In 1989, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers released the video above, an animated short that drew on a 1927 comic strip called Little Nemo’s Adventures in Slumberland by Winsor McCay

The song and video were the revival of a work that had been discontinued in 1927, yet was part of an influential wave of work in both music and literature, starting in the early 80s, from Queensrÿche to @neilhimself.

• Little Nemo Wikipedia

• Full text of Little Nemo’s Adventures in Slumberland - Winsor McCay wrote small dense narrations in the margins, so you’ll want to zoom in.

Posted here after Vonnegut’s personal Jesus went looking for nails in what he thought was the tool closet. Out jumps this half-pint clown faced midget in a top hat being chased by what I think was a brontosarus, slams the door shut before it can get through, and immediately grabs Vonnegut’s cigar out of his mouth, starting smoking like a train, blowing a huge cloud of smoke all over our faces.

“Where the hell is Petty? He said he’d meet me here.” He squinted around, puffing more, noticing Vonnegut taking a boxer’s stance. “Name’s Flip,” he said extending a hand with 3 freshly rolled Cubans.

Kurt viewed the cigars suspiciously, but upon some not so subtle prompting from his personal Jesus, accepted the cigars, and shook Flip’s hand. The two began chatting, and it turns out that the King of Slumberland had shut the doors about 20 years ago after the last bunch of crazy artists got in, and thus no one has been in or out since the last time Flip and Petty rode together.

Well, when Tom passed a little while ago, apparently his ghost made it to the gate of Slumberland, but wasn’t able to get in due to the king’s edict, which was a bummer because he’d been wanting to smoke a bowl with Flip for awhile (Slumberland weed is something else). He got a message to Flip, and the two hatched a plan to break Flip out through a forgotten back door to the 13th floor.

Only Tom was late opening the door and Flip was quick in closing his end, being as he was chased by a pack of angry brontosaurians. So Flip got caught in the whitespace between worlds, endlessly chased by the king’s prized hunting brontosaurus (which had been hot on his heels and slipped through before he closed the door) for the past 5 years.

This was rough, because though Flip has an infinite supply of cigars, he doesn’t have an infinite supply of matches, and it’s difficult to enjoy a cigar while being chased by a hungry brontosaurus. So by the time we accidentally opened the tool closet, he’d been having nicfits for the last 4 years at least.

Vonnegut was quite sympathetic to this tale, and I think the two are on the way to becoming fast friends. I just need to keep them away from the Sasquatch.

Note, after some discussion and a great deal of effort on the part of the security staff, we did decide to let the brontosaurus out of the whitespace as, and it’s now happily wandering the hotel gardens. It was really a rather small brontosaurus, after all.

So now we’ve got a door to Slumberland (although no guarantee about safe passage) in the tool closet for those who want to risk the journey. I’m going to end this post by asking the very pertinent questions here:

1. How do we get the other side of the door open?
2. Do we want to get the other side of the door open? Pros - Slumberland weed. Cons - Royal execution
3. Where the hell is the ghost of Tom Petty anyway?