Dirk Destroyer Part 13 Chapter 6 Part 2

So if you’re reading this on the day I post it, I hope you’re Jewish, Kwanzan, Alaskan, or one of those other religions, otherwise you’re reading a blog called Just Plain Stupid on Christmas day. I’d say that’s pathetic, but I’m posting a blog called Just Plain Stupid on Christmas day, so I’m pretty sure that disqualifies me from judging others.

So here’s lucky Part 13 of Dirk Destroyer’s Less Destructive Brother. We join our story in the middle of a conversation among the ‘fellowship of the bring’ concerning how to find Dirk Destroyer. Elmer Destroyer is speaking…

“And he likes smoking…”

“Look,” said Mage-e-not, “smoke!”

Though I was about to say smoking cigars, Mage-e-not was right, there was smoke rising beyond a hill to the north.

“So,” said Tease, “it is true. Enlightenment comes from the north.”

“Onward, Comrades,” sang Lustavious with so much gusto, that I found myself rushing towards the smoke as if great glory awaited me there. That didn’t make any sense, but even in my tightly restricted rational mind, I knew I could use a fire to light a cigar and preserve my small supply of matches.

The Jonma Claim’s stubby little legs couldn’t keep up, and the Jonma Carry picked him up, using his long grasshopper-like legs to catch up with the rest of us. Did he do that out of kindness, or was there a compulsion in the name, Carry?

If names influenced or coerced you to do things, were some of Dirk’s pranks really the fault of the ministry for naming him, Destroyer? And what did Elmer mean?

As I crested the hill, I saw a small-bodied man with a huge head sitting in front of fire. He had some meat on a spit. Where had he found a pig, or a cow out in these hills full of sheep? Then I saw the wooly carcass next to the fire.

“Stop!” shrieked the Jonma Claim. “Ith a monster!”

“Monster?” asked Ono. “Looks iddly to be a roar-rip-snap-gulp.”

“Lip Ton Tease,” commanded Jonma Claim. “Go and kill it immediately.”

“I cannot offer it violence without offense,” said the monk.

“Can’t you thee?” lisped Jonma Claim. “Ith a RunPol.”

Though I’d never met a RunPol, I had heard of them. No one was sure how many of them they were, but they always showed up whenever there was an election with heavy favorites, and ran a hopeless campaign against them. There were strange rumors about RunPols. Some said there was only one of them, but didn’t bother to explain why they showed up everywhere. Other’s said that RunPols never wanted to win elections, just to be a fly in ointment. In that sense, Dirk was a bit of a RunPol, so I was interested in meeting one.

And as Ono had said so eloquently, he looked too iddly to be a roar-rip-snap-gulp.

We approached cautiously. The smell of roasting meat was tantalizing. It made me consider giving up being an earthtarian. Mage-e-not was visibly drooling. The RunPol must have heard us approach because he turned around and smiled.

“Hello folks,” he said. “My name is RunPol, and I’m a candidate for High Priest of the ministry of Thirty-seven Really Good Ideas.”

“That’s shnot an elected office,” snarled Jonma Claim.

“Well it otta be,” said RunPol. “Look at the effect it has on everybody.”

“What’s the platform?” shrieked Swampy.

The monster smiled at the rat-bird. “I’m glad you asked me that. I wish our talking beasts could vote, but that’s not in my platform. My platform is to seek out and find the original intent of the Thirty-seven Really Good Ideas, and reform the organization from within.”

“Kill him!” roared Akwar. We all stood frozen until she disappeared again.

“Say,” I said, “you mind if I light my cigar in your fire?”

“Be my guest,” said the monster.

“Tell me, monster,” said Lip Ton Tease, “how many showers each day should a person be allowed to have?”

“Good question,” said RunPol, though it didn’t sound particularly good to me. “As long as that person owns or has legal access to the water, and his use of it does not deleteriously affect others, he should be able to have as many showers as he pleases.”

“And if the government owns the water?” asked Jonma Claim.

“Then we should be asking ourselves if there’s a good reason for the government to own water.”

I had to admit, as monsters went, I wasn’t finding RunPol too monstrous.

Then Jonma Claim saw the sheep carcass.

“Oh,” he cried. “The humanity!”

“No,” said RunPol, “it’s a sheep.”

“But the thirty-fifth idea!”

“I’m eating it, not bugging it.”

“It’s the same thing.”

RunPol leaned his large head over the carcass and paused. “I don’t hear it complaining.”

“Seeing as it’s not really bugging the sheep,” said Mage-e-not. “Do you think it would be all right if…”

“No!” screamed Jonma Claim.

“I don’t mind sharing,” said the monster. “There’s plenty.”

“Strike him down, Lip Ton Tease,” said Jonma Claim.

“He has offered no insult,” said Tease, careful to stay out of the stream of smoke coming from the fire.

