Room 116

My curiosity got the best of me and now I’ll probably be dead before the sun rises. I’m writing this in a motel room in Missouri. I have been here on business the past few days and am without wife or child and get reasonably lonely in the evenings and so I thought I might take myself to dinner and a show. Why not, I said to me. I’m good company and have been meaning to get to know me a bit better.

Skipping forward in time; so there I was, appetite satiated, standing before the box office of one of Springfield’s picture-show houses.

“One for 1408.” I naively said to the box office employee.

As it turns out 1408 is Stephen King’s new movie about a haunted hotel room that no one makes it out of alive. Now, when I bought the ticket I forgot to consider two major factors. 1) I scare easier than a six-year-old girl. (The sequel to Wizard of Oz still has me terrified of monkeys AND roller-blades, and especially monkeys ON roller-blades.) AND 2) After the movie I would have to go back to my motel room… alone.

Right when I return to the room and walk in I know something is wrong. Evil is here. And because I’m crap-myself scared right now and can’t sleep, I decided to write all night just in case I wake up dead. That way my loved ones will know what happened to me.

11:35 pm
The air conditioner sounds like ghost howling. I try to shut it off but to know avail. It’s stuck on full fan.

11:50
The evil air conditioner won’t let me sleep so I turn on the TV to distract me but it clicks several times before coming on. Not mechanical clicks you might hear when turning on an old tube TV that needs to warm up before use, but a poltergeist or maybe a possessed-midget-who-is-stuck-inside-and-trying-to-get-out kind of click. M.A.S.H. is on but the sound isn’t coming from the TV like it’s supposed to. Instead it’s coming from my own brain. It’s like that dream I have where I’m on stage singing “Welcome to the Jungle” and I know all the words. I’m freaking out because I’ve never watched more than a few minutes of M.A.S.H. due to the fact that it’s not nearly as funny as people born before 1975 claim it is.

12:27 am
I started to drift off to sleep but was startled back to full consciousness by the sound of a baby crying. I can’t tell where it’s coming from, but it’s unnerving. I hate it when the Devil uses children against us.

12:42
I’ve put tissue in my ears in an attempt to drown out the baby and the AC unit. But now the TV has come back on and the only thing on is the same episode of M.A.S.H. that was on before. I turn the channel and realize it’s on every channel and now the TV won’t shut off.

1:20
All three noises climb to an unbearable climax so I try again to shut off the AC unit. No luck. I’m writhing from the auditory assault and in a fit of desperation I grab the desk lamp and smash the AC unit to pieces.

2:41
The AC unit is quieter now though it is still clinging to life with a pitch-fluctuating whirring sound. The crying of the baby is on the brink of making my ears bleed. I bang on the walls and scream “FEED THAT BABY!” The crying doesn’t stop but now there is someone behind every wall banging and screaming “FEED THAT BABY!”

3:15
I’m lying at the end of the bed, ear to the mattress with a pillow pressed firmly against my other ear. Something catches my eye. The handle on the bureau drawer moved ever so slightly. Hesitantly I move toward the drawer to investigate. I pull it out in one quick yank and without warning an angry piglet leaps from the drawer and hooves me to the ground with one powerful blow to the chest. He lands on me with all the fury of a Christmas ham, beating me mercilessly about the face and head with his fore hooves.

5:05
I must have blacked out because I just woke on the floor in a pool of blood I can only assume came from my nose and mouth. I crane my neck quickly in anticipation of another attack from Beelzepig. It is nowhere to be seen but I lay there a minute to be sure.

5:06
Just when I’m about to get up I hear a blood curdling squeal and look up to see the swine flying over the bed toward my face. This time I react by spinning to the side while reaching for the animal as it flies past. I snagged one of its rear legs. I keep spinning so to use the centrifugal force to keep his teeth away from my kill zones. When I don’t think I can spin any faster I release and watch the un-kosher terror fly headfirst into the T.V. thus ending his life and M.A.S.H. with one big electrical crash.

5:10
I’m really upset now because I’m usually pretty good with animals and only like to kill them for food… or sport… or as punishment to a neighbor who has wronged me.

