"Allergies"

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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.

A picture of the Tarman zombie from Return of the Living Dead

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.

Key art for the film Van Helsing

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.

Bad Attitude

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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?

In the Days of the McDLT

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The “M” Stands for “memories”!

Memory is an act of reconstruction, not record. It uses all the little pieces stored in your brain to recreate an experience, like using a tub full of Lego bricks to build a spaceship. Sometimes things change, get left out or get added in.

At least, that’s my understanding of it. This probably isn’t the best place to look for cutting edge understandings of how the human brain works.

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A good portion of my childhood memories revolve around McDonald’s. I was born one year prior to the Reagan administration de-regulating children’s tv, so I was—and am—a sucker for licensed toys. I was also vastly underweight until I was about 35, so McDonald’s was a borderline health food for me. Plus it was easy, cheap and beloved mascot Mac Tonight made it okay for everyone to go to McDonald’s for dinner, a tremendous boon to those of us with tired guardians and an appetite for greasy fries and greasy toys.

I’d say from the ages of 5-10, I ate at McDonald’s about twice a week, it’s presence in my life only threatened by the emergence of the Burger King Kid’s Club and whenever Taco Bell got Batman stuff. Just by law of averages, it’s not a surprise that so many of my childhood memories revolve around McDonald’s, but we also ate at Little Caesar’s quite a bit and the only memory I can cook up of that is “sucked”.

Actually here’s a fun Little Caesar’s fact: I knew it was a rough week for my dad’s bank account when we got Little Caesar’s instead of going to the actual good pizza place. If Friday night dinner was Little Caesar’s and Saturday night was cube steak, there’s a good chance some kind of check was bouncing.

But back to McDonald’s. It was a bright Sunday, some time in spring as I recall it. I think I was 8, which would put us right around 1990 and the time of the McDonald’s Dick Tracy Crime Stopper Scratch-off game, during which I won many a fry and Coke. My father had the McDlt, which was a tasty sandwich whose styrofoam packaging was essentially The Punisher but for ocean life. I had a Happy Meal, probably McNuggets with barbecue sauce. I believe the toy was a small replica of a Hot Cakes container that turned into a pterodactyl.

This was pre-Playplace and I can’t remember if this was the McDonald’s with the weird child jail, ride-on Fry Guys, and user operated Merry-go-round. What I do remember is a young child named Billy who kept climbing on the table and dancing. His mother was exasperated by this, while his slightly older sister was content to narrate the proceedings. “Mom, Billy’s on the table again”, she’d said as Billy stood dead center on the table, bouncing up and down, as if his mother didn’t notice but had just been broken by Billy’s need to break it down.

My father and I thought this was pretty funny, especially as I was never really a “climb public tables” child. So we’d watch Billy get up to hijinx and I’d transform my Hot Cakes into a pterodactyl. Then Billy’s sister said something that stuck with me for the rest of my life.

“Mom, Mom, Billy’s got a hammer in his pants”

Indeed, the backside of Billy’s drawers were hanging low. I did not have context at the time, but knowing what I know after the birth of my brother, I’d say he definitely breached the Luvs at that point. Didn’t stop him from dancing, in fact, it probably helped. It did stop them from eating though, as Billy finally had to be scooped up and removed from the premises.

My father and I have told this story to each other many times, because it’s essentially a perfect moment. In the years since, we routinely refer to shitting oneself or almost shitting oneself to having “a hammer” in one’s pants. Do I know it happened this way? No. We were halfway across the restaurant. That little girl could have said anything. Maybe she said “hamburg” or something. Maybe dad didn’t have the McDlt or I didn’t get a pterodactyl or I wasn’t using all my force of will to win $40 million in a probably fixed Dick Tracy scratch off game. But maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe the memory is nice enough that I don’t need to see grainy security footage of the actual event. Though it feels weird in 2023 to argue that the truth doesn’t matter, there’s degrees to everything, you know? It doesn’t have to be binary.

Here’s one thing I do know: Billy definitely had a hammer in his pants.

The Best Thing I Ever Made

The most popular thing I’ve ever made is this video of me eating a Dollar Tree steak. I made like $300 off of it back when the YouTube monetization rules were different. It’s not a particularly great video, more of an off the cuff idea, though the comments are impressively mean enough that I had to stop looking.

However, the best thing that I’ve ever made is currently sitting under 500 views.

