Randomedy: Novels with Structure, Organization, Fluidity, Cohesion, and Clarity Are for Losers

By Nathan Andrew Roberts

An Islamo-facist terrorist with shifty eyes who ends up being nothing more than a red herring. A CNN anchorwoman who is too attractive to have gotten her job based solely on her questionable credentials. A wizened and respected CNN anchorman whose famous beard could be its own situation room topic. A nuclear physicist with precognitive abilities and fondness for being killed by buses in the first act. A black man/rap mogul who goes against type and actually lives to the end of the movie. A flatfooted rookie cop who kills a lot of people before all is said and done. A liberal congressman who never met a regulation he didn't like. An aging movie star desperate for attention. Two British Lords ripped from their own time and get a lesson in modern racial etiquette and fighting techniques. A teenage girl on a journey of self-discovery and other-discovery. Two sarcastic Gen Xers who die and nobody cares that they die. A spaced-out feminist folk singer with hairy armpits and terribly broad definitions of rape. A nameless couple who fights all the time and use their kids as emotional weapons against each other. Two Mafia musclemen who try their hardest to not bolster stereotypes about their culture.
What do these people have in common? In the real world; absolutely nothing. In my fantasy world I've thought up so I can escape the harsh and overbearing realities of life? Everything. They come together (except for the fighting couple; they're just filler material and give me some space to backhandedly complain about the bad parents of the world I see) and stop a diabolical villain from blowing up New York City.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: May 19, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456727567

Nathan Andrew Roberts

Nathan Roberts attended and graduated from Faith Baptist Schools in 1998. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 2004 with a Bachelor's Degree in Communications. In 2009, he realized a longtime dream of becoming a published author, when his first novel; Other-Land and the Extraordinary Birthdays, hit the market. He is a single father of four beautiful children. He also owns four dogs. His kids and his dogs keep him pretty busy. He is very active in organized sports, playing soccer, volleyball, and softball leagues year-round. He currently works as a substitute teacher in many districts surrounding his hometown of Flint, Michigan. He absolutely loves this job and wishes he had gotten into teaching earlier in his life. He is currently working on a teacher's certification from the College of Education at Saginaw Valley State University.

Book preview

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1

Out of My Way, I Really Have to go Chapter Number 2:

2 Chapter’s Company, 3 Chapter’s a Crowd:

Breaking the 4th Chapter:

Cinco de Chapter:

Half a Dozen-th Chapter:

And on the 7th Chapter I Rested:

The Elite 8 Chapters:

There are 9 Chapter Positions on Every Baseball Team:

To Multiply the 10th Chapter by any Number, You Just Add a Zero:

Would You Think Me Weird if I Told You I have 11 Chapters and 11 Toes?

The Dozen-th Chapter:

Friday the Chapter:

The Perfect Chapter x 2:

The 15th Chapter Just Entered 9th Grade and got his Driving Permit:

SKU-000435608_TEXT.pdf 16 Chapters SKU-000435608_TEXT.pdf

There are 17 Chapters in This Book:

This is book is dedicated to the wonderful students I had the distinct privilege of teaching in the winter, spring, and fall of 2009; my first foray into the amazing world of substitute teaching. All of you very special kids at Davison, Kearsley, Goodrich, Swartz Creek, Montrose, Corunna, Flushing, Carman-Ainsworth, Beecher, Saginaw Township, Linden, Brighton, Howell, Owosso, and Mount Morris districts were the reason why I fell in love with the profession. I told some of you I would dedicate my next book to my students, and I’m a man of my word.

PREFACE

I felt that I had lost my Funny. That’s what I tell anyone who asks me about my motivation to write a comedy novel. I was about a year into a bitter and drawn out divorce. Loneliness and despair felt like tangible entities that were suffocating me. I was crying all the time in my private moments. I had lost a steady job due to depression and letting my performance slide. I had gone through my first holidays without my wife. All I did when with my friends was complain about my situation. It was up in the air as to whether or not I would get custody of my children.

I felt that I had lost my Funny.

