Blog Love Omega Glee: Grudgefucking: The Musical (20 September 2012)

"So I think I solved the mystery of who sicced the literary genius of Bruce Goose upon me," Francine tells Jake on the phone.

"Who?" Jake says, staring at a picture of Dick shaking hands, er, tentacles with a group of students on the wall of the high school classroom.

"You."

"Me?"

"He sent me another email today. In it, he asked if I had Hank's email address. You know Hank, his buddy whom he worked the Democratic National Convention with."

"Uh, oh. I think I know who he is."

"Oh, you're going to pay for this one, buddy."

"Hey! I didn't do it on purpose. He must be the crazy old guy I worked with one night. He kept asking me questions all night. I probably told him the name of your blog. I don't remember. It was a long night. He never shut up but he never said he was a poet though. He just kept complaining about his ex-wife who was a poet."

"He seems to be new to the world of poetry. He's also writing a musical."

"A musical?"

"Yes, a musical. Get this. It's called Grudgefucking. And just to let you know it's a musical, it's subtitled so the entire title is Grudgefucking: The Musical."

"I take it that it's going to be an off-Broadway sort of thing."

"How far off-Broadway can you get? It's about a guy who's bitter about his wife cheating on him and their divorce so he sets about getting revenge by having sex with her best friend, her sister, her mother, her niece, her co-worker, her neighbor, her . . ."

"I get the idea. Somehow I think The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus would make for a better musical."

"I don't know. He sent me an MP3 of one of the songs. It's pretty catchy. It's called 'Love, I'm Not Over You. If I Were, I'd Be Defecating'."

"'Love, I'm Not Over You. If I Were, I'd Be Defecating'?" Jake says, then coughs as he sees the first student enter the room.

Jake waves to the student and tells Francine, "Well, I'd 'love' to hear more about it, but I have to go. The students are starting to arrive."

"Oh, don't worry, you'll hear more about it. I gave him your email address. See you later, 'Hank'!"

Blog Love Omega Glee is a novel by Wred Fright about two bloggers who fall in love while the world falls apart, which is being serialized on his blog. To start reading from the beginning or read another installment, please visit Blog Love Omega Glee Central on WredFright.Com. If you like what you've read, or you've read all of Blog Love Omega Glee and want more Fright, then please read his first novel.

Blog Love Omega Glee: Talk Like A Pirate, Write Like A Poet (19 September 2012)

To celebrate talk like a pirate day, Francine is working on converting the following rant into piratespeak: "Conservative commentators are intellectual prostitutes. Even if liberals came up with dumb ideas from time to time at least they mean well. You can't say the same about conservatives. The only honest ones are libertarians. We might be wrong but at least we aren't bending over backwards logically and morally in order to attempt to justify things, once you've cleared away the intellectual cover stories, such as exploitation, theft, fraud, and murder. People in the future who study history will think the people of our time were awful for tolerating sweatshop exploitation, economic injustice, and environmental degradation the same way that we find hard to believe today that people in the past tolerated slavery, bigotry, and royalty."

She threw in that last bit about royalty for Ringo who was ranting about that the other day when he dropped in for a visit before hitting the road again.

She's only gotten as far as "Conservative commentators should walk the plank" when she hears her email ding and can't resist checking. It's from Bruce Goose and says, "Sorry I forgot about these two. I spilled coffee on my keyboard and hit send prematurely. By the way you don't know of any open mics soon, do you?" and includes two more poems:

"A New Definition Of Sad"
5 years on
From our wedding
My wife
Called me at work
She wished me
A happy anniversary
I mumbled
Something similar
After work
I didn't go
To the Italian restaurant
We usually went to
Instead
I went to Arby's
By myself
Afterwards
I went to the movies
Again
By myself
Given the circumstances
I had
A good time
Where was my wife?
I don't know
Probably fucking
Her new friend
Hey
At least one of us
Ended the evening
In the traditional way

and "A Toast To Mr. Flood"
If you have not read "Mr. Flood's Party" by Edwin Arlington Robinson, you really should.
And, if you have read it, then you should reread it because it's a great poem.
Hell, I like it so much that I reenact it every night.

Reading the poems reminds Francine of a pirate joke:

Who's a pirate's favorite poet?

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrthur Rimbaud!

Especially after the crew has cut his throat and chopped off his hands!

Blog Love Omega Glee is a novel by Wred Fright about two bloggers who fall in love while the world falls apart, which is being serialized on his blog. To start reading from the beginning or read another installment, please visit Blog Love Omega Glee Central on WredFright.Com. If you like what you've read, or you've read all of Blog Love Omega Glee and want more Fright, then please read his first novel.

