lateral obsessions

i've put up a new blog - with a growing amount of the old couch of doom reviews, as well as more fresh stuff. it's just a dumping ground, really, but i like it.

you can find it at http://www.lateralobsessions.com

new stuff and archive

i've been promising an archive of my work for ages.

so, i finally got around to figuring out the google groups system and have found it a fantastic way to archive my work. yay! so check out the link...

lots of creepy and hatboy stuff there, including the ebooks...

don't spoil the rush

hatboy has locked himself in the garage. i feel sorry for him. it’s hard enough for me to keep my sanity, what with the pizza delivery drivers still on strike, as well as the added stress of the theft of our soldier, but hatboy’s always been a softie on the inside.

i made myself some coffee. the coffee had mutated, evolved in the dark place under the sugar. it smelled strong, potent, and filled with nutty flavour. it bubbled. it squirmed in the container, and squealed as i poured the boiling water over it. i tried to ignore the strange evolution of our only coffee supply, and instead concentrated on how to coerce the sugar into taking a bath in the not-quite hot enough water. the sugar has always been picky about the temperature of its bath.

i drank the coffee slowly, careful not to drink too much in one sip.

it burned into my mouth. it slid down my throat, its tiny fingers clawing the edges of my swallowing tubes. it scraped holes down the side, and i screamed as it bit into my stomach to stop being murdered in the acid bath. i heard it hiss as it died, consumed by the skanky acids, faces burning in flame unnatural.

and then, like some train ploughing off its rails, it smashed into my face. my head crunched, and i felt the dizzy kind of back-of-the-throat taste as concussion enveloped my eyes. stars, i swear i saw them, melting on the edge of survival.

tripping over the violet curtain, i tried to crawl into the bathroom to be violently sick, but the coffee rush snaked around my brainstem, squeezing its revenge. i saw the moment of my birth, countless eons ago. i saw the nature of my demise. i saw the seven faces skimming the cold dish, their tongues lapping up dishwater, lips foaming bubbles of washing-liquid froth. their faces twisted and were scratched out of my memory with pins.

and then, just as i thought everything was going to be fine, the black ice froze my insides, boring great holes into my brain until i was hollow.

when i woke, i rushed to tell hatboy not to touch the colombian blend. but it was too late. he was squirming on the floor in front of the television, screaming, “the spiders! why haven’t they stopped crawling around my chest? are they mad? are they looking for something? i left my pencils upstairs!”

i thought i’d help him, so i hit him on the head until he closed his eyes to sleep.

sometimes it’s fun being this heroic.

support vs. tolerence

politicians invaded our television today.

they’re going to war again. this time, they say, it’s righteous.

this time, god is on our side.

god was on our side last time, too.

centuries ago, the knights invaded the middle east in search for holy places to loot. along the way, they decided to do some pillaging.

today, the politicians are going to invade small bits of some country. along the way, they’re going to loot the entire country and do some serious liberating of all that oppressed oil.

they’re being polite about it, though. they’re handing out leaflets to the locals to make them feel a lot better about their lives.

“we’re only doing this,” the leaflets say, “because we have to. we’re not enjoying this at all. not one bit. if you could kill your neighbours for us, it’ll help us a whole lot and we promise to import our sitcoms in exchange for your cooperation. have a nice day. and don’t forget, as soon as we’ve changed you for the better, to eat at mcdonalds!”

sounds like a bargain to me.

kill for cosby.

hatboy wonders when the movie’s coming out.

i tell him i hope stephen segal’s not in it.

segal gives me the creeps.

robert z'dar's jaw

“wow. look at it move!”

“it’s worse than watching one of ninjagirl’s zombie films! it can’t be real. no way it’s real.”

“it looks real enough.”

“it looks deadly. you think he needs a licence to carry it around with him?”

“has to. no way it should be allowed to roam about on its own.”

“imagine running into it on a dark night.”

“no thanks.”

“it’s, like, hypnotic and stuff.”

“oh no! he’s talking! make him stop, it’s creeping me out!”

“it’s aliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive!!!”

george

“hi, creepy. i can’t decide what to do with my next movie. i’m completely stuck. any ideas?”

