The Lost Nirvana Cartoon Episode

This is a fictional joke story written by DaveTheUseless. Don't take it seriously, fellas.

Have you ever heard of the Nirvana movie? No? Good. That's because there never was one. Kurt Cobain thought that'd be selling out, citing his punk rock ethic and penchant for the go-find-yourself narratives of Jack Kerouac novels. Anyway, the good news is that Nirvana managed to make their way onto the small screen instead of the silver one—in the form of MTV music videos, yes, but also a cartoon. 'Nevermind: It's the Nirvana Cartoon!", it was ever so cheekily entitled. It starred bassist Krist Novoselic as the tall, handsome guy with a boyish charm, drummer Dave Grohl as the toothy-grinned prankster who was often down on his luck, and Kurt himself as the leader, thinker and voice of reason. Together, they made for a rather impressive group of flannel-donning ragtag compadres.

It was 12 past midnight, and I had just gotten laid off from my job as a women's shoe salesman. I'll admit that I hated the job—the humility of being put down by manatee-sized primadonnas who demanded that I shove stylish leather onto their buttery, obese bunyuns as if it was why my momma birthed me—but it helped me provide for my family. Who I resented. My dumb, teenaged, stereotypically blonde-haired daughter, and my booksmart but otherwise gullible son. And that wife of mine. She was enough to drive a hardworking man to pieces, sitting around on the couch, watching her soaps and munching down bonbons while staining the cushions with cigarette burns and putting me down. Sometimes I ask the Lord why. Why I couldn't have persued my football career further, but instead, here I was watching a cartoon past midnight, because I was in major fear of cuddling with my repulsive, middle aged wife. Ah well. Enough with reality—back to my fantasy reality that may as well make no difference.

I was a pretty big fan of the cartoon, and at first, the theme song wasn't much different from what I came to expect.

"Like most babies smell like butter", It began. "His smell smelled like no other. At first I thought I smelled butter coming from the TV set, but then I remembered that I had left my midnight snack—a family sized tub of storebrand creamed corn—burning in the oven. Also, while the song played, the video showed Kurt Cobain tossing a crying baby out of a window. It landed on a trampoline and landed inside a naked lady's vagina before being sucked in and being reborn. Yep, this was the Nirvana show intro, alright. When the distorted guitar lick faded out, Dave Grohl played a single drumbeat, kind of like a rimshot, before reading out the episode title like he always does. "Tonight's episode: I Hate Myself, and I Want to Die." ...Wait, what: What an awful title for a television program! I was beginning to think that there was something wrong with the Nirvana cartoon, but I continued watching any way.

The episode began with Kurt Cobain with his hand in his pants, watching what appeared to be the evening news. He had on a homemade Fermented Sloths t-shirt, which didn't surprise me. After all, despite being mislabeled 'The Fathers of Grunge', Nirvana had erected their sound based on the influence of other Seattle grunge bands, such as Mudhoney, Green River, and Grab Her By The Pussy. Kurt had his other hand on the remote control, but instead of flipping the channel, he fiddled around with it. "All the votes have been tallied, and our network is ready to project: We're all dead inside." Kurt let out an inappropriate chuckle. "We were dead before the ship even sank", he muttered to himself, citing what I could only assume was a song lyric to one of his Nirvana albums. The existential Gen X angst from this episode so far was par for the course. But then Kurt Cobain flipped the channel, and I... I was scared.

It was an episode of Frasier, but... Dr. Frasier Crane's eyes were missing. That, + he was bald!

"Caller, you're on the air.", he began. "I'm listening." When the call began, I instantly recognized the voice—and it was someone who it simply could *not* have been. "Doc? Dr. Crane?" "Go ahead, caller, I'm listening." "Ah, ah did something horrible! Something *terrible*!" He wasn't quite sobbing, but I could make out a terrifying mix of sorrow and fear in his voice. "Yes...what is it?", Dr. Crane responded, seeming to grow impatient despite his experience as a licensed psychiatrist. "I... I killed my love with...something I love", he began. Suddenly, a squeaky Texan accent could be heard in what must have been the background. "You killed your wife with *Propane*, Hank!?", a horrified, middle-aged sounding man inquired. Wow. This was...simply...unbelievable. And strange.

The next call was... similar. It was a child, though. Claimed he clubbed his father to death for training him to hate his mother, who his father ruthlessly murdered for failing to cook dinner by their usual set time. This reminded me that my creamed corn was still burning away in the oven. I laughed at the thought of my wife being useful enough to get out of bed + retrieve it. Then again, I think she died a few years ago. I returned my focus to the television set to hear a stream of stories that made less + less sense to anyone who wasn't stark raving mad as I am. Troubles with a heroin-addicted bear. A science experiment concerning a Frankenstein resurrection of somebody's mother. A magic pill that could turn a brainiac scientist into a bumbling, pea-headed pervert. The heroin-addicted bear, reincarnated as a KISS fan with a friend turned insatiable lover. A service that told you if you were pain or not, but actually killed you if you called them. And then—I saw it.

