Nature abhors normality, that's why mutations are constant. Tweeking this genome, changing that chromosone, putting an extra finger here or there. A generational testing of the waters if you will. Regardless of the reasons of/for the mutation, mental, physical, or cellular, they all hear a common call, a call which more than lures, almost instinctually driven, like a trout to a spawning ground. They all hear it, they all act on it, and they all end up here, All Hallow's Eve, Key West. These are the stories of 6 such mutants, too weird to live, too rare to die.

He's seeing monsters, he's losing my mind and he feels it going. -Skinny Puppy

So, it was settled....Captain Doug has been reached and Key West Fantasy Fest was a go. Myself, Ody, and Sheldon leave Andros on a wednesday, although now I could not tell you which one, it seems so long ago. Nesterhead, being bumped off our little plane opted on alternate means of transportation involving a floating plane. I was not witness to such a beast, so in mine mind she got here by magic. If Key West taught me anything it was believe none of what you hear, half of what you see, and not to worry about what that smell is, just get the hell away from it. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Once all was said and done, the three of us slept on the La Ke. Now this is a superior vessel, the captain's seat alone had enough gadgets and swiches and lights to drive the simple to facial ticks. In the morning after a quick game or Rock, Paper, Scissors, it was agreed, Shelli was driving for the next 4 1/2 hours collecting the remainder of our wayward souls, at which times myself and Ody would be waxing the boat waiting for a call from the captain. A call that would never come. Somewhere around the nth beer it became painfully obvious we were waiting on a ghost, a freak, a whack job. A few phone calls later it was confirmed, the captain never got on his plane in Detroit. He was decapitated by a tilt-a-whirl at a local carnival, at least I hope he was.

So, here we sit in this beautiful boat with no captain, no captains wheel, no charts, no hope. Doing quick math in our heads to try to figure out how we're going to pull this off. Options being; buy a steering wheel for the boat, get some charts and try to figure it out; rent a vehicle and drive down; just stay on the boat in Lauderdale and party till our collective livers rebel. Lets shut these down one at a time. New Steering wheel is $600 and even with charts, these waters are completely foreign to me, they may as well be made of cheese. Even if we get a vehicle there are no hotels available in Key West this time of year. Nesterhead is already $230 down after her flying boat ride, so staying here is not an option. Ody calls a rental place and inquires on renting a vehicle that will house 6, they disappear and come back with some big black leviathan that literally could sleep 6. Which is good, because at this point that would be the plan.

South Miami, a lonely stretch of I-95, a man in a Jeep, and Kari has to poop. Traffic is slow, times are starting to wear on us. Kari says something to him in Nesterese which illicits the response of him just looking at her like a cow would look at a new gate. This of course, prompts whoops of laughter from the other 120 people in our vehicle, sending the poor hapless soul screeching ahead of us. Come on, I think you're racing between red lights of which there are another 4098 before we reach Card Sound Rd. We catch up to him and Nester tries to convey to this poor yuppie that we were laughing at her not him you see because..... Doesn't matter what followed because, being that he stood on the accelerator after the first 6 syllables. Now it's my turn, I've had it with this preternatural courtship, I have to make a stand, make a difference, take him out and hope that it's remembered on a genetic level better equiping the next generation of yuppie to weather similar situations better than this freak. His jeep sets merciless in line behind countless other vehicles as the Leviathan approaches...circling like a shark to prey, he's visibly shaken, he's sweating, he knows. Knows that this obviously escaped batch of whack-jobs are coming to finish the job....his face starts to tick. We stop, out of the window comes bellowing, 'SHE'S NOT CRAZY, SHE JUST HAS TO POOP!'. I didn't see him stop at another red light, until he was a memory, a blurry one at that.

