VNTY

California is the land of the “vanity plates,” completely ridiculous customized licence plates that are usually vaguely sexual or somehow or other always seeming to say, “I am insecure about my genitals.”  Every time I see one I find myself wondering what the story is, or - more often - what the hell is wrong with the person who owns the car.  Well.  Wonder no more.  I’ve been itching to do something in the short story area and this is my ticket to ride.

I’m taking actual vanity plates that I encounter day-to-day on the Los Angeles roads (and there are plenty) and making up rediculous stories to accompany them.  I will not be posting them online, because the eventual point is to compile them together and publish them for “the money,” as the kids are calling it.  However, I would love to shove an excerpt under your noses:

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“MRMATTV”

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It is a funny thing, waking up as a television.

Well, I should add one caveat: it is not at all funny to the man being awoken.  Mr. Matt - for that was the television’s name - had hitherto been a perfectly bland senior regional manager at a low-end department store.  Given his cheap but deliberate manner, he was not naturally inclined to find his current predicament especially amusing.  Surrealism held no charm for him.  Irony had never been an issue.  Mr. Matt did not wake up as a television and think to himself, “Hilarious.”

A more accurate description of his thoughts upon waking might be something the vicinity of “The world is disarmingly boxy.”  That, or any other angular string of adjectives applied in poor taste and inconsideration of Mr. Matt’s recently nonexistent limbs.  Mr.Matt had never been particularly swanky with his vocabulary, and would have had difficulty describing an ordinary Tuesday with much detail, let alone a morning in which his face had been flattened into fifty inches of plasma screen.  Perhaps it is better, the reader might easily point out, that under these circumstances, Mr. Matt is not writing his own story.  The author would like to make it known that Mr. Matt is not the type of man who would find jokes at his expense very amusing, even after being turned into a television that is regularly tuned to reruns of Mork and Mindy.  This knowledge throws almost everything that is to follow into the realm of bad taste, so take that as you like.

After all, this is quite serious.  Remember, the man has become a television.

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  1. prodigium said: Oh California and our ridiculous vanity plates. There was a little red bug that drove around my school and it had a vanity plate that read “Mrspit”. My friends and I couldnt decide if it was “mr spit” or “mrs pit”
  2. opallynn posted this