Waiting for a snowstorm
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Christmas time is here,
Happiness and cheer,
Extension cords electrify,
Puddles far and near.
Seals and polar bears,
Ozone in the air,
Flamingos promenade around,
In flamingo underwear.
Midnight sleigh bells ring,
Jing a-ling a-ling,
Jing-a jing a-ching-a ching,
“Hey you! What are you doin’ out there? Every damn night for a week now! Get off my property or I’m callin’ the cops!”
Christmas time is here,
Another case of beer,
Dear Aunt Ruth is on the roof,
And missing her brassiere.
Oh, that we could always see,
Such spirit through the year.
It’s been three days since you boarded up the windows and jammed all the furniture haphazardly in front of the door. Even your aunt’s priceless antique grandfather clock. Anything heavy to keep them out.
It started with some crazy stories out of South America. Disappearances, mutilations. Demons and gargoyles. Real George Noory stuff that nobody, save a few frantic “Coast to Coast” listeners, really believed. There was even a blurry Youtube video. You watched it at work, forwarded it to your friends. The CG was obviously fake, but it was a pretty good fake.
Then Sao Paulo went dark, like someone pulled the plug. The Brazilian government denied anything was seriously wrong. Just a glitch in the power grid. Satellite photos and seven minutes of grisly camera footage shot from the back of a speeding pickup truck told otherwise.
Reports of mass murders and unexplained disappearances were taken seriously after that. It was all there was in the news. All there was on television, for that matter, despite the blackouts that were steadily creeping north. You could tell which city was going to be next just by looking at a map. Every day, like clockwork, another town was consumed. Every night another city screamed until the microphones cut off.
A churning wave of panicked refugees preceded the front as it moved northward toward Panama. There the advance seemed to stall.
Relieved authorities announced that everything was going to be okay. Yes, the southern continent was teeming with monsters, but they had stopped at Panama. We were safe, you see, because they were there, and we were not.
It turned out that there was wherever the food was. And the food was running north.
Panama City took longer to be devoured because the mass of fleeing refugees coming up from the south ran smack into the backs of those trying to get out of the city, creating an enormous bottleneck. And a feast.
It didn’t end at Panama, no. And we watched it all play out like a miniseries on television. The horror that became the Pan American Highway. The failed evacuation to Moyogalpa on Lago de Nicaragua. The San Salvador firestorm. The twin bloodbaths of Oaxaca and Veracruz. Mexico City.
The brutal violence was televised around the clock until one government or another shut down the satellite feeds. But there was always video tape, so we watched that, transfixed. Network ratings skyrocketed.
Maybe we were literally frozen with fear, or just lazy and desperate to believe that the government, the military, someone would step in and put a stop to it. Call it mass hypnotism, but even with weeks of advance warning, we weren’t prepared. Who knows why.
“The army’s gonna whoop ass!” said your next door neighbor, Dan, planted in a lawn chair on his front porch, anchored to a leaky cooler of beer. “But if any a’ them things show up ’round here,” he added, stroking the shotgun on his lap, “we’ll take care of business. Ain’t that right?” His sweaty palms smeared the oiled metal. You just nodded.
“Maybe,” you thought to yourself, “I should toss a couple of blankets and water bottles in the car. Just in case.” Then the storm hit, and it was too late.
Despite everything, you didn’t think it would actually come to your town, your street. You couldn’t imagine the inhuman screams from the television echoing outside your front window, or the loud popgun noises next door, or the image of Dan’s madly twitching legs, his shocked expression staring up at the sky from the puddle of spilled beer where his head had rolled. The sight of a thing standing in the driveway, sucking greedily from Dan’s gushing neck, was your last clear memory for a day or two.
You vaguely remember ripping shelves from the garage and nailing the boards across the big picture window in the living room. You barely notice when the power goes out until, at some point, you find yourself huddled in a corner, every stick of furniture is piled across the front door or nailed over the windows, and it’s pitch dark. Far off thunder, or muffled explosions thump in the night. Artillery? Somehow, you fall asleep.
