Horses, drugs, and some Volvos
Revolved around December 2, 2012.
“Gabba-gabba hey! Gabba gubba goo-bort! Boo-bort!!” And so, with a bubble and a squeak, not unlike the sound I myself make when sitting too long on the pot after a period of hopeless impaction, week #48 of year #2,012 began in all its eggluescent and corpusculent glory. It would be a week of squiffling and babbling. It would be a week of dords and fnords. It would be a week of contrasts: November and December. It would be a week a mere four weeks before year #2,013 would begin. It would be seven days long. It would be… this week.
Monday made me understand that if I were to have a cat for a pet, I probably would be a much happier person, and if I were to name it Meowey, I would be happier still. Alas, the last time I had a pet—a cow, it was—she was eaten whole by my bestial kerfrumpt, along with every other beast in my bestiary, pet in my petiary, and ape in my apiary. I still had that scaly ol’ kerfrumpt, too, and unless she tried to eat me myself (and I), or Ravna or Loquisha, I wasn’t about to release her back into the wild anytime soon. She had indeed tested my patience when she made foie gras out of my recent goosely addition, but I forgave her: After all, if not for torturously stuffing and eating, what are geese good for? So, rumination duly ruminated upon, I decided that having and petting a cat would be a bad idea at this point in my life. Zaniness would have to serve as a substitute for happiness, paltry though it was. “Bubba-pubba boo-bort! And a gnarlee-fnarlee gooblee!” Poor Mooey.
I frowned as I reread the last paragraph. But, what was I going to do, rewrite it? I had better things to do, like write the next paragraph!
Tuesday burst upon the scene all shiny and purple-streaked, and I remembered that it was once again time to excoriate my exoterica, but I was all out of gum. My computer had crashed again, and my adding machine had forgotten how to add. I could go water my potted plants, but the last time I did so I suffered a beating that brought me to within a ha’inch of my very life. Let the little fiends shrivel up and die, I decided instead. I then had a novel idea: I had recently bought an entire case of brass safety hasps from the local hardware store and there were an awful lot of places I could use them around my abode! I got to work at grunce. I ran through my palatial house, floor by floor, chamber by chamber, putting hasps on everything in sight, until I ran out (first of hasps, then the front door). I then proceeded to spin around in my front yard for a few ha’hours, pweeing madly and shrieking in horror at the images that had suddenly begun assaulting my mind. The gluey, tentacly horrors bursting across my mind’s eye weren’t as vivid as when I had been raising a clutch of shuggoths upstairs, but they were close—and just as eldritch. I flailed and I writhed and I squirmed and I tater-totted the garden hose. Then I ended up back on the pot: My throne, my porcelain throne, was calling me, and who was I to ignore her siren song?
Plop, plop, plop!
Ineluctably Wednesday arrived, following close on the heels of Tuesday. Not since 1987 had this not been the case, but since it was the case now—Wednesday coming after Tuesday instead of Thursday or Woobsday—I was forced to deal with it, put up with it, and even to live with it. Grumbling, I swallowed my pride and then swallowed my tongue, and flailed and writhed around a while (on the floor this time), not unlike a gaffed carp out of water and bicycles. Luckily, my perpeleptic seizure was over before Ravna decided that she needed to call on my crack team of gnomish EMTs to save me again or, Gob forbid, the captain of the Magic Oreo Machine™. I wasn’t really in the mood this week to have my limbs or internal organs stapled to my forehead, nor did I want to receive a bill for a brazillion dollars from an angry cookie machinist.
As I had seized, all gnarled and knobby, Ravna had knelt over me, waiting patiently to render assistance if needed: Scissors in hand, she was ready to cut my tongue off herself should I fall deeper into my perpeleptic fit. Fortunately, it was not to be: After a bit more bubbly frothing and gubbly-ŋubbly flabbling, I flottled out and plurmed languidly, then sprawled supinely upon my hard dirtwood floor. I was exhausted. Swort glorned from my threehead and my brœþ came in short, fillow hasps. At last, coherence returned: “Buppa, fuppa-nuppa… fnoo!” I looked Rav right in the eye as I continued: “Worr’p! Worr’p! Gargly-dargly durp-murping stew! Mud in your eye and a fish-binder, too!”
A woman unused to my inimitable strehezenity would have thought I was still held tightly in the throes of perpelepsy, but my woman knew better. My poor Rav had no idea what I was actually going on about, but it was evident from my use of authentic words in place of choked and gagging howls that I was back to my old Pnårpy self. She put away the scissors. I gurgled gratefully and stood up, smiling as insipidly as I could muster. After a moment, Ravna put her hands on her hips, like she expected something more from me, but I was confused.
I thought a bit. I looked around. Ravna waited patiently. Then it came to me: “Dugongs… in your ear canals!” I conquavered, now in song. I gurned mightily as I rolled onward like a bull in a china shop: “Dugongs… in your butt canals! Butt, butt, butt-butt, buttery, buttery butts!”
