Man Oh Man

Laurie had a bad allergic reaction to something (shrimp, we think) yesterday. Ambulance, emergency room. Some drugs, some waiting. As cranky as I am about our little town's littleness compared to the bustling megalopolis of Birmingham, Alabama, I gotta commend the professionalism of the ambulance crew and the Emerg. Room staff. My honey went from sick to safe in short order.

As we sat in the waiting room I saw a Thunderbird in the speckles of the floor tile. Clearly the tension made me receptive to uncanny perceptions...

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And speaking of receptivity to uncanny perceptions, I recently found a Canadian bookseller on who's willing to sell me a copy of Man After Man by Dougal Dixon for $30 instead of the more typical $100. It's a book that rips the lid off Humankind's Evolutionary Future by showing us paintings of creepy humanoid critters. L'il Aaron thumbed through it in a Waldenbooks and experienced his first taste of the uncanny. In the early Eighties I didn't quite get that this was a work of imaginative speculation, rather than Scientific Certitude. I figured the Scientific Community had done the research and figured out that we were gonna evolve into shambling things. The notion that these creatures with human faces were our destiny was like a cosmic wind blowing through my ribcage and playing dissonant notes on the reeds of my heart.

Recently I was paging through a book of similar creepy creature art by Wayne Barlowe in which he accused an unnamed artist of ripping off his ideas for... a book about creatures into which humans might evolve. He didn't mention Dixon by name. My dim recollection of Man After Man certainly resembles Barlowe's idiosyncratic creatures more than Dixon's more straightforward art on display in his more easily accessible dinosaur illustration books. Still, whether or not it's Barlowe's creativity fueling Man After Man, I wanna see the images that chilled me when my age was still in the single digits.

Speaking of things that bugged me out when I was young, I recently rewatched Michael Jackson's Thriller video on Youtube. When I was a boy I would run out the room every time I tried to watch it. Nowadays it just seems silly. Will Man After Man seem equally limp to my adult self, as jaded to Sci-Fi as I am? Or will it still carry a charge?

Well, it's in the mail to my address, and you know I'm not gonna refrain from updating you on this weighty matter.