🎨 Artcow Iconoclast / Jonathan Mack Sweet - The Chris-Chan of Arkansas

[Adamska]

I can see him getting there; he did use the brother he tried to murder as a bus after all, so he could've probably arranged something with him; it's how he got to the hospital he got stuck at due to incompetence after all.

 

[sonichuis44]

I keep trying to figure out how, exactly, Sweet sees his scheme going down.

Spoiler

One day, Scott Mitchell shows up in Blytheville, AR at the door of a ramshackle old house with an overgrown backyard and one wall nearly collapsed from water damage. He knocks on the door, and none other than the badboy of college journalism himself, Dr. Belch, answers the door. Scott is overcome, and falls to his knees, tears streaming down his face, begging for forgiveness. Our Sweetian Hero's pleas have not gone unheard; the administration of Arkansas State University has re-opened his case, uncovered the evidence that Scott and his henchwoman Bonnie Thrasher thought they had buried away for good, and overturned their previous ruling; they've stripped Scott of all his degrees and are now turning them over to one J.M. Sweet by way of apology - and, by newspaperman law, that means Sweet also gains all of Scott's awards, his job, and his secret personal phone line where hot co-eds call him up for anonymous sex. Just before he collapses due to a fatal attack of guilt, Scott hands Sweetums a piece of paper - it's the location of his new dorm room, fully outfitted with a state of the art, CD-ROM equipped Windows XP computer and a 55-inch TV hooked up to real, live, non-Obama cable.

A single tear runs down John's face, catching in the tangled, pube-like curls of his beard. Finally, his struggle is over.

 

[Holdek]

According to Google, Jonesboro is 52.1 miles away from Blytheville. He MIGHT have taken a cab, but that would have been really expensive. Maybe he badgered someone into buying him a bus ticket? Or blackmailed his brother into driving him? I wouldn't put it past him, maybe he found out something illegal his brother got up to to feed his habit. If he "borrowed" the family car, maybe they reported it stolen.

He may have lied to his mother or something, saying that he had been unbann, and she gave him a ride. Presumably that would have just worked one time, though.

 

[John Titor]

how I see fit, in a little corner of the world where the girls are easy, life is simpler, and the clocks are firmly set at half-past 1997. I will finally be happy and free. I will live it up.

If the girls are so easy, why hasn't he got any in decades at all?

 

[NobleGreyHorse]

He may have lied to his mother or something, saying that he had been unbann, and she gave him a ride. Presumably that would have just worked one time, though.

In my state it is possible to get handicapped parking placards without a driver's license, because it's perfectly legal for the driver to park in the spot as long as they are displaying your (generic you) placard that matches a card in your wallet, and of course transporting you. I wonder -- if Sweet Bro is badly off enough (with whatever condition) to get disability income, could he also have a placard or plate that would get him the "good" parking?

Or, more likely, nobody told him how to get a handicapped-parking plate/placard, and his ancient browser won't load the website of the state's DMV anyway. Otherwise wouldn't he already have BELCH vanity plates?

 

[Dr. Merkwurdichliebe]

I keep trying to figure out how, exactly, Sweet sees his scheme going down.

Spoiler

Just before he collapses due to a fatal attack of guilt, Scott hands Sweetums a piece of paper - it's the location of his new dorm room, fully outfitted with a state of the art, CD-ROM equipped Windows XP computer and a 55-inch TV hooked up to real, live, non-Obama cable.

Nice work.

But I'm gonna have to call you out on one point, @sonichuis44.

Windows XP? Are you out of your mind? Get out of here with that overrated, incomprehensibly advanced OS!

Come the revolution, all computers will run on Windows 95.

 

[Holdek]

Otherwise wouldn't he already have BELCH vanity plates?

That would be amusing, but I have a feeling his mother (what mother wouldn't?) takes a dim view of his kind of humor, and wouldn't let a plate like that be placed on her car.

 

[Dr. Merkwurdichliebe]

If the girls are so easy, why hasn't he got any in decades at all?

