Build Your Own Dog

By Robert Brady

An exploration of modern life through a series of 47 brief stories involving Neanderthal nagging, surreal romance, pre-columbian golden arches, the Shit Creek community, technosex fashions, banking fun, planetary cursive, life carpentry, big cosmetics, apparatus affairs, cubist food, doggy blends, desk life, tunafish lit history analysis, dimensionally challenged presidency and much more. Plus, it's free! For now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Brady
• Release date: Nov 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370505845

Book preview

Preface

Robert Brady’s The Big Elsewhere recounted illuminations from closely-observed decades of homesteading on the slopes of Mount Horai, overlooking Lake Biwa, beyond the eastern hills of Kyoto; an idyllic personal perspective disrupted only by passing typhoons and marauding monkeys.

This new collection of fragmentary fictions and metamorphic musings gradually formed over those same decades, spinning as tales do into higher definition, greater velocity, more critical mass, chronicling another, fundamentally non-parallel big elsewhere, the psychosocial mindscape and discordant ethos of a richly-imagined yet eerily-familiar New World — in which the constitutionally-mandated inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are hounded bigtime by a marauding Macy’s parade of self-possessed individuals who appear not simply fantasized but channeled. Real-time entities, with histories and minds of their own, each doggedly constructing other ways to perceive what we mislabel reality.

It’s probably not a coincidence that the author spent some of his formative years scanning the airwaves at a US Air Force intelligence facility in Okinawa, learning through deep listening to recognize individual Chinese military radio operators, even extrapolating distinct personalities from their Morse code fingerprints. Similarly, in a way, to how Chinese medical practitioners read volumes from a patient’s pulse, Bob has learned to tune into and diagnose the otherwise ethereal Zeitgeist.

In the decades since many of this book’s transmissions were first transcribed, social perceptions of normality have plunged off the charts and off the map, and the formerly unimaginable has become merely commonplace. Alternate facts and fake news reveal truth, as always, to be more bizarre than fiction, and the most far-out projections of science fiction eventually become simply accurate predictions of the all but inevitable.

Read and ponder these kernels of event-horizon conjecture now, before they transform into common wisdom...

— Ken Rodgers

Managing Editor, Kyoto Journal

Table of Contents

Preface

The Very First

Little-Known Elevator Facts

Langdon Makes a Career Choice

All Except Blue

Build Your Own Dog

What I Meant to Say

A Touch of Amusement

Tao Te Virginia

Is There Life at Desks?

Cubist Cuisine

How Golden Arches Got His Name

The Forest of the Accountants

Little Yellow Flower

My Brigitte

Langdon Confronts the Enigma of Laundry

The Goddamned Tunafish Sandwich

Ask Dr. Clarity: Is the Universe Benevolent?

Twisted Shadows

The James Dean Parameters

From Here the Night Goes on Forever

Rambo Gets the Mail

Balshank Rules

Pieces of Fame

Makeup

L.I.T.A.

Character Actor Planet

Langdon Fathoms Normalcy

Throwing Up Off the Bridges of Madison County

Exploring the Upper Reaches of Shit Creek

Instant Office

The Deal

Been Down One Time

Time Soup

Langdon Buys Brown Shoes

Rumors About Leonard

All I Ever Do

Carpentry

Ask Dr. Clarity: A Sense of Syntax

Cutout

A Structure Named Zelda

The World’s Largest Pen

Ask Dr. Clarity: My Neopaleo-ultramacrogeocentric Diet

The Morning Falls into Langdon’s Hands

Sleazy Gods and Rat Frames

Whirlwind

The End of the Human Race as I Know It

There Goes the Neighborhood

Other titles by Robert Brady

The Very First

The very first discovery of America, or of the land mass that would one day be known as America, took place on what would have been April 27, 49,926 B.C., at 3:22 in the afternoon, Pacific Standard Time, when Aijuk, a young hunter who had been pursuing a wounded caribou for two days, jumped from a large ice floe onto the uninhabited continent now known as North America, beating out Columbus by 48,500 years or so.

But no countries are named after Aijuk; no cities, streets or universities, automobiles, rivers, public squares, expressways, moving picture corporations, apartment projects, dry cleaners-- no, not even a cigar bears the name of America’s true discoverer.

Because when Aijuk’s foot became the very first to touch the now hallowed ground of the broad American continent, Aijuk didn’t claim the land for any king, god, nation or manifest destiny; he held no ceremony, had no quoteworthy statement ready for the occasion, didn’t even carve his name on a rock.

In fact, such thoughts never even entered his head, because to him it was all one world. Aijuk simply scanned the horizon, gave up on the caribou and jumped back out of America.

Such was the clarity of mind in those long-gone days.

Little-Known Elevator Facts

In the millions of years before elevators were invented, human beings rarely went straight up or down.

Early versions of the elevator were largely failures, moving sideways if they moved at all. Over millennia, those devices evolved into the motor vehicles we know today.

Say elevator to a giraffe, and it will stare at you blankly.

Elevators are never seen mating, since they reproduce asexually.

The concept of the elevator is only vaguely hinted at in the world’s holy books.

Sigmund Freud secretly believed elevators to be highly erotic symbols of both sexes, and loved to ride up and down in them.

Napoleon Bonaparte, like most people in history, never heard of an elevator.

Langdon Makes a Career Choice

It began in a company elevator. Langdon, an eccentric but mild-mannered low-echelon employee, was alone there, chewing on a large, sticky caramel as he rose toward his elevator-sized cubicle on the 84th floor, when the Chairman of the Board crowded on with several junior executives, whose suits and grooming contrasted exceedingly with Langdon’s pajama suit and sasquatch haircut, which caught the corner of the Chairman’s predatory eye.

Bangman, is it? Lamprey?

Mernerg... Langdon responded, from far around the caramel.

Oh. Well, Mernerg, how are things going in---- where are you anyway, Mernerg?

Fack mith... managed Langdon.

Fack Mith? What the hell is that? Smedley, is there something going on here behind my back?

No sir, it’s a mixup of some kind, sir. The junior executive raised an eyebrow at Langdon in the back of the elevator. The eye under the brow fell to Langdon’s do-it-yourself birkenstocks.

"Mixup, my ass. Mernerg, I like your style. You’ve got a rough cob look about you, the kind I just don’t see anymore. Have a full report on Fack Mith ready for the board meeting at 3 o’clock on Wednesday."

Borgle! answered Langdon as the Chairman and his flock bustled out through the open doors. This was Langdon’s big chance! To create Fack Mith from whole cloth and ride it all the way to the top!

But on second thought Langdon had plans of his own, so he bought a brown suit and brown shoes, got his hair cut like the Chairman, stopped chewing caramels and took the stairs, and they never found him again.

All Except Blue

There had been a time when blue was nowhere near Arnold’s favorite color, but ever since Maybelle had left for reasons he’d later