Bodhi Flanders

The story of the lost Flanders boy and sightings in the north west...............

Kneedeep wrote:....
I looked up and standing next to me was a pudgy twelve-year-old boy that looked like he just stepped out of 1950s television show.......


What a lovely story Kneedeep!! Unwittingly you may have one of the few leads to solving a north west mystery that rivals the disappearance of DB Cooper. It would appear that you have possibly located the long lost 3rd son of Ned Flanders Homer Simpson's neighbor in the bucolic Eden that is Springfield U.S.A.

This is how it began.........

Matt Groening (back in the day, when he was a struggling 'toonist living low in the highbrow West Hills), having finally sold a strip of cells to a South Korean mega-conglomerate slaveship of animation artists for a soul guzzling amount of money and thus freed himself from ever having to stand in line at the local Starbucks for a mocha-cinno (his fave drink!). Back in those days once you had sold your characters in this fashion, you lost control and direction of their lives and for better or for worse they became the property of a soulless corporation. There to be re-drawn and sent back to the the good ol' U.S.A. in a container ship where they were unloaded in Long Beach Harbor and sold to equally soulless Hollywood financiers who attached their names to the new and improved cartoons before showing them off on upstart television stations across the country.

However I'm jumping ahead too far and you're probably screaming at me right now..... "Gaz!! Enough of the bloody history lesson you old bastard, tell me about the missing 3rd son of Ned Flanders, that's a fascinating tidbit you dropped there!"

I'm getting there mate. just hold on.....

So a forlorn Matt was collecting all the characters he had sold. They were hanging from the shower curtain rod in his basement unit, drying as cells have to after being created (it's an arcane but beautiful process that I cannot explain further, lest the Cartoon Police are reading this and mark me for rendition to a 3rd country for "talks"). As he put them into the large Simpson cell bag he began to weep, just a little at first, but soon a torrent of tears flowed and handling the little flimsy peeps that he had created from the the recesses of his imagination began to be more difficult.

The Flanders familia were the last to be bagged. First Maude, then the two youngest kids Rod and Todd, then Ned. The last character was the oldest boy Bodhi ( the name while an homage to Ned's hippie upbringing didn't fit in with the other two lads as you can see but Sodd had been deemed unacceptable). By now with the sobs wracking his body, and the tears running around the drain like a shower gone wild, Matt lost his fragile grip on Bodhi! With a flutter Bodhi slipped between his fingers and fell to tiled floor, where he spun counter clockwise in the tears and with a little wave of his four fingered hand he flipped the bird to his former master!

Weeping hysterically, Matt ran down to the Willamette River and waited for a little flash of color to emerge from the run-off of the sewer plant. In his hands he held a fishing net with which to scoop Bodhi up and return him to the fold. But alas he was no athlete our young Matt and he flailed uselessly at the water where Bodhi jostled in the currents. Past Linnton, on to Scappoose and then eddying toward Rainer where in the warm effluent of the still functioning Trojan nuclear plant little Bodhi spun violently. Here a strange thing happened, in the dimming light of day little Bodhi began to swell and fill out into the human form of a pre-teenager. While a little pudgy as you described earlier he was no longer locked in the youth of childhood Bodhi dog paddled toward the river bank and climbed out....

Shocked and awed, Matt backed up toward Portland from whence he had come and the last thing he saw before leaving was young Bodhi, wandering in the westbound lanes of Highway 30, muttering snippets of Old Testament scripture and giggling to himself.