The New Testicle: Introduction

It all began with the blizzard of 1993.  I was at a small college tucked away in the mountains of West Virginia, and we were stranded for about a week.  No highways, and there were several days where nothing could get through the roads.  A rare moment of isolation more in keeping with 1903 than 1993.

It was a tiny little apocalypse, and, for a carefree college student, it was enormous, life-changing fun.  The snow around our dorm drifted so deep you could (and I did) throw yourself from the third-storey balcony, plummeting safely into a sea of suffocating white.

I lived on Kraft Mac & Cheese from Wal-Mart, cooking it on a hot plate that sparked and caught fire occasionally while I guzzled cheap beer and calmly controlled disaster.  It was, probably, my best college moment.  I had a single room and just sealed myself away at night.

Boredom drove me to the Boble.  For some time, I felt oppressed by the work.  Not because it sucked and was insane, but because it was unfinished.  I wrote that big fucking Old Testicle…and yet it was only the halfway point.  So I figured, what the hell?  Time to take on Jesus Christ.

Since I was a kid, Jesus Christ Superstar was my favorite take on the Jesus story.  There’s even a Super-8 video out there, somewhere, from when I was 15, playing a guitar, and stripping to songs from the cast recording of Jesus Christ Superstar.  This tape still exists, and I think it’s somewhere in the UK.  Every once in a while, a certain friend lets me know that he drunkenly showed it to his friends or co-workers or something.  Creepy.

I put the album on a loop and wrote for a week without taking any breaks, in between throwing myself 30 feet through the air into snow drifts, sledding down a hill into a line of unforgiving trees, drinking, and masturbating like a sailor trapped on the ice during an Arctic expedition.  And for all that work, I only got 65 pages.  And it’s still not complete!  I skipped the “Bobsel of Kram.”  No reason why… I was just suffering from the love-hate thing I’ve always had for the Boble.

Happily, you get to read the never before printed Bobsel of Kram.  I returned to it in 1996.  It’s 12 pages, and unfinished… So there’s a Dead Sea Scroll sort of feel to it.  Which, at this point, is just fine.  I don’t intend to write any new content for the Boble.

I definitely lost my mind a little bit writing the New Testicle.  If you read it as originally printed (I will not post it this way) you get the straightforward Bobsel of Matdude, one page saying that I didn’t feel like writing Kram, the Bobsel of Luke Duke written in half-assed Appalachian dialect (since edited back to normal, but some of it remains), and then the Bobsel of Nohj, which I formatted into columns to be more Bible-like.

Nohj is deeply crazy, I think…And I’m not looking forward to plowing through it (as I write this intro, I have not yet opened my New Testicle file – last accessed on March 12th, 2001).

After Nohj is “Exploits,” where I reprint and answer actual letters I received during the life of the Boble up till 93, and also mix in a narrative with me and “Zosish” – my old friend and Boble-enthusiast from England (who is the same friend in possession of the tape mentioned above).

The letters from the apostles are all a mish-mash of near-stream of consciousness insanity, and then we get into The Trip.  Fifteen pages of the New Testicle is turned over to The Trip, and it was fun to write.  The perfect way to end the drunken, snowbound writing frenzy.

After the Trip, we get some junk that’s been tacked on over the years.  I’ll probably keep the 1997 epilogue from the “Second Revised Edition” of the Boble, which includes an in-character (as Boble Translator) discussion on the previous editions preceding 1997.  I’ll also include the brief “study guide” that accompanied the “Modern Era Comet Catastrophe Edition” (1998).

The Comet Catastrophe Edition of the Boble was the last version to be sold (and make money).  I released a special “Y2K” edition in 2000, but it was just to send around to friends.

Well…next week, then.  We’ll start with the original introduction pages…