by the spirit of Anthony Bourdain, broadcast spiritually over late-night cable TV with a slight smell of burnt popcorn
You think you know the world. You think you’ve seen enough—slept in enough train stations, smoked enough cigarettes with strangers, dodged enough bad coffee and worse intentions to say, “Yeah, I get it.”
But then a box shows up. Beat-up. Smelling like mildew and forgotten Blockbuster carpet. Inside? A stack of postcards. Some familiar. Some warped. All of them addressed to nowhere you’ve ever been—but somehow, places you remember.
Not real places. Better than real.
These aren’t destinations. They’re moods. Nostalgia. Bad dreams in pastel, miracles made of model glue and bad decisions. The kind of stories you only get when filmmakers are desperate, high, underfunded—or just unhinged enough to care more about weird than safe.
In these places, rules don’t apply. Time doesn’t matter. Aliens fix your toaster. Zombies flirt at the mall. And somewhere, in the distance, Jane Fonda is floating through space in a fur bikini asking if you’ve seen her raygun.
These are postcards from the edge, part 2.. And I keep collecting them—because I know someday, I’ll want to go back. Or maybe I never left.
L.A. – The End of the World Is a Shopping Spree – The Night of the Comet
Still the best post-apocalyptic scenario ever imagined by a mall rat with a uzi. Bright pink skies, everyone’s dust, but hey—RadioShack is empty!
The postcard’s got neon lettering, a Valley Girl holding a machine gun, and of course a comet. You can’t miss that.
I don’t need Mad Max. I need a world where you survive the apocalypse, meet Commander Chakotay and score a Walkman during a shopping spree.
💋 Tau Ceti – Space Is Horny, and So Are We– Barbarella (queen of intergalactic softcore)
If you haven’t gotten tangled in space netting while being seduced by a malfunctioning organ of pleasure, have you even lived? The postcard looks like it was ripped from a 1973 lava lamp’s wet dream. Barbarella is barely clothed, surrounded by glitter, robots, and what may or may not be psychic jellyfish.
Smells like hairspray and pheromones. I’d move there permanently.
🧸 New York – Rent-Controlled Aliens Welcome – *batteries not included
Somewhere between Spielbergian warmth and a trash-strewn miracle lies a tale about a tenement, a toaster, and tiny space robots that look like they’d help you file taxes and then make you pancakes.
The postcard’s handwritten:
“Greetings from the Fix-It Café. Still standing. Still weird. Still family.”
It doesn’t explode. It doesn’t roar. But god help me, it feels. And sometimes, that’s the loudest story of all.
Grover’s Bend – Come for the Cornfields, Stay for the Carnage
Critters
Tiny alien nightmares land in small-town Kansas, eat everything that moves, and sass you while they do it. The town never stood a chance—and frankly, it didn’t try very hard either.
You ever been to a place so quiet it feels like it’s daring something awful to happen?
Grover’s Bend is that place. One road in. One road out. A diner with a broken jukebox. A gas station with no gas. And just enough cable TV to remind you what you’re missing. It’s where the cows don’t moo anymore. They scream.
Then the stars fall. And suddenly the local wildlife’s been replaced with sentient meatballs from space with teeth like Ginsu knives and a sense of humor darker than a dive bar toilet.
The postcard? It’s dirty. Smells like burnt hay and melted rubber. There’s a bite mark on the corner, and something scribbled in grease pencil on the back:
“DO NOT APPROACH. SERIOUSLY.”
It’s the kind of place where the sheriff’s out of town, the dog’s missing, and the bounty hunters wear human faces like cheap Halloween masks. The air smells like shotgun shells and cooked denim.
Grover’s Bend doesn’t have a tourism board. Just survivors. And stories they’re trying to forget.
Still, I’d go back. Maybe just for the pie.
These postcards aren’t just souvenirs. They’re evidence. Proof that once upon a time, filmmakers gave us stories that didn’t ask to be franchised, rebooted, or focus-grouped into oatmeal.
They just asked to be remembered.d.
Well shared 💐