I’m opening the Hugs For Monsters store today. You can go get yourself a totally sweet shirt with a giraffe made out of spraypaint on it! It’s fun! Go!

http://hugsformonsters.bigcartel.com

Go there

This is kind of a personal thing. But I really want to write this down. I think it’ll make a lot of people smile. It’s my twenty-fourth birthday Friday, and I’m pretty sure I share it with Trace Beaulieu, so it seemed like a good time to write this. (Kevin Murphy’s birthday is just a couple days beforehand, so hey, all the more fun.)

If you know me well, you know it’s been a rough few months since I had to leave Crush+Lovely. The job market is a nightmare. My best friend went to Japan to teach English for about a year. I was about 200 dollars from going broke at one point. I got swine flu. My grandpa died. Worst of all, I’ve had to live with my parents the whole time in a town where there’s over 100,000 people and only like three different places to go.

I’ve worked hard to create cool stuff to keep myself busy. Since going freelance in February, I launched this site. I launched a video game blog with some friends called Bomb Guts that we all work hard on when we can think of games to make fun of. I’ve made posters, portraits, a fake mac application, freelance stuff, and I’m working on a children’s book. It’s all been good, but none of it has really made me happy, just too busy to be upset. I woke up every day telling myself, “Today will be better. Just get out of bed, man. It’ll be okay.” Eventually, I got kind of tired of lying.

One day, while looking through the Netflix website (you have a lot of time to watch movies when you’re home for 24 hours a day, 6 days a week) something I consider to be nothing short of a miracle happened. I had watched some goofy movie the night before and got the standard, “HEY, IF YOU LIKED THAT, WATCH THIS SHIT, MAN:” prompt containing two episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I was sort of shocked. I completely forgot about MST3K, and it was my absolute favorite show as a kid. I watched it every single sunday on the Sci-Fi channel (we didn’t get Comedy Central in my town at the time, so I didn’t know about it before then). Thanks to the passing of time and an awful long-term memory, I completely forgot about it.

If you don’t know the show, let me explain really quickly. Mystery Science Theater 3000 was a weekly show where they’d get an awful horror/sci-fi movie (sometimes they used other genres, but for the most part they’d stick with those) watch it, and make fun of it. It was like watching terrible movies with three really, really funny people, except between commercials and stuff you’d see them do sketches. It was a human being (Joel Hodgson or Mike Nelson, depending on what season you watched) and two puppets: Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot (voiced by Kevin Murphy and Trace Beaulieu/Bill Corbett, respectively). That’s it. Cute sketches with a guy and two robots, then making fun of a bad movie. It’s so simple and goofy and intentionally lo-fi but so awesome. If you want to learn more, go read up on it here.

I filled my queue with every single episode they had available and started watching them right away. I think I laughed so much at the first few movies that my parents thought I’d finally gone crazy and was laughing at things only I could see/hear. For about two hours a day, I wasn’t sad. I just forgot about everything that was wrong and watched what was going on up in the Satellite of Love and way down in Deep 13.

After mentioning the series in passing to friend and Bomb Guts co-editor, Kevin Craig, he informed he that he owned the entire show on DVD, and even had some old VHS tapes of the KTMA and non-released episodes. I was in my truck doing 90mph up the Garden State Parkway before he even finished typing, “You can borrow them if you want.”

Since the end of August, I’ve been watching one or two episodes a day, every single day. I usually get the most bummed about my still-existing crappy situation with unemployment/living at home with my parents late at night, so that’s when I put it on. It’s changed the worst part of my day into the best. I know that, no matter how shitty my day was, no matter how few places seem to be hiring or how hard it is to be with my family all the time, I’ll get to visit the Satellite of Love that night and hang out with the best three movie-watching friends a guy could ever have. When Mike or Joel smile during the intro, I smile back. No matter how many times I hear that cheesy theme, it always makes me smile. I just feel like I’m with friends at a time when I feel so incredibly lonely otherwise. It’s a really good feeling.

I think I love it so much because it’s always so happy, regardless of how sad I am. There’s never a negative mood or a”serious moment”. Even when Joel left, it ended with a gag about him liking a cheesy movie. I’ve been told that even the last episode of the series ends on a funny, happy note. I can’t bring myself to watch it yet. I keep telling myself that when all this is over, when I finally have a job and my own apartment and a smile on my face, I’ll be ready then to say goodbye. For right now, I still need you guys.

I just want to say thank you. Joel, Mike, Kevin, Trace, Bill, Frank, Mary Jo, and Josh, and everybody that made the show happen. I can’t imagine how many crazy fans you’ve had over the years, but I just want you to know that you’ve made a really awful time in my life way, way less awful.

So to everyone in the Satellite of Love, down in Deep 13, and in Pearl’s Castle, this one’s for you. This time, you go through. I’ll go around.

My grandpa died a few weeks ago. We weren’t super close or anything, but my dad was. Every day, it was all I heard about when he’d get home from visiting him at a hospital in New York. My dad has a lot of brothers and sisters, so I knew that at their houses, it was the very same thing. A lot of talking and waiting and worrying.

At the funeral, it was so quiet. Nobody said a word. A family of loud people that always yelled even the littlest thing suddenly so quiet. I liked it a lot. Everyone reminded me of deer. They just stared straight ahead. Wide eyed. Not saying a word.

The footer is about how we’re like animals when we die. We’re quiet. We watch and listen and wait for something to happen. And then we move on.