Oh, Reality

by Marcy

Everyone was sick and tired of Eddie Glug, but try as they might they could not get him to trip up and do something stupid.  Annoying he was, and rank smelly, but he was a smart player with no scruples.  He was made for reality television, and he was the person on the show that everyone - on the show with him or at home watching - loved to hate.

Eddie was manipulative.  He wooed Charice in the first three episodes just to turn on her when she lost the mud race challenge in episode four.  And you would think that his betrayal of Charice would have set off alarms for Bran and Alyssa, his closest cohorts in the tribe, but he outsmarted each of them in turn to win immunity and eventually lead to their being voted off.  The others tried to gain his trust in an attempt to figure out his motives, but he cut them down with his strategies week by week, one by one.  They had been on the deserted island twenty-five days, and Eddie still had yet to take a bath or shower.  Rhonda was convinced he had something growing out of his toes.  She never got the chance to investigate it, as she was booted off the island on the fifteenth day.

On day thirty one there were three people left; Eddie, Martin, and Kataya.  In an unprecedented three-way tie, all three had immunity necklaces and therefore could not be voted off.  The rules of the game stated that should a stalemate like this occur, the remaining contestants must stay on the island as long as possible, and the last one to leave the island would be crowned the victor.  Kataya was sunburned and starving, and Martin had sprained his ankle in the last challenge wherein he won his immunity.  Eddie, aside from his toe fungus, was still intact and completely convinced of his victory.  After fifty-four days, Kataya finally gave in to the elements and begged to be removed from the island.  Martin and Eddie were the only ones left.  

The viewers at home were rapt with attention as the show moved into day fifty-four.  How long would they last?  And who were they rooting for at this point?  Eddie had played an incredible game, and the viewers at home had seen his masterful manipulation of the game unfold from the comfort of their own couches.  But Martin had played true.  He was the good guy.  But still, Eddie was captivating.

Week seventy-two finally saw a victor, in the form of a poisonous marple snake who took both Eddie and Martin in their sleep.  It was the highest rated and most critically panned episode of reality television to date.  Until next season when Bret Michaels attempts the same game on the same island with a group of crazy half naked former strippers in search of attention and 15 minutes of fame.  

Everyone was sick and tired of Eddie Glug, but try as they might they could not get him to stop giving honest answers when asked how he was doing. You see, Eddie always had one tragedy or another hanging over his head and he was always just moments away from turning it all around. When innocently asked how he was doing he would invariably come back with” Horrible. But…” and fill in some grand plan for turning his life around.

Now, Eddie’s four best friends from growing up would never dream of making him leave their little group. They had all been friends since the kindergarten, when Eddie had thrown up from eating too much paste and stuck the five of them together, quite literally, for the first time.

But Edie, Nora, Jeff, 'Cisco and Andrea were all in the mid forties now and at least 80% of the paste friends had long ago tired of Eddie’s neurotic compulsion to tell everyone exactly how bad things were and how great they were going to be. Eddies plans never turned out and the lamentation of their failure was utterly draining to endure.

When Eddie was 27 he was made manager of the video store where he worked. He was convinced that he had finally turned a corner. Then, of course, his store shut down because no one rented videos from a store any more and Eddie was laid off. Everyone got an ear full on that one for about a million years.

So, it was with some surprise that non long after the four friends were about to retire and slow down to a rather modest and fixes income that their fifth friend, good old Eddie Glug bough himself a winning lottery ticket; 24 million dollars after taxes.

It came to pass that for the next two years everyone was sick and tired o Eddie Glug because you could not get him to stop answering the question, “How you doing?” With the answer, Fantastic! But…” and then he would drone on endlessly about taxes and solicitors hitting him up for donations and how much stress he was under from having his new mansion renovated.

So the paste friends killed him.

They made it look like an accident. They convinced Eddie that he should leave all his money to them in equal parts because they were his only and best life long friends. And they killed him.

Which of course was a huge mistake, because within a month everyone was sick and tired of Eddie Glug’s ghost because they could not get him to stop haunting them every moment of every day and whining about how he was killed by his friends just as things were finally turning around for him. But… just as soon as he was done haunting them, he would get to go to heaven and then everything would finally be great.

-Brihac