KING OF FREEDONIA

The term Freedonia was popularized by the 1933 Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup, as a fictional country. Over time, however, the word has come to have a more generic meaning.  Because the Marx Brothers’ Freedonia had so many qualities—autocracy, diminutiveness, and obscurity, to name but a few — a place can be described as “Freedonian” for having any one of these qualities.  Ladies and gentlemen, I am here to tell you that I spent June 19th-June 21st as the undisputed King of Freedonia. That’s right. How many of you have ever been #1 in Jewish Fiction Free e-books?  That’s what I thought.   I can’t blame you for being jealous of all the perks I garnered from my lofty throne.   It was sweet, I won’t lie.  What can compare with spending three days glued to one’s computer screen while watching downloads accrue, taking short snack breaks only to analyze the per/hour download rate?  Unlike the rest of you, I got to bask in the indescribable joy of seeing 200 hundred people snap up my work for free in a sixty minute time period, while my head throbbed and eyes went buggy.  After a boffo first night, I went to bed with 3100 downloads and a massive headache, then woke up the next morning with 3600 downloads and the identical headache.  By the second day, as I glided past the 4 and 5000 marks, all my muscles cramped and I became tense and irritable each time I attempted human interaction.  Cruising into Day Three, I stopped speaking to people entirely, having come to the conclusion that my best friends were numbers.

And then, when I woke up on Day Four, the free download offer ended.   I was forced to surrender my bejeweled crown and my kingdom, and go back to seeking renumeration for my services.  On the upside, like Rufus T. Firefly — I’ll always have Freedonia.