just like superman’s blues
I wasn’t sleeping anymore, so I started taking 3AM walks when nobody else was around, shouting out Fanny’s name and doing my best Stanley Kowalski. I love 3AM. You know what F. Scott Fitzgerald said about 3AM? “In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning…”
That’s when I saw it, on a TV in the window of some coffee shop down on Ocean Street: “Cranium Killer Strikes Again.” This time was different, though. He was getting closer. This time, he was just a few blocks away.
Imagine that, a serial killer right here in Santa Monica. The last time we had an honest-to-God serial killer of our own was Michael Thomas Gargiulo back in 2008, but all he did was go around stabbing people. I don’t count Whitey Bulger. Mobsters do not qualify as serial killers, no matter how many people they murder. And anyway, Whitey was from Boston, not Santa Monica.
This time, Action News reporter Flint Rockway reported, the Cranium Killer not only bashed in his victim’s skull and removed their brain, he absconded with it as well. Now, that is really unsettling, knowing there is somebody’s brain out there, all alone, without even so much as a skullcap to keep it warm.
The victim, 18-year-old Carson Kannin, suffered from what is known as SCID, Severe Combined Immune Deficiency syndrome. That’s right, Kannin was a bubble boy.
Along with Tod Lunitch and Jimmy Livingston, Carson Kannin was forced to live a life sealed in Saran Wrap, except for brief stints in an astronaut suit. Bubble boys have been the inspiration for several movies, and even an episode of the TV comedy show Seinfeld.
On top of that, now it seems that Fedor Jeftichew, the dog-face boy, is missing. Friends down at the Freakshow say the last time they saw him was three days ago when he went out to play Frisbee on the beach. Maybe the Frisbee went in the ocean and he got eaten by a shark, like Pippet the dog in Jaws. Never mind. That was mean. See why I don’t like looking at the freaks? Turns me into a cynic, just like everybody else.
Of course I was still on my mission to get my brain to heel; I hadn’t forgotten about that. But no amount of autoerotic asphyxiation, hanging myself, or putting my head through a wall seemed to have any lasting effect at all.
No matter how much paint thinner or patio sealant I inhaled, still I knew dark forces were in charge of the world’s finances, lending money to desperate nations in order to establish permanent tax structures.
No matter how many times I jabbed myself in the ear with an ice pick or how many holes I drilled in my head, still I knew that seemingly harmless appliances like old television sets and computers break down over time in landfills and create mercury and arsenic toxins that spill over into the water supply. Even old food waste decomposes and is released into the air as methane gas, twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide. Take that, Al Gore!
Anyway, the real reason the polar ice caps are melting is the alien invasion force from Germanicus. Right?
What I forgot to mention is that some of those germs in the north are currently stationed at what used to be Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. So the story goes, when Greenland annexed that patch of ice where Superman had his weekend retreat, the First Citizen of Metropolis defaulted on his property taxes. Superman never was very smart with money. You don’t make much as a beat reporter in a dying industry, and after sending half his paycheck home to his grey-haired old mother, there just wasn’t enough left over to pay the taxes on his icy-cold, love nest.
You see, Superman’s Fortress of Solitude was not in the middle of the North Pole, hidden way away like you might think. He actually built it close to the water so he could keep an eye on all those Icelandic hotties in their fox-fur bikinis. Superman was a perv, or didn’t you know that? Why do you think he had super-powered, x-ray vision?
And why was he always running around in his underwear, showing off his muscles? Remember, the Man of Steel gave up all his superpowers just to get a little nookie. All life is sex, whether you’re a lovestruck germaphobe from Santa Monica, California, or a superhero from a dying planet twenty-seven light years away in the Corvus Constellation.
Did you know that Superman’s original country estate was called the Secret Citadel and was located in the mountains just outside Metropolis? He built his new hideaway, the Fortress of Solitude, way out in the boonies to avoid property taxes. The moral to the story: you’ll never escape property taxes. They’ll find you wherever you go, be it the Kalaallit Nunaat low arctic tundra, the Moon, Jupiter or Mars.
The way I saw it, if Superman made the conscious decision to trade in his super powers for a woman, why couldn’t I?
Besides, who decided I had to know so much in the first place? Why couldn’t I just sit there like I didn’t know anything at all, watch TV, stare at the wall? Why couldn’t I just slop up hot dogs, swill down Coca-Cola, and snack on Cheetos all day long like everyone else?
Even after putting my head in that vise again and squeezing it until my eyes nearly popped out, still I knew that TV episodes are broken up into diminishing segments to keep you from concentrating, to keep your mind soft so that the ads have more punch.
Even after slamming my head repeatedly with a car door, still I knew that hot dogs are made from hog snouts, pig lips, and chicken carcasses, all squeezed through metal grates, blasted with high-pressure water, then mixed with powders, preservatives, red food coloring, and squeezed through plastic tubes until they come out as the delicious, tasty little Red Hots we all know and love.
No matter how many times I hit myself over the head with a frying pan, still I knew that while Coke is teaching the world to sing, it’s also using up a large portion of the drinking water in India, drying-up wells for local villages and dumping cadmium, chromium, and other carcinogens into the water supply. Chromium, like in the movie Erin Brokovich.
Despite jumping headfirst into the shallow end of a swimming pool, still I remembered that Cheetos are made with an artificial food coloring known as Yellow dye #6. This synthetic azo dye is derived from petroleum, crude oil, and side effects range from asthma, eczema, migraine headaches, even cancer.
Something you might want to think about: in a world where you have to watch out for Cheetos, a seemingly harmless snack food that’s made to look like little carrots, you can just imagine what else is going on out there.
No matter what I did, no amount of banging or bashing, huffing or puffing, strangling or suffocation, no amount of damage I could do to my brain stopped me from knowing all the horrible truths about life and the world around me.
