Thoughts diverging from reality
Converging on January 29, 2012.
The colors gnawed on my every appendage. I was planted in the ground like a potato. And, as I stirred my coffee, the underunderwear moved ever lower, and lower… and lower still. My eyes disbelieved what they saw, but still the colors gnawed and still my potato-esque nature continued. Wednesday slowly ebbed by.
Loquisha and her big, dark brown, sandaled feet entered my mind-pan right as I was considering the grody little eye spots covering my shapeless, dull brown form. As did Ravna Olegg-Thorssondóttir and her contrastingly pale and delicate counterparts. A Loquisha/Ravna sandwich would be good right about now, I mused to myself, if only Goldsmith hadn’t also added a crying ram’s horn to the music that was presently blaring from the speakers studding my thermistor radio.
The power was out; it had been for hours: How my thermistor radio continued to function, I was unsure, but I was quite confident that the answer involved the zillions upon zillions of tiny, subatomically-sized gnomes now zooming endlessly along the copper wires, pushing the reluctant electrons back to work until the power company restored their own gremlin-based electrical service to full functionality.
Corporate sloganeering reared its corpusculent head moments later, as I remembered that the power company servicing my town was more into providing empty statements about “sustainable, green, scaly energy” than actually keeping the gremlins moving along the wires.
An ad for Leopold and Loeb, LLP blared from the radio. I took that as my cue to go do something else, for I was allergic to lawyers and this particular pair of clowns not only gave me hives, but they even gave my hives hives and my blebs blebs within blebs. I snorted, retreating, and settled on striking out toward my kitchen to explore the possibilities of constructing a drink or two.
Rising from my chair, joints popping and brittle, osteoporotic bones creaking under the weight suddenly shifted upon them, I slowly waddle-sauntered into my fnitchen to fix myself that drink. (The door-to-door fnords were flowing by at a record high today, otherwise the room would be called my “kitchen” as it usually is.) Arriving at my cabinetry after an arduous journey down hundreds upon hundreds of half-inches of hallway, I surveyed the available glassware, from glass glasses to ceramic mugs to disposable plastic cups. Smiling grimly, I settled on a red Solo cup—knowing that my choice had doomed this bright, young cup to casual discardment within mere hours.
Sour grapes and sweet, sweet wrath ebbed and flowed through my beaver-like mind as I constructed a concoction of every liquor that I could find in the expansive cabinetry lining my wall and every fruit juice that I could find in the expansive refrigerator hanging beneath the cabinets. The list was extensive indeed, and when I added that last drop of spoiled grape juice to the elixir, I knew why those wrathful and sour grapes had injected themselves into my axonal ganglia seventeen minutes (and three microts) earlier.
“It’s… balefully… pernicious!” I croaked, sing-song like an old commercial jingle, as I choked down the horrible elixir I had concocted out of rum, bourbon, whiskey, whisky, vodka, gin, white wine, red wine, blue wine, blue whine, blue whale juice, something green and opaque, fermented tomato juice, fermented beetle juice, fermented goat juice, fermented apple juice, apple juice, orange juice, orange-colored juice, mystery-fruit juice, grapefruit juice, grape juice, rape juice, lemon juice, milk, milk juice, crab juice, Mountain Dew, Coca-Cola, frog juice, Croaker Cola, toad oil, and lastly, a single drop of flat Pepsi.
Eye turrets spinning, I blacked out upon the first sip. I hit the floor so hard I almost kept going (except I didn’t, because there was a rather hard floor in the way). Time elapsed. In my mind, I was a bushy-tailed squirrel all hepped up on meth, frenetically scurrying from one tree to another, but in reality I lay flat upon the floor drooling and mumbling unconsciously about my previous life in 1886 when I wore a top hat, suspenders, and a pair of shoes made out of real ox leather, and had been employed as a grouse salesman (they actually had grouse in those days). I was in the employ of Phineas & Finch, Ltd., the finest featherers in my town, and immediately upon my hiring I had been tasked with selling at least sixteen gross (of grouse) within two grumptuous days, lest I be fired—tarred and feathered—and left to starve in a ditch. Needless to say, I couldn’t meet my sales quota and was duly tarred and feathered three days later. And that, dear readers, explains why, to this very day, I become grouchy when I see a gross of grouse (which I don’t, because they’re all extinct).
Upon Friday did I awake, on the floor, in the exact same position in which I had left the conscious world. I murped and began the long, arduous process of merely sitting up. How I accomplished this feat is left as an exercise to the reader.
Groggily I stretched, removing the froggilies from my ears and the bales of cotton from my mouth. Deciding to compound my vaingliminous corlissitude of two days prior, I resolved to now fix myself a sandwich in addition to the grumnutterous drink I had previously poured myself. After much kerplonkerous thought, I settled on fetching myself a hair sandwich: A brunette one today, with meatloaf, potted meat, liquid cheese, and chipotle-battered cat heads.
Mmm, cat heads…
A businessman dressed in a finely tailored, black suit leaned over a balcony, surveying all below him. But the man wasn’t a human being: He was a Lego man. His squarishly cylindrical, bright yellow head turned slowly from side to side. All I wanted to do was snap a big, red 2×4 Lego brick to the knob rising out of his scalp in place of ordinary human (or even Lego) hair, and see if he could bear the weight. Being made out of high-quality plastic alloy, I was sure that he could. That he too was composed of plastic only further bolstered my confidence.
