C(o)unt
Sometimes, I welcome writers block. I like to believe it’s like being poisoned by a beautiful woman so that she can rape me and steal my wallet – a privilege. At least, in my book. Things like that only happen to important people. People like me, we get stabbed 13 times in the kidney by an eight year old ATM robber.
I’ve had writers block for a while now. Officially. I’ve kept it a secret. I’ve had my secretary lie and I’ve unearthed old writing from my Cold File, spreading it out as recently completed work. I’ve smiled and lied and danced. It’s all over now, though. I’ve exhausted the Cold File, I’ve come to the end of my lies and my dances.
I tried all the old tricks to get out. The whole “All work and no play…” thing for 50 pages, murdering my girlfriend and stabbing people in the kidney 13 times. No luck.
When I was growing up, they had that Friday the 13th: The Series. Remember that? It didn’t have anything to do with the movie, it was just some misguided, insane attempt to cash in on the films. The show was Highlander-standard Vancouver stuff about two cousins who inherited an antique store from their uncle. They soon discovered that all of the antiques had been cursed by the devil and it was now up to them to use the sales registry to go out and recover the cursed antiques before hell came to earth. Each item had a certain power but, for the buyers to access it to further their own nefarious desires, they had to kill – feed the items souls. So, episode after episode, the two cousins and their elderly advisor pursued blood-thirsty madmen and recovered antique watches and water glasses and lamps. It was actually a passable show that enjoyed a three year run, though the last year isn’t worth it.
My point is that I’d love some cursed antique to help me get back to a productive writing schedule. But now I want to continue on this tangent. Friday the 13th starred “Robey,” this delicious redhead with a killer body. As a kid, I always thought she was porn star, because of the one name thing. I’ve searched high and low for a porn career, but no luck outside of a few soft-core flicks. She’s actually rock singer Louise Robey, who went on to marry the Earl of Buford and retired from the entertainment business. So my next step was to find out what the wife of an Earl is called. It’s not Earless, is it? Because then that would mean she was missing ears.
Days of research, conducted from my writing office where I usually write my writing when I am writing but am instead masturbating my master when I’m not writing, led me to an interesting fact: The wife of an Earl is a Countess. So what’s the point? Why not just face facts and call yourself a Count, then? At least your wife is honest. So then I found out that an Earl is British for Count. The Brits don’t have Counts. This really throws me, because, then, they do have Countesses. Why thumb your nose at Count and not at Countess? That doesn’t even begin to make sense to me.
Count comes from the Roman rank of comes, like comes except pronounced comes. See? A Count was in charge of a – wait for it – county. Which makes an Earl in charge of an Earldom. Except Britain has counties.
So here’s the fun part. The Brits do have Viscounts, whatever the fuck they do. The Count thing is all over the place except for where it counts. (Hah! See, that’s coming from behind the writer’s block right there, baby. Cutting edge humor. I’m the Earl, baby.)
There’s actually a depressingly mundane explanation to the whole Earl/Count thing. Earl comes from the Middle English, taken from the phrase “Whatchoo doingk today , Sven? Killingk soom moor Saxons, eh? It’s a pretty day foor de Plague!” (that’s to be read in a comical Scandinavian accent, by the way, otherwise the joke falls flat, and having one of my jokes fall flat is against the Danelaw.) Allegedly, Earl (which means, in Norse, ‘nobleman,’ tee-hee) was selected to replace “Count” at some point in history because “Count” looked an awful lot like “cunt.” Seriously. It’s late-Middle Ages political correctness at work. That is the only explanation for using Earl, and they’re proud of it, too. See? We’re cleaner than the Europeans. Our brutal, raping, murdering low-level peerage are sensitive to the public. You don’t want your children misspelling count and learning bad things! Now, let’s cunt to ten… Oh god! Sorry! How many horses are you selling at market? I only cunt six… Oh god! I can’t stop! Please, draw and quarter me for stealing hay, you cunt!
All of this is meaningless because “Earl” is a made up title. The real power, early on, fell to the sheriffs, like the Sheriff of Nottingham, and Earls have just sort of carried over like bad pennies. The point becomes moot because the official way you address an Earl is Lord. The Lord of Nothing! It’s all yours! Lord of a poisoned world! That’s right! Take it all! I’m headed to the escape shuttle! It’s all over, Lord of chaos!
So Robey is a big nobody. She’s the Lady Louise Robey. So I went looking for the Earl of Burford and discovered that he isn’t an Earl at all. It’s some sort of special title that the first son of the Duke of St. Albans gets. That means Robey is a somebody, I guess, whenever the Duke of whatever kicks it.
Robey’s Earl of Burford is also very outspoken for the rights of hereditary peers to…something something. Be allowed to kill peasants, I think. He’s very English, as you can tell from his name: Charles Francis Topham de Vere Beauclerk. He’s also certifiable, as, besides restoring the rights of peerage, he also believes that his direct ancestor ghost wrote Shakespeare’s plays.
Just think of it. Robey left behind her tit-flashing movie career, her low-grade TV career and her rock music career (best known for doing a cover of “One Night in Bangkok” which was a runaway number one hit in Montreal, which is a city located on Jupiter) for some loony Englishman with a fake title and a name that sounds suspiciously terrorist, if you’re asking me. Like Homeland Security red alert. Charles…okay… Francis…uh-huh…Tophamdevereem–stop stop! What are you doing? What’s happening! oh god I am not good with computers…
Everyone get down! Pa-kow, pa-kow, pa-kow!!
Okay, you caught me, I don’t have a writing office.