Livin’ large in the large intestine
Emboweled on September 23, 2012.
Snugly I nestled in the giant space slug’s large intestine, going nowhere but forward: Slowly forward, inching now, inching, inching—and hoping against all hope that I would soon be free of the hideous Torkan beast’s long and snaking gastrointestinal tract. I wasn’t sure how much of myself would be left, of course—I was being digested along the way—but I was cautiously optimistic that whatever remained would be enough of me for my crack team of gnomish reconstructive surgeons to piece back together into some semblance of a Phillip Norbert Årp again.
I sighed inwardly (for I had no trachea anymore). Out of the darkness, no more voices emerged—not even the ones in my head!—but images began to form in front of my mind’s eye (for my real eyes had long since melted away). I saw elephants. I saw oliphaunts. I saw pachyderms and even tachyderms, the fastest species of elephants known to mankind. The elephants danced, purple and red and adipose and filibusterous. I knew these were all hallucinations, and not even particularly good ones compared to what my addled little pate usually came up with. I wondered if the sluggy digestive enzymes and acids had leaked into my brain and had begun turning it into a nutritious and delicious soup. Was my cerebellum gone? What about my cerebrum? Had my amygdala melted? Had my Lewy bodies become the slug’s proteinaceous snack? Were my axons—once again—firing their impulses off into the yawning darkness?
I wanted to yawn, but I had no jaw.
The pachyderms danced and tachyderms zipped by faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. The scorbutic whelps of desperation swelled before my mind’s eye, baleful and dolorous. Fish flew and birds swam and lithe porcupines did lithe pirouettes upon my scrotum, liberated from my veins at last. My oatmeal cookies were there, too, mocking and jeering, and Thudley and Rogov and even Comrade Volgolskin™, the skinniest yet most barrel-chested Communist comrade this side of the future Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union had no future. It was a thing of the past. Superman, Batman, and Super Ronald Reagan had made sure of that. But where would Comrade Volgolskin™ go now, and what would he do?
“Was that place… Frankfurt am Main… or Nurgdurbett am Main?” I wasn’t sure any more. The golden dogbuttocks Nurgdurbett would surely meet up with Nar-Bibbly the Moon Rock soon, and then all would be rainbows and wellness and cats and dogs living together in holy matrimony. The era of Fail and AIDS would be over at last.
“Shaka ha… kree hol mel… Goa’uld…!”
What was left of my gooey, melting mind ran through the years of my life, all forty-two of them, and the years of my blog entries, all thirteen of them: The frothy, the prosy, the pious, and the pedantic. As the higher layers of my gray matter peeled away, like an onion melting on a dashboard on a hot summer day, so did the thoughts and memories and feelings and instincts associated with each layer. Out went the human, the simian, the mammalian. Finally, the dread god Ka‘ū rose up from my primordial brain stem and took hold of my mind, raw and scaly. Ka‘ū had been dormant for one hundred thousand years but now he loomed large once again. Wide-eyed (had I had eyes), I bowed before His scaly presence.
“I could sure go for some forcemeat right now…” I muttered under my breath, thinking of the cans and cans of shady meat products I had stowed in my kitchen cabinetry. “Mmmm… forced meat…”
But I was surrounded by darkness: Darkness so damnably dark that you would need a thousand thousand Klieg lights burning at full bore just to brighten the cloying darkness to a mere “pitch black.” I knew my mind was all but dissolved now. I knew I was nearing the end, both of my life and this Torkan slug-beast’s sigmoid colon. There was nothing to do now but await the final, terminal, ultimate end.
A final thought popped into my head. What brand of buttwash did this giant, alien slug-beast use? Did he prefer the classic Butt Bros., my own personal favorite? Or was he more of a Fanny Flush™ man? I guess I would never know for sure.
I knew then that the giant and white-furred humanoids that inhabit the deepest depths of the Hypogeum of Ħal-Saflieni would soon raise their palms and plunge me into the darkest depths of their catacombs on a gust of cool air. But I didn’t care, for I had a can of tuna: Bumble Bee® tuna, no less! Yum yum, Bumble Bee®, Bumble Bee® tuna! I… love a sandwich made with bumblebees!