In the four years since I began paying serious attention to Demented Freak Bill Schmalfeldt, several facts (perhaps I should call them “informed conclusions based on information he has published” just to avoid the whiff of
DEFAMATION!
LIBLE PER SE!
CONTENTIONAL REFRACTION OF PROMOTIONAL INCEST! (or something)
JOHNNIE WALKER RED WITH A MAYONNAISE JAR CHASER!
RESIST! BUTT STUFF! INFLATAGAL!!
Where was I?
Oh yeah…stuff we know about Bill Schmalfeldt.
- He’s a liar. He’ll lie about anything. He lied to the police about how he injured his head the night he forced his wife to open a package of horse poop that someone sent him. He lied about who sent him the horse poop, accusing approximately half a dozen people of authoring that exquisite prank. He lied about the Postal Inspectors being on the case. That’s been a frequent refrain: that the cops are coming down on *whoever*.
- He’s not very smart. After his cut-rate blind date banged-her-on-the-first-date Ashtray Soulmate died while he was furiously checking his email, he said the life insurance benefit from her policy would fund his retirement for many years, if he was wise about it. Two Scootypuffs (Vroom! VROOM!!), a wheelchair, three relocations, one or more automobiles he is unsafe to operate and several bus trips later, those funds are used up. Now he’s forced to leave his cozy beachside disability retirement for near-minimum wage work in microscopic midwestern radio markets, provided his potential employers don’t check his background and run like hell the opposite way.
- He is a DYNAMITE legal theorist. By which I mean, every attempt to mount a legal case against anyone blows up in his goddamn face.
- He loves animals. He just doesn’t like them enough to keep them around very long. As near as anyone can tell, Raven, Shiloh, Jake, Boris and Onyx turned into Really Useful Sweet-n-Sour Chicken if they were lucky. If they were unlucky, they could be rotting at the bottom of a river in sacks of gravel. There’s a new one named Monty, but since Schmalfeldt has gone quiet in the last week, it’s a fair wager that little fella has also met a bad end.
- He’s got a disease of some kind, but it sure ain’t Parkinson’s. So maybe a doctor diagnosed him with it twenty years ago…how many doctors did he shop to find one who would? So maybe he schmoozed his way into a clinical study…who can say he wasn’t in the control group? The study administrators detached him from that study with a “hold harmless” agreement, if I recall correctly. To best of anyone’s knowledge, his Deep Brain Stimulation implant batteries have exceeded their useful life, and there’s no evidence that he’s ever had them replaced or even been examined by a neurologist since escaping Maryland on a tidal wave of fear pee back in 2015. He says he quit driving in 2009 because he couldn’t trust his reflexes and degrading physical condition resulting from his diagnosis with a “progressive neurological disorder” that never, ever, ever gets better (unless it’s convenient, of course). He wrangles an agreement to work (i.e. surf the internet on company time) from home, and later is granted a disability retirement which he had to “convince” (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) his superiors to give him a shit performance review to secure. He spent the next five years waxing chairs with his ass until the wife died, then suddenly discovered he wasn’t sick so much as fucking lazy, and he could in fact do things if no one else magically appeared to take the burden off his tremor-free hands.
I can go further, but that is not my point.
We know a lot about Bill Schmalfeldt. We know what we know for one simple reason.
He has told us. Everything we know came from him. Every conclusion that we draw is based on information he provided.
But he’s gone dark again. After allegedly getting hired by a station in Denison, Iowa, then getting himself unhired just as quickly after engaging potential listeners in Twitter flame wars, he appears, at long, long last to have actually LEARNED something…
How to shut the fuck up and actually operate in stealth mode.
Run Silent, Run DERP.
Usually he can’t go a week between dropping on Twitter account and firing up a new one. We know he said he purchased a month’s worth of BlogTalkRadio service, but he quit two weeks in. He hasn’t updated his blog.
Is he gone? Has he finally figured out that I was 100% serious when I told him he had to vanish for two weeks before I would stop paying attention? Has he finally realized that when I rescinded that open offer and determined that I would never turn away from an opportunity for Pointage, Laughery and Mockification at his expense that I was not then, and am not now FUCKING AROUND?
Is he gone? He who never starts a fight (except when he does) but always finishes one (flat on his back and spitting out his own teeth)?
Is he gone? Do we dare believe it? The party is planned, the funds amassed, the menu finalized. All we have to do is set the date, reserve the venue and make our travel plans.
Dare we dream so bigly?
Or will he just pop up again to crush our hopes once more?