St. Remedius Medical College: “Junk In the Trunk, And In the Back Yard, And the Creek”

Not All Experiments Are Disposed Of Equally

(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)

Those who grew up in the greater Dallas/Fort Worth area during the Great Media Wars of the 1980s and 1990s often find themselves awake at night with various advertising slogans and jingles running unbidden through their heads. It might be as cheery as the Dallas Times Herald classified ad jingle “748-1414” (immediately marking anybody who remembers it as older than the split of multiple area codes in 1997) or the Joske’s department store Christmas ads, as repetitious as the jingles for Color Tile and Crystal’s Pizza, or as pointlessly obnoxious as Western Auto radio slots or the Creative Onanism slogan “Let’s Shake Hands With Your Prostate.” If anyone were to run a poll on “Most-Missed Dead Company Advertising, Dallas Division,” though, the overwhelming favorite would be the icon of late-night television in the late 1980s, Dale and Darren’s Exonormal Cleanup. For those working nights, those working early mornings, or those with severe insomnia, not only were D&DEC ads a fixture on the channels running late-night movies, talk shows, and syndicated feeds from either coast, but the ads were often a lot more entertaining than the main programming.

Thanks to Dallas’s relative paucity of esoteric energies, St. Remedius Medical College wasn’t the only group or individual conducting experiments with exonormal research. Many who refused to risk being rejected for Zwinge Foundation certification attempted bootleg thaumaturgy, with little thought about longterm cleanup or disposal. Mangled glyphs, broken sigils, contaminated incense charcoal, undispelled spirits and elementals, curdled holy and unholy water, corrupted circle and pentagram chalk…all of it built up if not properly gathered, vitrified, and anchored. This also applied to high technology: warp field pylons in back yards, abandoned clone tanks in garages, and the occasional tektite array in areas later used for flowerbeds and victory gardens. Genetics: replicated pets and children, gene fusion between Bermuda grass and flycatcher bushes to repel political pollsters, and destroying angel Amanita fungus that spelled out profanities in giant poisonous mushrooms in inoculated lawns along airport flight paths. Psionics: psychic repellents and attractants, reichite porch heralds, and trauma klaxons. Sometimes they even crossed over, as with androids and nanotech that needed their kami released before they could find peace. By the late 1970s, the issues with unlicensed and unregulated materials dumping, both by amateurs and companies with little to no interest in paying for proper mitigation, led to the Exotic Materials Disposal Fund Act of 1979 passing through the US Congress, with a similar bill threading through the Canadian Parliament in 1981. The Act authorized a regular fund to clean up contaminated and abandoned maker labs, pagan bookstores, and polymeld anchors in vacant fields and disused parks, and it got its biggest test the very next year, when Texas found itself baked slowly during the Great Heat Wave of 1980 and inadequate containment facilities crumbled and ruptured in the August heat.

True to form, the Texas state government saw little reason to expedite cleanup, at least until the US Army base Fort Belo, located just east of Dallas, ruptured, distorted, and disappeared on August 20, leaving no trace whatsoever of the facility or the 2000 troops inside. A hastily organized investigation found that an improperly decommissioned and dismantled stardrive, collected from a possible spacecraft crash in Michigan sometime in the Pleistocene, activated a large cache of classified materials, with competing energies cancelling each other out and everything in the vicinity. By the end of September 1980, the Texas Legislature pushed through an emergency bill allowing freelance mitigation teams to be licensed and bonded for cleanup efforts, and also true to form, a truly heroic gaggle of underqualified and misapplied “professionals” received licenses for exonormal threat mitigation. Most didn’t survive to the holiday season, but the one that not only survived and thrived but became famous through the state was D&DEC, mostly because of their fantastic television ads.

To be completely fair, most of the waste mitigation problem was due to family or estate executors not knowing what to do with associated debris and detritus left by the original experimenters. The manufacturers of “Dolly Bedlam,” a child-sized homunculus sold through the 1978 Neiman Marcus catalog, may have been sued into oblivion when the poorly-tested and massively-hyped dolls hit Dallas houses on Christmas Day and turned those houses into hellportals by New Year’s Eve, so there was nobody to recall the few unactivated ones hiding in attics alongside branded trash bags. Estate sale organizers often found much worse than bondage dungeons in the back rooms of the Dallas elite, and sensory resonators and summoning cubes were much harder to identify and relocate than leather chaps and studded paddles. Often, to hide family secrets or the end results of years of embezzlement, these items often ended up in ordinary trash, where they combined with expired milk, shredded tax forms, and broken toys to form strange new aberrations and life forms. Exonormal mitigators, good mitigators, rapidly found themselves overloaded with work, but only the great ones had to open branch offices to handle the business sometimes literally thrown at them. This is where D&DEC excelled.

One of the charms of Dale & Darren’s Exonormal Cleanup advertising was the low production value, as the siblings, cojoined fraternal twins, started each ad with “Don’t you just HATE…” and then focused on the problem. Working with customers thrilled to be featured in TV ads, the camera cut away from the twins to the issue at hand: nonterrestrial parasites in crawlspaces, ectoplasmic stains on walls and ceilings, the gardening automaton that looked at intruding humans as a great source of compost. A few quick flashes of the conflict, with containment bottles, electric prods, vacuums, the occasional Dobbshead for the occasional earwax vampire, and lots and lots of brooms, Tyvek suits, disinfectant, and mops. At the end, they and their staff stood, waving mops in the air and yelling “ISN’T THAT BETTER?” In an ad world emphasizing the slick and superficial, Dale & Darren stood for basics and lots of hard work, and people loved them for it. By the height of their television fame, barflies would yell to friends at pool tables “They’re on!” and nightowl workers would call up friends to let them know “There’s a new ad!”

With the sudden disappearance of St. Remedius, Dale & Darren’s Exonormal Cleanup didn’t follow the college into oblivion. Instead, it became an international institution. The ads ended at the end of 1989 thanks to the proliferation of informercials on late-night terrestrial television stations, but Dale and Darren started a limited TV series that combined comedy and exonormal safety tips that became a breakout hit. This just increased the demand for their services, as well as encouraged sales of T-shirts and hats reading “Sage Is For Thanksgiving Turkey” and “Save the Sweetgrass For the Horses.” (Their recommendation for releasing potentially malignant presences ranging from lava elementals to vapor golems: “Grapefruit peel. Cleans and smells good, and it doesn’t set off the smoke detector when you’re exorcising.” Even today, the twins are a regular presence at the D&DEC Museum in downtown Dallas, where they greet fans, live-narrate extreme cleanup movies (the consolidation and banishing of a nycate colony left trapped in a stasis tesseract in the Tyrolean Alps was a perennial hit, especially when the twins traded japes during the scary parts), introduce new mounts and trophies of “critters that just wouldn’t back off” (mostly replicas of still-live organisms and entities: the Museum also ran a zoo outside of Arlington full of captures and “adoptees”), demonstrate newly approved technologies and mantras, and sign endless bottles of grapefruit peel extract with admonitions of “Don’t you just HATE it?” Judging by the multiple generations of fans and relieved clients still crowding their public appearances, “don’t you just HATE it?” never applies to them.

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.

Dale & Darren's Exonormal Cleanup St. Remedius Zwinge Foundation