ALL HAIL THE SNALLYGASTER: an excerpt from the upcoming work of pseudofiction INDRID COLD IS DEAD

ALL HAIL THE SNALLYGASTER: an excerpt from the upcoming work of pseudofiction INDRID COLD IS DEAD

~Washington, DC / Frederick County, Maryland

Maybe the closest I ever felt to being culturally appropriated is when a bunch of slinked-out gringos decided to name their beer festival after my personal favorite DC-area cryptid: the Snallygaster.

“THE EAST COAST’S GREATEST BEER FESTIVAL!” reads the header on the Snallygaster Beer Festival GramaSpurt page.

See, beer festivals are unique in that you take two positive words—beer and festival—and combine them to create a huge dogshit-sodden plank of unfun awfulness.

“Ew,” said one beardo, sipping his dixie cup of Punxsutawney Phil’s Early Spring Ale. “This is way too rambunctious for a pale ale. I was expecting something, I don’t know, crisper and more caramelly. Pass.”

Ten thousand beer snobs descend on downtown Washington, DC to show off how deft they are at having a dull time. Tents and picnic tables and makeshift bars as far as the eye can see. And dudes: legions of fat skinny dudes with beards and Bullets hats and yesteryear’s eyewear, most of them in tow with an equally uninspired/uninspiring ladyfriend.

“What’s the ABV on this milk stout?” another asked the bartender.

The bartender shook his head dunno.

“Oh, really? That’s disappointing.”

“I’m not sure how I feel about this name,” said another to his buddy. “Uncle Spearchunker’s Boat People IPA sounds problematic at best, in my opinion. It’s like they are trying to be controversial.”

His buddy’s eyes lit up. “Maybe that’s their schtick.”

Nobody nowhere actually intoxicated, except me. I had found the Coors tent and was sucking down Coors Original like I was getting paid fifteen bucks an hour plus tips to do so.

Another scrawny beardo sidled up next to me and waved his iPhone at the bartender and said, “Hi, may I please have a Coors Cutter?”

The bartender replied that he did not have Coors Cutter, nor did he have any other type of non-alcoholic beer; his disposition suggested that he’d been besieged by this question since the beginning of time itself.

“Oh, wow, okay . . . Um, well, may I please just have a soda water with lime. Actually, never mind, I’m good, thank you.”

I tried to jumpstart a conversation with a few of them with a little aimless chatter. “Hey, you know what they call English muffins in England?” I asked one.

“May I ask why you are asking?” he said, squirmily.

“No reason. Small talk and such, brother.”

“Interesting. I presume they call them muffins?”

“Nope. Sissycakes!”

He did a little chortle and started fucking around with his phone.

“Isn’t it weird,” I said to another, “how we can drink like thirty different types of beer in one sitting, yet if we eat a red apple and a green apple in the same day, we’re like, holyfugginshit, hope I don’t explode into six pieces!”

More silence. I decided to turn my attention to the dogs, of which there were plenty.

The world is full of bored cuties walking thousand dollar pooches. And since the Snallygaster was a dog-friendly festival, they were seemingly all here.

“C’mon, Riley!”

“Logan, c’mere, boy!

“Murphy, NO!”

“Finn, let’s go!”

If you walk into any of Washington, DC’s million dollar dog parks and close your eyes, you could easily pretend you’re in a 19th century pub in Ireland, and that same rule applied to the canine scenario here at the Snallygaster.

I walked over to a border collie with a spiked collar and looney tunes eyebrows. Its owner, a Daisy Duked-out little bag of skin and bones, eyed me suspiciously. The dog seemed to take a liking to me though.

“Cool little dude,” I said. “What’s his name?”

“Seamus.”

“Ah, that’s neat,” I said, petting little Seamus. “Reminds me of my former lives . . . I was a woodland elf named Seamus . . . Man, that was a weird one. Basically spent half of all twenty-six years of my existence negotiating with trolls and dwarves and water spirits. Let me tell you, if you ever come across a saber-toothed squirrel, run like hell and don’t look back. Whatever you do, don’t climb a tree. Mean little suckers.”

The girl mumbled a string of non sequiturs, and I was about to reach for my crucifix when I realized she had ear buds in the whole time. She mouthed a sorry and gave her pooch a couple of tugs and they walked away, disappearing into the sea of gringos.