In the heaviest days of the lockdown, something spoke to me. I had spent a good portion of my days making McDonaldland characters in the 2004 GameCube wrestling game, WWE Day of Reckoning. I got even more entertainment by making entrances for the characters, which eventually evolved into writing entrance music.

Maybe three times in my life, a song has arrived fully formed in my head, to the point where the actual recording of it felt like a cover. One was this song that I wrote after I was interviewed by This Podcast Will Kill You. The other 2 were the entrance themes for Mayor McCheese and the Hamburglar.

I eventually made two episodes of a show with these characters and some rough ideas for a third are floating around on my phone, but once work opened back up and my day reverted back to 80% spreadsheet, the voice that told me what Grimace would do next was silenced. Though occasionally, if it’s quiet, I still hear a whisper that says “The King hires the Hamburglar and names him the Whopper Haver”.

Things I’m Enjoying

I have a Paramount Plus subscription for two reasons:

  1. Beavis

  2. Butt-Head

The show returned this week and I’m overjoyed. It should not work as well as it does, but it’s easily my favorite show on television, even if it makes me feel bad because I love Beavis so much but the episodes that make me laugh the hardest are the ones where he gets the absolute bejeezus knocked out of him. Now if only Paramount would make good on their promise to put up all the old episodes complete with music videos, I could finally retire my bootleg King Turd collection.

Me wearing cheap red sunglasses

Summertime Blues

My body is not a finely tuned machine. It is a questionable collection of too sweet blood, c-grade organ meat and hundreds of thousands of dollars of pharmaceuticals. This particular compilation of materials does not care for the heat. Or the sun. Or, for that matter, the summer.

At the beginning of each summer, my entire body fills with a low thrum of dread that I may be forced to spend all day at a family picnic watching a loosely related group of Bud Light Loyalty Customers play horseshoes while I–with nary a video game in sight–have to deal with whatever children they have custody of for the weekend. It’s been multiple decades since a parent could even drag me to something like that and much worse things have happened to me in the interim–hell, much worse things were probably happening to me at the time–but it’s the horrors that could have been avoided that stick with you the most.

To be fair, I don’t necessarily blame anyone for that. I was born cranky and I’ll die cranky. I don’t really hold on to good memories either; most memories don’t stick with me unless I find them funny, so my recall on the trip to the Sandwich Glass Museum is a little fuzzy, but I remember every time my mom’s ex fell asleep on the toilet.

If I think about it, I can recall good things that happened during the summer. There was no school for one. And using my child of divorce powers, I saw Terminator 2 like 4 times even though I was way under 17. But I don’t get a visceral summer nostalgia because the things that I associate with summer–surf, sand, and fun–are not things that I care to associate with myself.

And then it happened.

A wonderful summer memory floated to the surface as I sat directly in front of the air conditioner and played Street Fighter II. This is what summer meant to me. The cold air drying out my eyeballs. The Street Fighter II AI absolutely handing me my ass. Shirtless and screaming “how is he throwing two sonic booms?!” while drinking soda in a room so cold it doesn’t really need to be refrigerated. Summer is here and I’ll be goddamned if I spend it outside with the bugs.

And yes, in the picture above those are official Chester Cheetah glasses I got for buying two bags of Sweet Carolina Reaper Cheetos.

Me, wearing googles and half of a hockey mask

Jason Lives!

May is Cystic Fibrosis Awareness Month, so I’d like to talk about Friday the 13th Part VI – Jason Lives.

That sentence may or may not make more sense by the end of this. No guarantees.

Being a product of divorce, I spent more time than I’d like at the workplace of whatever parent was in charge of making sure I didn’t choke on my own mucus. My mom worked in the retail part of a large pharmacy chain and I considered most of the staff to be my friends, though looking back they probably considered me the little kid who wouldn’t shut up but they had to deal with because his mom was the manager. In any case, I often hung around with some Cool TeensTM and made them explain the plots of movies I was too scared to see. Chief among them, the Friday the 13th series.

Sick of telling a first grader the plots of slasher films, one of the kids asked me why I didn’t just see the movies myself. I told him my mom wouldn’t let me. This was a lie. Perhaps owing to the fact that I was a Tiny Tim of a child or just that it was the late 80s, no one ever gave a fuck about what I watched. The truth is, I was scared shitless.

(I do want to take a moment to give a shout out to that guy, Joe, who would occasionally babysit me. Thank you for renting Bloodsport and I’m sorry I almost got you swept up in some vestigial Satanic Panic because I told my grandma you let me try to put a figure four on you and she didn’t understand what that meant.)

