Grunting and squeaking in the goatburping park
Soil sampled on November 13, 2011.
“Ah… ha!” I spied a weakness. The Fimbriated Man was either Hungarian, or my name was really St. Joe Kowalski and I was from the Bronx. I yowled in red, rampant rage, and lunged.
The Fimbriated Man suddenly disappeared in a puff of counterchanged dimidiation. Escutcheons gules bordured Or and argent flew everywhere; one—party per bend sinister—hit the ceiling fan and splattered everywhere. Off in the distance, a Frisian eagle barked. Nothing being in my path now but heraldic confetti slowly settling to the floor, my rampant lunging continued forward along a physically predictable ballistic curve until I impacted the hard, dirtwood planks making up that floor beneath me. Those planks, being much harder than the squishy, flesh-like material making up my face, dutifully stopped me along that curve the moment we met.
“Ow!” I caterwauled as I rolled head-over-buttocks into the wall and came to rest upside-down. I blinked three or seven times as my eye turrets slowly returned to a mostly forward-looking direction. I stared in utter bewilderment as I became aware of my bedroom floor hanging from the ceiling and my bedroom ceiling resting quietly on the floor.
Then, with a squickening thunk! I collapsed in the direction that gravity was pulling me today. I floundered flailingly for a few minutes, fishily fimbriating my own reticulations for a few moments, and then clumsily repositioned my corpulent self in a usefully rightside-up position. Ah… ha! My bedroom floor really was on the floor where it belonged, and the ceiling was appropriately clinging to the ceiling—hanging on for dear life, I wagered, considering the length of time it’s been hanging up there.
I murped. My encounter with nine-hundred and forty-six armless and legless fimbriated corpses had only been a terrible, eldritch dream—a dream sans tentacles and the attendant eroticism, but eldritch nonetheless. And that was no escutcheon that had hit the ceiling fan…
An hour later, I had succeeded in stuffing all of the goosey, goosey goose down back into my tattered pillow, and had finished sewing, stitching, stapling, and duck-taping it back together. Unsatisfied with the result, I added another 34 yards of duck tape, then examined it again. It wasn’t perfect, but my ceiling clock had started squawking at me that it was time to take Moosey for a walk (10:07 a.m. and eleventy-twelve seconds), so the remainder of my goosey repairs would have to wait. Plus, I was all out of duck tape.
“Perhaps some goose tape is in order?” I mused to myself as I swung my front door open and led Moosey out onto the Bouillabaisse Boulevard sidewalk. However, I quickly dismissed the idea when I went back and counted how much emphasis I had used so far in this week’s blorg entry and realized I was already far, far over the legal limit.
Damn! There’s another!
Rounding the corner onto Apple-Latchier Circuit, I almost ran smack-dab into Mr. Van der Woobie—or, more precisely, Moosey almost ran right over Mr. Van der Woobie. Wide-eyed at the sudden appearance of an 8′-tall and full-antlered moose staring him down, Mr. Van der Woobie emitted a sound not unlike a screech owl having its toenails slowly pulled out by a drunken Britney Spears, took three steps back, and then turned 360° and moonwalked away faster than a football bat exported via rocket ship from Hell’s Kitchen.
I like to think he died repentant.
But then I’m reminded that he didn’t die at all. But he sure did make a mess in his adult diaper!
I returned to my palatial domicile with Moosey in tow 2½ hours later, and with Britney Spears’ toes on my mind and my mind all over Britney Spears’ toes. Normally this wouldn’t be much of a problem, and would quite frankly be quite an enjoyable diversion from my otherwise depressing, bizarre, and horrifyingly fnordy existence, but right now—a few minutes before one mcClock on Thursday afternoon—falling into a bout of perseverating goonflayvination over one of my favorite femjoy’s itty-bitty little feet would be nothing short of disastrous. Perhaps it would not be as disastrous as the last time, but it would be disastrous nonetheless. For, at precisely one mcClock on this fine Turdsday afternoon, I was supposed to be grunting and squeaking about Fobos-Grunt and the nutty gaggle of Russian scientists that came up with such a comical name for a flying space probe.
One mcClock came, and off I went to grunt and squeak in the public goatburping park about the silly, silly silliness of those Russian scientists. I wore my best leisure suit (a pink one with red tassels!) and even nattier bolo tie; my hexagonal noggin sported the finest asshat that I was able to acquire at the parsimony store over on Van der Donk Street. (Or was it on Ooidonk Avenue? I couldn’t remember, and frankly it didn’t matter just now: If I arrived late at my speaking engagement, nothing would matter for almost twenty-four whole hours.)
My grunting, squeaking speech lasted an hour, and by the time I had wrapped it up, a small crowd had gathered to hear me squeak, squawk, meep, fneep, and grunt in a language that closely resembled English but was in fact Drinniol flavored with every Tamil curse word I knew (two, to be precise). “Rah-rah, ah-ah-ah… roma, roma-ma… GaGa, ooh, la-la!” I finished, stepping down from the lectern before anyone could embarrass me by asking any pertinent questions. As I gathered up the small pile of color-coded pepperonis I had brought with me to use as visual aids, a sudden ppplurk! rang out from across Shoehorner Street, causing my entire audience to abruptly take to the air. I ducked under the nearest goat lest I end up with an asshat full of pigeon shit.
My audience dispersed and my asshat luckily unsoiled, I peered out from under the goat under which I had taken refuge. Cretaceously I scanned the sidewalk for the source of such an oggvorbicious sound, but seeing nothing other than random passers-by and the thick, mivulating plume of smoke rising from the perpetual grease fire over on Terwilliger Street, I slowly came to the conclusion that it might be safe to emerge. The voices in my head assured me, in surprising unison, that it was indeed safe to emerge from under this goat’s udders, and so I at last did so—cautiously at first, but with gusto and glee after that initial 16.667 seconds of near-phobic hesitation.
Ppplurk!
I grunted and dove behind the nearest goat—a ruddy orange one, with cloven hooves yet uncloven horns. Seconds ticked by, and then minutes. My mind wandered back toward Britney Spears’ toes and the curvy feet they were connected to. The goat which I was using as a human goat shield belched rudely and sauntered off. I darted, as wide-eyed as Mr. Van der Woobie had been, behind another goat; images of a lovely Ms. Spears yanking my own toenails out ricocheted across my synapses. More seconds ticked by, and then some even tocked by. Finally my blood pressure, heart rate, and turgidity returned to normal and once again I slowly… cautiously… emerged from behind my goaty hiding place.
There it was. At first I thought it was a typewriter. But then I realized it was really a rupturewort. These two things can be so easily confused! Not since I had confused the words “sausage” and “cuissage” had I been so embarrassed at my mistake. I slunk back behind the nearest goat, and waited for time itself to end.
And the rupturewort wasn’t truly the source of the plurking sounds at all. And then, once again—
Ppplurk!
Ppplurk! Ppplurk!!
I hid even deeper behind the goat. Not even the sweet, sonorous sounds of Murderdeathcock, my favorite genocide metal band, could lure me out of my hidey-hole this time.
And, to make things suddenly worse, the renowned Jakob Maria Mierscheid had scheduled his symposium on the stone louse in the public goatburping park the next day, so within another few hours, the goatherds arrived in order to rearrange the goats, and, when they found yours truly strapped under the belly of the biggest she-goat in the park, they ordered me to leave at once, under pain of death by goat-schtupping. I yerked: Death by cow-schtupping I had heard of, but using goats to carry out such a sentence! How melanderously horrible! I departed at once.
I spent the remainder of the week proofreading and mouse-proofing my blog. I never did truly determine the source of those plurking sounds on Shoehorner Street.