“what’s it called, george?”

“star wars seven.”

“that title’s got to go for starters. too predictable.”

“oh, thanks. hang on. let me get a pen.”

“sure, take your time.”

“right. got it. fix the title. what about realistic dialogue this time?”

“dialogue? what do you need that for? just put in a few more explosions, give us a new colour lightsaber, and give yoda some hair. preferrably candy apple red. that’ll save you money on having to hire writers.”

“brilliant idea! anything else?”

“yeah, put more boobies in it this time.”

“right. boobies. done.”

klingons in the biscuit tin

i had to battle a rogue band of klingons who had decided to make off with the biscuit tin today. their leader, a savage looking mutant, with terrible scarring to his cheek, proclaimed the choc-chippy goodness as prize, won in fair battle.

of course, blood rituals were involved, so after much spillage, they considered the payment justified the siezing of the treasure. i disagreed.

much to the amusement of the larger klingons, i offered to fight for my biscuit tin. they asked how much blood i was willing to leak onto the tiles.

i glanced at the pale unwashed porcelain and grunted. as little as humanly possible.

the battle commenced at oh-one hundred. in the darkness of the kitchen, we stealthed each other into corners and whacked ourselves senseless with foam batons. i was in the middle of mashing their leader’s head against the fridge, when one interfered, much to the dismay of his comrades, and proceeded to give me what i could only call ‘one hell of a mmf mmf, ouch.”

because of his interference, i was rewarded with my choc-chip biscuit tin, complete with a replacement packet, and grudgingly told i would not be seeing them in the future.

i pity the poor inexperienced one, because he no doubt found himself cleaning the ovens for the next few weeks.

i, in the meantime, have established a healthy respect for klingon women, and hope one day to travel to the klingon homeworld to further encourage my newly discovered tolerance for strange foreheads.

a dingo stole my coffee

hatboy fills the cup full of java goodness. hot steaming coffee tickles our lungs and swamps our eyelids.

we make slurpy yummy noises and tippy-toe to the couch.

hatboy warns me not to spill a drop on the carpet, advice i regretably ignore.

“now you’ve had it,” he tells me. “the coffee dingo will come steal your coffee now.”

“coffee dingo?” i scoff.

he tells me of the time he spilt some coffee on the duvet. “just a drop, it was.”

the coffee dingo had come, silently sneaking through the house on his paws of much coffee-stealy. “i only turned to the television for a second. to watch the cheerleaders do their little dance, you understand?”

i nod, understanding.

“then, quicker than it took for them to do their jiggy dance of much eye-explodey, the coffee dingo slipped into the room and slipped out again, into the night. and i’ve never spilled a drop since.”

i asked if he actually saw the coffee dingo. hatboy shakes his head. “didn’t even see the swift flicker of its spooky shadow, and that was the creepiest thing about the entire incident.”

i think of the many times i’ve filched hatboy’s coffee. “i don’t think any nasty dingo’s going to steal my coffee,” i tell him. i’m very confidant about that.

hatboy shrugs. “it’s your spillage,” he says.

i place my coffee on the table beside me, and look about for the guide to foxtel’s night of horrors.

when i turn back, my coffee has been filched.

presumably, somewhere out there, in the dim dank night, a lonely dingo pads slowly toward a healthy shadow, where he sits back on his haunches, exhales a long sigh and, hugging my mug close to his hairy face, begins to softly sip that much-beaned goodness.

hatboy looks wise. “i told you so.”

“damn your super-sidekick powers of much dingo-knowy.”

attack of the souped-up ramen noodle brigade 2: post-attack rituals

later, as we sat in front of winona ryder on tv, hatboy blew on his coffee to send steamy ghosts into the air. “y’know that thing you did with the second noodle ogre? how’d you do that?”

“oh, it’s just a matter of turning their wrists until you hear a soggy snap.”

“delightful sound.”

“wasn’t it? what about the squishy noises they made when i rammed their leader into the pot.”

“still gives me the giggles.”

“you didn’t finish all of your warrior.”

“i’m saving some for my burgers.”