“Lustavious,” said Jonma Claim. “Do something!”

“What?” said Lustavious. “He’s not the Destroyer. I can’t cast him into oblivion.”

“Do something,” Jonma Claim shrieked.

Lustavious shrugged his shoulders, held up one hand, and produced a short flame from his index finger.

“That’s pretty,” said the RunPol monster.

“Now we go,” said Jonma Claim.

“Yeah,” said Mage-e-not, still salivating. “I guess we showed him.”

“Come back tomorrow,” the monster called after us, “I’m creating campaign buttons out of parchment.”

That night we camped in a small wood and sat around our own fire discussing whose fault it was that we hadn’t packed any food except Jonma Carry who possessed a single bag of beans that looked beyond their prime. I ate from the earth as usual, and made some algae bars, but only Ono seemed to like them. Swampy must have found something edible because he crapped twice on Lustavious, the second time when the Light Bringer offered to join Ono at the stream for a bath.

“You know,” said Mage-e-not, “I could go back to the RunPol monster and ask…”

“No!” snapped Jonma Claim who never seemed to be happy about anything.

“Would you like to try an algae bar, Mage-e-not?” I offered for the second time.

“Maybe tomorrow,” the partially invisible wizard sighed. “I’m not quite that hungry yet.”

“Destroyer,” said Jonma Claim. “You take first watch.”

“What am I watching for?”

“Just watch!”

“All right.”

Here's a Christmas song I almost forgot.

Dirk Destroyer Part 5 Chapter 2 part 1

This is the 5^th installment of an endless serialization of a novel that was never meant for prime time (unless you read this between 8 and 10PM – some say 11.) I’m sure there’s a way to search out the first four parts, but blog navigation has never been my strong suit.

Chapter 2

Politically Incorrect Smoking Protagonist Meets Other Folk

The town of Gyno wasn’t really a town. It was a loose grouping of settlements, scattered across a valley. Each grouping was just two or three buildings, all with small doors so that sheep couldn’t rush in when people came and went. The Ceasarian section of town was in a curved gash between two hills. I walked through the tobacco fields, occasionally running across a ram or ewe experimentally nibbling on a tobacco leaf.

“Sick, sick, sick,” said Swampy. Sheep and tobacco didn’t get along. They might eat a leaf, but they never kept it. Only one thing smells worse than healthy sheep – sick sheep.

Getting through the field, the Ceasaran homestead came into view. It was a pretty little settlement, and I was happy to see it, but getting to the door was going to be a problem.

“Sheep,” said Swampy.

“Yup,” I said. The house, work shed and barn were all surrounded by hundreds of sheep. They were especially packed around the doors.

How do you wade through a huge flock of sheep without bugging any of them?

“Lotta wool,” said Swampy.

A man was sitting on a rock at the edge of the flock. It was a pleasantly warm day, but he was still wearing a one hundred percent cotton overcoat.

“Don’t bug the sheep,” he said predictably.

“How do I get to the door?”

“Don’t care,” said the man, “just don’t bug the sheep.”

“How long have they been here?”

“The sheep?” asked the man. “I’m not sure. Maybe a week.”

“Are the Ceasarans all right?”

“Don’t care,” said the man.

“Well can I call and see if they’re all right?”

“I wouldn’t,” said the man. “It might bug the sheep.”

“Stupid Spy,” said Swampy, and I had to agree. I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted. “Are you all right in there?”

The man jumped up from his rock. “I better report this!” he said and hurried off. I was just about to shout a second time when what looked to be a second story window opened in the house.

“Is that you, Mister Elmer.”

“Yes Mister Ceasaran,” I said.

You might think we were being formal here, calling each other mister, but we both had our reasons. Ceasaran called me Mister Elmer, because I was the brother of a very important, albeit infamous man. I called Ceasaran, Mister because I’d dealt with so many Ceasarans over the years, that I’d given up trying to remember their first names. He was probably Marko, Mario, or Martin. The Ceasarans almost always named their boys a name that began with M, and those three were the most common. I’d had dealings with a couple of Martins, a handful of Markos, and several Marios. Curiously, I never dealt with Marias, or Martinas. I don’t know if the entire tobacco industry was patriarchal, or just the Ceasarans.

“Are you all right in there?” I asked again.

“We are dying,” Ceasaran replied, “otherwise, we are fine. You’ve come to get cigars?”

“Yes,” I said, “but that doesn’t seem so important now. Maybe I should do something to stop you from dying.”

“That is very kind of you, Mister Elmer. You have always been a kind man, but Maria and I are old now, and there is very little food. We would have to get around to dying eventually, so there’s no reason to put it off.”

“I’d be happy to go buy you some food,” I offered.

