The blue porridge is to be fed to the POWs (party guests) once they have been kidnapped and processed, and consists of the cheapest, gloopiest looking instant oats we could find, plus blue food dye. The decontamination gas is a canister of some of the foulest smelling air-freshener I've ever had the misfortune to encounter in my life- in a blind smell-test (read: I toilet-spray bombed my dad in the face when he opened the door to my room), it was determined with one hundred percent accuracy that this shit smells like insect killer. We simply spray painted the can silver, which I'm going to go ahead and say is some meta-shit right there.
Then there are the guns. It took some ferreting, but somehow we ended up finding exactly what we needed at Forum stationers. We knew we were looking for a bunch of el-cheapo water guns with exactly the right amount of bells and whistles so as to look sufficiently alien once spray painted with the above mentioned hard-working silver spray paint. Whilst looking for fingerprinting ink (long story), we happened across our arsenal right below the fine-tipped ink markers and just to the left of the cache of plastic crickets. I don't ask about these things. Huzzah-ing all the way, we took our stash of stuff to the counter and the poor girl whose bad fortune it was to be on shift (or whatever it is one does in a stationary shop) got an eyeful.
"Wow. Uh. What's all this for?" she asked tentatively, her eyes darting from me to Tertius as though one of us was as liable to either eat her or break into choreographed song as we were to breath at any moment.
"An alien invasion," I answered truthfully and matter-'o-factly. Just because the truth is strange does not require me to sugar coat it for her.
"..."
"2012 end of the year, and all that jazz," I added, to make sure she understood, of course.
"This is for a party?" she asked with the most desperately hopeful tone of voice I've ever heard outside of places where 8 P.M. is called "happy hour" and comes with mandatory medication. "Or are you, like, those kinds of people, you know, who believe in all this stuff?"
I waited maybe a little too long before I said, "Sure, a party," and gave Tertius a look that was really just tremendous and slightly inappropriate pleasure at the effectiveness of the ruse, but probably looked more worryingly like tremendous and slightly inappropriate pleasure at the effectiveness of the ruse. When we returned minutes later for a few genuinely stationarily related things we had forgotten, I wiggled my eyebrows at my Partner In Crime and whispered to him under my breath that we should speak to each other in Alien. He obliged beautifully, and the poor girl could not make eye contact with me at all while she swiped my card.
When we left for the second time, I called back a teasing "Don't worry, no humans will be harmed!" over my shoulder as though I was going for the conspiratorial, you're-in-on-the-running-joke thing, but added a strained and badly conceived laugh- "Ha!! Ha!! Ha!!"- and I think I saw her dive for her phone and grab the other clerk by the sleeve the moment she thought we were out of eyeshot. I love the idea that somewhere out there is a Forum counter-jockey who cannot shake the niggling suspicion despite herself that two of her customers were exceptionally well disguised (and in my case, supremely well-fed) alien beings who intended to take over Centurion with neon-coloured water pistols.
So we spray painted the guns, the decontamination gas canister ("Now In Enchanted Lily") and some of the front lawn silver. As crap of a job as I did of photographing it, I think you'll agree they look surprisingly intimidating, non? Nothing like a bit of theatre magic to make a piece of aaaabsolute shit just sparkle to life.
I've been rewatching Angels in America. It is my absolute, 100%, most favouritest thing in the goddamn universe. It is so superbly well written, no two words in the entire play or miniseries can be taken apart and examined for its sheer mechanical genius, because there are no hinges on this thing. It's too clean; too simple to identify what makes any one of the sentences in this thing tick. I mean, observe:
How simple. How gorgeously put. Five words, just perfectly suited to one another to express the sentiment in such a way as to give rise to question to how it could ever have been said otherwise.
The angel breaks into Prior's apartment in the middle of the night with great pomp and splendour, making excellent use of $10 language and many hand waves of his "Shoo! You're scaring the SHIT out of me, get the FUCK out of my room!"s, and says that. Who the fuck says shit like that? Tony Kushner, that's who the fuck. I want a sex change so I can marry him. And also, Emma Thompson. I want to marry Emma Thompson.
Single funniest thing ever. Apropos of absolutely fuckall, the angel proceeds to sort of mid-air fiery fuck the flamboyantly gay Prior with her eight (Belize mouths, "Eight?!") vaginas, and he responds more or less how I believe any rational man ought to.
Damn damn damn I love this play. It's my happy place. Granted, I have a few happy places, but this really is the absolute top of my list of happy places. If I could meet Tony Kushner and get him to sign my copy of Angels, I think I could die happy. (*cough, cough, wink, nudge, etc.* Seriously, who's got some contacts for me? I can trade sexual favours and/or several dozen cats.)
And as a side note, Thomas Newman just murders every other attempt anyone else has ever made to write music for the screen. His music really just is what Kushner's words are. They fit like me and sushi, or me and Benedict Cumberbatch, or me and some more sushi. Perfection.
Allow me to bail, for I am weary and sore from some unknown flu and must still do a ton of work if this invasion is going to go ahead as planned. Also, my dad mentioned something about vacuuming the house, and that scares the shit out of me, so I must mentally prepare. I'll leave you with this bit of Crazy Cat Lady pictographia:
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| Subterfuge. |
That is one tasty chicken and mushroom sub, but I am not interested in the least, even though I will literally climb into your mouth for a piece of unbuttered bread if given half a chance. No no, I shall simply be over here, two centimetres to the right, quietly and respectfully grooming myself until-
GHAaaaAAAaaGh! *Mad leap with open jowls and flailing tongue, falling short of sub by about 4 feet since the human eating said sub is wise to this ploy and pulls away in leisurely time.* I'm ok. I'm fine. Meant to do that. I was just testing your reflexes.
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