A Shaggy But Nonetheless Exquisite Blorpse

As you may know, "Exquisite Corpse" is a game invented by those madcap modernists known as Surrealists in which a group of people contribute sections of words or images to produce a collaborative (and monstrous) artwork. The rub is that they make their contribution sight unseen, so the artist continues the drawing using only the most minute portion of the previous one (hidden by folding the paper over) or the writer uses just the last word of the previous writer's contribution. According to legend (that or wikipedia), the name comes from the first game played, which resulted in the phrase "The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine."

NOW: it has been suggested by the entity the people at ghost of paper will henceforth refer to as "Pulp Zombie" that a version of this method be launched into the blogosphere. As we are 1) touched by the connections being made across space, across people, across blogs ... the implications of minds stuck on the web, and 2) worried about the current distance between posts, we decided perhaps it's worth a shot.

THOUGH: Of course, the circumstances make a true "exquisite corpse" unfeasible, as each contributer will be privy to what came before, our beast will be built in sections and without blueprint. A virtual narrative daisy chain.

OR: Perhaps a better model would be the beloved so-called "shaggy dog joke," that brand of comic jazz in which the teller stretches his story out to include absurdly specific and tangential details, building and building a palace of useless information until finally the punchline ("fuck you clown," for example ... if you know that one) is the height of anticlimax.

IDEALLY: A goodly number of peeps will contribute - in large amounts, small amounts, named or unnamed, tamed or untamed, putting as much or as little time and effort into it as possible.

SO: as to what goes here ... here goes nothing. A shaggy, but nonetheless exquisite blorpse.

So there's this really fat beekeeper named Gary. And Gary lives in this old house way up on a hill by himself. He has no wife, no friends, and no pets - other than the bees, but they're more of a vocation. In fact when his sister Melinda, who lived in town with her family, suggested they go see Bee Movie, it took him a while to register why she'd done so. When he's not making sure those bees are kept, his hobbies involve other minature microcosmic worlds - he builds model ships in bottles, he collects model trains, and he reads political science voraciously. Anyway one day he's eating Hamburger Helper (which he liked) and watching that new reality show Kid Nation (which he didn't) and the doorbell rings...