A funeral that suspiciously featured the presence of the first caller himself! Using my deductive reasoning, I realized that the woman in the casket was none other than his wife.

I could only wonder why the man who had murdered his own wife with the product he had sold had been allowed to even attend the cartoon funeral. This, of course, was a scene from the Fox television network's animated classic King of the Hill...but the show hadn't even been conceived until well after Mr. Cobain had committed suicide, so this didn't make any sense at all!

"I'm the kinda guy that laughs at a funeral", KDC muttered to himself this time, again reciting what I could assume was one of his lyrics. Then he...well, he did something that I could never, ever hope to explain. He started directly into where the camera would've theoretically been. Directly at...me. "You might wanna get that creamed corn out of the oven. Before it goes and starts a new metal revolution, or something." He chortled, lit up a cigarette, and took a puff. "Oh... and one more thing", he began to add. "Anyone who even jokingly refers to cigarettes as the f-slur can just stop buying our records. Alright?". He took the cigarette out of his mouth, and he...he burned himself with it. Right in the freaking arm! He didn't yell, make a face, or even flinch. Then he did it...again, and again. And again.

The scene returned to Peggy Hill's funeral. It was at this moment that I remembered that my own wife was named 'Peggy', but I thought little of it. The focus shifted over to a conversation between the town's most famous Native American resident, John Redcorn, and the Hills' neighbor, Dale Gribble. Knowing the history between these two, I knew the conversation would be tense. "Yeah, so I fucked your wife, got her pregnant, and you've been raising my son for me for the past however many years, doing all the hard work that no parent actually enjoys doing before I sweep in and take him back as my own boy. Which he is. Since I cucked you. Bitch..." "I knew it, you lizard!", Dale shouted back before stabbing John Redcorn straight through the heart with a pickax he was hiding behind his back. John Redcorn...was dead.

Now, I guess that I shouldn't have been surprised, given that Hank Hill was allowed to attend the funeral despite gassing his wife to death with a propane valve jammed into her mouth—how did I know this? Shut the fuck up!—but nobody cared that John Redcorn was dead. Or murdered before their very eyes! Mr. Gribble, showing absolutely no emotion at all, picked up Mr. Redcorn's corpse and tossed it into the pit that they had apparently already lowered Mrs. Hill's casket into. A close-up of Mr. Gribble licking off the cartoon blood from Mr. Redcorn's corpse was shown, while the camera slowly zoomed in on his eyes for reasons I couldn't even begin to understand.

I was just about to turn off the TV and force myself into having sex with my sleeping wife when the doorbell rang. "Who is it?", I asked. "Pizza!", a cheery and perhaps over exaggerated voice hollered back at me. Now that was odd: I didn't remember ordering a pizza, but since my creamed corn was already hopelessly burnt, I figured I'd take it if I was free. I wished I had one of those Amazon Alexa things to open the door for me at my command, but since I didn't, I got off my fat lazy ass + opened the door.

Hmmm. A grisly looking, orange-haired man with a vein snapping, bursting out of his forehead, and disheveledly bloodshot eyes stared back at me. "What would you like on your tombstone?", he asked in a drawn out manner that I could only assume was sarcastic. "I'll take...half-pepperoni, half-anchovies? All the way delicious, like All in the Family, because I'm actually a second-rate Archie Bunker knock-off?" "No!", the strangely cheery but horrifically featured gentleman shouted back at me. "You're going to take it with lemons. Sour lemons. So difficult to suck on without making a face." "And when life gives you lemons...", I started, thinking I understood what this hyperrealistic pizza boy was suggesting. "That's right!", he barked back. "You bow down and suck on my unforgiving testicles!"

Ohhhh, no! Nooo, thank you! I wasn't about to become some sojourning pizza guy's pusillanimous little bitch! I turned around, running up the stairs, preferring to have deeply disturbing hot buttery sex with my wife than—then with that man! I'm not sure where it came from, but I heard clapping and laughter as I ran up the stairs, disheveled. "Wake up, Peg! I'm having that dream again!"

...Wait. That dream. That was it. I was dreaming! All I had to do was pinch myself, or yell at myself to wake up, maybe. But I...I was running out of time. The orange haired man was ascending the upstairs steps while pulling off his pants, revealing that he had a small pizza box wrapped around his genitalia the entire time...stapled. I winced. Eugh...

I could hear the Nirvana episode playing downstairs. Kurt was talking, seemingly to himself. "All of the warnings from the punk rock 101 courses over the years, since my introduction to the, shall we say, ethics involved with independence and the embracement of your community has proven to be very true. I haven't felt the excitement of listening to as well as creating music along with reading and writing for too many years now. I feel guilty beyond words about these things."

