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Charmless
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27 Aug 2012, 6:18 pm

Any feedback would be appreciated, including vomit stains.
There are some format issues, my bad :/
Four Characters in Search of a Plot
Once upon a place much like wherever you happen to be right now, Bob Palmer, an ordinary person just like yourself in the sense that he typically puts his socks on using his hands, was experiencing a bit of existential angst. “Yo,” he would say, addressing the various molecules around him, “I’m feeling some angst here.” The problem that was troubling our friend, the late Mr. Palmer, was his ongoing foolhardy attempt to adapt a novel, The Story of my Life and Other Disturbing Things, which was written by a little-known Iowan writer. Most critics agree that the author of this work, among other things, almost certainly puts his socks on using his hands. Anyway, the semi autobiographical monstrosity was never intended to be adapted to the stage (or read by anyone with good taste), and good ol’ Bob made things a lot harder by insisting that all dialogue spoken by male characters be translated first into Portuguese, and secondly into binary. An actual, legit passage is reprinted in its entirety here, with the permission of no one:
Colonel Maher: 010101010101! 01010101010 010101 010 10101010 1010
Martha: What?
“Martha” poses an interesting and relevant question for us, safe in faraway and sunny readerland: What? What as in, perhaps, “What would drive a person to waste their time like this?” To that, at least, I will supply a partial answer, here and now. Get ready for it. It is: drugs. Anyway, back to the main plot, which yes, there is one. Apparently.
At about whatever time it is now, Bob Palmer spoke once again to the surrounding molecules; this time, he asked a question: “Oy,” he said, “What is the meaning of all this?” That is a question that is rarely asked aloud in “civilized” circles; it is answered even less often. In this case, it was answered by a ghost of a short, fat man that I am unable to describe proficiently, other than to say that he looked a lot like Danny DeVito. This man’s name was George Mellon, and he was the deceased business partner of our main character, who I will remind you is “Bob Palmer”.
“BAWB (that is how it was said; with caps lock on),” wailed the restless spirit, “I have to come to warn you?”
“George?” yelped Bob, marking the second to last time in his lifetime that he was startled by the appearance of a ghost, “What’s...going on?”
“BAWB,” intoned George’s spirit, “I have bad news and good news; the bad is that I have acquired (dramatic pause) ghost cancer.”

“That’s terrible,” gasped Bob, and the plot point dissolved into the emptiness from which it came.

“What isn’t terrible these days?” sighed George, “Also, you are about to embark on an epic adventure with a crapton of symbolic ghosts.” Then he was gone.

Bob did not have time to do anything significant relating to the fabled plot, so this sentence is basically a waste of ink. A few worthless seconds later, the plot reared its ugly head in the form of the first “symbolic” ghost, causing Bob to react with, presumably, a reaction of some sort.

“Mother of Friedrich Nietzsche’s mother,” exclaimed Bob, “You’re Kurt Vonnegut Jr.!”

“Haha, if you say so,” said the specter of the late Mr. Vonnegut, “The powers that be, blessed be their condiments, have decided that I shall be your guide on your journey into the mysteries of life and death, the universe, everything etc. etc.”

“Awesome,” said Bob.

“We will be accompanied by several unused characters,” continued Vonnegut, “In order to fit with the title of the paper we are acting out right now. Here they are.”
Three faceless shadows appeared somewhere to the left of backstage (by backstage, I mean “behind Bob and Kurt Vonnegut”), looking menacing with their menacing darkness and redundancy. The leftmost, i.e. first character shall be known simply as the Director. Contemporary sources postulate that he was called so because he directs, or has directed at one point and decided to go into acting. The second character is a complete waste of space; I will not even give him/her/it a name or personality, suffice to say that whatever it would be is comparable to a minor villain slain early in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The third character shall be known as “Martha”, as featured one of the previous paragraphs.

“Enough of that,” coughed Vonnegut derisively, “No one even cares about these pitiful characters, and we are burning some poor reader’s eyesight here.”

Then they were off.

An Interval of Time Later
Our protagonists were on route to their destination, whatever it may be, in the old-fashioned “road-trip” style. For those of you with OCD, Bob was driving a 1966 Volvo with a Milton Berle paint job. Seeing an opportunity to further the plot, Vonnegut turned on the radio, apparently ignoring his physical inability to do so.
Radio Host: Dave Gahan is dead again, I guess. So where are all the Depeche Mode fans now?
Caller 1: We’re right here, calling.
Radio Host: Yes, I know, but you’re only calling because we said none of you were calling.
Caller 1: Well, here we are, we are calling, we are here.
Caller 2: Dave Gahan is dead?
Radio Host: No, just no Depeche Mode fans are calling until we say no Depeche Mode fans are calling.
Caller 3: We are calling, and we are here, and Dave Gahan is not dead.
Caller 2: Though we have an obituary that we’ve been saving since ‘93, just in case. Also, we are calling.
Radio Host: No, what I’m saying is that none of you were calling, like fifteen minutes before we said that none of you were calling. You only came in the time of NEEE-
The Director, also apparently ignorant of his lack of a corporeal form, turned the radio off. That is how our protagonists and collection of useless characters saved the universe.

