The Characters (So Far), Part II

The Characters (So Far), Part II

First, want to know something that is a complete waste of time? Trying to teach your 20 month old (well, actually my 20 month old—yours might be able to do it) to say, “Braaaaiiins!” Utterly disappointing. Now, while I did get him to sort of say it a few times (Gabe’s still not much of a talker—he’s doing pretty well with a bunch of words, but it’s still pretty much a crap shoot which ones he’s going to latch onto), his treatment of the material was all but completely lacking in feeling. It was pretty obvious he was just trying to shut me up with his half-hearted “bains.” I had a tough time believing he was a speaker of English, much less a grey matter starved undead killing machine. He’s going to have to really put some work into his presentation if he’s ever going to convince anyone.

Anyway, on with the roll call:

Aldo Cheeseburger
Aldo is a bug-eyed ladybug doll that Gabe received from, I believe, Karen and Darrell (Libby’s folks), who live in New Zealand. These adorable, bug-eyed dolls are, if my research is accurate (I’m not actually doing research at all on these dolls, though I have all the power of the internet at my disposal, I just can’t be bothered), are made only in New Zealand and are as close to an accurate representation of insect life on the island as is possible. It’s a little known fact that New Zealand has almost nothing but birds on their island (this, actually, is a somewhat accurate generalization). And man are there some crazy ones there. Apparently, there is one songbird that sounds almost identical to a dial-up modem trying to connect to the internet. Or so I’m told. At any rate, the island’s bug life—with the notable exception of their little sand flies, which are always just shy of reaching official “plague” status—is understandably reclusive. Wouldn’t you be if you were the main food source for birds on a set of islands that boasts the craziest bunch of seemingly biologically impossible birds imaginable? As such, the bugs live largely secure lives underground in an elaborate maze of subterranean tunnels that lead to the vast, open, and bustling city of Bugtopia where all bugs, regardless of thorax or antenna shape, live in peace and harmony. And, because they are underground, they have big, adorable eyes. Aldo, is a budding entrepreneur and inventor. I can’t really go into much more detail here without giving away most of the plot of his first bit of drama.

Wendell Bacon
Wendell is another ladybug, only he’s pretty boring and ordinary looking when compared to Aldo. I’m not sure where Wendell came from. He might have been part of Libby’s collection of pre-baby stuffed animals. She has a thing for bugs, and I know there are about a dozen different plastic bugs and bug puppets and what-not in Gabe’s room, and since I don’t remember ever buying them (because bugs, by in large, are only useful as target practice for my feet or hands, and, from a professional, scientific standpoint, I find them icky), I can only blame Libby. Wendell is Aldo’s best friend. They grew up together in Mole Cricket Hills, a suburb of Bugtopia, where they knew nothing but blissful existence as they attended various privileged schools. Wendell, however, was always a bit of a scoundrel, inherently discontent with his life of ease and advantage. Every week when they were growing up, it seemed like Wendell had one scheme or another, and he always coaxed his very proper and straight-as-an-arrow friend Aldo along for the ride. Obviously, this led to many wacky adventures, none of which have been documented up to this point. It is also worth noting that his unusually small eyes are a birth defect that renders him all but blind in the underground world that he grew up in. Probably, this was a major contributing factor to his rebellious nature, but since he never had any proper therapy, nobody will ever know. Sad.

Gretchen Bacon
Gretchen is another bug-eyed doll, this time a caterpillar. Or, possibly, she’s some kind of weird, multi-legged, green worm. I’m not much up on my entomology. It’s entirely possibly that she’s just some kind of nightmare fueled inspiration. She does sort of look like that weird mind controlling bug that crawled out of Chekov’s ear in Wrath of Khan (I was curious if this bug had a name, and all I can find on the one web site I’m willing to look on—because more than one site would constitute research, and I’m determined not to do any of that—was the designation “indigenous, mind-controlling eel.” Really? An eel? In a person’s ear? Give me a break! You can stick my suspension of disbelief where the sun don’t shine if that’s the kind of respect you’re going to give it!), and that thing gave me a few wicked nightmares when I was growing up. Not as many as American Werewolf in London did, though. What were they (and I won’t say who exactly, though they might remember and feel duly guilty all on their own) thinking letting a nine year old watch that movie? But I digress. Gretchen is the younger sister of Wendell and she, obviously, doesn’t suffer from the same birth defect that left her brother nearly blind, to stumble around clumsily in their underground suburb. Since Gretchen’s neighborhood was mostly filled with the underground equivalent of D.I.N.K.s, she was forced to hang out almost exclusively with her brother and Aldo. As such, based on her early behaviors and the mannerisms she adopted later in life, she might be pigeon-holed as a tomboy, but, really, she was just kind of a ditz and she didn’t have the imagination or personal wherewithal to accomplish much on her own or come up with her own definition of “self.” In this way, was Gretchen, in fact, even more handicapped than her brother? Discuss.