Blog Love Omega Glee: Hank Plays A Prank (18 September 2012)

With the presidential election in full effect, Francine has been blog, blog, blogging away. Listening to "Get 'Em Out by Friday" by Genesis, she checks her email to find some poetry submissions.

Poetry submissions?

The poems are from a poet named Bruce Goose and the note accompanying the poems says that Francine's friend Hank said that she might be looking for material for her blog and he apologizes for the delay but he was busy cutting his lawn.

The first poem is "I Should Have Listened To John":
I should have listened to John.
That harried apartment building manager knew what he was talking about.
We all thought he was an idiot.
He thought the same of us.
We were college students who knew the secrets of the atom and the history of world literature.
But we didn't have enough sense not to try flushing paper towels down the toilet.
While fixing the clogged commode, John started discussing women.
No connection between the two implied.
At least not by me.
I don't know about John.
He said his first wife looked like a Playboy model.
Guys were always chasing after her.
It drove John crazy.
He had to constantly play goalie in front of her vagina.
She wouldn't do that herself apparently.
Finally, someone scored and she and John got divorced.
He's much happier with his second wife.
She's ugly.

The next poem is "To My Soon To Be Ex-Wife":
You amazed me even right up to the end.
That final time, I was impressed with your dexterity.
For it wasn't until I checked the phone records
That I realized that during that last time we made love
You had been text messaging your lover.
No wonder you wanted to do it doggie-style.

The third poem is "For The Lonely Reader":
Dear Reader,
Are you lonely?
I am, too.
But though lonely, you aren't alone.
You have me.
And I have you.
It's not much.
But it's a start.

Francine stops reading the poems and tries to figure out which of her friends is playing a prank on her.

Blog Love Omega Glee is a novel by Wred Fright about two bloggers who fall in love while the world falls apart, which is being serialized on his blog. To start reading from the beginning or read another installment, please visit Blog Love Omega Glee Central on WredFright.Com. If you like what you've read, or you've read all of Blog Love Omega Glee and want more Fright, then please read his first novel.

The Thirsty Bear & The Hungry Snake

Every once in a while, I get the urge to make a comic strip, but rarely do I have time to follow that urge. I drew comics occasionally growing up and even did a daily strip for my college newspaper for a semester or two before I had to give up on meeting cartoon deadlines so I wouldn't flunk out. Lately, when the rare urge strikes and I have the opportunity to follow it, I've been having fun with photograph comics (or fumetto/fumetti as they're known) starring a teddy bear and a snake sock puppet, with the gag being that the bear's a drunk and the snake wants to eat everything. Naturally enough, I call the strip "The Thirsty Bear & The Hungry Snake". Over the years, I've published cartoons with them in Gestalt & Pepper and as a minicomic for Genghis Con, among other places that I, um, forget right now. Anyway, the latest Bear & Snake sighting is on the Facebook page for Xerography Debt. Since I'm not on Facebook, I figure I'd republish it here for the rest of us nonFacebookers. If you're on Facebook, you can friend XD and find out about some cool new zines.

Mickey Hess Is A Blurbatron!

Author Mickey Hess has been perfecting his book blurbing skills over the years and now has honed them to such a degree that he can deliver just in time (within 24 hours) blurbing for any author who wants a blurb for the back cover of her or his book, or the front cover, or, hey, even the spine! When he announced his black belt in blurbing on GalleyCat and The Rumpus, I took him up on his offer to blurb and here's what he said about Blog Love Omega Glee:
"Goons and patriots, get ready! Wred Fright’s new novel scowls at your perfect sentences. There are gorgeous techniques and colorful dialogue, the book’s action, mood, the author himself. There are things this novelist should be allowed to do that the rest of us are not."
Earlier, he had this to say about The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus:
"Brilliantly, it is possible to watch the book in the process of revising itself to death."
Remember, his guarantee is speed, not accuracy, but if you need a blurb, see Mickey!

Blog Love Omega Glee: I'm Going To Open You Up Like A Can Of Beans (17 September 2012)

Trying to keep things peaceful at home and as a result keep Ringo from staying with Francine, Jake takes Ringo out to Lackwood Park on the shore of Lake Eerie before Jake's folks get home from work. Jake and Ringo sit on a bench and watch lake gulls swoop over the shoreline. They've basically run out of things to say to one another yesterday, but Jake keeps trying, "So, what do you think of Mark Cain's new gimmick?"

"The militant vegetarian thing?"

"Yeah."

"It's a stupid gimmick, but the audience being mostly meat eaters should hate him more because of it."

