Christopher Moore’s Blog

The Perfect Christmas Gift…

by Christopher Moore

You guys realize that you are only about a year from being vaporized by a death-beam from outer space, right?

So let’s talk about Christmas.

I got about seven-hundred gift catalogs in the mail today, and every one of them featured some sort of item with GPS built in. GPS, as you all know, is the Global Positioning System – a series of satellites in geosynchronous orbit around the Earth which send out signals by which, with a proper receiver, you can be located. With a GPS you can find out where you are, anywhere on the planet, at any time, within a three-foot radius.

I bought one. I get lost a lot. Should you buy one?

You already have.

All cell phones must have a GPS chip in them BY LAW. It may not be activated, but it’s there. Haven’t you watched CSI, or Bones, or Crossing Jordan – the Buried Alive episodes — where the hero/heroine is buried alive and they find them by their ever-diminishing GPS cell phone signal? Nevermind that my cell phone won’t work if I can see my own shadow, let alone buried six feet under ground, the concept is totally based on reality. At any given time, you can be located, pinpointed, from space. Ergo, at any time, the government could totally vaporize you with a death beam, from space.

The only thing keeping you from being vaporized right now by a death beam from space is that the government can’t get the death beam to work. (Mainly because they actually set a goal to build a space-based death beam back in the 80s, and pursued it by giving huge, no-bid contracts to defense companies based on the screenings of the film Real Genius, without any contingency for actually making it work.)

Of course, you could use a GPS to kill someone without a death beam, I suppose. For instance, I was walking around Paris last summer, using my GPS receiver to find Metro Stations and such, and my GPS actually speaks French. I don’t, but it does. My GPS could have just lead me into a Muslim neighborhood, then, totally without my knowing, said in French, "Hey, is that your sister eating pork rinds and giving Muhammad a golden shower?" I would think I’d just asked how to get to the nearest falafel stand, and the next you’d hear from me, some whack-job would be sawing my head off on YouTube. (Then you could be all, "Hey, stop goofing around getting your head sawed off and get to work on the new book, would you!")

I realized that after the robot overlords, robot parents blog, I may seem like a bit of a conspiracy wingnut. Not true. Kennedy has been dead for forty-some years, and I don’t really care what happened that day in Dallas. Even if the Pope was doing Marilyn Monroe doggie-style on the grassy knoll while she licked the gun oil from a .30-06 in between singing Happy Birthday Mr. President and writing checks to Castro, and the sight of it gave Kennedy and aneurysm that blew out the back of his head – I don’t care. Never have.

"But Chris," you say, "you are just being paranoid. The government would never vaporize their own citizens just for disagreeing with them."

Uh huh.

Like they would never hold prisoners without representation, or evidence, for an indeterminate time. Like they would never transport prisoners to other countries for the purpose of torture. Like they would never condone torture or call the Geneva Conventions, "quaint". Like they would never go through your phone or internet records without a warrant. Like they would never reveal the identity of a covert agent because she was married to a diplomat who reported facts that contradicted their propaganda. Like they would never report false intelligence information to further the prosecution of a war. Like they would never pardon a traitor who revealed the identity of a covert agent. Like they would never claim fiscal responsibility while simultaneously doubling the national debt. Like they would never accuse a war hero who lost three limbs in combat of being a traitor. Like they wouldn’t cause the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians and thousands of American soldiers while claiming to be "pro life". Like they wouldn’t call themselves "free market capitalists", then award no bid contracts in the hundreds of billions to defense companies and oppose competitive bidding from pharmaceutical companies for the Medicare prescription program. Like they would never – well, what the hell wouldn’t they do? I think vaporizing you from space is a minor infraction. And you are carrying the targeting device with you right now.

They fucked up the beam, that’s the only reason I’m still able to type and I’m not drifting over the Pacific in a little puff of smoke and ash. (And you aren’t going, "Hey, why are you floating vaporized over the Pacific, instead of working on the new book?")

So, you know, a GPS might make a nice gift this Christmas. They’ve certainly come down in price from last year. Do we need a machine that tells up where we are?