It’s easy to lose one’s Funny. Just have something happen which drastically shifts your perspective and/or overwhelmingly dominates your thoughts. It’s not that hard to get it back. Prayer and distraction were what did it for me. Prayer in the form of my own and that of my friends. Distraction in the form of writing, overhauling my eating habits, taking up running, making new friends, going back to college, finding a job (substitute teaching) that I love, sports, and dreaming about the gorgeous, intelligent, engaging, and funny woman who possessed impeccable moral values that would someday come and save me from my crushing emotional pain. The last has yet to happen so if there are any takers…

I wanted to get my Funny back.

So I started writing this book. My first book contained a lot of the pain of my divorce. It wasn’t all that cathartic as all I did was brood on my divorce and the characteristics of my ex when formulating my villain. I wanted to get my Funny back. I hope this book has done it for me. I started writing a novel with a silly plot. Then I started writing a novel with a silly plot that had chapter openings in which I ranted and raved about things not connected with the silly plot that bother me or things that I wanted to make fun of but never found the right forum. I started testing some of my material in the classroom (once the students finished their work, of course) and found that I had found my Funny. I started posting snippets on Facebook and found that I had found my Funny. I started showing parts of this book to my besties and found that I had found my Funny. If anyone reads this book and doesn’t find it funny then I hope they are gracious enough to not say that I haven’t found my Funny but that their Funny and my Funny just don’t meet eye-to-eye.

So I decided to finish and write a book with no cusses, only one or two euphemisms, only fleeting references to substance abuse, sex, and other crass subjects; basically a book my students and fellow Christians could read.

I succeeded. I hope.

I have no doubt I will offend some people with this book. I’ve offended more than a few Facebook friends but made many more LOL. There are some societal groupings that take a few big hits (single mothers and Catholics, I’m looking at you right now) and some groupings that I make fun of in other unflattering ways. I hope I can be forgiven and that anyone who is offended by their group taking a hit can find something else to laugh at in this book, and realize that comedy is more often than not offensive to somebody. In asking for forgiveness up front I would remind them that this book is not profane or vulgar and that’s got to count for something in the current postmodern world of what passes for comedy nowadays, right? I would also remind them that I make fun of myself and my pathetic life, that I make fun of both Republicans and Democrats, and so on and so forth.

Please don’t be angry and just be happy for me. After going through a lot of pain I’ve found my Funny. It was like welcoming an old friend back after too long a hiatus.

I missed him.

Chapter 1

REALLY DEEP…STUFF

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Author’s note: Interesting word, taught. Root word teach, is a verb similarly spelled to other verbs preach, reach, leach, but the past tense of those words are not praught, raught, or laught.

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This is a story about, uh…things. This story about things contains commentary on some stuff. This story about aforementioned things and containing commentary on aforementioned stuff will teach you something about love, friendships, family, and life in general. If I don’t get to teaching you about those things, you had your eyes closed when reading this story, man. And if you had your eyes closed when reading this story, then you couldn’t have read it at all, which means there was no way you were going to be taught about anything, because you couldn’t perceive the words on the page. So don’t blame me for you dropping thirty-two-ninety-five (actual price TBD) plus tax (unless you live on a military base, and you can keep your six percent and use it to put your kids through college someday) on this chunk of wisdom bound and glued together for less than the cost of a second ride on the penny-horse at your local supermarket just so you could flip the pages with your eyes shut. Like the old adage goes, man; if you walk around your whole life with your eyes closed, you can’t smell the roses. If I sound like I was high when I wrote this, it’s just because I’m possibly too real for you, man.

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Author’s note: Someone has to tell these folks that Golden Labrador puppies saying What’s up, dog? to each other just ain’t funny. I would if I wasn’t afraid of being sued out of existence.

