-worker over to confer and the coworker said “You’ll have to ask the manager. I can’t wait to hear the answer to this one!” That’s never what you want to hear after you’ve handed someone paperwork.

Technically the car was purchased in NY and I’m registering it in CT, which has thrown a couple of very exciting unknowns into the equation, but the manager was very helpful in getting me a temporary registration so I can get the emissions checked. Now I get to wait a month to find out if there will be surprise taxes. I find the suspense riveting.

Things I Like

I saw two semi-related documentaries that I really enjoyed this week. First, Chop and Steele, a documentary about Joe and Nick from Found Footage Festival and the time they got sued for booking themselves as fictional strongmen on some morning news broadcasts. It’s very funny and I’m a sucker for a story about people who continue to do the weird thing even when it’s difficult.

They also produced a documentary called A Life on the Farm which is about a very strange video/series of videos that I don’t want to say anything about if you’re not familiar with it. The documentary is funny, odd, a little sad and surprisingly beautiful by the end.

Surprisingly strong to most people!

From what I’ve seen of the average person’s attitude towards sickness, they could be gushing blood out of every orifice, but if it’s spring or fall, they’ll write it off as “allergies.”

I live my live similar to the little guy from Frogger, but in addition to avoiding cars as I race across the freeway to get to the swamp, I’m also avoiding germs and viruses.

I was a fan of social distancing before it was cool and then before it became a hackneyed punch line. I believe it’s part of the standard issue CF package, though technically it’s only encouraged to stay 6 feet away from other people with CF, I don’t want to be discriminatory, so I apply the rule to everyone. They actually made a movie about this rule called Five Feet Apart (there’s a plot reason it’s only 5 feet). Back when Twitter was a place where people would see the things you post, I talked enough pre-release shit on the premise of that movie that the pr team gave me free tickets to see it early. It was fine, though no challenger to the throne of the best cystic fibrosis movie, Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist.

Still, I wished it was a bigger hit so I would have an easy touchstone for people when they got too close to the goods. Of course, when Covid hit everyone learned about social distancing and—spoiler if you’re reading this after whatever our dinosaur asteroid moment ends up being—most people still didn’t understand it.

Throughout it all, even back when I used to drive to work and go to an actual office instead of running reports by myself in a room with a roughly 67:1 ratio of action figures to people, there was one get out of jail free card that everyone would pull in order to travel unrestricted amongst the population as snots flew at every angle from their face: “allergies.”

I have seen some shockingly sick people claim they had “allergies” though they never had them before. I’m convinced I know at least two people who could have a limb drop off and still blame it on “allergies.” Towards the end of the pre-vaccine era days of lockdown, I started wearing masks in my own damn house because of the amount of “allergies” I kept hearing about.

Assuming my life could actually be viewed like a game of Frogger, I imagine it would be very funny to watch the various ways I move and slide to stay 6 feet away from people and their “allergies”. Sometimes I’ll head to another room to look at a thing for a view minutes. Sometimes I’ll try to place objects between us, as if I were taming a lion or something. But never will I ever trust someone when they say they have “allergies.”

Hot Competition for the Worst Monster Thing

Nineteen years ago, I woke up early for my third shift job and dragged my ass into a theater to see my beloved Universal Monsters officially come crashing into the 21st century in the form of the film Van Helsing.

I fucking hated it.

It had the aesthetic of a PS2 game and the soul of a JNCO jeans fashion show. It probably would have been a great film had it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars instead of hundreds of millions, but it was doomed to mediocrity by the ability of its makers to throw money at the problem. For a number of years, I referred to it as my least favorite movie, until I saw the Nightmare on Elm Street remake, which felt like two hours of Platinum Dunes gloating about the $10 they swindled from me.

For the record, that film is only 95 minutes long.

Still, I’ve long thought of Van Helsing as the worst Universal Monsters thing, though Crazy Dracula for the Game Boy Color is probably worse, the game gets a pass because I didn’t know it existed until a couple of weeks ago. And I know Van Helsing is worse than the 90s Monster Force cartoon, because the Wolf Man in Monster Force kind of sounds like Hulk Hogan and that’s funny.

I’m not sure if Van Helsing is worse that Renfield.