The real Snallygaster is a huge piece of pure unadulterated chimeracana. It is sort of a living breathing Rorschach test. Some people see a bird, some people see a reptile, some people see an octopus, but most people see all the above and then some. The easiest way for me to describe it is, break out your headphones and crank up Jethro Tull’s 1979 proto-dragoncore album Stormwatch and shut your eyes tightly and, voila!—what you hear is pretty much what the Snallygaster looks like. Cthulhu vibes and such. Or, yeah, like some five-year old took a stab at sketching the Welsh flag from memory.

The Snallygaster has allegedly conducted its creepy business around the hills of Frederick County, Maryland. Sensible move, as DC proper is a strictly enforced no-fly zone. If the Snallygaster so much as pooted in the direction of Our Nation’s Capital, it would swiftly find itself in the company of a dozen pissed-off F-15’s. Guns and missiles, repeat, oh my . . . Ain’t enough Talking Heads lyrics on the planet to fenagle its way out of that scenario.

The etymology of “Snallygaster” is not as algebraic as one might think. It is my opinion that the German immigrants who settled the area were simply too stubborn to learn how to wrangle with the word “pterodactyl” and I salute them for it. Even for a native English speaker as myself, “pterodactyl” looks and sounds like Mandarin from Mars. In fact, “Snallygaster” comes from Schneller Geist, which means, yup, “quick ghost” in German.

I shot up to Frederick, Maryland, the eponymous county seat. I had noodled around these parts before while grappling with two hits of high octane white blotter. Acid: the gateway drug to a swirling sea of gnostic bedlam. There is one part of the human body that is way more vital than the brain and all its squishy amigos that loiter around in the torso and that is the cerebral reducing valve. Without a cerebral reducing valve, you would be tuned in to all the sights and sounds of the cosmos—and the cosmos is not a congenial place. You would be marauded with the sound of wailing gamma rays and basically feel like you were skinny-dipping right smack middle of the Book of Revelation. Acid takes your cerebral reducing valve and pushes it in front of a speeding car and then pours gasoline all over it and sets it on fire. Total obliteration for anywhere from eight to thirty awful hours.

Anyway, I had made a few enemies that day in Frederick so I decided I would need to whip up an alias, just in case.

The most common way for people to get outed using an alias is because their chosen alias simply sounds too cool. I mean, you get to choose your own fucking name. Who wouldn’t want to be Vicente Fox Mulder? Or Meadowlark Lime? I let sensibility have the floor and went with Steven James McDonnell—a name so boring it hurts.

If you want the alias to be successful, you have to take your ego and put it in a zip-lock bag and toss it into a muddy river. That’s the only way these things work. Criminality, in general, is usually done in because of ego. The perfect crime is that one that no one but you knows about. But that sure as shit ain’t much fun, is it? So you get zinged up one night and deliberately proffer to your ladyfriend some oblique business about how you know exactly what a butter knife will do to a fully-grown man’s eye socket—and how a corpse’s final revenge is its profound uncooperativeness. (“Lemme tell you, sister, dead people are cumbersome!”) . . . Fast forward to a year later and your ladyfriend is neither your lady nor your friend and you get a knock knock knock on your door at 7am on a Monday morning. Handcuffs and bars and lawyers, oh my . . .

Steven James McDonnell. A name so dull it makes you want to barf backwards. A name nobody could remember an ounce of if you pointed a loaded Ruger at their ballsack. And the name pretty much comes with a box of gift-wrapped Saltines. It’s a benignly honked-out moniker, which fits the script with me and my cave-dwelling jellyfish-people ancestry. That’s rule number two: choose a name that generically summons up your genealogy. Your will find a white rhino fist-fucking a California condor before you find a black Finkelstein. And if you want to get cute and take on a Latino name like Garcia or Santos because it lends an air of mysterious exotica, you sure as hell better not still be gargling Kitchen Spanish.

Frederick, Maryland is a satellite city of both DC and Baltimore but claiming allegiance to neither. It is its own weird thing, and the final outpost of civilization if you are heading westward into Maryland’s undomesticated schnozz.

The Frederick area contained a notable Snallygaster expert by the name of Sarah Cooper, who is also the creator, curator, and owner of the American Snallygaster Museum and basically ground zero for all things Snallygaster. Miss Cooper happened to be on a safari in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, so I was stuck with a leading brand Snallygaster consultant by the name of Dr. Missy Puddles. I arranged online to meet Dr. Puddles at a Mexican restaurant and squeeze the scoop out of her.

