Plumbing The Debts

Here then, for edification & edutainment, is a brief character sketch of Floyd Flapp, eminent hair economist & hermit divorcee:

Dr. Flapp was born with a PhD in Flying Buttress, Illinois, a small community which inaugurated Blood Sports Month in 1925 to take advantage of the successful importation of medieval ideas to the American midwest. Flapp's father, a winsome lass named Jerry who would attempt to use grape jelly as an auto part throughout his four-storied career, disinherited the boy when he noticed the screaming child had not been born, as had all the Flapp men & women, with a handlebar moustache. The mother followed suit, as did the hospital staff, & most of the town, until kindly Mr. Jackanape, the neighborhood interrupter, took the boy in & raised him as one of his own cats.

Flapp was unemployed during his childhood, a fact that did not escape the Internal Revenue Service, which was astonished by the boy's annual income of $40,000 a year, which was an enormous amount at the time &, for a tween, still pretty impressive. Flapp published his first self-help book before he hit puberty, which was titled "Be Rich By Being Like Me!" The book was not successful, as most people wanted to be rich but no one really wanted to be like Floyd. However, the book remains notable as the introduction was written by none other than future President of the United States Laura Ingalls Wilder.

After spending time in a tax shelter in the Maldives, Flapp taught burger flipping & fry-o-lating at several fast food chains before being asked by the faculty of Harvard University to please stop calling in the middle of the night. Flapp's next series of papers, published disrespectfully in Modern Economics & Highlights For Children, established him as virtually alone in his field in believing that the ratio of debt to earnings is proportional to the amount of hair on one's thighs (pre-shaven) minus how much money one thinks one could win on a game show selected from a list. Still, for brief window of opportunism, Flapp's crazy theories were discussed on television morning programs & in editorial pages on slow news days.

But Flapp continued to be excused from mainstream acceptability. His marriage to infamous fashion model/guerilla warrior Scam was scheduled to happen on a late-night talk show but was moved instead to a segment on the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour to be shared with a Maya Angelou poetry slam report. When his wife left him shortly thereafter to become a concubine of Melvin Adenoid, the inventor of post-nasal drip, he was inconsolable. He toilet-papered the smallest church he could find in Alabama & fled the jurisdiction with a knapsack full of forty pounds of assorted coins.

Establishing a hermitage in the popular caverns in & around New Miami, Nebraska, Flapp would have been all-but-forgotten except several record albums he recorded in the mid-fifties to explain his theories were sampled by underground hip-hop & classical musicians like Humpa Humpa & the East Garland Half-String Quintet. Inexplicably smelly appearances on college & community radio followed, & a "Flapp For Vice-President" campaign attempted to get him on the ballots of every presidential ticket since 1980, when Ronald Reagan, upon meeting him, thought Flapp had been cast as President instead of him, & almost left the Republican National Convention to audition for a role on "Dallas."

Flapp is incredibly old &, by most accounts, a little weird about it. Yet his cult of personality continues to grow, & he continues to publish increasingly obscene economic treatises that are posted to blogs along with celebrity bikini photos. This may be because the treatises increasingly sound like blurbs for celebrity bikini photos. He has gone mad? Or is he speaking now exclusively in metaphor? Or does he spend a lot of time on the internet looking at paparazzi photos of celebrities in bikinis?

What's clear is that Flapp's influence may yet one day be felt, & this, above all else, is what his fans & admires most dread.