Monthly Archives: June 2012

If you’re having squirrel problems, I feel bad for you son

There’s a squirrel stuck in my basement. The first time I saw it, I’m not going to lie, I got a little freaked out. I walked downstairs and turned on the light and this grey blur jumped into a hole where a pipe merges into the wall. I screamed. It was a little dramatic. I hoped the neighbors didn’t hear. If it weren’t for that big bushy tail, I would’ve just assumed it was a rat. Honestly, isn’t that the only difference between squirrels and rats? They’re the same size, the same color, they’re both just as fast, and they both leave little dropping in the corners. Every time I go downstairs I hear it running in the walls and above the ceiling. I don’t think it’s having a great time in there. I think it’s stuck and is trying desperately to figure out how to get out. I have no idea how it got inside in the first place.

The bond that we eventually formed had an unlikely beginning. After a few days I started to worry that the squirrel would eventually starve to death inside the walls and, after a few more days, the body would start to decompose. It would stink and attract those really big horseflies that only ever appear when something dies and is left to rot. But I didn’t know what to do. I figured that I’d leave it some food and water, just a few acorns here and there, just enough so that it could survive while I thought of a plan on how to get rid of it for good.

I put off figuring out what to do for way too long – look, I’m really busy; don’t judge – but finally I went to the Home Depot and bought a squirrel trap. That’s what the Internet told me to do, and the Internet has never let me down before. These squirrel traps are long metal cages. I don’t really know how they work, but the squirrel goes in and gets stuck. I kept thinking that, if the trap actually worked, I’d eventually find myself in the situation where I’d have to go up to this small cage with a live squirrel in it and get it out of my house. That was the probably the most terrifying idea I’ve ever had in my life. I could just picture me going up to the cage, the squirrel would be inside, just sitting there calmly, as if it had surrendered, and then I’d go to pick up the cage, but just as I touched it, the squirrel would start going berserk, making little crazy squirrel sounds, scratching at all sides of the cage at the same time, moving and jumping around so much that the cage starts bouncing around by itself. No, absolutely no way would I let that happen. I determined that I’d leave the cage downstairs, wait for the squirrel to get trapped, and then not go down to the basement for a week while it slowly starved to death. There might be some flies, but I could easily just get rid of the body.

But then I thought, aren’t I going to have to put some acorns in the cage to lure it in? What if the squirrel realizes that it’s been trapped and carefully rations out the acorns to survive in that thing for weeks, or months? I was beginning to feel outsmarted by this little rodent at every turn. But something had to be done. The squirrel kept knocking over all of the clean clothes that I always hung up to dry in the basement. And I’m pretty sure it wasn’t me who had gnawed a hole in that giant bottle of laundry detergent, creating a soap spill so epic I had to take a day off of work just to clean it up, the whole time I’m just wiping up layers upon layers of lather that, no matter how thoroughly I wiped, never seemed to be able to go away, all while the squirrel ran nonstop laps in the walls and in the ceiling, taunting me, daring me to do something, anything about my unfortunate circumstances.

Finally I resolved to set the trap. I didn’t care if I couldn’t go down in the basement for a year; this had to end. So I went downstairs with the trap in my hands and the squirrel was just standing there by its plate of acorns. It looked at me, took an acorn, did a little dance, spun around a few time, and then jumped back into his wall. Yes, it was at that moment that “it” became a “he.” The squirrel was definitely communicating with me. I had finally gotten through to him. He didn’t hate being trapped inside the house anymore. He loved living with me! He loved his little wall and his little plate of acorns! I named him Mr. Sparkster, because whenever I forgot to put out some new acorns, he would start biting at the wiring inside the walls and I would here these zapping, sparking, electrical sounds.

I decided not to end our relationship, but to further it, to nurture and encourage it. Maybe I could get him comfortable enough to hang out with me. Maybe I could train him to do some tricks. Maybe I could lure in a female squirrel and train her and I could name her Mrs. Sparkster and, after a small wedding ceremony, they could have a family and I could train all of them to do not just a few tricks, but a whole act. I could take them around the country, on tour, on the talk-show circuit. The Sparksters could be famous. I could be famous. I could be the most famous squirrel trainer in history. It’ll be tough at first, living on the road, staying at dingy motel rooms around the country because nice hotels won’t let my squirrels inside. I haven’t even figured out how to get this one guy out of the house. I have no idea how I’ll bring the whole family on the road. It’ll be a hard life; I’m not blind to that fact. But eventually Disney’s going to contact me and buy the rights to my story. It will be called “Rob G. and the Sparksters.” They’ll cast Joel McHale as the lead, as Rob. They’ll probably even go so far as to offer to buy the Sparksters from me because they’ll already be trained, and why go through the process of training a whole new family of squirrels to act in the movie when they could just use the actual Sparksters? But it will be out of the question. There’s no way I’d ever consider parting with them. Disney will insist. I won’t back down. Negotiations will stall and eventually I’ll find myself back in my basement.

