We’ve Been Bought Out By Papa John’s
We do everything from inside the big pizza factory now.
If you haven’t heard, we’ve been bought out. Papa John’s, for the price of $18,000, now owns everything The Shocker does. Surprisingly Lord John is quite hands-off so far, though, so not much is going to change for now, and we doubt he’ll ever see this either, so I’m going to be candid and accurate with you about everything. Lord John keeps us all in one small office, a tinny box of a room beneath one of the gigantic dough chutes in the Papa John’s Pizza Factory. Outside the windows, streaming by, are the glorious tomato sauce rivers. It is said that if you drink of these red rivers, your blood will feel infinite. Thus far none of us have dared to try. The men who make the pizzas, standing between the rivers and our office — which clangs like the inside of a gutter in a hail storm — these are not very nice men to look at. And when these pizza-making men see our eyes peering between the blinds of the office windows, when we peep through so to dream about those rivers, these men seem to mean violence if we ever get near their red flow.
Woah! Why did we get bought up by Lord John??? It is said that he saw us destroy another man’s business — that of Wedgehead, to be exact, he the evil purveyor of the Shock Top beverage we took out of business — and wanted us in-house, as a sort of deranged secret weapon in the ongoing Brand Wars. Lord John has a lot of these little bands of writers: in the outpost nearest us, beneath another of those dough chutes, is a bunch of nerds writing a pilot for a Showtime series that Lord John is trying to get aired. The writers are always complaining that the propaganda that Lord John is giving them is too blunt to be worked into a plot subtly. “Those guys at HBO get to preach The Message much more discretely,” they’re always whining. In our time at the factory we have also learned there is something called The Message: we do not know what this is, but we know that it is only mentioned in ominous tones and that if we talk about too much, it will be bad for us. Thankfully, no one is reading this.
I can’t say much more for now. Lord John has been so nice to us, he even let us all hug Peyton Manning once, but we have learned in short time that he can also be cruel. If The Shocker stops publishing, it may mean we are all hardening and dying to death in a big baking pizza oven, trapped in the heating dough. Lord John’s Inferno, as they say, his giant-sized pizza oven, is where all the bad content boys go to die. Wish us well and hope for our success. He may start reading our work at any moment, so we do not know how long we can leave this dispatch running…