That being said we find a Walgreens, stock up on Gummy Bears, and Sour Patch Kids, Nester was very thankful. We drive until we're stupid, at this point it's about 1030, still 1/2 hour out. On a whim Sheldon calls Key West 411. Comfort Inn has a room. $120 later we're showering and going out. Every one is tired and second guessing weather or not we should go out. I insist, so we order a Maxi Taxi (Taxi Light Days, and Taxi with Wings were busy). The kid in the Maxi Taxi drops us off at Schooners Wharf, smells like vomit...welcome to Key West. The band is, however, great. Buffalo Strange from Tampa, remember that name, there will be a quiz. From there we hit Duval, have some Jager bombs to wake up and end up at the Bull and Whislte, for more bombs and beads. Shelli is of course quick to show the puppies so we all get enough beads to choke a Rhino. Mangar is still apprehensive, she's too level, too structured for this crowd, we're going to have to break her into this lightly. Almost like bonefishing, very skittish, you have to make deliberate, perfect movements to keep from scaring off the prey. Don't let the creature know anything is amiss until they're on the end of the line, then they know it's too late. But Mangar isn't giving in lightly, she's still circling the downward spiral that is life by our rules, I'm guessing she'll cave, eventually just like all bonefish do, and when they do, it's a beautiful thing, and you can have nothing but respect your opponent for a battle well fought. Or course it didn't hurt that Captain Morgan was seen dancing with a 6'3" penis down Duvall St.

Once The Bull and Whistle lost the lure that initially drew us in, we continue our Duvall Crawl. This is a trek that would've sent Maurice Sendak packing. All manor or geeks, weirdo's, cross dressers, transexual, sexless, sex with the dead, are here tonight. It's like someone took the Wizard of Oz, cross bred it with Alice in Wonderland and Debbie Does Dallas, with just enough Willy Wonka thrown in to maintain an R rating (NC-17 is the kiss of death), then you arm the whole cast, just to keep everyone honest. After a 15 minute walk we end up at Willy's, the girls want to dance, so our party dances. With the exception of your humble narrator, whom if he were to dance would resemble a paraplegic leper trying to scratch the small of his own back. This is where the sticker kids found us. These guys need to be building space shuttles or balancing our nations budget. Spool of tickets reading "I GOT SPANKED", $40. Plastic paddle, $7. Toga's (i.e. sheets stolen from hotel), free. Getting to spank every hottie's posterior on Key West....priceless. Now, It's 5 am, the band has stopped, the girls are covered in stickers, our trusty Maxi Taxi is in need. In waiting, Shelli gets some pizza, Ody get's scarred of a 6'3" black drag queen, and Nester almost got her groupie cherry busted. Buffalo Strange pulls up, all 7 of them in a small red Pontiac Cyst. Nester in her own haze of intoxicatia remembers them from what seems like a past life, she says 'hey, you're that band', which is the 'in' that they were looking for. The door opens she's crawling in, I'm cheering her on, Shelli stops her, the door closes and Nester eats her pizza. The Maxi Taxi drops us off at our hotel where the roosters are giving continuous encores of the only song they know. After some poolside drama betwixt myself and Nester we retire for the morning.

Interlude. Around 730 am Mangar has to use the head. On returning I watch her toes. She seperates her little toe from her foot rhythmically, over and over again getting slower and slower until she stops at which point her breathing becomes slow, deep, and constant. And I think it's the most adorable thing I've seen all week. Well that and you could put your eyes out on her hipbones....that's adorable too.

Showering is good. givin the state and smell of the room, imagining it all in the Leviathan brings a shudder, like fingernails on a chalkboard. We opt to hang at this hotel for another night. On myself and my lovely wife mamboing to the lobby to maintain our residence in their fine poolside establishment we were told by the nice witch(literally, it is halloween remember) downstairs that the room would by $278, my responce 'did you just realize the room was poolside?!?!', to which she informs us that they are cleared to charge $325 for this room in peak season. And this is just about as peaked as a smackhead 45 minutes into a 4-way window pane of west coast LSD. I make a horrible attempt at a stall tactic by implying that we should discuss this with the rest of the room without telling the lobby attendant that we don't have the rough equivilant of scratch-ass west Iowa staying in room 206 creating all manor of human olfactory assults as we're speaking. 12 minutes later Shelli and Ody go down to confirm that we indeed do want the room being that it's only going to cost $17 a night with 125 people staying there. That settled we hit the pool with a cocktail, opt for pizza. While the kids are napping Pete and myself hit a bait shack, slum with the locals for a while, learn what it takes to be a local in Key West. What mettle does it take to see this ritualistic abuse of your home by all these mutants. While talking to Whitey, and studying his habits, I noticed, he's not much different than us AUTECnics, he indeed used to be one, with the right kind of eyes you can see it. It's not something that's there, so much as it's something that's missing. Missing the recoil spring that makes people so quick to judge others by their actions. Missing the drive that makes what the world considers normal to constantly persue the 'bigger, better, faster, more' mentality. This is the genetic code that would be passed if Darwin would've been a hippy. The code that is required to make this world liveable post December 22, 2012.

