A Totally Fabricated Bio in the style of Tom Robbins

There's this thing I do sometimes called a Totally Fabricated Bio. It's where I write a short bio for a person that contains very little in the way of actual biographical information, but is fun and usually funny and often written in the style of the subject's favorite author.

I recently wrote a set of Totally Fabricated Bios for the management team at Red Pill Now, a tech solutions firm that is probably the coolest company ever because they are using my wacky bios on their website.

I thought I'd share the bios with my Steemit friends, too. So here's the first one, about a very cool guy named Bob Kadrie who loves to fish and who challenged me to write his bio in the style of the practically legendary Tom Robbins. As always, my efforts are not guaranteed to perfectly match the style of the requested author, but I sure do try my best! And hopefully, the result is entertaining, regardless.

Seaweed Margarita

A Totally Fabricated Bio written for Bob Kadrie, in the style of Tom Robbins

In a Cambodian riverboat, a fisherman sings a hopeful prayer to the goddess of the waters. Halfway around the world, the Pope, having just eaten his Lenten meal, digs slender sea bass bones from between his teeth with a gold plated toothpick. And in a small Georgia town, in a dark, windowless hut behind the Cinco De Mayo Mexican Cantina (dollar margaritas every Friday), Bob Kadrie, fish mystic, performs the arcane spell that calls the leatherback sea turtle to embark upon her annual transpacific jellyfish hunt.

The mystical has always been steeped in saltwater, bound up in seaweed, adorned with silvery scales. Once upon a time, the great fisherwomen of Hawaii could stand on the beach and cast their eyes out over the water to do their fishing for them. The old Hebrew water benders could part the seas or stroll atop them without even getting their sandals wet. The Dogon tribe of Mali credit their spiritual wisdom as well as their cosmological understanding to a race of spacefaring fish-people.

An Irish myth tells of a salmon who, upon being ingested by a king’s servant, gifted humanity with the knowledge of the universe. Bob Kadrie was that salmon. Of course, the salmon, being a special kind of immortal only the Irish could have devised, could be fried and eaten without dying. Can we say as much for Adam’s apple?

The fish mystic has appeared as man among men and as fish among fish, and has on occasion taken the half-man, half-fish form by which he is known in the folklore of various animist sects. His career did not stop at Salmon of Knowledge. He is also the Flounder of Joy, the Lobster of Sorrow, and the Narwhal of Triumph in Maritime Battle. He is the merman who seduced Leviathan, who raised her beluga babies and sent them off to dental school. He is the harbinger of the news of the flood who reminds you to pack a fresh pair of underwear before boarding the ark. But nowadays, most people just call him “Bob”.

Bob’s origins can be traced to the earth’s humble beginnings. He was not created—for whatever gods there once were fled our quaint ball of clay long before life took hold, holding up their robes on the way out so as not to muddy the pristine hems. Creation, he recalls, was more of a self-starter. He remembers when the world was new, its scant patches of dry land inhospitable to all but a few single celled organisms. He witnessed the great aquatic diaspora when ancient proto-sharks grew stubby legs and ventured out of the sea shallows onto the parched alien landscape beyond. He remembers the advent of men on the planet, their awkward, fleshy bodies made for the dirt but inexplicably comfortable in the water. He remembers the Great Deluge, when the whole world was covered over with water and for forty days and forty nights, fish was king of all.

It is said he can breathe underwater and speak the languages of the deep. Local legends claim that when he puts on his red trunks and hikes down to the swimming hole for a summer afternoon dip, schools of brook trout part down the middle for him, accepting him as one of their own.

Fishermen come to Bob’s hut to pay homage. For his blessing, they give offerings of ten dollars and a can of worms, and he murmurs a homily of unintelligible sounds like flourishing fins and bursting bubbles and the slow masonry that turns oyster puke into pearls. Afterwards, out on the river, the fish seem almost magnetized to their hooks.

When Bob goes out for dollar margaritas on Fridays, small children sneak around his bar stool, craning and tiptoeing for a chance to see if he has gills behind his ears. He doesn’t. The gills are not present in his human manifestation.

But if you creep around the edge of his hut on a warm summer night when the moon hangs large, reflecting a rippling yellow pufferfish on the surface of a parking lot mud puddle, you might hear Bob Kadrie utter the haiku that commands the ocean tides. If you venture closer, parting the undulating seafoam curtain at his doorway, you might catch a glimpse of shimmering scales or a whiff of fresh caught tuna. And if you gather the courage to enter the hut, you may find the fish mystic relaxing in a cool bath, his tail thrown luxuriously over the side of the whale bone tub. Look closely and you will see something of eternity etched in the scales around his glass bead eyes.

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All images used in this post were snagged from Pixabay.com and used under a creative commons license.

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I love you, Steemit!

If you're interested in commissioning a Totally Fabricated Bio for yourself, hit me up!

@lesliestarrohara