Then I... then I woke up. Someway, someow, those words were like an alarm clock going off. I was self-aware again. I was a community college computer science tutor. I used to be in a punk, perhaps grunge band with a guy who no longer would talk to me. I used to have long hair. Unkempt. Disheveled. I had received a Bachelor's of Arts in a Psychology program that I did not even believe in. I had tried to make it as a sarcastic game reviewer who exagerrated his own insecurities for comedic effect, though most people didn't get it. I liked to go off on nonsensical rants based on the abstract, seemingly subconscious loose ends of my mind. I was angry, upset, depressed about a lot of things. Like failed retail jobs, selling sunglasses on the New Jersey turnpike to abusive wannabe gangstas who thought I was mocking their moms for ragging on me for undeserved discounts on our cheap, Chinese trinkets.

I felt as if I had been in a trance for years. I had...changed. Gone crazy, maybe? But all those loose ends...even the ones that seemed to be random ultimately had some merit or explanation to them. I was afraid of objective truth, and personal responsibility. Failed attempts at romantic relationships, and at finding long-term emotional and financial security. I wasn't a sitcom protagonist, an insane homeless man, an intern for some television network, or some sort of bandicoot, pokemon, or chimpanzee. I called myself 'Dave', though that wasn't my real name. I had based it off of a character from some video game. Not Tony Hawk, though. One for the 8-bit Nintendo—you can guess which one, if you'd like. I had done all of this to figure out who I was, how I could find happiness, some sort of sustained success, some sort of way of bonding with strangers in a meaningful way—

When I woke up again—this time, for real, I guessed—I was in a Halloween store stockroom. I saw masks all around me. Bill Cosby, Super Mario, Jerry Seinfeld, Bullwinkle J. Moose. The kid from Adventure Time. What was I doing here? I looked down on the dirty, dusty retail stockroom floor to see a pizza box—open, with crums inside...and what appeared to be a letter.

"Dear DaveTheUseless: thank you for the laughs and the spooks. It's been real—relatively speaking." I paused and continued to read on. "You just couldn't let me go, could you? This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. You truly are incorruptible...aren't you? You won't kill me out of some misplaced sense of self righteousness, and I won't kill you, because you're just too much fun! I think you and I are destined to do this forever! Sincerely, your partner in crime, George J. Jetson. P.S., Good game...you lose!" Puh...what in the blazes could that all mean?

I looked down to realize that my dark gray sweatpants were missing, and were replaced with Spider-man underoos. I had a feeling that this was a deep and powerful metaphor for...something, but I didn't know what. I had ignored up until that point that I was in pain in my nether-region, too. Perhaps my epididymitis was acting up again...but no. Scholarly inspection of my scrotal area revealed deep and powerful bite marks. HE had gotten me by the balls, Mr. George J. Jetson did...

I reached for the doorknob. It wouldn't turn. Strange...and pretty scary. I didn't want to live out the rest of my days in a storeroom of shitty Halloween costumes—that much was for sure. I turned off the oven, put on my Romneys—that's a little joke, I mean my oven mitts—and took out my creamed corn I had left out the oven for way too long. My creamed corn was on fire, and had set my hands aflame, as my Crash Bandicoot themed oven mittens were not flame retardant. Oh well. I threw the fiery creamed corn at a dusty, old, cobweb covered bookcase—and to my great amazement, it turned around like something out of an old Scooby Doo animation. I guess that was my way out, but for some reason, I didn't want to leave. My lungs were filling up with smoke while my sweaty flesh peeled off in the intense heat, but I couldn't help but think to myself, this is O.K. Knowing that my creamed corn was now rendered inedible, I ignored my hunger pangs and investigated a book that had fallen off the staircase. I smiled when I read off the title, revealing what it was—'Heavier than Heaven'. A Kurt Cobain biography, authorized by Cobain family widow Courtney Love. This mysterious object contained a letter as well, but it wasn't from Mr. Jetson. "Is it better to burn out than fade away? One number down, then up, then the other stays the same. 576. As all things begin and end with Yogi Bear. A schism into a crystal night. Crystal clear? Eternal sadness? Not quite." As I read this, the fire had melted through my bones, killing me. But I wasn't dead. Killed...but not dead.

I was a skeleton. In my right hand was a vaudeville style cane, and on top of my head, a top hat. I don't know why, but I felt the urge to dance and perform a musical number. ... And I did!

"Have no fears: we've got stories for years!

This is what we were been born to do

So sink into a taco and slurp down Ducklite beer

Though I prefer Mountain Dew"

I coughed. Cleared my throat. Changed up the course of the musical number. Tossed off the top hat, + pulled a beatnik beanie cap out of my ribcage. I snapped my bony, flesh and sinewless fingers and began to recite a poem. But then I exploded. Highly realistic gore flew everywhere.

We all know about the 1997 series King of the Hill. (repeat a bunch of times)