An arpeggio for Snarpegon
Spatchcocked on March 28, 2021.
Indeed, maybe it was the location. Or maybe it was just the legalistic argle-bargle I spouted as if it were a magickal incantation. I guess we’ll never know now.
A refrigerator sat on the edge of a cliff, overlooking the edge. The sky was green, cloudy. The refrigerator contemplated its next move. Would it jump? Or would it just continue sitting there silently—because it was, after all, just a dumb appliance. And it wasn’t even plugged in. Both of its doors—for it was a standard refrigerator–freezer combination, I must add—stayed firmly shut. No errant children would wander along and climb inside this fridge as such wayward urchins are wont to do. The fridge continued to sit and contemplate its existence.
Music erupted from my bed cushions suddenly, while I was mulling over this gripping, refrigerating scene. I shrieked like a frightened goat. Chords progressed and my duvet quivered. I calmed myself down, talked myself down from the ledge (the one outside my third-floor window), and returned to cunctating regarding my bloggery, in which I had previously been deeply ensconced.
The music however provided further distraction from my hebdomadal scribblery: The melody reminded me of my brief ownership of an arpeggiator (otherwise known as an arp), and my attempt, arp in hand, to join a local garage band in the summer of 2014. They failed to appreciate my potential contributions, alas. My cleverness in naming my instrument “Pnårp’s Arp” was overshadowed by my complete inability to actually play any music beyond randomly pressing the black keys on the synthesizer attached to the arp. Occasionally performing loud, dissonorous goat impressions using my most exaggerated vibrato did not impress them either. The band’s drummer, a particularly frog-like individual, even had the audacity to tell me I couldn’t carry a tune in a shipping container. The exact details of my response to that aren’t fit to print in this here blog, but I can say this: The strenuous gurnings and cacophonic bleatings that I threw back, between meandering litanies of profanities, vulgarities, obscenities, and insults of the most scatological nature, were more than enough to cow the drummer and his raniform bandmates into giving me a second chance to prove myself.
I was finally laughed right out of their garage when I recommended gluing their broken chords back together.
The arpeggios and ostinatos blaring from my otherwise inert furniture further reminded me of Snarpegon, an ancient Assyrian king in the era of Ashurbanipal. An oft-forgotten son of Aššur-etel-ilani-mukinni, brother of Shamashshumukin, Shamash-metu-uballit, and Aššur-etel-šamê-erṣeti-muballissu, Snarpegon is remembered for only one thing: Not having a nigh-unpronounceable name like everyone else in his square-bearded family.
He is also remembered for reconquering the city of Shupria, which his father had earlier subjugated, and amassing a mountain of foreskins taken from his captives, but that’s neither here nor there now. (And that fleshy mountain isn’t there anymore, either.)
Off in the distance, a goose honked. And I had work to do.
Drain the blood, cure and slice the flesh, season and fry the potatoes, feed them the sugar water. Be born. Toil. Die. Arby’s. We sell food. (Toil the blood fields.)
Only Daisy cottage cheese will do. Caw, caw.
In 1990, the U.S.S.R. and Pepsi renegotiated to exchange syrup for vodka and a small fleet of Soviet warships including seventeen submarines, a frigate, a cruiser, and a destroyer. Until Pepsi sold the ships to Sweden a few days later for scrap, Pepsi was the sixth largest military force in the world. (Pepsi starts the Corporate Wars in an alternate timeline.)
If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until it gets so ugly you can hardly bear to look at it.
This freezer is out of control.
We are anomalous. We are a region. Forgive and forget.
Running for office? First, we’ll need to see your toilet. India wants would-be leaders to act as a role model in campaign. A growing number of states in India are imposing a new requirement on candidates for local office: They must use a toilet.
Teacher says to Prangu, “Why are you drinking malk in class?” Prangu says, “Because my mother says to always drink my malk before I sleep!” Teacher says, “No! Do not sleeping in school!” Prangu snores. (Asleep.) Smoke emits from the teacher. Ahaha! Ha?
I’m too high for housework. Seventeen dabs was probably a bit excessive.
Because doG loves us and wants us to be happy.
The members of WallStreetBets adopted 3,500 gorillas in a mere six days. That sure beats the 375 gorillas I once had—but I bet this clutch of gorillas didn’t come with their own upended flower pots like mine had.
“Christ on a trampoline!” I swore mightily. Computer technology is naturally unusable. My brain is mush. And my ears are full of fungus—screaming, shrieking, shrill fungus. A relative neophyte to otomyclogy, I was both baffled and flabbergasted at the multiplicity (let alone the mulpicity) of the species and genera that seemed to have taken up residence in my ear canals. The dugongs, abundant as ever, did not seem to care—but did I? The stinkiest of stinkhorns crowded behind my tympanum, and the most immoral morels clogged my cochlea nigh unto bursting.
My long, flowing locks of ear-hair made no difference. The fungus grew unabated.
It was either Evel Knievel or an evil weevil who once told me: “Bark like a chicken! Neigh like a goose!”
And of course I did so at once, with as much sassigassity as I could muster. The fungus grew unabated.
With Charles Babbage babbling about his cabbage, and Cuthbert Burbage burbling about his curtilage, I surmised that a smart refrigerator would in fact have jumped over that precipice. And I could probably check the temperature of its crisper right in my phone, from anywhere in the world, right up until the moment that plummeting Maytag shattered into a million smart little pieces when it impacted the ground.
I tried to draw my mind back to the task at hand, but it was hopeless. My cunctations would rule the day, and I would rue the day I ever thought this was a good idea again. My bed cushions continued cheerily blaring out frenetically ascending and descending progressions of musical notes. Wernicke was out partying with Broca again, leaving my brain in an aphasic stupor. The Sun was setting now. I babbled. The downy symphony played on.
It was truly a Snarpeggio: An årpeggio for Snarpegon.