Sunday, January 23, 2005

A Report on Fritz Hollander's Short but Remarkable Journey into the Alternate Universe

Fritz Hollander was a remarkably unremarkable man. He lived in an unremarkable house on an unremarkable street in an unremarkable city not even worth naming for the purposes of this narrative. He lived a remarkably unremarkable life, remarkable only insofar as it's remarkable unremarkableness, not in any real, substative remarkable way. It was about halfway through the first paragraph that Fritz Hollander would have realized that the word unremarkable had lost all meaning, except of course that an awareness of the text of a third person narrative of an episode of his life would be a remarkable thing for a fictional character to possess and Fritz Hollander was far too unremarkable to have it.
One day Fritz was drinking his morning unremarkable coffee and reading about the day's unremarkable events in his unremarkable copy of the New York Times. He might have made a remark afterward, if not for the intense unremarkableness of his surroundings. Presently, he fell through a sudden and rather remarkable vortex into the alternate universe.
Suddenly surrounded by remarkable things, he presently began to make remarks.
"I'll say!" he remarked, and "My word!" and lots of other remarks of the sort people remark at remarkable things. He was seeing quite a few of these in the alternate universe, such as a duck with shoulder pads, and former president Gerald Ford playing the dijereedoo for a group of well dressed but badly behaved pirates.
Presently the vortex reopened, and Fritz Hollander found himself back in his unremarkable life.
"What a remarkable experience!" he remarked, and finished his unremarkable coffee. He went on to have an unremarkable day, and to be featured in a most unremarkable story lacking, among other things, good characterization, varied word choice, or a real plot. Even with the trip to the alternate universe, it was overall an unremarkable day.

2 comments:

Evey said...

Hehe... made me laugh, something i really needed! Thanks.

Lisa said...

My God....that was incredible. It's even more funny if you read it with a Monty Python-type accent.