I got to the restaurant early and Dr. Puddles was already sitting in a booth waiting for me. We shook hands and ordered margaritas from an overly alert waiter. Someone somewhere smelled heavily of Drakkar Noir. I read on the back of a cereal box once that wearing three or more spritzes of alpha male cologne was, what they call in some social circles, a power move. The Drakkar Noir was successfully advancing on my three spritzes of Polo and this did not sit well with me.

Dr. Puddles was a friendly woman who was about as pretty as a bowl of ear cheese. Her appearance is difficult to explain without semaphoring like a flight deck chimp. She looked halfway melted, if that makes any sense, as if she had spent much of her childhood stuck in the microwave—and come to find out, this was not far from the truth. Her father, she explained, had been a disciple of early twentieth century Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, who, in addition to winning the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work with wireless telegraphy, later on, under the menacing eye of Benito Mussolini, accidentally invented what they call in some social circles the Death Ray. Her father, Noel Puddles, after blowing through countless sheep and cows and goats and other expendable animals, began secretly blasting his own daughter with his inventions. In his will, he left her forty-seven fully grown aloe vera plants and a whole broom closet full of band-aids—as well a potato sack full of gold coins that he had unearthed in his adventures in the parts of South America you won’t find cutesy descriptions of in the Time Out guide or Lonely Planet.

A small mariachi band was quivering its way around the restaurant, pawing at the air for one-dollar bills between songs . . . The plume of mystery Drakkar Noir had seemingly ebbed—either that, or I had acclimated to it.

“That’s pretty harsh, by the way,” Dr. Puddles said.

“Salt overload?” I said, implying her margarita.

“No, that you think I’m hideous.”

Ho-lee shit, this goddamn thing can read my mind.

“Yes, I can,” Dr. Puddles said. “It’s okay, though. I’ve heard it all before—in a sense.”

“My excuse, my lord, is that I have no excuse,” I said, paraphrasing some Sufi poet. My thoughts strayed to more pleasant places . . .

“No,” she said.

“No what?”

“No, you’re not taking me to Vegas.”

“Drats,” I said, brattily. “C’mon, why not? If you can read minds, then you know I thinking we could bankrupt the whole damn state of Nevada inside an hour.”

“I am blacklisted from every casino this side of asteroid belt.”

“That is a big fat bummer,” I said. “Does your, uh, voodoo work from long range?”

“It’s not voodoo. And no, it does not work from long range. I have to be within about ten feet of the person for it to work.”

“What about, like, cats and dogs and birds and stuff?” I asked.

“Why in the world would you want to read their minds?”

Good point. We decided to carry out the rest of our conversation using only telepathy, which must have looked weird as shit to the wait staff, since my face was hosting the same emotions had our conversation taken place in the land of the verbal. Lots of headshaking and smirking and wide-eyed incredulity. The Snallygaster had long retired, according to her, and he now spends most of his time marinating in low-hanging algorithms and basically voicing every pleasure and displeasure on his various social platforms, and all under the pseudonym Film E. Noir on the popular social media app Snitchster.

I paid the bill and said adios to Dr. Missy Puddles and went back to my motel room at a nearby Econo Lodge.

I made a Snitchster account (SJM2112) and did a search for Film E. Noir.

Whoa.

The Snallygaster, it seems, had become a right-wing fearmonger’s soggy pillow.

Blah, blah, hobbyist outrage, blah, blah, manufactured strife. Don’t blame me, I voted for blah, blah, blah . . . Shameful stuff. The Snallygaster, it appeared, had indeed become infested with every low-hanging algorithm in the galaxy. Wackadoo supreme, chumming up with the likes of Congressman Jim Jordan, that thin-headed mutt from Ohio and easily the most terrified-of-everything little man in America, as well as what’s-her-nuts from Florida with the Pall Mall voice and the Whitesnake hair, and, yeah, that machine gun hussy from Colorado who looks like an evil Lisa Loeb. For some reason, the Snallygaster had plunged boner first into the trash zombie brigade.

“DON’T COUNT YOUR CHICKENS BEFORE THEY GET MOWED DOWN BY MACHINE GUN FIRE!!!” exclaimed one cryptic post. “LOOSE LIPS SINK SUBMARINES!!!” said another.

