creepy and hatboy – more selected episodes

creepy and hatboy - heroes for a couching world.

in night of the living dead the zombies kind of shuffled slowly along, determined to annihilate and chew on the corpses they could create out of screaming young american victims. in evil dead, the zombies shrieked and screamed “dead by dawn!” which was really slippy, and made us howl with laughter.
zombies in movies are quiet, unobservant, dull, and seem more intent on your arm and the flesh beneath the skin, than they are on the chainsaw you’re wielding. they remind me of my family. i’m a vegetarian, and when i visit them at meal times, i notice the way they consume their meaty dishes. they don’t so much eat, as ravish the prey, sawing it to pieces with a mixture of glee and satisfaction in their otherwise deadpan eyes.
and the kids across the road, when they’re sent out on saturdays by their mother, who wants to clean the room where they keep the sega console machine, have this way of shuffling in the light, blinking as if it was the first time they’d ever seen a world outside of intricately organised pixels. they groan too, little moans of dissatisfaction, and you think at any time they’re going to say, in that grating monotone, “braaaaaaains…”
if i were a zombie, i’d like to be a chinese zombie, because they hop.

plan chip from outer space

there was an invasion by a lost contingent of bbq chips today. me and hatboy had to fight to maintain the equilibrium. we crunched their tusky outer-shells and consumed their munchy inner-centres. sitting in the couch, my hands flicking with lightning speed into the chippies’ space shuttle, i was suddenly struck by a fear of the bbq uniting with the armed forces of the liberal salt and vinegar front.
i don’t know how to confront salt and vinegar, and i don’t think hatboy (skilled as he is at holding whole fleets at bay), could deal with salt and vinegar, as well as a wave of bbq, all in one flooding army of salty goodness. we’d be overwhelmed should such a treaty between the two factions be made.
i decided to send scouts into the field (true to my intense military training during ‘nam), to test the likelihood of this action, but i lost contact halfway through a regiment of bbq snacks.
i hope to use musk-flavoured sugary goodness to foil any attempt at unification.

sitting on the top of the world

as the sun began to rise, we went to the park, and looked down at the river. from where we were, we could see the buildings of the city, and the bridge over which a great percentage of the population had to travel on their way to their selective employment moments.
we drank some coke, and reminisced about the days when the phantom terror terrorised the city with his underpants, and how we’d caught him using a technological gadget designed to magnify underpants. sure, it immobilised the city, but those few of us who didn’t wear underpants, were able to do a complete house-to-house search for the phantom terror. we found him in the four thousand, one hundred, and fifty-second house. he was desperately trying to unattatch himself from his underpants.
we de-poled his magnetic pants, and sent him to prison where he stayed until his lawyers successfully lobbied for his release on the grounds that he’d been unlawfully bound to his underpants for the duration of a citywide search.
lawyers.
cars stretched for most of the freeway, their angry buzz like music to our ears. i giggled and pointed at them. hatboy waved to some of those who made obscene gestures back up at us.
one yelled, “get a job!”
we yelled back, pointing our super-fingers, “got a job!”
it took him two hours to move four car-lengths. in that time, we consumed our entire esky-full of coca cola and were busy looking very calm and relaxed.
i really think that if he thought he had the time to get out of his car, climb the hill, and beat our brains out with a very blunt instrument, he’d have done it.
lucky for us that such traffic jams are uncertain things. you could go nowhere for an hour, and then suddenly, for no apparent reason at all, you’d be moving at a hundred kilometres an hour. best not to risk getting out of your car and hitting those who are mocking you with their reclining chairs and shady open-air positions, for fear you might miss that sudden break.
for, without that break you could be stuck there. sweating. cursing. alone, in a tin can, for the rest of your unfortunate days.

couch

we are called on by the mayor to save the city once more from evil spacebugs or somesuch dastardly devices of horror.
we listen to his pleas, and assure him we’ll do our best. hatboy hangs up the phone and dives to the fridge for a magic can of cokey-goodness. “well, creepy?”
i stand straight and as tall as i can get, which still isn’t quite so tall as my slouching super-sidekick. “we must save the city with our super-sidekick powers of much badguy-beaty!”
he throws me a can and i pop its fizzy top. i guzzle a hearty amount of cola as my super-sidekick reveals our wickedly devious plan. “let’s couch.”
hours later, he passes me some cheesy snacks. “you think the evil has been vanquished?”
i consider. “we’d best make sure. quick, subject it to the comedy channel for a few hours.”
thus, another global catastrophe is averted for yet another day.

fairuza

we have decided that we’re going to each apply to fairuza balk to be considered for her future sexual usage. we worked for hours on the forms necessary to send to her, and even completed a physical test (which we cheated on), and collaborated on some poetic numbers sure to win her black heart.
i’m really trying to look on the positive side of our filling the fairuza forms out, but i don’t know if they’ll be any more successful than our applications sent to uma, which were returned to us with letters signed by her lawyers, delivered by some very beefy-looking bodyguards.
we’ve tried to explain that we weren’t stalking her, we were just following her around a bit, but it was a futile argument and fell on deaf ears.
i think if fairuza sends our applications back with her lawyers’ signatures on them, we’re going to be in trouble with that nice judge again.

