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"The Fall of the House of Douchebag" (Part 1), by Edgar Allan Poe, Cujo DeSockpuppet and NancyGene
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NancyGene
Sep 26, 2023, 3:08:17 PM9/26/23
to
The Fall of the House of Douchebag
a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, Cujo DeSockpuppet, and NancyGene
https://imgur.com/gallery/OPzRCZD
Part One
Standing downwind from the lair of the Dreckweasel on Forestside Drive, it was a foul-smelling and cheerless area as it was three weeks before the government check arrived. All day long Douchebag Willie was fixing the mud on the floor so it didn't cave in for the third time that day.
The wind recoiled from the latibulum of Dreckweasel and turned around and went south. Death lived on Forestside Drive, along with chicken bones, non-running cars and weeds. The roof and the floor of the dwelling were frequently on the same level. Cats screamed and mated. People did too.
I do not know how it was — but, with my first sight of the blue tarp, a sense of heavy sadness filled my spirit. I looked at the scene before me — at the hovel itself — at the ground around it — at the painted
beaverboard walls of this dump — at its filthy windows — and at a few dead weeds — I looked at this scene, I say, with a complete sadness of soul which was no healthy, earthly feeling.
There was a coldness, a sickening of the heart, in which I could discover nothing to lighten the weight I felt. What was it, I asked myself, what was it that was so fearful, so frightening in my view of the Shithole of The Dreckweasel? This was a question to which I could find no answer.
I stopped my bicycle with my mummified cat in the basket beside the crumbling old house, on the edge of a dark and filthy street. There, I could see reflected in the lone street light a clear picture of the dragged bodies, and of the dilapidated shed and its mostly boarded-up windows. I was now going to spend weeks of my life that I would never get back in this house of no talent, this house of losers, this odoriferous hovel.
The house's original owner was named Mildred, who evidently had died years ago but was still listed as the owner. She may still be in the house…somewhere. Her two sons were worthless leeches and lived with her before her death and beyond that. Neither I nor any neighbors had seen the brother or the mother in years, but her checks were cashed every month.
I was now going to spend several weeks in this house of sadness — this house of gloom. Its present owner was named Dreckweasel T. Douchebag. We had been friends on Usenet and we both pretended that Bob Dylan could sing. A letter from him had reached me, a wild letter which demanded that I reply by coming to see him. He wrote of an illness of the body — of a sickness of the mind and a failure to sing in key — and of a desire to see me — his best and indeed his only friend that didn't suspect what a failure he always was. It was the manner in which all this was said — it was the whining in it — which did not allow me to say no. Plus I was a homeless man with little but a bicycle, so any port in a storm.
Although as we had been together online, I really knew little about my friend. I knew, however, that his family, a very old one, had descended from a line that only inbred hillbillies would. I had learned too that the family tree had no branches. The name had passed always from failure to failure, and when people spoke of the “House of Douchebags,” they included both the family and the family home.
I really believed that around the whole house, and the ground around it, the air itself was different. It was not the air of heaven. It rose from the dead, decaying trees, from the walls cats pissed on, and the quiet lake. It was a sickly, unhealthy air that I could see, slow-moving, heavy, and gray. It was if old douchebags and heavily used enema kits had decayed along with several thousand used condoms.
Shaking off from my clothes what must have been a million webs from Joro spiders, I looked more carefully at the squalid shack itself. The most noticeable things about it seemed to be the great smell of human feces and an old blue tarp on the roof, weighed down by ancient leaves from trees that were no longer alive. None of the walls had fallen, but I only counted three, and the plastic siding appeared to be in a condition of advanced snap, crackle and pop. Perhaps the building inspector’s eye would have discovered the gap in the front of the hellhole, a crack pipe making its way from the top to join a dozen other drug paraphernalia.
The shed I spotted was very small and decrepit. The plastic windows were filthy. Only a little light, red in color, made its way through the scratched plastic, and served to warn the cockroaches that the denizens may be stirring. Dark blue paint covered upon the walls. The broken chairs had long since given up trying to support so many obese douchebags. Roach-filled, unsold chapbooks lay around the room, but could give it no sense of life. I felt sadness hanging over everything. No escape from this deep cold gloom seemed possible.
