MoronicArts Classics: Damien Hurlbutt’s Pool Toys

~ Jen ~ 2 Comments

“Why does your brother Damien keep buying pool toys in the middle of Winter?” Wally Green asks his Illinois pharmacy-chain clerk, Kankakee Elvis impersonator and covert narcissist, Robbie Hurlbutt.

Robbie says nothing, chooses to ignore his boss and keeps on stocking shelves as he hopes to leave early so he can skip out on closing.

“Has he moved a body or something?” Wally says of Robbie’s equally creepy and narcissistic brother Damien.

Robbie ignores Wally, finishes stocking and sneaks out the door while the store owner is not looking so he can head down to the bar. First, he has to meet his speedball dealer.

Robbie, high on uppers, spends 20 minutes chatting up the bartender, while other customers grow impatient and angry as he is holding up the mixing of their cocktails and the pouring of their beers.

Robbie downs his downers and chases them with prescription painkillers he stole from his elderly mother PJ.

The inebriated Elvis impersonator texts his brother Damien, hoping he will join him and take him home, however after multiple selfies and text messages saying how much he loves his brother, Damien does not reply.

Cinema-13 clerk, bulbous neckbeard and communal narcadoodle Damien Hurlbutt strokes his dayglow-orange facial coiffe, and sets out a clipboard containing a sign-up sheet requesting email addresses for a newsletter. A theater customer walks up to the movie theater counter and asks what the newsletter is about. “It’s just a newsletter,” the sneaky narcissist Damien replies in his typical smug tone.

After the picture finishes its run and the ushers escort all the guests, Damien collects the newsletter sign-up sheet and heads to his Bourbonnais neckbeard-nest to sleep on the floor. Before he can retire for the night, he get annoyed over the mess of texts and photos from his brother Robbie. Damien would rather sleep in his mess of plastic tubs, and boxes of the things he loves more than people, than head back to Kankakee to pick up a drunk. Thinking he can gain something from helping his brother, he drives down to the Kankakee bar at which Robbie is performing slurred Elvis Presley Karaoke. The two bumbling idiots get into Damien’s beat-up van and head home. 

“What about my purple clown car?” Robbie asks Damien.

“Get it tomorrow.”

Damien gets a text from a coworker whose birthday is coming up soon. Knowing well it is illegal to text and drive, Damien messages his coworker, lovebombing her about the $50 gift card he is going to buy her, bragging about the surprise she clearly expressed she did not feel comfortable accepting.

After nearly crashing, Damien flips off the other driver and heads to Robbie’s Kankakee apartment, crashing on his floor instead.

Damien and Robbie wake up to snow on the ground. Damien retells the same story about his father N. Ron’s obsession with the weather channels he has already bored Robbie with at least 80 times now. Robbie leaves the room, stumbling on record albums he dumped all over the floor to get to the bathroom. Even though he is terrified of getting locked in the washroom while pooping, Robbie wants to get away from Damien.

Robbie emerges, and Damien pulls out the newsletter sign-up sheet, filled with names and email addresses. “Hey Robbie, my number-one brother? I would love to ask a favor from you. Can you contact Pat Splatt and try to sell him these email addresses? I collected them to send out messages getting out the good things us tender-hearts at the Bourbonnais Men’s Rights Activist (MRA) Club can do to help us men fight misandry. I would like to sell him a copy because I need the money to buy my coworkers gifts. I spent my paycheck already on action figures.

“What’s in it for me?” Robbie asks his equally self-centered brother Damien.

“Well, our theater has an extra Gothic Diana Ross poster from when we sponsored her show a couple years back.”

“Sold.” Robbie grins ear-to-ear and dials up Kankakee criminal and email spammer Pat Splatt.

The Hurlbutt brothers drive over to Pat Splatt’s flat, where the straggly long-haired Pat is busy harvesting emails from the Internet using his Spam-O-Matic computer program. The three group together to organize their petty crime. 

“Damien, I can pay you per email reply, that’s it.”

“Oh come now!”

“Oh go now, Damien. That is my final offer. Take it or leave it. I don’t have to offer you anything.”

“I know, I know, I know…” Damien says like a broken record, mimicking a certain furniture commercial emanating from Champaign. 

Damien reluctantly hands Pat the photocopied sign-up list containing contact information he collected from unsuspecting moviegoers.

