At Twilight
by Dan Morgan

Every morning I wake up to my alarm which is tuned to Q102 on one of those ancient, non-digital, dial radio thingies.  Well, maybe not ancient, but the clock could be older than I am.  Anyway, I wake up to Elvis Duran and the Q102 Morning Show, and the past few months they have talked non-stop about this series of novels called Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer, predominantly about this character named Edward Cullen.

And I mean non-stop talk about it, especially the women on the show.  I resisted for a long while, but eventually the girls’ fawning over this Cullen miscreant wore on me and the first book in the series arrived on my doorstep about a month and a half ago.  Of course, it wasn’t cheap—Amazon wouldn’t send it to me unless I packed up my testicles in a little brown shipping box and sent them on their merry; sort of a proof of purchase, I guess.  I wanted to know why Cullen was such a freakin’ vagina-throb.  That’s my best rationalization.

So I started reading it, and was immediately aware of the flat smoothness in my groin area.  What was I thinking?  This is the furthest thing from what a straight, heterosexual man should be reading.  It’s not even for my friggen age group.  Put this book down now and go hit a strip club!  The next thing I knew I’d read the whole damn thing.  What the hell?

If you’re wondering why I chose this movie to review, over say Role Models or Four Christmases or Quantum of Solace or even the new Punisher movie (which I’m sorry, but might as well be 20 years old and named Commando), I can tell you, with the utmost confidence, that my castrated state had nothing to do with it.  Obviously, I went to see this movie to meet girls!  Every woman in the world right now is obsessed with this movie, so the ratio had to be heavily in favor of me.  If a theater at Loews can hold 150 people, and 149 of those people are females where one out of every twelve are attractive and every fifth attractive girl is hot, then it follows that there will be precisely 10.416666 attractive girls and two really hot girls to my one self.  My friends, I like the odds in that. 

Turns out, so did a lot of other guys.  I spent the whole movie trying not to touch elbows and knees with the fatass to my left and the very tattooed, cologne à cigarette, gang member to my right.  Actually, a group of girls did walk in during the previews.  We all cheered and clapped… and they ran away screaming.  Oh, well.  (And by the way, I saw a preview of a movie starring Dakota Fanning.  She’s older now, and she is friggen CREE-PY!  Honestly.  I had a nightmare about her that night.  She was chasing me around my apartment screaming, “I SEE DEAD PEOPLE!”  I kept shouting over my shoulder, “NO YOU DON’T!  NO YOU DON’T!  THAT’S HALEY JOEL OSMENT!”  And then her voice cracked and she said, “I AM HALEY JOEL OSMENT!”)

Okay, now on to the actual viewing of the movie, which I had to watch while ignoring the uncomfortable throat-clearings, and eventual snores of the men around me, those that stayed past the first act anyway.  They got this guy, Robert Pattinson, to play Edward Cullen, the uber dreamy guy all women get weak in the knees over, and I have to say, I wasn’t impressed.  Edward Cullen was supposed to look like a Greek god, and Robert Pattinson’s no Greek god.  He’s an eight-year-old’s drawing of a Greek god.  Edward’s also supposed to be a ninety-year-old trapped in a seventeen-year-old’s body.  Bella, the girl character, asks Edward how old he is in the movie.  He tells her seventeen.  She asks how long he’s been seventeen, and he says a while.  I guess vampires don’t mature past the age they were turned.  If you ask me, Pattinson made Edward sound like a seventeen-year-old trapped in a seventeen-year-old.  And then there was the thing with how vampires looked in the sunlight.  Some myths have vampires poof-ing into a cloud of dust on contact, others have them being cooked away slowly, like we would be walking through fire, but no, in this rendition of the vampire myth, the sun has no adverse effects on a vampire.  Believe it or not, they sparkle in the sunlight, like a million little diamonds are embedded under their skin.  Shit, if that’s what women want, lather my ass in glitter and set me streaking down Fifth Avenue.  What is wrong with women?  Is it even explainable?

The movie ended and I wasn’t impressed.  The five of us men still awake rose and filed out of the theater.  There, waiting for me, was a cashier girl, smiling widely.  She had her hands behind her.  “Mr. Morgan?” she inquired.  I nodded.  She said, “Here ya go!” and held out one of her hands to me, fingers clasped around something.  I held out one of mine to her and she dropped onto it my testicles, then giggled and skipped away.

…True story.

 

DAN MORGAN, half enigma, half mystery, and half conundrum, is still—after a whole year—working on his bio. He has nine purple fishes all named Wendell and in his free time he constructs scale models of scale models of other things. That is our best guess as to what he really does.

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