Smile

Smile. The horror movie. Should've been called Frown, because it was a bummer. A good concept ruined by a monster who follows a standard operating procedure so broad that it grants the Smile Entity the power to do just about anything, especially if it involves a jumpscare.

I've been getting interrupted sleep lately. We share a wall with my wife's brother, it's a thin wall, he has a voice that resonates, and I'm a light sleeper. I wake up to everything, so I buy some Loop Earplugs, which I could do another mediocre review of right here... doesn't work enough for me. Then I blast pink noise out of my phone all night long, right over my head. The combination of those kind of work.

My wife calls pink noise something tragically incorrect... she calls it vag noise. I fall asleep to queefs on loop for eight hours.

2024: Celebrate

2024.

It was glorious. Two days in bed sleeping off a cold, with nothing but strange vivid dreams and a song stuck in my head for this god-awful moments awake.

Love is an Open Door, aka the song from Frozen where Anna and Prince Hans sing together at the start of the movie. It's not even Let It Go, it's the shitty B Side ear-worm you'd only get if your kids tortured you with the soundtrack for years, like mine did. Two years, Frozen every day. Love is an open doooooooooooooor!

DOOOOooooooooOOOOR!

Life could be so much more.

With you.

I'm in bed, soaked in sweat under my weighted blanket, 80 lbs of pure tundra-thick tuna-net on me. I'm determined to sweat it this demon inside me. Then I drift off.

My four year old daughter and I are going to my high school. Walking through the lobby was a precession of giants, moving a little like they do in a fox's wedding, except they're giants -- slow, skinny, and over two stories tall. They groaned these deep, cthulhu-esque whale-like groans. Grrrmmmmm. One decided it wanted a closer look, probably to sniff us and eat us. I picked my daughter up and ran down the hall, which was so small for the giant that it had to fall on its belly, shaking the ground, and crawl after me like a Marine going under a barbed wire fence. Its big bald head thrashing as he came for me, and I was just a little slower than the giant. Luckily there was a door I could swing open with a shoulder-hit.

Then I'm back in bed, trying to suck air in through my snot-cemented sinuses. Still sick, no life in me, then I'm out again.

My mansion is expansive like an airport, only an asshole would need this much space and luxury. But it's mine. And this dream is high-definition, not one of those hazy dreams where you're going to lose signal the second you have too much fun. It feels solid.

Something is amiss. There's a woman inside, stealing from me. I don't know how I know, but I know she's in here somewhere, and I'm hunting her, and she fucked with the wrong billionaire because I can fly -- like Zuckerberg. I pull two axes off the wall, because of course I have weapons mounted on my mansion wall. And I fly down the halls, ready to hack her up.

I'm pumped. Too pumped. My vision gets blurry, like I forgot my glasses. I'm waking up and losing the signal, but it's still strong enough that I can settle down again. I calm down it down a bit, breathe it out, gaze upon the splendors of my billionaire interior decorating.

I sense a disturbance in the force and know she's in the room next to me. I walk there, because I'm calm now. Yes, she's there, the she-devil who came to steal from the richest pimp in the world, just a tiny speck across this vast arena of a room just big enough to contain my glory. She's straight out of the 80s, big Dynasty hair, blue silk dress, blue silk scarf around her shoulders, walking like an empowered black widow. She's not just stealing, she wants to kill me, and look fine while doing it. And she has two spiky lantern things that look like flails, because sometime earlier in the day I was thinking about maces that doubled as lanterns and if those were cool or not...

It occured to me that this dream was written for a sitcom. It's filled with shenanagins and wish fulfillment. I'd go so far as to call it zany.

Aha! A distracting detail! Her purse is right there at my feet! She must've dropped it while grabbing dope lantern-flails off the wall. And her purse is filled with... six sets of car keys, and they're all mine! Hell... no... I did not drive beaters and hand-me-down cars for the last 20 years, saving up all my Galileo 2 royalty money, just to give up my six limos to this hag.

Oh, I know what'll really piss her off. I'm gonna hide her purse, then watch her freak out trying to find it in this giant place. Tee-hee! Nope, I'm not gonna hit her with my axe, I'm gonna tease her like a stinky little brother! It makes sense to me!

Hide her purse, quick!

I grab it and fly... and oh no, the dream, fading! Fading...

I got too giddy, and woke myself up... why didn't I just fight her? Did I even take back my limo keys?

Ugh. Is it 2024? Where did 2023 go?

I cleaned shit out of a hellish hoarder duplex, then I had to make it livable, and after six months of that my own life wasn't livable, so I told my wife I didn't want to do it anymore, can we hire a contractor? She said "of course, honey! It'll cost us around $30, 000, and we're broke, but you said Galileo 2: Judgement Day was selling well, so we can just all that royalty money!"

Then I said "Actually, I'm totally satisfied doing this job myself." Then I tapped my hammer on a piece of wood. "Yup. Solid as a rock."