All right, that was a little deeper than intended, sorry about that, where were we. Napping. Right. I didn't get to, so I'm still driving strong on 6 hours of sleep in 3 days, my body and mind soaking all the nutrients out of Jack Daniels, Jagermeister, and second hand smoke of most varieties known to man since 475 A.D. Showers all around and we are indeed strip bound once more. Our trusty Maxi Taxi driver shows, drops us at Schooner's Wharf again...and again, it smells of vomit, with the warm acrid scent of urine intertwined with it, and these fiends are walking around barefoot. I see foot amputeeism being a profitable profession in Key West. If last night was the frying pan, tonight is the fire. More of the same wierdness. Although tonight Schooner's Wharf does have a 'Haunted Tunnel of Pleasure' which proved to be quite entertaining. They take a painted sea nymph wearing a thong and multi colored paint, off of which they are serving body shots of liquor of your choice. Then once the shot is gone, you get to follow it with a paint chaser by licking it off some portion of the vixen's body. All the while circa 1930's porn playing on the wall behind her. Good schtick! Especially for those of us that ate paint chips as a child. Although by the time we got there she was almost so licked clean she was shining like a new mint quarter. Floating rib, and armpit were about all that was left with color to them (other than a raw red which completely engulfed her breasts and waistline of her thong, do to enough licking that would've made even an African Big Game Cat jealous), so we opted to put Ody in a Stock while some 50 + year old woman beat him with her breasts, he was a good kid, I really don't think he'll be the same.

Cattle drives of all manor of freaks, slowly walking zombies, drunk, cross dressed, most nude from the waist up, zombies. I like to think of myself as a big of a partier as anyone...but when there are no rules, what is considered extreme? This is my first disappointment this week. The lack of shock-value. When a 60 year old woman is walking around with her waistlong breasts painted like basset hounds with the words 'Love those Puppies' painted across her coller bone, what can you really say is 'next'? When children are laughing at there own mother who is vomiting in a potted plant, who do you feel for? This night is a washout. Not enough weirdness (or such a large amount of it, it seems mundane). Too much Key West, too vivid. Too many treating weird like a spectator sport, and doing it becuase they'll blend in, not becuase they have the missing chromosone which creates these beasts. It's only 3 am, and I'm spent, with an air of disappointment we go to Denny's where the real weirdos are at 3 am. We made it home before the roosters started their cacophony of exlamation at this 400 trillion tons of fusing Hydrogen and Helium creeping up from the east that their sunflower seed sized/shaped brain completely forgot did the same damn thing roughly 24 hours prior. Because of this is was the most blissful 3 hours of sleep I was destined to have throughout these 5 strange days.

On waking, it's decided we're not going to subject ourselves to another night of this madness. We're better than that, we took this trip as far as we can. More of the same is not in my table of contents. There's only so many beautiful 1/2 naked people you can look at before you start looking for something different. Beauty becomes the mundane. Give me different. Give me a 300 lb woman dressed up like flipper in a tutu, give me the 60 year old woman with the basset hound breasts, give me the 6'3" black drag queen. These are the people that make Fantasy Fest. I feel holding a conversation with these beasts for 1/2 hour, is so far removed from a sexual experience with a vapid yuppie tourist who's only naked because she can be, not becuase she doesn't care what others think, that the light from one would not reach the other for 10 thousand years. That being said, it's time for decisions, I want to shower, but given the state of our shower, I feel I would end up more filthy were I to partake in any activity involving what used to be our shower, or our towels. Kari is severly hungover, so I make her some 'hair of the dog', which turns out to be 3 Vernor's Gingerale and 1/2 bottle of Jack Daniels in the Camelpak, she nurses it for about 10 minutes and starts looking human again. Still smells like hell on a triscuit, but we all do, this room does. All manor of vile has contributed to make this room the reason my picture will be up in every Comfor Inn establishment world wide with a note underneath stating, 'do not rent to this man'. Between Kari's sensitive stomach, Pete's hair ponies behind the toilet, Shelli's beads of questionable origin, my feet and ody's....come to think of it, he and morgan my be innocents here, that'll be hard to take it they are scarred from this knowing what we've put them through. Regardless, it's time to leave this mess, not even a dog sleeps where it shits.

