[this post is part 1 of a 156-part series, "The Twilight Zone"]

This is where it all began.

The place is here. The time is now. The picture is black and white. The footage is grainy.

Overlong synopsis, ripe with spoilers:

A man finds himself walking down a road, just dripping with amnesia, leaving globs of the stuff behind him like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs. He comes to a town, and goes into a diner. Everything is left on, but nobody is there. He gets himself a cup of tea and a sausage, and leaves some money on the counter. Investigating the rest of the town, he finds it to be in the same bizarre state of abandonment, as if everybody just disappeared in the middle of doing shit. And then, holy shit, a phone rings. He runs over to answer it but there is nobody on the other line, and he can’t reach the operator. Then it seems as though the door to the phone booth has been locked, and he bangs on it and yells a whole lot until finally he forces it open. He goes into the police station and finds a cigar still smoking on the counter. In the cells in the back, he finds a sink still running, and a shaving brush still thick and sticky with cream. As he examines it, the cell door begins to swing shut and he runs out at the last second. At the ice cream shop he makes himself a sundae and talks to himself in the mirror while he eats it. Then he wanders through some rotating racks of books, idly spinning them and talking to himself until OH MY GOD THERE’S A WHOLE RACK FULL OF COPIES OF “THE LAST MAN ON EARTH” JESUS FUCK! By this point he has vacillated between being convinced that he’s dreaming, that a prank is being played on him, and that he’s being observed by some organization. He spends the night playing tic-tac-toe by himself with a stick in the dirt. But then holy shit the streetlights turn on and a theater lights up and he goes into it and a movie starts playing and he yells, “FUCK, WHAT IN THE COCK SHIT ASS BALLS IS GOING ON!?!?!” and runs up to the projector room and that fucking thing is just running by itself and he flips the fuck out and runs head-first into a mirror and it breaks, but he gets up and runs out into the street and the camera is at all sorts of diagonal angles and he’s sweating all over the lens and panting suggestively and he trips over a bicycle and traffic lights go fucking nuts and then all of a sudden it cuts to a bunch of military officials watching him while he pants and groans, studded with electrodes, and IT TURNS OUT HE’S JUST HALLUCINATING THE WHOLE FUCKING THING HOLY FUCKING COCK-ASS SHIT! He was on a trip-to-the-moon simulator, shut up in a box by himself for FOUR HUNDRED AND EIGHTY FOUR FUCKING HOURS and then as they carry him away on a stretcher he looks up at the moon and says, “FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKER, I’M GOING TO COME UP THERE AND STICK MY DICK IN YOU JUST TO SHOW YOU THAT I CAN!” The end.

Awesome moments:

When he tells a mannequin, “I’ve always had a thing for the quiet type, know what I mean, babe?”

When he runs right up to the camera and yells, “Hey! Where is everybody?!”