"It seems like a goofy thing to give someone heat. I mean who cares what someone else eats?"

"Ah, wrestlers rib each other about everything. A couple guys are vegetarians but they get a lot of grief. Remember when the bags of spinach had bacteria in them and got withdrawn from the market a few years back?"

"Vaguely."

"Well, one of the guys dug a bunch out of the dumpster behind a supermarket and filled up a vegetarian wrestler's rental car with them as a rib. He also left a sign that said, "Honest, those E. coli bags were blown out of proportion. I'm good. I'm delicious. Eat me!"

"Are you a vegetarian? I hope not. I just realized that my parents have been serving a lot of meat. Maybe you've been too polite to say anything."

"Ah, what they've been serving is fine. I'm sort of a freegan. If it's free, I'll eat it. Animals eat other animals so I don't see what all the moral fuss is about, but the all veggie crunchers have some good ecological points on their side. Did you know that Killer Kowalski was a vegetarian?"

"Really?"

"Yeah. So any wrestler who thinks someone isn't tough because he or she doesn't eat meat ought to think twice."

"I don't know. The Cannibals are pretty scary because they try to eat their opponents. What can a vegetarian wrestler say, 'I'm going to open you up like a can of beans!'?"

"Speaking of beans, I'm hungry. Do you want to go dumpster diving?"

"Uh, not really. Mom probably will have dinner ready soon anyway."

"Say, Jake, do you ever get the sense that you've kind of wasted your life?"

"Your life isn't that bad, man. Just because you're wrestling in the indies now, doesn't mean that you won't get back to the big time eventually."

"Thanks, dude, but I was talking about you."

Blog Love Omega Glee is a novel by Wred Fright about two bloggers who fall in love while the world falls apart, which is being serialized on his blog. To start reading from the beginning or read another installment, please visit Blog Love Omega Glee Central on WredFright.Com. If you like what you've read, or you've read all of Blog Love Omega Glee and want more Fright, then please read his first novel.

Blog Love Omega Glee: Ringo Lingo Bingo (16 September 2012)

"Don't you have a home?" Jake's dad says to Ringo, who sits in Dad's usual recliner using Dad's usual remote control to watch Dad's usual television.

"Not really, no," Ringo says, looking a bit sad under his mop of long brown hair.

"Well, dig this lingo, daddy-o. You're in my seat so beat your feet," Dad says, flourishing his remarks with an abrupt jerk of the thumb.

Ringo looks at Jake, sitting on the couch, for clarification. "Uh," Jake says, beginning to regret taking Ringo in when Mrs. West threw him out, "I think he means he wants you to move so he can sit there. It's sort of his recliner."

"Oops, sorry," Ringo says, getting up and muttering, "Private property is bullshit though."

Dad plops down in the recliner and promptly reclines, "Just a couple of more days, boys, and then it's a hockey night in Lackwood again."

"I was going to watch the presidential debate," Ringo says, sitting next to Jake on the couch.

"Bingo! You're in luck then, Zingo because that's what I'm going to watch. I can't wait to see what O'Couscous wears, or doesn't wear," Dad says, flipping through the channels.

"Yeah, that's great," Ringo says.

"Yes," Dad says.

"Uh, pardon?" Ringo says.

"'Yes', not 'yeah', didn't your mom teach you how to speak proper English?" Dad says.

Jake inhales sharply, "Ringo's mom's dead, Dad."

"No, she isn't," Ringo says, "She just lives in the outer ring suburbs of Chicago. That's kind of like being dead, but technically she's still breathing."

"I thought you told me that your mom was dead?" Jake says.

"Well, she is to me. We had a big falling out when I took up wrestling. She wanted me to be a dentist."

"So, you do have a home?" Dad says, "Why don't you go eat their food?"

"Maybe I can stay with Francine," Ringo says, standing up, "It's still a couple of more days before I'll be on the road again. I don't want to cause any problems."

"No, no, that's all right. Dad's just got a strange sense of humor," Jake says, horrible thoughts of Ringo being alone with Francine flooding his head, "Why don't we go watch the debate at Caffeine Eden?"

Ringo shrugs and Jake leads him out of the room before Dad can say anything else offensive.

When they're gone, Dad scratches his balls and smells his hand afterwards. Ah, the joys of solitude!

Blog Love Omega Glee is a novel by Wred Fright about two bloggers who fall in love while the world falls apart, which is being serialized on his blog. To start reading from the beginning or read another installment, please visit Blog Love Omega Glee Central on WredFright.Com. If you like what you've read, or you've read all of Blog Love Omega Glee and want more Fright, then please read his first novel.