Time Traveling As Fast As You Can To Stay In The Same Place
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
(One of Dallas’s essential Superb Owl options, the first Perot Museum Thursdays On Tap adults-only evening event of 2026, debuted on February 12. St. Remedius Medical College alumni and Bromley Contingent members were cordially invited to attend the festivities, which included live music, food trucks, and access to the four main levels and one sublevel of the museum. In the spirit of the writer Tom Cox, the Annals of St. Remedius describes exhibits and portions therein, already in progress.)
Despite the arguments of wannabe authorities on post-life forms and templates, the mobile deceased readily show up on electronic recording devices, both video and audio. The biggest problem is getting them to shut up. And to keep them from mooning cameras because they still think cameras use film. Vampires, barrow-wights, ghouls, zombies, cremation spectres: turn a camera on them, and they become absolute fools, groping passersby and bragging about murders they committed 500 years ago. The disclaimers went up mostly to convince them to go elsewhere: let them go to Dallas Cowboys and Texas Rangers games, where that sort of behavior would be welcomed and sometimes paid.
Breakfast cereal mascots usually find new life in revivals and retrospectives, but the lives of alcoholic beverage spokesanimals usually never turn out well. Budweiser advertising icons were especially brutalized and abused: most people today know the ultimate fate of Spuds McKenzie, but the Budweiser Frogs of the 1990s were cruelly cast out as soon as their ads went below the minimum acceptable cultural cachet. In desperation, they switched to performing in ads for a chain of beer halls called “Joey’s Half-Life Saloon” only to be paid in beer, which they soon discovered had been spiked with radium, neptunium, and technetium. Today, their gravesites are a stark reminder of the dangers of radioactivity, as the frogs with a sufficient output of gamma radiation still irradiate and fluoresce their tombstones, the placards out front, and the “DROP AND RUN” notices on their coffins.
“Honey, did you set out the trap?”
“Yes, I did. Just ten minutes ago.”
“I think I heard something.”
“It’s probably an opossum.”
“But what if it isn’t? Will you go out to check?”
Visitors to the Perot are recommended to take the Museum Entrance to enter, and the museum takes no responsibility for those following the signs for the Grand Entrance, Understated Entrance, Entrance Requirements, and Beware The Man-Eating Egress.
Most museums have issues with patrons who bring their own food, but the Perot welcomes spatial and temporal visitors packing their own lunches so long as they give up their leftovers. The Perot currently has the greatest collection of Chukchuk lunchboxes within a span of 90 million years, as well as a carefully curated assemblage of Harkun used vomit bags.
They say there is nothing more helpless and decadent and depraved than a time traveler in the depths of an aether binge, and most stay away from that rotten stuff when planning family vacations. When St. Remedius professors Bennett and Calliope Pendergast planned a trip to the Vendian Period for their tenth anniversary, neither expected an aether leak in their time capsule, but they were pretty sure they left plenty of food for their dog Woola before they left. When they finally returned, they cleaned his remains from the surrounding rock matrix as best as they could, went back to the late Permian to pick up Woola seconds before the last time they found him, and used the paradox of Woola sleeping next to his own bones as a study question in their next joint lecture.
Billy and Buddy were on the fast track to stardom, what with three HBO comedy specials and a four-movie deal with Universal, when Billy succumbed to success in the worst possible way: standing on the side of Dallas North Tollway during morning rush hour wearing a Sailor Moon outfit (obviously worn commando) while singing “I’m A Little Teapot” at the top of his lungs. Escaping the 73-car pileup and the subsequent suits for the psychic damage and mental anguish, Billy soon found himself bereft, and spent the rest of his days working the front counter at a Firestone tire dealership. Buddy, his dreams of fame crushed by his partner’s lack of subtlety, remade himself as a fiction writer, producing the first and so far last great saga of the construction of Canada Highway 1 and the lives and loves of the crew thereof.
Darryl and Merle were a bit surprised that nobody else had started the first Dallas-area Electric Light Orchestra cover band before them, but they took to the challenge with alacrity. Their first show, opening for Mandatory Parker, nearly took the stage down, mostly because their roadies accidentally/deliberately chained their keyboard, paid for with the money Darryl’s grandmother gave him to buy her Big League Chew bubble gum by the shipping pallet, to an insufficiently stabilized support pillar.
“RiffRaff hopes he won’t pass gas…Boy! I say, Boy! Do y’all know the way to the Woodbine Formation? I have a dee-lightful speaking event theah, and time’s a’wastin’!”
Horace lost all of his friends when his musical tastes switched from goth to ska in his junior year of high school, but this was their loss. Hiding in storm sewers until people walked their dogs past him, only to yell “ONE STEP BEYOND!” down the tunnel…nothing made him feel more alive.
