Sometimes, I Like to Sit And Imagine...

That Abraham Van Helsing (from Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula) is the older, crochety slightly-more-high-on-meth “Garbiel” Van Helsing (whom we meet in Stephen Sommers’ Van Helsing movie, which I personally enjoy, and don’t see why people hate it so much.) Then, I further like to pretend that at the same time in “history,” Mina Harker is making love to and being made a Vampire by Vlad Dracula (like in the Francis Ford Coppola movie), while over in the United States, a young Abraham Lincoln is inventing a shotgun-containing axe, whose only purpose will be to hunt the evil Vampires of the South, and eventually defeat them with silver bullets mined from the War Effort of the Yankees. Even further than that, I like to dream that at the very same time in fictional history, or shortly thereafter, I guess, Mina Harker joins up with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, of whom the Invisible Man, Dorian Gray, Tom Sawyer, Captain Nemo, Dr. Jekyll, and Alan Quartermaine are all members, too. Then, I further fantasize that at that same time, in the Old West in America, Will Smith and Kevin Kline are busting some heads with some amazing Gadgets, and getting a wildly-scenery-chewing Kenneth Brannagh just so he will, like, back the fuck off, and then they steal his giant, steam-powered, clockwork spider, and lumber off into the sunset with it, to potentially fight steampunk anime heroes and villians. Finally, I like to think that in the middle of all this hullabaloo, H.G. Wells is silently inventing a Time Machine . . . So he can travel to the Future, and witness — up close and first hand, with the help of Jules Verne’s space capsule — the destruction of Planet Krypton as it’s depicted in the Zack Snyder film, Man of Steel. (And that the “pet women” that Dr. Arlos Loveless—whom Will Smith and Kevin Kline are currently popping some caps into—there are six girls in a not-so-healthy mental hospital, dreaming their way to freedom from the orderly named Blue, and that one of them is the imaginary friend of the others. And last but certainly not least, I like to picture Nikolai Tesla and H.P. Lovecraft teaming up to fight monsters and ghosts . . . Which, in the future, so inspires a young Ray Stanz to create the supernatural hunting organization, Ghostbusters. Then, they broke into the Bureau For Paranormal Research and Defense one day when Hellboy wasn’t home. And that the technology they stole, went into their “proton packs” and somehow got married to the technology in Buckaroo Banzai's oscillation overthruster and became Doc Brown’s Flux Capacitor in Back to the Futures I, II, and III, and was then weaponized somehow so the Time Lords and Daleks could battle it out in the Time War . . . And so that one day, on Gallifrey, a young Time Lord decides to run away from it all and steal a TARDIS. And that this — ALL of THIS!— happens in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And why do I dream of all this? Because I really think Lord Morpheus, a.k.a., The Sandman, a.k.a., the Lord and King of all the Dreaming . . . Will, at some point, have to take out some seriously batshit crazy property-damage insurance. That’s why. ( . . . And I wonder why I don’t have a girlfriend yet. Hmmm.)