How Not To Be Famous

From the National Institute for Stasis and Subsistence:

With the onslaught of the holiday season comes an alarming new danger. Traditionally, this time of year has been associated with the influenza virus and the common cold. Immune systems, weakened by pathogenic invasions from the open sores that cover many of our swollen, obese bodies, so often immobilized by the intake of an estimated 13 billion metric tons of unloved fruitcake, cannot cope with further threats. The t-cells and b-cells that comprise the fearless army of our natural bodily defenses choke and die on bloodstreams poisoned by nightmarish pharmacological cocktails. In the midst of this chaos rises a new and deadly threat: fame.

The common fame virus spreads most easily among those living in large, metropolitan regions such as New York or Los Angeles. Here, exposure to the virus can take place among thousands of potential carriers. Virus strains can be imbibed, eaten, absorbed by the skin, or enter the body through dry, bloodshot eyes. Demographically, this illness, for reasons scientists do not fully understand, tends to strike those who are young, rich, intelligent, attractive, and who fill the empty void of their soulless existence with blind ambition and a low tolerance for moral certitude. We caution all those falling in these demographic patterns to be especially careful.

Studies have shown a marked increase in common fame. Researchers believe this may be attributed to several factors, including the rise of the internet, reality television, and an emaciated news media, bloated by corporate business interests and vitriolic conflict-mongering. These studies note a curious paradox. The amount of total fame has increased only gradually, while a larger number of people share a smaller portion of fame over an increasingly fractured cultural landscape. Surprisingly, the consequences of fame have become more severe.

Some of the symptoms of fame are already well known. These include: substance abuse, car crashes involving substance abuse, vanity, eating disorders, vagina-flashing, and obscene amounts of money disproportionate to an individual’s value in society. To combat this disease, be aware of these symptoms. If you exhibit any, and fall into the right demographic range, we recommend an immediate enrollment into a certified public accountancy program. No public accountant has ever become famous. Additionally you should:

1. Stop washing your hands. Fame does not afflict the unclean, so long as you do not dedicate your life to selfless acts of charity.
2. Avoid casting calls/couches for reality television programs
3. Not attempt random acts of accidental heroism and try to sell the movie rights
4. Become morbidly obese. But not TOO obese, because then you might experience a fame-related pathogen called Infamy.
5. Suppress your talents and dreams
6. Not exhibit signs of charm, charisma, or photogenicism.
7. Eat raw garlic hourly
8. Aspire to conform to the mundane norms of your established social structure
9. Not betray original concepts or ideas that could “set you apart.”
10. Attempt to live vicariously through the celebrities you admire who set out to achieve everything that you have wasted your life vainly wishing you were good enough to achieve.
11. Only abuse mundane drugs
12. Enroll in “prehab”

With these guidelines in mind, we hope you have a safe and anonymous holiday season.

The Adventures of Augustina Ruiz, part un.

