Write Club Ghost Town

Come on. Surely there is one other creative person in our Blogger circle. Someone put their talent where their mouth is and join Write Club! It's gonna get really old if I just post all the stories.

The Pussification of Modern Man : Volume One

by Rush Montgomery III

My name is Tom Norman. Yes, two first names. My family is the Normans. Originally Vikings, they were comprised of the Viking outcasts. While Olef the Strong and Erik the Criminally Insane were busy chewing on branches and kicking the asses of trees to produce their mighty sailing vessels, my Viking ancestors - Kell the Kindhearted and Norman the Nice - were generally looked-down upon by their peers, and given a boat if they promised to sail in the other direction and never come back.

On one particular day, the regular Viking war machine sailed West towards the Americas, where - as an interesting side note - they were all abducted and dissected by aliens. The Normans, captained by the ever friendly Norman the Nice, sailed into Scotland, where they quickly had their asses kicked crooked.

After the battle, the Normans and Scotts decided it might be better to just shag a little, and this produced the Scottish Normans. My great-grandfather Shaney Norman was the guy who suggested potatoes might be a good source of food.

His son, Mallory Norman, inherited the family’s potato farm and grew it into Scotland’s largest potato production facility. The Norman family became one of the wealthiest and most-influential families in Scotland. At the height of their fame, there was even an honorary beer named for them. Norman Special Hopps or something like that.

Mallory’s son, Vermil, was a tinkerer. He was interested in odd contraptions and science. As a child, he would often build bombs to blow up chicken coops, much to the village’s dismay. He soon inherited the family potato production plant, and quickly upgraded it with the latest in potato processing machinery, opening a new division to produce chemicals that would revolutionize the way potatoes were grown. Vermil Norman became the accidental inventor of an anti-root vegetable bomb which exploded across Scotland, producing what history refers to as “The Great Potato Famine”.

The Normans quickly spawned a following. A following of people who seethed with hatred at the mere mention of the Norman name. The Norman surname even spawned its own word for the entire world to use in mockery - normal. Normal was a word that cursed a person to limbo, by not being much of a threat against anyone, but also not being much help. To be normal, meant that you were neither here, nor there, but just kind’a stuck in the middle - lost in obscurity.

The Normans were then moved far away from Scotland, to do harm on another land of people that was reportedly made up of the same kind of tinkering riff-raff shipped out of England during the "Purification", which most Americans refer to as Independence Day. There are always two sides to every story, as my conspiracy theorist friend Stan always says.

My grandfather, Shamus Norman, was a captain in the Navy. In 1944, during a major battle with the Germans, he dove off of a sinking oil tanker, swam 3 miles in the icy waters of the North Atlantic, and climbed on board an unsuspecting nazi U-boat. Before they knew what hit them, he tore open the hatch, dove into the submarine, slit everyone’s throat, and single-handedly drove the bastard back to the American shore... This morning I got a paper cut reading my Danielle Steel novel and it hurt so bad I cried like a lost kitten in the fetal position for 3 hours.

Shamus Norman planted soybeans, cotton, corn, potatoes... He tilled the soil, marched the field watering and inspecting, day after day with the hot sun blistering down on his dark, muscular, sinewy skin. He single-handedly plowed up 15 acres, and planted all his crops with a manual plow that he pulled himself. I spend most of my time digging through mushy eggplants at the grocery store and complaining that their tangerines aren’t as fresh as I’d like them to be.

My grandfather is the type of guy who suffered 3 heart attacks in a span of 4 years, and never once went to the doctor because he didn’t want to be a pussy about it. This morning I called in sick because I was coming down with a headache. The week before, I found a lump on my bunghole and I ended up quivering like jelly on the examining table with the doctor’s middle digit up my piehole, only to be diagnosed with what the medical profession calls a hemorrhoid.

My grandfather still lives today in a house that he built. He just walked in the forest and kicked the shit out of some trees. Beat them down with a double-bladed axe and whipped them into a log cabin. He built all the furniture - coffee tables, chairs, dining room furniture. He wired the electricity, laid the plumbing, did all the carpentry. I once bought a desk from IKEA, had it delivered and then ended up on their tech support line for 4 hours trying to get help translating Dutch instructions into English. I ended up hanging up and paying my 10-year-old nephew to put the damned thing together.

All of the advancements of my ancestors were done with sticks and hammers and shoe leather and sweat and tears, and although the Normans fucked up, they accomplished things. I sit here at my PC doing nothing. I’ve sat at my PC doing nothing for the past 30 minutes, because I can’t make the damned thing start.

Vikings plundered civilizations with a tree log boat and axes, and I can’t make my computer start. My computer that is so smart and fast, and without which my own personal life doesn’t exist.

If the Vikings had seen a computer back in their day, they would have either smashed it to bits for being so odd looking, or worshipped it like a god. I can’t even get a fucking C prompt.

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