The Christmas Tree From Hell

Them! Vs. Christmas

Take a moment to perform one of the following sense memory exercises:

1) You are a young adult of either any sex and ethnic background walking on the sidewalk of a relatively safe Los Angeles neighborhood at night. If you don't know any better, you consider the air to be chilly and you can pretend that it's fall. The interstate emanates a constant white noise, and the air smells of that weird apartment building three blocks south. Suddenly, you see a Christmas tree thrown to the curb. A man emerges, kicking it furiously while it's down.

2) You are a slightly older young adult of any sex (but most likely female) and ethnic background (Thai? Vietnamese? Mmm. Viethaimese.) and you enter your apartment building's garage early in the morning. You are carrying a bag of trash, which reeks of cardboard from mail-order Christmas presents or just moving in. Living so close to the interstate, your ability to taste is inevitably dead. You open the door to the trash bin and see...(roll2d10)...a Christmas tree sticking out of the bin, still green, with lights still on it, a week before Christmas.

How do you react?

The understandable answer is "WTF?" But should you ever experience either of these scenarios in real life, allow me to fill you in on TF.

TF is that the Christmas tree someone paid $40 for, the first real one they ever acquired since moving out of their parents' house, was covered with ants.

Die Hard on a Blog

By the end of this post, I will present a list of demands. But first, a dramatic preamble.

Half a lifetime ago I stumbled upon my first real girlfriend. Shortly after we started dating, she moved to India. That was the last time I let my parents send me away to summer camp. Instead of spending an extra three weeks with a chick who actually liked me back, I got to be the weird guy who wore a trenchcoat and a fedora in 80-degree weather, played role-playing games as much as I wanted, and met a really cute gymnast who wanted maybe only one thing more than to read the first draft of A Christmas Tree From Hell.

Put that way, I guess I should have given performing arts summer camp one more shot. I wonder if I'm too old to be a counselor.

But I digress. After my girlfriend left the country, I wrote her letters once a month, every month for a year. I didn't even think of dating anyone else until January. Of course, I never heard back from her until a year later, when I wrote my "this is my last" letter.

It was then that I finally heard from her. She claimed to have been horribly depressed and missed me all that time. She finally sent me a picture, albeit one where she appeared hardly bigger than my thumbnail. (She did say she lost some weight.) I wrote her back, informing her that, yes, I did finally have a new girlfriend, which prompted her to write that she had only gone out with me on a dare, to which I responded not too politely, which was countered with a "How dare you think that last letter was true? I was only mad!" response, and continued until I finally discovered my superpower--the ability to destroy friendships on purpose.

If my abnormal ability sounds depressing, it's really more of a blessing than a curse. I think of it as Delayed Blast Karma. I have yet to meet anyone who can take that many d6 of emotional damage. Let's see Heroes rip that off.

And now we'll skip to the part where my flashback becomes relevant.

I don't have the window on Tuesdays and Thursdays I used to. Considering that I didn't necessarily post until late on those days and I live on the west coast, this may not make any difference to you. But I don't know that for sure because no one has said anything.

I realize that our current audience is composed of friends who may not be as hungry for Internet content as Mr. Bile or myself. But I have a vague plan to expand beyond our core demographic and that requires feedback. I have requested input several times and recieved none outside of phone conversations or the occasional e-mail. If I wish to expand our influence, and I do, that can no longer be considered sufficient.

Therefore, I will not post again until I recieve significant answers to the following questions, either in comments or by e-mail. Have fun on the pledge drive, Mr. B.

1. What days do you read our blog? Would you object to a traditional M/W/F schedule?
2. What do you think of our current font/color scheme? (Whenever I try a large font to accomodate sleepy eyes, it looks stupid. Agree/Disagree?) I hear it takes a toll on readers above the age of 30.
3. What features should we follow up on? More metaplot? Short story movie reviews? Wal-Mart muckraking? Original fiction that would be otherwise unmarketable?
4. It's late and I'm tired. I'm forgetting something.
5. Do our comments and e-mails even work?

Until I hear from you, Narraptor out.

It Was All A Blog

Wow, what an ending. One might argue that the "It was all a dream!" ending is cliche, but upon analysis the narrative follows a certain dream logic. Contributing to the theme of dreams and their meaning as prophecy is the scene in which...

Hey, it was third grade. My teacher liked it enough to give it an A and a "Scary!" comment. Years later, The Christmas Tree From Hell garnered an "Interesting!", which was my writing teacher's way of saying, "I need to go home and cleanse my soul with Wild Turkey and a wholesome Richard Laymon novel. An evil voodoo rain that turns people black and makes them go crazy and kill people? No way that could be construed as offensive. And I'm sure his depictions of survivors of sexual abuse will be as insightful as always."

Googling The Christmas Tree From Hell, it appears I'm not the only person who thought ripping off Army of Darkness, The Children's Pit, and mixing them with adolescent sexual frustrations was a good idea. So rather than bore anyone with that cliche as well, I'll do something else to make up for your disappointment with the resolution to an otherwise brilliant climax that featured everything but Godzilla, the blob, the Creature From the Black Lagoon, and Megatron.

Be sure to complete the assigned reading. There will be in-jokes only smart people will get.

(Edit: One day I will make good on this vague promise.)

In Which I Establish Another Rule

Until the following post gets knocked into the archive, our site is no longer entirely composed of text. Also, we now have comments, which proves my gmail account is working if nothing else.

I'd like to amend the blog rules to suggest that we never promise to write more on something later, because it's embarrassing when we get distracted by Project Runway repeats and don't post again that day. And if we do promise more later accidentally, we should go back and delete that part and hope whoever read it was durnk at the time.

For anyone waiting with bated breath for my WOW rant, it is posted below. As for Errors and Omissions, I barely remember it at this point and would be surprised if anyone gave it a second thought. You should not. The AV Club review clearly outlined the book's flaws, but I was distracted by the shinier potential. "A legal thriller about an alcoholic intellectual property lawyer? How could that not be awesome?"

Well, if the character stopped being an alcoholic as soon as the expository scenes and unbelievable murders began, for one.

Looks like Thursday is Monster Day for me. It will not be vampires, though it might be Mr. Vampire. It would have been sword-tongued zombies, but zombies are too trendy now. Totoros? That's probably a step towards the right continent...

Next week is embarrassing scary story week, and my wife (who has yet to be given her own Interweb handle--she keeps suggesting grandmother names) had a different idea of what story to post than I did. So to encourage more comments, I suggest a vote:

Would the eight people who know this site exists prefer:

• A story about two kids and a haunted house written in third grade on bat-shaped paper (with photos!)
• Excerpts from The Christmas Tree From Hell
  
• "The box! The box!"

Fuck me. Considering that list, having a vote is pretty moot. At least I get the tie vote. And there could be some pretty good stuff in that box.