Mr. Sweet has yet to realize that the grotesquely repellent appearance he has chosen to adopt as his signature "look" screams to every female member of phylum Chordata on the planet: "Do not have sex with me! I am genetically defective in so many ways that you almost certainly can't count that high!"

 

[Holdek]

Mr. Sweet has yet to realize that the grotesquely repellent appearance he has chosen to adopt as his signature "look" screams to every female member of phylum Chordata on the planet: "Do not have sex with me! I am genetically defective in so many ways that you almost certainly can't count that high!"

I wonder if he introduces himself, "Hi, I'm Jon Sweet, but you can call me Haggis McCrablice, or if you prefer, Fekul the Baby, or Dr. Belch."

Spoiler

 

[BrokenEntity]

I wonder if he introduces himself, "Hi, I'm Jon Sweet, but you can call me Haggis McCrablice, or if you prefer, Fekul the Baby, or Dr. Belch."

Spoiler

That's an absolute kind of horrifying.

 

[Dr. Merkwurdichliebe]

In the same way that AJM are closing ranks around Sweet, country people tend to "take care of their own" and a 50 mile trip wouldn't be out of the question. Whether Sweet could convince anyone he was "one of them" I dunno, but I mean, if there's anywhere it could be done it's some fuckhole in the deep south. There are some very stupid people down there. There are stupid people anywhere but when you're talking rural Arkansans you're basically talking the people from those "The People of Walmart" blogs.

Combine the way Mr. Sweet looks and acts with "born in Chicago." I doubt that anyone born and reared in Dixie would do much for him unless he were asking someone to beat him into a coma with an ax handle.

I wonder if he introduces himself, "Hi, I'm Jon Sweet, but you can call me Haggis McCrablice, or if you prefer, Fekul the Baby, or Dr. Belch."

Spoiler

I've always assumed that "Fekul" is Mr. Sweet's attempt at a nonstandard spelling of fecal. That seems to be how he rolls.

 

[ASU]

Is Sweet an adult baby fetishist? Jesus. I don't know that I want an answer to that. Ditto for "is he a furry".

Edit:

Combine the way Mr. Sweet looks and acts with "born in Chicago." I doubt that anyone born and reared in Dixie would do much for him unless he were asking someone to beat him into a coma with an ax handle.

We have vastly different rednecks in mind. You're maybe thinking of someone like this guy:

Spoiler

He's probably a no-nonsense Republican-voting gun owner and if you date his daughter you best bring her home before 8pm.

I'm thinking of someone like this guy:

Spoiler

He's the type of person who taught Sweet to be a racist, bigoted, homophobic asshole. He's the kind of guy who goes around calling people who didn't drop out of high school "book smart".

There's both kinds in Arkansas but the top example is a dying breed. The lower picture is much more common. Both would probably half accept you as long as you hate gays and blacks, though.

 

[Dr. Merkwurdichliebe]

Is Sweet an adult baby fetishist? Jesus. I don't know that I want an answer to that. Ditto for "is he a furry".

Edit:


We have vastly different rednecks in mind. You're maybe thinking of someone like this guy:

Spoiler

He's probably a no-nonsense Republican-voting gun owner and if you date his daughter you best bring her home before 8pm.

I'm thinking of someone like this guy:

Spoiler

He's the type of person who taught Sweet to be a racist, bigoted, homophobic asshole. He's the kind of guy who goes around calling people who didn't drop out of high school "book smart".

There's both kinds in Arkansas but the top example is a dying breed. The lower picture is much more common. Both would probably half accept you as long as you hate gays and blacks, though.

I retire from the field of battle on this issue.

You make excellent points.

I don't believe I've seen this linked in this thread:

Some of the folks who make comments on the video would fit in very well here. Go there. Read them.

Among my favorites:

Behold: the Worst Person.

I think I'm dying. People like this exist.

I almost vomited by the end of the video. Such a disgusting person.

"So I'm a 35-year-old man who enjoys Kim Possible. Big deal." Yes, it is a big deal. A big deal indeed.

Welcome to the hell of hells. Purifications need to be done.

The neckbeard to end all neckbeards.

There is no aspect of this guy that is not disgusting.