“not noodleburgers again? how you can do that with perfectly good defeated ramen is beyond me.”

“think you can defeat another army tomorrow?”

“i don’t think so. we’re being ravaged by a band of sneaky sausage rolls and tomato sauce beasts, remember?”

“oh, yeah. i forgot. wednesday?”

“the spooky kebab creatures of khalim.”

“saturday?”

“i think i could fit them in.”

hatboy patted his ample girth. “me too.”

attack of the souped-up ramen noodle brigade

we had just walked through the door, armfuls of corn chips, coca-cola, jaffas, strawberry and creams, choc milk, bbq shapes, chilli dip, and winona ryder goodness, when we were swiftly set upon by a dastardly brigade of mutant ramen warriors.

“creepy!” my super-sidekick yelled as he was thrown to the ground by two rather ugly mutations. “we’re under attack! forget me! run away and seek revenge for my death at the hands of my merciless noodle captors who will no doubt torture me for many years with all kinds of insane devices! i shall not give in, though! i shall fight with my last breath and as that last breath comes, i know you will come and boil these buggers in a soup of their own making!”

i stepped back. “no! i will battle with you, side by side until the noodles are broken! their cunning shells are no match for my martial arts!”

“martial arts? creepy! you don’t know any martial arts!”

“ah, but i do! i never told you about my time in the jungles many years ago. when i got lost in the vine-like horror of our laundry, i was taken under the wing of a jedi chi master who taught me to defend myself from such evils as this! i will crush their noodley arms and gnaw on their bones!”

“look out! they’re all around you!”

“all the better to do - this!”

and this i did.

this site's gematriculator rating

the borg have a plan 8: dreams from green alcoves

it’s been six days since we were implanted with borg technology. hatboy’s been wandering around the house in the daytime, his implants making him do strange stuff. like cleaning the dust from off the top of the kitchen cupboards.

i’m re-evaluating my borg-lacking-humour theory.

the implants have brought back my dreams. i dreamed last night of a possum, caught in the crossbeams of a semi-trailer. the driver saw it, but didn’t bother to slow, beep his horn, or swerve a little to miss it. he just left it up to some weird trailerpark trash god he’d known when he was a kid.

the possum rode the rest of the way, half its brains spread across the wheels of the semi, like a post-modern sculpture in motion. stray electrons filtered into the brain, letting it know pain without awareness.

i dreamed that the hitch-hiker standing at the side of the road was watching the truck pull closer in the night. he put his hand out, and waited for the truck to slow. he didn’t try too hard to get it to stop, and nor did he encourage it by waving. he just left it up to some weird hitch-hiking god he’d known when he was a kid.

the truck did stop, and the hitch-hiker got in, sat through ten minutes of stunted sentences, pulled out a bowie knife and stuck it as far as it would go into the throat of the driver.

glancing into the corner of my eye at the time, i realised it was almost three pm. time to wake up.

i watched the red dribble down from the driver’s seat and puddle between his motionless feet.

what the hell, i thought. give it another fifteen minutes to see if it gets interesting.

the borg have a plan 7: waking with implants

we wake with implants. somehow, as we slept, seven of nine transported us home. hatboy’s got a silver implant jutting out of his cheek. i distinctly remember seeing a similar thing on angus of borg. i’ve got two on my face, one on my belly button, and two on my inner thigh. we’ve both got one sticking up from our wrists.

my eyes feel funky, but i think that’s more to do with the hangover.

hatboy’s freaking out. “what have they done! they said we were getting tattoos!”

“well, they’re kind of like tattoos,” i croak, wishing he’d lower his voice. “they’re collectable, at least.”

he doesn’t think i’m funny. he flails about, his arms smashing into cupboards, upending drawers. his mouth is foaming. at least now we know what one of his implants does.

after the berserker implant has decided to quit filling his body with berserk nanoprobes, we skulk into the lounge to watch some television, and i finally figure out why my eyes feel funky. at the corner of my vision, a small digital clock ticks over. it is green, which is pretty slippy.

i try to tell hatboy about it, but he seems a little distressed. i think he’s also found out how one of his other implants functions.

after about two minutes he looks a little better about it.