One day—either August or October of 1993, when I was ten years old—a friend from school was staying over with me at my grandma’s apartment. On these overnighters, we would usually take turns getting absolutely destroyed by M. Bison in Street Fighter II Turbo and clowning on infomercials until the sun came up. But for whatever reason, my grandma suggested we watch the 8 o’clock movie on WPIX: Friday the 13th Part VI – Jason Lives.

I’ll say this: the title rules and the main villain has a cool name. But I had to disassociate when horror trailers showed in the theater and change the channel when they came on tv. Just renting the Friday the 13th game for the NES somehow convinced a slightly younger me that Jason Voorhees was going to come out of my toilet and stab me in the asshole while I pooped. But being 10—basically a grown man—I couldn’t say any of that. I tried to weasel my way out of it with “oh, that sounds stupid”, but my friend seemed really into it. It strikes me now that he could have been full of shit too, but he seemed sincere at the time. Either way, neither one of us blinked and at 8 o’clock, I saw my first “modern” horror movie (which at that point was 7 years old).

I suppose it was inevitable. Thanks to a combination of the Crestwood House Monster books in my school library and some aggressive marketing of new VHS releases, I had become obsessed with the Universal Monster films of the 30s and 40s, suffering few sleepless nights in the process. Maybe if there was a Crestwood House book about Jason Voorhees, I would have jumped in sooner. Though since I lived in absolute terror of a Freddy doll I accidentally brushed past at Toys r Us once, I’d probably still have to be pushed.

After high school, I lost touch with the friend that watched the movie with me, though I somehow doubt he would even remember seeing it. It’s funny how things affect people differently. I was never in a completely dark room for probably a year after that viewing and had started sleeping under the covers as if a thin, borderline transparent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comforter was going to stop a machete, but I still felt the need to march to the local video store and take advantage of their 99 cent catalog rentals to see all the Friday the 13th movies. Then I saw all the Halloween movies. Then all the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. You know the rest.

Over the years, I’ve found myself explaining the particular joys of the Friday the 13th series to many a befuddled coworker or acquaintance. “Why do you watch that filth?” they ask. “Psychic pollution” they call it. It’s easy to fall back on “you just don’t get it” and feel that little outsider rush, but I legitimately want everyone to enjoy Jason Lives and I feel a particular failure when I can’t explain it’s charms. So let me try here.

The first thing that struck me about Jason Lives is that Jason is a Frankenstein. He’s resurrected by a lightning bolt and the first shot of him in the movie is a succession of three increasing tight shots stitched together just like James Whale showed Karloff for the first time in 1931’s Frankenstein. Then he rips out a guy’s heart by punching him straight through the chest. I do not know if that says anything about the human condition, but it sure does make me glad to be alive (I did not yet know this guy as Ron Pallilo, Horschack from Welcome Back, Kotter because that didn’t start showing on Nick at Nite until 1995)

Being that I consider myself a bit of a Frankenstein—a genetic abomination cursed to wander the world in search of purpose—I’m a sucker for a good Frankenstein story. Though Friday the 13th Part VI – Jason Lives isn’t really a Frankenstein story; it’s a story about a murder machine who happens to be a Frankenstein now. Still that lightning bolt was helpful in bringing me on board and adds a level of unreality that makes the rest of the film a little more fun.

Like Karloff’s Frankenstein, there’s something lovable—or at least likable—about Jason Voorhees. I think it’s because Jason doesn’t toy with his prey. Michael Myers will show up in your neighbor’s house, steal his sister’s tombstone and put it above your dead friend just to get a reaction. He’s a dick. Freddy will talk shit the entire time he’s murdering you with a goddamn power glove. Total dick move. Jason will punch your heart out, but only because you tried to light his corpse on fire and lightning happened to strike. Not being killed by Jason follows similar rules to not being killed by a shark. If you want to keep your leg, stay out of the ocean. If you want to keep your heart, don’t go to Crystal Lake.