And the icing on the cake? Mr. McCrablice shows up and tries to defend himself in the buffoonish and inept manner that is his alone. For example, here's how he quotes one of his tormentors: "Blah blah blah yibbeddy-yibbeddy-yibbeddy blah." And then there's this: "I suceeded, [sic] proved my innocence, crushed all my enemies, returned to school, and got more hot co-ed tail than a merry-go-round pony."

And the cherry on top? ". . . from time to time she sends me pics of her and her kids . . . and one particularly spicy shot [[IfYouKnowWhatIMean of where the kids came from.]]"

God have mercy.

 

[ASU]

I retire from the field of battle on this issue.

You make excellent points.

Well, all of what I posted is speculative, there's nothing that I'm aware of that's specifically pointing towards it being a neighbor, I just don't think we should rule it out completely yet.

 

[Holdek]

and one particularly spicy shot [[IfYouKnowWhatIMean of where the kids came from.]]"

God have mercy.

May God bless the poor souls who have ever had the misfortune of meeting this...creature...named Jon Sweet.

Also:

"Szgerle 2 years ago
It makes me glad when I browse the internet searching incredibly speific fetish porn I bump into this video and I can go 'well, atleast I`m not this guy'"

"JohnMooreification 3 years ago in reply to CilverNightHigh
@CilverNightHigh It's more a set of unkempt whiskers than a beard, anyway."

"seattlerevolution89 3 years ago
This guy can turn a gay man straight"

Oh BTW Sweets was found so disturbing that they did a sequel This Troper video on him. Has some good comments too:

"POOPTURTLE 4 years ago in reply to Hammer Slammer
@RomZomCom *writes about panties in Kim Possible*"

"Cheeseman 4 years ago
Wow, he literally just said 'everyone that disagrees with me or calls me out on my bullshit is a liberal'. I'd be surprised if he actually knows what 'conservative' and 'liberal' mean, yet he seems to be very informed about the proper terminology for Kim's undergarments. Pretty special, that."

I think the guy who made these was the same guy behind Clyde Clash, meaning they both share the same troll too.

New smilie proposal:

Sorry for the triple post, but:

According to his personal Troper page, one of his fantasies is "in "Smitten With Her", when a flighty young Catholic girl breaks up with a boy who tells her about the death of a loved one, though they get back together a month later... but only after he's slept with someone else, unknowingly catching HIV and giving it to her."



Also:

"In "Eve Bade Adam Eat" a man falls in love with a woman who turns out to be a coworker he got fired from the college paper nearly 30 years ago."

"Virago" and Tiresias dealt with the dark side of stalking, with spurned lovers turning up armed."

So, I mean I guess it's better that he gets all this out in fiction no one reads rather than acting on it. But history is replete with cases of people who fantasized this way as a means of working themselves up to do a deed. My only solace comes from Sweets being so dormant for so long, there's no real reason for him to break that pattern.

 

[Francis York Morgan]

"In "Eve Bade Adam Eat" a man falls in love with a woman who turns out to be a coworker he got fired from the college paper nearly 30 years ago."

Oh my fucking God. How many stories is it now that revolve around someone getting fired from a college paper? This is beyond standard autism.

 

[He Sets Me On Fire]

So, I mean I guess it's better that he gets all this out in fiction no one reads rather than acting on it. But history is replete with cases of people who fantasized this way as a means of working themselves up to do a deed. My only solace comes from Sweets being so dormant for so long, there's no real reason for him to break that pattern.

It's interesting, though, because while Sweet possesses neither the intellect, nor the twisted form of dedication, to pull off any real kind of revenge, the thing is, he's at least tried it in a couple of different ways. While the primary result has been a lack of any victory whatsoever, the irony is that Sweet's pursuit of vengeance occasionally ends up with him pulling his own underwear over his head. I mean, look at how he handled his thread here. It's been said again and again (most recently by Absinthe, who nailed Sweet perfectly), but it bears repeating: If Sweet just ignored it, it would have gone away. But no, he had to come here, act a fool, and then after he ran back to his safe place, he had to double down. As a result, us morbidly curious villains and villainesses are digging up more and more of his history, history that would've been left alone if he hadn't put on his show of mental clumsiness. I, for example, knew he had a record - I had no idea he had eight arrests.

