PODZ: A Short History of the First Pelvic War

‘PODZ’

A Short History of the First Pelvic War

By Keith Sherwood

‘PODZ’

A Short History of the First Pelvic War

By Keith Sherwood

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Smashwords Edition

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Copyright © 2011 by Keith Sherwood

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this work, in whole or in part, in any form.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, organizations and products depicted herein are either a product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.

Chapter 1

Call me Ishmael. That’s what my mother did. I’ll confess I tried to kill her at birth for her incredibly bad taste in names by coming out sideways. But my prenatal plot didn’t work out as planned. And it’s a good thing for you and my soul mate Adrienne that it didn’t.

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Now, if you have a mind to know precisely when and where I was born – it was July 14, 1951, in Brooklyn, Jewish Hospital. My circumcision took place eight days later in my parents’ home in the heart of Flatbush. The house where I lived was three and a half blocks from the old Dutch cemetery, which had been planted – for as long as anyone in Brooklyn could remember – with dead Dutchmen. In the days of my innocence, I felt a certain empathy with dead people of Dutch descent and would often sit under the spreading chestnut trees – contemplating my future – with my tuckus six feet above their gray, moldy bones. Maybe it was morphic resonance or something like it because – as I found out later – not only would it be dead Dutch people who would influence my life, but living Dutch people as well.

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As the years passed, I matured and grew in stature. And in my fifteenth year, which was 1966 according to Pope Gregory XIII, in spiritum, I … Ishmael Rosensweig, astral traveler and revered savior of mankind, at last stumbled on the existence of parallel dimensions.

To be fair – much of the credit for my discovery must go to the intrepid crew of the Starship Enterprise because it was through their uncanny ability to boldly take me where no Jewish kid had gone before that I got my first hint of their existence. As I recall, it was star-date 4203.9 the night my paradigm got shifted. And while the Starship Enterprise was exploring strange new worlds, this little energy guy, who looked a little like a poltergeist turd, got beamed on board the Enterprise.

Anyway … once he was on board, anytime anyone got pissed off, the faceless little twerp began masticating. That’s right – E.G., the energy guy, ate emotions. But unlike flesh and blood people like you and me, who can get off on any sincere sentiment, he was particular about what he ate. A person had to be pissed off for him to begin drooling. No way would he have gotten off on the half-baked bundle of beatitudes you and I are forced to swallow each day. You know, the kind of crap that brain washed parents, brain damaged teachers, and brain dead bosses shove down our throat as part of the acculturation and socialization process.

Well … it was bad enough having this little twerp on board the Enterprise and having to stay on your best behavior all day. You know what I mean … like,

Yes sir, Captain Kirk … whatever you say … Mr. Spock … Kiss my ass, Scotty. But things went from bad to worse when, later in the episode, the Klingons managed to fake out Kirk and the crew and beam on board the Enterprise.

Now … it’s common knowledge that there’s no love lost between Kirk and the Klingons. So … once the Klingons were on board, there was presented a schmorgesbord of sophomoric sentiments for E.G. to sample. And what can I say – E.G. was like an alien pig in freeze-dried shit.

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Anyway … after a short pause, during which Speedy Alka-Seltzer sang a chorus of "fizz fizz, what a relief it is," E.G. continued to scoff down everything in sight. But what really blew my mind was that the little twerp didn’t care whether the sophomoric sentiment he was scoffing down was male, female, human, or otherwise.

Well … all in all it was a memorable episode. But for me the issue wasn’t – as I expect it was for the majority of the home viewing audience – whether the Klingons trespassed on Federation space or how the Klingons beamed on board the Enterprise in the first place. For me the important issue was how a non-corporal energy guy (E.G.), or any other life form for that matter, could eat anger or any kind of non-material form of bio-energy.

It was a profound question, so I didn’t ask my older brother about it because he was Pre-med and useless when it came to abstract thinking. And as far as my parents were concerned, I didn’t ask them either because I was on their shit list that week for hanging my sister’s favorite stuffed animal down the back stairwell. As it turned out, I had to tackle the question on my own. And that was a Sisyphean task for a fifteen year old who could barely walk to school and carry his lunch.

