Indeed I can go home again
Returned home on August 26, 2007.
By the time I had regained consciousness on Monday evening, my house had somehow reassembled itself from the broken and burning bits of wood and plaster that had littered my lawn only days earlier. Smelling a conspiracy once again, I quickly burned the place down a second time, but this time the house only rebuilt itself quicker—before my very eyes. Sensing the futility of the situation, I gave up and let the evil house stand. My neighbors continued their plotting.
This Wednesday I actually returned to living inside the house, instead of camping in the front lawn with my (formerly roof-mounted) AK-47 at the ready. Semper fi, bitches. And a little semper sic tyrannis for you too, Mr. Lincoln.
But for the extensive fire damage, my moldy old home looked as good as new—even the dugong carcasses had somehow removed themselves. Quickly dismissing the concept of “ghost dugongs” that had returned to claim their corporeal forms so they could continue to haunt me for the rest of my days, I set about fixing the place up: Painting over the soot stains on the walls and charred cracks in the floors, stopping up all the gnome holes that had suddenly appeared, and caulking the electrical outlets so they could never again be used. The work was extremely slow and tedious, there being at least 157,238,789 gnome holes to stuff full of old socks, but I somehow completed the work in less than a day. I think that, in my haste, I forgot how to read a calendar and was actually able to compress about six months of real time into a single day.
Having torn up the last bits of my 2006 calendar featuring twelve lovely pictures of Alyssa Milano in various barefoot poses, I sat down on the newly tiled kitchen floor to admire my handiwork: Fire damage artfully painted over as if it never existed—gnome holes all stuffed full of dirty socks, the gnomes suffocating to death within—evil kitchen floor tile carefully replaced with benevolent linoleum—every incandescent lightbulb smashed as a lesson to the rest of them—not a single oatmeal cookie in sight or on site.
Then and there, I cracked open my refrigerator and crafted a mosaic art out of two bologna and cheese sandwiches. It was the most fun I’d ever had on a kitchen floor in my entire life, except that time with Ravna Olegg-Thorssondóttir and a tub of margarine. I lay back on the floor and slept for the rest of the week, happy dreams of Alyssa Milano’s dancing feet interspersed with terrifying nightmares of armies of grim-faced gnomes coming to pluck my eyeballs out and drill into my brain with their sharpened fezzes.