“You don’t understand,” said Ceasaran. “I don’t mean that there is very little food in the house. I mean there is very little food at all. Tobacco is not considered important enough, so we don’t get food.”

“Not important?”

“Mister Elmer, most years since my grandfather’s day you have been our only customer. Sometimes a teen asks for a cigar that blows up, or a man with a new baby buys some to give away. We had a politician buy an especially durable one for his mistress, but we didn’t ask if it was for smoking. Most of the time, it’s just you.”

“I didn’t realize that business was so bad.”

“Oh no,” said Ceasaran. “The business is not bad. You are always very generous. We have always been a wealthy family because of you.”

“So why can’t you get food?”

Ceasaran shook his head. “It is not a matter of money; it is a matter of importance. The sheep can’t eat tobacco, and the MOIST people do not smoke cigars. We do not contribute to the thirty-fifth idea.”

“But what about your children?”

“You did not notice, Mister Elmer? Maria and I have no children. We are also very old – not like you are old, but very old.”

I probably should have noticed that. It just seems like you barely notice someone and they grow old and die. The only reason the Ceasaran’s stuck in my mind is that I’d done business with fifty or so of them, and they tended to look alike.

“Hey,” I said, “I have a couple algae bars,” and I zipped open my fanny pack.

“Baaaaaahhhh!” A wall of wool rushed at me.

“No,” I said to the surprised sheep. “You can’t have these. They are for the Ceasaran family.”

“Let them have the algae bars,” said Ceasaran. “As I am dying now, I admit that I am not such a believer in the thirty-fifth idea, but Maria and I have both tasted your algae bars. If we are going to die, I would rather we did so without our mouths tasting like fertilizer.”

“Crappy bars,” said Swampy as I threw the bars to get the sheep to move away from me. This gave me a chance to get much closer to the window. I saw Ceasaran smile at me. He was an old man.

“Wait a moment,” he said. He must have been standing on something, because he lowered himself very carefully from the window height. While he was gone, the sheep wandered back over to me. The sniffed around me and my fanny pack looking for more food, then gave me a look that showed their annoyance when they found nothing. Swampy landed on a ewe and crapped on her.

Finally, Ceasaran’s face reappeared in the window. He held out a bag. It was too far for me to reach, so I used telekinesis to bring it to me, and then did the same with the gold and silver lumps to Ceasaran. A bead of sweat broke out on my brow. Dirk was always better at telekinesis than I was. For some reason it was easier to move stuff in the ground than it was in the air.

The old man took the metal and shook his head. “It is the last sale for Ceasarean tobacco. We were in business over a thousand years.”

“I am very sad to see you go,” I said.

“It has been an honor to know you, Mister Elmer. You have…”

Yes, I’m ending the excerpt here. It could be that Mister Ceasarian (not to be confused with Caesarian,) had nothing left to say. I could also be that I’m an SOB that sadistically ends an excerpt in the middle of a sentence.

Anyone vote for both?

To find out web in (well tune in doesn’t work,) next Friday!

Here’s the vid.

Dirk Destroyer part 4 Chapter 1

This is Chapter 1 of the novel, Dirk Destroyer's Less Destructive Brother, which means that lots of stuff came before it that you may or may not want to look at in previous posts. This story is a satire, which is not a concept I really understand except it keeps me from being sued.

Chapter 1

Boiler Plate Opening Chapter to Novella

It was a typical morning. I awoke on the dirt. It wasn’t so bad. Long ago, I’d learned how to make the earth soft, like a fine mattress. I sat up and looked around.

A ram and ewe were standing by a small patch of stinkweed. It was the closest thing to grass in sight and the ram was eyeing me as if he thought I might fight him for his precious stinkweed. The ewe was munching placidly. Swampy landed on a rock next to me.

“Need fish?” said Swampy. He said it as a question, as if he was offering me fish, though I don’t think that was his intent. Swampy was a swamprat bird, a remarkably ugly creature, which normally would have the capacity for a few words only. Swampy had a large vocabulary, largely because he was about half as old as I was. I think Dirk did something to him, though I have no idea what. Dirk is cleverer than I am, and though neither of us is magical, we’ve learned to do a few things over the years.

“Need fish?” said Swampy again. When he says that around some people, they feel obligated to go and catch a fish for Swampy, like he was a sheep, or something. I know that Swampy is not offering to fish for me, and he should know I won’t fish for him. I don’t particularly like Swampy, though I’ve known him longer than any other being but Dirk, and I’ve spent a lot more time with Swampy than Dirk.

The stupid rat-bird won’t leave me alone; I have no idea why.

“Stay with Elmer,” says Swampy as if he’s read my mind.

“Wonderful,” I grumble. I focus on the dirt, bacteria, and other unuseful organisms clinging to my body since I fell asleep. After a few seconds, it all falls away. Swampy swoops down and feeds on a worm that must have spent the night with me.