Maybe what we need is a machine not to tell us WHERE we are, but WHO we are. Something that would make us look into our hearts and answer questions honestly about what is right and wrong, about what it actually means to be free, and human, and humane. About whether we really want to live up to the values of our faith and our country, not the manipulated dogma of people with a selfish agenda. We need a machine that tells us what it is to be decent, and kind, and forgiving, and generous, and just, and fair, and humble. And not just a voting machine, (although we can use that until the new thing comes out). Something cool.

And we need it before they figure out how to work the death beam.

Happy Holidays.

PS. This may be it for a while as far as blogs go. I really do need to get more done on the book. So you nudges win.

Comments: http://bbs.chrismoore.com/viewtopic.php?p=169125#169125

That time, at Christmas, when dad shot Santa… By Christopher Moore

Okay, so tis the season and whatnot. And everyone’s always axing me: “Did you have any event in your childhood that might have fucked you up and made you like you are so you write these completely sick stories about zombies and Christmas and stuff?”

Yes, childhood! You’re small, stupid, and totally powerless. It’s like being, I don’t know, Lichtenstein at the United Nations, or, like the Littlest Pope. (Didn’t you love that book when you were a kid, about the littlest Pope, and how he was crowned head of the most powerful church in the world, but all he really wanted was a pony? I loved that. Especially when he has the Irish inquisition torture all the Leprechauns to death because they called him a wee Papist wanker. How about the part where the Dalhi Lhama kicks his ass at Pope school because he knows kung fu? Great book! )

Anyway, Christmas.

So, as I stated in yesterday’s blog. I had a little problem sleeping when I was a kid. This was largely due to the fact that my parents had been replaced by robots and I always had to be on my guard, but also because I had a bit of an over-active imagination (who would’a thunk it?) and I stayed up all night thinking of new stuff to freak out about. I was actually the first person to have a serious monkey pox scare, and this was back in the 60s, before the disease had even been discovered. I was just thinking, “Monkeys have tiny hands and tiny toes and they look a lot like us, I’ll be they could give us diseases and stuff.” So, five minutes later, I’m in the living room in my feety PJs going, “Mom, I’m afraid I’m going to catch monkey pox and get all crusty and fling my own poo can I have a glass of water?” As it turned out, that after the tests came back, the poo flinging was not caused by monkey pox at all, but by, you know, boredom.

So, Christmas eve was tough on the folks, because it was the one night of the year when they actually helped perpetuate the myth that was keeping me awake. (I’m not counting Tooth Fairy nights, because they weren’t scheduled and I would have caught that bitch if I hadn’t run out of teeth and the rat trap hadn’t kept going off during the night and catching my ear. Yes, it left a mark! )

Did I mention that Dad was a cop? Yeah, Dad was a cop, a highway patrolman, who very often worked until midnight on holidays. That particular Christmas Eve I was very excited for Santa’s arrival, as I’d asked for a real flying reindeer and I wanted to take that bitch out for a test-drive before I dropped off to visions of sugarplums dancing in my head. (Yes, I bought seriously into the Santa myth that year – I drank the koolaid, bought the T-shirt, and shagged the mascot – I know, but I was five.)

When Dad arrived home that night, well after midnight, he looked through the picture window and saw me bouncing on the couch, all jacked-up on candy-canes and egg nog, and made an infamous parenting decision.

Dad drew his service revolver, fired it into the ground, then holstered it, came in the front door and said, “It’s okay, Chris, you can go to bed now, Santa’s not coming. I just shot him off the roof.”

Completely true story.

Well, I’m not saying that had anything to do with me writing a Christmas horror story, or my life-long battle with insomnia, and the fact that I break out into sweats when I see a Santa Hat…

Happy Holidays.

Comments: http://bbs.chrismoore.com/viewtopic.php?p=168963#168963

Over The Friggin Rainbow Again…

Over the Friggin Rainbow By Christopher Moore

Tin Man episode 1 spoiler warning…

So, I was watching Tin Man last night on the Sci-Fi channel, which is a sort of reinterpretation of L. Frank Baum’s OZ books. (It kind of cracks me up that the characters refer to OZ as the Oh-Zee, but they deliver it straight-faced, so it’s not as fun as it might be.) Anyway, in this version, the Dorothy Character finds out early on that her parents — the ones she has known and who have nurtured her all of her life — are actually robots, who were programmed to nurture her and prepare her for the day when she freaked out at finding out that her parents were robots. And as I was watching it, I was saying, "That happened to me. I was totally convinced that my parents were robots, too."

