COLUMN: Slenderman

I'm not a fan of horror movies.

Eerie movies? Sure. Creepy movies? Fine. But movies with jump-scares where hatchet-wielding maniacs might pop out all boogity-boogity at any second? Hard pass. I'm well aware of the number of fast-food drive-thrus I've visited in my life. I'm pretty sure my arteries have a finite number of jump-scares left in them, and there's no need to waste any on a screening of The Conjuring Pt. 14 or whatever. 

So, as someone fairly inexperienced in the realm of horror, a question: How do you know if you've been visited by a supernatural bogeyman, and, if so, what can one do about it? Asking for a friend.

Last weekend was interesting. I DJed for a nice crowd of kids. I went grocery shopping and made some carnitas. I went on a relaxing drive up north to breathe fresh air and check out some wildlife. Oh, and I'm pretty sure I saw Slenderman.

What's that, you say? Slenderman isn't real? He's just some fictitious monster from online creepypasta memes invented to give little kids jump-scares? Yep, I'm well aware. I don't even think there's a universally agreed-upon storyline behind the meme. Slenderman is just a tall, thin, faceless guy in a dark suit who shows up ominously in the background of your family photos as he stalks and abducts people, right? It's a silly urban legend that will probably one day be a terriblde five-part movie franchise. 

Except that I'm pretty sure Slenderman is real and I saw him this weekend. 

Saturday's plan was a roadtrip up north with a friend for an aimless drive through Grant Wood country. I'd received a text from my friend that he was on his way, so I was hanging by the front door, waiting to hop in his car and head for parts unknown. I'm not a morning person by any stretch of the imagination, and I'd had a late DJ gig the night before, so I was still waiting for my brain to boot up. As I stood there in dire need of caffeine, I was totally zoning out and staring at the view from my front porch.

Across the street from my house is a vacant lot. Behind that is an alley. Whatever sits behind that alley is unknown to me, because there's a sizeable privacy fence that blocks my view of any goings-on. I was just absent-mindedly staring thataways-ish when the privacy fence suddenly swung open, revealing a doorway I never knew existed. And peering around the corner of that doorway was a pale face.

Keep in mind, this is all happening a good distance away from me at the far end of the vacant lot, so I couldn't really make out any features on the face (BECAUSE SLENDERMAN HAS NO FEATURES.) Then, the entire figure emerged from around the corner of this mysterious door. I couldn't make out much (BECAUSE NO ONE CAN CLEARLY SEE SLENDERMAN), but out walked a tall and thin bald man dressed in a dark suit. 

"Well, that's creepy," I announced to my cats and the thin air, but curiosity got the better of me. I stood fixed in the doorway, staring back at my odd new friend. He took several unnatural-looking steps forward and was now at the edge of the vacant lot across from me. His arms hung limply to his sides. And then he just stopped. And stared. At me.

He was a ways away, but it certainly looked like he was staring me square in my eyes. Eventually, I gave a quick little wave at this utter nightmare. I made sure it was not a wave that said, "Hi, please come over. I want to be your friend." It was clearly a wave that said, "I'm a busy guy with many things to do, but I acknowledge your existence and let's carry on with our day, shall we?"

Did Slenderman wave back? Nope. Did Slenderman instead remain motionless while slowly cocking his head to the side like a confused puppy? Yep. Did I pee my pants a little? No comment. I said a few more things to my cats and the thin air, but it's nothing I could repeat in a family newspaper, so let's just pretend I said, "Gosh, that's scary." He (it?) kept staring forward (at me? through me? into my soul?) for a few seconds more, and then slowly turned around and walked back through the gap in the fence in the same unnatural, fixed-arms manner as before.

There's no reason I can think for anyone to come out of that house, wander ominously towards me, and then retreat. A few minutes later, my friend showed up. I could've greeted him with a hello or even a "HAVE I GOT A STORY FOR YOU." Instead, you KNOW you have a best friend when you can greet him with, "QUICK, DRIVE UP THAT ALLEY. SLENDERMAN IS HERE" and he doesn't miss a beat and immediately heads up the alley. But nothing was there. Slenderman was gone.  

My best friend is also clearly smarter than me. "Wouldn't that be on your security camera?" he asked immediately. I hadn't even thought about that. I have cameras recording my front porch 24/7. Or should I say 23.9/7, because of the hours and hours of footage from this past week, the only missing video was the ten minute stretch when my new terrifying friend made an appearance. I did manage to get one grainy still-frame image as a memento of my daymare. It's about as conclusive as your average Bigfoot pic, but I know what I saw.

