Picking at a sore

I have now been producing audio dramas for this company for eighteen months, with no complaint from them or me.  It is fun to do, and while we do not have the luxury of time nor of budget to refine our process indefinitely, it is surely fun.  I think in an interview with the New York Times, it was compared to actual "pulp fiction," only of the audio type.  

Pulp fiction was a specific type of story-telling that doesn't exist much today... it started dying out in the 70s.  I could feel down on myself that I am not producing NPR's highly acclaimed Serial, but it's throw-back, dime-store cousin, but then I remind myself that Stephen King sustained his college years writing pulp novels and look how he turned out.

But it has been very educational as well.  For example, I had no idea that Kroger's employees have a union because of a young pre-crime-boss Jimmy Hoffa, who brought their business to a standstill by having a strike against strawberries.  I had no idea that one of the major conspiracy theories, which in my mind seems to be possibly the truth, that the true reason for Marilyn Monroe's "death" was covered up by an enema laced with barbiturates, which may or may not be true, but also that enemas were very fashionable in 50's Hollywood circles.  And I had no idea that many a serial killer's victim nowadays may have escaped excruciating torture thanks to the invention of the freezer and the plastic ice cube tray.

Before that, you had those metal manual ice cube trays (see Kill Bill Vol. 2 during the Bud/Elle scene for one if you need a reference), but these were messy affairs and it seems that many people preferred to just buy blocks of ice and chip away at them with ice picks, whether or not they actually preferred the "rough edges," per Basic Instinct.

I say this because I have never seen one fucking ice pick in my life, and these serial killers used to use them all the time, in exactly the worst ways you can imagine.  In the earhole.  In the eyes.  Up the fanny (British for vagina).  In the back door.  And possibly worst of all, in the male pee-hole, almost certainly as torture when the victim was still alive.  And usually to torture teens, or worse, pre-teens.

Of course as ice picks become less proliferous, serial killers will find other, more inventive ways to off somebody.  I am just glad it is statistically unlikely now that I might be found dead one day with my wee-wee violated by an ice pick and a bum full of barbiturate enema.