Sunday, November 25, 2001

Jimmy and his Noise.

Jimmy was pretty dumb in the head, but one day he thought he had come up with an idea. He figured out how to make this really funny noise with his mouth, and he'd keep himself amused for hours making this sound. Sometimes he'd do it in front of a mirror so he could watch how funny looking he was when he made this funny sound (he was very funny looking), and sometimes he'd just make this sound while he was laying in bed at night trying to fall asleep. But this one day he got an idea of how to put this really funny noise to good use. He figured that if he could get on Color Television and make that noise (which Jimmy called "The Noise"), it would amuse the whole world. People all over would hear it and maybe even learn how to make The Noise themselves and teach it to others that weren't watching Television at the time, and this would bring about World Peace. Who could fight when they're amused and making funny noises with their mouths, while their "enemies" are doing the same thing? Jimmy was an idealist.

Now Jimmy was dumb, but he wasn't stupid. At least not really really really stupid. When he wasn't sniffing glue. So he went right out and hired a lawyer to patent the mouth noise process (US Pat. No. 38464537839), and trademarked the phrase The Noise® and World Peace®, and then set out to find a Color Television camera to get in front of.

The first camera he found was in an alleyway near his house. The camera had a big 7 on the side of it, and a Television newsreading `personality' in front of it. They were shooting a made-for-Television-news documentary about the dangers of sniffing wallpaper paste and drinking BBQ sauce. Jimmy leaped in front of the camera and made The Noise. Everybody laughed hysterically, even the Television `personality', who was demonstrating how to drink BBQ sauce at the time. She was laffing so hard that she shot BBQ sauce out of her nose and mouth. And her ears too. The camera man fell over with his camera, whereupon it exploded and burst into flames, burning and scarring his face permanently, but still he kept laffing. To this day, he can't even tell the story about how his face became horribly disfigured without laughing uncontrollably. Tragically, however, the videotape didn't survive the explosion, so The Noise never aired.

The next day Jimmy was sniffing glue and watching Color Television, and he saw a live segment being aired from a local bingo hall. For some reason that was the most exciting thing going on in town at that time, so that's what they had to put on Television. It wasn't too far away so Jimmy walked over there, ready to thrust World Peace® on the world. He asked the camera people if he could make a funny noise on Color Television, and they said yes, but he'd have to wait until a commercial for cream corn had finished. Jimmy decided to spend this extra time warming up the important muscles of the body. He let loose with a practice Noise, and out of nowhere a tiger that had escaped from the zoo jumped on Jimmy and was about to eat him alive, except that it was frightened away by the sound of the entire bingo hall laughing. Eventually somebody got enough composure to call the police. By the time the cop showed up, the tiger was long gone, so he shot some woman in the leg instead. They had to cancel bingo because the guy who reads off the pingpong balls couldn't stop laffing. After all that, they decided they didn't want Jimmy to make his Noise anymore, lest it attract more angry tigers. Jimmy left unhurt, but saddened.

A couple of days later it was Halloween, and Jimmy dressed up as the Devil and went trick or treating alone, because he had no friends. Eventually he ended up at a weird church that was open because it was also Sunday, in addition to being Halloween. It was the First Church of Televangelism. There was a preacherman with a gold suit and a solid gold bow tie, and they had television cameras so they could broadcast his ramblings and tongue-speakings to all the backward people of the world on UHF. The preacherman, who's name also happened to be Jimmy, was the most popular fanatical nutcase in the world, and there he was preaching to an audience and the Color Television cameras, for broadcast the next week. Now was Jimmy's chance.

As Jimmy walked up to the pulpit in his Devil costume, people gasped. For some reason they thought he was the real Devil because they didn't notice the rubberband that held the mask on his face, and they'd forgotten that it was Halloween. Jimmy jumped in front of the cameras and made The Noise.

There was a shocked few seconds, and then everyone started laughing and cheering, falling in the aisles and crying with joy. The cameras had caught it all on videotape. Before long, the entire congregation was jumping on the stage, pledging their allegiance to the Devil and promising their souls and children to the Dark Side. When the show went to air the next week, they had edited out the part with Jimmy in the Devil costume. They didn't feel it fit the format of the show.

On his way home he walked through the alleyway where they had been shooting the wallpaper paste and BBQ sauce documentary, and saw they had discarded the tub of wallpaper paste there. So he took it home and had eaten all of it by the time the sun came up.

He stayed in bed a week after that, and by then the president, who was named Big Brother, was coming to town to make a speech about how we need to have a big war to help his upcoming re-election. Jimmy had realized a few things during his wallpaper paste induced coma. One of those things was that he needed to get his Noise on Color Television before a war broke out, because The Noise was the only thing that could stop it. He also had decided that he would have to spread the word on live Television so that they couldn't edit it out. So how better to spread the word than to steal the limelight from the President?

He took the bus to where the President was going to be talking. He got there early so he hung around, thinking about how great it was going to be. How he would show the world that war wasn't necessary, and how he would single-handedly usher in a new era of peace and all that kind of crap. But he must have been thinking these things too hard, because the Secret Service's mind reading machine detected too much thinking about peace and love, and Jimmy was quickly apprehended, tortured and shot to death. It was reported in the media that he was really there to assassinate the President, and so nobody cried at his funeral.


Bonefish Sam has won countless awards for literature.

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