Jon Cogburn's Blog

Arthur Fonzarelli (aka "Fonzi," "The Fonz")

I knew him in real life.

He was a screwed up Korean war veteran who seemed to live on benzedrine and cigarettes. When he said that "Aaaay" thing it was usually because he was in such a benzedrine induced haze that his brain went on auto-pilot. He always needed a hair cut and shave, and his skin had that waxy look of the truly unhealthy. He never actually got his motorcycle to run properly. It just sat there on the Cunnighan's lawn in filthy pieces. The Fonz would go on and on about how he was going to get some money together, fix his bike up, and take a big road trip. And he often smelled bad.

Why did we put up with him? (1) The war messed him up something awful, and we felt sorry for him, (2) he was actually extremely well read, far more articulate than people now remember him to be, (3) all violence was directed against himself; Fonzi was the least scariest hood I've ever known. The T.V. show got that part right at least.

Family Circus

Xarlarle initially had a horrible time on the planet Earth.

Nothing made sense to him. What kind of planet only had one sun? And what kind of inhabitants would build structures so likely to be destroyed  by the ion storms generated by two suns? What would that do to one's psychology? Well, one thing was for sure, everything on Earth was slapdash and ugly and the inhabitants didn't make any damn sense.

Unfortunately, Xarlarle's job was to write an ethnography for the higher ups in the Galactic Federation. But he just couldn't make sense of any of it, from the ants with their weird collective houses up to the terrifying giraffes and camels with their (to Jorkakian eyes) obscene nasal apertures. But having benefited from two decades of post-graduate work on the planet Zaurelius (home of three million institutes of higher learning and the main base for the Galactic Anthropology Association), Xarlarle patiently collected data, coding formulas into his virtual omnibus.

After a few years of this, he had a major breakthrough. While doing an exhaustive chemical analysis of a New York City trash barge. Xarlarle discovered a paper garbage bag full of Family Circus comics. Here was something that made sense to the intrinsic geometry of Jorkakian eyes. He could now see that some of the species on Earth were nothing more than representations of the characters on these dead trees. But why had these species thrown their Adam and Eve (and family and cat and dog, Barfy) into this festering dump. What rebellion lurked in their hearts? Was Xarlarle himself not in fact safe among these primitives?

He immediately transponded the entire trash barge up to his spaceship, and had his Jiji servants separate and restore every issue of Family Circus. Xarlarle wanted the comic strip to be comfortable, but did not know very much about the ecosystem of newsprint. He gave one of the rooms on his spaceship (roughly the size of three football fields) to the strip. He dated each caption so that he could study it in order.

Luckily, Xarlarle had taken four classes (indeed, he'd toyed with writing his dissertation on them) at Zaurelius on sequential based life forms (SBLFs), which Family Circus seemed to be an unevolved case of. So he carefully laminated each pane in order in its dedicated room in his giant spaceship.

After years of study, he wrote up his conclusions and submitted them to the prestigious Journal of Galactic Anthropology. According to Xarlarle, Family Circus is first and foremost an artist, but to the primitive earthlings it must seem to be a god. While most of earth evolves entirely by chance and the laws of nature, Family Circus works from outside the laws of nature to give things a supernatural "push" when necessary. The end results are "Families" that more or less approximate various sequences of Family Circus' life. Thus did Xarlarle explain the suburbs, and the even stranger creature, the suburbanite, some of whom actually seem to like spending most of their lives in cars because it helps them to more fully instantiate the mythical Bill, Thelma, Billy, Dolly, Jeffy, PJ, Grandma, Grandpa ghost, Barfy, Sam, and Kittycat.

As a static set of printings, Family Circus lives outside of time, yet it paradoxically exerts control over the creatures it has created in its own image inside of time.

Unfortunately, The Journal of Galactic Anthropology sat on Xarlarle's paper for ten Earth years, before rejecting it with no comments. Two centuries, and five rewrites later, his paper finally came out in The Journal of Applied Sequential Based Life Form Studies (not to be confused with the more prestigious Sequential Based Life Form Studies). By that point, human, dog, and cat life had gone extinct on Earth.

From What Xarlarle could tell, Family Circus is a jealous god and had wreaked a terrible revenge for being put in that trash barge. Xarlarle hoped that his paper on the death of Barfy and Sequential Based Life Form eschatology would get published so that he could get at least temp work teaching anthropology on some backwater planet. If his scheme worked, then the lousy saga of Earth would have served some good at least.

Kaspar/Casper (w/ apologies to Franz K.)

Kaspar was one of hundreds of thousands of Hungarians burdened by a Romany Gypsy appearance during a pair of centuries unkind to such people. He couldn't rise above the ostracizing and as a young man joined a traveling circus.

Though he'd hoped to be a humble roustabout and maybe caravan driver some day, the circus manager saw that he was marked for greatness. "Kaspar my boy," the old man's arm snugly around him, "you are marked for greatness!" Kaspar never knew what to say, the manager's breath smelled like cheap whiskey and decayed meat. It was work not to throw up.

"Kaspar my boy, you my boy are going to be this country's next great hunger artist. I can see it in your eyes."

Well it wasn't so bad. At that point in history the hunger artist had a position (in terms of intra-circus and public prestige) below that of the trapeze artists and animal trainers but actually above the ventriloquists and clowns. And in those days, nobody confused the hunger artist with the gimp, who was really just some gibbering alcoholic living in his own filth, biting the heads off of chickens in return for the booze that was killing him.