“hey,” he says. “i don’t think this is going to be so bad.”

we couch and i reach for the remote. the television switches on without my touching our little buddy. i frown. “it’s never done that before.”

hatboy looks startled. “our wrists,” he says. “remoties!”

i aim my wrist at the television and think of channel 25.

hatboy thinks of channel 6.

i think of channel 19.

hatboy thinks of channel 5.

i think to 7.

he beats me to 9.

we do 8, 11, 1, 2, and i’m about to think us to 10, when we find 13, a previously blocked channel. it seems our wrists now decode child-locks.

hatboy grins and we decide to couch with the sights and sounds of two grown adults, engaged in what could only be described as “doin’ the nasty.”

implants are slippy.

the borg have a plan 6: the dream half-remembered

i don’t know. can’t remember.

the whole world is spinning. what’s that? oh, a tattoo? no? what? implant shmimplant.

i think i’d like to go sleepy bo-bos now. what? your face looks funny.

stop staring at me. i wish you’d not talk so loud. how can you be so chirpy?

what’s that? hey, that’s smooth.

ouch!

where am i?

blue rings of saturn fill the viewscreen. i am an amoeba. my blobby flesh expands and is consumed. so many voices spilling down my spine like trickles of red wine. fizzy on my tongue.

huh?

no. i don’t know what you did with the remote.

turn the channel.

turn the fucking channel!

the static, it won’t re-tune.

nothing.

quiet.

equilibrium.

and somewhere, out there in the distance, a lone sailor plots his course. the stars shine, and his face is held, proud against the wind. “we are sailing,” he tells me. “forever sailing.”
shut up.

be silent.

you’re going to spoil it all. the mood, you see.

the children. he said the children would come for us. with knives.

what children? his children.

i don’t understand. fast eddie reaps the whirlwind.

ouch! quit sticking needles into me. what are you doing?

i think i want to sleep now.

voices. too many. itching my eardrums.

who is it? come in. oh, hi. how are you? did you get my letter? i wrote it two weeks ago. i don’t understand. if you didn’t get it, did it get lost in the post? it’s such a small thing.

by the way, did you know that you’ve just been assimilated?

the borg have a plan 5: american sitcoms

we beam back to the cube, and search for a place to slump. groaning borg fill the alcoves, and lie sprawled across the gangplanks, being sick. seven leads us to a small alcove area which seems deserted. she gets ready to plug herself in, and hatboy passes out at her feet.

i hear a sound, like a terrible moaning. not the kind of moaning you make when you’re really really drunk, but the kind of moaning you make as your life slips further from your fingers.

“what’s that?” i ask.

seven looks down at me, an almost-smile passing across her face with all the real presence of an apparition.

i crawl to the small doorway from where the sound is coming from. inside, a group of weird drones sit in comfy chairs. their eyes are stapled open. they’re watching american sitcoms. they’re strapped to their chairs, and the sound is being plugged into their bubbling brains in 3d surround sound.

dolby.

i shudder. “my coke god, seven. that’s horrible!”

“no, creepy of borg,” she tells me. “that’s species 9675.”

the borg have a plan 4: seven of nine and her merry drones

after liberating the planet from their opressive individuality, the borg decide to party. borg parties are odd affairs, and i attempt to get into the spirit of things by collecting bits of broken metal and sticking it to various parts of my body with a mix of various adhesives which seven swears will not last through the night. “sure, they’ll fall off by morning,” she tells me.

i begin to wonder if the borg lack of humour is merely a facade. i decide not to stick any more pieces to vital parts of my anatomy, just in case.

hatboy’s artistic approach to throwing-up has earned him the nickname “chucky the chunderous of borg” by several borg admirers, who assimilate his vomit-landscapes from where he sprays them on the pavement. they take the little pieces of alcohol-induced art up to the cube to decorate their alcoves with.

angus of borg sits in a corner, sipping from a great mug of mead. the lizard lies strewn across the valley, its once massive body assimilated into tiny little pieces, none larger than my pinkie toe.

once the ax-throwing competition has ended, and the winner declared, the drones begin to get terribly drunk, and like most technologically enhanced species they can’t help but get nasty when they’re tiddly. they make incredible boasts, trip each other up, re-assimilate unattatched limbs, and insult each other.

