my plagiarized story
by josh herchenroeder

it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. nobody could decide which. on one hand, a lot of people got married and lived happily ever after. yea them. but then they all took a trip to the oracle of delphi, and many of them heard that their new baby would kill his dad and marry his mom, and nobody wanted that very much. so they mailed their babies to corinth and told a shepherd to nail the babies' feet into the ground.

but one of these dudes survived, and he grew up to be a rodeo rider. he had a lot of aggression building up since he had no parents, and he took it out on the cows he rode. he managed to win a bunch of prizes including a big pearl. but everyone wanted his pearl, and it gave him a lot of toruble, so he chucked it after his little pet coyote died.

after an accident in which he broke all of his ribs, the dude decided his job really stunk, so he quit the rodeo and moved to new york. he settled in west egg, living in a cardboard box sandwiched between two mansions. he immediately tried to hook up with an old girlfriend whom he hadn't seen in five years, but her name wasn't in the phonebook, so he just stood outside every night staring like a zombie at a little green light. but one day the dude found out that his ex had gotten married, and so her name had changed. but he figured a rose by any other name is just as sweet, so he called her up. they got together, but when he saw her, he noticed that she had engraved a bright red "a" into her naval. since he couldn't stand tattoos, he dumped her and ran off. she went nuts because she was desperate for a guy--any guy besides her husband--and she couldn't handle his leaving, so she went swimming without her floaties and drowned. in the rain.

meanwhile, the dude took off for italy to be an ambulance driver in world war one. but the ship he was on had to sail between scylla and charybdis and the boat got pretty beat up in there. they managed to stay afloat, but the captain had lost his duct tape, so they were forced to stop on calypso's island to make repairs.

calypso's island was a strange place--mainly because calypso wasn't there anymore--and the government system was all screwed up. all the pigs were turning into people while trying to set up a communist dictatorship, the choir people all wanted to eat meat, and nobody could talk unless they were holding a conch shell. eventually they all gave up on politics and just set the whole island on fire. the dude and the ship's crew barely escaped with their lives.

the boat floated around for a while and finally stopped in italy. but isnce they had taken so long on calypso's island, world war one was over and world war two had begun. some nazis chased them around fora while, and eventually they were hauled off to a concentration camp. the concentration camp wasn't much fun, and the dude wanted to go home, so he went awol. he told the guards, and since they had just gotten drunk, they believed him, and since he wasn't in the opposing army anymore, they let him go. the london underground picked him up and escorted him to england.

london, too, was fun actually. everyone went around eating drugs and having sex with each other. the dude didn't want to get aids, so he ran off to a lighthosue and hung out for a while. sometime later he bummed a rice with a whaling ship called the "potentbelly." the captain was a nice man who introduced himself saying, "call me ishmael."

the journey was relatively uneventful--there weren't a whole lot of big white whales in the english channel at that time. but one day one of the crew members wouldn't talk to anyone, so they hung him, but when he didn't twitch they all decided that he was an angel.

the dude sailed with all the whalers all the way to the mississippi river, but there were no big white whales there either. the ship's crew decided that the dude was scaring the whales off because he smelled bad, so the chucked him overboard and ditched him.

the dude hitched a ride with a boy and a black man who were floating down the river on an inflatable crocodile. the man was fleeing because his pa was an insane drunkard and the boy was running away because some old lady wanted to sell him.

the trio enjoyed their cruise until they reached the town of aybomb, where people go around killing little birdies all the time. the people there decided that the black man had committed some kind of crime, so they shot him and threw him in a field. the black man's sister wanted to bury him, but the king wouldn't let her, so she committed suicide. this disturbed the king so much that he stabbed his eyes out with a mechanical pencil.