Anyway … later that night, after I had eliminated all the rational possibilities I could think of, I finally figured out that E.G. (the energy guy) had to exist on a parallel dimension where he was solid. And he only appeared to be a nonmaterial energy guy to the actors on Star Trek and to the home viewing audience. Taking that as my starting point, I quickly deduced that anger – which was a non-corporal form of bio-energy on our dimension and about as appetizing as frozen spinach – must be material on E.G.’s dimension and must taste something like a vanilla thick shake. Naturally … once I’d fully grasped the concept of parallel dimensions, I began to see them everywhere.

The very next day I discovered that my mother went into a parallel dimension whenever she prepared dinner because on the dimension she was on not only did ‘Birds Eye Creamed Spinach’ look good, it tasted good, too; while on the dimension I was on, which for convenience we’ll call physical reality, creamed spinach looked like shit and tasted like shit, too. I could go on for hours telling you about the flood of insights which cascaded into my consciousness that night and the days that followed. But the equation below should be sufficient to slake your curiosity since it provides a mathematical foundation for my unprecedented experience.

Where

R = the numerical coefficient for individual reality at any given time.

C = human consciousness – the constant for all parallel dimensions.

IQ = intellectual quotient of the observer.

G = the quantitative effect of (anything) impacting the consciousness of the observer at the time of the observation.

Although it was E.G.’s incursion into the third dimension that opened my eyes to the existence of parallel dimensions, it wasn’t until I saw ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ two months later with my friend Howie Abromowitz that I discovered that the earth plane was the target of a full scale invasion from a parallel dimension by peck upon peck of pernicious pods.*

*Pods are undifferentiated-subjective, non-corporal, vegetable life forms that originate on a parallel dimension known as the astral plane.

From the events documented in the film I learned that aliens called ‘Pods’ had touched down in Santa Mira, California, during the McCarthy hearings in 1954.

And … that once they’d hit town and succeeded in snatching* everyone, the citizens of Santa Mira forgot about the ‘Avocado Festival’ they’d been planning all year and began nurturing one another and bonding with other members of the community … not because everyone in town had just graduated from E.S.T. or become devotees of Leo Buscaglia, but because 1954 avocado festival had been preempted by a premeditated pod pogrom.

However … contrary to centuries of tradition, this particular pogrom wasn’t against Russian Jews, southern Blacks, effete, intellectual snobs from New York City. This one was against the small town Wasps of southern California, who were being snatched up by the bushel by a band of bloodthirsty pods.

*Snatching is a unique biological process found exclusively among the pods. It is somewhat akin to gene-splicing, except that in the case of snatching it is not genes, which are removed from the cell of one organism and inserted into the cell of another. Rather it is the astral body of one creature, which is inserted into the physical body of another creature after he has been snatched.

Well … as you can imagine – after I saw the film, my paradigm went into traction. But after I got a peak at the new issue of ‘Playboy’ and realized that there was still something on earth worth living for, I made up my mind to find out everything I could about body snatching.

From the movie I’d learned that the pods snatched people while they were asleep. So I assumed that people were being snatched while they slept because their rational intellect wasn’t functioning. But as long as they were awake and it remained active, they were safe from the sinister sprouts. But I quickly abandoned this theory when I remembered that the people of Santa Mira, where the pods had landed, were the same boneheads who listened to Mitch Miller, joined Friday night bowling leagues, and bought their kids hula-hoops, which meant that their rational intellect was rarely if ever active, even while they were awake. So … when I reconsidered my theory, it didn’t seem likely that rational intellect could be a factor in their waking immunity to the bean blitzkrieg. No … it had to be something else … something I hadn’t considered yet.

But before I could come up with the answer, my research was interrupted by an even more shocking revelation. That’s right – the pods had snatched my family! Nothing else could explain why my mother adored Mitch Miller, my father was a member of the American Legion, and my brother and sister both had hula-hoops.

