The New Second Base

First off, congratulations to the Texas Rangers for being the beneficiary of my pre-season pennant pick. In this World Series between the third- and fourth-longest championship droughts, I pick the Rangers once again (in either 7 or 4, depending on whether the SF offense shows up). 

But this isn't the baseball I wanted to talk about. (Okay, it's always the baseball I want to talk about, but I'll probably get my show canceled if I go after niche audiences.) I'm here to talk about makeout baseball. In my day, back when I didn't need a cane to walk and there wasn't a colony of sparrows in my beard, first base was kissing, second base was feeling up, third base was oral sex, and a home run was figuring out how to get horizontal in the back seat of an '87 Honda Civic as a six-foot-tall person while still aiming the correct parts at the correct parts. 

According to today's trip to Wal-Mart, the new baseball goes something like this:

1st Base: kissing a vampire.

2nd Base: kissing a vampire that you know is a vampire.

3rd Base: getting bitten on the neck by a vampire.

Home Run: flirting with a werewolf.

There was an entire rack of teenage supernatural romance novels. And unless you think I'm being facetious about that genre name, here's Barnes & Noble enshrining it. I will be the five millionth person to dissect this tsunami of girl-oriented vampire fancy, so I'll spare you the details of the subtextual drive for abstinent boyfriends and psychological thrill of mixing blood with sex in a way that makes men excited instead of grossed out, and just jump to the horror fan bitching.

Zombies and vampires and werewolves are all venerable monsters, and they've all been softened or over-beaten to the point of buffoonery, cartoonery, or squealy-girl moonery. As an ex-boy, I'm disgusted by this full-scale appropriation of ick. Vampires are now officially for girls. Gender equality issues aside (because I'm really talking about 12- and 13-year-olds here), what does this leave boys who want something escapist that isn't tainted with cooties? 

Bugs. Giant space bugs. Carnivorous bugs. Bugs made out of people who are attached at the digestive tract. I guess bugs are still pretty much fair game. But bugs are only a surface willie. There isn't much there to dig into your brain and give you full-on horror heebiejeebies. I guess some parasites, properly deployed in a non-zombifying manner, could do the trick.

Mummies? Lame.

Frankenstein? Too cerebral, and honestly kinda boring. That tale was always science fiction dressed up as horror, anyway. Universal just happened to give Doctor Frank and his Real Doll a starring role in the Halloween parade, but as every subsequent version that tries to actually be scary proves, it's not. It's weird, and it's got a humdinger of a moral, but there's not much fright there.

That leaves clowns. Obviously, everyone is scared of clowns, or at least that's the phobia fad of the day. Clowns can be intelligent. I suppose it's hard to hide in the shadows with all that white face paint and those giant-ass shoes, but clowns don't need to lurk to be scary. They just show up and sort of ... loom. Or stand there awkwardly. Just thinking about an awkward, immobile clown standing in my apartment gives me the freaks.

Clowns have the added feature of being almost incorruptible by romance literature. While crazier things have happened in the world of pop culture, I really can't imagine a fad for young girls to fall in love with adult clowns, at least not outside of flash fiction written by particularly creepy prisoners. Clowns aren't sexy. Clowns don't do sex. They only do seltzer jokes and murder and the occasional armed robbery.  

Of course, this could all backfire terribly. Maybe clowns could be the next big hunk antihero archetype. Maybe Barnes & Noble will have to clear a shelf for Teenage Mime Romance. Maybe we'll get around the bases like this:

1st: Kiss

2nd: Flower squirt

3rd: Nose honk

4th: Figuring out how to get horizontal in the back seat of a small car as a six-foot-tall person while still aiming the correct parts at the correct parts.