I started a new podcast on July 18, 2016 called “David Boles: Human Meme” and I have had some great luck with episodes like Of Wealth and the Starless Eye and Omne Trium Perfectum: The Rule of Three and De Anima and the Demon Soul, but today’s podcast — American Gargoyle: A Cloven Hoof in the Homeland — has taken off on a life of its own, and that’s precisely what you hope to have happen in a podcast about human memetics and the how and why we learn and share knowledge!

Here’s the blurp I wrote to describe American Gargoyle: A Cloven Hoof in the Homeland:

In this original, David Boles fairytale, you meet an orange-faced Gargoyle. That short-fingered, cloven-hoofed, Vulgarian God is set upon the destruction of the world, and is served by three, misshapen, children as the rest of humanity are rendered mute with nukes. Then — a child appears — to tame the hatred, and stanch the drooling, with the gift of kindness; and the world is able to be re-birthed again, in the valley of the homeland.

There are times in a writer’s life where everything perfectly aligns and intention meets execution and that has started to happen with the American Gargoyle: A Cloven Hoof in the Homeland podcast:

I am grateful for the support and the attention! Now is the time to propagate the fairytale beyond the meme of me and you. American Gargoyle: A Cloven Hoof in the Homeland needs to take the next step in distribution of thought and be made into a web animation, or a comic book, or a stage play, or an ASL story, or something else only you know!

Here is Janna Sweenie’s translation of American Gargoyle in American Sign Language on Vimeo:

Here’s the same American Gargoyle edition for the Deaf, but on YouTube — in case you prefer that service for saving and viewing:

In my spirit of Making America Great Again, I am offering my fairytale script under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license for continued propagation! Make a movie! Record your own podcast! Put on a Church play! Do a street performance! Make the meme matter!  All I ask is that you give me credit for the story and not make any money off the effort — and then let me know what you’ve done so I may celebrate you on social media!

Here’s the script just as I wrote it for the podcast — so there are markers and misspelled words — it’s a working tool, not an article, and there are hard links at the bottom of this page to the .PDF script file and the original .MP3 podcast audio file:

David Boles: Human Meme
Podcast Thirty­Three (8­-22-­16)
American Gargoyle: A Cloven Hoof in the Homeland
(A Modern Fairytale written by David Boles)

DISCLAIMER: Any resemblance to any character in this story with a living person is clearly coincidental — and there’s no such thing as a coincidence.

DISCLAIMER : This is a modern day Fairytale written by David Boles and the contents are unintended for a child of any sort. Or is it?

THE FAIRYTALE, BEGINS!

He was born into being to never be anyone’s scapegoat. His giant, bulging head and orange skin were nothing compared to the tiny size of his short-fingered Vulgarian hands — and his pasty, prehistoric, monkey-thumbs.

He first appeared out of the sulfur mist that was New York City in the dawning of the City’s pornography career — and while he had no human mother or father — he had the threat of the ethereal with him — the unexplained and the dyscognitive were his orphan upbringers and all he wanted out of life was to control everything, to be on everyone’s mind at all times, and to never diminish in public stupidity because he — and only he — could save the world — from himself!

With microscopic hands, and one — cloven hoof for a foot — he was always searching the streets for a broodmare to bear the bounty of his evil — and when none could be sourced locally, he looked over seas and land and heavenly sky to land upon the most unfortunate foreign bodies in the world to have them bear his inhuman offspring.

The Gargoyle built monuments to himself, and at night, when nobody was watching, he would perch on the cornices of his towering headstone namesakes, and pose for the other players in the air, becoming the very granite version of himself that so many stone cutters before him had added to architectural artifices to scare off young children, and bad omens — just like him.

The total irony of it all — the posing, the bumbling, the screaming into the air — were completely lost on our triumphant, Gold-encrusted, Gargoyle.

Being the star of his own life wasn’t enough of an infection for him — to truly achieve his goal of virally infecting everyone with his blood and memes and harmonizations — he had to be prevalent in their lives even if they had no interest in being, or knowing, him.

The American Gargoyle decided to begin a war with goodness — because it’s always easier to be evil than to care to be right — and so he slaughtered tiny children, he pushed newlyweds into Niagara Falls, he euthanized any person over the age of 18 because they all smelled like life and they all had tangled hair and would soon shrivel into wrinkles. The completely irony that he, himself, was 150 years old — was lost on the stony brute.

And so slowly, moment by method, people began disappearing from the earth until only the young and the dumb were still breathing, and for that, the American Gargoyle took pride in making New York great again.

His own offspring beneath him — gnawing on the guts of snakes and the hearts of bats — paraded the Gargoyle on their wretched shoulders from East Coast to West celebrating his victory over the aged and the infirm.

Then, one day, with no one else about — a young child approached the Gargoyle King while he was sunning himself on the beach in a tanning bed — and the child noticed, that in addition to his spectacularly tiny hands, the Gargoyle in the Homeland — was not wearing shoes.

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing to his one, cloven, hoof.

“Why that’s nothing!” The Gargoyle shouted, digging his one cloven foot deep into the sand.

“Are you man or monster?” the child asked.

“Why, I am neither! I’m a God Who Walks The Earth!” said the Gargoyle while putting a blue sock on his cloven hoof and then a black patent leather shoe over the stockinged mount.

“I’ve never seen a cloven hoof on a God before.” said the child.

