Remember that cheese wrapper wax castle I was building a couple months ago?

BOOYA. Soon I will build a moat and hire some archers. Best ye have an invitation when you gallop into mine courtyard, Chuck! Forsooth! I say.

And no, this isn’t one of those “Man, he hasn’t posted in a long time, he probably just doesn’t want to leave an open gap in the monthly post calendar for reasons having nothing to do with blogging and mostly everything to do with the appearance of consistency,” no, why would you think that?

I used to collect antique postcards when I was in college, or “vintage” for you excessively modernist cats. Racist postcards were especially treasured finds. I guess I thought I was being post-ironic and hip or something, because I was a man of the learned present, not some regressive ape from the 40s, or 20s, or whenever it was this buried loot came up from whence.

Funny how things come back to you. I was going through the pictures I’ve been scanning for my mom, and these postcards turn up. I’d really forgotten completely about them, until my mom reminded me that I used to be very excited about this hobby.

Giggling-at-bigots yucks aside, the thing I never did when I first found these, apparently, was stop and read the back sides of them. Because they are full of messages from the Facebook that your grandpa knew about. Telling you who is bored and who had the gout and who had duck and green beans for supper. Also there is a check for $2.50 in the mail from your Uncle Grover and it is intended for you to buy some Xmas presents for your cousins. Always Xmas because space on postcards is small and writing is large.

The stories they tell are shrunken monologues, one-act plays divorced from context without any apparent resolution. You are dropped like a heavy sack into the middle of a room full of people you have never met.

Dear Sister, Mother & Dad;

Whether or not I’m still able to kick, I am still able to “cuss.” I have a red-headed girl helping me and she can “cuss” too. Between us we keep the atmosphere pretty well disinfected. Except for two short trips to S.L.O. I haven’t been out of this flea bitten town for about 5 months. It it were not for the Navy unit here I believe I’d quit, “go over the hill” as the military men say who don’t like their job. Well, the war isn’t over yet by a long shot, and I haven’t much of an idea what the future has in store. I have asked for a transfer & indicated I will go anywhere for the duration.

– Heston

The card shows a picture of Paso Robles on the front, a sleep, pretty little town in the Central Coast area of California, known primarily for its excellent wines and occasional bone-rattling earthquakes. Heston could have been stationed at Fort Roberts, which is somewhat north of Paso Robles and served during WWII and the Korean War as a transition base for troops headed across the Pacific.

The date of the card is 6/27/43, about four months before the launch of the Gilbert and Marshall Islands campaign, which would set the stage for some of the bloodiest fighting in military history as the Allies hopped island by island on a grim train bound for mainland Japan. Yep. I would have bitched about my bivouac, too.

Usually, though, people sent postcards as a way of reminding others that they existed without the formality of a letter. To demand money, or to announce an arrival, or just to request a little attention. The art on the front rarely matched the sentiments expressed on the back, except maybe unintentionally.

On 12 April, 1913, a postcard was sent to Mr. N.C. Pierce of Strong, Colorado, by one Lessie Randolph of [town illegible], also in Colorado.

Hell! How are you? I am dandy fine. There is to be a Dance here April 19, and you want to be sure and come. I’ll look for you and you better come. If you don’t I’ll never never like you anymore. I guess you wouldn’t care anyway, would you?

In the early part of the last century, people were penalized quite severely for missing the dance, as television had not yet been invented and the only other form of mass popular entertainment was following ambulances on horseback and hoping to catch random bits of carnage from railroad accidents or labor riots. On a lighter note, there was also widespread food poisoning.

Hello Twitter, I have met your grandmother. She’s kind of a lunatic.

Somewhere in the world it’s always John Ritter Hour.

Also, I fixed my computer, bitches. A hero ain’t nothin’ but a goddamn sammich. As it turns out.

AND DON’T CLICK BUTTONS YOU DON’T KNOW WHERE THEY CAME FROM, OK? OK.