Destination

“Abandon all logic, ye who enter here.”
Thus spoke the sign on the entrance to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, which is, indeed, our protagonists’ final destination. Why? Why does anything happen? Why did I type this sentence? On a philosophical note, why did you read it? That last sentence did absolutely nothing for this story, or, as far as I know, for anyone or anything, with the possible exception of Mitt Romney. Doing or not doing pretty much anything always helps Mitt Romney. Following Vonnegut’s lead, Bob Palmer tentatively entered the outer circle of the chocolate factory, where they encountered the whirling typhoon in a sea of the legendary oppressed proletariat, that is, the Oompa Loompas. It was a truly terrible sight, I guess. The Director, still recovering from his trauma in the Volvo, had a flash of insight into the ways of the world.

“Go!” he shouted, holding open the door to the second circle of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, “I’ll profit off of them, save yourselves!”

“Alright,” said Bob, and that was that.

The Second Circle
The Second Circle of the chocolate factory was a technological wonder; an entire city-state made out of (you’ll never guess!! !!1one): carrots. That’s right, edible carrots. With all these new regulations, even chocolate has to be a fruit or vegetable. Which is interesting, because, when you think about it, who or what isn’t a fruit or vegetable any more? Kids these days, I swear. Anyway, back to this glorious plot line. Our heroes’ nameless companion decided to remain in the healthy city-state in order to devour the entire delicious municipal edibleness, in the hope of getting big and strong enough to become a real character.

Circles 3-8.5
Nothing really interesting (or relevant to the plot) happened here, except for Martha just disappearing, because, what do you know, she was actually a worthless filler character. Also, Luigi Pirandello showed up, but he only speaks Italian, and Bob learned a lesson from Ian Fleming...plus, I guess copyright laws exist. The nerve of some people.

The Final Circle
“Well, Bob,” spoke the ghost of Vonnegut, “I can go no further than this...and, as fascinating as you and your plot is, I would prefer to going back to being dead.”
“Thank you, great mentor,” said Bob, “I’m pretty sure that the glorious plot, blessed be its name, knows what to do.”
“Whatever floats your shipwreck.”
“Helium.”
After this significant exchange, which I emphatically assure you is full of all kinds of symbolic meaning; indeed, one could say that it literally oozes symbolic meaning like the lifeblood dripping from the carcass of a slain metaphor. So Bob Palmer walked, alone at last, save for the billions of microscopic parasites inhabiting his digestive system and, disturbingly, the echoes of Ian Astbury’s voice in his head. He walked over a bunch of bridges, several of which were burning, and all of which were over troubled water. He walked and he walked, and he jogged a little, until this sentence ended. Then, finally he arrived at the deepest, most chocolate-y center of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory (haunting violin refrain here). Bob waited for the unseen violinist to finish the remainder of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony before taking a deep breath and actually looking at the chamber around him. The chamber had the look of a black-carpeted industrial dumpster in Zagreb, Croatia (which is, of course, the capital of that fine nation and probably a location of some historical significance) on a day in late December (I’m thinking the 27th, not sure about you), a day in which it had rained for no less than two hours, but almost certainly less than three and a half hours, after midnight-in other words; it was pretty dark.
At the center of the Zagreb-esque darkness stood Willy Wonka, the man himself. The tears dripping from each of his three heads appeared to be the source of the “rain” mentioned in the previous paragraph. His scaly clawed feet held a grimy placard that read:

Willy Wonka-Ask me anything.
Bob hesitated for a second to see if he was able to deliver his question in Serbo-Croatian, a query which his brain answered a couple seconds later as eloquently as if Chuck Testa himself had smashed his cerebral cortex with a large golf club, possibly one made out of a titanium alloy. So Bob decided that he didn’t go all of this way, through ghostly unused characters, radio talk shows, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and numerous other trials and horrors (several of which only appear if you read this on a Wednesday) to not get an answer.
“What should I do to find the truth in the world?”
The fallen angel spoke in a voice filled with sadness...yet also somehow reminiscent of the infamous “troll face” of Microsoft Paint. He said, by way of advice, “Always remember; a wet bird does not fly at night.”

Bob Palmer woke up and realized that it had all been a dream. Then he killed himself, because this ending is idiotic, and a waste of the reader’s time, or the viewer’s in the case of the movie North, which is, for the record, probably one of the worst films ever made. I’ve personally never been able to watch the entire picture, but it is simply awful. QED


_________________
"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different."-Kurt Vonnegut

"Goddamn it, you've got to be kind."-Kurt Vonnegut

I like Vonnegut quotes, OKAY?


Charmless
Hummingbird
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28 Aug 2012, 5:18 pm

Come on, I really wanted those vomit stains...


_________________
"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different."-Kurt Vonnegut

"Goddamn it, you've got to be kind."-Kurt Vonnegut

I like Vonnegut quotes, OKAY?


Underscore
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28 Aug 2012, 5:42 pm

I'm not in the target market for this, I'm afraid



Stuffedwithempty
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31 Aug 2012, 2:17 pm

I visualized it as a dream you had and wrote down. It's so random for my psyche, yet it feels like there's a meaning behind this that I can't yet figure out because I only read about two paragraphs



Logicalmom
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31 Aug 2012, 3:16 pm

It's certainly playful - it appears to have a Douglas Adams vibe - are you a fan? My concentration is faltering but I will come back later and give it a good read.