Damien then heads to Wally Green’s to buy more pool toys and chucks them in his bathroom. After whizzing, he washes his hands with far more water than he needs and sprinkles the water all over the bathroom floor, leaving on the bathroom light and fan because he does not care.

Damien begins typing up his MRA “newsletter” in a word-processor program on his 10 year old desktop computer, resting atop a wooden folding table, the only piece of furniture in the entire room. The rotund neckbeard emails his diatribe while wearing his graphic tee displaying the text:

“I can 

EXPLAIN 

it to you

But I can’t

UNDERSTAND

it for you.”

A few days go by, however nobody takes Damien up on his offer to join the Bourbonnais MRA Club. Nobody clicks on the ads for the 21 Conference either. 

Damien realizes he needs to get ready for work now so he can make it on time after taking his two-hour shower.

Mr. Hurlbutt walks into the theater barely on-time. His boss, theater owner Konrad Teirant, calls him into his office.

Damien’s heart sinks and he utters a melodramatic “gulp” as he walks over to Konrad’s office.

“Damien, you really dropped the ball this time. I have been receiving numerous complaints from customers who have been getting emails about some misogyny club.”

“What?“

“This is unacceptable. They told me they signed up for a newsletter here? I never ordered you to or anyone else to put out a call for contact information. Do you want me to get sued?”

“Well…no” an embarrassed-because-caught Damien tells his boss.

“Damien, you have been working here a long time. You know that if we want to gather contact information so we can sell it, that would come from me. And only so I can profit, not you Damien. You’re not that important. Not at all. In fact, I can fire you at any time. I am telling you that because I am your friend. Oh by the way, why do you wear that dumb fedora? It looks stupid. And wash your beard. It smells. Don’t tell anyone we had this meeting. Go home and stay home the rest of this week. I will call you about next week’s hours.”

An excited Damien rushes home to play with his pool toys because he is happy he has the week off, not wondering at all if his boss will even call him back to work the next week.

Where’s the Beef?

~ Jen ~ Leave a comment

Kankakee bill collector Sybil Katrina Kibble sighs. No matter how many times she turns the key in her car’s ignition, its engine would rather fart and shart than start.

“Stupid freaking LeBaron!”

Much to her chagrin, Sybil’s Chrysler Boxmobile doesn’t talk back to her this time.

“Oh man, I’d much rather talk to my car than to those stupid morons on the bus…I wish they would get better hobbies instead of bothering people. Read a book or something…”

A very tired Sybil waits at the nearest stop, pays her fare and sits down in a seat toward the middle of the city bus. She avoids looking at the other riders, and instead gawks at the bus’ console instead.

“I wonder if Ma has seen that new parking brake design. I haven’t seen it in her bus-parts collection yet,” Sybil thinks to herself, bobbing her head to the mumble-country music playing through her headphones.

Sybil’s already tense heart races as she witnesses the unthinkable:

Pris Dixon, wife of Brandon Dixon who owns the local imbecile machine lot, uses her young daughter as a punching bag. “How dare you disrespect me!” Pris yells at the innocent child.

“What are you doing? What the heck are you doing?” Sybil yells to Pris as she intervenes to stop the violence. As grumpy as Sybil can get, she has enough of a conscience to at least help an innocent child who cannot defend herself, because duh!

“Mind ya own business!”

Pris calls Sybil every name in the book.


“It’s everybody’s business! It’s illegal to hit an adult, it’s illegal to hit a child!”

“Wanna go? I’mma gon’ kick yo’ butt!”


“Oh, grow up now.” Sybil shakes her head and waves away Pris.

“Stop it ladies!” the bus driver yells out, and Sybil flashes a thumbs-up. Sybil saves the video she had secretly recorded on her phone, pushes up her glasses and breathes a sigh of relief as she pulls the cord to get off the bus just in time for work.

Miss Kibble logs onto the Collect-o-Matic 2000 and makes her first phone call. Sybil can’t wait for the weekend after yet another long, stressful week during these strange times.

It’s now Sunday, April 31st at the Manteno Cantina and Optimal Club. This week’s live entertainment is ready to start.