“That’s because you… you… know nothing of… of… what not!” stammered the Gargoyle God into the rising sea breeze.

“Does it hurt?” Asked the child.

“Hurt?” The Gargoyle had never been asked such a question so tenderly before this moment. “How would you like to walk tip-toe on one foot all day?”

The child took his shoe in her hand and untied the knot binding the cloven hoof. She gently removed the shoe. Then, slowly, rolled the sock down his calf, past the cloven hoof.

“It looks red,” she said.

“Yes, yes.” the Gargoyle replied, “Shoes are hot, you know!”

The child took his hoof in her hands and gently started massaging the keratin layers. “Does that feel better?” she wondered.

The Gargoyle replied, “Yes! Yes! That’s wonderful! Nobody’s ever touched my cloven hoof before!”

“It hurts when you hide something,” said the child, and she ever-so-gently kissed his hoof — even though it smelled of Betadine and Pinesol. “Does that feel better?”

“Mmmmm.” Said the Gargoyle, as he lifted his cooled hoof and brought it back down, sharply — deep into the eye of the little girl.

“You’re hurting me” said the child … as the Gargoyle dug his hoof deeper into her eye socket, pinning her to the ground.

“Such a foolish child! I am the God-King! The Gargoyle, Triumphant! And you think you can defeat me with a kiss on the cloven hoof? I have defeated prettier, younger, people than you!”

“I was only trying to help” said the girl, drooling blood from her mouth — eye mush dripped down her ruddy cheek.

“Yeah, right!” Said the Gargoyle! “Well who are you helping now?!”

The girl, now dead and unresponsive, was untucked from the Gargoyle’s hoof by his three, brooding children, and tossed over the railing of their penthouse level apartment!

“That’ll show you!” the Gargoyle shouted at the falling body tumbling below “to help someone more powerful than all of you!”

The thump of the girl’s body landing on the street below was lost in the guffaw of the Gargoyle as he replaced both sock and shoe to, once again, cover his cloven hoof from public hypocrisy.

Later that night, while tucked into bed, beneath the mosquito netting covering his ornately, carved, bed, the Gargoyle heard a tiny shout out.

“I’m still here, you know!” said a faint voice from … somewhere…

“Who are you? Where are you! Show me to me!” Shouted the Gargoyle.

“I’m down here,” came the plaintive reply — “Inside your cloven hoof!”

“Eha?” The Gargoyle peeled back the sheets to look at his angry, swollen, cloven hoof.

“That’s better. I can breathe now.” Came the thin reply.

“What are you doing in my CLOVEN HOOF?” Stormed the Gargoyle!

“I’m part of you now. We’ll be together forever!”

“NEVER!” The Gargoyle leap to the fireplace and used a steel truncheon to sever his cloven hoof from his body. He hopped to his penthouse window and tossed his now giggling, bloody, hoof over the railing into the city below.

The Gargoyle returned to bed, laughing — and bleeding profusely from where his shin used to be… — when he heard the voice, again — louder this time —

“I’m still here.”

“Gahhh! Whaaaa? WHERE? WHERE?!!” The Gargoyle spun around in his bed looking…!

“I was stuck in your cloven hoof — but now I’m free.”

“Where are you so I may cut you out as I have slayed you before!?”

“I’m over there. And over here. I’m everywhere now. See, that’s the problem with kindness. It tends to, like, spread around a lot!”

“Well, then I’ll kill you all! I’ll cut off every piece of me and burn it all in the fireplace! My children will eat my bones and spit them into the sea and then toss themselves into a volcano before they can poop me out!

I’ll have this building destroyed and the entire Western Hemisphere nuked — because why have such a power if you don’t intend to use it and set the world afire!”

“Okay, then.”

And, the Gargoyle did just as the threatened. He started by cutting off the smallest pieces of himself, there, in the groin, then the heart, then his tiny little hands. When his hands were gone, he used his teeth to bite of the other bits of him — fulfilling his predestiny of saving the world from himself.

His children boiled his bones and ate his marrow and and tossed themselves into the great volcano before their poop came out — all while being serenaded by the sweet voice of kindness urging them on with a friendly “Hello!” and a warm, “I’m still here!” reminder.

The Gargoyle knew everything — except that which he knew nothing about — kindness — for evil anneals kindness and — once annealed, kindness is super tough to get rid of because it tends to be sticky and it gets stuck in inconvenient places.

Finally, with the Gargoyle dead, and all the nukes of the world launched to encrust the earth in amber and fire, and all his small-animal eating offspring dead and not pooping — did the old alive start wakening from the hills, and the stones, and trees, where they’d been hiding, waiting forever for the Gargoyle to die and pass away all the hatred in the world — and they hid in the once place they knew he’d never find them — in the goodness of the homeland.

It wasn’t just kindness that saved the valley that day to preserve the earth for a bright new start — it was also the uninformed act of doing something unearned for a someone who deserved nothing but pity and loathing because, …

… you see, in the end of the beginning — how we choose to start determines how we end — and kindness is circular — and once you start its golden arc — kindness can only circle back on itself and close with the same intention in which it was gifted.

Thank you for listening.

Be a Human Meme!

Copyright © 2016 by David Boles

Here’s a link to the .PDF file of the American Gargoyle: A Cloven Hoof in the Homeland script with special bold text highlights for the podcast production as well as a link to the original .MP3 file if you want to redistribute the story yourself.

.PDF Script

.MP3 File

Thank you!

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