It all started when Rusty Hanson smiled at her.
Augustina had never found a boy particularly attractive before. They were sweaty and vulgar and liked to dangle mice in front of the school's pet boa constrictor, Abbie. None of those things tend to be sexually attractive to a sexually inactive fourteen year-old girl like Augustina.
However, when Rusty Hanson smiled at her from across the mess hall that dreary February morning in 1999, Augustina Ruiz felt something coagulate inside her stomach and explode somewhere a little lower than her stomach. Her knees felt tingly, her forehead began to sweat and before she knew it, she was smiling back at him.
“Did you get your hands on some Prozac this morning?” her best friend Peyton nudged.
“Huh?” Augustina replied. She blinked across the table at Peyton, who was glum and sarcastic as usual.
Peyton added, “You’re smiling…like you’re happy or something.”
“Oh…” Augustina’s mouth twisted itself into a coy grin. “No, St. John’s Wort.”
Peyton nodded. “Cool. Natural mood enhancers are so much cooler than the crap the fascist pharmaceutical companies manufacture.”
“Tell me about it.”
The girls grinned at each other, their eyes sharing a secret celebration of the absurd.
Augustina arched herself over the table in an effort to read whatever great work of literature Peyton was currently writing. It had been preordained that Peyton McLeod would one day be a great author, and if the rest of the world never recognized her work, then at least Augustina Ruiz would be her greatest fan. “So whatcha working on now?”
“Oh, I’m just finishing up a chapter of Newton’s Law,” Peyton replied. Newton’s Law was an ongoing serial about the exploits of a top-secret group of British gangsters and assassins. Though the head of the organization was a nicotine fueled Frenchman, Peyton’s hero was a witty young Englishman named William Newton, who went by the unlikely nickname of “Newt”. Though the series was steeped in violent escapades, the main drama (and comedy) came from Newt’s relationship with his brothers and his futile goal to break free of a life of crime.
It was also a work in progress.
“How close are you to finishing this chapter?” Augustina asked. She had been dying to find out what happened next in Peyton’s twisted literary world.
Peyton paused and flipped through her journal. “Uh…depends on whether or not Denton keeps the lights on during the movie today. I might be able to finish it during class. If not, probably by tonight or tomorrow morning at the latest.”
“Well keep me posted.”
“You know I always do.”
As Peyton went back to her writing, Augustina decided to scan the crowd for Rusty. Breakfast was a chaotic time at the Norman Vincent Peale School for the Positive Minded. Students were pretty much left to come and go as they pleased, eat what they could scrounge and talk as loud as they could—so long as they all reported to their first class on time. In many ways, Peale was an incredibly liberal school. The teachers invested less time in raising test scores than in attempting to raise the moral latitude of the student body. But Peale was still a boarding school, and a social hierarchy existed, as did a rigid set of rules. The rules at Peale were atypical, though. Students could dress in whatever attire they chose and speak whenever they wanted to in class. What they were not allowed to do was to be “negative-minded”. After all, the school had been established in honor of Norman Vincent Peale’s philosophies. Hard work and an optimistic outlook were valued over raw intelligence. So, naturally, the vastly intelligent Peyton and all of her sarcastic portents of doom were dismissed in favor of the sunny, yet vacant outlook of some other students.
The mess hall was divided into five rows of long, pinewood tables, but it was politically divided into territories based on coolness. The greater you were on the social hierarchy, the further away you sat from the gusts of chill winds that blew from the great glass doors that opened onto the deserted pavilion. The jocks, rich kids and “Papillons” (Peale code for “social butterflies and their male courtiers”) all sat around the two long tables furthest from the cold and closest to the hot tray table. Peyton and Augustina only had one table separating them from the pavilion, and that table was populated by squirmy kids under the age of ten. They didn’t really mind not being popular. They thought popularity was a reaction of a puerile mob. They didn’t even mind having to sit between the AV Club and the Chess Team, whose members smelled like tartar or armpits. However, Augustina resented the feeling of cold wind blasting her back during the long Ohio winter, and on this morning, when Rusty Hanson had just smiled at her, she was forced to consider the inequity of her life. Why couldn’t she be a Papillon and flirt and giggle with the boys like Rusty? She had the money they had, and the looks. She only lacked the inane sense of insensitivity that each of those girls possessed. Well, there was that, and Peyton. For as much as Peyton could be morose or sarcastic, she could also be equally as loyal and understanding. You don’t quit friends like that.
Just as Augustina was telling herself that she didn’t need the affection of a flippant boy to make her feel happy, her eyes met his from across the room. He smiled again, and almost seemed to blush when he saw her smiling back. Then, as soon as it had happened, he turned away and joined a group of Papillons in conversation.
Augustina couldn’t help it. The idea of Rusty Hanson simply made her smile.
“What are you smiling at, Teena?” Peyton asked. She had begun to crane her neck around to try to see what or whom Augustina was so pleased by.
“Peyton! Peyton! Please stop!” She grabbed her friend. “I’m sorry. Just promise not to tell anyone but…”
“Yeah?” Peyton leaned across the table in confidence.
Augustina swallowed, and then whispered, “Rusty Hanson smiled at me.”
Peyton narrowed her eyes. “Are you sure he hadn’t just told a joke about you?”
“No! Well, I don’t think so. It didn’t seem that way to me.”
Peyton shrugged. “Be careful.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Don’t get pregnant?” Peyton shrugged again.
Teena yelped. “Peyton! What the heck is that supposed to mean? He smiled at me. That’s it.”
“Well, that’s how it always begins…”
“Who told you that?” she asked.
Peyton was trying to avoid eye contact now. “My mom.”
“Your mom’s Irish Catholic.”
“Yeah, and she said my grandfather used to get my grandmother pregnant just by shaking his pants at her.”
“What?”
“It’s true.” Peyton then nodded in complete faith.
Augustina shook her head. She said, “That’s crazy.”
“Well, it makes more sense that saying robots harvest babies for their energy.”
“I had just seen the Matrix!” Augustina exclaimed in fierce protestation.
Peyton returned her focus to her notebook, leaving Augustina feeling awkward and embarrassed. She had nothing better to do than tap her fingertips on the table and hope Peyton was wrong about the miracles of conception. Surely Peyton was joking, or perhaps she was jealous…
“Peyton…”
She was still scrawling sentences across the page. “Uh-huh?”
Augustina didn’t know how to say what she wanted to ask, so she struggled to express herself. “If you…I mean, what’s wrong with wanting…What do you think of Rusty Hanson?”
Peyton quickly turned to give the boy a glance and then looked at Augustina. “His hair fits his name.”
“I mean, do you think he’s cute?” Augustina asked.
“Like a puppy?”
“Like a boy.”
Peyton grimaced. “No. I already told you, I don’t like boys.”
It was true. Peyton often said she didn’t think she was heterosexual. She wasn’t homosexual, either. Peyton thought of herself as a graphosexual. She could only be attracted to comic book characters and literary representations of men. Flesh and blood seemed to let her down.
As Augustina’s friend, Peyton could sense that this wasn’t what she wanted to hear. So she said, “Though he is kind of cute like a puppy.”
“Really?” Augustina was surprised.
“Yeah,” said Peyton, “His hair is fluffy and I suppose it would be fun to pet.”
Augustina said nothing, but she did look at Rusty with a more discerning eye.
Peyton added, “And…I suppose if he was older, Cajun, had red eyes, wore a trench coat and was two dimensional, he might look like Gambit. And then I could see the attraction.”
“Oh.” Augustina felt better. She said, “Okay.”
Then the bell rang and it was time for the first class of the day, and that was the day that everything at the Norman Vincent Peale School for the Positive-Minded would change forever.