Aside from the lovability of mass murderers, Friday the 13th Part VI – Jason Lives is a movie that starts conversations, often between the screen and the audience, about what you would do if you did find yourself in Crystal Lake (though the town attempted a rebrand in this movie and changed it’s name to Forest Green). Famously, director Tom McLaughlin added a shot of a victim’s American Express card silently floating in a puddle so the audience could add their own “Don’t Leave Home Without It” punchline (for the younger audience, this slogan was everywhere for roughly 20 years). And anytime Jason shows up, it’s bound to start a round of “What would you do?” For example, if I were 10 years old and Jason busted through the door of my summer camp cabin, I would shit every pair of pants I’d ever owned. Honestly, my answer is probably the same at 38. I’m not going to pretend I’d be a hero or find a way to weasel my way out. If I managed to make it out of that situation without being folded in half the wrong way, it would be pure dumb luck. The machete came close but didn’t swing my way that day.

I suppose that machete can represent anything you want it to, though if you’ll allow me a moment to connect the obvious dots for you, seeing Jason would make me shit myself and having CF has made me shit myself. 

A movie starting up those conversations—about death, not about me shitting myself—was important to me at that time. Very few people want to talk about death with a kid. I get it. It’s weird. It seems like you say the wrong thing and you’ve broken that child for years, or at least given them something to talk about in therapy. But you can’t hand a child a bunch of pills and be like “if you don’t take these every time you eat, your body will have a booboo” forever. I constantly wanted to talk about death, but I also didn’t ever want to have a Very Special Conversation about it, which seem to be the only two acceptable conversations the average person will have about death. 

I think that’s what made staring death in it’s hockey masked face so appealing to me as a rat-tailed wheeze machine. Other than the specter of my own, I hadn’t seen a lot of death at that point, so it was a mystery to me. Horror helped me talk about it. Even when the “booboo” talk has to go, it’s usually replaced with flowery, soft focus inspiration, or worse yet, bible stories.. I’m not really interested in either of those. 

But all these years later, I’m still interested in Friday the 13th Part VI – Jason Lives. I’ve seen more death and so I can truly appreciate that there are no dignified deaths in Friday the 13th Part VI (or any other part for that matter). It’s a beautiful touch, because while there’s a chance that dignified death exists in real life, I’ve never seen one. More often it seems to involve being broken beyond recognition and then put out of your misery way too late. It’s not fun.

It is fun to see a hockey masked Frankenstein use the wall of an RV to make an imprint of someone’s face. Contrary to the popular wisdom (and perhaps some other entries in the franchise), the characters in Friday the 13th Part VI – Jason Lives are mostly likable, save for a paintball guy or three, so it’s not like you end up cheering for every death. But there’s something to be said for looking death directly in the face and seeing it rip a guy’s arm off while you get to walk away. No, it’s not real, but there’s a small part of the brain that registers a “I can’t believe I made it through that.”

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May being both Cystic Fibrosis Awareness Month and the month of my birth, I end up thinking about Jason Lives a lot around this time. In fact, last year while I was furloughed from my job, I was going to do a livestream/concert for the dogs that consisted of the Theme from Cheers, a wrestling entrance theme I wrote for Mayor McCheese, and the Alice Cooper song “He’s Back (The Man Behind the Mask)”, which plays over the credits of Friday the 13th Part VI. I ended up going back to work before that happened, but I did manage to dig up a demo I made of “He’s Back”, which I present to you below.

The Old Amorphis Logo on a Bottle of Pills

Death Metal Improved My Lung Function

I don’t know how many of you have done a Pulmonary Function Test, so here’s a quick rundown: inhale as much air as you can then exhale it into a machine as hard, fast, and long as you can. Here’s some footage of Nick Nolte passing out while doing one:

The fun starts at 0:34

Nick has made a crucial mistake here and it’s one that I made for actual decades: force does not equal volume.

The problem with the Pulmonary Function Test is that it’s effort dependent. Whereas I can test my blood sugar with no more effort than pricking a finger or attaching a little sensor to my stomach every 10 days (shout out to the Dexcom G6–you blew a ton of my money on a Super Bowl ad and sometimes you come up with a ridiculous reading, but I’ll love you right up to the moment that they finally crack non-invasive glucose testing)–a PFT requires a lot from me: at least three of my hardest, longest breaths (repeatability matters!). 

If I were an athlete, I’d say it’s the difference between a drug test and running a sprint, in that one is passive and the other can be affected by the weather, my mood, or even the time of day. But I am not an athlete, so I will not say that.

I will liken the PFT to singing, but I’ll do it later. First, a small detour through medication.

