I’m older. To take my mind off that, have a list of some things that are awesome.
-Zombies that rise from the grave to take a nice stroll, chat to their grandchildren, and have a word in private with that bitch Else Maye about people who snore at your funeral.
-Magnificence in the arthropod phylum, provided it is kept at least five metres away from me and behind a double-layered Plexiglas wall at all times.
-More fangs than are strictly necessary.
-Soft, wispy-at-the-edges explosions that seem almost delicate and fragile in nature until you really make yourself think about what was just destroyed, leaving you depressed but somehow still happy.
-Publications written by, about, and for alligators. Which are protested against by crocodiles as racist screeds.
-Really stupendous hugeness.
-Armed whales. Using either definition of armed.
-Any pub fight that manages to cross at least two different international borders before it gets really interesting.
-Futuristic settings where humans are pretty much as dull and dense as they are in the present, but on an intergalactic scale.
-The CN Tower talking smack to the Empire State Building who bitches about it to the Eiffel Tower who gossips with the Pyramids who mentions it to the Burj Khalifa who calls up the Tokyo Skytree to chat about it who sends the CN Tower a nasty email about how it’s the FOURTH-tallest freestanding structure and nobody loves it anymore. So there.
-Depraved checkers.
-No, wait, depraved chess. More possibilities.
-Death-defying obstacles that are overcome with sufficient volumes of livestock.
-Reams of anything.
-A constellation of impossibly huge balls of burning hydrogen scattered at random across an infinite expanse of empty vacuum that looks sort of like human genitalia when you squint at it from the right spot on earth.
-An organized religion that considers holy books cheating and divinely endorses ‘winging it’ as a form of worship.
-Raspberries.
-The quiet wonder experienced at estimating how many hours-worth of pornography has been filmed since the first cinema was created.
-Roadrunners that try to run on roads to and become run over.
-Warbling walruses. Walri? Walroids.
-Monuments to failure constructed from writer’s blocks and mortared with elbow grease, surmounted by good intentions.
-Voracious kittens.
-Martial arts focused around buttering.
-Utility Mohawks.
-Using a cat’s pajamas to cover your debilitating and socially awkward bee’s knees.
-Any dream that becomes recursive at least twice. Anything past four times is trying a bit too hard, though.
-Newspapers heavy enough to crush a weta to death.
-A chuckawalla chucking wood with wood chucks in Walla Walla inside a chuck wagon.
-Keeping a stiff upper lip in times of peril due to terror-induced muscle paralysis.
-Long-lost ruins constructed from cardboard and Styrofoam.
-True Tales of the Terrapins, series I, volume III. Action-packed as hell, over four twigs and leaves eaten per page.
-5 gigabytes of pure unadulterated boredom straight to the forebrain and through the imagination’s heart.
-Undue viscosity in an officer of the peace.
-Ancestral cross-species feuds that date back as far as the excuse-me-I-believe-those-are-MY-amino-acids incident.
-Blue skies with big fat white clouds on ‘em and a huge yellow glowy thingy up in one corner.
-Incredibly tasty lethal toxins.
-The ability of five-year-olds to construct lego guillotines entirely unprompted for their own entertainment, as well as what this says about our species.
-Freaky things from too far underwater with eyeballs that are just wrong.
-Voluptuous terrain.
-Cross-continental wars between cross continents.
-Mountains that have been hollowed out and filled up with whacky bullshit.
-Gravel salads garnished with blue diamond dressing.
-Naturally occurring unnaturalness.
-Species that are hipster enough to do sexual trimorphism.
-Any civilization sophisticated enough not to have discovered other humans.
-One million cupcakes in the right place at the right time making exactly the right difference.
-Moustaches that reach full maturity, forcibly separate themselves from their hosts, and leave for home via the exosphere.
-Manuals for doomsday machines that come with helpful, multi-lingual instructions and very clear little diagrams so you won’t accidentally put half of the thing together backwards or fire it at your foot by mistake or something.
-Mistaking your left for your right twice in a row and fast enough that it works out okay.
-World leaders that pick their noses in front of the press and just don’t care. Bonus points if they flick the results at the cameras. Double word score if they scream their current tally each time they connect with the lens.
-A refreshing quantity of bees.
-Nose flute power ballads.
-Sentient geological formations.
-Rigorous, diligent, and well-planned faffing about.
-That one Viking that wore a horned hat on that one raid and completely ruined the image of his entire culture for a thousand years.
-Scientific hooligans clashing with bodybuilding nerds.
-The vibrant and unique sensation of waking up to find a big friendly spider sunbathing on your outstretched tongue.
-Metaphors that are as free to mix as they damned well please. Segregation went out of style decades ago after hanging around like a bad smelling guestfish after three days.
-Pink things, as long as there is sufficient enthusiasm involved. Lots of it.
-Barbs that are covered in other, smaller barbs.
-Cloning dinosaurs topsy-turvy.