Surviving April Fools Day
Foxholed on April 1, 2012.
Today being April Fools Day, I thought it would be wise to dig a large, deep hole in my back yard, jump in, and wait out the clock until April 2 arrived on Monday. Today also being Sunday—a most pestilential day, one which plagues me without fail week after week, every seven days—I knew that I had some bloggin’ to do, so I wouldn’t be able to spend the entire day safely tucked in a hole in the ground, no matter how much I wanted to.
I also knew that the moment that I emerged, every living being on the face of the three planets would immediately begin conspiring together to fool the heck out of me. The nonliving and unliving beings would probably join in, too. But I had no choice: If I was, once again, late to update the ol’ wegflog by posting a so-called “Sunday” entry on Monday—or even as late as Tuesday—the great insect goddess Strahazazhia Kalamazoo-Kintaki-Meeps would descend from the heavens, not unlike a swarm of devouring locusts released by a vengeful gourd, and throttle me with her long, spiny, cricket-like legs.
So, as the seconds ticked by, then tocked by, and finally started farting and belching by, I knew what I had to do: Impersonating a wiry, young weasel as best as I could, I furtively peeked out over the top of my foxhole. No one was around, so I peeked out further, sticking my chromed, dome-like countenance a whole 3.5″ above the crumbling edge of the hastily-dug hole. Still nothing, even at the height of a whole floppy disk! I then peered a full 5¼″ over the edge, and was again met by no tomfoolery. Still…
I wondered if Samuel Dreckers was hiding in the bushes, waiting to strangle me with his retractable piano-wire wrist fob… or if Mr. Van der Woobie was lurking in the shadows, waiting to start beating me with a broom like only a crotchety old coot could do. Perhaps Ravna Olegg-Thorssondóttir, in all her porcelain-white beauty, was planning to play a trick on me with her slender, supple feet—or perhaps Loquisha, in her starkly contrasting ebony-black voluptuosity, was planning on being a might bit devious with her sandals today!
Most likely, I would just be buried under a sixteen-ton pile of wheedling, greezling gnomes the moment I set foot or toe above my makeshift hidey-hole. There would be no strangling nor broom-beatery, no footsie nor sandal-deviancy. Just… gnomes. Endless, endless gnomes. (That golden shape!)
Hoping to startle whatever may have been waiting for me, I suddenly sprang from my foxhole—not unlike a fox pup pumped full of methamphetamine and set loose in a man’s long johns—and started running as loudly and flailingly as I could back toward my back door. Hopefully, if anybody (or anyfnord) was lurking or plurking about unseen, my inscrutably panicked flight would raise their mind-boggle quotient to such a high degree that they would be paralyzed with confusion, bemusement, and even—dare I squeak it—bemusion. I had once mind-boggled to death a pair of Jeehobee’s Witnesses who made the mistake of visiting me before 9:17 a.m., merely by appearing at the door wrapped in as many Slinkies as I could find (and not much else).
Not unlike a man too often reusing the same hackneyed rhetorical flourishes and florid grammatical constructs, I leapt through my back door—without opening it first—and did a barrel-roll across my kitchen floor, not unlike a ninja being pursued by a gaggle of enemy ninjas bent on making California rolls out of his hide. Rolling to a halt only because the kitchen/parlor wall rudely got in the way, I scrambled to my feet, leaned my stegosaurus-like back against the very wall that had blocked my path in this very same breath, and assessed my surroundings with the expert eye of a gynecologist. (You don’t want to know how or why I had possession of Dr. Hagop Salpingian’s glass eye. You really don’t.)
Nothing was amiss: My sugar bowl was still where it belonged, my salt and pepper shakers were lounging comfortably on my kitchen table, and my refrigerator hadn’t run away. The sink was still nestled in my countertop, doing a fine job of holding the stacks and stacks of dirty dishes that had been piling up for 24 years, and the oven still hadn’t burned the house down despite its best efforts. I checked in my cabinets and examined their contents; sure enough, my endless rows of canned spam, potted meat, and homogenized pink slime were all present and accounted for. The skeezle-wumpus that had taken up residence in place of those canny, canny canned goods, but later moved to my over-stove cabinetry (to keep me on my toes), was still there too—and reminded me by duly clawing my face off the moment I opened the cabinet door.
