The Spectacular Adventures of Dictionary Salesman!
I will always have a soft spot for one story in particular: The Spectacular Adventures of Dictionary Salesman.
I wrote the first draft of the story when I was a junior in high school (1998) and continued to work and submit the story all the way up until 2008. By that time, quite a bit had changed--and some 30 odd magazines had passed on the idiotic masterpiece. I still felt strongly enough about the story to put it in The Lexical Funk. That story, along with Murder in New York probably baffled readers more than other stories.
Below I've given you the two best parts of the story...the opening and the speech at the end.
Opening Paragraph from The Spectacular Adventures of Dictionary Salesman
It was a hideously hot Tuesday afternoon. Cows of the worst kind threatened us from all sides, taunting us with their incessant mooing. With no Beast Master to assist us--with his animal communication powers or rippling muscles to impress the female readers--my partner and I continued on. We stepped past the cows carefully, through a front yard filled with cheap decorations of the sort found lying around in garage sales, flee markets, and other places of low character. And I remembered wondering to myself, in these exact words: how the heck did I get into this mess? specifically, referring to the dung that had accumulated on my shoe, but in a more universal sense, referring to my plight as a member of the human race.
Ending Speech:
It felt appropriate at this moment to give an uplifting speech. Lucky for me I had been composing one earlier that day on a napkin I had found while searching through a trashcan for a pair of pliers. It goes something like this: “Forget about the dictionaries. We’ll be lucky if we escape with our lives. I’m tired of being a dictionary salesman. It’s time to look to the future, past this hideous job to the wonders of the world around us. By golly man, our lives may not amount to a hill of beans, but at least we’re better than dictionaries. Beans, no. But by gosh, we’re better than dictionaries.”
“You’re right,” my partner said lamely, as all conservative white men who for some reason carry Tommy guns do.
I continued: “We’ll roam the earth and meet new and interesting people, and have nachos with cheese on them. Not the artificial kind, but real cheese. And we’ll ride donkeys, but we won’t call them donkeys, we’ll call them asses, and we’ll ride our asses into the sunset, and never sell dictionaries again.”
As I retire this story forever, I triumphantly ride my ass into the sunset...THE END?
I wrote the first draft of the story when I was a junior in high school (1998) and continued to work and submit the story all the way up until 2008. By that time, quite a bit had changed--and some 30 odd magazines had passed on the idiotic masterpiece. I still felt strongly enough about the story to put it in The Lexical Funk. That story, along with Murder in New York probably baffled readers more than other stories.
Below I've given you the two best parts of the story...the opening and the speech at the end.
Opening Paragraph from The Spectacular Adventures of Dictionary Salesman
It was a hideously hot Tuesday afternoon. Cows of the worst kind threatened us from all sides, taunting us with their incessant mooing. With no Beast Master to assist us--with his animal communication powers or rippling muscles to impress the female readers--my partner and I continued on. We stepped past the cows carefully, through a front yard filled with cheap decorations of the sort found lying around in garage sales, flee markets, and other places of low character. And I remembered wondering to myself, in these exact words: how the heck did I get into this mess? specifically, referring to the dung that had accumulated on my shoe, but in a more universal sense, referring to my plight as a member of the human race.
Ending Speech:
It felt appropriate at this moment to give an uplifting speech. Lucky for me I had been composing one earlier that day on a napkin I had found while searching through a trashcan for a pair of pliers. It goes something like this: “Forget about the dictionaries. We’ll be lucky if we escape with our lives. I’m tired of being a dictionary salesman. It’s time to look to the future, past this hideous job to the wonders of the world around us. By golly man, our lives may not amount to a hill of beans, but at least we’re better than dictionaries. Beans, no. But by gosh, we’re better than dictionaries.”
“You’re right,” my partner said lamely, as all conservative white men who for some reason carry Tommy guns do.
I continued: “We’ll roam the earth and meet new and interesting people, and have nachos with cheese on them. Not the artificial kind, but real cheese. And we’ll ride donkeys, but we won’t call them donkeys, we’ll call them asses, and we’ll ride our asses into the sunset, and never sell dictionaries again.”
As I retire this story forever, I triumphantly ride my ass into the sunset...THE END?
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