The Boble: Intro

Last month, I decided to put up some regular features on the front page. So far, the only thing that’s materialized is the “Sunday Archive”, which I really got into as I dug crap out from my Gmail archives.  Currently, there’s shit programmed up through the end of the year…then, in 2009, I’m going to pull out the really old rejected articles from the Dirtyfreaks.com days – and a few that predate my web presence entirely.

So here we are with Boble Wednesdays, where I will once again try to post the entire Boble.  At this point it’s more of a challenge than anything else.  I can’t say that I particularly enjoy the Boble.  It is, after all, the weird ramblings of a tenth grader.

The Boble started in the 1989/90 school year.  I don’t really know what inspired me to do it, but I started rewriting the first five books of the Bible in my little notepad of doom (which still exists in my bedroom closet).  I then read aloud from my notes in front of my theater class each day.  I sucked at theater, but I was really in my element reading sections of the Boble.

The Boble is, simply, an irreverent, childish take on the Bible, with God BOB (no relation to the Subgenius) as our somewhat distracted creator.  Throughout high school, I fleshed out the work to include the entire Old Testament (or “Old Testicle”) and actually made a small amount of money ($500) selling chapbooks through my little “press,” which I called Purple Publications.  That was mainly me and the library’s printers and Xerox machines.  Oh, and a stapler.

In 92, bored during my freshman year at college, I went nuts and listened to Jesus Christ Superstar over and over for about three weeks, whipping out most of the “New Testicle.”  Then the Boble, pretty much, sat untouched for a few years.

I picked it up again in 96 during a long, slow night shift job and added a few “literary” threads, getting more into God BOB’s background and, ultimately, putting together a backstory where we discover that he stole the universe from our actual creator – the Blood Mistress Kraal (with whom he was romantically involved).  The day to day operations in Bob Heavens (where there is great sausage) also got some more detail, as the final pages of the Old Testicle became less parody of the Bible and more a build-up towards the Bob Jr. Scheme, which launches the New Testicle.

I gave the Boble yet another re-edit in 2000 when a few excerpts showed up at 3AM Magazine and, of course, the April 2001 launch of Dirtyfreaks.com featured the “Boblehub.”

By 2002, though, I’d lost interest, and The Boble has been untouched since.

I am, of course, forced to re-edit again.  Though, like the Sunday Archive entries, I’ll only clean up obvious typos and glaring errors that happen to catch my drunken eye as I casually put the files together.  Still, you’ll notice the various stages of development.  The first five chapters are, generally, unchanged from 1989.  After that, the evolution of the Boble through the 90’s will be clear.  With the ability to program ahead, I’ll just get the whole damn thing and get it up in the system.  Then I can forget about the project again for five years!

We’ll start next Wednesday with the copyright page and introduction from 1991.  And I may take breaks throughout to share Boble-related stories, like how I mailed it off to Pope John Paul II in 2002.