The only hope for the Snallygaster, it appeared, is that he starts dating a nice pretty woman of liberal/moderate disposition who can get him to swing back a few clicks left of the Reichstag circa 1933.

It was around this time that the Washington Football Team, known as the Washington Redskins since basically the Paleozoic Ear, decided to consult an extremely well-paid panel that consisted of a flurry of Ritalin-stiff six-year-olds and a few retired space chimps and rename the team the Washington Commanders.

Damn, I thought. Why not the Washington Snallygasters?

If you’re going to Bukkake the household of every Midatlantic nuclear family with unnecessary syllables, you might as well go all out, eh? Besides, the Commanders will assuredly be relegated to “the Commies.” (“Hail to the Commieeees! Hail victory! Reds on the warpath! Fight for CCCP!”) . . . It was a deluxe failure, but what do you expect from Chief Slimester Daniel Snyder?

Only a year earlier, when all the Big Tech opportunists flexed their Bowflex muscles and bullied Snyder and the gang into changing the team’s name or else (or else, yeah, they won’t peddle his shit on their zillion dollar platforms “Look, ma! I’m woke!”), I had visited a men’s club where Snyder is known to loiter around and I’d stuck manilla envelopes under the left windshield wiper of every Maserati in the parking lot, each containing the same handwritten letter, from moi, that explained the high prospect of civil unrest if Snyder were to choose some generic Hasbro name like Brigadiers or Admirals or Drill Sergeants, et cetera, et cetera. Snyder, probably realizing civil unrest would do well to muddy the view of the sundry conduct investigations in which his company was routinely besieged, went with the most Saturday Morning Cartoons-inspired name that his fleet of sea level IQ, data-slurpin’ apparatchiks could summon: Commanders.

*barfs in Comanche*

You see, in my little letter, I had suggested the Dukes (after DC’s own Duke Ellington), the Champs (the Washington Football Team were NFC champs their first year without the Redskins moniker, so why not choose a playful, user-friendly name that perpetuates this success?), the Icons (visually/phonetically very neighborly with Washington; can easily shapeshift into an adjective: “An iconic sixty-yard field goal as time expires gives the Icons an iconic win over their archrival!”), and the Legends (remind your dejected, fledgling fanbase that the team used to indeed be legitimately successful).

In the company of any of my four suggestions, I believe the name Commanders would get up off the sofa and leave the room without bothering to put its shoes on. But, yeah, as a lifelong Dallas Cowboys fan, am I really gonna saw fewer logs because of this? Nope upon never, boys and girls.

 WHY DO YOU DO IT, VAN?

I'll tell it to your face, for once and for all, my life is anti-strategic, lying between comic and tragic – Marie Davidson

For many people, the idea of scrambling around trying to prove the existence of a cryptid—be it one of the old timers like Nessie, or one of these newly reported critters like Mothbunnydogman—sounds like an absurd way to spend a life, and they are not wrong.

If I had a nickel for every time some bub asked me why I spend my time sniffing around for impossible creatures, I’d be wearing Bugle Boy cargo pants and six fanny packs and weigh seven hundred pounds. I reply to this sea-level question with one simple grotesque word: martyrdom.

Literal millions of people die every day across this planet. I personally know people who have yawned themselves to death, while others get crunched by city buses or choke to death on six-dollar hot dogs.

My aim is to get killed by a cryptid. Not exactly suicide by cryptid, because, yeah, I get the impression that my nervous system ain’t on board with any of this, and I will no doubt spaz like a banana spider and succumb to the outpour of expired adrenaline that implodes within me and high-tail it to Tierra del Fuego if I do ever wind up face to terrible face with a Glawackus or Wendigo or a Slide-Rock Bolter or whatever.

But if it takes me having to end up in six mason jars and couple of zip-lock bags to prove the existence of a cryptid . . . Yeah, if it takes me having to get notably snacked on by the Muck Monster or end up on the unfun end of a bunch of Puckwudgie poison arrows, then, inshallah, amigos! I enthusiastically consent. All I ask is that you build at least a five-foot eleven-inch statue of me outside of the International Cryptozoology Museum there in Portland, Maine. I have already consulted with my witch doctor, who has promised to do his thing (for an already paid undisclosed amount of crypto currency) and breathe just enough animation into the statue for it to come alive at night and help keep Portland’s population of rats, pigeons, stray cats, and runaway teens at bay. Bon Appechomp!