My arm just follows them
Detached on July 11, 2021.
The dog days of summer continue. My own dog-headedness continues unabated, also. Two thirds of the Dog Star remain missing, and the other half of the Moon has now vanished in its entirety. Our nights are dark and moonless now. Large, invisible lizards still infest my palatial abode, in every room and on every floor. Despite my top-quality HERPA filters, lizards slither in through any crevice wide enough to admit them. And even with my advanced degrees in herpetometry and herpehepatology, I still can’t ascertain how two-foot-long reptiles sneak into my home through 0.001″ cracks in its foundation. And then the scaly beasts climb inside my liver and party. It just doesn’t make any sense.
It just… doesn’t… make any sense.
My bones are connected to my fingernails. My fingernails are really the only things that move. The rest of my arm just follows them.
When I tried to explain all of this to my physician on Tuesday, he just called me a crazy person and told me to check myself into the brain hospital. I couldn’t find one of those so I ended up at a different hospital where I inquired about having a new brain surgically installed into my canine head. Strange looks were exchanged, referrals to veterinarians were made, and much confusion ensued; things were only sorted out when the hospital quacks, cranks, and their clerks realized I was talking about my canine head, not my canine’s head—for I don’t even have a dog anymore. Misunderstanding resolved, they uniformly informed me I was a crazy person and told me to go find the brain hospital, too.
When I tried to explain all of this to my haberdasher on Wednesday, he just called me a nincompoop and told me to leave his haberdashery. Here, I had refrained from any mention of my relapse into cynocephaly, since I was beginning to suspect that only I can see it. But he still thought I was a nincompoop and deserving of expulsion from his haberdashery. At a loss for any appropriate retorts, but never one to allow l’esprit d’escalier to get the best of me, I unleashed a litany of scatological and sexological insults at the young Harshbarger on my way out the door—insults whose juvenility was only outweighed by sheer puerility. I ended my barking tirade by reminding him what I thought of his father and his sister and his whole family, then turned tail and ran out the door before he pelted me with any cravats or codpieces.
When I tried to explain all of this to the proprietor of the town propane-filling station on Thursday, he just called me a witless boob, reminded me I still owed him a large pile of shekels and pesos, and added that five months of compound interest made the pile three times larger than my dog head. (Ha! He could see it!) I pigheadedly averred that I owed him nothing—that firebombing was an accident! But my resistant asseveration was met with persistent perseveration on his part. Not even a last-ditch attempt at gurning my way out of the confrontation bore any fruit. I finally conceded after much negotiation (sans goats this time), and we agreed that a small pile of gnome gold would suffice in place of a large pile of shekels and pesos. We shook hands, I wagged my tail, and we parted ways.
When I tried to explain all of this to my own cynomorphic reflection in the mirror on Friday, I realized that someone had stolen my pulmonary artery again. Yet I was still breathing, standing upright, and conscious for the most part, so I dismissed the theft as unimportant and returned to barking at my own image in the mirror. I was all out of potato juice and the lizards had so fully invaded my living room that I couldn’t fit in there anymore, so it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Out of breath at last, my barking reduced to a hoarse yipping, I mooblesauntered out to my orangery to perform my next matutinary ritual. I carefully held an orange up to my cauliflower ear, waiting for the vitamins to slowly diffuse into my skull via aerosmosis. This method of nutrient consumption took time, and with a small lounge of lizards gnawing at my ankles, waiting for it to conclude was quite aggravating, but from what my doctor told me, it was the best method to absorb vitamins from oranges since Sergei Brukhonenko invented the autojektor. And, I had to admit, employing a single orange in this manner surely beat eating one hundred oranges, entire loaves of black bread, and jars of peanut butter in a mad effort to stave off blindness. I had tried such a diet back in 2020, and whereas it hadn’t prevented me from going blind, it did turn me into an orange. And it probably saved my life when all those stacks of newspapers came tumbling down on my head that one time.
President Piggy-Man claimed that his brilliant carotenemic complexion, shining out from beneath that whirling and windswept coif of his, was the source of his ingenious stability, but I knew better: If you want to be a genius, you need to jam oranges in your ears, not just bathe in carrot and sweet potato juice.
Vitamins aerosmotically transferred to my bloodstream, I mooblesauntered out onto my back porch. I had a hankerin’ for some sweet potato juice myself right about then, but until all the reptiles vacated my house and my cynocephaly abated, I knew I couldn’t go shopping: Who would let a dog covered in lizards just waltz into a grocery store unaccompanied? I briefly considered passing myself off as my new neighbor’s emotional support animal, but since the only emotions I myself was capable of emitting were panicry, lunacy, and manic granfalloonery, I nixed that idea and sank to my haunches to bay at the Moon for a while.
But the Moon was still entirely missing.
When I tried to explain all of this to my garden gnomes right then, my individual cranial bones began to move around loosely under my scalp: A sensation much more alarming than the discovery of a purloined pulmonary or even an unexpectedly empty orangery. So I smashed up all my garden gnomes and made myself some new skull bones out of their shattered ceramic bodies. In my haste I hadn’t given the little buggers a chance to tell me where they hid all their gold in the back yard, so I guess Mr. Propane-Face will just have to go unpaid for another month or twelve.
I then finished out Friday evening by going on a rousing dick chase through my back yard, around the neighborhood, and ending at the banks of the Thattagawatchee River.
Against all odds this week finally made it to Sunday, where at last it could be laid to rest. I awoke this fine Day of Sun and, looking in the mirror, realized I was in the final, nearly irreversible stages of cynocephaly. Mooblesauntering downstairs to prepare myself a meaty breakfast, yet finding an entire flock of geese spread out in my living room, decimated and headless, feathers everywhere, did not help my prognosis. A vague recollection of loping down to the public goose pond on Witherspoonworth Lane… a fuzzy memory of honking… so much honking—howling and hissing and honking—running on all fours and howling and honking and feathers flying and some crazy person werewolfishly dragging six dozen geese one at a time back to my living room. Biting and gnawing and howling and hissing and honking. Wings flapping and bills flying and six dozen headless geese all around my living room. Still honking.
There was only one thing to do now, before this got really out of hand. I mooblesprinted out to my Trabi to get my chainsaw…
My dog head cleanly severed from my body at last, I was free. I really could’ve used Brukhonenko’s autojektor right about now, too. I retired once again to my Hopeless Slack-Ass® recliner, headless and spurting bright orange blood, and pined for some potato juice. And suddenly the left half of every human, the entire world over, detached itself and scurried off into the heavens.