Return from the Brundlebeyond
Disgorged on March 7, 2010.
With a bubble and a squeak, and some bangers and mash, the vortex leading to the Brundlesphere disgorged me on my living room floor early this morning.
After duly wetting myself—now nothing more than routine formality, honestly—the first thing I did was rush to my computer to record my memories of the Brundlesphere, before they faded like so many dreams of Alyssa Milano’s toes. I sat down in front of my computer, cracked open the monitor, and leapt right into my word oppressor to compose a web blob entry for August 17, 2008.
Then I saw it: The tiny little calendar application running on my desktop, surrounded by viruses and trojans, dutifully displaying the current date and time in 7pt Tahoma, each letter and digit a delightfully light shade of purple.
I froze. I murpled a little in my pants. I even bubbled and squeaked a bit myself.
The date was March 7, 2010.
My eyes started from my head. My pupils popped. I went, “Gnaåaåaåaaahhh!!” and fell to the floor, quickly skittering under my computer desk in abject fright. Yappie yapped. In the distance, a hog would have snarked—had it not died a year ago of old age. Not since Pope John Paul II, that crazy old coot, had canonized the entire population of Arp, Texas during a particularly intense bout of dementia, had I been so enfliverously, testicularly shocked and appalled in my life.
“Oh, my doG! It’s 2010! Pwee, pwee, pwee!!”
Yappie lay down and covered his face with his paws.
I jumped up, ran in circles 87¼ times, and then sat down again to catch my breadth. (My girth had already escaped and I knew it was hopeless to attempt a recapture.) 2010. March 7, 2010. I had been suckled into the Brundlesphere in July of 2008. And now it was 2010. March 7, 2010. 82 weeks. 574 days. 49½ million seconds. That’s a lot of seconds! And now here I was, sweating profusely in front of my virus-laden computer.
How had the world changed in these 82 long, long weeks? Was Mr. Wilson still dead? Was Ravna Olegg-Thorssondóttir still alive? Were her feet as supple and delectable as always? Did we still have a smirking baboon in the White House, or had that bearded copy machine salesman from that silly Kevin Costner movie taken over the United Spates yet? Were all those smirking gorillas still lurking about my palatial home, yearning for Ravna and her delicious saliciousness?
So many questions. So few answers.
It was then that I curiously noticed how the date upon which I had been so discourteously disgorged from the Brundlesphere happened to be eleven years to the day since I had begun scribbling in this web blob of mine like the miniature yeti in heat that I am. Was this significant? Did it mean something? Did it mean my nose was, once again, jammed firmly in between the buttocks of Adolf Hitler and Rory Calhoun? One thing was for sure: I would find out.
I stood up, yelping with grim determination to find out. Not since the Empress of Trebizond squashed the Despotate of Morea between her long, curly toes had I been so enfliverated. Not since Pope John Paul II had canonized every broomstick manufactured in Poughkeepsie, New York, had I been so determined to get to the bottom of this (and get my nose out of the bottoms of two terrible dictators).
I stood up taller—and smacked my head on the ceiling. I fell to the floor, unconscious, bleeding profusely from my follicles. Yappie trundled over, growled slightly, and tried to eat my head.
I awoke perhaps an hour later, after dreaming dreams of sugar plums dancing on my head.
Okay, then. I scratched the idea of finding anything out off of my mental to-do list. Then I scratched my ponderously large testicles, for they were itchy, and no one was around to see. Then, I sat down,
inserted another unnecessary paragraph break, and started writing up today’s entry: The entry you now hold in your clammy little hands, the entry now glowing in front of you on your own computering machine… the entry now burning itself permanently into the phosphors of your cheap CRT monitor.
I had returned from the Brundlesphere: That realm beyond the beyond, beyond the Brundlebeyond, beyond the Beyondbeyondbeyond, where golden lawn gnomes dance in mad gyrations heretofore unknown to any and all manner of men (except perhaps Larry Appleton), and I had survived to tell the tale. So, I mused to myself, even though I lost two years of my Pnårpy life, it didn’t matter. I had been to the Brundlesphere and back again. My previous life had been a long train of failures, house explosions, and careening insanity anyway. I was back. And there was nothing stopping me—not even the nattering lawn gnomes peeking out of my baseboards and cupboards—now.