This entry is missing!
Misplaced before January 8, 2012.
This week’s entry has gone missing! I don’t know where I put it or what has become of it! I seem to have misplaced it somewhere! And I don’t know where!
On Monday, I looked high and low, and ran to and fro. On Tuesday, I looked left and right, all day and night. On Thursday, I looked up and down—and all around town! On Friday, I looked in my cupboards and behind my clapboards; I looked under my floors and behind each of my doors! I looked in my bedroom, my bathroom, and lastly my basement; I even looked under my roof-mounted machine gun emplacement! And still I couldn’t find it: Not here, not there, not even tangled up in my hair. Not up my nose, nor between my toes, nor in either ear, nor even up my rear!
I don’t know why a Palestinian labarum popped into my mind just then, but it did.
On Saturday, so thoroughly beside myself with vingriddious grief that I couldn’t even think up any more single-syllable rhymes, I sat down on the log outside my house—the one I put there years ago just for sitting upon—and started weeping like a little girl still in her tigpails. I bawled and I bawled and I bawled, until my new neighbor came over and asked me if I had lost my cat, too. Upon telling him that I have no cat, and therefore could not lose one, he offered to give me his cat—once he found it—so that I could lose it and then have a good excuse to go about log-sitting and bawling like a little girl. I told him that I would take him up on his offer—if he ever found his cat—but for now I had another good reason to weep and wail: I had lost this week’s blog entry and had utterly failed in trying to find it.
He patted me on the shoulder, murmured some platitudes involving Joseph Stalin in a giant bunny suit, and then went back to his own house next door.
Mr. Van der Woobie wasn’t home, but if he were, I was sure he would be sneering and cackling at my misfortune.
Off in the distance, a dogfish barked. Somewhere, Britney Spears was bathing her supple feet, and in Iowa presidential candidate Rick Santorum was surging from the rear. And here I sat on a knobby old log, wailing like a banshee and lacrimating like a fire hydrant that had been humped one too many times by a horny pit bull and had finally sprung a leak.
As the Sun slithered, newt-like, behind the horizon, and darkness enveloped me and everyone else for thousands of miles around, I finally began to come to grips with the sad, sorry truth that this week’s entry had been lost for good: My only solution now was to get up, jam as many soda bottles into my ears as would fit, and then run about the neighborhood in my finest birthday suit until the authorities nabbed me and threw a towel over me to protect the delicate sensibilities of the neighbors and whatever pedestrians had the misfortune of strolling down Bouillabaisse Boulevard at the time.
Blundering back into my palace-sized domicile, I fetched the nearest empty two-litre soda bottles that I could lay my groaty hands on: A bright green Mountain Dew bottle and a Pepsi bottle made of the clearest polyethylene terephthalate that $1.54 could buy. In my left ear went the livid green bottle and in my right went the crystal-clear one. Off came my layers and layers of wool, cotton, silk, flannel, polyester, horsehair, doghair, and moosehair; off went the fez, the homburg, the fedora, and the sombrero underneath them all. Back out my front door I went—naked as a newborn, naked as a jaybird, naked as a kaybird—even naked as a wild and rampant Geri Halliwell fantasy rattling through my scrambled little pate in the wee hours of the morning.
Zigazig… ah!
I didn’t get very far before memories of that nipple-twiddling accident last month on the corner of Mapplethorpe Street and Alpha Ralpha Boulevard made me think twice about running about naked and out-of-doors. I stopped smuddenly, skidding along on my heels in as cartoon-like a manner as I could muster, then turned tail and ran back to my home on Bouillabaisse Boulevard. I slipped the soda bottles out of my ears, brushed off all the earwigs that came out with them, and then returned to my study to study my lost-blog-entry situation further.
Saturday came to a close, ushering in the dreaded Sunday.
As I drifted off to sleep, I dreamed of a blazing tablet made of pure light and inscribed with symbols I had never before seen in the waking world. They appeared to be letters—or perhaps cartoon owls; I couldn’t tell. And if they were letters, were they Amharic, Pfhoric, or merely Balsamic? The sour little tablet finally faded into nonexistence, replaced with a single word written in clear English: “Pooh.”
I sat upright in bed, yelping at the realization that Winnie the Pooh was responsible for my week of misery. Then I flopped back down and went to sleep once again, deciding the whole episode was best forgotten.
Morning arrived, and after my coffee and transcontinental breakfast, I went about trying to summarize my AWOL blog entry in the form of a poem—but I then realized that I would never be able to think of a line that rhymed with the sentence “It’s a wonderflous, bubblious efflubery of gnostical ut-buttery” before Sunday came to a close, so instead I decided to write the meaningless collection of paragraphs that you, dear reader, are scanning with your beady, newt-like, little eyes right now.
Yes, right at this moment.
I realized then that “kitty-cat” and “ticky-tack” are only a consonant-transposition apart. I also realized that my pepperoni was on fire, so I quickly brought this brøderbunderous substitute blog entry to a sudden and abrupt close.