The Burning Desk

“Jimmy’s Detective Agency. This is Johnny.”

“Ohthankgod.”

Her voice jabbed at my ear, like a cloying violet blooming in a stone quarry. Or maybe a minefield. I gripped the telephone receiver tight, like I was strangling someone, as I pulled my chair closer to my office desk. I knew that voice. At first I though I had heard it in a car commercial. Then I realized it was my cousin Sue – the one I made out with at the family picnic, the last summer before the war

“Johnny,” she mewed.

“Sugar,” I said.

“I need your help. It’s urgent. Pick me up at this address-”

“Hold on, pumpkin,” I barked, recognizing the voice at last. She was a sweet, troubled kid, the kind of girl who sees the world as shades of innocent sepia. I had a bad feeling in my gut. It was my peptic ulcer hemorrhaging again, and I cursed the world for not making mucous membranes like they used to. “Let me grab something to write down the address with.”

“Hurry.”

“I don’t want to forget, cupcake,” I told her. “I’d regret it for a year or two.”

My hand swiped across the desk, brushing aside empty gin bottles and scratch-off stubs. I needed a pencil bad. A number 2. I could even have tolerated a softer lead, just for that one night, for that one phone call. I woulda grabbed a soft-leaded sissy-stick and scraped it across a scrap of dog-eared 8 ½ by 11 like a man. A pale, sensitive, art-student man, but still a man.

“Johnny, I hear footsteps.” Sue’s voice again. No pencil in sight. No pencil in the whole goddamn office. No time to run out and get one.

“Sit tight, angel face, I’m almost ready.” A lie. Obviously. She tasted it on my breath, straight through the twisted phone line, that’s how much I reeked of lie. I’m good at it – that’s the problem. My living is lying to cops, or to faded-flower spouses who hire me to catch cheating lovers. I lie to make people happier. I lie because they want me to, and because it makes me feel less hollow inside. But this girl, poor Sue, smelled my lie, and knew I was pathetic. I had maybe fifty bucks to my name, with an office on the wrong side of the tracks and a dubious reputation. She called me to save her life, and brave, strong Johnny didn’t even have a pencil to write down her address…

A pencil. All I needed was a pencil. Or even a pen, or a piece of chalk, a diarrheic child’s crayon, or one of those flaky grease pencils from Telegraph Supply. Everyone has a pencil. The crackwhores and the tramps in the roper yards have pencils. My mother has a pencil. And she’s dead.

A bottle of scotch sulked behind a carton of lo mein. A loose woman had dropped it off this morning in exchange for some services rendered. I snatched it up, checking to see if it was any good. No. It was kerosene-cheap, with a similar pine-pitch taste. Flammable.

