Excrescence and excreta
Unfolded on September 26, 2021.
Convivial conclaves of paternostically patented perflayvination awaited me, popishly as usual. My onions were all nestled snug in a cool, dark place, and my coffee pot was coffeeing away quietly in the corner of the kitchen. Today it was percolating nicely, but I wondered: Could my coffee pot deliver a peroration as grand as the coffee it made? Could it collate the sheets of paper my computer printer was always angrily spitting out in random order? A perorating, collating percolator indeed sounded like a nifty invention, and when I delved into the manual of my cheap Spend-O-Matic™ coffee pot and found it could do nothing more than make coffee, I decided that I would nift into existence this nifty invention this very week.
I also vowed to refrain from buying Spend-O-Mart’s private label appliances again. The last three house fires should have taught me this lesson, but they hadn’t: All I learned from them was to stop cutting holes in my walls so I could gnaw on my house’s wiring like a rat. (I decided to leave that up to the actual wall rats.) But this brevelation was just too much: This sad, $9.99 coffee pot was so bereft of features it couldn’t even skin my onions for me, let alone deliver grandiloquent speeches nor organize the stacks of 8½×11″ chaos spewing this very moment from my angry, angry inksplat printer.
On Tuesday, after muzzling my printer once and for all, I went to work trying to invent a perorating, collating percolator. By Thursday, I hadn’t invented much—but I had stripped every single roll of duck tape I owned of its actual tape (leaving the elegant, delicious cardboard cores behind), used up every staple I ever possessed (and then some), and inserted far too many parentheses onces again into my scrivening (in this sentence, specifically). I stepped back and looked once more at the massive, wrinkly (and prickly) ball of tape (and staples) I had invented. It wasn’t much. But it would do. It would do nicely.
“Epenthesis? In my parentheses!?” I whinnied, horse-like. Excrescence would certainly explain how Dingleberry–Hampsterism had ended up with that extra P in there all these years. But it wouldn’t explain the excreta lying all over my living room floor. For that I had to turn to the new flock of indoor geese I had acquired by stealing all my neighbor’s geese and locking them in my living room. Unfortunately, these geese had proven rather dexterous and had soon learned how to turn doorknobs and open windows, and the next time I had gone out (to buy another new coffee pot), they had used their newfound abilities to escape through the under-cabinet over-sink window in the kitchen. All that had remained was one final pile of poo—soft, and steaming lightly—sitting atop the cold water knob of the sink: A final “honk you!” from these curiously prehensile-winged geese.
I spent the afternoon forlornly kicking my staple–tape ball around my living room, kitchen, parlor, and horse-drawing room. In the old alt.usage.english newsgroup I also made a valiant attempt to prop up all the extra vowels I typically insert in the word “nuclear” when I pronounce and spell it as only a Pnårp can, but no amount of excussion for my unusual and overbearing anaptyxis could convince anyone who would listen (and there were none) that the word needed those fifteen extra vowels.
On Friday I discovered, right outside my ample abode, little black bags of dog turds strewn about the sidewalk and hanging from the trees. In the midst of an emergency—I was all out of onion powder and potato juice—this was the last thing I wanted to see strewn about before my beady little eyes. Too bad it wasn’t Stroon strewn about, or I could have lived forever. But it was still highly nutritious, if not summarily delicious. And at least it wasn’t more goose poop. I wasn’t sure who was bagging up all the dog turds and flinging them skyward, but one thing did matter, and one thing I knew for sure: My sticky ball of tape and staples had found a purpose in its life.
“Caca d’oie!” I swore mightily when I realized what was about to happen next: That sempiternal afficionado of goat-flavored doodlewhacker pie, “Rowdy” Nimroddy Piper, was walking my way. He was a manticratic manticore, a true puzzle of a person–thing. Despite his formidable-sounding name and attached cognomen, he was nothing of the sort—bearing no resemblance to any part of his name, he was more of a cartoon character, a caricature of a person–thing, in fact. He also wore an even larger and finer collection of asshats upon his head than I could afford, which set me to no end of jealousy each time I lay eyes upon him.
“Hello, Nimrod,” I intoned mockingly as he passed. Thoughts of stealing all his asshats and running off into the dark played across my axons and synapses. Perhaps he was responsible for all the dog turds in the trees. The nimroddy little man made some kind of abrupt noise in reply to my puerile intonations: Possibly words, or things resembling words, or perhaps just the curt ablurpling of a startled squirrel in man’s clothing. But my brain was too far past thinking about things that had happened in the past—even mere seconds ago—to care. I continued past, juicy potatoes and powdery onions the only thing on my mind.
“Gone a-blurpin’” read the sign on the door when I arrived at my destination—the new costermongery on Alpha Ralpha Boulevard. A soft mooing could be heard from behind the door, but the fruit stand was surely closed. I stood there, lips pursed and nose agape. Off in the distance, a dog blogged. How dare the costermonger not be open at 3 a.m. on a Saturday? Didn’t he know I was having a vegetative emergency?
“Oh, d’gerpt!” I cursed in frustration, turned on my hindmost heel, and slunk back to my palatial abode. Mulling it over in my mind, it was probably best for everyone that the costermongery was closed: For when have I ever been able to bumble my way into a store without making a complete and total ass of myself? That still didn’t explain the cow noises emanating from the closed shop, but some things simply defy explanation.
Passing through the intersection of Alpha Ralpha Boulevard and Pinnfarben Street, I had my own abrupt (but not ablurpt) revelation: This was the absolute, most perfect intersection in the entire world. The pavement was just right. Not a crack in sight. The traffic lights: The perfect shade of red, yellow, and blue. The only thing it lacked was a flock of prehensile-winged geese clogging the road and making obscene gestures at motorists who expected to be able to pass through unmolested.