I’m worried that a rat might sneak in, kill one of the children, and infect the rest of the family with rabies. I’m also worried that one of the Sparksters is going to accidentally bite one of those wires a little too hard and get electrocuted. And maybe even start a fire. I’m even more worried that the Sparkster kids are going to grow up and start inbreeding, creating a whole line of genetically unstable offspring. Whereas the first generation of Sparksters will have loved me, the horribly mutated great-grandchildren will hate me, will resent me for their cursed existences. But I can’t keep bringing in new squirrels to keep the gene pool fresh. What do you think I’m made of acorns? You know, I probably should make it a point to accept Disney’s eventually offer. I can’t let my own pride get in the way. After all, I have to think about the Sparksters, not just about my own self-interests.

What do you like better, Best Buy or the Home Depot?

I hate getting lost in a big store and having to find somebody to help me find whatever it is that I’m looking for. Home Depot and Best Buy are the two examples that pop up first in my mind. There’s really no reason why any store should be as big as these two are. Most of the whole building is usually just a vast empty space with giant ceilings, I’m guessing to purposefully make you feel completely insignificant as you get sucked inside, wandering aimlessly, having no clue where to even begin searching for a flathead screwdriver or an Ethernet cable. They want you to get lost. They’re hoping that by not being able to find whatever it is that you need, you’ll accidentally stumble upon whatever it is that you really don’t need, but it’s right there, and you want it, so why not just pick it up also?

Most of the time I try to do all of my shopping online. I can just type in exactly what I need, and buy it, no hassle. But every once in a while I’ll find myself in the middle of doing some chore or project where I need something immediately and I can’t wait the three to five business days for Amazon’s super saver shipping. Between the Home Depot and Best Buy, I can usually hope to eventually find whatever it is that I need. But it’s always a huge headache.

Home Depot is the worst because from the moment I walk in the store I feel like I’m being taunted for not being enough of a man. Just as I’m entering, some guy in work boots is exiting, and he’s carrying like eight giant pieces of wood with just one arm. That guy’s probably going to build something. Probably a house. A storage shed at the minimum. He definitely knows what he’s doing. He probably just walked in and got what he needed without even thinking about it. The whole trip probably only took him three minutes. I wouldn’t even know what to do with just one piece of wood. Now that I’m actually in the store, I’ve already forgotten what it was I came here to buy in the first place.

Inside I’m just completely overwhelmed by tons and tons of stuff that I know absolutely nothing about. Seriously, I’ll walk down every aisle and basically everything I see, I don’t know what it is, let alone know how to use. And just because the aisles are labeled doesn’t mean that it’s any help. If I’m looking for a screwdriver, having three aisles labeled “tools” doesn’t really help me out that much. If I do happen to accidentally reach the screwdriver section, I’m presented with thousands upon thousands of screwdrivers to choose from. How is anybody supposed to make such an impossible decision? It’s almost a guarantee that whatever I pick won’t be the best choice, the one that I should have picked under ideal circumstances.

Best Buy is a similar type of nightmare, but instead of being intimidated by professional builders and fixers, I feel like I’m being intimidated by professional cool people. Walking into Best Buy is like walking onto the set of Fast Five. There are speakers blasting cool music from every direction. There are giant TVs where the walls should be. Every employee has some cool goatee and is showing some wannabee DJ how to correctly use some state-of-the-art turntables. Instead of that guy carrying the lumber, somebody’s exiting the store carrying a plasma screen TV while texting his friends on the new Galaxy Smart Pad while riding on a neon green Kawasaki motorcycle.

There aren’t any aisles in Best Buy, just loose collections of stuff, and hanging way up in the air are the most unhelpful banners that do a terrible job at telling you where it is you’re going to wind up getting lost trying to find whatever it is you came here to buy in the first place. “Electronics.” Really? That’s a section?