“Hi! I’m Mr. JB, but you can call me Mister Beef! I’m your host today here at the Manteno Optimal Club! Get ready contestants, cuz we’re gonna play…What’s Your Beef? Now our fine contestants are going to all meet in the ring and answer one simple question. Whoever is still standing will win our grand prize of One Million Craptocoins, generously donated by the queen of the porcelain throne herself, Mrs Bernadette Cacca!”

A slow clap emanates from the audience.

“Now, contestants, hear me loud and clear. I will only ask you all this question once: Does whipped cream go on cake?”

“Ding ding ding!” Shapeshifting humanoid turkey vulture Carla Moran rings the bell with her beak, then returns to her regularly scheduled preening.

“Now I’m getting hungry for some burritos, I’m gonna go in the back and find the beef!”

JB walks into the kitchen storage room and starts berating the staff. Loud arguing can be heard. Meanwhile, the contestants just stand there and look at each other.

“Whipped cream is not frosting, it’s whipped cream.”

“Yeah, why do people put that crap on cake? So boring.”

“Yeah…no, I would never put whipped cream on a cake. I want my cake and I’m gonna eat it too!”

The contestants share a laugh. Bog witch, communal narcadoodle and entramanure Bernadette Moran Cacca yawns and rubs her eyes. Meanwhile, the cantina patrons watch the local news on the venue televisions. A reporter comes on the screen detailing a story why the Kankakee police looking for Pris Dixon, airing the evidence Sybil Kibble had secretly recorded and sent along with her report.

“Why does this JB, JBeef whateverhisface moron have such a big following on teh interwebs anyway?”

“Beats me.”

“Brainrot.”

“Yeah, anything for skibidi clicks I suppose…”

The contestants collectively shrug and look out at the bored audience, however this does not last long. Their boredom suddenly got jump-scared by a typical denizen of the Moroniverse: A loud thump shakes the cantina wall as a rather rotund, middle-aged woman comes busting through the door.

“Hey, I heard there’s some kind of Beefeater game?”

“Child abuser!” the crowd points at Pris, whom they recognize immediately after having seen her ugly mug on the TV news.

“Adult abuser!” the cooks point at Mr. Beef as he emerges from the kitchen after having chewed them out as if he were Gordon Ramsay or something.

“You want a piece of me?” Pris eggs on the crowd.

“Meet me in the ring, baby! JB smirks at the crowd with his giant set o’ choppers, his cold, soulless eyes stare into the abyss before the rage consumes him as he enters the ring. Both bumbling nitwits cannot wait for the attention and of course – social media cred.

Pris climbs up onto the stage and drops her ghetto blaster.

“Ow, ow, ow, my foot!”

She had wanted to crank up some tunes by the copyright-simps Metallica, but oh well — too bad, so sad.

“Ding! Ding! Ding!” Carla rings the bell with her steel talons.

JB blasts some butt-trumpet tunes in his opponent’s general direction.

Pris chucks a beer can at JB and of course misses, spilling that poor lager everywhere. Awww those poor hops, sacrificed for nothing..

JB dances around the ring, puts his hands to his ugly head and flips the bird with not only one but both hands! Wow — what a move! So creative.

Pris charges at JB like the raging beast she is, slips on the beer she had spilled, and hits her head on the concrete floor of the ring.

“I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” Pris calls out to the crowd for help, but nobody cares.

Gothic Diana Ross, The Midnight Supremes and their boyfriends point and laugh at the mess.

“Ding dong the witch is dead, the wicked witch is dead!” they gleefully sing as they head out the door to drive home in the black 1988 Chrysler Conquest TSi.

The patrons and staff all begin to walk out, they’ve had enough.

JB and Bernadette round up all the craptocoins, close up the joint and drive to Manteno. Bernadette loads them back into her basement Turd Vault, arms the two Turd Machine Deluxes guarding it and runs up the washroom. Then she poops.

Five days later, Pris’ dead body is found by a restaurateur after some customers at a nearby joint complain about “that nasty barbecue sauce smell next door,” demanding a refund.

