Losing weight at the lost-and-found
Bonked on September 19, 2021.
This week, I lost a lot of weight, but found it again. I had accidentally left it—all fifty pounds—at the lost-and-found at the local Fluffernuttery.
Drunkenly meandering from one topic to the next, lost in ruminative complexity, I scodged a dogue and passed another empanada. I hid in a culvert in the woods, listening to the water rush by in the dark. Armpits. An XML parser exploded, warning me of feet and alabaster paternosters, so I had to delve more deeply into the stack of code that was my purpurineal blog.
I waddled down the street, shouting at every lamp post, guard rail, and traffic cone. Then I noshed on an entire bag of pepperoni—an eight-ounce bag I had snarfed at a supermarket resembling a rectangular fish. Eight whole ounces of pepperoni. Could I consume it in a single walkabout? Or would I bring the greasy bag home with me still stuffed with little red slices of slippery goodness? I did my damnedest to eat every last oily disc, but I may have failed at gulping down the whole eight ounces. I don’t know, for I woke up in a ditch Wednesday morning, nary a bag of pepperoni nearby. I looked everywhere.
Before my somnolent collapse into that ditch, my walkabout had continued, <not unlike a wallaby, from one street to the next—through the fog of a hangnail, even after I was stomped by a pair of elephants wearing hobnails. It was well after sunset and I had continued stumbling along, bumbling as I stumbled, mulling over the fact that my kerfrumpt had sucked all of my gerbils right down her eating-snout. I had done nothing to stop the slaughter. I was now gerbilless. A train had blown its horn abruptly and I, startled, had queefed loudly—so loudly that the neighbors at the nearby Durgue-Forster Macadoonarow had overheard and set out to search for the source of the sound. Finding me stumbling and bumbling, they proceeded to mock me relentlessly for the next 78⅞ seconds. After fleeing, all hurt and afliver, I had cranched, eaten my underwear in despair, and gulped down another whole bottle of fermented potato juice, before keeling over like a Kreel undone by his own planet-spanning idiocy.
“Scrofula! Scrofula and scag! Scrofula, Dracula, and spectacular Scott Bakula!”
It was raining. I was busy drawing pilcrows on my pillow when someone shouted that through my window. (He did this after he threw a rectangular fish through it first.) I responded by tearing my own eyebrows to shreds and hurling the debris at him. My irrationally irate reaction so perturbed the fish-throwing miscreant that he fled all the way into next Sunday.
An episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation was blaring on the television, lurid as ever. The android was pretending to be human, the captain was giving a speech that would shake rafters (if the ship had rafters that could be shaken), and the lithe Betazoid’s oiled feet were on display. I wasn’t sure how any of this related to anything else I was doing—What was I doing?—but I watched anyway. Next up was a commercial for Vulvodyne® groinrinse, in which the obnoxious hawker compared the product favorably to the (in his smarmious opinion) inferior Groinblaster™ brand. In my uneducated opinion, they were both ineffective at washing anything but the smallest of groins. And, most subnoxiously, the product’s name put me in mind of Volvos: In particular, my horrificulous experience with a crater full of ’em. This reticular rememberation caused me a dissociative episode that left me smaxiflecting in a self-dug hole in the ground: I pined for Alyssa Milano’s feet (oiled or un-oiled) to comfort me. Alas none were forthcoming.
In my self-dug hole, I had to wonder: How slurshed did one have to be to consider sherry to be more than something for cooking? I decided to find out. Knowing I was not a wine snob, this was an uphill battle. But I would do my darnedest. After buying more sherry-soaked fish at the supermarket than fit in a single cart, I realized I still didn’t have a single bottle of actual, drinkable sherry. But I had lots of drunken fish. So I stood on my hind legs, eructated the anthem of Gnomelandia, and sank back down to my haunches—into a nurdling position. Sensing an opportunity, I then nurdled a garthok. A garthok I did nurdle. Keeping my entire collection of switchblade paperclips in my back pocket while awaiting the next Caldor fire, I bore down and pinched out a curd the shape of Florida and the density of an osmium ingot after an elephant sat upon it. It was pure dentistry at work: Free-form text entered into the eagerly waiting word processor in front of me. Free-form muffins awaited entry into my gaping maw. Mlaw, mlaw. I smaxiflected merrily again, stood on my toes (not the ones on my feet), and then vacationed in Farghanistan—where I was born. Forlornly I’d been born, where I gurned, spurned by all around me, and while I murped, I burped—I dipped my nose in a bag of hogweed, and then poured another whole bag of dried goat tea atop a statue of St. Manthandander. (He’s the saint of hogs, weeds, and crashed mainframes.)
This one time, I typed too many angle brackets and made my HTML parser very, very angry. I then had to spend the rest of that day counting each angle bracket—opened and closed—to ensure they balanced perfectly. See, back in my day, our HTML parsers didn’t print out line numbers in their error messages. We had to count our lines and errors by hand to find out what went wrong. This could take hours—or days. And of course we didn’t have computer monitors back then—not even the old glowing green monochrome ones. Everything was printed onto paper: An endless spool of the stuff was spat out by clickity-clacking line printers and humming, buzzing dot matrix printers. We then had to re-enter each program into the computer by flipping dozens of tiny little switches on the front of the box. And then…
The name of the game was “Goatburping Supreme: A Ferrous, Ferret-Shaped Dream Nozzle.” I didn’t know what the name signified but after a few dozen selfies with a giant blow-up doll shaped like Alyssa Milano (barefoot), I stopped caring. What I wanted to do was hang from the rafters upside-down, like a bat, and see if I could spread a new variant of COVID-19 to everyone. The WHO had run out of Greek letters so to name this one they had resorted to Tholian cuneiform. Someone at the WHO accused me of screwing a pheasant—an accusation to which I was well-accustomed. But—I insisted!—in this chapter of my life, I only schtupped bats. That’s where COVID-19 came from: Yours truly using bats as his own personal entertainment.
No one will ever believe this tale, this tale of woe, this tale of batty mucus and woe, so I shall type some more free-association HTML, spin around until I’m dizzy, and then vomit thirty-six thousand words upon your waiting screen (and additional lexemes resembling words, but not quite). Do you believe my tale now? Or do I need to resort to tweeting—or even hooting?
A doofus-shaped minion (who was also shaped like a pepperoni pizza, a pudgy goose, and the King of Belgium) once told me I should vanish from the pages of history. I retorted that he should be wiped from the map. This semantic confuzzlery resulted in an incident that almost led to war between Gnomelandia and Kurzgurglistan. A horse trade resolved the dispute, and now I have all the loli I could ever ask for.
I don’t care how many times you call milkweed “malkweed” or cardboard “cardle boardle,” to me they’ll always be lifts and flats and lollipop men. Caldor wasn’t ablaze anymore. But now Walmart was.
Another lollygagging accident broke out on Schmerber Street last night. Gagging so many lolis was rather outrageous on its own, but it was quickly overshadowed by a throat-clearing accident over on Shoehorner and then a seven-car pileup on the Carparker-Harshbarger Parkway caused by someone’s trash-bagging negligence. The police couldn’t respond fast enough, so they just gave up and returned to the multitude of donut shops lining Hegelian Avenue. None of this is the least bit intelligible to anyone outside the confines of the surreal podunk in which I live (and expect to die), but who’s counting? The harooloos probably are, for one. And Don Rickles. He’s always counting.
It was in that massive pile of recklessly dumped bags of rubbish that I found all my lost weight. This was the happiest hour of my day—but the unhappiest day of my week—and it was wrapped in the most hapless week of my month. That probably deserves more explanation, but you’ll get none—none, I say! None!