As most Dream Experts know, the Doodlebug represents your deepest subliminal dreams. He wears a tie and coat because he’s “serious business.”

He stands upon a skull, with his legs plugged in, as a way of visualizing that he is rooted in your subconscious.

His hat resembles the sleeve of a favorite sweater because, in regard to your dreams, there’s “nothing up your sleeve” while at the same time it’s a great place to keep an arm.

The #2 pencil he’s holding is a manifestation of your need to see reason and sense in your nocturnal wishes.

Balloons mean floating, or up, or flying, or drifting. A feeling of being lost or untethered. Maybe you feel out of place in your own dreams. Or maybe your dreams feel out of place in your head.

The doodlebug is holding a sharp tack to the balloons because he knows that at any moment we can fall plummeting down to the earth. Ever have that dream where you’re falling? Yeah, the doodlebug knows about those, too.

The tentacles coming from the skull are there because tentacles are cool.

And the horn that comes from the skull and has a crank mechanism at the other end? Well, that’s the most complicated piece of this entire doodle. That bit is worth the price of admission alone! You see, that’s no ordinary dream-horn. That’s a 1891 Corn-Bell-Washelbaum Bandleader Dreamophone. The dreamophone processes your subconscious electrical impulses through something that resembles a meat grinder and sends them through the musical horn section as a beautiful symphony (or terrifying cacophony) of images, sounds, and smells. It’s this dreamophone that’s responsible for the parts of the dreams you remember. Have you ever had a song stuck in your head all day and you can’t figure out how it got lodged there? Well, that’s the dreamophone!

The doodlebug is turning your dreamophone because he’s taking over the process for you. He’s showing that dreams, just like words, can be circular and bendy. They can flex and twist. They can see around corners. They can fit in small places, and fill up large places. They can assume the form of those you love and deceive you. The can dress up like historical figures and recite poetry in an Irish accent. They can waterski on one leg. They can see the past and the present at the same time. They can hold their eyes open for days without blinking.

Well, you get it by now.

In 2009, the Dead Pocket Station began sponsoring their very own luchador superstar, Brazo Del Absurdo. Two years later, due to his refusal to speak English and inability to reach superstar luchador status, the DPS dropped his sponsorship.

Brazo Del Absurdo was born Albert Juan Howard Lucas Rodriguez on April 12, 1978, in the Mexican city, San Luis Potosi. His father, Roberto Roberto Rodriquez, was a commercially unsuccessful poet, musician, and matador. His mother, Anita, was very tall and spoke with a stutter.

Juan Howie, as he was known to his family, had an incredibly boring childhood until the age of eleven when he was employed in a local business that manufactured toilet paper. Juan Howie’s job was to roll the paper onto the cardboard tube.

Juan Howie spent seven years employed by Casa del Libro, learning the subtle trade of paper-rolling. He was hoping to build a respectable career that could extend to rolling posters and cigars. But, on his eighteenth birthday, he was given the opportunity of a lifetime. While horsing around with some friends, Juan Howie became convinced that he possessed a natural talent for wrestling and theatrics.

For the next five years, he tried to get the chance to wrestle. After five years he gave up and went back to paper-rolling, taking a demotion to the cardboard tube glue station. But the next year his big break came. Juan Howie, donning his first mask and calling himself Macho-Macho, found himself wrestling the vicious and popular Pedro Diablodor. He lost this match, but his foot was in the door.

Juan Howie spent the next many years (he actually lost count of the years) losing match-after-match. He changed his mask and name thirty-seven times. He kept no sponsor longer than three months. He took up a paper-rolling day job, wrestling at night and on weekends. He eventually earned the prestigious Mster Roller title, but his heart remained a luchador.

To this day, Juan Howie has never won a major match. He still has hope, though.

The screamaloterous is native only to the small tropical island known to natives as Atamakawa’Awakamata, but more popularly known to reality television as The Island of Terrible Sounds.

Most of the terrible sounds on the island originate with the screamaloterous. No one knows where the creature originated. Well, no one but a nine-year-old named Pete.

Pete befriended a screamaloterous named Susan while on his family was on vacation on the Island of Terrible Sounds. The family only stayed on the island two hours, finally giving in to the fearful urge to swim away screaming. Those two hours were enough time for Pete to journey into the wailing forest and meet a new friend.

Susan, who is a male screamaloterous despite the unfortunate name, is 325-years-old, prefers to breathe salty air, sleeps standing on his head, speaks only in screams, and has developed a taste for beef jerky.

Pete somehow snuck Susan back home with him and the two enjoy precisely the kind of hijinks you’d think a nine-year-old boy and an exotic tropical screaming beast would.

Susan has started writing about his adventures with Pete in a memoir titled My Life Off The Island and In the Company of Humans, or What Happened to Me When I Escaped My Home and Made an Adventure of Stuff That Should Have Scared Me To Death But Didn’t. In his spare time, Susan also writes a popular salad dressing blog under the name, David Duchovny.

And there’s a comic strip version of the story, too!

The story of Victor Cranston Gustavson and the story of the lost Oven Mitt of Atlantis are sewn together by the strong thread of fate and circumstance. Before finding the ancient Oven Mitt, Victor was a simple spare tire tester at a large wheel and tire chain. However, after finding the Oven Mitt, he has become like no other man on Earth, hardly a man at all.

In fact, many have forgotten the name Victor Cranston Gustavson completely in the weeks since his miraculous discovery and transformation. These who have forgotten his life before simply call him The Oven Mitt Machine.

Myth has told that the wearer of the magical Oven Mitt of Atlantis was transformed into a mystical machine of imagination. In Victor’s case, that has proven itself to be true. Victor can summon any physical form from his imagination, often billowing forth with strange and unexplainable blobs, beings, and tentacles.

