Only In Ozarium
The revisions of Ozarium are finished. Thank the gods. It took clubbing Discouragement over the head and stuffing it in trunk and dump the pathetic creature in the river (please don’t tell anybody!) and then me driving off with a big smile on my face. This gave me a chance to work on my book. I really, really hope you dig the version when it’s released. This time it reads much better than the last. The original was a complete mess. Big time. You can thank the literary gremlins and Discouragement for making that happen. Should have dumped that creature in the lake long before now. Should have known better to listen to those guys. So, until the release, to promote the book, I'd like to start by sharing a few oddities--guess you could even call outtakes from the original novel--called "Only In Ozarium". If you like watching goofy commercials you might just enjoy these.
Only In Ozarium
Martha, The Rat Exterminator
“Do you know me? I’m Tyler Jim Bobby Elrod the third. You can call me Tyler for short. When I’m not on working at my store or sitting at home in my undies eating Cheese Puff Explosions In Your Mouth and watching the Sledge Hammer put a smack-down on his opponent in the ring I don’t worry with dealing with pests. Don’t have time for that nonsense. Or bugs. Big ones. Big black ones with eight legs. And, if you’re like me, and not one uh those uppity, nose-in-the-air-because-I-drive-an-air-car-worth-more-than-yours-and-make-a-six-figure-salary-that-you-do kinda people living in their sterilized communities in sterilized houses and eating sterilized vegan food and drinking sterilized water you just don't have access to your own pest control device. “Right?“So why not purchase Martha the Rat Exterminator X? It’s the best one out there. It's very reasonable. You can even finance it. You won't even have to give blood or sell a kidney or sell a pinky toe to purchase it. “Look folks, you need to rid those monsters from your home. Clear and simple. This is the best way to do it. Those things can ruin your lives. They did mine until I took charge and ordered a Martha. You need take control of your own kingdom. You need to rid those rats from the village. Those nasty creatures are dangerous, filthy, despicable rodents! You sure as heck don’t need ‘em roamin’ around in your double-wide mobile where your family sleeps. All my kids—the ten from the five marriage I’ve had—are safe n’ sound in their home with a Martha. I made damn sure of it. Believe me, even if my ex’s won't agree with anything else I do or say, they agree with a Martha on duty at all times. “To show you how valuable a Martha is, let's check out a family who was in dire need of one..."
Rats invade a double-wide mobile home. In the living room they scurry everywhere. They take a leap off the back of the couch and a bound onto the floor, missing empty beer cans. And surrounded by these cans sits the man of the house in his favorite recliner. His head wobbles. His eyes are glassed over. Obviously this man is drunk. His mind could be stuffed inside cloud nine, but, in all actuality, is swimming in cloud seven while he plays tug-a-war with a rat that is desperately trying to steal his bag of barbecue potato chips. In his incoherent alcohol-induced language he mumbles, meaning to say, “Let go of my chips, rat!”The rat understand this. The creature bares its teeth and hisses.
In the kitchen the man’s wife is making dinner on the stove. Government canned meat surprise: artificial onion, artificial potato, artificial dill pickle, artificial mushroom-flavor, added with nutritional vitamins, the only thing worth while in this mess of artificial. The smell of the food wafts through the mobile home like a moving shadow. The smell alone could stain the walls and ceiling for all eternity because this young mother uses so much lard it could easily be smeared on the linoleum floor and be used for a skating rink.
This poor wife has grown so tired of dealing with these pests which are running back and forth on the kitchen floor. She feels that she's wasted her life fighting them. Originally her dreams were to be a ballerina instead of a wife married to a husband that gave her six kids. But she loves her kids. She loves her husband. She loves her family more than anything in the world. Unless the world came knocking on her door and congratulated her on winning the Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes. And what would give this fantasy more of an incentive would be the famous actor Roger Rigatooee waiting for her in his expensive air car, the only one in existence that can do mach 7. Then she'd be out of this damn dump.For good.