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This story will make you groan. I’m not talking about certain types of groaning. Not the type of groaning you do when you see Tina Fey doing her impersonation of a real actress (poor nearsighted little dear, she tries so hard, every Thursday at 9:30, 8:30 Central), no. Not the type of groaning like what happens when you watch the trailer for the eighth live-action-animals-with-moving-lips-and-voices Disney is bringing to theaters before the month of May that year. Not the type of groan like what is induced when you attend a suicide bomber convention and you realize Mohammed from the rich side of Cave is wearing the exact same rhinestone-studded dynamite vest as you are and you have to leave and change, otherwise being seen like that would be social death and you had already made a fashionably late entrance and your wife(ves) has(ve) been nagging you about how she’s(they are) sure your babysitter has been stealing Q-Tips. Not the type of groan like what comes when your dad is beating you with a leather strap and you are in the fetal position looking for a happy place and telling yourself you only have a few more years until adulthood and the end of this nightmare. Not the type of groaning we have all committed by having to endure years of pseudo-comedic movies which never seem to tire of You can’t handle the truth jokes. Not the type of groaning you do when Michael Moore is approaching you with cameras and you are an icon of American capitalism and therefore his ideological enemy and you realize you’ll have to bribe him with a boatload of Twinkies to leave you alone. Not the type of groaning you do when you see a white kid from the suburbs with sagging pants, cap on sideways, and walking with a pimp limp.

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Author’s note: I don’t know how many times my readers have vomited on this holiday, but I have done it three times; twice due to stomach flu, once due to an undercooked bird. In fact, the last two times I’ve vomited were on consecutive Thanksgivings. I may have set some sort of holiday frequency-of-vomiting record with my third. The people at Guinness still haven’t returned my calls.

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No, if I could pull this from the ethereal and abstract and actually quantify the groaning you will do when this story grabs hold of you and slaps you upside the head like you’ve offended its sister’s honor and it demands satisfaction with rapiers, at dawn; it is the type of groaning that precedes brutal vomiting. Y’all know what I’m discussing (talking about being grammatically incorrect as it is a phrase ending in a preposition). Nanna’s turkey and cobbler just didn’t sit right, and you go to bed on Thanksgiving night knowing like you were a prophet that you will be bent over your toilet at about, oh, I’d say 3:17am-ish. You know you’re going to blow chunks hours ahead of time, but your gut isn’t ready to pop yet, and to induce vomiting with your finger would just complicate and confuse the biological vomit clock we all seem to possess. You know it’s coming, can’t do anything to stop it or speed it up, so you just groan. That’s the type of groaning this story will make you do.

It’s the groaning of a tortured soul, bloated from its own excesses and self-punishment, that has had the realities of…reality revealed and unmasked, and the soul can’t take it, and must expunge its own horror at the heretofore unknown evils of the hidden realm, along with that extra slab of dark meat with gravy it knew was a bad idea to eat during the Lions game.

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Author’s note: I will find you..

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Mark my words, (they are easy to mark, as they are right in front of you and I have made the publisher agree to large margins for reader notes) anonymous reader/fan of author/unattractive and disillusioned librarian/guy who downloaded this book for free off the internet/cheapskate at Borders who hangs out in their lounge area for hours so you don’t have to buy any of the books you read; you will suffer if you read this book, but it will be suffering you need, or at the very least will build character. On we go, if we dare…muuwhaaahhh hahahahaha.

Out of My Way, I Really Have to go Chapter Number 2:

SUNSHINE, LOLLIPOPS,

RAINBOWS, AND UNICORNS

I imagine Cupid is floating among the clouds somewhere, flinging his arrows here and there, and is inexorably bitter. Zeus can afford love potion-fueled missiles but for some inexplicable reason, clothes and a grown up body for little ol’ Cupid just aren’t in the budget. Who wants to be immortally trapped in the naked body of an infant? Cupid must have shot me the first time I saw both pizza rolls and monkey bread; otherwise, I wouldn’t be in the middle of an eating-induced shame spiral for which there is no foreseeable end.

Anyway, Cupid one day let his bitterness get the best of him and flung some darts at people who never were intended to fall in love, and set in motion a completely ridiculous and improbable chain of events which nearly brought about the end of the world.