5:46
I gather my wits and go to the bathroom to wash the bacon grease and blood from my hands. I scrub and scrub and never feel clean. When I dry my hands I realize that the cheap motel soap has made my eczema flare up. I’m in Hell!

5:53
I search high and low for some kind of ointment or lotion to sooth my dry itching hands but nothing.

6:10
I punch the bathroom mirror in frustration and shatter it. Now my hand is throbbing and bleeding heavily. I curse my stupidity but fail to learn from my mistakes and illustrate this by punching a pile of broken glass with my other hand. Crap.

6:14
My brain cracks and I loose it. I’ve never taken any martial arts classes but my rage doesn’t care. I kick and smash and do some major Jean-Claude Van Damage. I even pull the pig from the TV and use it as a club to beat the room to pieces.

6:57
Everything is destroyed, including the pig.

7:00
The guy I’m traveling with knocks on my door. Shaking from nerve wrecked hysteria and exhaustion I answer. He notices the blood on the walls, the smashed furniture and AC unit, the pig, and asks what happened.

7:35
I check out at the front desk and lodge a serious complaint with the manager.

7:36
Manager hands me certificate for “1 Free Nights Stay” at any Hampton Inn in the country.

7:37
I forgive the Hampton Inn and am looking forward to my next stay.

Did you see the Sequel?

So I’ve been sitting around thinking a lot about Jurassic Park lately. I doubt this is surprising to anyone since, aside from being one of the finest films ever produced by Hollywood, it is also thought provoking on a surprisingly formidable level, and anyone who tries to tell me they haven’t experienced countless sleepless nights staring at the ceiling while contemplating the possibility of dinosaur and man coexisting, whether in harmony or dissonance, is a bald face liar and is probably, as I speak, beating out the flames that were once his pants.

Of all the possibilities, metaphors, and philosophies purported by the movie that could arouse great discussion among great minds, the one that has recently provoked the most contemplation in my own mind is that of motive. Why, I ask myself, did they go back to the island two more times? The first visit (movie) was great and totally believable. However, since the trilogy has come and gone, movie critics and philosophers alike have tried to discern why the producers would dishonor it with the hair-brained sequels that followed?

Why did the characters succumb to such weak motives as were provided by the movies’ writers? Millions of dollars went into these high budget films and the best they could come up with was tripe like, "The dinosaurs are asexual and are breeding with themselves and now they want healthcare!" All I’m saying is give us a believable and interesting reason to go face flesh eating man killers like, "Air Force One crashed into Dino Island and the President and the First Family are hiding in the wreckage while constantly being stalked by predators." Half the country, the good Christian half that is, would be over there faster than you can say Hallelujah, armed to the teeth, drunk on Budweiser, and chomping at the bit to send every last reptile back to Hell where, as the Bible teaches us, they came from. So maybe you’re not republican, so how about this, "The CIA just received pretty reliable intell that there is a good possibility that the dinosaurs might be developing WMD’s." We’d have the military over there before congress could even convene to sanction such an action. (I’m sorry, I forgot. You’re not republican.)

But alas the characters go based on preposterous motives. Never mind that last time twenty guys got eaten by Velociraptors, 5 guys were torn in half by a T-Rex while sitting on the pooper (which only adds to the humiliation), Newman (from Seinfeld) was blinded then eaten by the Umbrellaheadasaurus, and two guys were raped by the Rape-a-saurus (one died from VD and the other is still in counseling). Never mind all that, they go back, and not in stealthy fashion either. They don’t go with an elite strike force using choppers with whisper mode and other high tech gear. They go with loud ground vehicles manned with jittery nameless minorities who try to stay quiet but fail every time they hear a twig snap and scream like a bunch of thirteen-year-old girls at a slumber party.

The endings were generally just as disappointing as the beginnings in these lack luster sequels. From my hazy recollection nobody found any WMD’s but only discovered it was a ploy by “The Man” to kill the dinosaurs so we could harvest the fuels made from their fossils.

That’s two strikes Hollywood. Careful what you write in the future.