In a single bedroom where all six children sleep the rats are in full swing. One little girl of about six screams when ten rats take chase after her out of the room and down the hall. The second child, a nine year old boy, a child with more courage than his petrified sister, has watched so many Friday Night Kung Fu Theatre programs he has mastered a set of nunchucks. Proudly, he fights off furry beasts one by one, knocking them this way and that.
Bruce Lee would be proud.
The third child is another boy, close to eight, who loves westerns. He loves watching them so much he has been sneaking his father’s pistol out of it’s shoebox in the closet for a year now, standing in the mirror admiring himself while wearing a cowboy hat, acting all Black Bart-like. He’s even fired the gun at empty beer cans, glass bottles, a neighbor’s shed, a neighbor’s window, a neighbor’s old vintage Chevy Vega, a neighbor’s mailbox, at the neighbor while she was at the mailbox, at the neighbor while she was running away, at the neighbor when she tripped and fell—the bullet missing her scalp by millimeters—, at the neighbor when she got back up and scrambled into her house, and at the neighbor when she barely got inside her home. With this training he felt he was ready to take on anything and has used it wisely by not only shooting holes in the bedroom wall, blowing apart a model of Chainsaw Freckles, shattering the bedroom window, shattering his piggy bank holding a whopping twenty pennies, he’s managed to shatter the wall screen his parents dug out of a neighbor’s garbage. The television already had a large crack split down the middle, anyway.No big loss here. All this he performed, in a Black Bart-like fashion.
The last child, a toddler wearing a diaper--a specialized diaper developed by a company swearing up and down their product does not leak--leaks a healthy pocket of feces where the legs fit snug against the elastic. This minute the child is surrounded by a group of rats. They are hungry. And they are drooling. Evidently they couldn’t score a scrap in the kitchen and have decided to go elsewhere for take out.
What's funny, though, is this baby hasn’t a worry in the world. She looks at them and goo-goos and gah-gahs and laughs and claps her little hands.
A second before the rats decide to make a meal of this weird-sounding creature the front door bursts open, ripping from its hinges. A white fog curls around the legs of a figure that steps into the living room. The face is set in a scowl. Red eyes sink into her eye sockets. There is a curl of the lip. The camera shot makes Martha the Rat Exterminator X appear ten foot tall when she is only four foot seven. She is grey-headed, wears a colored blouse and slacks, and looks quite mad.
After the husband lets loose a riveting, projectile burp with a spray of washed down beer sending a flutter down his esophagus, he loses his tug-a-war with the rat and curses. Then, while his brain catches up, he notices a savior in the mist: “Holy jumpin’ gods in their bubbles! 'Bout time ya, got ‘ere, Martha," he wishes to say, but his incoherent alcohol-induced language doesn't allow it, making his voice a undistinguished babble.
He tries standing up and he falls back into his recliner. His brain just isn’t functioning properly enough to allow his legs to perform the duty.
“With God as my co-pilot, I swear vengeance!” Martha the Rat Exterimantor's voice crackles through a tiny speaker hidden behind her non-movable plastic lips and follows it with a fist in the air, as if she was getting ready to lift off the floor and fly.
Bright red lights flicker inside her pupils.
Martha is ready for work.
She pops two shells in her shotgun’s breech, targets a rat, pulls the trigger, and splatters not only it, but catching three more in the spray, even chewing holes in a wall next to a bookcase which has not seen a single book on its shelve since it was built.
Rats scatter, taking notice to this horrifying sudden turn of events. They aren’t worried with potato chips. They aren’t worried what’s cooking on the stove. They’re definitely not worried about eating the toddler. They’re actually more worried about saving their own fur.
The shotgun goes off again, washing rat blood and rat guts all over the wall. Another blast and pieces of fur and a slice of a rat head lands smack dab inside a pan on the stove. The wife scoops it up. “Yuck!” And flips it over her shoulder and continues working on dinner. Can't waste food in this house no matter what.
Three more rats explode. Their bodies splatter against the mirror where the husband usually admires his ever growing belly. Walls become washed with rat. Panelling on the walls become washed with rat. Lamps. End tables. The coffee table. The wall screen featuring reruns from a pre-Shift era. Each rat is picked off one by one as if they starred in a shooting gallery at the county fair.