At least at the Home Depot you’re surrounded either by professionals or by people in the same boat as you are. But when I have to go to Best Buy it feels like half the people there are just there because they’re bored and wanted to go somewhere bright and shiny to spend their day. Yeah, maybe I’d consider buying one of these cameras if there weren’t a hundred kids playing with all of the test models.

Inevitably I’ll give up and have to ask somebody for help. And everyone always looks super busy. I’d ask that guy over there, but he’s moving boxes. Those people over there are available for questions, but they’re surrounded by people just like me, waiting for guidance. I’d stand around and wait my turn, but I just know that somebody’s going to come out of nowhere, after I’ve been waiting for ten minutes, and interrupt with a question like, “excuse me, where can I find the tools?” because, hey, it’s just a fast question, and I’m sorry, were you waiting? I’ll just be a second. Can you show me where they are? I’ll be right back. And then I’m back to the start.

Probably the biggest fear I have is asking somebody for help that doesn’t actually work there. There are always a few people wandering the aisles that just look like they belong on the store’s payroll. If they’re not working there, they should be. And if I say “excuse me, do you have a minute?” they’ll give me a death stare like I’m probably the ninety-fifth person that’s asked them today.

I really just have to make it a point to make sure that I never go back to either of those stores ever again. If I must, if I really find it necessary, I just have to limit my visits to no more than once a year. Oh, and I’ll never ever accompany someone else who has to run an errand at either location. Then I just wind up wandering aimlessly waiting for whoever it is I’m with to find his or her way out alive. It’s funny though, the few times I’ve gone on such a pointless trip I usually wind up just trying to look at the products, free to browse without having to actually buy anything. The employees there must have a radar and a strict policy against this type of non-committed shopping, because when I know I’m not going to buy anything, somebody’s always coming up to me every ten minutes of so. “Can I help you find something?” “No, I’m just waiting for my friend.” And they give me this look, like, “OK, then get the fuck out.”

We’re going on a field trip!

I miss field trips. How come only schools and classes get to do field trips? They’re fun. You get to go somewhere else. You get to ride on a bus. You get to eat a different lunch. You don’t have to sit there and be quiet the whole day. Even the teachers like field trips. Even the parents that have to come along as chaperones like field trips.

The only person who doesn’t like field trips is that kid in your class with the really weird parents, the ones who don’t trust anything or anybody, not the government, not the school, definitely not the teachers, not anybody, and they refuse to sign the permission slips and while everyone is out having fun, that kid has to spend the whole day sitting in the waiting room of the principle’s office, completing photocopied worksheets that his teacher left behind. The worksheets are supposed to be fun, like word finds and puzzles and riddles, but let’s be honest. It doesn’t matter how interesting that educational crossword puzzle might be; everyone else in his class is out on a field trip, and he’s stuck there sitting in this waiting area doing busy work, and everyone that passes by assumes he’s just sitting there because he got in trouble and that he’s waiting to get yelled at by the principle. And some other nosey teacher might walk by and say in a really annoying voice, “What did you get yourself into this time?” and he’ll have to explain that he’s not in trouble, it’s that his mom didn’t trust the field trip, and the school couldn’t just give him the day off, because a field trip isn’t a day off, it’s still technically a school day, even though everyone else got to dress in their casual clothes while he still had to come in to school in his uniform. And the nosey teacher is already regretting having ever even asked and just walks away feeling really sorry for him, and for herself for having had to stand through such a depressing conversation with such a sad, sad little boy.

But the worst part for that little kid isn’t even the sitting there alone all day, it’s at the beginning of the school day, when everyone in the class comes in and lines up in the auditorium all bouncing around, shrieking with the euphoric energy of an anticipated field trip. This is about as close to that kind of bliss that this kid will ever get. And he’s just experiencing it peripherally. And while he might share in their happiness on the outside, “Hey everyone! Have a great field trip!” he might say, smiling, it’s all just a lie. He wants them to just get on the bus already and disappear before they notice those tears welling up in the corners of his eyes. Because while the majority of his classmates might honestly feel bad for him, there will always be those one or two little assholes ready to snatch those tears up and drink them in. They’ll point out in a loud voice to everyone that he’s crying, that he’s crying because his mommy won’t let him come on the field trip. And they’ll point and laugh and it will be so vicious that the rest of the classmates won’t have any choice but to point and laugh also, because they’ll be so scared at the ruthlessness of this personal attack that they’d rather just join in than risk having the abuse and the torment directed at them also. Better just to laugh at the crying little baby and then you can get on your way and have your field trip.

