jaybaticon: The Pipelining
-
A Caucasus Mountain Ski Resort on the border of Georgia to the west and Azerbaijan to the east and between Russia to the north and Turkey to the south in the dead of winter in 2017…
Increasingly frustrated film director Q. Brick Bloodflow and his wife Gwennie and their son, Stanley, preposterously hotel-sit and caretake the a fabulously grand hotel with a conspicuously sterile exterior and improbably geometric interior for god knows what contrived reason, while being communicated with by short wave radio by Deke Scat and his alter ego Maine Coon King, the latter of whom we never hear from again, as he gets mad about the quality of the story being told and leaves.
In a few months of isolation, Q. Brick Bloodflow reveals that he has decided to make a movie about using the empty resort hotel for a new version of the old Big Eight Christmas Tournament that will be called the Big Twelve Hannukah Tournament to avoid trademark infringement. When wife Gwennie says that she doubts that that a resort hotel on the border of Georgia and Azerbaijan is big enough and accessible enough in winter to stage such a sports event for a midwest conference in the United States, and adds that Colorado University, Nebraska, and Missouri left the Big 12 some time ago, and so should not be called the Big 12, regardless, Q. Brick Bloodflow becomes incensed and starts gesticulating wildly and shaking his ridiculously unkempt hair and Stanley Kubrick like beard, while repeating endlessly, “Live from New York, Its Lorne Michaels!!!” and talking to apparitions about what is wrong with his wife.
Unbeknownst to troubled husband and frightened wife, their son, Stanley, stands alone in a very long hotel hall way pierced end to end inexplicably by two oil pipelines–one stenciled in English with “HALFORD MACKINDER” and one stenciled with unintelligible Russian and Chinese writing, and muttering “Kund, kund, kund” for no apparent reason.
Soon, a confused Deke Scat tries to save them by driving a snow creeper through a sand storm from T’Bilisi up through a blizzard to Mt. Shkara even though the resort hotel is actually on Mt. Kazbek to the east. Deke Scat decides these white folk are too crazy to bother with, and drives back and parties in T’Bilisi.
Meanwhile, back at the hotel. Gwennie finds little Stanley with one foot on each pipeline in the hotel hallway still chanting “Kund, kund, kund…” Gwennie uncertain what to do, checks her make up and reads her son’s lips in reverse and realizes “Kund” means “Dunk.” Gwennie grabs her babbling son and takes off running down the western pipeline, while Q. Brick Bloodflow enters the hallway with a mad grin and a portable, two headed welding torch mounted on a camera track, again, for no particular reason, and shouts, “Here’s Lorne!”
In a shot echoing the tracking shot of Touch of Evil and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, the camera with flaming portable acetylene torch heads hissing races down the pipelined corridor trying to catch Gwennie and young Stanley still shouting “Kund, kund, kund…”
Finally, Gwennie and Jack turn a corner and find Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump standing at lecturns on the pipelines debating about Donald’s groping and Hillary’s deleted emails.
Gwennie forces her way past them and continues fleeing down the pipelined corridor to where the pipelines enter an elevator and disappear upwards in darkness. Q. Brick Bloodflow pauses ten feet from them and starts sayng menacingly, “Eeeny, meeny, miney, mo, which pipe line will get the blood flow?”
He begins burning holes in both pipelines with is impossibly strange dual headed torch.
As Gwennie holds little Stanley in horror of what is about to happen, the elevator doors open and a ridiculously melodramatic slow motion rush of sweet crude comes roaring down and out of the elevator shaft and washes Gwennie and little Stanley to safety, while first trapping Q. Brick Bloodflow between the pipes and then igniting the sweet crude improbably the moment Gwennie and little Stanley are washed out of the hotel and into a chaise lounge that then begins to slide like a toboggan down the mountain side toward T’Bilisi, and away from the resort hotel that erupts in a petroleum mushroom cloud that prevents either Western bankers, or Eastern bankers from controlling the Eurasian center point for another 35 minutes, before the next deadly game of strategic brinksmanship starts to play out.
THE END.
CLOSING CARD: This film is dedicated by cast and crew to the fond memory of the Big Eight Christmas Tournament, and hope and dream that someday our world will be done rolling the dice with our lives over control of the Eurasian Center Point and can get back to humane activities like Christmas (or Hannukah) Basketball tournaments.
VOICE OVER: KUND, KUND, KUND…
(Note: all fiction. No malice.)
