INVADER ZIM Fact #28

FYOO-CHAAH BAYBEHHH! COMIN' TO GET YEWWWWW!

I want to talk about yesterday, okay?

Yesterday’s post was very obviously hurt by my having to deal with a few unexpected hurdles, and those hurdles took precedent over what has, thus far, been my sole reason for existing: my selfless mission to help you understand what it is to be human, to be a sentient being whose awareness is not clouded by lies, and to just stuff your head with the truth the way a sausage-lord crams filling into a sausage casing.

You are my sausage casings, and my fistfuls of truth-stuffings are at the ready.  I’m a lot better at this than when I first started out, so I no longer literally have the metal tubs sloshing around with stuffings that I have screamed truths into.  I’m not even sure why I thought that would work!  Hah!  Those poor first few test subjects!  Ah, education.

As a result of my generally relentless dedication to the cause, a glaring lapse in attention as demonstrated by yesterday’s anemic post stands out more than it would if I went with my usual instincts, and shat out a crappy post day after day instead of blinding you with brilliance as I so regularly do.

People, don’t think I walk away from those lapses unscathed.  There are individuals out there who suffer for the lack of my amazingness, and when they hurt, I hurt.

“But, Jhonens,” you say, because you see quite a few of me after participating in those early truth-injecting tests, the stuffings still bulging and occasionally plopping out of the crude seams where your skull wasn’t fitted back in place properly, “you’ve done so much to help mankind!  People have to understand that sometimes you, too, must stumble, that you may learn!”

You say things like that now and then, and though I get the gist of what you’re gurgling, I’m just uncomfortable with the way half of your face sags (from where I cut something important to making your face not look hideous while rooting around for the best places to cut into your brain).

“You can’t help that some of them are so sensitive,” is what I am barely able to make out of the mushy noises farting from the loosely-puckered anus that was once your mouth, your one good eye trying to lock with mine to assure me, console me.  I look away, barely able to keep from vomiting at the very sight of you.

“You can barely keep from vomiting at the sight of me?” you ask.  Oh shit, I’m thinking out loud again.  Why am I so bad at that?

“You used to think I was beautiful!” you cry.  Always with the crying.  Always with the waterworks.  I think I might’ve messed up something that regulates your moods while in that head of yours, because you weren’t always this unstable.  I get it, I turned you into a revolting abomination but I’m having a lot of difficulty dealing with your mood swings and constant need for “love and understanding from the person who turned you into a monster”.

“Used to.” I mutter.

“What?  What you say?”

“Did you just say ‘What you say?'”

“Muhhh?”

“Uh oh.  Looks like you’re getting worse.  Speech seems to be degenerating.”

“Why you do this to me!?”

“You don’t need to talk to be able to go do my laundry.  Think you can still do that?”

“Me think so.”

“Sweet.  Get to it, monster-doll.  I gotta finish this entry.”  The slimy trail of what passes for your tears now oozes out from the corners of your eyes, your eyeballs bulging outward a bit as the thick mess of it forces its way through your tortured ducts as you shuffle your way to the laundry room.  You’re one of the good, loyal ones.

So, back to what I was saying before, about how my actions affect people in ways I might not always like.

I hold people’s very lives in my hands.

What might just be an amusing anecdote about INVADER ZIM to you, might also be the very thing someone else is living for.  It sounds funny, and it is, up until the letters start coming in.  That’s the point where you stop laughing and start taking responsibility for your actions.

Don’t believe me?  Just look at some of these excerpts from letters I’ve gotten on the days when I had “better” things to do than to save the world from ignorance:

-“and so I waited and waited and waited for the next ZIM FACT to go up.  I waited and still nothing showed up.  I knew you wouldn’t let me down, and so I kept waiting.  My baby was halfway poking out of me, and my husband was yelling at me to get in the car so we could go to the hospital, but I threw my ZIM dvd box set at him.  Last fall I had the box set bronzed, so it shut him up pretty good, and that made it easier to sit by the computer and keep refreshing the web browser to see if you had updated your blog yet.