Making her own face, halfway between perplexed, amusedly dismissive, a bit miffed, and horse-like, Ravna sauntered off and—as usual—left me to my own devices. Just like that television ad for Arsemann buttwash, that seemed to happen a lot lately. As she went about her sauntering—barefoot, I now saw!—I noticed that my beauteous little skeetch-truncheon was sporting a shiny new coat of brilliant yellow nail polish on all ten of her toenails. I grinsped with gusto and glee… but then caught myself abruptly before outright goonflayvining right there on the floor: Was this what Ravna had expected me to notice two paragraphs ago? As a result of my obtuseness and obliviosity, would my dearest Rav be mad at me now? Would I be in the doghouse tonight? Or the outhouse? Or the cathouse!?
Or was it just time to rotate my tires again? I withdrew to my drawing room upstairs and sullenly contemplated my oblivity.
The Sun sank lower in the sky, yet Wednesday refused to go away no matter how hard I tried to make it do so. I pushed and I pulled, I coaxed and I cajoled, I threatened and I pointed my shotgun at my desk calendar, but Wednesday just would not leave—at least not until late at night when, suddenly and without a lick of warning, the day got up and stalked right on out of my drawing room without so much as another word. Downstairs, my staid old grandmother clock tolled the hour: Midnight had come… and with it, Thursday.
The arrival of Thursday caught me with my pants down—on the pot—and deeply engrossed in reading the hardcover edition of Latawnya, the Naughty Horse, Learns to Say “No” to Drugs that Loquisha had bought me next week as an anniversary gift. Being a person who likes horses only slightly less than he likes drugs, I found the tale truly captivating. I would give it both two thumbs and two big toes up, if asked to do so. As I finished reading and put the tome down next to my throne (on a shelf built specifically to house books and book-like objects, mind you), I realized there was something I now had to do: Down the stairs I flew like a flash, tore open the front door, and made a mad dash—
—Out into my front yard again did I fly, breaking from the brief bit of rhyming verse that I had suddenly sprouted and returning to the merely prosaic. I threw my arms into the air and, catching them as they fell back to the earth, I began extolling—at the top of my alveolae—the wond’rous wonders and awesome awesomenicity of the horsey book that I had just read. No cars stopped and no people stared, but lights came on, one by one, in the windows of several of my neighbors’ houses.
Mr. Van der Woobie, across the street and ur-grumpy as all get out, shook his gnarly, knobby fist out the open window and demanded invectively that I let him sleep in peace. “But this is about horses!” I bawled, almost pleading with him to understand. He harrumphed: He would have none of it, but that didn’t stop me—oh, no! Peppering his speech with the saltiest of insults and cursing like a sailor—an old, old sailor—he finally slammed his window shut, shut off his light, lit back to his bedroom, and bedded back down for the night. (I couldn’t see all the way into his bedroom through his kitchen window of course, but my spies confirm all of this.)
Mrs. Farnston soon did the same, as did the rest of my neighbors (whose names I don’t know yet). The abandoned house next door stood abandoned still. I deflated like a tacky blow-up lawn ornament left out too long and went back inside my own piffilious house. As I finally pulled up my pants, I wondered what I would do between now and when the Sun rose in six hours or so. Ravna’s feet came to mind but she was mad at me. Loquisha’s came to mind, but that was next week. Reading another horsey book came to mind, but I was all out of horsey books.
“Most people ‘sleep’ during this time,” a voice matter-of-factly whispered deep within my brainpan. It sounded like Zippy was awake, too, but maybe it was just the squirrels playing a trick on me again. (It’s often the squirrels, you know.)
“I know what I’ll do!” I moobled, again throwing my arms wide and bugging my eyes out to dragonflyesque proportions. “I’ll go to sleep!” I bounded up my stairs on all fours and dove into bed. Blackness fell the moment my head hit the bowling ball I had left atop my pillow for some reason.
Morning crept through my bedroom window like a thief in the night, except it wasn’t night anymore now that morning was here. I rose, put on my fuzziest blue fez to cover the huge bump swelling from my concussed-upon noggin, and went downstairs to fetch my arms from the living room floor where I had left them. Ravna was up and about, making tea and strumpets for breakfast, for which I was heartily grateful: The last time I tried to make tea, I had been—let’s just leave it at “less than successful,” shall we?—and the last time I tried to make my own strumpets, that had turned out even worse. Much, much worse. To this day I still don’t know how that crater full of Volvos where Bobo, Mississippi once stood could have possibly been blamed on my experimentation with tea- and strumpet-making, but who am I to argue with fifty thousand Mississippians?
Friday reminded me that it’s more like it is now than it ever was around here. I mentioned this to the Drunken Donuts clerk when I pumbled on down there to fetch myself a gin and coffee. I was met with the blankest of stares, and then a cheerful—if ominous—request for $1.89 for the coffee I had “bought” moments before. Professing complete ignorance that “buying” a kip of coffee required me to carry any legal tender on or about my person at all, I backed out the door slowly—coffee in hand—and then broke into a run the moment I hit the glowing, green sidewalk. I made it all the way home without the guardsquirrels descending upon me with fists and truncheons, but upon my arrival back home, I was met with the most horrible of horrors imaginable: The abrupt end of the last paragraph of this week’s blog entry.
[Feetnote: Bet you’re awful impressed I got through that entire paean to funnels without a single pun regarding peeing on them, aren’t you? Well, that shows what you know! I peed all over them—all week long! Woo-hoo-hey!]