And maybe the day wouldn’t be such a total bust for this kid if his mom knew how miserable he’d be at school, so maybe she’d pack him a special lunch, maybe buy him a Lunchable or something cool. But no, it’s the same old peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the same old packaged rice-krispie treat, the same old lukewarm box of Ssips iced tea. And he wants to just stay in the waiting room of the principle’s office to eat his pathetic, miserable lunch by himself, but the principle wants her own lunch break, and insists that the boy go down to the cafeteria with the rest of the school, with all of those other grades that don’t have field trips that day. And he goes down and sits at his grade’s empty table by himself and just keeps his head down and tries to ignore every other kid in the school staring and talking about why he didn’t get to go on the field trip. And the lunch moderator sees this too and, with the best of intentions, orders the kid to go sit with the students from another grade. And he protests that he’s OK by himself, but now the lunch moderator’s authority has been questioned, and her once good intentions have now been replaced by the need to exert the little power that she has. She demands, forcefully this time, that the kid find another table, now! Move! Do you want to go to the principle’s office? Do you?

So the kid looks to his left, and it’s the grade above him. And all of those bigger kids are taunting him, just begging him to come over and sit with them. We’re going to make you wish you were never born, they’re saying to him. And he looks to his right and he sees the kids from the grade below him. And they’re just like looking away, like please don’t come over here and infect our table with your depressing presence, you loser. He has to pick the younger kids. But nobody makes room for him, and he has to sit way too close to that kid who smells like egg salad, the kid who’s mom packs him celery sticks filled with cream cheese and raisins for lunch everyday.

But the absolute very worst part of the day is right before dismissal, when the rest of his classmates get off of the field trip bus and return to the classroom. And everyone is just beat, exhausted, totally spent but still smiling uncontrollably. The teacher brought the little boy some brochures and a map of the dinosaur museum they visited so he wouldn’t feel totally left out, but also really mostly because she has her whole lesson plan for tomorrow based on everything that the rest of the class learned and saw today. She collects his completed work sheets and will return them all tomorrow, check-plus at the top, a sure sign that she hadn’t even bothered to look at all the nonsense work she made him do that day.

And the kid goes home, finally it’s over, and when he gets home his mom says, “How was school today?” and he doesn’t answer, he just pours himself a glass of milk and goes to watch cartoons in the living room, but it’s all reruns, nothing new, and none of the good shows come on until much later in the afternoon anyway. And he takes his glass of milk, and he doesn’t even like milk anyway, but his mom won’t let him drink soda for no reason, in the middle of the afternoon, and he sits there and watches cartoons and continues to choke back the tears that he hoped would stop wanting to come out when he finally made it home from school.

But, yeah, field trips were awesome. I wish that adults got to do field trips. I wish that one day I could go to work and my boss will be like, “Hop on that bus Rob! No work today! We’re all going on a field trip!” That would be so f’n sick.

This is why I don’t read comics anymore, in case you were interested. You’re not interested? Yeah … I hear you.

I used to love reading comics. Up until about four years ago, I spent the majority of my income on buying them. But then one day I found myself pretty fed up. I realized that I wasn’t really enjoying the bulk of my purchases. I came home from the comic book store one day with a bag full of mags, and I started leafing through all of my recently bought titles: the Amazing Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, X-Men, etc. And I just started thinking to myself, am I seriously still reading Spider-Man comics?

There’s nothing wrong with reading Spider-Man comics. I’m not trying to say that I had this moment of self-doubt because I suddenly realized that Spider-Man isn’t cool. I don’t care about what’s cool (well …) What I was thinking about was that Spider-Man has been around since the 1960s. And here I was still spending way too much money on reading his continued adventures. I had been a pretty faithful reader of Spider-Man since about the second grade. And over the years I had been given the collected works of all of the stories that were written before I was born. So with over forty years of Spider-Man stories stuck somewhere in my head, why was I still buying these books every week? What could possibly happen to Spider-Man now that hasn’t happened at least twenty-five times already?