Now, see, everybody knows this, and it'll just be a matter of time before we know even more. In addition, we've apparently done a heck of a job on his convictions, causing him to question what he's fighting for. And why is this happening?

Because Jon Sweet is hopelessly dumb. Dumb enough to go charging into a clearly indicated minefield? Oh, no. Dumb enough to stomp his remaining foot in anger after surviving the first explosion.

 

[JU 199]

Oh my fucking God. How many stories is it now that revolve around someone getting fired from a college paper? This is beyond standard autism.

Like CWC, Sweet has very little life experience and almost no desire to expand it. So you get media about what he knows. With CWC it's shopping malls and McDonalds, With Sweets it's schizophrenic retellings of his newspaper expulsion.

 

[He Sets Me On Fire]

Absinthe posted a link to this story about a week ago, but I wanted to share the complete thing here for your perusal and opinions.

Ladies and gentlemen and others, please witness Scarred Deep.

Scarred Deep by Jonathan M. Sweet

What would he think of her, she wondered fitfully as she paced the length of her tiny trailer. 1987. God. Nine years. What would she think of him, she amended? She’d had a hellacious crush on him back then, but of course she’d only been nine, and he’d been close to eight years her senior. It would have been improper, in so many ways, to act on such a feeling... for both of them.

He was the only person who had looked at her as a human being... not with the restrained sense of disgust or the barely-veneered pity most people’s faces wore when they saw what the fire had done to her, as if she weren’t a girl at all, but a curiosity, something that threatened to blow apart to dust if touched, a thing that had no right to be. He spoke to her not as some cripple, or even with the condescension one would use with a normal child, but afforded her the respect one would any adult.

“Neitzche had it wrong,” he once said, sitting with her in the kitchen of her grandmother’s house. “He said that Man would someday achieve a state of perfection in which he would lay God aside and call Him dead, and that would be it. But he was too shortsighted. Do you think God will simply lie down and give up? Do you think, now that Man has no use for Him, He will say, ‘Well, I think I’ll go fishing, or take up turkey farming, or something.’

“Hell, no! He’ll make Himself known in a thousand ways, getting underfoot constantly, attacking and sabotaging Man’s newfound purity and clarity of thought, avenging His being put out to pasture in every conceivable way. If He can’t be constructive, He’ll be destructive, just to keep busy. Neitzche, in short, was a moron.”

Jerome thought of himself as a nihilist. When she asked him what that meant, he said, “I b’lieve in nothing, and nothing b’lieves in me.”

The letter she’d gotten on Monday was as spare as his faith: “I’ll be in Springfield this week on business. Your granny said you were living around there now. Figured I could come see you on the 13th, about ten or eleven.” These three simple sentences were followed by his signature... abrupt, sharp, as boldly sketched as his convictions.

Heather checked the clock on the microwave as she passed it; it was 9:24. She continued her restless pacing, punctuated by bursts of cleaning and straightening, more to keep her hands busy than anything else.

“You’re late.”

“Am I?”

“Yes. Your letter said you’d be here at eleven, the latest. It’s nearly half-past noon.”

He checked his watch. “Now it is half-past noon. Smack on the button.”

He looked at her. He’d first met her the summer after the house fire that had burned her alive, leaving the whole left half of her face a mess of scar tissue, singeing away most of her hair on that side of her head. He reached out to touch her cheek. It was smooth... but if he applied a bit of pressure, he could feel the heads of the pins in the bone, the edges of the metal bolted to the bridge of her nose and below her eye, replacing, reshaping, and remolding the damaged bone and cartilage. A fine scar joined the inside tips of her eyebrows, tracing where the steel pieces had been implanted in the upper half of her face.

“You like what you feel?”

“I do. Yes.”

“The operations took, thank the Lord. I’ve been living here for the last, oh, seven, eight years now. Easier than schlepping me four hours to and from the city every time I needed to go to the BTC for a follow-up operation.”

