Funfiltered Episode #077 - "The Lord of Straw Men"

This is a true story. In the year 2000, my parents took me and my cousin on holiday to Magaluf. I was five. By that time, I was already a voracious reader, as far as voracity can apply to the habits of a nipper. Thus, in the breaks between swimming, mocktails and ice cream, I turned my attention to penning my first work of fiction. A haunted house yarn, it amounted to an austere roll call of horror archetypes - the vampire, the ghost, the mummy... it isn't humility alone when I say that the piece lacked accomplishment. Nevertheless, when I ponder the birth of the bug, this is the provenance at which the train of recall halts. The tracks may persist rearward, my Bic may have earlier met paper, but such things have been lost to the fog of infant amnesia. And so, be it history or mere story, accounting for the blur betwixt the two and the value of myth, I consider this my creo-genesis. But this emergence wasn't the only salient feature of the vacay. I also remember a pirate-themed stage-show, during which my adolescent cousin drunk himself into paralysis. I remember my continued insistence that we patronise the local Burger King in the hopes of completing a kids-meal toy collection. I remember the friendly server swapping out the trinkets already in my possession for fresh plastic trophies. I remember the elderly man pawing at a payphone so that he may scavenge coins. I remember, trailing behind my family as I was, stopping to study this strange spectacle. I remember the man's fixed gaze as his arm extended outward, grabbed my shirt and began to violently drag me into an alley. I remember my father running back to us, tackling the stranger to the ground and restraining him until the police arrived. I remember being told much later that the stranger, now known to me as Camilo Muñoz, had subsequently been jailed for his role in a string of attempted child abductions. That wasn't a true story. Well, some of it was. But enough about BABY REINDEER. Almost enough. Just enough more to say that Jordan and I talk about it. That, along with the first season of FALLOUT, the KNUCKLES miniseries, LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL and a whole bunch more. Tuck in!