The actual end of the world, as anyone who isn’t a frickin’ retard and can read the zodiac signs knows, will be nuclear Armageddon brought on by the many decades of warfare between the allied powers of Google and Starbucks against the evil axis of Oprahphiles. Think about it. Does anyone doubt me and think that Google, Starbucks, and Oprah aren’t trying to take over the world? Google has had such cultural impact that it received its own verb. In the future, all information will have to be sanctioned by and filtered through this mighty overlord of search engines. They will team up with Starbucks because outside of giving their customers a thoroughly rewarding coffee drinking experience, statistics show that smart people use Google (all hail the mighty G), and those people who are smart and use Google or think they are smart and make the rest of us feel unsmart and unattractive congregate in Starbucks. Starbucks is also quietly sneaking mind control juice into their Non-Fat-Mocha-Double-Tall-Frozen-Stirred-Whipped-Shaken-Bloody-Midget Centaur blessed-Sap collected from a tree of 1 year and 6 days under which arcane rituals of famine and drought have been performed mixed-latte; that is to say, their most popular drink.

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Author’s note: Anyone who has seen her taking her sup knows that even the things Oprah discards make a better meal than to be found at all but the best New York bistros.

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If anyone doubts me on the whole Oprah thing, wake up; and please save me from the retribution of badmouthing Harpo in printed form. Otherwise, I’m sure I have only weeks to live once this baby hits the market. Oprah has millions of soccer moms and sugar daddies with no day job devoted to her, unto whom she bestows gifts of cash and transportation at her pleasure from the bountiful hand at which her worshippers lick the scraps of her board. If you don’t think she has people who will go to war and die for her just to get the chance of going to a heaven where they can watch unending Oprah episodes in which white celebrities act like they have a little bit of soul when they’re on her show, then you need to open your eyes, man. Now, let’s get away from this annoying and disturbing non sequitur and back to the serious story; Cupid nearly ending the world.

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There was a radical Islamo-facist terrorist Muslim guy who was shot with Cupid’s arrow while he was watching CNN news and Robin Meade’s show. He’s not the only one stung by the love bee (Call me Robin, please. I’ll stop the weirdo letters and hanging around your house if you just give me a chance and forgive me for sending you a severed ear as a token of my love) during that show. His name was Achmed, because as all sketch comedy show devotees and parody film writers know, all radical Islamo-facist terrorist Muslim guys are either named Mohammed or Achmed. He decided to come to America and see if he couldn’t hear this Robin go tweet-tweet-tweet. Even though he was a person of interest (not in the way of like, a promising potential business contact or the leader of a cult you have had your eye on for some time) to our government, he found it quite easy to come here, as the current Homeland Security policy of frisk-only-geriatric-wheelchair-bound-females-on-their-way-to-America’s graveyard-so-we-don’t-look-like-we-are-profiling gave Achmed plenty of breathing room when coming through customs. He wasn’t even asked to discard the smelly egg salad sandwich he had unenthusiastically nibbled ever since his layover in Frankfurt.

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Author’s note: Florida is America’s graveyard. It’s gotten so crowded in cemeteries down there that during his final year in office; in a terribly misguided attempt to solve the space issue while simultaneously trying to appear environmentally and nature friendly, Jeb Bush started feeding the newly deceased to the alligators.

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His mood was soured when he could only rent a two-door from Enterprise and vowed revenge by passing gas as much as he could with the windows up and wiping boogers under the seat.

It was a whirlwind romance he and Robin shared. He clubbed her unconscious in the middle of the night and anchor-woman-napped her from her suburban Atlanta home. Six months later, after multitudinous statements and gestures of love from Achmed, along with much more clubbing; she was resigning from her lucrative job as a gorgeous anchor-woman many men watched with the sound muted. She was in Wolf Blitzer’s office one day while Wolfey was chopping up raw rabbit meat and feeding it to his beard.

Why are you doing it Robin?

I know he seems scary, and well, kind of psychotic and murderous to you, but underneath that rough ‘kill the imperialistic West’ exterior, he’s actually quite a softy. Oh, and all that muttering he did under his breath at the company picnic about the vice-bloated and reprobate denizens of the Great Satan was really just his way of complimenting Americans. He really loved your potato salad by the way.

