Everyone's Blog Novel

By Jon Morgan Davies

Everyone wants you to read the book on which he or she is working, a novel everyone is writing in order to find the meaning of life, with which everyone’s spouse ran off. But everyone has to finish the novel before everyone can know where the novel begins. In the meantime, there are all these distractions, such as the twelfth-floor window at the office building where everyone works out of which people or maybe just one person keeps jumping or falling--everyone isn’t sure--or everyone’s sexy coworker Sam, whom everyone is struggling valiantly against to keep from becoming a paramour. It’s kind of pitiful, actually, the way everyone keeps begging you to read, sending you e-mails, dropping it into conversation (“I have a book, you know?”), posting links to it on social-networking sites. Everyone figures that if he or she begs enough, you will break down and try it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Sep 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781329768611

Book preview

Everyone's Blog Novel

Everyone’s Blog Novel

by Jon Morgan Davies

Copyright © 2015 by Jon Morgan Davies

This work is published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC 4.0: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

You are free to share (copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) for any noncommercial purpose, provided you give appropriate credit, link to this license, and indicate if changes were made.

First Printing: 2015

ISBN: 978-1-329-76861-1 (e-book)

http://no1bag.angelfire.com

Everyone Starts a Blog

Everyone started a blog. The blog was a novel in progress, and it wasn’t very good. It wasn’t very good because everyone’s dog kept barking. Everyone’s four children were always letting the dog out, and outside, the dog barked at the dark as if the dark were an overweight squirrel.

The blog was to help everyone find the meaning of life. Originally, the children had been intended to supply this meaning; then it was the dog. Everyone had yet to realize that there was no meaning of life. Everyone thought that the meaning of life was playing a very long and difficult version of hide-and-go-seek.

After work, after the kids were in bed, about the time the dog went outside to bark, everyone sat down to post the blog. Everyone was uncertain what to write in the blog, so everyone wrote about the blog itself. Writing a novel was hard.

Everyone asked the Internet for help. The Internet and everyone were good friends. They had gone to graduate school together. Everyone asked the Internet what the best way to write a novel was, but the Internet was long winded and confused and couldn’t supply a simple answer. So everyone asked the Internet how to find the meaning of life instead. The Internet showed everyone an advertisement. The meaning of life, the Internet said, was for sale. Everyone could buy it. The Internet knew the meaning of life and could give everyone the contact information if he or she wanted it.

Everyone wanted it.

That night, instead of posting a chapter of the novel, everyone wrote the meaning of life to ask how much it cost. It was a heartfelt letter, full of recipes and nostalgia. Everyone hoped that if there was enough nostalgia he or she could get a discount.

The meaning of life wrote back instantly. The meaning of life did not respond at all about the nostalgia, but the meaning of life did answer everyone’s question. Too much, the meaning of life said, more than you have.

Everyone grew despondent. Everyone did not have too much, just a $5092 savings account, a car that squeaked as it bumped into the dips in the driveway, and the dog and four children. Once, everyone had had a spouse, and everyone had thought that that meant something, but the spouse had run away, and now everyone wasn’t sure.

Rumor had it that everyone’s spouse had run away with the meaning of life. That was why everyone wanted to find the meaning of life, but he or she could not confirm the rumor because the meaning of life cost too much and was very good at hide-and-go-seek.

So it was nice to finally be in contact. It was good to have a friend like the Internet, because the Internet seemed to know all of humanity in addition to all knowledge.

Do you know my spouse? everyone asked the meaning of life.

Yes, the meaning of life responded. I know him or her well. Your spouse is very good. I like him or her in the sack.

This struck everyone as an odd statement coming from someone he or she had just met, and now things were awkward. Everyone was uncertain what to write back. Everyone thought about the spouse and remembered him or her. When everyone thought about the spouse, he or she did not think about the sack.

Everyone thought about the blog.

Everyone Goes to the Mall

Some days, everyone went to the Dasney Amusement Park Mall. The Dasney Mall was a knockoff of Disneyland; only it was a mall, and it had all things Dasney instead of Disney: for example, Sinderella’s Bridal Clothes and Dunbo’s Hearing Aids, Banbi’s Taxidermy and Stuffed Animals and Snotty’s Cold and Flu Elixir Shop. Plus, it had dysfunctional rides and long lines. Everything was bright and pastel and had a sheen of lacquer, as if the world were a giant LP with cartoon liner notes.