Okay, so maybe I have no idea what I saw. It was probably just a random person coming out of their house. Maybe they were waiting for THEIR best friend to pick them up. Maybe they had no idea how creepy they looked. Maybe they came out to get a closer look at the creepy guy staring at their house from across the vacant lot. Maybe I'M the scary one. If you thought Slenderman would make a good horror movie, wait 'til you catch the demonic terror of Awkwardfatguy. Hollywood, I await your call. 

COLUMN: Basement DJing

Well, it's official. I'm a celebrity. 

The guy who writes silly columns for the paper? Check. The dude who spins records for people half his age on the weekends? Check. The occasional fill-in clerk behind the counter at your favorite record store? You betcha. And now I can officially tack one more thing onto my resume: SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCER EXTRAORDINAIRE.

That's right, at 7:05 p.m. on Monday night, I officially became one of the cool kids. I went live on TikTok for exactly seventeen minutes. And it was every bit as awkward and anti-climactic as you'd expect.

It all started during the COVID lockdowns. Nightclubs were closed and DJs were bored. Instead of taking extended vacations from the wheels of steel, many DJs instead turned to social media and streaming platforms. All it takes is a webcam and some streaming software, and you could suddenly be bringing the party into the homes of countless strangers tuning in. Watching online DJs helped keep me sane during the pandemic, and the fad hasn't stopped.

If you log on to TikTok right now, there's probably over a hundred different DJs broadcasting right now. For the past half hour, I've been watching a guy in Hawaii live-streaming from a beachfront DJ booth. A quick scroll and now it's a girl blaring house music from what I think is downtown Kuala Lumpur. Swipe up and now it's a guy playing records to himself in a musty basement. One more swipe and it's a kid spinning ear-shattering EDM music in a tiny bedroom equipped with about 3.7 nightclubs worth of DJ lighting and lasers.

Is it ridiculous? Absolutely. Is TikTok an app made for people half my age or younger? Definitely. Was I super jealous of all these streaming DJs and did I secretly want to be one? Most certainly. Look, I'm a realist. I have no fancy lighting. Lasers would traumatize my cats. Some of these DJs look like Swedish supermodels and I look more like a Swedish meatball twenty years past his prime. But I'm not half bad at mixing records together. And I quickly discovered there's a niche group of old DJs like me who stream vintage and classic jams from back in the day, and they get a decent audience of viewers. I think I wanna join this party.

I had that thought about a year and a half ago. That's how long it's taken me to slowly gather the necessary equipment to livestream. Remember above when I said "all it takes is a webcam and some streaming software"? I forgot to mention you also need a digital interface, about six different adapters, multiple computers, hard-wired ethernet, and a whole lot of patience. 

Thankfully, I never have a shortage of nerdy tech friends to help with this sort of thing, and they're used to receiving texts from me like, "Hey, do you have one of those thingamajigs that mounts an audio doohicky to your phone?" One of my friends got so sick of my many questions that he stopped by, dumped a box of gear at my door, said I owed him fifty bucks, and said, "you're all set." My basement now looks like a Fisher-Price version of Baby's First Television Studio. There are cables and lines running across the floor. There are multiple tripods. I even have one of those ridiculous ring lights down there for enhanced portraiture of my pretty face -- so if DJing doesn't work out, I have all the gear necessary to start filming makeup tutorials or showing off my graceful choreography skills.

And so it was that last night, after a year of thinking about it, watching WAY too many tutorial videos, and slowly assembling all the necessary equipment, I gave live-streaming a quick test run. I thought it'd be fun. It was mostly just nerve-wracking.

How do our children film themselves every day without a care in the world? As I sat there watching the timer count down to my first livestream, I had about EVERY care in the world. I HAD ALL OF THE CARES. "Whoa, lookit me on that screen. I'm super old and fat and ugly! Gross. Do my arms look weird? How am I supposed to hold my arms? Are arms supposed to bend like that? Does this look too casual? Not casual enough? Is it too loud? Too quiet? AM I FORGETTING TO BREATHE?"

It was all just a bit much. I now understand why younger generations seem prone to anxiety issues. Those were seventeen of the most anxious minutes of my life. To get over my crippling insecurities, I ended up positioning the camera so that the only things visible were my hands and the DJ controller, and I STILL felt self-conscious.

The internet is SUCH a weird place. Even though the only thing I aired was 17 minutes of a pair of hands pushing some buttons on a DJ controller, 283 strangers tuned in. They can't ALL be the Chinese government spying on me, right? Over 75 of them "liked" my livestream. One person followed me. Clearly, my hands are well on their way to becoming viral sensations. Maybe I'll score a lucrative sponsorship deal with Isotoner or something.

