Pnårp’s in space
Station-kept on September 30, 2007.
I once knew a man who was well-versed in the physical laws of nature. He had explained to me, when I once confided in him my ability to propel myself miles into the air by merely flapping my buttocks rapidly, and the unpredictability of the onset of such buttflapping, that so long as I maintained a velocity under a certain threshold, I would be safe: I would eventually land, somewhere, after traveling on a graceful parabolic arc across the sky. If I, however, exceeded this special velocity, I would go careening off into outer space, with no hope of ever returning to the surface of the planet except through a fiery—and ultimately deadly—course similar to that taken by a meteor.
Last Saturday, I had clearly exceeded this velocity—by a lot.
By Monday, as I vroomed onward, ever upward, my home planet had shrunken beneath me to the size of a Canadian $1 coin when held at arm’s length. I had clearly left Earth behind and most likely wasn’t ever going home again. I prayed to the voluptuous insect goddess Strahazazhia Kalamazoo-Kintaki-Meeps, and then the Lord himself, that I would eventually decelerate and perhaps even fall back to Earth; even a fiery—and ultimately deadly—descent was preferable to spending the rest of my days floating alone in space. It’s not like I would die or anything.
On Wednesday, Earth having shrunk to the size of a pea when held fourteen inches from one’s face, my thoughts slowly turned to everything I had left behind: Ravna Olegg-Thorssondóttir, her milky-white feet, and the gorillas that loved her. Alyssa Milano’s ankles. The Spice Girls’ toes. Jennifer Love Hewitt’s heels and soles. My dearest sister Plårp, and her slender sisterly feet. Mr. Wilson and his cat-canning plant. Samuel Dreckers and his zany attempts to assassinate me in order to prove he was, indeed, a trained assassin. My haberdasher. My asshatter. The stumblebum stable keeper I always called Ol’ Bummie because I didn’t know his real name.
The teeming swarms of gnomes that came to dog my every step. The endless rows of hamsters, dingling their berries forever. The golden cockroaches. The screaming stars. The floating pi. The flying pi. The Earth-shattering Bermudan pie-eating contests. The cow-schtupping. The Pam & Meg’s.
All left behind.
Not wanting to turn this “web blargh” of mine into some cheesy clip show, I turned my mind to other things, such as how to keep breathing now that I suddenly realized that interplanetary space is a near-total vacuum. Gasping like a fish out of gasoline, my eyes starting from my head, I writhed around quickly grabbing enough hydrogen atoms and pinching them together to construct a makeshift spaceship for myself. Squeezing them between my fingers until they fused into iron atoms was quite the arduous task, but, being well-motivated (the whole suffocating thing), I completed it in about twenty minutes.
Cursing my physicist friend for his bloody space-is-a-vacuum assertion, I finally powered up the spaceship—the main reactor is fueled by incinerating over 36,500 eigengnomes per second—and boarded through the airlock on deck 37. Galloping up to the main bridge like a horse on PCP, I quickly plopped myself down in the captain’s chair and ordered the eigengnome at the helm to head for the nearest planet, at once.
The spaceship began sliding through the æther toward Neptune. We would arrive in two weeks.