“Well now, I’m clean, and you’re fed,” I say to Swampy – not that I’m looking to start up a conversation with the rat-bird, but I guess it’s better than talking to yourself. “Now it’s time for my breakfast.”

I squat down so that I can lay my palms flat against the earth. I concentrate on vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, proteins and fats. I feel my body begin to absorb the nutrients, until something buts me in the back.

It’s the ram. He’s looking at me as if it’s my job to give him anything he wants. I feel like punching him between the horns, but you never know where Moist might show up to enforce the thirty-fifth idea, so I move away submissively. Swampy flies by and farts in the ram’s face.

At times, Swampy isn’t such bad company.

One of the advantages of living out in the open is that you have nothing to defend. Sure, the sheep were annoying, but they weren’t a threat. They couldn’t take anything from me because all I had were my clothes and whatever I could fit in my fanny pack.

I wandered over the rise that had once been a grassy bluff. The soil was loose and sandy now, with an erosion ditch that led down to the river. How long had it been that way? From the height of the rise I could see quite a ways. I saw lots of sheep, lambs playing, ewes clumped in groups as if they had anything to fear now that nearly all the wolves were dead, two rams were butting each other across the river, probably over a large group of ewes nearby, though maybe over a patch of short grass. There was surprisingly little grass.

“How long has it been this way, Swampy,” I asked. The rat-bird had followed me, as it always did.

“Need fish?” said Swampy.

A single worm isn’t much when you’re a rat-bird, I guess. I was still hungry too. The ram had interrupted my breakfast, and river soil is rich in nutrients. Swampy flew ahead as I made my way down the rise.

The river was muddy; filled with silt. There must have been some flooding downstream, though I couldn’t remember any particularly heavy rain. I didn’t notice rain much since I learned the secret to repelling it. It was a pretty simple trick – one of the first I learned when I was only three or four hundred years old. Every once in a while I let the rain drench me; just to remember how it felt.

I knelt by the river. Swampy waddled over to join me, his greasy wings flailing, and his seven rat-tails stirring up the sand behind him. He stared at me with one gray and puce eyeball. Birds don’t stare at you straight ahead. He didn’t need to say anything, I knew what he wanted. I thought about him farting at the ram and laughed. I leaned over and dangled my fingers in the water. It took longer than usual to attract a fish – it must have been all the silt. It wasn’t very big.

Swampy pounced. That would keep him quiet for a while.

I imagined that my body might still be able to digest fish, but I didn’t try to catch another. I just put my hand flat in the river shallows and soaked up nutrients. It was pretty poor for river soil. Maybe there was some natural disaster going on that I didn’t know about. Plagues, famines, earthquakes, floods – they didn’t affect me much anymore. The first few were exciting, but after you live through a hundred or so, it’s kind of like diarrhea, go about your business and it passes after a short while.

I wasn’t hungry anymore. I reached into my fanny pack for a cigar and noticed that I was down to two. It was a good thing that sheep didn’t like the tobacco plant. I’d have a hard time obeying idea thirty-five if flocks started threatening my cigar supply.

Not surprisingly, I was short on matches too. One of the matches was wet. I pulled it out and smelled it. It smelled like sheep urine.

How had a sheep managed to pee into my fanny pack and onto one, but only one, match?

I was just glad the other matches were all right. I once spent a couple centuries trying to figure out how Light Bringers made fire come out of their fingertips. It would be a useful skill to have, but I couldn’t learn the trick. I asked Lenny Bruise to teach me once and he made fire come out of his middle finger.

“Flick – you, Elmer,” he said or something like that. I can’t quite remember exactly what it was.

I guess that meant no. Maybe Light Bringing wasn’t a skill, but actually magic. I always expected magic to be more dramatic.

“Well Swampy,” I said, “if I don’t want to run out of cigars, I better go see the Ceasarans.”

“Going to town,” said Swampy.

I fished the earth for gold or silver. It’s a lot like soaking up nutrients, but I had to stop the mineral before it entered my body. There was still plenty of precious metal in the ground, and it only took a few minutes before I had a decent sized wad of silver, and a smaller one of gold which I put in my fanny pack. I did a similar thing with river algae, drawing it up into a couple of rough bar-shaped lumps. I pushed the moisture out of the bars, along with any harmful bacteria. Algae bars might not taste good, but if there was a famine in the land, one of these would keep a body alive for a day or two. I wanted to keep the Ceasaran family alive. They were the only cigar-making family I knew, and had been selling me cigars for… well, quite a while.

I didn’t bother asking Swampy if he was coming. Of course he was coming. The stupid rat-bird never left me alone.

I might mention here that I created the character Swampy before I ever saw Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, though I imagine the screenplay writer had the concept first.

Sometimes muses mess with us like that. Here's a clip from the movie.