I'm still not sure how often I'm going to livestream, what I'll even do with it, or if I'll ever show my face. Maybe I'll try a weekly mix of vintage 80's new wave. Maybe I'll just livestream my practice sessions and play whatever I fancy. Maybe if I keep the camera pointed at my hands, I can play new jams and the kids won't realize their DJ is old enough to be their grandpa. Or maybe I'll find something more fun to do and give up my dreams of becoming a basement celebrity. Who knows for certain? I mean, other than the Chinese government, who know everything about all of us thanks to TikTok. Here's hoping they're big fans of Depeche Mode.

COLUMN: Pothole

Every day in the news, it seems like there's some new threat-du-jour to our way of life. Whether it's political strife or civil unrest or war or the economy or even the weather, sometimes it feels like everything's out to get us. When faced with these existential threats, I'm usually the first one to ring the bell of optimism and say, "Buck up, people. You're over-reacting. It's not that bad." I might have been wrong. It might be THAT bad.

There IS a threat out there, people, and it's challenging our very way of life -- or at least MY patience and wallet. If we don't get to work on fixing this national nightmare, we may not make it through this crisis. The time to act is now.

I speak, of course, about potholes.

When I was a kid, I loved it when my dad would accidentally hit a pothole. It was fun, right? The car would bounce up and down, everybody would got a free little amusement ride, and life was grand. Somewhere along the way, though -- perhaps when I bought my first car -- potholes became considerably less fun. If you don't believe me, try joyriding along Rock Island's 15th Street on the blocks leading up to the Centennial Bridge. That particular stretch of road is less a street and more like a series of gaping wounds loosely held together by asphalt.

Tough winters and tough summers play hell on our midwest roadway, and this spring, potholes are popping up -- or way, way down -- everywhere. 

Last Saturday was a great day. The weather was exceptional, and it was the perfect time for a good old-fashioned aimless drive. My best friend and I headed out of town on little more than a wing, a prayer, a Hyundai, and a well-crafted Spotify playlist. The entire day was spent on the back-est of back roads, exploring hills and valleys and small towns aplenty. We even stumbled into one town's spring festival, where you could buy elk jerky from one vendor and save the world from a zombie apocalypse escape room in the next. There was even a woman selling, I kid you not, Mountain Dew jelly. 

It was a delightful day full of everything that makes the Midwest great. We rolled back into town with just enough time for me to drop my friend off and get to the charity trivia fundraiser I'd agreed to play in that evening. I have ridiculously smart friends who take their trivia VERY seriously, and every so often they ask me to tag along in case there's any inane questions about Taylor Swift or trashy TV. The event was on the outskirts of town, so for the second time that day, I headed out to the boonies.

The one good thing about solo drives is not having anyone telling you to turn down the radio, so I took full opportunity to load up one of my favorite songs and jack the volume to a wholly irresponsible level. Said volume-jacking required me to look down for the splittest of split-seconds, and you can guess what happened.

BAM!

That was the sound of my right tire falling into a pothole I didn't see coming. Actually, pothole is too forgiving of a word here -- this was more like a pot-chasm. This was no run-of-the-mill, whoopsie kind of pothole. This was the kind of impact where it felt like the car was going to come to a complete stop and flip end-over-end like a cartoon.

The good news is that the impact seemed to be cushioned. The bad news was that it seemed to be cushioned entirely by parts of the male anatomy that should NEVER be used for cushioning purposes. So if you were driving past, saw a car wipe out on a pothole, and heard the driver hurl a stream of obscenities in a high-pitched soprano wail while gasping for air, you're welcome for the comedy gold.

I have no idea how my tire stayed attached to my car, let alone stayed inflated. I nursed both car and pride to the parking lot and gingerly went in to show off my trivia skills. At break, I went out to check on the car, and it was not good. There, on the side of the tire by the rim, was a noticeable bulge. I know little to nothing about automotive maintenance, but I'm pretty sure your tire should never resemble a "before" photo from Dr. Pimple Popper. 

A friend of mine followed me home to ensure I wouldn't be stranded on a roadside somewhere, wiping my tears with shredded rubber. The next morning, I managed to book an appointment at a tire shop and make it there without a blowout. The mechanic told me it likely only had hours left. I won five dollars and a door prize at the trivia night, and all it cost me was $180 for a new tire and perhaps the ability to procreate.

I still don't regret how the last election turned out, but I'm pretty sure I remember a campaign promise about investing eleventy kajillion dollars towards infrastructure and putting all of America to work repairing roads and bridges. Is all of America on a long lunch hour from this job? I hate road construction as much as the next guy, but I'd rather contend with a detour than keep taking the pothole express to the Land of the Lost. I'd like to leave behind a better legacy than a reserved seat at Tires Plus.

