(no subject)
“Still Going Strong”
Kilgore Trout was not, despite popular consensus, the unhappiest man in the universe, or even on the planet earth. This was the subject of much heated debate at the hospital: “I’m missing a finger!” Kilgore would exclaim passionately. “I’ve just hitchhiked hundreds of miles to be at a conference I can no longer attend!” He would complain, and whine, and so on.
But Kilgore couldn’t be the unhappiest man on earth, for though I’ve thrown him into circumstances which could be considered cruel and unusual, it is no worse than what an average seven year-old sees on television on a daily basis.
Listen: The most miserable man on the planet also happened to be stuck in Midland City on the night Dwayne’s bad chemicals caused him to hurt people.
His name Johns Walker, and he was quite a pathetic specimen of a man.
He was, physically, nearly the same as Kilgore Trout. He too had the same skinny, pale legs my father had. He too, had varicose veins running along his thighs. He had the same tufts of white hair. Perhaps the most distinguishing physical feature of Johns “Johnny” Walker, however, was the fact that he always wore thick, bottle-frame glasses.
Johnny Walker’s success, however, was the only thing anyone seemed to care about, though, so his looks were rendered unimportant. All that mattered was that when he spoke, people seemed to relax, and when people relaxed around Johnny, more often than not money had a habit of disappearing from those people’s wallet’s and reappearing in Johnny’s.
It was quite a remarkable phenomenon, which would not be reported directly until, while in the hospital for smoke inhalation on his seventy-second birthday, Johnny ended up reading one of his short stories aloud to the other patients. Soon after, just about everyone in the hospital reported losing money, while a grand total of $73,000.63 appeared in Johnny’s Hospital bed. Johnny didn’t know where he got his money. He never remembered working for it, but it always seemed to appear. He didn’t know that I’d chosen him to have this remarkable ability, and he certainly didn’t expect that he would soon be the most miserable person in the world.
Listen: Johnny Walker was the most miserable man on the planet because I made him that way. I gave him an extraordinary ability which could never be practically used without making him seem like an extremely suspicious character and amoral human being, and thus was only useful for getting him into trouble with the police, the FBI, the IRS, and so on. This ability was what brought him to Midland City, which was full of not only assholes, but asses too.
This is what an Ass looks like.
Other people say that this is what an ass is.
It doesn’t really make much difference- in either case, having an intimate relationship with an ass is against the law and generally frowned upon.
Johnny Walker was a writer, among other things. He was not invited to appear at the literary convention, but he saw it as an opportunity to further his career as a writer, and such eventually donated a tremendous amount of money into the construction of a new convention center even though the old one wasn’t finished yet.
Listen: Johnny Walker’s main problem as a writer was that he wasn’t particularly good. He tended to get distracted and draw pictures to go with what he was describing. He drew them with a Sharpie Marker, which looks like this:
His only good piece of literature was a short story about a man named Rabo who was the luckiest person on the planet. Any time an event was a long shot, it was sure to happen to Rabo. He would win the lottery on a daily basis and reached into his pockets weekly to see what sort of baseball tickets, dollar bills, or rare, brilliant works of art and music would materialize. Rabo lived on Pluto, where everybody else led thoroughly miserable lives. They had no sunlight, lived in extreme cold, and had to deal witch constant meteor strikes wrecking their towns and cities. Rabo lived quite happily for a century after he discovered his luck, during which time he became president and made contact with earth twice. Then, the scientists on Pluto decided that they wanted to study Rabo’s luck. They locked him in a padded room with nothing to do, and studied him from a little hole they put in the wall with their laser beams. The scientists deliberated over Rabo's condition for five years, after which time the let him go. By that time, though, the damage had already been done. Being kept around so many scientists and particularly so many numbers proved extremely difficult for Rabo, who then became affected by chance rather than luck. He got the best and worst of everything from that point on; supermodels would come home with him, only to leave him on his doorstep where he would subsequently be mugged, then find a diamond ring in the gutter. Eventually, Rabo was crushed by a spaceship sent out by the humans, who hadn’t realized that the citizens of Pluto were not only severely allergic to oxygen, but also reached an average height of one and three-quarters of an inch.