I poured some into the bottle-green ashtray, and sloshed it around. The scotch soaked up the rancid ash, swirling and gathering darkness and color. I tried dipping my finger into the stuff, and writing on the back of a tax return, partially completed. No luck, and time was running out. I needed to write down her address fast.

“They’re at the door, Johnny”

“Is it still locked, muffin?”

“Yes.”

“Pretend you aren’t home.” I didn’t have time for her caterwauling. I yanked my pistol out from my shoulder strap and cocked the gun religiously. Aimed at the ashtray. Prayed to a false idol. Pulled the trig.

Pow.

The ashtray exploded into bottle-green brimstone, and the heat from the .45 ignited the spilled scotch on my old oak desk. Quickly, I thrust the partially completed tax return into the flame, thinking I could make a piece of charcoal like some mangy collier.

“What was the address again?” I shouted into the black plastic phone, now slippery with sweat. The flames licked dangerously close to the rubber chord. She muttered some words that sounded like a street name. Maybe she shouted. I scrubbed the blackened wad of tax return on the surface of the desk, trying to scrawl the address into the oak, which was beginning to ignite, the shellac peeling back with the dancing orange.

“Oh god. They’re inside.”

“Get down, buttercup!”

“Oh my god!” screamed the woman, and I heard a gunshot. And another. The shots rang with scratchy echoes as they bounced through the telephone wires.

I had to take drastic measures to save her. It was my duty. With a jagged piece of ashtray glass I sliced open the blue vein in my wrist. The blood spurted out, hitting my eye. I dabbed my finger in it, and smeared the address on the wall behind me. The blood dripped on the wainscoting, but remained legible. Then my eyes began to tingle, and I coughed from the acrid smoke, tinged with scotch and cigarette butts and marine shellac from the surface of my bloodied, burning desk. Splotches of blackness swam in front of my nose as my grip on my bleeding wrist loosened and my arm went slack. I fell to the floor like an Olympic diver doing a belly flop – graceful, frustrated, sneered at by German judges.

As my congealing red life bubbled out of me, I thought of the maid, who I hadn’t paid in three weeks. I thought of the rent, also unpaid for the aforementioned three weeks. And I thought of Cousin Sue, whose only mistake was ringing me up on the one day that six thousand years of humans using tiny shapes to represent language utterly failed. The phone lay next to me on the floor, the dial tone buzzing in my ear for what seemed like forever. Eventually it fell quiet as the office and the desk burned away, and I no longer heard anything at all.

My Mothball Skippy

MY MOTHBALL SKIPPY
By Billy Krumholtz, Age 9

My best friend in the whole world is my mothball Skippy. He is six years old and is mostly white, with brown and black spots. Skippy is the family mothball, but he likes me best. When I get home from school, Skippy is waiting in the windowsill watching me walk up the path to the back porch. When I open the door, Skippy rolls around on the floor, excited to see me.

Mom and Dad say that Skippy is middle-aged, in mothball years. He used to be bigger, but now seems pretty small. I think it is because I have gotten larger, because I am growing up. Mom says that Skippy is very healthy, but that I shouldn’t feed him junk food. But Mom, I said, Skippy is hungry. And Mom says William, mothballs don’t eat people food. They eat mothball food. Sometimes, though, I give Skippy some of my meatloaf. I don’t think meatloaf is really a people-food anyway, and Skippy likes it a lot.

The best thing about having a pet mothball is that you always have someone to play with. Skippy is usually a very good, quiet mothball, but he loves to play fetch. We run around in the yard and throw sticks. Skippy is very bad at catching things and picking them up, so he usually loses the game. I often throw him around instead. I used to think Skippy could do anything, but I am learning that that isn’t true. For example, Mothballs can’t climb trees, unlike the neighbor’s rat poison, Slinky. Slinky hates mothballs and is mean to us, so I throw Skippy at her to express our hatred. Mothballs and rat poisons just don’t get along.

Skippy is very well housetrained, for a mothball. He never goes to the bathroom inside the house, and doesn’t shed on the carpet ever. Also, he does tricks, like rolling over and playing dead. He is really good at playing dead. Sometimes I think he is dead, but then he moves and I realize that Skippy was just teasing me. Dad says that Slinky the rat poison couldn’t do that, because you can’t train rat poison. Mothballs are friendlier than rat poison, says Dad. I think that is true.