COLUMN: Strike

Well, it's official. Life is temporarily meaningless.

As I'm typing this, the Writers Guild of America has just gone on strike. Unless it gets resolved in a hurry, it's likely that all late-night talk shows will be in reruns by the time you read this. If you were anxiously awaiting Pete Davidson hosting Saturday Night Live this weekend, you'll need to keep on waiting. Already there's talk of the anticipated fall slate of new TV shows getting pushed back to winter or later. The storytellers are on the picket lines.

This is a huge bummer. TV and film writers shouldn't be struggling for money. Writers have the thankless job of creating people, places, and events exciting enough that'd we'd rather stop living our own lives and watch the lives of pretend people instead. That kind of skill deserves fair compensation. And now with streaming networks where "seasons" of shows can be 8-10 episodes instead of the traditional 24, some writers are having to work for multiple shows and flicks at the same time just to make ends meet.

With all the problems in the world right now, it might seem frivolous to pay good money to people whose job it is to entertain us. But without them to create characters with rechid, problem-soaked lives, we'd have no means of escaping our own rechid, problem-soaked lives. I would certainly rather watch "Homicide: Life on the Streets" than live it.

So it's bad that writers aren't making a fair share. It's also bad that I'm so addicted to television, I'm not sure how I'll survive this strike. I guess it'll have to be a return to the classics. Goodbye, new episodes of "Ted Lasso." Hello, reruns of "Parks and Rec." Leslie Knope has never let me down, and I don't think she ever will. There's no telling how long this strike could go on, so we'd better be prepared for a long summer of reruns and terrible reality TV. 

Unless...

The way I see it, it's the fault of the Writer's Guild of America for not inviting small Midwestern newspaper columnists to join their ranks. The Guild might be on strike, but I'M not. Us writers have gotta stick together, so you'll never see Shane Brown crossing any picket lines to do any scab writing. Good thing, then, that I'm willing to work from home. 

Give me a call, big network TV producer types. I'll get to writing and keep all your franchises afloat, don't you worry about a thing. What should my first project be?

Ooh, I know. Give me the reins of "Bridgerton." I'll take over head writing on the ridiculously popular Netflix series while the strike goes on. You're welcome, everyone. Let's see, first thing's first. Quick, someone tell me what "Bridgerton" is about because I've never seen it. Ah, who cares. I'm pretty sure "Bridgerton" is a stodgy show about old-timey England, right? Except with, like, LOADS AND LOADS of whoopie-making, yeah? It's basically "Downton Abbey" if soundtracked by Marvin Gaye, right? From what I gather, it's just petticoats and nookie as far as the eye can see.

I can handle that. Okay, so maybe I don't know a thing about romance shows or England in the 1800s. But I know the key to success for any good show is securing a younger audience. Well, I watched one of those "Twilight" movies once, so I'm pretty sure I know exactly what "Bridgerton" needs to get a younger audience.

Bridgerton S3 E1, a Shane Brown Joint:

Camera OPENS on an old-timey 1800s estate bedroom. In walks LADY WHATSHERNAME and THE DUKE OF WHEREVER. 

DUKE: Hark, what light through yonder window breaks? Tis the east, and Lady Whatshername is the sun! Let us commence with thy nookie!

LADY WHATSHERNAME: Actually, I'm over here on the other side of the room. That light is just the full moon.

DUKE: Wait, did you say... FULL... MOON...? Nooooo!

Everyone turns into werewolves. Much whoopie is made. It is ridiculously sexy, but it is mostly just ridiculous. The end. 

Hire me as your new head writer, and I'll prove you can NEVER have enough werewolves. Don't ask me why, I have no clue. But if those "Twilight" movies are any example, ladies just love werewolves. Put me in charge and I'll add them to every show.

Let's be honest, who among us WOULDN'T watch a TV series called "Law and Order and Werewolves"? Admit it, if there were even the slightest chance that District Attorney Jack McCoy could transform into a blood-thirsty lupine killing machine, you wouldn't miss an episode. "In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police, who investigate crime -- and the werewolves, who eat people's faces off. These are their stories." THAT'S RATINGS GOLD, PEOPLE.

In honesty, I stand in solidarity with the Writer's Guild of America. Well, mostly I sit in solidarity with them, usually in front of the TV where their work is on nightly display. I hope the strike gets settled amicably soon. Mostly because I don't want to wait for the second season of "Severance." And also because I don't think America is ready to handle my magnum opus, "Everybody Loves Raymond Except Werewolves."