Johnny called his story “The Luckiest Man on the Planet”. It was published beside one of Kilgore Trout’s stories in an Adult Magazine called Ultrasexxx. The cover had six scantily-clad Asian women holding up a throne on which a man sat, giving the reader a thumbs’ up. It proclaimed, in giant red print across the top and bottom of the magazine “Buy This! Wide Open Beavers Inside!” Johnny bought a copy of Ultrasexxx to get a copy of his work, but never opened it. Johnny was scared to look inside because the man on the cover had a penis eight inches long and one and a half inches thick when fully erect. Johnny’s Penis was only five and a half inches long.
The Rest of Johnny’s novels were science fiction novels about how the world would have been changed if one event changed; if a person died where they should have lived or chose to eat steak instead of vegetables, and so on. They almost always involved hundreds of small explosion, leading up to one gigantic explosion at the end. They almost always also involved two characters who ended up shooting each other.
Listen: This is how Johnny would get the ideas for his stories. He would go into bars early in the morning and drink himself half to oblivion. Then he would announce to everyone at the bar that he was a famous writer, and if they gave him the name of one person who could have changed history, he’d write a story for them. He would then hitchhike his way to the nearest hotel, where the clerk behind the counter would almost always make a comment about Johnny Walker’s name and current inebriated state. “Born in 1820 and still going strong!” they would say, or “The first of the four horsemen arrives!” and so on.
Johnny Walker hated that. He always wanted to go up and write, and hotel clerks would always pester him about his name. He hated it because after chatting with the hotel clerk, he’d go to his room, attempt to remember who his latest story was supposed to be about, and fail miserably. He’d then get frustrated, and write whatever he could think of onto a piece of paper. In the morning, he never remembered what he’d written on the piece of paper, but he always qualified it as being the best idea in the bar at the time. In short, Johnny’s creative process was utter and complete nonsense that didn’t work at all.
In fact, Johnny’s writing was so horrendously awful that major publishing companies would routinely send him checks when he sent them his stories. Attached to the checks would come notes written on elegantly simple stationary, would consist of three simple words. They were “burn the manuscript.” alternatively, they would say “do not send more.” The strangest note Johnny ever got, however, he’d gotten on the same day Kilgore Trout opened up his mailbox to find an invitation to the convention. It was on a full sized piece of paper with dinosaurs scribbled across the outside. Johnny assumed it was written by a powerful person: only powerful people could get away with using a dinosaur as stationary. Dinosaurs had penises ranging from nine inches to ten feet.
*******
The note Johnny got was written by me. It was a terrible thing to do, since I knew it would put us both through no end of trouble. I did it, however, to show Kilgore that despite the fact that he was now missing a finger, had been mugged, and had slept in an adult video theatre, there was still someone unhappier than him.
Everything is relative.
*******
Johnny was in Midland City, the asshole of the universe, because on the piece of paper were written for words with a question mark: “Made for T.V. Movie?” Johnny didn’t particularly care for television. He didn’t care for much, especially not people. But he cared about fame. He cared about being successful, and so when he received the letter he sat down and had a good, long conversation with his parrot. Unlike Dwayne Hoover’s dog, or Kilgore Trout’s bird, Johnny Walker’s parrot actually talked back. Johnny had taught the parrot to say two things only: “Yes!” and “Let’s go to bed!” When he had visitors in his house, he told them that his girlfriend was both the perfect woman and that she had trained his parrot to speak. His actual girlfriend looked like this.
[picture of a male hand]
“Cat,” said Johnny Walker to his parrot one night after arriving home from attempting to write a short story in which Abraham Lincoln became a professional assassin and led a crack team of commandos called the cabinet. Abraham and his strike team journeyed all around the universe preventing crimes from happening until one day, it was revealed that Abraham had been involved in a scandal on Earth in which the wrong man was killed, and then the incident was covered up. Abraham Lincoln then killed himself in shame, and his presidency was posthumously removed.
“I’ve got a problem, old buddy. Should I go to Midland City for this movie?”
“Yes! Yes, Yes, Yes!” said the parrot. “Let’s go to bed!”
So they did.
*******
Johnny still had a problem. He lived, as so many miserable people do, in the state of New Jersey, where any of the local flora and fauna which could survive the smog, chemicals, and radiation that permeated the state was just as likely to eat you as you were to eat a bag of chips. Johnny had to find a way to get from the armpit of America to the asshole, which was somehow located in what people attempted to call America’s Heartland. Hitchhiking was out of the question because it would make him dirty, as were busses, trains, steamboats, horses, and so on.