The first 30 minutes of Renfield were so rough that my wife said it caused her physical pain and asked me to shut it off. I ended up watching the rest of it and I’m not entirely sure why. It feels like a movie assembled by committee, designed to hit every demographic but swinging so wild it doesn’t come into contact with anything. The jokes don’t land, the violence is bloody but toothless and though it gets points for it’s Suspiria-like dedication to color, it’s rarely interesting to look at. I’ve seen reviews that say Nic Cage is good as Dracula, but I think I may have watched a different movie.

Again, it probably would have been great at a tenth of the budget.

There’s something to be said for limitations, though it’s hard to articulate it without it coming out as gatekeeping. I love the fact that I can make all sorts of things using my phone and my laptop, but sometimes the easy solution is not the best solution. Like it’s easy to use digital blood, but I’m not sure it’s ever been good to use digital blood. Or maybe it’s not easy, I’ve never tried it and I never will. But it’s the current accepted solution and it mostly sucks. This is the old man in me coming out, but the accepted solution does not mean it’s the best solution.

Which brings us to Artificial Intelligence.

Being known as a guy who likes computers, means I’m often asked about my opinion on AI. The truth is, I’m not all that interested in it yet. I’ve dabbled a bit and it’s probably going to take my job at some point—which is different from it actually being able to do my job—but I won’t be fully on board until some maniac uses it to make a truly stunning piece of work. Unfortunately, I feel like we’ve set up AI for success by beating the life out of everything until it’s so bland that it’s not a huge step to believe a couple of prompts into a computer could make a reasonable facsimile.

I’m not sure AI could make a Dracula or even a Nosferatu in Venice, but I’m pretty sure if you fed Chat GPT 3 episodes of What We Do in the Shadows, a random NCIS: New Orleans, and a Stuart Smalley sketch, you could get a Renfield.

Things I Like

Had some big whiffs with movies this week. In addition to Renfield, I watched The Last Seduction on Criterion Channel, which played like a too hot for tv episode of Silk Stalkings that  soured itself by coming out of nowhere with a real Ace Ventura ending.

However, we finished the first season of AMC’s Interview with a Vampire last week, a thing I walked into with much trepidation and walked out of ready to read the book for the first time. Maybe watch that if you haven’t yet.

In Which My Electronics Conspire Against Me

My guitar amp told me I had a “bad attitude” once. Scared the absolute piss out of me, mostly because it was right.

This was the 90s, so cordless phone technology and an unshielded practice amp conspiring to talk shit was not a huge shock conceptually, but a very loud voice saying “you’ve got a bad attitude” while I was playing along with Iron Maiden’s Live at Donnington was surprising enough that I immediately shut the amp off and jumped to the other side of the room. Not sure what either of those actions would have accomplished in a poltergeist situation, but I was prepared to go down fleeing.

If this situation was not a stinging rebuke on the shoddy craftsmanship of sub-$100 Crate solid-state practice amplifiers but was indeed an admonishment from beyond the veil, I regret to inform you that it had little to no impact on my actual attitude, which to this day is often referred to as “bad”.

In my defense, things are often shit.

In counterargument, there are a few family members who feel my attitude–particularly towards cystic fibrosis–has improved over the last decade or so. This is because I stopped telling them about how much it sucks.

The best case scenario for any complaint is a solution to the problem. This type of resolution is rare enough that the only example I can some up with off the top of my head would be if your meal was a little cold and you got someone to put it in the microwave for half a minute.

There were multiple years that my insurance coverage teetered on a cliff. I desperately wanted it to take just one giant step back from the edge and give me a barely livable set of parameters with which I could run out the clock while still maintaining a proper supply of prescriptions. It was the worst time in my life.

I’m nearly two decades removed from it now, though it still comes up a lot because a.) I’m two to three mistakes from being right back in it and b.) it sucked. But a funny thing has happened in the ensuing years. Someone who was there and absolutely heard a lot about it at the time—a parent, though I won’t tell you which one to protect their SEO—said “why didn’t you ask for help? We could have figured it out.”

A younger me would have went batshit at that, but time has given me the strength to simply explain that I did ask and no help was coming. Perhaps that’s a point in the “improved attitude” column.

To be clear, I’m not sure there was anything that anyone could do to fix the problem. We actually did visit a lawyer to see if disability was on the table and I did apply, but the decision was essentially “this wheezing, 130 pound tank of a man? Any help we give him would only hold him back!”.