In December 2019, I started Trikafta, the latest Cystic Fibrosis drug from Vertex Pharmaceuticals. Like Orkambi and Symdeko before it, Trikafta uses a combination of drugs to help out my busted Cystic Fibrosis Transmembrane Regulator (CFTR) protein by getting it to the surface of my cells and making it function in a more normal way with it gets there. Basically, more salt and water can pass through my cells and my mucus is less sticky. It works pretty well!

It also costs roughly $300,000 a year, but for now I will simply mention its price, partially charity funded development and incredible profit margin in passing so you know how I feel about high drug prices (against!).

The phenomenal shareholder value of Trikafta does shade my view of it slightly, though I have to say I feel better than I ever have. Some of that has to do with circumstances–working at home has done wonders for my health–and Trikafta hasn’t taken any medications off the table, leaving me with a current total of 12 daily medications, give or take a nasal spray. Plus I did pretty well on Orkambi and Symdeko before moving to Trikafta, so my lung function didn’t take a huge leap on Trikafta. Not at first, anyway.

When I started Trikafta there was a month or two where I brought up stuff that felt like it’d been in my lungs for years. Neat! It’s very satisfying to cough up a crusty piece of brown gunk that’s in the shape of your bronchial tree. But for the first official clinic PFTs I did 3 months after starting Trikafta, my lung function actually dipped down a little bit. That was disappointing when I was expecting record highs. If crusty old mucus wasn’t holding me back, that meant that maybe my lungs were just beat up after so many years of abuse and this was the best they would ever be.

As it turns out, I was holding back my lung function.

PFTs measure a lot of things, but there are really only two things that I care about: FVC and FEV1. FVC is Forced Vital Capacity which is a measure of the total amount of air exhaled. FEV1 is Forced Expiratory Volume in 1 second or the amount of air you can blow out in 1 second. When asked to move as much air as I can in 1 second, what I hear is “how quickly can you give yourself a headache?” I was taking the “forced” in Forced Expiratory Volume too literally.

Pre-pandemic I made two incredible decisions though only one is really relevant here: I bought an electric drum kit in December 2019 (if you’re curious, the other decision was not taking a job in a city that got rocked by ‘rona). At the time, my drum skills were limited to some Rock Band I’d played 10 years prior, so I essentially made a $400 bet that I’d actually learn and play the drums. About 10 weeks later I was furloughed from my job for about two months. Guess who’s an adequate drummer now?

I learned that if you want to get better at something, do it every day. Even if you do it poorly at first, you’ll eventually get better through sheer repetition. Maybe not great–I also spent some time trying to learn piano and my progress there has been slow–but better.

So if I wanted to get better PFTs, I should do them everyday.

Just sitting on my ass and breathing as hard as I can isn’t the same thing as putting up big lung numbers. The process of PFTs requires a feedback loop; I need a number that I can beat myself up about. Luckily, since I’m enrolled in a continuation study for Trikafta and it wasn’t/isn’t exactly safe to go to the hospital just for fun, I got mailed a handheld spirometer that hooks up to my phone.

The research coordinator was a little nervous when I said she’d be shocked by the amount of data she got from me, but so far no one has said anything. Immediately after my morning medicines, I do a couple PFTs to see how the lungs are. For the first few weeks, the efforts weren’t great, essentially matching what I had done at the clinic. I had assured everyone for years that if they just let me practice I could put up some big numbers and it was starting to look like I was full of shit instead of air. But I eventually realized that in forcing out the air so hard that I got light headed, I was actually closing up my airways. 

It wasn’t until I was listening to Amorphis’s tremendous 1999 album Tuonela that I figured out what I had to do: I had to growl.

I think Tuonela is the first album I ever owned with growls on it. It’s not really a death metal album–more of a dark progressive rock thing–making it somewhat controversial among the fanbase and somewhat ignored by the band. I celebrate the entire catalog though as Amorphis are a beast too beautiful to be contained by one genre and Tuonela is one of my favorite albums ever.

The song “Greed”–the middle in a triptych of absolute bangers–has a very long and low growl in the beginning that I’ve never been able to replicate, though I’ve tried for roughly 22 years. Possibly because I have bad technique, I noticed I move a lot of air when I do it, far more than I was moving in my PFTs. So I growled into the spirometer.

Ladies, gentlemen, and non-binary friends, we had an all time record.

The growl happens around the 0:45 mark, but the whole thing’s a treat.

It doesn’t really count if you can’t hit it more than once, so I did it every day until I could. In doing so, I modified and refined my technique. My PFTs got a little worse at first–any time I make a “breakthrough” learning anything, I tend to get a little worse at said thing before I get comfortable with the new technique–but I eventually learned to play my lungs like an accordion. It still makes a weird noise when I do the test, but now it’s less like a dinosaur roar and more like a ghost taking a dump. See for yourself!

