Coming 2025: Otter Boy
- March 1, 2024
An Odd, Little Novel
Local man Tim has a vision. He has a dream. He wants to be an Otter.
Or does he?
What things in his own way are stopping him...or is it the Universe?
In the make-believe world of Otter Boy's mind, iPhones blared auto-tuned odes to derrieres. The sun, that nuclear inferno millions of miles away, decided to make everything sparkle. Why? Who knows. The universe rarely explains its aesthetic choices. Today's choice was ideal to the Otter Boy.
A gate creaked. It always creaks in stories like this. Out came Otter Boy, as mysterious as a tax form and twice as exciting.
The crowd chanted "Otter! Otter! Otter!" as if he had somehow become the solution to all of humanity's problems. They hadn't, of course. Nothing ever is.
Otter Boy dove. Chris Schenkel, long dead and thus free from having to narrate such nonsense, didn't comment. If alive, he might have been as grandiose as his celebrated Wide World of Sports.
Otter Boy floated, cracked imaginary mollusks. The crowd went wild again, proving that humans will cheer for just about anything if you give them enough sun and the vague promise of entertainment.
READ MORE"How's it crackin', babe?" he said to a woman, who giggled and blew a kiss. In that moment, Otter Boy was a god. A small, wet, mollusk-obsessed god, but a god nonetheless.
That's how it went in Otter Boy's head. Reality, as it often does, had other plans.
In the real world, at the Lusty Pines Apartments (named, no doubt, by someone with a tragic misunderstanding of both lust and pines), the sky was as gray as a philosopher's outlook. A mosquito, nature's tiny vampire, considered Otter Boy's nipple as a potential meal. It reconsidered. Even mosquitoes have standards.
Otter Boy burped. He sipped his warm beer, that ancient human solution to the problem of being conscious. The beer, like everything else, didn't solve anything. But it helped Otter Boy pretend that it did.
And so Otter Boy sat, trapped between the grandeur of his delusions and the mundane reality of his existence. Much like the rest of us, really. The only difference was the otter fixation.
COLLAPSE
Brian Gerard
Brian is now a gentleman farmer. Well, the "gentleman" part is of kind sketchy...but then again so is the "farmer" part. He really is a City Boy but is off on a new adventure. He pretends the rows of corn are tenement housing.
The dude writes books. Not Bukowski is his second with mostly words.
He has appeared on stage both as a comic and as a microphone stand, all dependent if his jokes were funny or not. (That one wasn’t. Mic stand!)
He also is an award-winning photographer person. He has had pictures in Smithsonian Magazine. And in the Post Office.
He won a bake sale once too. He’s a mediocre painter. And a web and design guy.
