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donnerpartyofone · 6 months

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horrorphones...

Like many of the cretinous shut-ins who follow this blog, I hate phone calls. If you call me on the phone without an approved appointment I will assume that you are experiencing a deadly emergency. You will scare the shit out of me and I may not even be relieved if there is no deadly emergency. For me to talk on the phone, I practically always have to write a little script, even if we are very close personal friends. I must have a physical list of talking points in case my mind goes totally blank from the enormous pressure and I forget my entire life. I usually have to have at least one drink for calls lasting longer than a minute or two. I would probably be most comfortable conducting all social business from behind a Late Show desk on which I could reassuringly tap my stack of helpful cue cards. I will write you very long personal letters. I will text and DM with you at all hours of the night. I just cannot talk to you on the phone. The phone fries my brain. Actually, I feel extremely nervous even after a phone call, even if everything went well, even if it was super fun. I kind of have to sleep it off.

Unfortunately, not all people communicate in non-phone ways. I have one best friend (I'm an adult, I don't put the top people in a hierarchy as if they all serve exactly the same purpose and some are better than others; I have a couple of verified "best friends") who is just too much of a free spirit to be really into the internet, or to be brooding over long written documents. I gotta talk to her on the phone or she won't feel loved, she'll feel detached and isolated. I love to talk to her, but I still need to get in the like phone zone in order to not act like the total fucking outer space alien that I actually am. Being me is very taxing.

But now I have this old friend, see. An old friend and also a friend who is old. Actually I have no idea how old he is, he was old when I met him. He gave me my first post-college job (my first "real job" ever, I was and remain an unemployable mess) at his comic book store, where I stayed for many years. The whole crew there was very tight. He is a cool, smart, funny, cultured, frustrating, infuriating, offensive, secretly caring and wonderful sort of person. We went through a lot together, including several years of a random customer stalking and harassing me. We dealt with the police together. We served the dregs of society together. Sometimes we hated each other. But he is a major reason that I survived my 20s.

Several years ago he was in a freak accident where he was pinned under a heavy piece of furniture in his apartment for days. It could have killed him. He already had a well-developed case of Parkinson's, I don't know if that's related. Through a series of different events, he wound up moving into an assisted living place on the other side of the country, near one of his brothers. I'm sure he hates it. Every year on Halloween, which is a little bit before his birthday, I send him a hand-drawn card featuring classic comics characters doing all sorts of demented things, along with a little update letter. One year I got a letter back asking me to call him. OH NO, I thought. I didn't call.

Yesterday was a big, very challenging, in some ways very rewarding day. When I was finally all out of tasks I decided to turn my brain fully off and become spectacularly stoned. I was well zooted when my fucking phone rang. I quickly Googled the number, and I'm pretty sure it was the assisted living facility where my friend is. I didn't pick up. They called back once, but left no message. I felt pretty bad, though I also knew that in my current state it would have been a huge disaster if I answered. What if he died? I thought, knowing that he has a lot of siblings and I wouldn't have been that phone call, and also if it were important they would have left a message or kept trying. I forced myself not to worry about it by popping a couple of Benadryl and making it an early night.

I think I have to call back though. I might regret it if I don't. I have been thinking about this for a long time. I have all sorts of worries. What if he's incoherent now? What if we can't understand each other? What if I have nothing to say? What if he IS coherent but he wants to say terrible things about politics (a life-long constant for him, I don't know if he even cares as much about politics as he does about trolling people)? But also what if he like dies and I have to sit around thinking about how selfish I am for never calling him for all eternity? I'm sure I'm the only person making him original personalized art for his birthday every year, but does that really get me out of everything else?

So the point of this post is to somehow force myself to call him. I have way too much shit to do and I am preparing for a lot of stressful social things with strangers and I need to stop being unemployed and I am cramping up a storm. But I think I also have to make the phone call. Maybe I will do such a bad job that I never have to do it again! Pray for me, pray for the sweet saving grace of personal failure.

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hell-yeahfilm · 3 years

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ABSOLUTE GARBAGE, TOTAL NONSENSE, AND UTTER RIDICULOUSNESS

In his collection, Rice shows that he has a knack for the strange. His works often embrace horror, and they particularly shine when he leans into the disturbing. In the story “Eat,” Martina is judging a hot dog eating contest only to be mesmerized by a contestant who’s interested in another type of food. A similarly grotesque event occurs in “Horrorphone,” when a set of twins finds a box under their late father’s bed and the sound that emanates from it has strange effects on one of them. Alongside the terror, however, there are also moments of comedy, with a prime example in the collection’s first story, “Branch Manager,” in which an actual tree is hired as—you guessed it—an office branch manager, and its two human employees don’t trust it. In addition to some arboreal puns (“I bet he walks around after everyone leaves. Probably roots through people’s desks”), the absurdity of the plot adds appeal to the prose: “He had every right to go home just the same as any other employee. But he was a tree.” Some entries are innovative and experimental, including poetry as well as scripts, such as “Is That Weird?” which the author initially intended to pitch to the producers of the most recent reboot of The Twilight Zone,and “Nothing Would be Nicer,” a tale that includes a Seinfeld-inspired teleplay, complete with fictional advertisements. The poems offer readers pleasant changes of pace scattered throughout the collection; however, their language can feel bland at times. Another issue that sticks out is the fact that each piece is prefaced by explanation of why the author wrote it or what certain aspects are meant to signify; these are informative, but they leave little room for readers’ own interpretations.

from Kirkus Reviews https://ift.tt/3nd0J1u

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