The Larkash normally took no offense to portrayals of their distant troodontid ancestors by humans without access to temporal scrying, but the unveiling of a replica of Bnee’Bnee’Bnee, the “Benighted One” first afflicted with sentience according to their largest contemporary faith, threatened to start a trade war across the centuries until the skeleton was displayed with the correct amount of deference and respect as was due Bnee’Bnee’Bnee and the Larkash in general. Thankfully, the museum team was able to find large enough stick-on googly eyes, which go on any time a Larkash delegation arrives in Dallas.
In addition to St. Remedius Radio, one of the great sources for alternative music in the Dallas area during the late 1980s was the pirate station KCID, broadcasting from dusk to dawn and playing only the best speed metal, electrojazz, and acid polka. When sole DJ and transmitter lugger J.M. Ludington died after 45 years of faithful broadcasting, his faithful listeners made fiberglass replicas of his heroic nose-hair mustache, which also hid his transmitter antennae, and put them in places of honor in his memory.
“Doc, what do I do if it hurts when I pee?”
“I’m a dentist.”
“You heard me.”
At the height of the fancy dress ball fad in the 1950s, the absolute fashion accessory was a Diplocaulus skull, lovingly excavated out of West Texas rock, carefully cleaned and prepared, fitted with straps, and worn over the face. This lasted until a series of daring daytime bank robberies, with the perpetrators obvious socialites wearing Diplocaulus masks, were foiled and arrested. When word got out that their masks were counterfeits, the fad was done and the remaining masks relegated to estate sales and the occasional fetish ball.
“Okay, so let me get this straight. I lie down in the mud and get fossilized, and in 86 million years, I’ll be the most famous individual from Flower Mound, Texas?”
“Well, sorta.”
“I mean, looking around, this is more ‘Cycad Tidal Flat’ than ‘Flower Mound,’ amirite?”
“That’s how fossilization works. Go to sleep, let someone dig you up, and they make you famous.”
“So what’s my competition? I mean, if you’re going to go to this effort, Flower Mound has to be a rocking place.”
‘Well…um…okay, the biggest export from Flower Mound in 86 million years is a writer.”
“Great! I take it that this person writes grand things and thinks grand thoughts, and everybody has a copy of everything they’ve ever written because it’s so wonderful.”
“Not quite. He’s best known for writing a paleontology column for the magazine Science Fiction Eye.”
“‘Science Fiction Eye‘? What the hell’s that?”
“Precisely. You’re already more famous than he is.”
“So why me?”
“Because your bones will be found about a thousand meters from his house, and we need to make sure he doesn’t find them in the 1980s and make him more insufferable than humanly possible.”
“Ooooookay. So what else does he write?”
“In the 1990s, he wrote a ‘Rant’ column for a magazine called Sci-Fi Universe.”
“Sci. Fi. Universe.”
“Yep.”
“And I’m the only being in all of space-time that can keep him from being the most famous person in Flower Mound, Texas?”
“Yep.”
“CANNONBALL!”
Doug always had a problem losing his car keys. It didn’t matter what high-tech dongle he used, or what mnemonic device he tried, right at the time he was getting thrown out of the bar for lighting his stool on fire, and his seat as well, Doug was always crawling around outside in a desperate search. It made matters worse that the bar owner would come outside and kick Doug in the rear as he crawled around, so Doug found the perfect solution to all of his problems. He found the bar owner in the middle of the night, sat on the owner’s chest so he couldn’t move or scream, and stapled the keyring onto the owner’s forehead. Problem solved, and Doug’s next problem came when he bought a new car.
Jerry was a very fussy eater. Some would say “peckish,” while others would say “birdlike.” To his dying day, his only preferred meal was a single deep-fried tarantula, served on a sliced onion. It was only after his death that anybody knew about the tremendous cache of junk food, mostly Pringles chips and Slim Jims, he had smuggled in and hidden under his bed.
Dagwood had a series of horrible personal habits that made him notorious through the Dallas area. Stripping used bubble gum from underneath diner tables, compressing the chunks into lumps the size of a baseball, and then pegging the waitresses in the head with the resultant masses was bad enough, but between learning to use his dangling hemorrhoids like a lariat and snag passing cattle and his ability to fart Morse code made him unacceptable in polite company. At least, until he started his own brewery and the same people shunning him were lining up eight deep to listen to his recitation of the Gettysburg Address in exchange for a glass of his latest stout.
“I see a little silhouetto of a man…”
“Scaramouche! Scaramouche!”
“Will you do the fandango?”
“Thunderbolts and lighting! Very very frightening!”
Clarissa was famed for her pound cake, particularly for its stick-to-the-ribs tendencies. Each one weighed approximately 30 kilos, composed of high-quality quartz sintered together in an electric forge, and decorated with only the best black opal, fossilized palm wood, and steel lathe shavings. Surprisingly, she made a career out of making them for social functions around Dallas, where their benefits for alleviating constipation were sometimes checked by their propensity for encouraging kidney stones.
Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. Questions, concerns, and disgust over generative AI? Check out Contact, Privacy Policy, and AI Policy. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.
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