This video is a demonstration breath that I did after my normal testing, so I’m a little tired and I sort of cough it out at the beginning, but you get the idea.

For those that would like to play along at home, first I inflate my chest as much as possible, using my diaphragm for overflow storage. I think it might help to practice a few inhales while not inflating your rib cage, but when it’s showtime, you want air everywhere you can put it. Then I like to visualize doing a long, low growl and really focus on keeping every airway as open as possible. Then I send out as much air as I can, making sure to not do it so hard I start closing off airways (though I still don’t get it right every time). When it works, the whole house gets to hear the resonant frequency of my lungs/throat, a sort of low “ugggggghhhh” sound.

The first time I did this in an actual hospital setting–hitting the note in the rehearsal room is one thing, but it’s doesn’t mean shit if you can’t do it on the big stage–I warned the technician that I would be making a weird noise and would probably breathe out for longer than they’re used to. Thankfully, the larger apparatus of the clinic spirometer ate up most of the noise, but I think they were wildly unprepared for how long I would take. Not only did I hit a personal record, but I bested my previous FEV1 by .2L, which is kind of a lot. I had done about a 3.47L three months prior, which was a small bit away from my previous best, 3.54L which I did about two years prior to Trikafta. My new clinic record is 3.69L (nice).

This is a graph of my lung function over time. FVC is in blue, FEV1 in orange. I made Predicted FVC gray and Predicted FEV1 yellow. I also included some linear trendlines so you can see that by 2022 I’ll be unstoppable.

I expected a parade to accompany this new record, preferable one where the ticker tape would be my old medical records that they no longer needed because I’d never have to come back. Instead I got, “we just want to make sure you’re still using your Acapella device and doing regular airway clearance”. I hate the Acapella–I’m a threshold PEP man, thank you very much–because my hot breath renders it useless, but if you say that to a medical professional they essentially view it as suicidal ideation, so I usually just say “yeah, I’ll try that out again”. Sometimes it’s just easier to tell them what they want to hear. 

What they don’t want to hear is that my airway clearance regimen includes death growls and attempting to drum Judas Priest’s “Painkiller”. In their defense, there is more clinical data on the Acapella device and I don’t think any of them have heard “Painkiller”.

My lungs still aren’t perfect–my FEV1/FVC ratio is on the high end of low because I screw myself by coming in for too soft of a landing–but maybe there’s a song that can help me with that.

To be clear, I could not have gotten to this place had Trikafta not cleared out the nastier corners of my airways, making it so I could get out more growls without choking on mucus, but it alone was not enough. I also required 10-11 other medications, practice, luck (my health took a big upswing when I started working at home), money (those prescriptions aren’t free!) and Amorphis. But hey, don’t let your disabilities hold you back, right?*

*The current state of discourse on the internet makes me feel like I need to fully explain myself here and say that there are very few–if any–people who are actually attempting to be held back by their disabilities but are instead crushed by a system/society that does not give one single fuck about their situation.

The All Hallow’s Evil All Hallows’ Eve Spooktacular

A man with horns plays a very nice multiscale guitar in front of some $4 "creepy cloth" he bought from Wal-Mart
The budget for this thing was like $200. You know how much this would have cost 10 years ago? At least $30,000.

This starts with a “back in my day…”, but it’s not about how things were better back in my day, so adjust your expectations accordingly.

Back in my day, before personalized entertainment was delivered straight to your pocket 24/7, there were two choices for amusement: watch tv or try to beat the third level in Battletoads. Going outside was also technically an option, but nothing good has ever happened outside, so why bother?

When one’s thumb could no longer withstand the unforgiving plastic of the NES d-pad, one was left to ride the waves of whatever programs were cheap enough to fill the hours between the shows people actually wanted to watch. You know how there are now so many good-to-great tv shows that it just reinforces that the hours left for you on this mortal coil are a rounding error in the actual history of the universe? Wasn’t like that back in my day. There were 3 shows worth watching and in between those 3 shows was a wasteland of things that people would watch just to see something move on that damn screen.

Back in my day, the content well was dry. New movies were not a click away, we had to walk/drive to a damn store and rent an actual tape. So I often just watched whatever was on tv. And thanks to that, I’ve developed a nostalgia for insignificant things that happened before I was born. So in that spirit, I made a Halloween special designed to pay tribute to the hours I wasted watching 70s television in the late 80s/early 90s.