Bert
Bert is an economy-sized Beanie Baby. Since I only know one person who collects Beanie Babies—my grandmother—and since we’ve had Bert since the very beginning, I sort of assume that’s where he came from. I’m a little embarrassed to even include Bert. His name is, I think, the least inspired of the group. See, he’s the color of rainbow sherbet—or sherbeRt as Libby insists on calling it. Thus, Bert. Erm. Bert is also saddled with possibly the worst backstory of them all. He is a rainbow sherbet colored bear. That’s pretty much it. At one time, because of his name, I considered giving him a story that corresponded to something from a Burt Reynolds movie—probably “Smokey and the Bandit,” “Cannonball Run,” or “Deliverance” (I can’t really think of much else he’s done off the top of my head, except for Loni Anderson . . . ba-zing!) Oh, wait. There was “Boogie Nights,” too. Hmm. Naw, best not to go in that direction at all. I expect that would be a slippery slope and before long I’d have a Ron Jeremy and a Ginger Lynn—and if I followed the evolution, eventually I’d have to end up with Miscellaneous Spring Break Girl Who Got a Hat to Show Her Boobs to the Camera—in the group, and I can only imagine trying to explain those names to Gabe when he’s old enough to understand. So, anyway, there is probably the possibility that he will eventually get some sort of back story—involving Dom DeLuise, Sally Field, or Ned Beatty, probably before the, um, deflowering scene—but for now, Bert remains hopelessly boring.

Dag Masters, P.I.
Note: Look at my helper! By the second animal posing, Gabe was very anxious to do everything he could to disrupt my project--usually by grabbing a hold of the toy I was trying to take a picture of and throwing it across the room. Eventually, I had to make it a game where he got to push the toy down the slide after I took the picture. This game, of course, was lame, and it only kept him mildly interested in letting me take my pictures. As you can see by the placement of his hand, he was quite eager to do his part.

Dag is a pretty enormous, um, gorilla? Some sort of big monkey (I say “monkey” because I know it will tick Libby off—I can hear her saying, “He’s an ape, not a monkey! Monkeys are blah blah blah!” In other words, I do know that Dag isn’t a monkey, big or otherwise, but he is some sort of hairy non-man, so I’ll leave it at that). We received Dag as part of a visit by The Puma, Newton’s own superhero. Oh dear. This opens a whole new can of worms. Actually, I’ll make The Puma an official bedroom character next, even though, technically, he’s a very real superhero who lives in my town. His spirit, however, is a part of every bedroom, in Newton, at least, so I’ll explain him in a minute. Dag is one of those hard-boiled private investigators—like if Kojak and Mike Hammer had a baby, but it was raised by Garrison Keillor’s Guy Noir, because Dag has a pretty well-developed, though tough to crack, soft heart. Wait, that last metaphor made no sense. How can a soft heart be well-developed? How can any heart be well-developed? And if it’s soft, it wouldn’t need to be cracked in the first place. How about his heart is like a Cadbury Cream Egg, hard and crunchy on the outside but filled with nauseating and entirely suspect “cream” on the inside? Hmm, not quite, but probably close enough. Seriously, though, Cream Eggs are disgusting. And this is coming from someone who could eat an entire shelf of Peeps and a bucket of assorted gummy foods in a weekend. Mmmm. That would be a good weekend. And probably my last. But what a way to go! So, yeah, Dag is a P.I., but he hasn’t had much more backstory than that developed at this time. He wasn’t a part of the bedroom saga for a long time because Gabe used to be scared of him, so he stayed locked in a closet for quite a few months. All the same, it’s tough to say what we would know about Dag anyway. He’s a bit of a closed book, existing, as it were, only in the here and now. And that’s just the way he likes it!

The Puma
Picture is an approximation only. Or do I mean an artist’s rendering? Dramatization? Pirated picture found in a Google search of someone dressed in a purple cat suit? Whatever. The point is, nobody knows what The Puma really looks like. Use your imagination, but not in a "furry" way, perv.

The Puma is, as was stated before, Newton’s own superhero. How, you might ask, does Newton, of all places, rank a superhero? That’s a good question. You’ll have to take it up with our city council. It took some pretty serious finagling, I’m told—and now we have mandatory recycling as part of the deal. Anyway, you probably don’t really want your town to have its own superhero if he’s going to end up being like The Puma. See, The Puma doesn’t fight crime. He doesn’t save people. Really, the “hero” part of his name is something of a misnomer. He might be considered a superperson, or superbeing. Maybe. But only if you consider the only prerequisite of being a superperson to be the having of a superperson’s name (I can’t even say, for sure, that he has a costume, so he might not even meet that requirement). He does capitalize the “t” in the “the” before his name, which is pretty special—articles almost never being capitalized. He might have super powers of some sort, but I sort of doubt it. In fact, the only thing The Puma does, that anyone can verify, is play rather lame practical jokes on people. He might, say, leave a gallon-sized can of hominy on your front porch. He might have catalogs from a dozen companies specializing in Renaissance Faire style replica weapons sent to your house. He might call the phone number that’s on TV in the middle of the night and effectively sign you up to have people visit you on a monthly basis, for the rest of your life, to tell you the importance of the Book of Mormon. But he really shines when someone goes out of town for a vacation. That’s when The Puma will visit your house and do stuff to your things. He might switch the salt and the powdered sugar in your cupboards. He might dig out several stuffed animals, action figures, and the like and create a freaky weird toy “mass suicide” in your kitchen. He might leave a big monkey doll sitting on your toilet with an open magazine in its lap to seriously freak your shit out when you get home from a two week vacation. He’s kind of a jerk, in other words. But he’s ours! And I gained a big monkey that is now named Dag Masters out of it all, so I guess I came out ahead—except that I can still taste the salt that I made my Christmas frosting out of. You know, on second thought, The Puma isn’t going to be making any appearances in my storylines. Screw him.