Being the weasel that I am, I did eventually figure something out, though it required a tremendous set of doors to appear before me and I had to run through them before anyone noticed. My situation now is best described as “perturbed, but stable” which means everyone can look back at the bad times and say “it was tough, but you did it!” or re-litigate decisions that were made or even pretend that they could have assembled a war room to make these problems disappear. None of which I’m all that interested in, because I have a bad attitude.

The one mocking comfort here is that after all these years, after the housing crisis and COVID and the other housing crisis, I can see that I was/am not alone. No help is coming for anyone. Well, anyone with less than a $100 billion market cap anyway.

The people who do not know this always seem to learn it too late, after having stood in the way because things were going well for them. But the body always fails and the price of that failure is steep and it might be neat to make literally any decision that could relieve some of that burden, but it also might be neat if my dog starting shitting solid gold, but I just don’t see that happening.

In Which My Bad Attitude Tries to Get Me to Kick a Chair

We leased a car this weekend and I’m furious about it. There’s a low thrum of anger that has accompanied me since the day I was born and it can still roar on occasion, but it’s a controlled roar. Be it the wisdom or numbness of age, it’s been years since I felt the switch flip and my heart race as every cell in my body told me I needed to kick something and storm out. That counter reset itself on Sunday.

We had a deal in place at one dealership, but the market being what it is, it wasn’t a great deal, so I thought I’d do the right thing and get a second opinion. With literal hours left in the month and minutes left in the workweek, we got a very aggressive deal from a competing dealership and I did the right thing and thanked the original dealership for their time, but told them we had to take this new offer.

And we did take the new offer, though it was still a little higher than I’d like, that’s just the nature of everything right now. I felt a little bad for having to back out of the previous deal, but I’m looking to save everywhere I can and sell as little of my stuff as possible.

So we sat down to finalize everything with the finance manager and our monthly price magically jumped up $25. I did the wrong thing and did not walk out.

They played us perfectly on this. It had been about 90 minutes of waiting and it was about an hour past closing time for the dealership. We were hungry and ready to be done with the process. The finance manager explained why the deal changed, but I did not hear him, as my ears had already started ringing. It was suddenly very hot in the room and I could feel the blood in my face. I should have left. I stayed. And I cannot stop thinking about it, to the point that my chest is still a little tight and my blood a little hot as I type this.

I can sit here and type to you that I’m overreacting, but I do not believe it. I can sit here and tell you that I don’t know why it made me so angry, but that’s a lie too. I know exactly why: they won. I came so close to getting an okay deal on a mid-range Volkswagen, then shit myself at the 1 yard line. I got the “thank you so much for the pleasure of meeting” email from the sales person and immediately started looking up how to get out of a lease. It’s one thing to win, but another to gloat. The email also said they’d be looking forward to my Google review, but I don’t think that’s true.

There’s nothing I can do about the money at this point and I’m sure the extra $725 they got out of me is worth a couple of stars off some shitty internet review, but like pissing in the ocean, I may not be able to change the current, but I can make myself feel better until the moment passes and I’m standing in a cloud of my own rapidly cooling piss.

In any case, I’ll walk to my doctor’s appointments on my bloody exposed ankle bones before I ever set foot in that dealership again.

Please Buy Some Cassettes

The limited edition cassette run of the new All Hallow’s Evil album Coven has arrived. It’s very funny to me that at 15 years old I was desperate to release an album on something other than cassette and now I’m closing in on 40 and very excited to be back in the tape game. I just think they’re neat! Even if I am currently at war with a boombox I bought on eBay and a deck got from Goodwill.

Get the tapes here: https://allhallowsevil.bandcamp.com

Things I Like

I filled in a gap in my cinema knowledge and saw Brian DePalma’s Blow Out for the first time. I found it to be a pretty good 80s Hitchcock film with some tremendous camera work. Then the ending happened and it jumped into a whole new tier. The ending is just an incredible piece of ice cold work. It’s sad, it’s dark, it’s a little funny and it’s perfect.

I’ve also been playing the 2010 Dante’s Inferno game for the Xbox360. After playing the Ninja Gaiden games, I’ve grown a real taste for third person melee action and I also like things that take place in Hell. I have to say it’s legitimately one of the funniest games I’ve ever played. I laughed for 5 minutes when I damned Pontius Pilate and even though I knew they were coming, fighting an army of “unbaptized” babies still made me laugh. Some of the platforming loses me and the combat isn’t quite as good as Ninja Gaiden II, but what is?