The traumatic affect of this new revelation was enough to make me abandon my plans to go to Optometry school, like I’d promised my parents, because it invalidated everything I’d learned from my teachers in Sarah Lee High School and by the older kids on the block.

But … of course, until I made the connection between the folks from Santa Mira and my nuclear family, I had no idea that there was anything more important to worry about than my personal survival and New York Jewish mating rituals.

Certainly, I had no idea that we earthlings were being routinely oppressed – not by goyem and renegade Nazis living under the South Pole, as I was taught by my parents, – but by self-serving creatures from a parallel dimension.

Anyway … after I discovered that my family had been snatched, I spent all my free time trying to find out why I remained the sole surviving member of the animal kingdom in my family while everyone else had mutated into a vegetable life form. I began by scouring the house for some vestigial physical evidence of my family’s metamorphosis, in the hope that it would shed some light on why the pods had snatched them, but hadn’t snatched me.

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I started my search in the attic and worked down from there. And after three days, I finally found what I was looking for. It was a set of C. G. Jung’s collected works in German, which was stuffed in a cardboard box and left behind the oil burner. There was an inscription in the first volume dated June 15, 1954, and it was dedicated to my father, Samuel Rosensweig. This is what it said:

"Dear Sam,

It gives me great pleasure to present you with this collection of Jung’s complete works in German. It’s in grateful appreciation for the intellectual support you gave me at N.Y.U., which, as you know, inspired me to continue my work in behavioral psychology and human engineering.

After reading the inscription, I wanted to weep because, although I’d lived with him all my life, I had no idea that my father could speak a second language. But I quickly got a grip on myself when I remembered that my mother was in the kitchen defrosting a packet of ‘Birds Eye Creamed Spinach.’

Instead … I did what any red-blooded, Brooklyn Jewish kid would have done in the same situation – I swore on the hymnal I’d gotten from the sisterhood of temple Beth Emeth, which was also stuffed in the cardboard box, that I wouldn’t rest until I’d reunited my family members with their physical counterparts. And while I was in the mood to swear, I swore that I would devote my life to destroying the pod conspiracy before it destroyed the youth of the nation.

After I finished swearing, I sat down on a toilet that was also left behind the oil burner and wondered what to do next. Although so much was still unclear, I was certain about one thing – I had to be careful around my family. I couldn’t let them know I’d discovered their secret. If I did … then I could end up like them and wake up one morning as a Caesar salad, et tu, Brutes.

Chapter 2

The next Saturday was a bright and sunny day on earth. To the naked eye everything looked copasetic. Children were playing in the street, mothers were at the supermarket shopping for frozen vegetables, and fathers were in the yard, puttering around with their garden tools. But I knew better. I knew that behind every shit-eating grin and every good morning, Mr. Rogers – there was a pod. And the pods were in the market for meat … and not just any meat would do. It was human meat they were shopping for!

But who was on their shopping list … that was the sixty-four thousand dollar question. Certainly my nuclear family was on it, and so were the Nixons and the Nelsons – anyone could see that. But what about J. Edgar Hoover … was he on it too? And what if he was on the list and the pods snatched him and infiltrated the FBI, what would happen to us then? I didn’t know … but I had to find out.

That’s when I decided to get some help, and my thoughts turned to Brighton Beach and my Buba Sadie. So … instead of mowing the lawn like I’d promised my mother, I told her that I was going to the Brooklyn Museum to see dead dinosaur bones with my friend Howie.

Then I bolted out of the front door and headed down the street to Flatbush Avenue. My mother had once told me it was the Broadway of Brooklyn. She was partial to euphemisms. Anyway … once I got to the subway station, I slid down the banister to the platform and got the QB train to Brighton Beach.

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Now, there were two reasons why I trusted Sadie and believed that she still swung from the same family tree as I did. The first reason was her age. She was real old, so I knew that no one gave a shit about her except her pharmacist. And the second reason were her language skills, which were still so bad after fifty-four years in America that she spoke English like it was someone else’s second language.

So … considering her liabilities, it didn’t seem likely that the pods, who spoke English in the movie, would want to snatch her if they’d have to walk around Brighton Beach afterwards speaking Russian.