I opened the freezer to see if any obspluction had taken place in there, but none had: My frozen peas were still the right color, as were my frozen carrots, frozen asparagus, frozen ice cubes, and frozen yellow garden hoses. Unctimoniously I shut the door, beginning to relax and worry less that Mr. Van der Woobie might come crashing through the ceiling like a firework, or that a gaggle of headless geese might suddenly waddle through my front door and start honking and squirting blood everywhere.
Donning the new tagelmust that I had left hanging on the coat-hook by the door, and grabbing my crunkiest bottle of rumfustian, I decided that it was time to go upstairs to my computering den and begin bloggin’ up a storm. I wasn’t sure what there was to write about this week—after last week’s altercation with a delightfully blonde and be-sandaled tentacle-beast, everything that happened this week was downright banal. Compared to what those tentacles did to yours truly’s mind, body, and soles, not even the battle I lost with a nose hair dryer on Friday—however humorous it was to witness—was something to write home about.
“Monkeys learning to wash sweet potatoes,” I ruminated from my third stomach as I sat at my computering desk, awaiting inspiration. “Or… perhaps that keelboat aptly yclept an ‘yngling’?” I wasn’t sure what I was talking about, and neither was Moosey. He just stared dolefully with his two big, round moose eyes and waited for me to feed him another bale of maple leaves. Grumbling, I put down the board o’ keys, stowed my mouse in the gaping hole squirrels had chewed in the side of my computer case, and went down to the basement to fetch another bale.
Keeping a pet moose was turning out to be a major expense in my Pnårpy little life.
Whistling the Canadian national anthem as I set foot on the staircase leading to my dark, dank, dungeon-like basement, it struck me like a fish-slap across the face: Moosey was part of the conspiracy to fool me! His hunger had been a ruse to get me into the basement! Why?! What was waiting for me down here in place of the bales and bales of maple leaves that I expected to find?! A clutch of snulbugs? Or a selcouth pile of Pilosian Pile-Driving Gnomes? Would I be greeted by an eldritch elephant-o-horse, or a blasphemous display of tentacular shuggothry? Would Maho, Modu, Pippin, or Philpot try to seduce me into selling my soul to Satan, or would Lustie Jollie Jenkin lead me not into temptation but outright goonfornication with Ravna, Loquisha, Regina Maria-Theresia Louisa Ilsa Ollanthorpe von Sträsmussenbörg, her daughter Genevieve, and their Vergnügenstiergarten der Gänse?
“Only thirteen ways to find out,” I mumblebuttered as I peered down at the thirteen rickety steps that made up my basement staircase. I began my long journey with a single step—and tripped over my own supernumerary toes.
Legs went sprawling and arms went thrashing, including my own. A Bug’s Life flashed before my eyes. Gurning wildly, I rolled down the stairs like a powdered donut slipping out of the pudgy fingers of a fat, waddling police officer. Thirteen hard, wooden, and splinterful steps later, I came to a rest on the even-harder concrete floor below. Face-first, naturally. I lay there a few moments. Silence. I waited for the other shoe to drop. Seconds farted by, and no shoes hit me on the head. I stood up. I straightened out my disheveled nose hairdo and looked around. Nothing but bales of maple leaves as far as the eye could see!
I breathed a snigh of relief and then flicked on the light, flooding the pitch-black room with the harsh, green light of the Klieg lights I had installed down here last year in order to ward off vampires, cockroaches, and Ross Perot. I looked around again—now that I could actually see. The image that diffracted through my corneas and burned itself into my retina was far from nothing but bales of maple leaves.
Nothing but nothing as far as the eye could see; that’s what I saw. And “as far as the eye could see” was only about 40′ as a result of yet another wall rudely getting in the way.
I breathed a sigh of relief. The scene before me told me that I was all out of moose feed. However, the nothing that I did see was better than, to name just one example, an army of Jessica Fletchers waiting to stomp me flat with their wooden old-lady shoes, which is what I ½-expected to see when I fired up the Klieg lighting. As everyone knows, Jessica Fletchers are attracted to Klieg lights like a moth to a judge’s robes.