hatboy’s camo-visit

hatboy emerged from his garage for buffy.
it took us another thirteen hours to notice his camoflaged existence.
ninjagirl was the first to notice him sprawled across the couch when she sat on him.
“i was testing my camo-kilt,” he told her when she demanded to know how he’d snuck onto the couch unobserved.
he offered to show us his camo-bagpipes again.
“great!” ninjagirl squealed. “i need some target practise!”
hatboy’s new camo-bagpipes were so good that we didn’t hear them all night.

friday

a couch is a spiritual entity.
if you treat it right, and scrub it up now and then, it will keep you snug in its arms through many nights of much-tv-watchy. however, if you don’t feed it enough, it might decide to move house on its own, to go to where it will be guaranteed a fresh meal each day and a nice brushing.
that’s why every friday is be nice to the couch day.
today, we danced in front of our couch and showered it with joyous salty treats of much-tongue-tasty. then we topped the salty treats with sugary treats. then we raised our coke glasses and toasted the couch.
we could almost hear it purring.
hatboy threw himself onto the couch with great vigor and began crunching and munching.
i plucked a rogue jaffa from my cushion and plopped it into my mouth.
“fridays are the bestest bestest days ever,” i said. “you should make a machine which can make every day friday.”
“if i did that, what would happen to our cheesy snacks and ramen noodles sundays?”
“ooh, frightening thought. well spotted.”
my super-sidekick looked very wise indeed as he belched out the tune to inspector morse.

what’s going on

we were attacked today by a vicious horde of nothings.
i sat on the couch and waited for them to do something.
being evil, the nothing pretended not to exist, but i knew it was there. i could smell it.
i waved my remote control at the horde of invisible somethings and told it i would hunt it down and stick stuff in its innards unless it got out of the way and let me watch enterprise in peace.
hatboy came in just before starting time, threw himself onto the couch, opened a crispy pack of salty treats and said, “what’s going on?”
i shook my head. “nothing.”
“oh, evil. what’s it doing this time?”
“dunno, it’s got me flummoxed.”

commercial twilight television zones

“you know commercial radio?”
“not personally, no.”
“but you’ve heard of it?”
“it? then it’s not a who?”
“i’ll take that to be a no.”
“spooky. tell me more.”
“anyway, hatboy, i was just thinking that, if you switch from station to station on commercial radio, that you’re bound to hear the same song time and again on every station, regardless of how many songs a particular band has per album. for example, band a might put out an album of seventeen songs, but you’d only ever hear the third track, and band b might bring out an album of only ten songs, but you might hear tracks five and nine. you would never hear any other songs by either band, and they’ll play the same song from each band about once every two hours or so. therefore, if you accept that each radio station only needs a minimum number of songs, then it’s quite likely that all stations share cds. i mean, station a would play track three of band a, then send band a’s cd to station b, who would send band b’s cd back to station a to play track five. right?”
“sounds reasonable.”
“then, and here’s where it gets eerie, what if commercial television ran on the same principal? that is, each station showed the exact same shows at the exact same intervals. station a would show buffy every two hours, and station b would show buffy every two hours, but one hour behind station a.”
“hallelujah! buffy 24 hours a day!”
“no, you don’t get it! they’d only ever play one episode. on all stations, the same episode. they’d just repeat it solid for about two months. if you wanted to see the other episodes, you’d have to buy the dvd collection.”
“creepy, stop it.”
“don’t you see? television shows are just ads, anyway. the day television companies start buying distribution rights for buffy is the day they start showing one episode. it’ll be like listening to stairway to heaven over and over again.”
“and as she winds on down th- oh, shut up, creepy! you’re twilight zoning me out!”

don’t tell us what we should do with our choc honeycomb pieces

today we were investigated by the department for the protection of choc honeycomb pieces. apparently we had been caught by speed cameras as we consumed more than fifteen pieces each in a two minute period. this, claimed the officious official, was both illegal and highly dangerous.
“you could choke,” he scowled. “don’t you know that? or, worse still, there could be an accident with one choc honeycomb piece hitting another in an unparked situation! don’t you know the kind of devastation such accidents can create? i know. i’ve seen it, and it’s not pretty.”
“it was only fifteen pieces,” hatboy said.
“only!? only!? let me tell you, sunshine, that fifteen pieces is all it takes! one of those pieces could have been seriously damaged, and it’s my job to protect choc honeycomb and the consumers of said pieces! so, that’ll be two-hundred and fifty bucks.”
“two-hundred and fifty!?” i cried. “but we don’t have money, let alone two-hundred and fifty bucks!”
“come on,” the official whined. “i have to feed my starving children. that two-hundred and fifty will help me feed my kiddies some of those delicious choc honeycomb pieces.”
he took our supply of choc honeycomb pieces, two packets of noodle goodness, and fifteen jars of my homemade chili sauce.
when the little goblin finally left, i turned to hatboy. “see? i told you a choc honeycomb race was a stupid idea.”

Tags: creepy and hatboy