Fertilized Minds

~ Jen ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
Jot down the first thing that comes to your mind.
View all responses

“This skunkweed ain’t skunky enough. Gotta add more port-a-pee.”
– Peppi Cacca, Fartner, Peppi’s Portapotties


“Not more flatulence testing! Stop feeding me corn and send me home!”
– Damien Hurlbutt, world’s largest source of natural gas, test subject at Area 51’s Alternative Fuels Division

“I keep circling and circling…I’m getting hangry…gotta be some fresh carrion around here somewhere.”
– Carla Moran, Shapeshifting humanoid turkey vulture, Sterile supply technician


“These dog bones are making me constipated! I want a refund!”
– Sybil Kibble, bill collector, Credit Recovery Associates (CRASS)


“What are they burning now?”
– Gothic Diana Ross, Singer and Vet Tech

“Poop!”
– Bernadette Cacca, Entramanure

Sonya-Daemon wants a change o’fart.

~ Jen ~ 5 Comments

Hell, Inc. CEO Satan temporarily banishes the daemon — once known as Midwestern slumlord Sonya Mare Smith Moran — to the land of the living, because she refused to stop stalking him in his basement C-Suite. He’s tired of hearing the shapeshifting humanoid turkey vulture squawking and pecking at his door.

The former president of The Poopy Groupies pays her favorite singer a visit hoping to sing a stinky doo-doo-et, however Bernadette Cacca has once again fallen asleep on the toilet while pooping. Despite her best efforts to make a direct-to-dream connection, Sonya fails to reach her subject because she is too busy farting in her sleep.

Ms. Moran then curses her former tenants who had reported her for false lease violations (cha-cha-cha), using every word in the book, however they all tune her out because the community room television is volume has been turned up to accommodate the hard-of-hearing. Duh.

Making one last ditch to stir up trouble, Sonya-Daemon appears at Sybil Kibble’s house, however she is not home, so Sonya instead cuts off her mother’s internet connection, tapping her toes anticipating a reaction.

“The web has tossed its darned cookies again,” JoAnn Kissane Kibble thinks aloud. “CeeCee, did you throw some nuts into the router again?” JoAnn asks her squirrel-buddy.

After clearing the router of chocolate chips and nuts, she switches her phone from a wi-fi connection to a cellular one, and types on Fakebook: “I can’t get online because the internet is down.” Then she starts crushing candy with her phone.

After Sonya-Daemon has used up her most recent free hall pass to planet Earth, she gets sucked back into the underworld.

“Hey Boss, can you make me 10 feet tall? I wanna be 10 feet tall! I wanna be 10 feet tall, just like I was when I sold you my soul!” the nitwit screams as she repeatedly jumps up and down, like a toddler who lost a kickball.

“I’ve tried startling people, I’ve tried inhabiting their dreams, stealing their cookies, nothing. Nobody even notices me!”

“Have you tried just shutting up?” Satan replies…“Now back to the call center. We need 1000 surveys completed every hour…”

“Woo-hoo!” Sonya un-ironically shrieks as she runs to her new cubicle in Hell, Inc.

Doug “D-Fail” Failure challenges Darth Vader.

~ Jen ~ 2 Comments

Chickenheads rapper, disgraced former management consultant and wannabe Sith Lord Doug Failure, known by his stage name “D-Fail” calls Luke Skywalker into his office after having given out awards to all staff members except him, including ones who had who had missed their targets.

“Does your skin give off an odor?”

“What?”

“I’m telling you this as your friend. You stink. Don’t tell anyone we had this meeting.”

“What’s your problem?” Luke replies, confused.

“I know you’ve got thumbs on me. If you don’t like me, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Wait until you meet MY BOSS!”

Luke just shakes his heads and walks out.

Narcadoodle-doo D-Fail has decided to run against Darth Vader to become the next Emperor of the Galaxy, convinced that he will win without a shred of a doubt.

“Vote for me, the onus is on you” quoth his campaign slogan; book, chapter and verse.

“And buy our new Chickenheads album “All About Us!” containing these sick tracks!”

Doug reads off his the names of his eight home-made mumble-rap tunes:

Hooray For Superficiality!
The Chicken Dance (Farmer Hurlbutt’s Extra Clucks Remix)
Let’s Do Something (Other Than Make Love)
Things That Make You Go Ppppphphppppplttttt!
Let’s All Go (To Sleep)
6 Degrees and Rising (Hell Freezes Over Mix)
I’m In Hate With You
We’re Poor & We Don’t Score (Every Hoop We Shoot Is A Whiff) Feat. Roe-Mello Fowler
The Chicken Dance (Auto-tuned Mix)
The Chicken Dance (Auto-tuned Low-Pass Mix)

Mr. Failure then chants…err…mumbles his war cry, from his new album he performed with his buddy Tyrell “Ty-Fowl” Fowler:

“We’re poor, we’re poor and we don’t score.
We’re poor, we’re poor and we don’t score.
Every hoop we shoot is a whiff!
Every shot we make is a miss…”

“Free tickets for our Galaxy-wide tour for everyone who votes for me!”