Once the job is done, Martha the Rat Exterminator X stands in the living room, an uptick of her chin, proud of her work, cradling the shotgun, obviously approved of her mass murder. “This house is clean.”
Now the double-wide is in ruins. Large holes are punched in the wood paneling and some of the pieces scatter on the floor. Family pictures are disintegrated. Wires hang out of the shattered wall screen like twitching, multicolored worms. So much for the viewing of reruns. The window in the living room is completely shattered with free A/C for all, thanks to the cold wind blowing outside.
However, there is an upside to this: the family are as happy and as content as if redneck Santa Claus pulled up in a four-by-four Ford F150 with a rebel flag waving in the wind and gave them all presents and an empty Mountain Dew two-liter plastic bottle to use as the reservoir to fit inside their 1969 Chevy Camaro's engine, the same vehicle that has been on blocks for five years in their front yard.
“Glad ya saved us, Martha!” The husband has managed to perform his vocabulary. He attempts to stand up, but slips on a congealing pile of rat blood and fur on the carpet and lands face-first into another pile of it.
The kids gather around Martha and laugh and hop up and down and celebrate—except for the toddler who’s diaper is still jammed with poop. The girl is slow-to-crawl into the living room. Martha notices the little girl and reaches down and picks her up and places her on her shoulders.
Toddler fecal oozes out of the diaper and down Martha’s back.
“Dinner’s ready!!” The wife strolls out of the kitchen, holding a large bowl of the greasy substance that looks like a cross between sausage gravy and black mold and what is inside the toddler’s soiled diaper. “Who’s hungry?”
Her family raise their hands. Except her drunk husband who attempts to rise back up wearing a mask of rat blood. His speech has returned to the incoherent and falls back in the muck, passing out.
The picture switches back to Tyler Jim Bobby Elrod the third. “Boy did that family have a time of their lives, eh? What are ya waitin’ for, folks? Put that twelfth beer down and get off that couch and get your butt down here to Tyler Ray Jim Bob Elrod’s and visit our Rodent Quarantine And Kill department and buy yourself a Martha. She’ll be mighty fine to ya and will take good care of your problems! And don’t worry about the wreck of the double-wide, we are one hundred percent sure Slader Corp will offer its assistance for your loss!”
This message is still pending approval from the Slader Corporation™
Only In Ozarium
Martha, The Rat Exterminator
“Do you know me? I’m Tyler Jim Bobby Elrod the third. You can call me Tyler for short. When I’m not on working at my store or sitting at home in my undies eating Cheese Puff Explosions In Your Mouth and watching the Sledge Hammer put a smack-down on his opponent in the ring I don’t worry with dealing with pests. Don’t have time for that nonsense. Or bugs. Big ones. Big black ones with eight legs. And, if you’re like me, and not one uh those uppity, nose-in-the-air-because-I-drive-an-air-car-worth-more-than-yours-and-make-a-six-figure-salary-that-you-do kinda people living in their sterilized communities in sterilized houses and eating sterilized vegan food and drinking sterilized water you just don't have access to your own pest control device. “Right?“So why not purchase Martha the Rat Exterminator X? It’s the best one out there. It's very reasonable. You can even finance it. You won't even have to give blood or sell a kidney or sell a pinky toe to purchase it. “Look folks, you need to rid those monsters from your home. Clear and simple. This is the best way to do it. Those things can ruin your lives. They did mine until I took charge and ordered a Martha. You need take control of your own kingdom. You need to rid those rats from the village. Those nasty creatures are dangerous, filthy, despicable rodents! You sure as heck don’t need ‘em roamin’ around in your double-wide mobile where your family sleeps. All my kids—the ten from the five marriage I’ve had—are safe n’ sound in their home with a Martha. I made damn sure of it. Believe me, even if my ex’s won't agree with anything else I do or say, they agree with a Martha on duty at all times. “To show you how valuable a Martha is, let's check out a family who was in dire need of one..."