*******
Kilgore Trout was not, despite popular consensus, the unhappiest man in the universe, or even on the planet earth. This was the subject of much heated debate at the hospital: “I’m missing a finger!” Kilgore would exclaim passionately. “I’ve just hitchhiked hundreds of miles to be at a conference I can no longer attend!” He would complain, and whine, and so on.
But Kilgore couldn’t be the unhappiest man on earth, for though I’ve thrown him into circumstances which could be considered cruel and unusual, it is no worse than what an average seven year-old sees on television on a daily basis.
Listen: The most miserable man on the planet also happened to be stuck in Midland City on the night Dwayne’s bad chemicals caused him to hurt people.
His name Johns Walker, and he was quite a pathetic specimen of a man.
He was, physically, nearly the same as Kilgore Trout. He too had the same skinny, pale legs my father had. He too, had varicose veins running along his thighs. He had the same tufts of white hair. Perhaps the most distinguishing physical feature of Johns “Johnny” Walker, however, was the fact that he always wore thick, bottle-frame glasses.
Johnny Walker’s success, however, was the only thing anyone seemed to care about, though, so his looks were rendered unimportant. All that mattered was that when he spoke, people seemed to relax, and when people relaxed around Johnny, more often than not money had a habit of disappearing from those people’s wallet’s and reappearing in Johnny’s.
It was quite a remarkable phenomenon, which would not be reported directly until, while in the hospital for smoke inhalation on his seventy-second birthday, Johnny ended up reading one of his short stories aloud to the other patients. Soon after, just about everyone in the hospital reported losing money, while a grand total of $73,000.63 appeared in Johnny’s Hospital bed. Johnny didn’t know where he got his money. He never remembered working for it, but it always seemed to appear. He didn’t know that I’d chosen him to have this remarkable ability, and he certainly didn’t expect that he would soon be the most miserable person in the world.
Listen: Johnny Walker was the most miserable man on the planet because I made him that way. I gave him an extraordinary ability which could never be practically used without making him seem like an extremely suspicious character and amoral human being, and thus was only useful for getting him into trouble with the police, the FBI, the IRS, and so on. This ability was what brought him to Midland City, which was full of not only assholes, but asses too.
This is what an Ass looks like.
Other people say that this is what an ass is.
It doesn’t really make much difference- in either case, having an intimate relationship with an ass is against the law and generally frowned upon.
Johnny Walker was a writer, among other things. He was not invited to appear at the literary convention, but he saw it as an opportunity to further his career as a writer, and such eventually donated a tremendous amount of money into the construction of a new convention center even though the old one wasn’t finished yet.
Listen: Johnny Walker’s main problem as a writer was that he wasn’t particularly good. He tended to get distracted and draw pictures to go with what he was describing. He drew them with a Sharpie Marker, which looks like this:
His only good piece of literature was a short story about a man named Rabo who was the luckiest person on the planet. Any time an event was a long shot, it was sure to happen to Rabo. He would win the lottery on a daily basis and reached into his pockets weekly to see what sort of baseball tickets, dollar bills, or rare, brilliant works of art and music would materialize. Rabo lived on Pluto, where everybody else led thoroughly miserable lives. They had no sunlight, lived in extreme cold, and had to deal witch constant meteor strikes wrecking their towns and cities. Rabo lived quite happily for a century after he discovered his luck, during which time he became president and made contact with earth twice. Then, the scientists on Pluto decided that they wanted to study Rabo’s luck. They locked him in a padded room with nothing to do, and studied him from a little hole they put in the wall with their laser beams. The scientists deliberated over Rabo's condition for five years, after which time the let him go. By that time, though, the damage had already been done. Being kept around so many scientists and particularly so many numbers proved extremely difficult for Rabo, who then became affected by chance rather than luck. He got the best and worst of everything from that point on; supermodels would come home with him, only to leave him on his doorstep where he would subsequently be mugged, then find a diamond ring in the gutter. Eventually, Rabo was crushed by a spaceship sent out by the humans, who hadn’t realized that the citizens of Pluto were not only severely allergic to oxygen, but also reached an average height of one and three-quarters of an inch.