And that’s basically how I stopped reading comics. I just finally understood that everything that the big comic companies were doing was just a rehashing of stories that had already grown stale probably close to a decade ago. I think that the powers-that-be were finally coming to grips with this little problem also. Towards the end of my dutiful reading, the publishers started to tweak the storylines in dramatic ways. Like Spider-Man revealed his secret identity to the public. It was in the papers. Or the Hulk turned red instead of green. Sounds cool right? Injecting some fresh ideas right? But these high-profile publicity stunts reeked of desperation.

And sure enough, while the characters may have changed briefly, superficially, the collective history of everything that they’ve been through was just too entrenched in popular culture to enact any meaningful, significant change. I remember about two months after I had seriously kicked the habit, I started going through some withdrawal symptoms. I found myself at bookstores, not comic book stores, just you know, like Barnes and Noble, my hands trembling as I browsed the chronically understocked comic book racks. I wasn’t going to buy anything, I swear. I just wanted to see what my old friends were up to while I was gone.

I’m not going to bore you with the extended details, but I remember standing at a bookstore one day while I was taking a three-hour lunch break from my mindless office job, leafing through the current issue of Spider-Man, reading about how this big fundamental change that took place in his life, his unmasking, his coming out to the public, had just been completely erased, like it never happened. And the creators couldn’t even think of a plausible or creative storyline to justify the whole world forgetting about his big reveal, so they wrote something absurd involving Spider-Man making a deal with the devil. Poof. Everything went back to normal. It was all a dream. Come on! At least make an effort to keep me wanting to be involved. But no. Spider-Man is still just a guy, perpetually in his twenties, swinging around New York, fighting the same bad guys, dating the same girl, quipping the same wisecracks since the 1960s. I don’t know, but it sounds like Spider-Man is trapped, stuck in a terrible purgatory, doomed to relive the same cheesy exploits, week after week after week, forever.

Can’t they just let anything end naturally, realistically, with the tiniest bit of respect? Everything today that was even once remotely great or interesting is dragged out entirely too long. The Office is still on TV, a shell of its former self, unfunny, unoriginal, just begging to be cancelled. But they’ll never cancel it. Dwight Shrute’s great-grandkids are going to be stuck selling paper on NBC, getting pranked by Jim and Pam’s great-grandkids. And they won’t even be new pranks. Just the same old pranks. Green Day is still around making terrible CDs, formulaic ballads and anthems that barely echo the once original recordings of almost a generation ago. But you know that Billie-Joe Armstrong isn’t going to stop touring. He’s not going to stop wearing eyeliner and singing “When I Come Around” to sold-out stadiums.

Somebody at Marvel Comics should write a story where Spider-Man is just sitting in a chair directly opposite the reader. The whole issue will be conversational, from Spider-Man to all of us. He’ll thank us for reading, he’ll reminisce about all the great times we’ve had together. It won’t be sad. We’ll always have our back issues. But then he’ll say goodbye and swing off into the sunset. And that will be it. Last issue. No more rehashed stories. Somebody, please come up with a new character that we can run to the ground for the next forty years.

It sounds like a good plan, but that last issue would probably fetch a really ridiculous price on the comic book market. And publishers would confuse that market price with demand for more Spider-Man. And not even a month later there would be rumblings and rumors about the Spider-Man relaunch. And he’d be back. And he’d be fighting the Green Goblin. Or Mysterio. Or the Lizard. Or the Shocker. Or Venom. Or his clone, evil Spider-Man. Or his clone’s clone, evil-evil Spider-Man, which, by the standard definition of double negatives, would actually be a good Spider-Man. So they’d team up and there would be two Spider-Mans for a while, but then the clone would die.*

 

*That clone storyline actually happened in the comics. Twice. Once in the seventies and once in the nineties.

I just thought of the greatest idea for a movie

Ever since I saw the trailer for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, I’ve felt a wave of inspiration to write a bunch of other historically inspired thrillers. My first one is going to be called Calvin Coolidge: In Space. It’s going to start off at that famous White House party, the one where that woman walks up to President Coolidge and says, “My friend made a bet that I can’t get you to say more than three words,” and just as Silent Cal is about to say, “You lose,” a group of space explorers, from the future, appears out of nowhere.

“President Coolidge!” they’ll cry. And Coolidge will turn to the camera and say, “Here we go again,” and they’ll all be teleported aboard a spaceship in the future. And when they appear on the bridge of the ship, Coolidge won’t be wearing his suit and tie anymore, he’ll be wearing a spaceship captain’s uniform. And the ship will be under heavy fire. And Coolidge won’t even have to say a word, he’ll just calmly make gestures to his crew, and they’ll all understand him, and they’ll somehow destroy the enemy vessel just in the nick of time.