I guess I was about five when I realized the temporary nature of life and was visited by a deep anxiety at my own mortality. What was the point, really? Here we were, cast upon with ball of dirt for our three-score and ten, only to suffer, die, return to dust, nothing to show for our having been here. It all seemed so meaningless, at least when you weren’t eating candy. And the world was so hostile, so dangerous, there were so many things that could hurt and kill you, or both. Didn’t my parents tell me that every day? Didn’t they shoot someone every single day on Bonanza, or Combat, or Gunsmoke?

And then it occurred to me that my parents were going out into that world, every day! There was no friggin way they were surviving the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune on a day to day basis. Heck, I’d seen my dad almost kill himself twice trying to mow the lawn, and mom endured similar run-ins with the Reaper while making a pie. (Okay, it was my fault that I hit a golf ball through the kitchen window – or at least my Dad’s fault. "You finally got under one!" he’d shouted. Then, as I cried, he laughed so hard he fell down. Glass in the rhubarb – I should have used that for a book title.) But my point is, we are but soft and squishy bags of morality rolling in a bin of sharp, pointy circumstance, leaking life like a colander full of wet spaghetti.

So clearly, my parents had been killed many times. And because I was so damn special, the government (I had a very ominous view of the government at five, it seemed pervasive, and secret, and hostile – like the Old Testament God, only way more sneaky – come to think of it, I still have that same view) anyway, I was so damn special that the government had replaced my parents with robots. Why? Well, so as not to upset me and keep me from doing very extraordinary things, like, you know, flying and being a genius. I was pretty sure my folks were robots. Why else would they whisper and have conversations after I went to bed? (I could hear them! Talking!) They were plotting. I imagined conversations like this: "Oh Jack, you must be more careful. You almost crushed that coffee cup with your scary robotic hand. Chris would have known right away and our cover would have been blown."

"I know, Faye, that is why I sent him to bed, so he will fall asleep and we can wipe the memory from his little brain so in the morning he won’t remember but he will have to pee really bad."So, I developed insomnia at a very early age. Which is why my Dad had to shoot Santa off the roof one Christmas to get me to go to sleep, but I’ll tell you about that tomorrow.

Over the years my parents were replaced again and again, each model having a subtle change so I would not notice. Sometime in the 70s, however, something went terribly wrong. I think the programming in the Mom-bot was tuned to have an obsessive affinity for the colors avocado green and harvest gold. Anyway, because of it, I never developed the ability to fly. And to this day, with those colors coming back in the trendy "retro" designs, I sort of break out into cold sweats when I see them, and to my chagrin, I still can’t fly.

The thing is, eventually you have to give in. Eventually you have to say to yourself, "What does it matter if they are robots, they still won’t let have a mini-bike?" You realize that your robot parents are programmed the way they are, they will never relent, and you can never escape, because everyone else is in on the conspiracy. Then, in the early 80s, after I’d left my parents and escaped to California, I became aware of a larger part of the conspiracy. The President was a robot. There was no other explanation for Ronald Regan – and all the robot parental units in the country who were supporting him. I was about to reveal the conspiracy, when they killed my Father-bot.

Sure, they said it was a heart attack, but I knew, it was probably his old nemesis, the lawn mower, or a golfing accident. I clammed up, minded my own business, and went about the business of life, making a call back to the Mother-bot in Ohio every month.

Then, in the late nineties, as the it appeared that the country was going to come out of the robotic closet by electing one of two robots: the really smart, but stiff and completely unconvincingly human robot, or the convincingly human robot that was as dumb as a box of rocks, I decided to come forward. That’s when they killed the Mom-bot. This time I wanted to see it coming, so I flew to Ohio to observe the process. They’d done a convincing job of making the Mom-bot appear to be wasting away from a debilitating disease, but after she was deactivated, I confirmed my life-long suspicion when I found her internal battery module. It was right there in her night-side table, next to her hand gun and her bible.

So, all I’m saying is, I totally know what Dorothy was going through in Tin Man. I’ve been there, done that. Wait until she finds out she can’t fly and she’s not a genius…

Comments: http://bbs.chrismoore.com/viewtopic.php?p=168832#168832