We leave Camelpak in tow in search of breakfast. Pete suggests Cuban everyone's initial reaction is 'MY GOD NO!!! IT'LL KILL KARI!!'. So he suggests a little place he knows a couple streets away, funny how everything in Key West is a couple streets away. Anyway when we sit down it turns out we are in a pharmacy. The lady brings us some Cuban bread which is delicious, and we all order, myself and Kari ordering a 'pic-a-dey-oh', no idea how it was spelled but that's how it's pronounced, it's a cuban spiced ground beef with olives served with yellow rice and black beans, sets very well with with 1/2 bottle of Jack Daniels. Now it's time to pay rent on said Camelpak of delight, but the head is now in-op since Ody dropped a sack of kittens off as soon as we entered this 'non-cuban-'pic-a-dey-oh'-servin'-pharmacy-of-breakfast. Sustience being had, we split up and hit the strip, I help chain a fire eating man up, and he gets out for money. We run ourselves stupid, till we end up lying on the grass by the docks off Malory Square, I remember lying on Kari's legs saying in my best bahamian accent 'Man, I drunk!!' over and over again. Ody finds us, Pete's disappeared again, but it's getting late and I'm sobreing up. We walk for what seems like 2 days to the 'other' end of Duvall St. We walk in tight little circles with all manor of spanish ethnicities laughing at the lost white tourists. Cubans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Peruvians, Argentines, all the Barrio was ahoot. After three circlings of the neighborhood it was obvious the leviathan was lost. How you lose a two acre vehicle on a 4 acre island escapes me, but we've done it. When it was found I'm convinced the only reason it was not up on blocks, was the fact that there are not blocks big enough. We load up and go.

It seems if you bite the heads and feet off yellow and green gummi bears they stand a 50/50 chance of sticking when thrown at passing vehicles, but only a 30/70 chance of sticking on motorcylcles, and motorcyclists alike. Just an observation. Another observation myself and Nester realized, nothing makes you gleek quite like Sour Patch Kids, so we spend from mile marker 4-20 spitting on each other and laughing about it, and generally annoying the rest of the Leviathan. Rest of the Road trip is pretty uneventful, with the exception of me dropping a piece of Arby's shredded Roast Beef covered with Arby's Sauce down Pete's shorts whilst he was napping on the floor. It seemed he just became possessed all of a sudden. He went from a slumber to a riot in 3 seconds. Smackin' and slappin his crotch, everyone thought he'd finally lost it, until he told us what I had done.....sorry Pete, but I had to laugh. Jack -n- Ginger really getting to Nesters bladder. She, in her misery, tries to get Ody's attention whilst he's driving. but we are two carlengths behind him, being in the extreme rear of the vehicle. Faithfully scanning the road, maintaining speed just at the speed limit, hands at 10 and 2, like a model citizen driver, which is a good thing since there's a cop behind us. After 2 failed attempts to get the attention she needs before turning the luggage compartment into a ladies room, she finally opts to just give him a call. His phone rings, he looks at who it is and answers slightly annoyed, 'What do you want Nester?', 'I have to pee', she says. 'And there's a cop behind you, so be careful.' Next stop Tambi's place.

So, that's our tale, or what we recall of it, there's not alot of pictures becuase pictures really fail to do this justice. We braved the mutants, with light armor and armament alike. Relying solely on wits, jagermeister, and sin. When seven was not enough, we made up new ones never concieved my man nor god. We eat'th of his flesh, and drink'th of his blood, chew through a concrete wall and come out the other side looking good. What will become of us, time and karma will surely tell. A guess, is that when one thing ceases to lead to another, or when the extreme becomes mundane the end is surely near. But I don't believe that. I'm not going to believe it's over till I'm knawing on the skull of the last whack job on the planet, because it never got weird enough for me.

"you're not registered at your hotel room. Your rental car is reported stolen. Personally I could give a shit, but you owe me a story." -'Where the Buffalo Roam'