“My, that’s a long string of emphasis!” I said to no one in particular. I turned to my audience and grinned coprophagically, breaking the fourth wall in one fell swoop. I turned back to the empty cellar, picked up the sledgehammer hanging from my tool rack, and got to work busting up the three remaining basement walls that blocked my view of whatever lay beyond them. I knew that, if those vicious April Foolers were waiting anywhere to fool me the moment my back was turned, that place would be right on the other side of these walls. That’s where they had to be—or my name was really Goaty McGoatles and I was the King of Goatlandia.
And I knew I wasn’t the King of Goatlandia. I was reasonably sure I wasn’t from the McGoatles clan either.
I kept pounding and smashing—hammering and crashing. Nicks in the rough gray wall grew into dents as the hammer flew; dents grew into craters as the sledge came down and down and down again. I blinded myself in three eyes as chips of concrete whipped through the air, yet so long as I still possessed some remaining vision, I refused to stop for even a microt. When my fourth, fifth, and sixth eyes went blind from the shower of cement jibs, my determination only increased: This wall would come down.
Within an hour I had dispatched one wall of my basement completely. I finally stopped to rest, lest my muscles curl up and commit suicide. The floor above my head groaned from the stress, joists shifted and bowed, but my palace of a house remained standing. The moment that I had made the first hole in the concrete wall, my fear that someone had indeed succeeded in pranking me today began to grow: As loose earth began to pour in through the hole, I was forced (forced!) to conclude that someone—probably Mr. Van der Woobie!—had buried my house under a pile of gravel! And, unless I missed my guess, James Knox Polk and perhaps even Milton Berle had been involved in the dastardly plot to inhume me, too.
“Rarrrgh! Dastards! I’ll show them!” I roared, resuming my sledgehammery on the adjoining wall. Two had fallen, two remained. More earth and gravel poured in and still my determination grew. Visions of Loquisha with a devilish smirk on her face and her sandals askew on her feet danced in my head. My house bucked and groaned above me. Bolts popped out and fell to the floor. Suddenly a noise not unlike a goose giving birth to a marching band erupted from the beams and rafters above my head, and my palatial house did the only logical thing it could do after some ignorant fool had knocked out 2½ walls that made up its foundation.
I braced myself, closing my eyes and wincing like a Bohemian emu salesman who had just had his last batch of emu eggs pilfered by the local band of poachers and pickpockets. Sunlight shone down on me, temporarily blinding me in my remaining eyes. As my Pnårpy eyes adjusted to the light, I saw that my house had—as I feared—sprouted a pair of angel-like wings and taken flight in order to escape the idiot homeowner destroying its foundation and trying to make it to collapse in a heap of rubble.
“Now that was unexpected,” I intoned under my breadth. I watched my house fly higher and higher, and higher still, then veer off to one side and disappear from view. Scrambling out of the hole, I caught site of the ol’ girl again: She had perched herself on Mr. Van der Woobie’s roof, balancing precariously and swaying slightly from side to side in the gentle breeze that wafted down Bouillabaisse Boulevard. I didn’t know what to make of the scene: My house was eleventeen times bigger than ol’ Woobie’s, but somehow she maintained her balance perfectly atop the much smaller house without crushing it.
I marveled out loud. Neighbors poked their heads out of windows and gawked. Cars stopped to stare; their drivers got out and stared, too. Even the wildlife paused for a moment to marvel at the house-upon-a-house spectacle that my obsplicitude had caused. Mr. Van der Woobie, right on cue and curmudgeonly as ever, came flying out of his house, broom in hand. He expected to use it on whoever was clattering about on his roof. But when ol’ Wibo saw that the source of the commotion was not merely his ol’ buddy Pnårp, but was instead his ol’ buddy’s entire house perched upon his chimney, he—to describe it in a delightfully understated way—had a heart attack and died.
“April Fool!” I shouted cheerfully as the crack team of gnomish EMTs finally carted his body away in their ambulance that doubled as a garbage truck. “Who’s the April Fool now!?”