He has been approached on three occasions by members of the Mighty Mortals, a small collective of crime-fighting superheroes, and has been offered, in writing, membership in the group. Victor turned the offer down, saying, “Well, I’m not really a superhero. I’m more of a hunt-and-peck kind of guy.” No one is sure what he meant by that.

Victor, who was known as something of an odd-ball before the Oven Mitt, has become increasingly eccentric and delusional in the weeks since he found the Oven Mitt at a flea market in a box labeled, “I don’t know what these are, pay what you want.” Victor now claims to be from another planet, and that he was sent to Earth to protect mankind from radiation poisoning, genetic mutation due to carbon monoxide exposure, boredom, and televangelists. He claims that his home planet, Belta (a moon of Kovon) is home to many oven mitts, some with magical properties, and some that are simply used to carry hot dishes.

When interviewed about his future plans with the Oven Mitt, Victor claimed to know nothing of the Oven Mitt, instead calling the constant and bizarre manifestations that accompany him, “my friends from home.”

Recently, Victor has been taken into custody by a secret (sort of) scientific laboratory operated by a distant special branch of the government. Inside informants have leaked that he’s been experimented on, but that there has been no way of removing the Oven Mitt from his hand.

*** You can wear your own Oven Mitt Machine t-shirt! Get it here! ***

Samson M. Campbell had the unfortunate misery of being born a mouse. But the delightful gift of being born with the soul of a bluegrass banjo player. And he made the most of it

As a child, Samson took lessons where he could: television, radio, through the walls at Bob’s Music Barn and Steakhouse. But as he aged, his passion for the banjo isolated him from other mice. Eventually, he had no choice but to take to the road.

Fate ultimately had something else in store for him. Something shaped like a stage.

Samson plays a custom, super-mini sized Cloverfoot banjo that was given to him by his musical mentor, Earl P. Taytow. Samson and Earl met at a KFC in Sweetwater, Tennessee while they were both touring with the Cornelius Red Savage Planet Bluegrass Quintet (Earl as a band member, and Samson as a stowaway).

After an awkward, seventeen-minute introduction to Cornelius Red, Samson was asked to tour with the band. For three years he honed his technique, and eventually received billing as a solo act beneath the Savage Planet Quintet. He has since taken up residency as the house banjo player for the Dixon Opry and Summer Musical Theatre in Dixon, Kentucky.

Samson hasn’t lost his wanderlust. Every day at 5:00 am, he can be found gazing out a window and singing to himself, “I hear the road calling…”

Remember Star Wars? How you tried to pass your deep affection for Luke Skywalker and Han Solo on to your children, but found that what they got from it was something strange and alien? You wanted them to embrace Yoda’s wisdom and clarity, but they only marveled at how cool Darth Maul looked? You wanted them to identify with Luke Skywalker and the importance of resisting the dark side, but found that their favorite character was Anakin? Disturbing, isn’t it?

I remember. And it disturbs me.

So, now kids have Indiana Jones Lego video games. They have an endless well of Star Wars characters in all shapes, sizes, and price points. They know the faces and names of the Muppets. But it seems like they’re missing what was originally so important about these characters and movies.

And I wonder if I’ve done that to them.

In the process of mining my childhood fascinations, the Machine (or The Powers That Be or They) took more than my cash. It changed me into the Empire itself, an Empire of marketing and consumerism that replaces childlike imagination and wonder. In my youth I loved giant robots that could turn into cars, archeologist adventurers, foam puppets, and most of all lasersword-wielding goodguys. But somewhere along the line, so many action figures and lunch boxes later, I forgot what was so lovable about them in the first place. The noise of it all overtook my simple attachment. And the capitalist pop-culture Machine of the 80s created, in me, its greatest masterwork. It created this nostalgia. And its lived off me for decades. And left me an undiscerning sucker, a cash machine, a vending pump with a cheap and endless supply of blind, numb childish allegiance.

So, I want to shake my fists at the Machine. I want to scream, “Get your greedy, stinking fingers out of my nostalgia!” I want to redeem my soul from the emptiness of nostalgia and barren sentimentality. I want to liberate the youth of today from the decay of Hollywood/Hasbro revamps and retreads and reboots.

So, here’s my appeal to you all: Please break the cycle. It can end here. Michael Bay is making a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot. And there’s no need for it. There’s money to be made off us, sure. But beyond the almighty dollar, there’s no benefit to humanity or pop-culture to having yet another Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.

And all it would take is for every one of us to refuse to buy into it. We could start by refusing to watch the movie (and not renting it either), refusing to buy the toys, refusing to play the video games, or visit the blog, or read the updates. We could disown it entirely. And in doing so, we could begin the process of freeing ourselves from this machine.

I appeal to you as Neo would appeal to the mass of humanity plugged into the artificial framework delivered to them as reality. This is not real. And when we say, “Enough is enough,” we might find that there is still something original and beautiful created in the world today. Something new. Something that inspires us to think real thoughts, our own thoughts. Something that stirs real, deep emotions, not sentimental, plastic, dollar-shaped feelings that are here one minute and gone the next.

We can end this.

- I am A. Turk

Coming up: Part Two, But What About Batman?

And, of course, there’s Wonrie himself, riding his magical unicyclophone.

And, for your reference, here’s a digital photo collage (by Will) that inspired Captain Pizzazz*:

*Our sincerest respect and gratitude to the real Captain B. T. Pizzazz.

I had a lot of fun producing these hand-drawn business cards. One-of-a-kind. Obviously, they have contact information on the reverse side. That’s handwritten as well. And I hand-cut them out of 100 lb. smooth bristol board. They feel nice.

And each one has a great little piece of advice!

And you can buy prints, cards, and t-shirts of the Oven Mitt Machine over at Red Bubble!