You guys have to read the The Great Cookie Monster Thread.  Started as a political thing during the last election cycle and veered into revelations of the true personality of the beloved muppet.

I missed it the first time around, but the wrongdoings of CM go farther back than many people think. I found a hand written account while remodeling a wall in the house where I live. The former owner had mysteriously disappeared and the bank foreclosed the property giving me a chance to get a nice place for decent money.  After I read the account, maybe it was not such a good deal.

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August in Miami is hot, humid and brings backs memories I want repressed. The only saving grace is that there are no hills, no mountains where blue death can come from above. In good days, I can actually make it to Publix on my own, do some shopping really quick and I avoid the cookie aisle. Maybe buy a cafecito and lotto ticket over Juancho’s Cafeteria and then return home to barred windows without the curtains drawn and sunlight coming inside the house. On bad days (the majority) the house is dark and I barely make a sound. And then there are days like today where the hurricane rolling shutters are extended and every possible entrance to the house has a claymore mine taped to it. I may die, but with any luck I will take that crazy f*** with me.

It all started back in 1980. I was hired right out of college for my ability not only to speak Spanish but to use the local slang and the proper accent so I could pass like a native. The money they offered was good and I was trained in the latest war toys by the best in the business but I had no experience in war at all. That would be corrected soon enough.

Me and this other guy, a huge South African banger were sent via DC-3 and indian canoe to a remote spot in the jungle of El Salvador. Besides my kit. I was given this sealed cooler with very specific instructions not to damage it or lose it and being the eager greenhorn I was, I took it very seriously. That did not rub well my Afrikaan companion who kept pestering me about opening the package to see what was inside and I refused every time.

When we reached the camp, I was happy to turn the package to the honcho in charge who thanked me profusely for my dedication. He asked me to leave the cooler outside and invited me for a belt of fine Tennessee mash to celebrate my arrival. We were sippin’ our second serving when we heard a voice outside screaming “What the f*** are you doing with those cookies?!” Head Honcho’s eyes went wide and went outside, I followed and saw the ***hole South African had opened the cooler and was gulping a package of Famous Amos chocolate chip cookies.

“What’s wrong, mate? You don’t want to share the treats?”

Those were the last words of the mercenary. My still civilian brain was only able to register a blue flash coming out of the tent next to ours and when my neurons finally adapted, CM had gutted the idiot and was making balloon animals with his intestines.

I threw up.

CM dragged the cooler and the opened pack of cookies back to his tent. Head Honcho gave orders to get rid of the South African’s body and pour diesel on the blood before the ants got there. He then pointed at me, and moved the finger to indicate his tent, I followed him. He explained that CM would undertake special jobs whenever the TV show was down for the summer and that he had been doing that since the 70s. Nobody at Sesame Street knew of his special abilities and they thought he just simply went to Europe to try the best cookies of France and Italy. Head Honcho told me he was reliable, hard worker but just not to f*** with his cookies…like I needed the warning.

And we went in the jungle after communists, CM leading the pack. He was the god of war, indefatigable, remorseless. He was also very protective of his fellow warriors and saved my green ass more than once. If we were at camp, he would join us around the fire, eating cookies and telling us stories about what happened behind the scenes at Sesame Street and the Muppet Show (That rumor about E & B? Confirmed) and giving us the Fig Newtons fans kept sending him (He hated them.) He was cool as he can be.

And then, it happened. The day he went mental and became the killer everybody now knows, was just another day fighting the communists and coming back to base to celebrate the success. Another batch of hand delivered cookies arrived,  he took the cooler with him to his tent after having supper and a bottle of mescal. Two hours later, Hell opened its doors and the worst demon came out with a howl that curled the nerves of the most hardcore veteran. We saw him naked, armed just with a short machete, heading inside the jungle and screaming “Red Piggy Bitch! Here I come!” Nobody dared to follow him. We checked hiss tent and saw what seemed to be the remains of molasses & rye cookies with a strange green patina on them: They were moldy. Later it was determined that the cookies had gone bad due to a faulty sealed cooler and that the fermented rye in combination with the local mold, created some sort of heavy hallucinogenic, something that scientists suspected happened in Salem back then when the witches.

The next morning, we followed the path CM left behind. A suspected communist sympathizing village was no longer standing but a smoldering pile of rubbish remained. We saw gallons of blood spilled and some brain matter, but no bodies. Next was the house of a local military leader and what he did to him was unnatural, sick and not what Michelangelo would have liked to see duplicating his Last Supper painting.

CM was unrelenting in his killing and he would not  stop. We had to stop after 4 days since we were not equipped for that type of mission. Another team came in and followed CM’s destruction but lost him after 9 days. Next we heard of him loose in Nicaragua and playing bowling with the heads of Sandinistas on the Pacific side of the country. We got there too late and saw the makeshift bowling alley he built. I never imagined human legs could be used as bowling pins. I saw he kept the score written in sand. I forget what it was but I remember it was in the mid 200’s.

We almost caught him in the Darien Gap in Panama. Washington stopped pussyfooting and sent a B-52 to carpet bomb the area where he was suspected to be. It was fine, but they kinda forgot to tell us and my platoon was wiped out with me being the only survivor and gravely wounded to boot. I remember waking up after the bombing and being in a cave, my wounds barely tended and I saw him.  His fur was matted with old blood and mud and he was wearing a necklace made from the heads of frogs and pig’s ears. And the smell? God, how awful it was! A mixture of rotten jungle and body parts left too long under the tropical sun. He was roasting something fleshy over the fire and muttering “Shortbread is good. I like shortbread.” At first I couldn’t figure out what was he talking about, but somewhere my brain remembered a long-lost biology class and the fear and horror mas too much. I passed out.

When I woke up again, I was in a hospital in the Canal Zone with two SPs keeping guard in my room. I was informed I was found in a dinghy in the canal and had been out for three months recovering from my wounds and a truckload of tropical diseases I caught in the Darien Gap. Two weeks later I was strong enough to fly to the U.S. where I spent another six moths in recuperative therapy at Bethesda and debriefing the government. I was given a very comfortable retirement package (adjustment for inflation included) health benefits and more provided I signed about a ream’s worth of non-disclosure agreements and kept laying low for the rest of my life. After what I went through, it was a fair deal.

A couple of years later, I bumped into a soldier from another squad tasked also to trap CM. It was then when I found out that he kept going south, had a nice holiday chopping FARC guerrillas in Colombia and was finally caught in Machu Pichu with Divine Intervention.  It was a stormy night. CM was surrounded by about 4,000 troops at the highest point in the monument and when he raised his worn machete to charge, lightning struck and knocked him out. The machete was reduced to a blob of molten metal fused to his hand so was the power of the lightning, but not even God could kill Cookie Monster.  The soldier did not know what happened after they caught him. They were sent home and some weird CIA-types descended on that Peruvian piece of real state taking over the case.

For the next year, I slept like a baby. OK, maybe you can’t kill CM, but surely they have him secured under tons of concrete somewhere, maybe a decommissioned silo. And they did a great job with the duplicate they have on TV: Unless you were there, you couldn’t tell that was not the original.

Then the rumors started to come out. Comments on internet forums about a blue entity wreaking havoc in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Somebody posted in Usenet a fuzzy picture that purported to be this warrior from another planet raining destruction somewhere in Serbia.

It was not an Alien: It was Cookie Monster.

The nightmares came back, with avengeance. I became the paranoid wretch I am today. One that cannot go to sleep unless totally drunk and inside a concrete reinforced titanium sarcophagus and then only for three hours at the time.

Somehow they “fixed” him and he is back killing. It is not a double on TV, it is him.

God help us all.