Noticing these foul and backwoods things, I biked over a short weedy driveway to the foul house. A bum sleeping on the sidewalk stole my bike, and I entered the warped and cat-sprayed door. A meth head, of unhealthy and drunken step, thence conducted me, in silence, through the 784 sq. ft. hovel to the bedroom of his master. Much that I encountered on the way contributed, I know not how, to heighten the vague sense of perversion of which I have already spoken. While the objects around me -- while the water stains on the ceilings, the newspaper and tin foil coverings on the walls, the Nelly-blackness of the floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial Perky which rattled as I strode, were but matters to which, or to such as which, I had been not been accustomed in polite society -- while I hesitated not to acknowledge how unfamiliar was all this -- I still wondered to find the bathroom.
In one of the three rooms, I met the physician of the family, a Dr. NancyGene. Her countenance, I thought, wore a mingled expression of high cunning and disgust. She grabbed me with trepidation and took my temperature. The meth head now threw up on the bare floor and ushered me into the presence of Dreckweasel.
As I entered the room, Dreckweasel attempted and failed to stand up from where he had been lying and met me with a warmth which at first I could not believe was real. A look, however, at his face told me that every word he spoke was a complete lie. Dreckweasel had failed again.
We sat down; and for some moments, while he said nothing, I looked at him with a feeling of sad surprise. Surely, no man had ever before changed as Little Will Dreckweasel of the Douchebag Klan had! Could this be the The One True God of Failure of my early years? He had gray-white skin; eyes squinting and full of evasiveness; hair of great brillo pads — a face that was not easy to forget. And now the increase in this strangeness of his face had caused so great a change that I almost did not know him. The horrible white of his skin, and the strange dullness in his eyes, surprised me and even made me afraid. His hair had been allowed to grow, and in its rat’s nest it did not fall around his face but seemed to lie upon the air. I could not, even with an effort, see in my friend the semblance of a simple human being.
In his disgusting manner, I saw at once, foul changes came and went; and I soon found that this resulted from his attempt to quiet a very great fart. I had indeed been prepared for something like this, so I held my nose. His actions were too quick and I had a choking spell.
He began to sing, slow and off-key, quickly changed to a mumble. It was in this strange manner that he spoke of the purpose of my visit, of his desire for me, and of the deep pockets he expected me to give him. He told me what he believed to be the nature of his illness. It was, he said, the Dreckweasel family sickness, venereal disease, and one from which he could not hope to grow better without cigarettes and alcohol — but it was, he added at once, a new infection which he could soon piss away. It showed itself in a number of strange facial tics. Some of these, as he told me of them, disgusted me but he said I just didn’t understand them; perhaps the way in which he told me of them while trying to kiss me added to their strangeness.
He suffered much from a sickly increase in writing his wretched poetry; he could eat only the cheapest tacos; all whores smelled too strongly for his nose; his eyes were tiny and rheumy; and there were few sounds that were not his own voice that he could listen to. A certain kind of super narcissism was completely his master. “I shall die without being famous,” he said. “I shall die! I must die and I’ve never made it anywhere, let alone in New York.”
a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, Cujo DeSockpuppet, and NancyGene
https://imgur.com/gallery/OPzRCZD
Part One
Standing downwind from the lair of the Dreckweasel on Forestside Drive, it was a foul-smelling and cheerless area as it was three weeks before the government check arrived. All day long Douchebag Willie was fixing the mud on the floor so it didn't cave in for the third time that day.
The wind recoiled from the latibulum of Dreckweasel and turned around and went south. Death lived on Forestside Drive, along with chicken bones, non-running cars and weeds. The roof and the floor of the dwelling were frequently on the same level. Cats screamed and mated. People did too.
I do not know how it was — but, with my first sight of the blue tarp, a sense of heavy sadness filled my spirit. I looked at the scene before me — at the hovel itself — at the ground around it — at the painted
beaverboard walls of this dump — at its filthy windows — and at a few dead weeds — I looked at this scene, I say, with a complete sadness of soul which was no healthy, earthly feeling.