Sometimes, we have to go away on trips and leave Skippy at home. We ask Uncle Fred to be our mothball sitter. He stops by our house make sure that Skippy is ok. I miss Skippy a lot when we go on trips, so hard that it makes me want to rip the heads off of my Power Rangers. Then I get sad. But when we come home, Skippy is always waiting.

At night, Skippy curls up on my bed. Mom makes him sleep in the blanket chest because Skippy smells bad, but I think that is inhumane. I like the mothball smell. Dad says that Mom is bitchy because she grew up in the city and doesn’t drink enough. Skippy loves her anyways. Sometimes, though, I think Mom wishes that we had rat poison for a pet instead of a mothball.

And that is my report about my best friend in the whole world, Skippy the mothball.

We Support Silver Genitals.

School children may want to avert their eyes. Oh no, too late. The image above was taken by Ain't it Cool News from the trailer of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. It would appear that the Silver Surfer as he appears in this summer's FF sequel is anatomically correct.

And we here at Moonsquabble dig it.

Ain't it Cool News was the first to break the story a few weeks ago, but since then it has fallen under the radar in favor of Swagdance Film Fest reports and close-ups of Optimus Prime. This, I feel, is a grave error in online journalism.

The consensus of Ain't it Cool News is that the Silver Surfer's junk is nothing more than one sick animator's easter egg for the audience, like Jessica Rabbit's vag or Ariel's priest's boner. We at Moonsquabble feel that a petition is in order to ensure that the Silver Surfer's chrome covered nuts appear in every frame possible. Is it not enough for big time film producers to water down epic Marvel plots? Must they rob Norrin Radd of his manhood, too?

Purists will argue that the Silver Surfer's crotch resembled Ken's in the comics, but I think purists need to move out of their mothers' basements and get a life. Moonsquabble supports Silver Surfer genitalia. (In theory, only. We're not prepared to be welded on him like a jock strap. That's a journey we can't take...no oxygen in space, dig?)

To see it yourself, watch the trailer.

If that version of Sue Storm and Reed Richard's wedding looks too lame for your, check out the original version.


Kitty con Carne signing out.

On The Lam and In The Zone

Humanoids and Cephalopods:

Welcome and good evening. It’s nice to meet you. Take off that hat and put up your feet. Check out the dreary and ridiculous world around you. It is filled with terror, despair, and betrayal. It is populated by monsters and thieves, along with a growing hoard of coked-out celebrities. It’s kind of sexy, too.

In the left hand corner of the galaxy, you have Larry, a blithering platinum-belted fighter with a mouth full of foam. Let’s say that he represents all that is chaotic and wrong with the universe, and that he wants to hurt you. Yesterday, he tried to set his VCR to record a rerun of CSI: Miami. Today, he discovered that he accidentally taped Judge Joe Brown instead. Larry hates Joe Brown. So do people who steal furniture from their diabetic in-laws. Larry does this frequently.

In the right hand corner of the galaxy shivers Melanie, who, let us suppose, represents enthalpy and the natural order of the cosmos. She just lost a Golden Globe nomination to Halle Berry, and knows that seeking revenge is wrong. Mel watches Masterpiece Theater and lives on Brattle Street in Cambridge. She takes long walks in the park, and kickboxes every Friday. Tonight, however, she is doomed. You can tell by the way she keeps muttering “I’m fucked,” to herself over and over again, and how she tried to disqualify herself a few minutes ago by faking an epileptic seizure. Larry Chaos looks on fire tonight, and your bookie will probably give you some fine numbers on him. But don’t be fooled – Melanie Order is wearing a mission fig aloe rub that makes her slipperier than an otter slathered in KY. We encounter such otters with surprising frequency.

The bell rings. The judges grunt in some Neanderthal tongue. The galaxy shudders as Order and Chaos duke it out in the cinderblock boxing rings of our galaxy. And in the middle of all of this sits you. And us.

We promise not to lie to you about that.

Welcome to Moonsquabble! Johnny and Kitty (that’s us) are in disguise somewhere near the planet Xena, on the run from killer sexbots. We hope to make you laugh. We ourselves laugh often, mostly at inappropriate times, and sometimes at harmless but pervasive stereotypes. The best remedy for a weary world, we feel, is a healthy dose of sarcasm and satire. No target is above us. No line is too sacred. Lines are for children. We are bigger than children, and can scare them easily.

Remember, the best disguise is one that nobody knows you are wearing. And we are not wearing anything.

Hello!

- Johnny Desolation and Kitty con Carne