“You’ve had a dozen or so, I hear.”

“Yes, more or less. Still in touch with Granny, I take it?”

“Yes.”

They had a simple lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and potato chips. He watched her as she ate slowly, methodically, marveling at how together she was for someone who had suffered so much in her short life.

A gas main had ruptured under her home and ignited the flame. Her babysitter had been killed by smoke inhalation. Heather, age 8, had been trapped in her bedroom, her parents up at the high school for some damn town meeting. Part of the back wall had fallen, weakened by the flames; the cold night air had awakened her. She was thankful for that propitious combination of factors to which she owed her life, but it had been a mixed blessing.

Heather had managed to get out of the house and to safety, but at the cost of a good forty or fifty percent of her skin. She saw Hell that night: the street around her in flames, the sky filled with choking smoke, houses exploding like beer cans stuffed by bored, malicious boys with a pocketful of Black Cats. Somewhere a tree fell with a groan and a thud. There was screaming. There was...

She really remembered little about how she had got out of there, or what happened before she awoke at the National Avenue Burn & Trauma Center. She’d been found by someone — a neighbor, or a rescue worker — her mind didn’t like to dwell on it. She remembered she’d been crawling on hands and knees through a field, that there had been dirt clumps sticking to her raw flesh... or maybe only thought she did, from the stories traded second- third- and fourth-hand, embellished by countless mouths.

Heather didn’t think she was pretty. When she looked in the mirror she saw only a burned, half-bald little girl staring back, her flesh held on by metal studs and braces. The countless hours of recuperative therapy, skin grafts, chemical peels, the untold dollars in medical bills, the lazy, drooping right eyelid, the scar on her nose, the traces of old scars under her right boob, which was markedly smaller and less well-formed, causing her to assume a self-conscious stoop when she walked or sat, to conceal her irregularity; the right ring and pinkie fingers a half-inch shorter than the left and malformed.

She recalled suddenly the first two lines of a poem, the rest long forgotten, that her physical therapist had, following her first set of grafts, taped to the mirror over her sink: “A sweet disorder in the dress / Kindles in clothes a wantonness...” It was to remind her that it was her flaws that made her pretty; her scars were badges of honor, not brands of shame. Imperfections meant experience. Wrinkles were wisdom. Scars were learning tools.

Heather wanted to believe Dr. Seymour, desperately, but when she looked at the fire’s ravages, she saw only ugliness, ignorance, futility staring back from the glass.

“I never knew you smoked.”

“You couldn’t.” Jerome waved out the match with a quick flick of his wrist and pitched it into the kitchen sink. It hissed in a stagnant pool of water. “I didn’t take it up until a couple of years ago. College.”

“You’re in school?”

“Was.”

“Where?“

“Clark.”

Quit?”

“Not by choice. Couple of years ago — Feb’rary ’94, it was, I think — I took up with a woman who was the news editor on the Explorer. She was married.”

“Did you know?”

“Not till later. When I found out— ”

“Too late to stop?”

“Ayup.”

“Her husband found out?”

“Husband... bosses... she was up for a promotion in the spring; I was in grad school. Major scandal. She made it sound like I seduced her. Which was total bullpuckey. My advisor says — real off-the-record one day, y’ know? — that the gossip about me sleeping with a married undergraduate student might seriously harm my chances of moving forward in the graduate program and that it might be wise of me to leave Clark. Seek other venues.”

“That doesn’t sound right at all.”

“I know.”

“The girl?”

“Still married. Didn’t get her promotion, but she’s still in school, still working on the paper, and her husband f’gave her and took her back.”

“Witch.”

Jerome smoked silently for a while. Heather cleared the plates, brushed away the crumbs from the tabletop.

“That whole mess in Canaan... that was — what year? 1985?”

“Eighty-six. October.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Ten years ago, last month.”

“That so?” Pause. “You were having treatments. When we met.”

“I was going to. Started fall. Lived with Granny while she was seeing your dad... And we got left to our lonesome a lot while they went back into her room and...” Pause. Giggle.