So we obtained a cat last week. We went to the animal shelter and we were all like “Cat: give us one,” and they made us walk through about a thousand kittens, and the volunteers they would pick up these tiny mewling balls of fluff and hurl them at us and sometimes they would stick and sometimes not and then there were all these kittens at our feet, shrieking and furious, or unconscious, and we fought our way through and demanded to see an older cat, something that wasn’t stupid.

So you go around and here are all the cats, and they all live in three-foot-wide jail cells. Two-story jail cells, but still, prison. And they’re nice cats. Some are fat. Some are sleeping. You wave at them: wake up! You’re missing your chance here, pal! They’re not moved one way or the other. And in one of the little cubicles here is this one cat, and she is pretty, a tortoiseshell, and mouthy, and pacing back and forth like a tiger and screaming at us, which we would later understand to mean I AM IN NEED OF AN ACTION! PLEASE PERFORM IT NOW! NOW! Scritched her on the head and played with her nextdoor neighbor, an acrobatic daredevil who did a nosedive into her cage while jumping for my finger. Then I met a kitten that turned out to be named Spock, and I thought, I don’t really want a kitten, but it is called Spock; its ears are extra large and they named it Spock. I think I was meant to have this cat. We waited until the next day and came back, certain we would get this Spock kitty and bring him home.

He had already been adopted. Which was good, because now I didn’t have to worry about a homeless kitty named Spock. But, still. We are down one cat. Back to the cubicles we go. How about this big fat guy called Mr. Big? He’s old and cranky, so of course you want him. They put us in a room and bring him in, and he plops down and doesn’t move. Pet him and he snarls. Only moves his front paws. Not happy. “He’s got pretty bad arthritis,” says the volunteer. We all make sad faces at each other, and decide an angry cat with arthritis is probably more than we can take on right now. “How about that tortie you call Mia?” I ask. The volunteer says go in the other room; I will bring her to you.

Well, she turns out to love us. Like, really hard. Except 10 minutes into the loving she snaps and hisses and freaks out. “She sometimes gets a little cranky because she’s stressed out here,” the volunteer says with a pleading look. I’m not fussed about it. The old girl is burrowing into Robyn’s armpit and winning over my formerly catless-for-life wife. “We’ll take her, but we’re not calling her Mia. Mia is a stripper’s name.” We spend the next hour filling out forms and such and then they send us home with an old half-deranged cat in a cardboard box. WHAT A COUNTRY, Yakov Smirnoff says from the proximity of Branson.

There is no information about this girl. They think she is somewhere between 5-7 years old. She’s had her shots. She has never been microchipped. The loose skin under her belly indicates she’s had babies. That’s it. Whoever had her before stuffed her into the night slot and peeled away. She’s been in the clink for over four months.

We get her home. She’s pretty freaked out, but still wants to be friends. Within a couple days she makes herself completely at home and is currently the most awesome cat ever: you can tell from the pixels. Her name is Agnes now and she is a genteel middle-aged lady who loves couches, sleeping and laps. She is also actually between 8 and 10 years old, according to her new vet. But her teeth are good.

She went to cough up a hairball a couple days after we got her home, or at least I thought it was a hairball. I looked closely, expecting that slimy mass of yellow/green goo that comes out of the cat’s mouth when the hairball comes up, but instead it was a little rolled-up piece of paper. “FACTS ABOUT AGNES YOU PROBABLY DID NOT KNOW,” it said at the top after I wiped the spit off of it. I was more shocked that we had guessed the name correctly than anything else. I unrolled the rest of the paper:

Agnes is 8 years, 4 months and 13 days old, it read. Agnes can see in the dark. Agnes prefers chunky bits of beef smothered in a savory sauce. Agnes gets over-excited about catnip. Agnes will chase a laser pen and when you turn it off, she will carefully lift her paw so as not to let whatever might be under it get away. You probably already figured some of these things out, but here is some more information.