Rats invade a double-wide mobile home. In the living room they scurry everywhere. They take a leap off the back of the couch and a bound onto the floor, missing empty beer cans. And surrounded by these cans sits the man of the house in his favorite recliner. His head wobbles. His eyes are glassed over. Obviously this man is drunk. His mind could be stuffed inside cloud nine, but, in all actuality, is swimming in cloud seven while he plays tug-a-war with a rat that is desperately trying to steal his bag of barbecue potato chips. In his incoherent alcohol-induced language he mumbles, meaning to say, “Let go of my chips, rat!”The rat understand this. The creature bares its teeth and hisses.
In the kitchen the man’s wife is making dinner on the stove. Government canned meat surprise: artificial onion, artificial potato, artificial dill pickle, artificial mushroom-flavor, added with nutritional vitamins, the only thing worth while in this mess of artificial. The smell of the food wafts through the mobile home like a moving shadow. The smell alone could stain the walls and ceiling for all eternity because this young mother uses so much lard it could easily be smeared on the linoleum floor and be used for a skating rink.
This poor wife has grown so tired of dealing with these pests which are running back and forth on the kitchen floor. She feels that she's wasted her life fighting them. Originally her dreams were to be a ballerina instead of a wife married to a husband that gave her six kids. But she loves her kids. She loves her husband. She loves her family more than anything in the world. Unless the world came knocking on her door and congratulated her on winning the Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes. And what would give this fantasy more of an incentive would be the famous actor Roger Rigatooee waiting for her in his expensive air car, the only one in existence that can do mach 7. Then she'd be out of this damn dump.For good.
In a single bedroom where all six children sleep the rats are in full swing. One little girl of about six screams when ten rats take chase after her out of the room and down the hall. The second child, a nine year old boy, a child with more courage than his petrified sister, has watched so many Friday Night Kung Fu Theatre programs he has mastered a set of nunchucks. Proudly, he fights off furry beasts one by one, knocking them this way and that.
Bruce Lee would be proud.
The third child is another boy, close to eight, who loves westerns. He loves watching them so much he has been sneaking his father’s pistol out of it’s shoebox in the closet for a year now, standing in the mirror admiring himself while wearing a cowboy hat, acting all Black Bart-like. He’s even fired the gun at empty beer cans, glass bottles, a neighbor’s shed, a neighbor’s window, a neighbor’s old vintage Chevy Vega, a neighbor’s mailbox, at the neighbor while she was at the mailbox, at the neighbor while she was running away, at the neighbor when she tripped and fell—the bullet missing her scalp by millimeters—, at the neighbor when she got back up and scrambled into her house, and at the neighbor when she barely got inside her home. With this training he felt he was ready to take on anything and has used it wisely by not only shooting holes in the bedroom wall, blowing apart a model of Chainsaw Freckles, shattering the bedroom window, shattering his piggy bank holding a whopping twenty pennies, he’s managed to shatter the wall screen his parents dug out of a neighbor’s garbage. The television already had a large crack split down the middle, anyway.No big loss here. All this he performed, in a Black Bart-like fashion.
The last child, a toddler wearing a diaper--a specialized diaper developed by a company swearing up and down their product does not leak--leaks a healthy pocket of feces where the legs fit snug against the elastic. This minute the child is surrounded by a group of rats. They are hungry. And they are drooling. Evidently they couldn’t score a scrap in the kitchen and have decided to go elsewhere for take out.
What's funny, though, is this baby hasn’t a worry in the world. She looks at them and goo-goos and gah-gahs and laughs and claps her little hands.
A second before the rats decide to make a meal of this weird-sounding creature the front door bursts open, ripping from its hinges. A white fog curls around the legs of a figure that steps into the living room. The face is set in a scowl. Red eyes sink into her eye sockets. There is a curl of the lip. The camera shot makes Martha the Rat Exterminator X appear ten foot tall when she is only four foot seven. She is grey-headed, wears a colored blouse and slacks, and looks quite mad.