Hoping to win the Galaxy over by getting them to feel sorry for him via his rap campaign, little does Lil Dougie Failure know that the very employee he had been scapegoating has some important connections to his challenger…not to mention that his rapping sucks.

Fan Art – Carla Moran by LAERAfoolish

~ Jen ~ 2 Comments

Big up to LAERAfoolish for drawing the first fan-art ever of the changeling humanoid vulture Carla Moran shapeshifting before our eyes! You rock!

MoronicFanArts

~ Jen ~ Leave a comment

Big up to LAERAfoolish for drawing the first fan-art ever of the changeling humanoid vulture Carla Moran shapeshifting before our eyes! You rock!

More fan art:

Thank you to the bot known as Alfred on my favorite social media, Counter.Social for drawing Kankakee’s biggest dog food connoisseur, debt collector Sybil Kibble!

If you are tired of Elon Musk Bones thrown out by the X-Parrot, then you might like Counter.Social. It’s completely free of crap like algorithms, spambots and trolls. It’s run by this cool hacktivist codenamed “The Jester.”

Drawing by Alea Ner

“Wash that Bernadette right out of my hair!”

— Sybil

“Brandon Dixon is Half-Asleep” drawn by Zotco.

“Sybil Kibble” by GlowButter

A bonus Damien Hurlbutt drawn in the background of this “Ghoul” painting by an artist who prefers to remain anonymous:

Robbie Hurlbutt’s a hunkahunka burnin’ up!

~ Jen ~ Leave a comment

Kankakee pharmacy clerk, narcadoodle and Elvis impersonator Robert Roy Gary Hurlbutt is surprised to see his ex-girlfriend Bernadette Moran Cacca.

“I dreamt I was living in a real-life Soylent Green. The Pope was the first one to sacrifice himself for Soylent Industries. Instead of going to the Suicide-Centre, he and others slid down a well, with a 50/50 chance of living forever or getting turned into Soylent Green.”

“Groovy! What did the cannibal do after he dumped his girlfriend?”

“I dunno babe, what?”

“He wiped his butt.”

“That’s so funny money honey.”

“I know. I hit rock bottom. You are both beautiful on the outside and the inside. Hell, maybe even your
intestines are pretty.”

“No, Robbie — YOU!:

This John is missing his Yoko. I have a feeling that something very special is about to happen, Bernadette.”

“Let’s go back to your place and we’ll make beautiful music together!”

Robbie and Bernadette hold hands, the two narcompoops go bouncing down the street together, a match made in Hades.

“Elvis!” A stranger yells from his car.

“I’m a hunka hunka burning love!”

The pair get together, have some NettFixx and chill.

The next day, Robbie wakes up to the sound of muffled shuffling. Bernadette is bent over, her poopybutt wiggling in the air as she searches through Robbie’s massive hoard of boxes.

“Found ’em!” Bernadette exclaims.

Bernie grabs a couple of record albums, three DVDs and a fedora.

“I got my things back. Gotta run.”

“What? We just got started.”

“And now I’m finishing what you started.”

Bernadette puts the fedora on her head and carries the media in a large sack toward the door.

“You stole these things from me and now I’ve got them back! Hope you find what you’re looking for!”

Bernadette exits Robbie’s Kankakee apartment and drives her poopmobile back to her Manteno home on Kant Street, hugs her half-drunken husband Peppi, then runs upstairs to take a dump.

A cure for willful ignorance

~ Jen ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What’s something you’d love to see in the future, but know you probably won’t live to witness?
View all responses

As my Aunty Sochelle has put it, this planet needs a cure for this disease called “Stupid by Choice.”

Common names for this affliction are “willful ignorance” and “narcadoodle.”

For now, I just choose to write about that crap and hopefully bring non-ignoramuses some laughs.

Cast of Characters