I was sitting on my baby by that point, and I didn’t know anything about babies, so I just did what I see them doing in the movies and slapped it in the face to make it breathe, but it was still halfway poking out of me and I didn’t know if it was too soon or not, but I just kept on slapping that baby and getting my keyboard all messy because that baby was covered in all sorts of weird body-stuff.

Finally, you updated, and by that point it was already almost dark outside and I had gotten so used to you posting earlier in the day, so already I was all confused and angry with you.  You had let me down already, and that was before I even read the post.  Once I did that, I couldn’t believe it, you had barely written a fraction of what you normally do and it was obviously rushed, and didn’t even contain anything pertaining to the show I love so much and maybe just killed my husband with.

Bears?  Frank Conniff possessed a bear?  What the hell were you expecting me to think?  What kind of world was I bringing my baby into where someone you trust is now fucking with us so hard that they’d expect us to believe that Frank Conniff was controlling a bear and attacking you?

I just sat there in disbelief for maybe an hour.  By that point the baby was pushed all the way out of me but still mashed under me, squishing around in the cold jelly of stuff that I had pooped him out with.  I got up, took my baby into my arms and wandered out into the streets, confused, abandoned by my one source of truths about this terrible, empty world, and found myself walking through traffic, begging the universe to just do me in, to spare my baby a life in this terrible place.

I came to my senses soon after, and returned home, trying to imagine how anyone could rebuild their view of the world enough to live in it after receiving a blow as heavy as that you you dealt me when you hit the upload button on your WordPress that day.  I would do it.  I would do it for my child and lie to her, tell her that everything was worth living because maybe, just maybe she’d believe it in time, and live happily enough before someone tore the eyelids off her face and held her head toward the hellish light that burned away everything inside of me when you didn’t put the time and care into a post.

My husband had come to, and made his way over to the computer.  He was still sitting there, the bullet hole in his head still smoking from where he shot himself after reading your post.

I swore to find a way to transfer my soul into my child’s body so that I could have more time in my life to avenge my lost innocence, the death of my husband, and my poor, soon-to-be-possessed baby.  I hate you, Jhonen Vasquez.

And I am coming for you.”

That was just from this morning.  I’ve done twenty eight of these posts now, and with each one I’ve ruined so many lives that I can barely type a single letter without wondering who I’m hurting with it.

Just a few hours ago I received this one:

“Dear, Jhonen Vasquez, or as you are known in my time, ‘THE ALL FATHER OF PAIN’,

You do not know me, but you helped create me.  I was born a day before you receive this letter, born into nightmares.  For decades my own mother, emptied out by the fires of your irresponsibility , attempted to possess me, somehow, to use me as a vessel for her own all-consuming vengeance.  Never did she succeed in the way she had hoped, but little could she know that she’d live on in my own motivations.

I am that child born of despair, born into the agonizing understanding of the nothingness around us all.  Watching my mother die screaming in the hospital, wishing only that she could have seen the day you breathed your last, I vowed to find a way to reach you before you became the thing you are today, in my time.

Thus far I have only succeeded in finding a way to send letters back through time, but soon those letters will be robots, and then those robots will be people, and those people will have laser guns with which to kill you before any of this could ever have happened.

With much hatred,

FUTURE BABY.”

So now I’ve got Future Baby to worry about, all because I didn’t put that extra effort into a post about INVADER ZIM.  I have to live with this every day of my life, at least until I find whatever it is in the future that turns me into some sort of hateful-deity monster.

So, I just don’t know any more.  I’m so close to finishing off this month, but how would you cope with knowing your words could kill, or that they could irreparably alter the course of human lives?

What can I do but go on?  Not much farther to go now, anyhow.  I pray that these next few days are without incident.  I swear I will do my best to live up to the standard of quality that I promised from the very beginning.  I owe it to the fans, to the everyone, really, and I owe it to the future.  I can change things.  It doesn’t have to end badly.

Oh…fuck.  The hot dog place down the street is gonna close in half an hour and it’ll take me at least fifteen minutes to get out and over there in time to grab something to eat!  FUCK!

I’m so sorry guys, but this is important.  I gotta go!

FACT:

Dib had a clubfoot.

–ZIM FACTS. Here’s why—