Agnes knows how to waterski. Barefoot. She can shoot LAZORS out of her TAIL. PEW PEW! Agnes once beat a man to death for snoring too loud: be careful! Agnes can play poker and she knows how to cheat. Agnes once drove a truck from Chicago to Albuquerque without stopping once to pee. Agnes can type 75 words per minute. Agnes enjoys light rock and jazz fusion, but none of that Kenny G. shit. Agnes can swim to a depth of 112 feet. Agnes can retract her own head into her neck as a defensive measure. Agnes once ate an entire extra-large pepperoni and mushroom pizza from Round Table in one sitting on a dare. Agnes is chronically late for parties. Agnes is a pretty good tipper. Agnes can be carried like a suitcase using the convenient handle attached to her back and hidden within her coat. Agnes thinks the first five seasons of Saturday Night Live were so overrated they set an unreasonably high bar for every season that followed, and that TV critics of the 70s are directly responsible for most of the sadness and disappointment we feel when we watch that show today. Agnes can turn into a hat, if needed.

Please take care of Agnes. Thanks.

And so we will.

I am collecting the wax outer layers of Babybel cheeses, the red wax that you have to peel off to get to the cheesy goodness underneath. I am turning the wax into blocks. I have a whole Costco bag of these cheeses; there is a lot of wax in this bag!

With these blocks I am building a castle.

Someone should know about this. I’ll let you know when it’s done, don’t you worry.

When we went down to LA to visit my mom before Christmas last month, she had this big box of photos sitting there. Detritus. Family detritus. Weird photos! I knew it before I even asked.

Every family has a big box of confusing photos. Random snapshots of people, a lot of them dead, some more of them alive. Many of them are black and white and printed on paper with strangely corrugated edges. Using developing techniques which are unfamiliar to you. The images will be largely unrelated to each other thematically; you only have them because someone once put one away in a box, and then added to that box every time someone else sent them a picture. That box was passed down to someone else in your family, and then again, and now you own it: a box full of somebody else’s memories.

So I knew that. But I kind of wanted that. “Your uncle paid some guy at Ritz Camera to scan them in and he wasn’t happy with the job they did; he said the CD they gave him was missing lots of photos he knew were in the box. So I’m going through them to see if I can find things I want and then I’ll have somebody scan them.”

“Done,” I said. I have an all-in-one printer, I explained. It does three things kind of badly all at once!

“But, there are a lot of these things,” she started to say, but I was having none of it. “Doesn’t matter,” I said, snatching up the box with both hands. “I’ve got both time and the wherewithal.”

And then I disappeared in a puff of logic, reappearing instantaneously approximately 400 miles north, with toner-stained fingers.

And the first thing I’m noticing here, after getting through the first big batch of modern, color snapshots, is that there are a ton of people in my family whom I have no idea who. I mean, no clue. If they were ghosts and haunted me, I would be all like “Somebody else’s ghost! Oh noes…”

And the second thing that I had no idea about is that apparently my family could star in a book called Wisconsin Death Trip Part II:

I’m sure everybody’s ancestors look weird, bathed in stark contrast and low resolution, their faces hidden by 100-year-old shadows and framed by long-dead trees and swing sets long since reduced to splinters, but jesus christ! Is that baby wearing a stocking cap? AM I AMISH?

My grandfather, who was actually a very nice midwestern security guard and veteran of two world wars. Meet Al Capone’s brother. They called him Ripped Up Face.

“Sorry Ma, I didn’t mean to do it! Please don’t send me to the Scarin’ Tree again! I’ll be good!”

I think this is an arm holding some kind of fish. Everybody died of botulism.

I did find one very pleasant image, and it’s a little girl and a puppy in a wagon and there’s nothing scary about that at all and everybody loves kids and puppies and wagons. But there will be more Death Trip to come, because did I mention there are hundreds and maybe thousands of these things? Because there are.

Logically, I must be holding a piece of red-and-white striped candy in the shape of an old Earth walking device known as a “cane.”

Therefore, Captain, I can only surmise that Christmas is coming. And soon-like.