On this day, everyone took her or his daughter or son with her or him, one of the four. Entry had cost twenty-seven dollars for the child, and everyone was feeling the bite in her or his pocketbook walking around. Everyone and her or his progeny would have to leave to eat lunch elsewhere, and everyone felt bad and cheap about it, but such became requisite when one’s spouse ran away: one was left as poor as a near-sighted librarian without glasses, which was sort of what everyone was. Everyone actually worked for Dasney. Everyone got half off entry to the mall (that is, free for her- or himself), but everyone could still not afford to take all the children at once.

The floor of the candy store in the Dasney Amusement Park Mall sounded like Pop Rawks. The store was a walk-through ride, looping machine arms twisting taffy around for visitors or giant mallets rocking in rhythm, pounding sweet milk from cane. The heart of the store was a computer made of suckers, its parts rotating to 0 or 1 on Popsicle sticks. Everyone stared in wonder. Everyone always stared in wonder, even though she or he had worked for Dasney an amount of time that, according to statistical averages, would have precluded such interest. The reason might have been that everyone’s second child, Star, had a heart of gold. Everyone could identify with metal and hearts and machines.

The child everyone had brought to the mall stood in wonder as well, or so everyone was thinking when everyone noticed that the child’s hand was not in her or his own. Everyone felt a quiver, uncertain whether it was panic or a candy high (the store smelled of bleach and sugar). Unfortunately, there were so many greedy children in Mikey Moose hats that everyone found it near impossible to distinguish her or his child amid the din. The child did not appear to be amid the computer Popsicles or in the pounding room, nor did she or he appear to be in the taffy room or in the peanut peeling quarters.

Where everyone eventually found the child, just as she or he was about to report the child missing, was next to the cash register, inside a giant glass candy bowl. The bowl was full of fifty-pound chocolate bars. The child was sitting atop the heap. Chocolate smeared her or his cheeks, and she or he was still eating.

Everyone warned the child to get out. The child stared at everyone and took another bite.

The chocolate bars were $5092 each, all that everyone had in savings. There was no way that everyone could pay for a bar. Everyone needed the savings to buy a new car. The new car would have room for the four kids and the dog, as well as the missing spouse, though there was no guarantee she or he would ever return to sit in it. The current car was a green that had peeled to gray and smelled of hairballs. It was hard to drive, and everyone often had to pull over after two or three miles to air it out.

Everyone wished that she or he still had the $27 entrance fee.

Everyone hoped that she or he could pay for just part of the chocolate bar, that the store would be willing to cut off the portion eaten and charge only for that. Everyone needed that $5092.

Unfortunately, everyone’s child loved chocolate.

A lot.

Everyone Looks for a Blog Entry Topic

Everyone worked on his or her blog during lunch, writing advance blog posts to give to the Internet late at night after the kids were in bed and the dog was done barking outside. Everyone was in love with the Internet, even though he or she would not have acknowledged it. Much of everyone’s day was spent writing things for it. Everyone was frustrated because he or she did not know what those things should be. Everyone did not have interesting life moments to give to the Internet for his or her blog. This is what everyone needed.

Everyone had been seeking inspiration in cans of Handsome Cola. Handsome Cola was the cheapest diet soda at the gas station convenience store on the corner three blocks from the office where everyone worked. Everyone preferred Popsi Cola, the real stuff, not diet, but everyone was trying to lose weight. Losing weight was essential if everyone was ever again to appeal to his or her spouse. It would be very difficult to wrestle the spouse away from the meaning of life, and everyone needed whatever small advantage he or she could muster. The meaning of life was very persuasive when it came to love. Photos of the meaning of life posted on its blog proved it. In the pictures the meaning of life stood next to thin, happy, smiling people who held cans of Popsi at waist level. It was no wonder that everyone’s spouse had run away. Everyone had taken the spouse for granted, let his or her body drift into some sort of half-inflated balloon state, the skin saggy and punctured.

Everyone was thinking of starting a diet. Everyone had been thinking this for a long while, even before the mate left, like years before, like two months after the wedding. But everyone had had four children with his or her spouse and had assumed that that—that fact—was enough to keep the spouse grounded. Everyone had not counted on the meaning of life showing up.

Everyone’s e-mails to the meaning of life had gone unanswered after the first night everyone had written, having gathered the meaning of life’s contact information from the Internet. The Internet knew every person in the world. Everyone was beginning to think the meaning of life might be playing a trick, that it might not actually know everyone’s spouse as it had claimed.

Maybe it hadn’t even really been the meaning of life. Maybe the true meaning of life was still out there, everyone thought. The meaning of life everyone had written certainly hadn’t been what everyone had expected, except that the meaning of life appeared to be successful and happy, at least in