The prime mover on this was the Paul Lynde Halloween Special, which was on Amazon Prime sometime over the summer. It’s from 1976 and is almost painful to watch, but it has KISS lip syncing some tracks from Destroyer and so I’ve seen it more times than I should admit to.

I actually saw KISS earlier this summer and though they do slightly less lip syncing than they did on the Paul Lynde special, it was enough that the idea of doing a one man performance with a backing track seemed less ridiculous to me than it probably should have. All Hallow’s Evil has always used a backing track for drums, but back in the day there were 2-3 of us on stage, so at least all the guitars were live. I always felt that was important, but from what I’m seeing out there, it’s not as important as it used to be.

All Hallow’s Evil didn’t play live a lot, but when we did, we recorded it. On at least two occasions, we were also pretty good! Unfortunately, all of our live performances were from a time before digital video was a big thing, so they’re all trapped on Hi-8 video cassettes and saving them from oblivion requires both knowing where they are and having the means to play them back into a computer. I’d love to see them again if only to find out if we were indeed as good as I thought we were, but in the meantime, I wanted to find out if I’m still as good as I thought I was.

There was some question about that, because when I was 22, youthful exuberance could power me past my limitations–I can’t breathe, dammit!–but I’m 36 and tired now, so the light very well could have died. However, I’m happy to report that I am still one of the great unsung performers of my generation.

It’s on Amazon Prime Video now, so hopefully people accidentally stumble upon it as they search for Peanuts or something like that. You can also enjoy it on YouTube, where it is only two clicks away from some truly heinous shit.*

*One thing that was better back in my day: you could watch random programs without fear that some math problem would eventually start serving you up some Nazi propaganda. 

Dehydration and This Podcast Will Kill You

A heart with a taser, lungs with a switchblade, and a brain with brass knuckles.
The lungs were originally supposed to be swinging intestines like a chain, but for some reason it looked obscene. The background is by Rasa Art Studios (https://instagram.com/rasaartstudios?igshid=1my73yk21hrmt)

I am an indoor cat. The indoors is where all of my favorite stuff is and where one of my least favorite things—the sun—isn’t.

I don’t hate everything outdoors though, as I’ve grown quite a fondness for roller coasters, thrill rides, and anything that can offer me a brief respite from constantly reviewing all the mistakes of my life. So when I was coerced into taking a family vacation earlier this summer, I spent a lot of time on the roller coasters of Busch Gardens, slowly rising above my lot in life before plunging back down to Earth.

In fact, I spent a little too much time on the roller coasters and not enough time at the drink stand, because I managed to work myself up a decent dehydration. I recovered well from it, but in the process I broke my almost month-long streak of solid, no-wipe-needed poops, leaving me with a feeling I can only categorize as “heartbreak.”

So while the rest of the family was floating down the lazy river, I was back in the hotel room playing on the computer and wiping my ass (not at the same time; I’m still paying off that computer). It wasn’t all bad though, because being inside surrounded by screens is all I really wanted anyway.

Sometime between bathroom breaks, one of my screens lit up with a message from This Podcast Will Kill You asking if I’d like to be on their Cystic Fibrosis episode. I, having more words than I know what to do with, immediately said “yes.” Two weeks later, I hopped on Skype and had a wonderful conversation with Erin Welsh and Erin Allmann Updyke, the best parts of which you can hear right here, introducing and closing their excellent episode on Cystic Fibrosis. 

No disrespect to An Introduction to Cystic Fibrosis for Patients and Families, which is/was my go-to CF resource for years, but I wish this episode was available when I was younger. Erin and Erin are able to communicate complicated ideas in ways that only the best amongst us can and this episode taught me everything I know about the actual discovery of CF.

They were also nice enough to offer me the opportunity to play some music on their show. The smart thing to do would have been to ask them to play a song off of the latest All Hallow’s Evil album No Gods, Only Monsters, which is currently available at https://allhallowsevil.bandcamp.com/album/no-gods-only-monsters or wherever digital music is sold. However, none of the songs on that felt thematically appropriate to the conversation we had so I wrote brand new song for the episode, “Complete Somatic Rebellion.” It’s currently available at https://allhallowsevil.bandcamp.com/track/complete-somatic-rebellion and will probably show up on streaming services in a month or so.