Thaddeus C.L. Harshbarger, the haberdasher
Belted out on December 4, 2005.
My good friend, Thaddeus C.L. Harshbarger, the local haberdasher from the local haberdashery (next to the fishmongery and asshattery on Wiggensworth Street), paid me a visit this Wednesday. He stopped by my house on his way to Eigentoria (by way of Iceland, British Honduras, and Abkhazia) riding in a large red dirigible, which he told me also functioned as a submersible. I didn’t believe him, so I asked him to show me.
Mr. Harshbarger, the haberdasher, didn’t want to show me anything. Instead, he stood on his hands, all the while wearing a pea coat and a pit bull–shaped sconebopper upon his head, and kicked me in the face with his steel-toed boots! So I sent him to the same place I sent Samuel Dreckers, and my ex–dear brother Grårp: Northern California.
I stole his dirigible and went on a wild ride all over the whole damned planet. I didn’t go anywhere near Eigentoria, though, even though that’s where Mr. Harshbarger—the ex-haberdasher—was headed. They still have those damned eigengnomes there! But instead, I visited Botswana, where the inflatable hotdogs are in bloom this time of year, then I swung by Belize to shout “Whoof! Whooof!” at the Belizeans, then I headed up to the hullabaloo in Geelong, Australia (that’s near Wodonga, over by Toowoomba and Warrnambool) in order to be accused of screwing a flock of sheep. I got lucky: They accused me of screwing five flocks of sheep—black ones!
(The dirigible didn’t work as a submersible: I ended up losing it at the bottom of the South Atlantic. That was an annoying swim home—too many sharks and floating garden gnomes and other encyclical things.)
When I did finally get home—where the hell is that inflatable goat doll!?—I paid another visit on Mr. Harshbarger, the haberdasher, in order to let him know where his dirigible lay. He wasn’t happy: He bounced around, snorted a lot, swore blithely, confounding and astounding me, flabbling about “that crazy idiot and his garden gnome fantasies and Alyssa Milano obsession,” until I sent him where poor, poor Mr. Wilson is: Hell, in a handbasket.