You'll recall that a while ago I blogged about the new Monkeybicycle 6 and how it is kicking ass and taking the names? It turns out that the volume is getting a lot of well-deserved nice press in the blogosphere and the printosphere, for example a shout out in the Philadelphia City Paper and these nice comments here. Oh, and also here. If you look at these comments, as you should, you will notice that my ludicrous story "The Advisor," is not singled out as one of the volume's high points. This, undoubtedly, is because my story is not one of the volume's high points. For example, I just read two of the stories in the volume that are much better than "The Advisor," one by Sarah Salway and one about a guy whose wife goes to see the gynecologist every year on Valentines Day, written by Michael Czyniejewski. Still, though, over at a blog called "Ejaculations of a Perverse Adult," Tim Jones-Yelvington is reviewing the entire volume story by story, and since "The Advisor" is indeed a story within the volume, he has written a post about it. He says some very kind things, like that the story is "funny," but he suggests that at the end of the story, when the crazy presidential candidate drops the giant television from the top of the ladder, it would have been more satisfying for the television to fall on top of the candidate's little white kitty-kat rather than the narrator's prize-winning bonsai tree. A comment echoes his wish. Now, I like kitties very much, I even have a kitty, but hey, if the people want the kitty to die, then the kitty shall die. Moooohahahahaha. And therefore I present here and only here an alternative ending to "The Advisor":
I suppose I should have known then that things were not going to work out for the best. When the cat finally revealed herself at the foot of the ladder, shooting out from underneath the china cabinet and scampering across the floor toward the overstuffed eggplant-colored Pottery Barn loveseat, Robertson threw his hands up in celebration of the proof of the cat's continued existence, the upward and outward movement of such throwing being enough to cause the television, a birthday gift just received from Ellen's stockbroker ex-husband but a week ago, to plummet out of Robertson's plump hands directly down onto that poor tiny helpless scampering kitty kat, squashing the little feline until she was as flat as the screen on the television that had crushed her. The shock of seeing his cat's head crushed on the pine floors of our tiny apartment must have altered somehow something so basic, so elemental in Robertson's brain because upon seeing the stained-red grey goo dripping from the cat's powdery ear, the candidate seemed suddenly to turn into his best buried self, he awoke from his blurry insanity and realized that the top of a ladder in a dimwitted law student's apartment at three in the morning with the smell of chocolate cookies baking in the oven was just no place, no place at all, for a serious man to be, and then without a word, he straightened his clothes and climbed down the ladder and left our apartment. I never heard from the man again, although of course I followed his meteoric rise to the top of the electoral heap with great interest, and when he won the Presidency and used his newfound power to launch an all-out nuclear attack against the subcontinent for no particularly good reason, and the counter-attack was on its way to destroy not just our city but all the cities, I watched Katie Couric along with all the rest of the nation as she announced the news that the missile defense system had failed and said a prayer for us, for all of us, now heading to eternity together, and I wondered whether perhaps I should have just shooed that tiny kitty away with my bonsai tree, prizes or no prizes, and saved us all from ruin. But then again, as they always say, hindsight is . . .
There, that's better! Happy now, Ejaculating Perverse Adult?
In any event, buy Monkeybicycle 6 here now!