“your momma wears analogue implants!”

the borg have a plan 3: the planet is dull

the planet is a dull brown. the people are fairly non-resistant. they are easily assimilated. seven says they were putting up more of a struggle last time they were here. she says that, once, one of them poked her in the face with a stick.

we are shocked by the rudeness of random stick-poking. seven says that’s why she’s assimilating them. to teach them some manners.

the only real problem we encounter is a giant lizard with fourteen legs and jaws so large it swallows borg whole. seven of nine considers the predicament for a few seconds, then orders the borg to locate angus of borg. one of the other drones shudders. “not angus of borg,” it says. “are we sure?”

“we are borg,” seven says.

the drone complies.

angus of borg is about four feet high, and wears a kilt. he has bright red hair. he grips a gnarled pipe between his yellow teeth. his eye implant is spooky. his sporran has little red lights zipping back and forth like those on that black car from knight rider.

hatboy grins. “see?” he says. “even the borg know kilts are a sign of manliness.”

angus of borg foams at the mouth. he steps toward the lizard, which growls. it is the kind of growl which sends mere mortals running for their feeble lives. but angus, he’s a borg drone, and borg drones don’t run. they walk.

so angus of borg walks forward, both arms extended, fingers curled into claws, and screaming his battlecry; “ah, ye dahrty greet jessie!”

his implant-filled fists smash into the astounded lizard’s skin, sending billions of nonoprobes into its bloodstream. “big fist! angus smash!” yells the pint-sized drone.
nonplused, the lizard reaches down and sniffs the berserk little drone. angus of borg glares up at the massive jaws and teleports into the beastie’s red mouth. little fists flail about from inside the chewing jaws, and the sound of the snarling borg inflicting many nanoprobe-infected wounds, whilst being well-crunched, fills the night. bits of borg fall onto the ground at our feet.

twelve of fifteen collects stuff to light a bonfire with. hatboy settles down to watch the show.

seven of nine begins taking bets.


(this episode dedicated to afrj's infamous angus mcsmashie, whose smorghish parrots will not be forgotten...)

the borg have a plan 2: tonight, we viking

we decide to dress as vikings for the current expedition. hatboy wears an overlarge helmet, with a bent rhinoceros horn on one side and a chickenfoot on the other. he says the rhino horn is for luck. we’re both wrapped in slippy bearskins and our leather boots are scuffed and revolting.

seven says we stink.

we tell her that stinky is the whole point of being a viking. we tell her we’re not going to wash for the duration of the expedition.

she orders the drones to somehow make the cube move faster.

we offer to lend her a bearskin, but she’s not interested. we try to get her to wear a viking hat, or at least a cute little seal pelt.

she tells me that, one day, when i least expect it, when everything is coming up creepy, and the frogs in my attic are croaking nicely, when the revolving doors fail to hit my back on the way out, and when i finally think i’ve tasted the perfect taco, she’s going to do something extremely horrible to me.

i tell her, “horrible is irrelevent.”

she says, “tell that to species 9675.”

the borg have a plan

seven of nine came for a visit today. she brought with her a bunch of friendly-looking borg who began to quietly assimilate our furniture, until seven noticed their doings and told them to stop it.

they’re going on an expedition. some planet is resisting them, and she wants to know if we’d like to join her. hatboy’s a bit dubious. he says his project is almost finished, and he would much prefer to spend his time tinkering.

she tells him that there’ll be plenty of pillaging.

he asks when we’re leaving.

after being transported to the borg cube, hatboy shakes his head and mutters, “how do i get into these messes?”

i grin at him and pat his shoulder. “resistance is futile,” i tell him.

polecat the mean

he knocked on the door and woke us up in the late afternoon. he pointed at the sign we’d left on our door for the lost surfer. he told us that he figured it meant we knew fluid. we told him what we knew of the legend, and he filled us in on some of the blanks.

fluid never said the word ‘globule’, and never owned anything blue, just in case.

polecat, on the otherhand, was dressed entirely in blue. he said it helped him to come to terms with the imminent end of the millenium scenario.