For the first edition of Frankenstein Jones Presents at Fiasco Towers, we kick it back to the early ’70s, an era when road movies had evolved from Buz-n-Tod innocence and wonder tied inextricably to America’s newfound love of the automobile (“What’s out there? Let’s find out!”) to a wary, existential horror at the prospect of The Road actually answering that very question; posed (Vietnam flagrante, post-JFK, -RFK, -MLK and -Manson) with only a slight tweak in verbal emphasis, the Emptiness of the American Canvas becomes a nagging worry (“What’s out there?”) instead of a carefree lark, a symbol of the profound pessimism that weighed down the post-Hippy hangover.

You never know what’s around the next bend in the road, these two films seem to be saying. But you probably won’t be happy about it.

First up, Steven Spielburg’s made-for-TV classic, Duel. “A business commuter is pursued and terrorized by a malevolent driver of a massive tractor-trailer.”

Yes, thank you RottenTomatoes.com, but Duel (1971) is so much more than that, and probably less, too. See Dennis Wagner battle impotence via metallic proxy! See one man wage helpless war against an implacable foe! See “man vs. machine” metaphors fly like cat fur! See Dennis Weaver cry! See Dennis Weaver scream at his car! See Dennis Weaver hoot like a baboon! See gorgeous vistas of the sun-baked high desert immediately north of Los Angeles! See red cars from the 1970s!

”Duel” might almost have been a silent film, because it expresses so much through action and so little through the words that are here. Mr. Weaver is David Mann, the film’s only real character, and he’s given a few internal monologues that only awkwardly express Mann’s anxiety. (After one encounter with the truck, he thinks: ”Twenty, twenty-five minutes out of your whole life and then all the ropes that kept you hangin’ in there are cut loose. And there you are, back in the jungle again.”) – Janet Maslin, New York Times.

Next up: Vanishing Point (1971).

How many “minimalist chase films” have you ever seen? You’re about to add to that paltry total. First, let’s get the synopsis out of the way:

“Richard Sarafian directed this minimalist chase film, starring Barry Newman as ex-marine, ex-race car driver and cop named Kowalski. He drives into Denver to deliver a car and pick up another vehicle to drive to San Francisco. To make the fifteen-hour drive to San Francisco bearable he pops a load of pep pills and drives off. Almost immediately, he is told to pull over by the police, but Kowalski refuses to stop. Ignoring the cops, a police chase ensues. Egging Kowalski on is a blind black disc jockey, Super Soul (Cleavon Little), who announces his comings and goings on his local radio show, praising Kowalski to the skies as the last American to whom speed means freedom of the soul. Super Soul’s hype makes Kowalski a media sensation and Kowalski fans mount up — as do the police cars chasing him — as he races against time to deliver both the car and himself to his San Francisco destination.” – All Movie Guide.

Next, let’s ask the reviewers what they think of this mess.

A movie about which I can think of almost nothing good to say. — Roger Greenspun, New York Times.

The last quarter of Grindhouse was little more than a love note to this flick’s towering excellence. — Brett Register, Orlando Weekly.

So come on, who’re you going to trust? The Orlando Weekly guy or the New Yor…er. Just come see it. It’s silly. It’s “The Brown Bunny” without Vincent Gallo’s enormous, um, ego (and also without an hour of pointless footage of someone riding a motorcycle across a desert). It’s got Barry Newman in it, for crying out loud, and he was sort of the 1971 version of Eric Bogosian. Or something.

Details to follow.

I seem to have forgotten to post to this blog the entire month of November.

Here’s why.

Please ignore that the above alibi only covers 14 days. Or 13. Something. Maybe 14. I had a toothache the other days. Also my dog ate it.

When you wake up Wednesday morning, the first thing you might note is that the Republicans control congress and the San Francisco Giants are the world champions of baseball.

Which outcome would be worse, exactly?

Rather than answer that, do what I plan on doing: getting on an airplane and flying to London.

Ah. London.