“She really did a lot of that, didn’t she? Geez. That horny, at her age.”

“She was 55. Not that old, really. She had my dad young, like at my age or something.”

“Kids?”

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“You mean have, or want?”

“Either.”

“No to the first, undecided on the second. I might have one, like, while I’m real young, then get one of those operations. You know, where they take everything out.”

“Hysterectomy?”

“Is that what it’s called?”

“Yes.”

“What a name. Sounds like a disease more than a cure.” He laughed. “Yeah. One of them.”

“Pretty risky. They don’t do them as often, willy-nilly, as they used to. Too much possibility of infection setting in, internal bleeding. To say nothing of lawsuits. They only take out your plumbing if you, you know, have something really wrong in there, like tumors, cancer. Something drastic.”

Silence. Smoking.

“Can you, do you think?”

“Can I what?”

“Have kids. I mean, with the— ”

“The scarring?”

“Might have damaged something inside— ”

“The doctors would know if it did, wouldn’t they? They’d tell me.”

“Guess so. Though maybe it’s one of those things...”

“That you can’t tell right away?”

“Ayup.” Jerome stubbed out his cigarette. It was his second so far. He selected another.

“You should quit.”

“Maybe. Find I don’t give a damn either way.”

Silence.

“What are you doing? Since you left Clark, I mean.”

“Kicking around. I’ve got a couple of interviews for sales jobs day after tomorrow at the Battlefield and North Town Malls. Southgate Center, Tuesday. You?”

“Drawing disability. But I may go in for my G.E.D., since I, you know, had to quit school. Granny home-schooled me since I was ten, but I want something real, you know? After that, probably college.”

“Clark?” Wary.

“Yes.”

“Why?” Bitter.

“I need... whatchamacallit... direction in my life. And... it’s... a good school.”

“It’s a nightmare. Built on narrow-mindedness and sneering elitist intolerance. It deserves to burn.”

She winced visibly.

Fourth cigarette. He looked at the girl, appraising her. He stroked her face, feeling the fresh softness of her new skin, the hardness of the screw-heads drilled into the bone beneath. His fingers danced in her hair.

She closed her eyes and forgot herself, sitting up straight. His eyes traveled towards the simple sheet that hung in the doorway separating the tiny kitchen from the bedroom... then returned to Heather.

Jerome rose from bed the next morning. She‘d already gone. He reached for his pack of cigarettes on the night-table, found below a note from her.

Jerome—

I’ve gone to the store for a few essentials. Please don’t be here when I get back.

Last night was beautiful but also sad, because I realized that we could never really be together and make it work. Two people so damaged have no business loving one another.

You told me once you believed in nothing because nothing believes in you. I used to think that was so wise, but now I realize that was just your scars talking.

We’re both scarred — my face and your mind. The difference is, I want to heal and you don’t seem to. You like being the way you are. You see ugliness in front of you and want to burn it... but with that attitude you will destroy a lot of beauty as well.

I’m sorry, but I can’t live believing in nothing, like you. That to me is ugly, and empty. Your God may be dead, and worthless, and a nuisance — but mine is not. So — goodbye.

Love,

Heather

Jerome shrugged. Smoking, he rolled the note up tightly, tucked it into the space in the pack where the cigarette had been, and began to search for his pants.


Copyright © 2009 by Jonathan M. Sweet

 

[ToroidalBoat]

I guess I forgot about the distance from where Sweet lives to ASU. While it's not out of the question that he trespassed in a desperate attempt to slip past the flaming sword that turned every which way security in order to get back into the Garden of Eden ASU, I think stuff like violating restraining orders from afar may be more likely.

Early in the thread, Sweet lamented about progressives setting up excessive rules, and more rules to explain the first set of rules, with harsh penalties for violating them. As an example, he cited him trying to call people from college and getting threatened with legal action in return. Sweet probably thinks that getting kicked out of college for acting like an ass and then getting penalized for trying to sneak back in is "excessive rules and penalties" by a progressive conspiracy.

all computers will run on Windows 95.

I wonder what Sweet's opinion was about Mac OS? OS 8 was released in July of 1997.