User:One-eyed Jack/John Scherer
John W. Scherer is a non-human construct. He appears to be a mild-mannered whey-faced baldy with a limp little mustache and abundant navel-rings. His biography claims he was born "John W" Scherer, in Gutflap, East Florida. But he is actually a composite of satanic ectoplasm and a burst of electromagnetic interference which was generated in the Eccles Gap between the rocky asteroid Ceres and the illusory moon Ghastus. If you see him, look away. He is non-real.
Origin and Purpose on Earth[edit | edit source]
One particularly fresh Saturday in April the Devil strolled down a dusty, deserted lane in Bigathdi, Tunisia, picking up gravel with his prehensile ape toes and flinging it against the mud-walled houses nearby. The sunshine caressed his steaming sulfurous forehead and the sea wind played in his filthy goat hair.
"I do believe," the Devil said to himself, "that the world needs more ectoplasm. Ever since the Enlightenment there has been too little ghostliness about. There has been too much rationality, and far too little of the unexplainable in the world."
And so the Devil gathered his phlegm and his bile and his ichor and his mucus, and he spat it straight up into the sunlit air. Of course, as the Devil is a supernatural being this effluvia could only be supernatural material -- ectoplasm. And like everything created by the Devil, the mass of ectoplasm was psychotic. The ectoplasm burbled and pulsed, suspended in a glistening glob several meters wide and some ten kilometers above the ground. It was filled with dreams of ill-gotten wealth, filled with thievishness and malice, with a lust for lawsuits and lies. The ectoplasm was filled with madness.
At that very moment a stream of cosmic particles from a distant supernova intersected the magnetic field lines in the Eccles Gap and sent a huge burst of static flooding into the inner Solar System. This energy was the kind that makes your television picture twitch, your radio stutter, and your mind dart wildly about like a guppy in a toilet bowl when it knows someone is about to flush. Bad stuff!
When this burst of evil static struck and merged with the blob of satanic ectoplasm in the upper atmpsphere the non-human construct known to us as John W. Scherer was created.
His purpose, if it can be called that, is the purpose of psychotic mucus imbued with mindlessly destructive interplanetary static. He makes fantastical claims, files idiotic lawsuits, bestrides late-night commercial television like a grotesque gnome driven to drink by the twitching of his own brain-polyps. Blue, flickering, fuzzy around the edges, John W. Scherer smiles drunkenly and asks for your credit card number. If you see him, look away. Somewhere nearby the Devil is chortling and picking bloody scabs from between his horny, black-calloused toes.
Corporate Endeavors[edit | edit source]
In 1987 the non-human John W. Scherer created from his own ectoplasmic non-body the legalistic mechanism known as Video Professor. It is not a real professor. It is not a real video. Like Scherer himself it is a psychotic illusion, in this case made of pseudo-legal moonbeams and corporate cobwebs. It offers nothing of value; it produces only malice, malpractice, and malfeasance. The smell of sulfur -- the Devil's perspiration -- hangs about it and no quantity of deodorant can clear it away.
A cautionary tale is in order.
Mandy Biffminge lived in Elmwater, Connecticut, all her life. At the age of 80 she bought a Hyundai 90-horsepower laptop computer and went online. But the virtual world she encountered -- so brightly colored, so odorless, so informative and yet so meaningless -- baffled her. Then, while watching the late-night reality show Grannies of Grunge Gone Bad she saw, during a commercial break, the ghostly image of Video Professor. Blandly he offered her the candy-apple of knowledge in return for access to her credit card and her used-panty drawer.
Poor Mandy Biffminge responded, made the phone call, gave out the requisite digits of her VISA account. Within days her banked savings drained away, her social security was garnished, her car was repossessed, and her pet canary began to vomit brimstone and recite the Torah backwards while shooting flames from his eyesockets. And her used panties appeared on E-Bay.
It is best, dear reader, not to respond to John W. Scherer or Video Professor. Best to look away. Not far off the Devil is snickering and digging clots of sticky brown wax from the hairy caverns of his ears.
Realms of Satire[edit | edit source]
Oh how wildly blow the winds of words across these Intarweb pages. Careless reader, you must understand that our purpose is to entertain: we follow the fading footsteps of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain across a landscape lit by the liquid-crystal glow of a hundred thousand computer screens. Across this same fey landscape prance minotaurs and digital leprechauns, Nigerian bank scammers, CIA web-bots, and instant Agamemnons. We make sense only metaphorically, darling reader. Our reality is not meant to be taken "seriously". It is Art, or what passes for Art in the world of the citizen-artist. When everyman writes, the reader must beware. As with your recently-hemmed trousers, all is not as it seams.
Somewhere close by the Devil is giggling softly and sucking maggots from between his snaggly mustard-colored teeth.