There was a coldness, a sickening of the heart, in which I could discover nothing to lighten the weight I felt. What was it, I asked myself, what was it that was so fearful, so frightening in my view of the Shithole of The Dreckweasel? This was a question to which I could find no answer.
I stopped my bicycle with my mummified cat in the basket beside the crumbling old house, on the edge of a dark and filthy street. There, I could see reflected in the lone street light a clear picture of the dragged bodies, and of the dilapidated shed and its mostly boarded-up windows. I was now going to spend weeks of my life that I would never get back in this house of no talent, this house of losers, this odoriferous hovel.
The house's original owner was named Mildred, who evidently had died years ago but was still listed as the owner. She may still be in the house…somewhere. Her two sons were worthless leeches and lived with her before her death and beyond that. Neither I nor any neighbors had seen the brother or the mother in years, but her checks were cashed every month.
I was now going to spend several weeks in this house of sadness — this house of gloom. Its present owner was named Dreckweasel T. Douchebag. We had been friends on Usenet and we both pretended that Bob Dylan could sing. A letter from him had reached me, a wild letter which demanded that I reply by coming to see him. He wrote of an illness of the body — of a sickness of the mind and a failure to sing in key — and of a desire to see me — his best and indeed his only friend that didn't suspect what a failure he always was. It was the manner in which all this was said — it was the whining in it — which did not allow me to say no. Plus I was a homeless man with little but a bicycle, so any port in a storm.
Although as we had been together online, I really knew little about my friend. I knew, however, that his family, a very old one, had descended from a line that only inbred hillbillies would. I had learned too that the family tree had no branches. The name had passed always from failure to failure, and when people spoke of the “House of Douchebags,” they included both the family and the family home.
I really believed that around the whole house, and the ground around it, the air itself was different. It was not the air of heaven. It rose from the dead, decaying trees, from the walls cats pissed on, and the quiet lake. It was a sickly, unhealthy air that I could see, slow-moving, heavy, and gray. It was if old douchebags and heavily used enema kits had decayed along with several thousand used condoms.
Shaking off from my clothes what must have been a million webs from Joro spiders, I looked more carefully at the squalid shack itself. The most noticeable things about it seemed to be the great smell of human feces and an old blue tarp on the roof, weighed down by ancient leaves from trees that were no longer alive. None of the walls had fallen, but I only counted three, and the plastic siding appeared to be in a condition of advanced snap, crackle and pop. Perhaps the building inspector’s eye would have discovered the gap in the front of the hellhole, a crack pipe making its way from the top to join a dozen other drug paraphernalia.
The shed I spotted was very small and decrepit. The plastic windows were filthy. Only a little light, red in color, made its way through the scratched plastic, and served to warn the cockroaches that the denizens may be stirring. Dark blue paint covered upon the walls. The broken chairs had long since given up trying to support so many obese douchebags. Roach-filled, unsold chapbooks lay around the room, but could give it no sense of life. I felt sadness hanging over everything. No escape from this deep cold gloom seemed possible.
Noticing these foul and backwoods things, I biked over a short weedy driveway to the foul house. A bum sleeping on the sidewalk stole my bike, and I entered the warped and cat-sprayed door. A meth head, of unhealthy and drunken step, thence conducted me, in silence, through the 784 sq. ft. hovel to the bedroom of his master. Much that I encountered on the way contributed, I know not how, to heighten the vague sense of perversion of which I have already spoken. While the objects around me -- while the water stains on the ceilings, the newspaper and tin foil coverings on the walls, the Nelly-blackness of the floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial Perky which rattled as I strode, were but matters to which, or to such as which, I had been not been accustomed in polite society -- while I hesitated not to acknowledge how unfamiliar was all this -- I still wondered to find the bathroom.
In one of the three rooms, I met the physician of the family, a Dr. NancyGene. Her countenance, I thought, wore a mingled expression of high cunning and disgust. She grabbed me with trepidation and took my temperature. The meth head now threw up on the bare floor and ushered me into the presence of Dreckweasel.
As I entered the room, Dreckweasel attempted and failed to stand up from where he had been lying and met me with a warmth which at first I could not believe was real. A look, however, at his face told me that every word he spoke was a complete lie. Dreckweasel had failed again.
