I know there has considerable enthusiasm amongst the hypothetical reader (s?) of this blog for my serial novel “The Quest for the Orange Dragon” but I’ve decided to completely scrap everything I’ve written so far and start anew with my co-author John Hagen, former President and Founder of the Planar Pentoidal Institute, recently ousted from the board and the fellowship and even, amazingly enough, written out of the official Institute history by the New Flounder, Duane Papasideras, née Hagen. How all this came about would probably make an interesting story, but I unfortunately learned it from my former teammate, Gerald, and he failed to make it interesting at all, although he unfortunately tried.
After extricating myself from Gerald by asking if he could help me find a recent issue of Supergirl (we were at his workplace after all, where I am a regular customer, meaning I pay his salary), I hurried home and reached out to the former flounder by phone, and he confirmed the story, and indicated that he had also lost his real job but that his wife had consented to keep him on as a houseman, a slight demotion from husband but with the possibility of future reinstatement. We met for lunch at Arby’s, at which time he expressed his enthusiasm for QFTOD, but not with the fawning enthusiasm one would expect from him in his current clingy desperation. So I knew the QFTOD was sub par, and further reasoned that he would be a good writing partner by way of generating absurd stories more in tune with the degraded tastes of the superhero crowd, the actual wording of which I would bring to professional or at least coherent polish.
Long story short (I refuse to use the acronym) my new partner recently fulfilled his tiny segment of our joint enterprise with a queasily autobiographical yarn full of idiotic dialogue, repulsively exploitative homosexuality, and shamefully grotesque violence, spiced with a subplot whose only hope of defense against legal action for its naked plagiarism of the Harry Potter Series is the idiotic, exploitative, and grotesque manner in which it carries it off, so that the Harry Potter people may possibly refrain from justly defending their property because of the severe physical revulsion that reading through the offending material might cause them.
In fulfilling my gigantic portion of our joint labor I have scooped the literary detritus from the emails into which they had been dumped, removed the paragraphs that could actually be banned by the FDA for their capacity to induce nausea and possibly harm the human nervous system, spruced the dialogue up with a few words of actual English, and attempted to organize the nightmarishly confused plot line. The first segment of the result follows apace:
The Quest For the Orange Dragon (encapsulated abstract)
From: D. Langtry
To Case File: 102761083
Private and confidential
Client: Diggan Torpherson
The following is Mr Torpherson’s primary statement to myself made at my request for all information pertaining to Kyle Loganberry that Mr Torpherson was able to provide that could possibly help with the investigation which he himself had requested that I perform. FIEO:
I met Kyle Loganberry at Values and Principles Camp when I was 14 and Kyle had possibly turned 13. I’m actually not a hundred percent certain about his age because he himself at multiple times indicated that he did not know his age because his family did not celebrate birthdays. This was a euphemism, I eventually discovered. More on this and many other unpleasant things about the Loganberrys later.
For now, picture the scene; I get off the bus along with the other boys from Dan, which if you grew up in the Cult of Marlo you would instantly recognize as one of the organizational subgroups in the Cult, named after the Tribes of Israel. This is one of the reasons the Cult comes off as just another crazy Christian Sect to casual outsiders.
So there I was, dragging my duffel bag across the parking lot, lagging behind the other Dan boys, slouching along miserably, when an iron hand gripped the handle and lifted it off my shoulder and pulled the shoulder strap out of my struggling hands as easily as a silverback gorilla might wrest a cookie from the hands of a particularly feeble kindergartener.
It was Brother Baynard, the largest and most effective counselor for Freshmen boys, ages 13-14, at Values and Principles Camp. He looms as inhumanly large in my memory, but was probably not much over 6 feet tall and under 300 pounds, or maybe not. I sat behind him on the bus, and could not help but gawk at the monstrous diameter of his neck. Now he loomed over me like an amiable oak tree. He was wearing a massive white shirt with a tiny tie and suspenders. He slung my duffel over his shoulder, and I noticed that his left hand gripped what looked like a full garbage bag, and that Kyle Loganberry was stumbling along at his heels like a puppy.
“Why don’t you two follow me,” he commanded, or something like that, I don’t remember the exact words. I just remember that he was addressing Kyle and I as a group. This made me unhappy. And Kyle began to mutter a song, which is not the same as humming. Mutter singing is something kids do when they expect someone to yell at them to stop at any moment, but the mutter singing recharges the battery of their soul so they plug into it whenever they can grab a few seconds which happens in two or three second bursts on a constant basis so they’re life is the mutter-singing or muted mutter-singing or holding back and waiting watchfully for the next opening to squeeze out a few bursts of mutter-singing and that’s Kyle.
Brother Baynard didn’t seem to care if Kyle mutter-sang, so Kyle kept doing the same three note song, a number programmed to be muttered out in bursts between shut-ups, over and over, with no one saying a word, all the way over to the dorm lodge.
This was Stansbury Lodge, where the freshmen boys at Values and Principles Camp slept in four person rooms for the ten weeks of Camp. It was a hateful, dark dungeon with no privacy and the festering, aggressive smell of adolescent male permeated through the wood ceilings and walls of the dorms. For myself, the most excruciating part of the experience of Stansbury Lodge, after Kyle’s mutter singing, was the wildlife-themed decor. For a certain mentality which seems to predominate in the American West, paintings of deer and deer antlers represent the the supremest visual delight, and reiteration of this motif in the form of actual mounted antlers, but also in paintings, cross-stitches, table cloths, wall-paper, napkins, towels, blankets, and even pewter figurines. No wall, no surface, can be left without this imagery, especially when decorating a cabin in the mountains. The presence of the most numerous mammal in the area must be at all costs rammed home wherever you turn. You would think that deer were the lifeblood of our western civilization, the staple of our diet, whose skins sheltered and clothed us, and whose antlers comprised the majority of the hand made tools necessary for our survival, or that the deer represented the ultimate menace of the forest, a dangerous animal whose visual appearance should be as vividly imprinted on the minds of our youth as possible in order that they may at all costs avoid deadly engagement with the creature. I never minded a few wildlife paintings, especially if the decorators managed to liven things up with bears, fish, hawks, or even moose. But the relentless deer lovers that designed the interiors of Stansbury would have none of those other beasts, wanting only to propagate and decorate every surface, every corner where the human eye might wander to, with images of the blandest and most uninteresting creature that has ever evolved. I developed an intense and irrational hatred of deer during that first year of camp, an intense revulsion for antlers, and a vehement antipathy for the color brown. Kyle and I bonded over this sentiment, our first agreement and probably the only factor keeping me from attempting physical harm on his person whenever I heard his mutter- singing. And we both hated our other dorm mates.
The Quest for the Orange Dragon will continue in next week or months exciting installment!
Sperberspeak 