Then there’s going to be a flashback to a young Calvin Coolidge growing up on the moon of some distant planet even further in the future. And you’ll learn how he became a space captain, and why he got to be so quiet, and how he wound up in the past on that first spaceship, and then how he wound up even further in the past to become President. Now that I’m thinking about it, I think that Calvin Coolidge: In Space, isn’t a descriptive enough title. It’s terrible, disgusting. Nobody’s going to want to see it. They’ll think it’s stupid and boring. I’m going to call it, Calvin Coolidge: Captain Space President of the Future in the Past. There we go. Seriously, let’s do this.

And then after I’m done writing that movie, I’m going to write another movie called, Joan of Arc: Witch Doctor. Everybody knows that Joan of Arc was burned at the stake, right? And everybody thinks it has something to do with religion, right? Wrong. This movie is going to tell the untold tale of Joan of Arc, where she was actually a sorceress from a parallel magic universe. Some enemy goblins escaped from her dimension to our dimension, and she has to follow them here to stop them from taking over our world. And she does it, but everyone is scared of her powers so they wind up burning her at the stake. But she’s a witch doctor, so she just let’s everybody think she’s dying up there, but she’s really just teleporting back to her own reality. So it’s like a new, happier ending for Joan of Arc. Kind of like when they killed Hitler at the end of Inglorious Basterds. Maybe if we enter another Dark Age, where all the books get burned and knowledge is banned, maybe thousands of years in the future, as society struggles to rebuild, to find out what happened before the second Dark Age, someone will come across a copy of this movie buried in a monastery somewhere and they’ll think that this is how it really happened. Just imagining that as a possibility is enough to motivate me to come up with these great ideas, nonstop.

I could think of movies all day long. Isn’t there a movie coming out called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? OK, well, how about Crime and Punishment and Robocop? Or let’s do War and Peace and Mummies. And then Law and Order and the Plague. I mean, it’s really easy. You just find existing movie titles or book titles that consist of two nouns separated by the word “and.” And then after the second noun, you make a third “and” and you just add something wacky, like Beauty and the Beast and the KKK. Boom. Can you imagine if I were actually in charge of an actual movie studio? I would’ve made millions of dollars just by writing this paragraph. Your loss Hollywood.

And I could do kids’ stuff too. Because at the same time that I’ll be producing all of these blockbusters, I’m going to be writing another movie, a children’s movie, called Christopher Columbus vs. Pinocchio. Columbus was Italian right? Perfect. In this movie, we’ll find out that Geppetto actually already had a son. And the son’s name was Christopher Columbus. But Christopher Columbus’s mom died during childbirth, and the little boy was left all alone. And he really wanted a brother so bad. But his dad was consumed by his work as a puppeteer, and didn’t have any time to go out looking for a wife or having any more kids. But then one of Columbus’s toys, Pinocchio, comes to life. And at first they are both happy. But then Pinocchio turns out to be a huge brat. He’s constantly crying and complaining to Geppetto that Columbus isn’t playing fair or isn’t sharing his toys.

“But you are a toy!” Christopher Columbus will say to his new brother. And Pinocchio will respond, “Not anymore! And now you have to share all of your stuff!” And that will be the whole movie, just the two of them the whole time engaged in nonsense sibling rivalry. We’ll market it as, “The untold story, before he discovered the New World, Christopher Columbus discovered that brotherly love conquers blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” you get it, right? Think about it. It’s going to be a Disney film and it’s going to be in CGI and it’s going to be in 3D. But there’s a twist: the theatres will be playing the movie on two screens side by side. So they’ll advertise the movie as 6D. It obviously won’t be six-dimensional, because I don’t think that string theory has been able to empirically prove the existence of extra dimensions just yet, but people are stupid and won’t really mind paying an extra four bucks for the added novelty. It’s going to be a huge success. Make it an extra eight bucks. Yes, all of them huge successes. No, you still can’t keep the glasses. And why would you want to? Seriously, what are you planning to use them at home? They only work at the theatre, not on your TV. Besides, you look like an idiot wearing them. And can you imagine how many people have worn those on their greasy heads before you? Gross.