After the husband lets loose a riveting, projectile burp with a spray of washed down beer sending a flutter down his esophagus, he loses his tug-a-war with the rat and curses. Then, while his brain catches up, he notices a savior in the mist: “Holy jumpin’ gods in their bubbles! 'Bout time ya, got ‘ere, Martha," he wishes to say, but his incoherent alcohol-induced language doesn't allow it, making his voice a undistinguished babble.
He tries standing up and he falls back into his recliner. His brain just isn’t functioning properly enough to allow his legs to perform the duty.
“With God as my co-pilot, I swear vengeance!” Martha the Rat Exterimantor's voice crackles through a tiny speaker hidden behind her non-movable plastic lips and follows it with a fist in the air, as if she was getting ready to lift off the floor and fly.
Bright red lights flicker inside her pupils.
Martha is ready for work.
She pops two shells in her shotgun’s breech, targets a rat, pulls the trigger, and splatters not only it, but catching three more in the spray, even chewing holes in a wall next to a bookcase which has not seen a single book on its shelve since it was built.
Rats scatter, taking notice to this horrifying sudden turn of events. They aren’t worried with potato chips. They aren’t worried what’s cooking on the stove. They’re definitely not worried about eating the toddler. They’re actually more worried about saving their own fur.
The shotgun goes off again, washing rat blood and rat guts all over the wall. Another blast and pieces of fur and a slice of a rat head lands smack dab inside a pan on the stove. The wife scoops it up. “Yuck!” And flips it over her shoulder and continues working on dinner. Can't waste food in this house no matter what.
Three more rats explode. Their bodies splatter against the mirror where the husband usually admires his ever growing belly. Walls become washed with rat. Panelling on the walls become washed with rat. Lamps. End tables. The coffee table. The wall screen featuring reruns from a pre-Shift era. Each rat is picked off one by one as if they starred in a shooting gallery at the county fair.
Once the job is done, Martha the Rat Exterminator X stands in the living room, an uptick of her chin, proud of her work, cradling the shotgun, obviously approved of her mass murder. “This house is clean.”
Now the double-wide is in ruins. Large holes are punched in the wood paneling and some of the pieces scatter on the floor. Family pictures are disintegrated. Wires hang out of the shattered wall screen like twitching, multicolored worms. So much for the viewing of reruns. The window in the living room is completely shattered with free A/C for all, thanks to the cold wind blowing outside.
However, there is an upside to this: the family are as happy and as content as if redneck Santa Claus pulled up in a four-by-four Ford F150 with a rebel flag waving in the wind and gave them all presents and an empty Mountain Dew two-liter plastic bottle to use as the reservoir to fit inside their 1969 Chevy Camaro's engine, the same vehicle that has been on blocks for five years in their front yard.
“Glad ya saved us, Martha!” The husband has managed to perform his vocabulary. He attempts to stand up, but slips on a congealing pile of rat blood and fur on the carpet and lands face-first into another pile of it.
The kids gather around Martha and laugh and hop up and down and celebrate—except for the toddler who’s diaper is still jammed with poop. The girl is slow-to-crawl into the living room. Martha notices the little girl and reaches down and picks her up and places her on her shoulders.
Toddler fecal oozes out of the diaper and down Martha’s back.
“Dinner’s ready!!” The wife strolls out of the kitchen, holding a large bowl of the greasy substance that looks like a cross between sausage gravy and black mold and what is inside the toddler’s soiled diaper. “Who’s hungry?”
Her family raise their hands. Except her drunk husband who attempts to rise back up wearing a mask of rat blood. His speech has returned to the incoherent and falls back in the muck, passing out.
The picture switches back to Tyler Jim Bobby Elrod the third. “Boy did that family have a time of their lives, eh? What are ya waitin’ for, folks? Put that twelfth beer down and get off that couch and get your butt down here to Tyler Ray Jim Bob Elrod’s and visit our Rodent Quarantine And Kill department and buy yourself a Martha. She’ll be mighty fine to ya and will take good care of your problems! And don’t worry about the wreck of the double-wide, we are one hundred percent sure Slader Corp will offer its assistance for your loss!”
This message is still pending approval from the Slader Corporation™
No comments have been added yet.
