Werewolf Radar: You Height Up My Life
By Nate Balding
Feature by Moon Patrol
Accompanying art by Jason White
Published Issue 093, September 2021
As the song goes, “Short people got no reason to live.” Nobody ever mentions the flip side that tall people are fucking horrific.
Slender Man? Second-story peeper creeper. Goliath? Big-boned bone grinder. Even basketball players of sufficient height are venerated as regional demigods. As they carry the provincial weight of collective hopes in a battle presumably fulfilled in the purgatory where souls are measured and many regular-sized persons are sentenced to whichever hell their team represents. Dying during a bad year for the Lakers is how you end up eternally owing too much rent in Toluca.
Historically speaking civilization has enjoyed seeing tall fight tall. And we’re correct in thinking that it’s pretty cool. Specifically, tall guy Finn McCool who, according to National Geographic (I know, just go with it), “… had a problem with a Scottish giant.” It was said he honored his surname by sporting a leather jacket with a pocket for Lucky Strikes that was said to contain a portal to a fridge-dimension full of Natty Lites.
Benandonner, the Scottish god of combat, had taken to yelling insults across the ocean that McCool, perfectly reasonable person that he was, heard and assumed were intended for him. Modern linguists have unsuccessfully tried to parse the trenchant language but assume it was something about dicks, as something about dicks has been a source of worldwide violence from creation.
Having been challenged to an anger of penises (technical term for more than one), McCool answered by screaming back until both men attempted to sail into a mid-channel punch-out and found they would not be suffered by traditional buoyancy. Their boats sank in harbor and they went back to skipping insults shore to shore.
UNTIL!
McCool, in a fog of ingenuity, began dropping stone columns into the ocean to build a land bridge between two sets of fists. These basalt columns would eventually become the first Irish UNESCO World Heritage Site, but at the time, they merely served to lend a heavy stepper a way to go knuckle plug a couple lungs.
Benandonner took no urging to cross the newly formed causeway. And McCool posted up against a tall tree on the other side. Flipping a coin and chewing a spear he started using as a toothpick purely by accident, but then doubled down with a Fonzie shrug when someone gave his activity side-eye, McCool watched with growing terror as the tall man’s form approached. It turns out he had a shaky understanding of telescopic vision and as such, was unprepared for what he believed to be a tiny, tiny man to grow larger as he came closer.
This was a mouth-written check that McCool was not ready to cash in on for a short-lived bout of annihilation. He let off one last high-pitched zinger, gulping down a quick, “Yar boo and sucks!” while hastily retreating to his wife, Sadhb. She immediately recognized the groundwork of a very stupid fight and decided it was in nobody’s interest to let McCool chew punches. Sadhb quickly swaddled her aging hipster husband and laid him in a crib. When Benandonner came knocking he was let inside to meet his transoceanic heckler. Instead, he was run afoul of a man pretending to be a baby, and had some second thoughts about losing his mind over a few well-timed words. Benandonner gave the man a condescending grin and exclaimed, “Oh no, if the baby is this big then the father must be a real giant’s giant!” and walked all the way back to Scotland, destroying the rocks McCool had placed and cementing the legend of the Giant’s Causeway.
McCool would ride into history as Ireland’s cleverest giant and as one of the great insult comics of the time. We have no record of his end but it’s been theorized that, having mistaken the Grither for not taller than a poplar tree, McCool made some incisive jests before finding out that the Grither is, in fact, taller than a poplar tree. If you’ve seen Tales From the Darkside you know how poorly this turns out.
Have questions about the paranormal?
Send them to werewolfradarpod@gmail.com or on Twitter: @WerewolfRadar.
It’s a big, weird world. Don’t be scared. Be Prepared.
Nate Balding is a freelance humanoid who occasionally manifests in print and can most likely be seen at Werewolf Radar. Should you wish to hear him manifest audibly you can do so at the aforementioned Werewolf Radar’s associated podcast on Spotify and Apple, and if anything ever becomes humorous again, on a variety of stand up stages around the nation. If you’re truly craving further content there’s always @Exploder on Twitter — even if it is only a form of digital self flagellation at this point. His one thing that he considers actually accomplished was this time he was published in the journal Nature and then later collected into a volume called Futures from Nature, still available in places that have things.
Check out August’s Werewolf Radar, Aliendness Love, here.
Moon Patrol is a Northern California-based artist. Taking themes including ’80s cartoons and video games, classic pulp illustrations, and comic book narratives, Moon Patrol remixes these many and varied cues using a collage technique he compares to “Kid Koala’s turntable albums, and in part by William Burroughs’ cut-up technique.” See more of his work on Instagram and snag prints at Outré Gallery.
Jason White is an artist living in the suburbs of Chicago. His favorite mediums are oil on canvas and pencil & ink drawings. When he was a kid he cried on the Bozo Show. His work varies from silly to serious and sometimes both. Check out more of his work on Instagram.
See Jason’s August art, Hollywood Skeleton Crew, here.
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