Mercifully, you don’t hear claws scraping the door jamb.
A fair amount of meandering is about to take place.
Like the Star Trek episode that starts out with the Enterprise being destroyed after slamming into another starship, captained by Frasier incidentally, this should begin to make sense somewhere toward the end.
It was just a 20 minute side project; maybe half an hour, tops. Three hours later you’re reseeding a squid-shaped spot on the lawn that was incinerated after you tightened the truck’s oil plug, dropped the wrench, and accidentally sent a spark into the drip pan that ignited a fire three inches from your nose. Mysteriously, the truck was parked in the driveway, a good 20 yards from the burnt spot. More mysteriously, you hadn’t intended to change the oil at all. You just wanted to play your MP3 player through the auxiliary channel on the stereo.
Things started off fine. You pulled the stereo, installed a new cable, and everything worked great. After reassembling the dashboard, you decided to get the dust wipes and do a little cleaning. Then out came the window cleaner, the vacuum, and before long you were detailing the center column with a Q-tip.
It wasn’t until hours later, at the end of an unintentionally productive afternoon, that you ignited the drip pan. You kicked it out from under the engine compartment, but it caught a basketball unawares and stopped just out of reach where the flames began licking a tire.
You somehow scrambled out from under the truck without leaving too much of your scalp behind, raced around the front, and with the grace and agility of the most accomplished NFL kicker, launched the whole boiling conflagration out into the yard where it exploded on impact like a cartoon appendix.
While your heart pounded out a drum solo, unplayable by any percussionist who has never changed his own oil or been accidentally locked in a closet with a curious bat, you stood at the edge of your driveway and watched the burning mass melt into an enchilada shape and slowly expel the last of its contents onto the turf. You were reminded of a documentary about Hawaiian volcanoes that periodically belch liquefied rock into the frothy blue ocean, thus slowly and impressively adding to the island’s size. Your frothy lump of petrochemicals produced an impressive billowing cloud of noxious blue smoke.
Not being overly shy, your old pal Spook will, from time to time, take a few minutes to review a product or service in the interests of growing the pool of honest and independent consumer opinion. Few things are as annoying as reading obviously counterfeit product reviews that carefully balance between the optimum number of spelling mistakes and subtly phrased company-speak.
I was into the third page of my Kenwood CA-C2AX – Audio Cable review before I heard that little voice say, “Whoa, horse. Pull it back.” Below is the abridged review without (as many) of the oblique meanderings (above).
A hardcore propeller-head or audiophile probably already has the bits and pieces needed to make his own auxiliary cable. However, if he’s that obsessive, then his car audio equipment is probably more up to date. In fact, his stereo and speakers are easily five to 10 years newer than that smoking Festiva or Subaru Justy he’s driving. And by smoking, I mean the blue clouds of carbon monoxide following him around are lowering his IQ bit by bit each day and altering his DNA.
Perhaps you’re not an engineering nerd. If you’re not interested in downloading pin-out diagrams, if you’re doing well just to pull your car stereo out of the dash without starting a fire, if circuit breakers pop in salute when you walk by, then this is a quick and easy little upgrade that will allow your compatible Kenwood boat anchor to play audio from your portable MP3 player.
The first thing you’ll notice is that your MP3 player probably won’t produce the volume that you want even at maximum. The second thing you’ll notice is that all those crappy MP3 files you’ve collected from gawd knows where over the years need to be normalized to a single volume.
Don’t be smug. You know what I’m talking about. Or, you will when you crank the head unit to 35 to rock some old “Apollo 100”, but forget to turn it back down and blow your ears off with the next “Freezepop” song. Even worse is leaving for work in the morning, turning on the radio for some news, taking a sip of coffee, then slinging it out the sun roof, cup and all, as the local weatherman BLASTS YOU INTO THE BACK SEAT. You forgot to turn the volume back down the night before. This is a cycle that repeats and feeds on itself as you grow older, more forgetful, and steadily become stone deaf.
But the cable works fine.