As the hunger artist, Kaspar was only allowed to eat in transit. Once the wagons stopped the first thing they did was bring out his tiny cage, just big enough for Kaspar to scrunch into the lotus position on the newly cut grass at the bottom. Then he would stare into space for the three or four days and nights in which the circus stayed there, neither eating or drinking. He never got filthy like the gimp; as part of the show, the circus prostitutes would clean him off with washrags as he stared in deep meditation.

Kaspar was a hit; you could always find his cage by looking for the largest crowds of people come to stare at his emaciated form, and the circus's popularity grew and grew.

Unfortunately, the goddess Kali grew jealous on the seventh day of one of Kaspar's performances. In his vision, she danced before him, necklace of skulls clanging together rhythmically. During that night she tempted him seven times; if he would only eat some of the succulent meat that she brought him all the way from Beneres (and which had been dipped in the river Ganges), she would: (1) remove the taint of Romany blood so he would be accepted by his Hungarian family, (2) get the circus prostitutes to free him from this cage and propitiate him, so that (3) they could start a successful bordello and/or themed restaurant, (4) have the world love him even with his Romany blood and without having to be a hunger artist, (5) give him the willpower to accomplish any task, (6) give him penetrating understanding and compassion equal to that of Vishnu, and (7) give him the wisdom and love of Shiva.

To all of these temptations Kaspar just smiled serenely, even after seven days of no food or drink.

After rejecting Kali's offers, Kaspar discovered that he had the ability to project his astral body at will. And as he ascended into the ether he looked down to see Kali dancing before him in praise of his fortitude.

"Who am I who Kali dances before? That is not me, that is my body, my corpse."

And he saw Kali reach through the bars to wrench the corpse's head off, adding it to the collection on her necklace. She continued to dance.

"I am not that body nor that head. I am Vishnu. I am Shiva. After my time outside of time with Shiva, I will incarnate myself not in flesh, but in ghost. And I will haunt the lands of my Romany forefathers, bringing peace and good humor to all who stare upon my ghostly shape. This is my due. I am Kaspar."

Unfortunately, while he did have enough yogic knowledge to reincarnate as a ghost, he was still abysmally ignorant of geography, so instead of reincarnating as desired at the ancestral home of the Romany Gypsies, he ended up in the United States, over the graves of millions of dead Native Americans. To be fare, Christopher Columbus had made the same error.

And when Kaspar finally learned enough English to help and amuse generations of children, without fail they butchered his name, calling him "Casper." That is O.K. though; he is a friendly ghost.

Superman

I hate to say this, both because some kids look up to him and because he was my best friend, but in reality Superman was a maudlin, self-pitying, jerk. And everyone who ever had the misfortune to spend an evening drinking with him knows exactly what I'm talking about.

I know, I know. I should be nicer about how I put this.

Superman had a bad childhood. He never got to resolve a whole truckload of issues with his parents. He never felt validated by all the human beings surrounding him. And most corrosively, he couldn't make love to a human woman using his "superpowers" the way they did on his planet.

Actually this last point bears discussion, because it is so indicative. Superman claimed to have lost the desire for human women at some point in the 1990's. He claimed that he was so far evolutionarily advanced over them that it was like having sex with sea plankton. And later, when a whole plethora of gangsta rappers started to refer to each other as "dog," Superman was delighted. "That's just what humans are to me, dogs. Some of you are loyal and nice, some vicious, but you are all ultimately dumb, limited, boring, and only of interest to the emotionally stunted who can't form relationships with proper sapient beings." Like so much with Superman, I'm convinced that this was a thin rationale. In fact his prodigious alcohol intake had by that point rendered the whole question of making love to a human woman moot. And if you'd seen his bloated, waxy, sweaty, and frankly stinking self during those last few years you would have to agree with me.

How do you save a savior? Maybe the supersmart people from his destroyed home planet could have figured something out, but all I could do was offer therapeutic, new-age platitudes. "Why not take a break from saving the world and work a little bit on saving yourself?" "You know, it's be 'super' if you went to rehab." It would have been easier if he was uniformly abusive when I stooped to that, but instead he would always say things like, "Yeah, I'm going to try to quit smoking tomorrow and then get back to the journalism thing," or "Well, I've already cut down," or "Give me a break, my girlfriend just dumped me" (see previous paragraph). When I quoted Yoda to him about the difference between saying you are going to try to do something (and he always said that about not drinking and getting back into journalism) and actually just doing it then he would get kind of abusive.

But now he's dead.

A couple of more things. (1) Why did I stay friends with such a self centered moron for so long? Well you don't really pick your friends. You just gravitate to people with similar senses of humor that don't bore you. When you spend enough time with them you end up caring for them. (2) If alcohol didn't bring his superpowers down, then I think the world would be over now. There were plenty of times when he would get drunk and abusive, but in such a state you could knock him over with a feather (as many girlfriends discovered). I actually think in retrospect, that was part of the reason drinking was so addictive to him. . . but here I am getting all therapeutic again.

The truth is, Superman was pretty much an a-hole and waste of space. Ultimately, he squandered his powers because he didn't love anyone but himself. He never took responsibility for any actions. He treated service personnel with horrifying, supercilious, condescension. Though in the abstract he had all the proper liberal attitudes about things, in the particular he really didn't care about the wellbeing of any individual person. He was selfish even as a friend. You were expected to help him with all sorts of things (and most of the help involved listening to him endlessly whine about his lot), but he would never help you with anything. . . . But he was my friend and I can't help but be consumed with guilt.