We sat down; and for some moments, while he said nothing, I looked at him with a feeling of sad surprise. Surely, no man had ever before changed as Little Will Dreckweasel of the Douchebag Klan had! Could this be the The One True God of Failure of my early years? He had gray-white skin; eyes squinting and full of evasiveness; hair of great brillo pads — a face that was not easy to forget. And now the increase in this strangeness of his face had caused so great a change that I almost did not know him. The horrible white of his skin, and the strange dullness in his eyes, surprised me and even made me afraid. His hair had been allowed to grow, and in its rat’s nest it did not fall around his face but seemed to lie upon the air. I could not, even with an effort, see in my friend the semblance of a simple human being.
In his disgusting manner, I saw at once, foul changes came and went; and I soon found that this resulted from his attempt to quiet a very great fart. I had indeed been prepared for something like this, so I held my nose. His actions were too quick and I had a choking spell.
He began to sing, slow and off-key, quickly changed to a mumble. It was in this strange manner that he spoke of the purpose of my visit, of his desire for me, and of the deep pockets he expected me to give him. He told me what he believed to be the nature of his illness. It was, he said, the Dreckweasel family sickness, venereal disease, and one from which he could not hope to grow better without cigarettes and alcohol — but it was, he added at once, a new infection which he could soon piss away. It showed itself in a number of strange facial tics. Some of these, as he told me of them, disgusted me but he said I just didn’t understand them; perhaps the way in which he told me of them while trying to kiss me added to their strangeness.
He suffered much from a sickly increase in writing his wretched poetry; he could eat only the cheapest tacos; all whores smelled too strongly for his nose; his eyes were tiny and rheumy; and there were few sounds that were not his own voice that he could listen to. A certain kind of super narcissism was completely his master. “I shall die without being famous,” he said. “I shall die! I must die and I’ve never made it anywhere, let alone in New York.”
NancyGene
Sep 26, 2023, 5:56:35 PM9/26/23
to
ME
Sep 26, 2023, 6:01:19 PM9/26/23
to
NancyGene
Sep 26, 2023, 7:02:13 PM9/26/23
to
On Tuesday, September 26, 2023 at 10:01:19 PM UTC, ME wrote:
> On Tuesday, 26 September 2023 at 15:08:17 UTC-4, NancyGene wrote:
> > The Fall of the House of Douchebag
> > a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, Cujo DeSockpuppet, and NancyGene
> > https://imgur.com/gallery/OPzRCZD
> >
> > Part One
> Except NG!!!
> On Tuesday, 26 September 2023 at 15:08:17 UTC-4, NancyGene wrote:
> > The Fall of the House of Douchebag
> > a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, Cujo DeSockpuppet, and NancyGene
> > https://imgur.com/gallery/OPzRCZD
> >
> > Part One
We are going to have David Dalton cross-post the short story to 186 unrelated-to-poetry-or-prose Usenet Groups.
ME
Sep 26, 2023, 9:44:27 PM9/26/23
to
NancyGene
Sep 27, 2023, 11:32:52 AM9/27/23
to
NancyGene
Sep 28, 2023, 1:31:00 PM9/28/23
to
Cujo DeSockpuppet
Sep 28, 2023, 7:03:00 PM9/28/23
to
NancyGene <nancygene...@gmail.com> wrote in
news:18ade54f-23c8-454b...@googlegroups.com:
"I'll Sleep When I'm Dead"? I'm thinking Dirtnap and Richard Pryor could
share an ashtray in an upcoming movie.
--
"I've been writing poetry for nearly fifty years, rest assured it's a
poem, Pendragon." - Will Dockery demonstrating why he's a douchebag.
news:18ade54f-23c8-454b...@googlegroups.com:
share an ashtray in an upcoming movie.
--
"I've been writing poetry for nearly fifty years, rest assured it's a
poem, Pendragon." - Will Dockery demonstrating why he's a douchebag.
Ash Wurthing
Sep 28, 2023, 7:09:46 PM9/28/23
to
NancyGene
Feb 22, 2024, 12:24:57 AMFeb 22
to
NancyGene
Feb 22, 2024, 11:06:22 AMFeb 22
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