CHOMP!!! Blood splattered all over the floor. Wolf waited until his beard had finished chewing to resume their talk.

How is married life then?

Oh, it’s just heaven. Achy (that’s what I call him when I think I can get away with it without being slapped) said that his other wives back home may accept me or may stab me in my sleep, so, ya’ know, fingers crossed, right! Ha-ha. He lets me speak my mind on Wednesdays and has really lightened up on the arbitrary backhands for burning the soup that one time. By the way, could you do me a real solid and refrain from telling him or anyone else I was in your office alone with you? Being alone with another man is kind of taboo and may just get me punched in the spleen.

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Author’s note: And there wasn’t even a draft to dodge this time.

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Robin decided to go out with a bang. She didn’t ever expect to be an anchor-woman again, so she wanted to use her final broadcast to do something fun and make sure she wouldn’t be asked to come back. She gathered up all the evidence she needed to play her joke and headed for the studio. What she did next made all the sweaty, balding right wing radio and TV commentators collectively say I knew it. It also resulted in many key Democrat leaders either skipping the country on the next plane or taking the suicide pills every Democrat is given when they register with the DNC in the event that any of their insidious conspiracies are unmasked. She would have been cut off as soon as the producer noticed she wasn’t reading the news, but the cameramen working that day were Teamsters and couldn’t be expected to flip a switch on their cameras to turn them off; that would have been going above and beyond.

First off today folks, I would like to announce that this will be my last day as good-looking cable TV news anchor. Immediately across the country, millions of lonely thirty-something men started crying into their Hulk hands.

Secondly, I do have some facts to dispel, but you may not call this ‘news’ per se. For visual aids, she did the quotation mark fingers at the word news so as to help her slower viewers out. Two things were later generally agreed upon during a CNN board meeting. The first was that the quotation mark fingers weren’t really needed at that moment, even for the slower viewers due to the fact she used the phrase per se. The second (and I don’t know why a CNN committee would even feel like they were in an authoritative position to determine this, much less qualified) was that many cynical up-and-coming authors use too much superfluous exposition and unnecessary rabbit trails in their prose. On a sidebar to the meeting notes, they determined that the phrase too much superfluous exposition is redundant.

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Author’s note: Robin put herself in great danger to get these clandestine communications. Robin had to endure several minutes of emotional Force Lightning by CBS Emperor Ted Koppel. Many Bothans died to get this information.

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"I have emails from my bosses and from the powers that be at other major news outlets and memos here which prove a few things some of you have suspected for years. I’ll name them off in rapid succession, as I expect to be cut off any second now.

1. The mainstream media and the majority of its outlets have been in the pocket of the Democrats for years. This despite years of constant vehement protests to the contrary.

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Author’s note: I don’t see how anyone could be surprised by this. Just look at that face. Diabolical.

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2. James Carville is the Devil.

3. The presidency is only a figurehead position. Every president is implanted with a mind control chip through which zombified Franklin Roosevelt can control the position from beyond the grave (in concordance with the ideological stances of his New Deal) and perpetually cultivate the ever growing list of political powers given to one man. He also has the zombie version of polio and still can’t walk.

4. A prerequisite to the job of being a Congressman is having low moral scruples and signing a contract stating that they will engage in no less than three extra-marital affairs.

5. The nine Supreme Court Justices are actually the nine Nazgul, or Ringwraiths as rendered in the common tongue, and have no bodies under their robes. When they aren’t totally misinterpreting the implied powers of the Constitution, they are on a quest to return Paul Bunyan’s axe to their mighty flannel-shirted overlord so he can return from the frozen North and complete his ruthless war on the free forests of America.

6. Al Gore is actually inhabited by the time traveling mind of Doctor Sam Beckett who figured out he could use Gore’s monotone voice and speaking style to bore people into inactivity and semi-comas, thereby consuming less consumer goods and producing less waste for the environment.

