Uneventful, boring, and bland
Nothing happened on August 28, 2011.
Yet another week has passed into somnolescent obscurity—and here I sat, the entire week, absorbed in gerrymanderous elosity and moribund fecosity.
Monday was uneventful, boring, and bland. Somewhere around two o’smock in the afternoon, I idly wondered if anyone anywhere had ever cared what the square root of 512 is, and if anyone ever would. I knew I didn’t care, and within a few short minutes, I had forgotten about the question entirely. The remainder of the day plodded by as uneventfully as the entire period leading up to two o’smock had done.
Tuesday’s blandiosity only suffered a momentary blip when, amidst a long stretch of banality that had already lasted seven whole hours, a horrible, piping cry of “Te-ke-li-li!” sounded from the floor of my palatial abode directly above the ass-sitting room in which I sat. It was the kind of noise that would not only chill one’s blood to the core, but freeze it so hard that one’s brittle corpse could then be shattered like glass—just like one of those silly, repetitive high school physics experiments with an apple frozen in liquid nitrogen and hit with a hammer.
I hurried upstairs to check my bestiary, but upon reaching it, I breathed a sigh of relief: My shuggoth hatchery was still secure, the tentacle-proof glass still intact. None had escaped. I spent a few moments watching the baby bubble-congeries writhe and irridesce blasphemously behind the six-inch-thick glass, their myriad temporary eyes forming and unforming as they watched me balefully—waiting, waiting, waiting. Then I went back downstairs as if the noise had never happened. Indeed it probably hadn’t: Much like everything else in my confusingly Pnårpy life, I had probably imagined the whole thing.
On Wednesday, my peace and quiet was again momentarily shattered, but—as on Tuesday—this unfortunate shattering was of such a short and perfunctory nature that it scarcely bears repeating. But, in the interest of completeness (and we all know I love completeness!), I shall do so anyway: At 3:17 in the after-smoon, that old bumblehead of a neighbor of mine, Mr. Van der Woobie, came curmudging to my door, trying to goad me into a fight over the goats I had let loose among his toads. But goad me over goats and toads he could not, for immediately upon swinging my front door open, I immediately began flinging load upon load of goat dung upon his cackling, ungulate form. Such a response to his goading was quite foreboding, and without delay he rode off on the toad he rode in on.
Thursday. Thursday was a spurt of contrasts; the crushing banality of the morning inspiring the most horrible dread in my tiny, goat-like brain, yet the sweet, enduring banality of the afternoon and evening inspiring the utmost of melanderous tranquility in the same goaty little brain. On the one hand, four days in a row in which absolutely nothing happened was a blessing, compared to my usual surreal and terrifying day-to-day life. On the other hand, I had different fingers. So, as Thursday drew to a close in the middle of the night, I was unsure if I truly wanted another day of unending serenity or not. All this peace and quiet was starting to get to me!
Friday crept into my home shortly after the departure of Thursday—crept in like a thief in the night. But before I knew what was happening, it was daybreak, and I had little doubt that somewhere in the world, a man was quietly singing the Albigensian national anthem to himself, while elsewhere a man was loudly and rudely belting out “Rule Britannia” while chugging pint after pint of horsepiss-flavored ale. And somewhere beyond the horizon the fimbriated man waited in his sable escutcheon. But why this mattered, mattered little; all that mattered was that it did matter. Of course, many things mattered more, such as: Are all plains really that plain? What about planes? Is the English Pale truly pale? Can it fit in a pail? Do soldiers actually use sacks when they sack a city? Are the sacks burlap? What if they run out of sacks for all the loot? Do they steal more sacks too? And most importantly, how many diprotodons could dance on the head of a 10d nail?
Of course, whereas answers to these questions clearly mattered, why they mattered mattered not at all, so I put them all out of my mind (using the business end of a brass hammer, if you must know). On the one hand, I truly did want to find an answer to the sack question, but on the other hand, I seemed to have toes instead of fingers. This sudden discovery pushed all questions of a less matterful nature out of my gray matter and forced me to concentrate on the matter at hand (to wit, my hand with the five toes). So I concentrated. And concentrated.
Friday ended with me staring intently at my left hand, waiting for those out-of-place toes to go away and my fingers to start finging again.
Saturday called in sick this week, so Sunday arrived a whole day early. A two-day-long Sunday was the most wonderfully syphiliferific thing to happen this week. It was better than a week of blandness, better than my new pet moose, better than fried moose synapse for breakfast, even better than a proleptic 64-bit Unix clock with nanosecond resolution. I decided it was now time to celebrate: I threw open all of my windows, grabbed the longest, loudest kazoo from my collection of antique and modern kazoos, and began hooting and tooting out “Yakety Sax” as I danced around my home, from window to window, twitching and gyrating like a Cappadocian Twirling Hound after its seventh cup of coffee. I continued wheezing out my favorite Britney Spears tune on that 3′ kazoo until the authorities came and told me to put my pants back on and shut the windows.
Sunday re-arrived the next day, and so I did it all over again. This time the authorities came and stole all my kazoos! So I went across the street to Mr. Van der Woobie’s house and stole all his toads! That’ll show that wily old bumblehead and those uniformed thuggery-doos that he keeps siccing on me! And now, I shall finally be able to find out the answer to another question that has been plaguing me for much of my adult life: Can one fashion a working kazoo out of nothing more than toadskin?