Anthropomorphic 

Giraffe Character 

Portrait

Louis Battenberg

Each morning with a groan of despair and a blubbering entreaty to the universe, the anthropomorphic giraffe, Louis Battenberg, manhandles himself out from the bin bag that serves as his bedding and wonders aloud just how diabolical his day is going to be. Sometimes, he even gets a speculative answer from a neighboring bedsit, grunting through the cack-encrusted walls of what is effectively an asylum for failed authors. Surrounded by a scattering of crumpled Pant-Pisser beer cans, cheap half-smoked cigars, stubbed-out Jackson Jiffy joints, pirated copies of Quentin Marmalade's Ménage à Moi Productions greatest flicks, and hand-written hate-mail from debt-collector Victor Wallop, Louis slowly rises and stumbling towards his desk—a sad, lopsided structure that seems to sympathize with his plight—braces himself for the day's first major challenge. The desk, leaning dramatically to the left as if in a permanent state of shock, holds his battered typewriter – the instrument of his torment and his only ally in the war against his woe. The uneven surface serves as an apt metaphor for his life: tilted, unstable, absurd, intolerable, and always on the brink of collapse.

As he sits down, the chair (also lopsided, but maddeningly, to the right) creaks under the skewed distribution of weight. Louis cranks his persistently sore neck and takes a squint at the little bastard. The previous night's blitz-brained exploits were supposed to usher in the much-belated torrent of creativity, but now, in the cruel light of day, he must again face the horror of his efforts. He knows what's coming, but mustn't look away. His vision finally lands on the paper rolled into the machine, each creased and smudged line a testament to his ongoing ordeal. The key question: did he hit his target word count of 10? Another key question: is he setting his standards too high?

The only constant in Louis' obscene excuse of a life was that rodent of a sentence. The opening to what was supposed to be his breakthrough piece, his magnum opus that would catapult him from the indignity of his crack-den of a bedsit and into the rarified realms of literary stardom, such as was the case with the misappropriating maestro, Orville Stonker, and his bestselling, autobiographical how-to-manual, The Art of the Steal. But alas, there it lay, stubborn and unyielding, a reminder of his creative impotence. How long had the anthro giraffe been stuck on the same sentence? Even he didn't know anymore. The years had blurred into eras, the eras into epochs, and the epochs into eternities. "Today's the day you nail this bad-boy, you hear?! Enough cocking about, today's the big one," he attempts at reassurance, half-heartedly hoodwinking himself with a routine pep-talk, as he braces for the day's impending assault on his long-suffering psyche.

Each day unfolds in a predictable pattern, mapping precisely onto the five stages of grief. It begins with the same repeating of the delusional morning denial – “The plot thickens...” shrinking by midday to the angry bargaining depression of “The plot?!” and finishing up with the despondent crepuscular acceptance of “The plot, I have lost,” in the evening. If brevity is the soul of wit, then how come he's at his wits' end? "I'm a scumbag," he concedes, half-demented, to the empty room, his voice barely audible over the hum of Anthroxville outside. "An utter disgrace." This admission of defeat, spoken as the light fades from the sky, marks the end of his daily cycle of mistaken hope and howling despair. 

Down to his last marble, Louis harbors deep-seated doubts that even the much-touted, sanity-salvaging services of Anthroxville's famed shrink, Earnest Wafflemonger, could extricate him from his derangement. Dr. Wafflemonger, renowned for his unconventional techniques and remarkable skill in recombobulation, seemed like a beacon of hope to many. But to Louis, he appeared as just another charlatan in a world overrun with false prophets.

This skepticism wasn't born out of cynicism alone but was rather a conclusion drawn from his disappointing encounter with another supposed savior of the mind – the psychic, Patience Bibble-Rose. Each session with her had only served to reinforce his belief that he was beyond redemption. Patience, with her mystical tarot cards and enigmatic murmurs, had peered into the abyss of his future only to find more despair. Each card she flipped seemed to snicker at him, a silent, mocking confirmation of his deepest fears: "And the worse is yet to come."

So, Louis, in his state of deep anguish, had come to view himself as a lost cause, a hopeless moon-howler held hostage in a world that couldn't understand neither his plight, nor his genius. After resisting the temptation to hurl himself out of the window, he sits down by his desk and swears at his typewriter until lunchtime. The old machine, stoic and indifferent to his increasingly inventive lexicon of threats and curses. As the midday sun peeks through the dust-laden curtains, illuminating his shameful surroundings, the anthro giraffe will either...