Johnny called his story “The Luckiest Man on the Planet”. It was published beside one of Kilgore Trout’s stories in an Adult Magazine called Ultrasexxx. The cover had six scantily-clad Asian women holding up a throne on which a man sat, giving the reader a thumbs’ up. It proclaimed, in giant red print across the top and bottom of the magazine “Buy This! Wide Open Beavers Inside!” Johnny bought a copy of Ultrasexxx to get a copy of his work, but never opened it. Johnny was scared to look inside because the man on the cover had a penis eight inches long and one and a half inches thick when fully erect. Johnny’s Penis was only five and a half inches long.
The Rest of Johnny’s novels were science fiction novels about how the world would have been changed if one event changed; if a person died where they should have lived or chose to eat steak instead of vegetables, and so on. They almost always involved hundreds of small explosion, leading up to one gigantic explosion at the end. They almost always also involved two characters who ended up shooting each other.
Listen: This is how Johnny would get the ideas for his stories. He would go into bars early in the morning and drink himself half to oblivion. Then he would announce to everyone at the bar that he was a famous writer, and if they gave him the name of one person who could have changed history, he’d write a story for them. He would then hitchhike his way to the nearest hotel, where the clerk behind the counter would almost always make a comment about Johnny Walker’s name and current inebriated state. “Born in 1820 and still going strong!” they would say, or “The first of the four horsemen arrives!” and so on.
Johnny Walker hated that. He always wanted to go up and write, and hotel clerks would always pester him about his name. He hated it because after chatting with the hotel clerk, he’d go to his room, attempt to remember who his latest story was supposed to be about, and fail miserably. He’d then get frustrated, and write whatever he could think of onto a piece of paper. In the morning, he never remembered what he’d written on the piece of paper, but he always qualified it as being the best idea in the bar at the time. In short, Johnny’s creative process was utter and complete nonsense that didn’t work at all.
In fact, Johnny’s writing was so horrendously awful that major publishing companies would routinely send him checks when he sent them his stories. Attached to the checks would come notes written on elegantly simple stationary, would consist of three simple words. They were “burn the manuscript.” alternatively, they would say “do not send more.” The strangest note Johnny ever got, however, he’d gotten on the same day Kilgore Trout opened up his mailbox to find an invitation to the convention. It was on a full sized piece of paper with dinosaurs scribbled across the outside. Johnny assumed it was written by a powerful person: only powerful people could get away with using a dinosaur as stationary. Dinosaurs had penises ranging from nine inches to ten feet.
*******
The note Johnny got was written by me. It was a terrible thing to do, since I knew it would put us both through no end of trouble. I did it, however, to show Kilgore that despite the fact that he was now missing a finger, had been mugged, and had slept in an adult video theatre, there was still someone unhappier than him.
Everything is relative.
*******
Johnny was in Midland City, the asshole of the universe, because on the piece of paper were written for words with a question mark: “Made for T.V. Movie?” Johnny didn’t particularly care for television. He didn’t care for much, especially not people. But he cared about fame. He cared about being successful, and so when he received the letter he sat down and had a good, long conversation with his parrot. Unlike Dwayne Hoover’s dog, or Kilgore Trout’s bird, Johnny Walker’s parrot actually talked back. Johnny had taught the parrot to say two things only: “Yes!” and “Let’s go to bed!” When he had visitors in his house, he told them that his girlfriend was both the perfect woman and that she had trained his parrot to speak. His actual girlfriend looked like this.
[picture of a male hand]
“Cat,” said Johnny Walker to his parrot one night after arriving home from attempting to write a short story in which Abraham Lincoln became a professional assassin and led a crack team of commandos called the cabinet. Abraham and his strike team journeyed all around the universe preventing crimes from happening until one day, it was revealed that Abraham had been involved in a scandal on Earth in which the wrong man was killed, and then the incident was covered up. Abraham Lincoln then killed himself in shame, and his presidency was posthumously removed.
“I’ve got a problem, old buddy. Should I go to Midland City for this movie?”
“Yes! Yes, Yes, Yes!” said the parrot. “Let’s go to bed!”
So they did.
*******
Johnny still had a problem. He lived, as so many miserable people do, in the state of New Jersey, where any of the local flora and fauna which could survive the smog, chemicals, and radiation that permeated the state was just as likely to eat you as you were to eat a bag of chips. Johnny had to find a way to get from the armpit of America to the asshole, which was somehow located in what people attempted to call America’s Heartland. Hitchhiking was out of the question because it would make him dirty, as were busses, trains, steamboats, horses, and so on.
*******