7. In concordance with point #1 the mainstream media has with the liberals dishonestly and glibly pretended for years as if the Constitution and the Founding Fathers who wrote it didn’t make laws and policies in mimicry of the moral commandments and belief in the God of the Bible. They have subtly been trying to convince us all that Ben Franklin and company were nothing but a bunch of filthy, hedonistic secular humanists.

8. Every time the power goes out in Boston, it’s really because Ted Kennedy is receiving his longevity treatments, the details of which are rather disturbing.

9. Also in concordance with point #1, the mainstream media has been quietly fomenting class warfare by suckering the lower class and poor into believing that any person of means must have gained their wealth by illegal and immoral methods, fooling the masses with pseudo-scientific conjecture about the environment and our supposed influence on it, treating Darwin’s evolution as a foregone conclusion, showing in a positive light the failed public school system and encouraging people to think that all they and their whiny unions need to stop failing our children is more money, subverting the First Amendment by suppressing any contrarian opinion to that of their own while simultaneously pretending to be the staunchest defenders of Free Speech, forcefully wresting Christmas and Easter from the ever weakening grasp of western Christians through the relentless commercialization and proliferation of non-Biblical figureheads attached to those holidays, encouraging your children to be promiscuous as the day is long, convincing everyone of the supposed ‘inherent evils’ of free-market capitalism, pretending like they and their obscene orgy of lawsuits over the last forty years isn’t what’s driving healthcare costs into the stratosphere, inserting into the news subliminal messages encouraging all women to get abortions no matter the stability of their familial and economic situations, dispelling the point of view that there is no avenue of American life which the government does not have the right to control and regulate, undermining every Republican president with negative coverage (my personal favorite is the ‘Bush is the new Hitler’ series which won many awards, none of them prestigious), relentlessly pushing the homosexual agenda, and; in summary, engaging in subtle and subversive treason against family, the rule of law, common decency, and God in general."

Robin took a long, deep breath. Point number nine was a doozey, and she did it all in one breath. She held up a picture of her new husband and quietly stepped off set. Everyone was so shocked as she left that no one said goodbye, nor threw her the surprise going away party they had been planning. It’s really too bad. I heard the ice cream cake which melted as a result of the un-thrown party was from a bakery which Zaggots had reviewed favorably.

2 Chapter’s Company, 3 Chapter’s a Crowd:

STARBUCKS AND NUCLEAR STUFF

The reader should be aware of a few things right now. All of the people I am describing in the seemingly disjointed chapters following this one are going to play an integral part in each others’ lives. That’s right, this is one of those cliché-rich stories in which a large ensemble of diverse persons through serendipitous ways and means end up crossing paths at different points in each others lives; don’t know each other when they do, and then end up recognizing each other at the climax when they have just saved New York City at the last second from an H-bomb. I already have in mind the actors who I’d like to portray each person, and who I’d like to direct.

That’s right. I am a modern author, not a principled one. This means I don’t write books to tell compelling stories; I write books for the sole purpose of garnering lucrative movie deals so I can get out of the drudgery of having to keep making up stories for you vultures.

That is why my books are full of narrative stage direction, trite, formulaic conversations which don’t last too long for the reader/eventual moviegoer to disengage from the scene, last-second rescues, attractive and voluptuous female cops, nauseatingly happy endings, and really, really short dénouements. Take a thorough look at the books of most authors who have put out material in the last thirty years and try to find the subtle hints authors throw at potential screenwriters. You will see I am not alone in this. I am just the only one willing to admit it.

I just want you to be prepared; and I want those of you who read the book before the movie to take part in that smug satisfaction of sitting in the theater and knowing exactly what is happening next because you are literate and read books; even one as intellectually insulting as this one.

So, for those of you who have gotten this far without selling your signed copy on Ebay and have thought that this book is kind of aimless and the manner in which I have jumped around nonsensical; don’t worry. All of my characters will meet each other before the end in a terribly contrived and illogical manner, and save New York City from a nuclear bomb.

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Adam S. Apple; a nuclear physicist in Seattle, was walking out of his favorite Starbucks. He walked across the street