“it’s going to be like mad max,” he told us. “there’ll to be no water, and gasoline will be the new currency.”

he’s collecting barrels of petrol in his basement, and he says he’ll make a fortune when the millenium bug brings the world to a grinding halt.

he sits with us to watch tv. we munch salty goodness and then he hits us with the crazy part of his plan.

he tells us that, when the millions have finished rolling in, and his petrol has been sold to the new world order, he’s going to donate every single cent he makes on the petrol boom to the orphaned children. he says he knows what it’s like to be an orphan.

“the world would be a better place, if only every orphan had a transformer doll when they’re still young enough to appreciate the value of a toy which can change shape when confronted with violence.”

gulliver's travels

in iceland, englishmen eat the green contents of reindeer stomachs, and consider it a vitamin-enriched delicacy. when they come to australia, they eat the tails of roadkill kangaroos.

headhunting tribes eye english travellers with analytical gaze, probably measuring up a stump. they raise the blood-dripping heads of their enemy, and i blink. i didn’t expect that.

kind of refreshing, really.

in africa, the farmers are dying. there’s some perverse justice there, but what it has to do with the colour of skin, i don’t know. only that, no matter what you were when you began, when your head is turned into a fetish mask, you still look pretty silly.

the englishman is back, making sour face while nibbling on a nice fat grub.

i wonder what kind of expression they’d stretch his face into if he were a fetish mask.

elsewhere, americans are being gnawed on by sharks, and in the northern territories, they’re being chewed on by more wildlife.

when crocodiles snap you up in their rugged jaws, they roll you across the pebbles under the murky water-blanket, making furious love to your body. they don’t want to eat you all at once, though. they keep pieces of your body as trophies. take you out, months later, and remember your struggle.

i watch the pretty newsreader as she crinkles her forehead and tells me about the divers who have been lost forever in the murky coral off our coast. their pale bodies are probably floating across the sea bed wrapped in green algae ribbons, their dragging fingers teasing the clams.

i love tourists. they’re so funky.

the zombiegrrl

she knocked on the door and i answered. she told me she had a watch. i didn’t know why she wanted to tell me that, so i shrugged, and offered to let her clean my windows.

the zombiegrrl groaned, pushed her way past me, and let me know all about her watch, which was of vital importance to humankind.

she opened its face, revealing a compass, which always points west, a thermometer stuck on 17 degrees, a mirror, which she said is for signalling passing ufos, and a series of small buttons which are used to aid in the satellite positioning of, the codes for using, and the guide on how to obtain thermo-nuclear devices.

when she left, i took the watch, and proceeded to push all the buttons in random order until the alarm screamed rudely. that’s it, i thought, i’ve finally destroyed the world.

when nothing happened by the end of the week, i gave the stupid watch to hatboy, who offered to rewire it into a handy doorbell. we set it to play rock around the clock whenever anyone pressed it, and we took great delight in pressing it all day long.

needless to say, when xol came storming through our front door two days later, we were a little surprised to find that we’d been unwittingly ringing her mobile phone each time we used our new doorbell.

our ignorance of the watch’s function was probably the only thing keeping her from tearing out our intestines and turning them into a casserole with a side of brains.

one choc milk, one juice, and one coke

today we decided to sit inside to beat the outdoor heat.

we closed all the windows to keep out vicious flies, which butted the glass with their heads in desperate effort to regurgitate our meals. we turned on the air conditioner, cooked up a small batch of noodles (hatboy didn’t do funky things with them this time), loaded the bar fridge beside our couch, and sat down to enjoy the daily routine of frosty drinky-goodness.

hatboy, closest to the fridge, played bartender all day.

“what you want?” hatboy grunted, pointing at the fridge.

i put three glasses on the table. “what you think?”

“one choc milk, one juice, one coke?”

later, as we sat sipping crushed ice and juice from a brandy glass, hatboy stretched his legs onto the coffee table and sighed. “i love summer,” he said. “the weather’s so darned slippy.”