Looks Like I Used The "Abbra-Cadaver!" Title Too Soon.

It doesn't totally suck to be me. Every once in a while, I get to fly across the country and be paid to do something that I absolutely love. And if I'm really lucky, while I'm there I get to venture out on the town and see what kind of trouble I can get myself into.

Last weekend's location presented me with two options for entertainment:

I could have gone to the Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights, which I assumed to be something that would haunt me for the rest of my life. Where I'm from we don't have the luxury of Universal Studios makeup artists and costumers preparing our haunted houses, and we don't have the beneift of the built-in terror equity that comes with well-branded horror icons such as Freddy Krueger, Jason & Leatherface. Haunted houses around these parts are supplied by the same Wal-Mart and Garden Ridge in which we citizens have already been shopping. So when a "monster" pops out at you, you're first reaction is less of an "AIEEE!" and more of a "Hey, I almost bought that mask! Glad I didn't...not nearly as scary as I had hoped." So I imagine the Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights to be the equivalent of The Playboy Mansion for the Undead. Definitely worth consideration.

Or I could have gone to a science museum and seen ACTUAL deceased humans, cut to shreds, plasticized and put on display with nothing between me and the carcass except muggy Florida air.

It wasn't really a tough decision: Barring any further global warming leading to massive hurricanes and the utter destruction of Florida, Universal Studios will likely host their Halloween Horror Nights again for years to come. But the odds of me and plasticized cadavers being in the same city at the same time are slim at best. Besides, if I visit the Universal Studios thing, it would spoil me for all of the wonderful abortion-themed spook houses put on by all the churches here in Hicksville.

So I essentially got paid to go look at a bunch of dead people, which is rather beautiful this close to Halloween. The museum folks were pretty adamant about me not taking photos, but that didn't stop me from busting off a few gonzo shots while nobody was looking. I was there about an hour before the exhibit closed, so nobody was really watching me all that closely.

The exhibit was creepy enough to give me the heebie-jeebies. If walking through the exhibit uninformed, one might think that he was looking at a bunch of wax statues. The specimens are all Asian, and not to make a broad generalization, but in the instance of this particular exhibit, their frames and features were considerably smaller than mine. So it was easy for me to imagine that I wasn't really looking at dead people, I was looking at elaborate department store mannequins.

...until I saw the eyelashes. *shudder*

I really did get a tour of every part of the body - the central nervous system; the respiratory, reproductive and digestive systems; there was even a pre-natal exhibit showing us what we look like before we're either born or aborted.

I saw human heads, brains, guts and eyeballs lying on tables. I saw a man's penis and a woman's vagina cut form their bodies and laid out to show the entire reproductive system. I saw a brain that suffered a stroke, which really does look like there was some sort of electrical fire in the noggin. I saw a healthy lung next to a smoker's lung, and they were BOTH fucking disgusting. And I saw two entire human cadavers, one cut into sections lengthwise, and the other cut from toes to nose. Haunted houses are for pussies.

Trick-or-treat at MY house this year, and you'd better be carrying your own fucking flesh on a coat hanger.

Comments

[Jo]

Wouldn't a box of Nerds do just as well?

[briantologist]

Dude, that exhibit is fucking AWESOME. We've seen it twice, it was so good. Did they have the plastinized horse with the plastinized guy on his back this time around? The second time we saw it there was, I believe, some sort of yak or goat or cow, something with four stomachs, laid out to explain how the four-stomach system worked. Which, y'know, I'd always wondered about.

Also I couldn't stop chortling about how low the nuts hang when there's no skin. They're like eyestalks on an upside-down land crab.