Hideously loud klaxons went off suddenly—a clamorous hooting and tooting—and I smashed my way back to the tenuous semblance of reality in which I typically took up space. I didn’t even remember blacking out again, but apparently I had—and now my wristmoose was beeping and demanding attention. I reset it and looked around at the available sandwich components. “Yes, a Loquisha/Ravna sandwich indeed!” I called out to my empty fnitchen. Moosey poked his head in through the moose flap in my back door and eyed me curiously. I eyed him back, the depth of my stare speaking volumes about hexadecimal balefulness and quaternary interdictions. Moosey was the first to blink, flinch, squoink, and withdraw. Not since Jimmy Wales had plastered his free encyclopedia with his vacant, staring, caring eyes had anyone so successfully cowed another with a mere look.
I picked up the phone and dialed crotchety, old Mr. Wiebe van der Woobie’s crotchety, old phone number. “At any given moment, over a thousand universes are residing within my brain, exploding into existence from a zero-point: Living, evolving, withering, and finally dying,” I explained to him in a rambling murmur. Instead of answering me in English, Balinese, or even Mypiot, he started buzzing and bleeping ominously. It wasn’t the honking cadence of Pfhoric or the serene whispering of the S’pht’Kr, but it was familiar to me. I tried to talk over it at first, but it wouldn’t stop. Finally, I hung up before the modem could finish its handshake with my brain and start using me to spread viruses, trojans, and worms all across the Internet. I then dialed another telephonical number: It had thirty-seven digits and, unless I missed my guess, would connect me to the central switchboard in Utopia Planitia, Mars.
I missed my guess. The phone just started insulting me. Soon my alarm clock joined in, then my smoke alarms, wristwatch, wristmoose, oven, microwave, miniwave, laundry machinery, megawave, computer devices (both large and small), and finally Moosey. Everything was insulting me. Everyone was hurling degrading epithets at me. I didn’t even know that a moose could talk, but here before me was one cursing me out in a manner that reminded me of Lady Da and all her extra torsos. I fled my fnitchen in a Jesus-forsaken panic and hid under my voluminous bed cushions.
Friday may have ended. I wasn’t sure.
Slatternday arrived in all its vainglorious ignominy. Five van der clock arose onto the glowing, red face of my digital alarm cluck, flickering at a languorous 57 hertz. (Damn useless gremlins…) I looked out my window. Snow blanketed the field behind my kerlossal house like snow blanketing a field behind someone’s kerlossal house. My alarm cluck started squawking, chicken-like, as 5:04 arrived; for some reason, I had set it to go off at this particular microt.
With a mighty roar I threw it through the window.
It threw itself back in through the window, and clobbered me over the head for being a big doodie-fess.
I took that as a cue to flee my fnedroom.
“Helcmodion and Kelliocam, arise!” I began chanting, calling up the dark powers that would aid me in my quest for a Loquisha/Ravna sandwich. “Molkin and Wilkin, arise! Kroger and Caldor! Arise, my dark fiends! Arise, arise!”
I cackled like any professional necromancer would at such a juncture. “Motubizanto! Lustie Dickie and Tricky Dick! Arise, arise, my minions! Arise!” Thunder crashed; lightning shot from the ground toward the heavens above. A torrential wind storm started. Gusts fell in torrents along with ice and snow, and then frogs, toads, fruit bats, and dingbats. I wished my house had a roof.
Two point six multiplied by π (“pi”) microdes later, my hoosie-fessed little skeetch-truncheon appeared before me, riding aback the ever-valiant skeezle-wumpus. Without warning my Icelandic queen had appeared, for skeezle-wumpuses aren’t known for knocking on doors—they do, however, knock doors down quite effectively with their phlebotinum-plated fists. “My old skeezle-wumpus, back from the dead!” I chittered enfliverously upon seeing my dearest Ravna Olegg-Thorssondóttir riding atop its stony, adamantium-plated thorax. “And… Ravna, my most favoritest, goobly-toonked little stink-spoon!”
Things happened. Time passed. My brain contained Saxon quoins in the nave…
“Bufo, bufo, bufo…” Rav enquavered at last as a Bufo bufo sung in basso buffo about our buffoonery in the buff.
“But what about the buffalo?” I sloshed back, still drunk from the nuclear-powered elixir I had so fnordulously constructed three days prior. Ravna reminded me of her stint at the Three Days Priory, where she had been a nun from 1982–1987, and that shut me up for good: I remembered well how those vinyl-clad nuns dealt with impertinent questions! Basso buffo it would be; I bumped Ravna on the buttocks and our baffling buffoonery resumed…
As the waters of Babylon washed over me, there came a knock-knock-knocking on my bedroom window. Since this particular bedroom was on the sixth floor of my home, I first dismissed the knocking as mere post-goonflayvinal hallucination brought on by my deep state of eroto-comatose lucidity, but I was finally forced to go see what the hell was the matter as the knock-knock-knocking transformed into a tooth-crackingly loud scratch-scratch-scratching of claw upon glass. I was mad.
Yet, my building fury subsided as I went to the window and witnessed: Loquisha, voluminuptuously adorned in my favorite pair of red sandals. She was riding aback a bony, bony stuffleupagus: Its claws had bored their way through my triple-paned windows, which would cost thousands of soy sauce packets to fix, but at this particular microt I didn’t care. I would get that Loquisha/Ravna sandwich after all!
Things happened. Time passed. My brain contained Saxon quoins in the nave…
“An engram, a manger, and German ragmen…” I mused anagramatically as Loquisha dreamed of goats promenading along a balcony (where the Lego man had stood) and Ravna dreamed ever deeper of submarine fallacies and dual air bags beneath her hoosie-fessed little head. Gladly I formosed the dormfuddies about my carapace as I drifted and re-drifted off into an umbulious, gentle doze. Noshing upon another pair of brunette hair sandwiches I would do tomorrow—but now was the time for deep, deep fneeping.
I dozed and, droolingly, I dreamed of a previously life as a well-used traffic cone.