Shouting at every houseplant
Shouted at before December 5, 2021.
Another omnipalegic paternostering took place this week, took place indeed it did, in the damnable brainpan of an experimental mouse that had too big a brain to continue in this plane of existence. None of this mousely sentience was relevant to how I was reborn this week (after I died last week) but it did alleviate many quandaries and answer many questions, such as “How many enterographs can dance on the head of a pin?” and “Exactly how sloshed was Pnårp when he pinched out this docile & perfunctory blargh entry?”
I find the question offensive, to be honest (which I rarely am). I don’t have to be inebriated to blargh. I don’t need a snootful to be blogful. I can blag with the best of them while perfectly sober. I don’t even need my favorite №2 pencil to bloorgh—I can do it with a pen, a №2½ pencil, a computer keyboard (with or without keys), or even fingerpaint and construction paper. Just watch me!
Subsystem allocation 412 was the key to my blogging prowess, but I didn’t know this yet. Nor did the gnomes know this, nor did the soulless minions of orthodoxy who dog my every step and cat my every move. Perhaps what I needed was a starship shaped like a dog tick. Those were available if you knew whom to ask, but most starships were shaped like something out of a Nicki Minaj music video—not a dog tick. But I didn’t know that either just yet: For you see, I was still dead. Dead and unburied. (Which, I might add, is better than being undead and buried.)
This antigonal predicament brought me to my newest hobby this week: Shouting at every houseplant of the genus Chlorophytum that I encountered. I wasn’t sure why this particular genus brought out such strong urges in me, but one thing was assured: It did so, so scream I did. The spider plants took my shrieking and babbling in stride, as most plants are wont to do, of course. Who ever heard of a plant getting offended at being called unpleasant names by a dead man? But that got me thinking: Back in ’15, I did have an unfortunate run-in with a Mimosa pudica after I had insulted its mother—but that was neither here nor there now. Few plants actually had the capability to throttle me; spider plants certainly did not.
Dead or alive, I would continue my animated thundering at these peculiar, eight-legged plants. And the borfnagled, blurpnagled paternostering would continue unabated, with bated breath, as the harooloos masturbated in a lonely cabin in the Brundlesphere. This brought to mind a novel course of action for me. Everyone suddenly had unusually large hands on TV. I had no idea why but I had my theories. I wished their feet were twice as big, at least half of them, but this was what I had to work with. I tried not to blame the gnomes but in the end I blamed the gnomes. An old neighbor of mine, that sempiternal consumer of cow nipples, may have been at fault for this televisionary chicanery—but I was still reasonably sure it was the gnomes who were culpable. A storm of surmising suddenly blew in across my axons. I had to figure this out.
“Gnaddeus Underdong McDoggerel Kleinbutt!” I surmised out loud—loudly out loud. My spider plant sat there morosely, exactly like the ones at the nursery did yesterday until the clerk came running over and shooed me out of the store. “Gnaddeus Underdong McDoggerel Kleinbutt! Dew Schnozzle! Pfnk!” I wasn’t sure what any of those words meant, especially in that sequence, but it mattered not. My hapless hapax legomena would continue with renewed purpose. “Gnaddeus Underdong McDoggerel Kleinbutt! Pfnk! Pfnk! Pfnk! Thaddeus van der Dogwhistle Cheesely McCheeseface! Dog, dog, dogdog, dogdogdog, Peabody Pee-Buddy McPiddle-Disaster!” I took a breath. “Gnaddeus! Gnaeus! Gaius! Caius! Pfnk! Puh-Fink! Outnoodle this, you alabasterous monkey-scones! Away! Away with you, Kleinbutt-laden doofus-minions of dunderponderous roon!”
The spider plant kept sitting there being a spider plant. I continued my tirade for another hour, stopping only to count the garden gnomes that had accreted at my doorstep to gawk at my sputum-laced bellowing. (There were nine.) I then turned back to my hapless houseplant and continued my harangue until I was hoarse in the face. (Of course in the face—where else?)
The next morning I awoke still in a high dudgeon—the highest of dudgeons of course. And no longer hoarse in the horseface of course. I was mad. Mad, mad, mad. I was madder than a cow, madder than a hatter, madder even than common madder itself. I thought, right now I could kick a kitten through an electric fan. But instead—seeing as how I had no kittens, no electric fans, and currently no functional legs with which to kick anything—I decided to direct my aimless shouting at the Rubia genus instead. My spider plant was now safe.
An enormous surge of metreon radiation sent me back in time again, but I escaped the soul-devouring minions of orthodoxy—once again—before they had a chance to crunch my soul and slurp up its delicious spiritual energy. Not even the McDoggerel–Einstein–Kleinbutt paradox held sway this time: I returned to the present day without needing to kill my own grandfather or marry my own great-grandmother. Once again my expertise in temporal mechanics had proven invaluable.
But, I was shocked to discover, upon my return, one new thing, amidst this seemingly, excessively long, long string of commas: I was dead. Or maybe not dead, not quite—I was undead. As is so often the case in my granduncular life, I realized there was but one single course of action to take at this point: Sink slowly into the soil beneath my apiary and await the next phase of (non)existence.
Days passed, maybe more, then weeks passed, maybe less, then months passed, maybe more (or less). Inhumed beneath my beehivery, I continued to be quite undead. With nothing more than my nose poking above the earth, ready to inhale every bee buzzing by as a novel but necessary form of sustenance, I waited. I waited. I waited. I waited.
Undead and buried, I pondered how my recent trajectory in life resembled nothing more than a glorpf-snake outnoodled by a wizzle-nipf. Angrily I yearned for my Hopeless Slack-Ass® recliner and my mug of potato juice. What I wanted was to recline hopelessly in my easiest of easy chairs with a mug of thick potato juice in one hand and the latest edition of Goats Illustrated in the other. But, buried in the ground and decomposing badly, I knew what I wanted was not to be. There would be no recliner, no hopeless reclining, no watery mashed potatoes in a glass, no goaty periodicals. My piqued pining slowly gave way to acceptance, alabaster, and mirth.
Time surprisingly moved forward at a steady pace. For the thirty-seventh time (that is, the 37th time [or, the 37ª time (alternatively, the xxxvii. time)]), I contemplated an excursion to Finland so I could talk some sense into a certain curmudgeonly fish boot manufacturer regarding the spurious €717 bill he dunned me over the head with some months ago. At last reaching the end of that garden path sentence, I knew however this was not to be, either. COVID-19 had eaten my plane ticket before I even bought it. (And I wasn’t even planning to take a plane.) Therefore I decided to move to Venus. Naturally, this decision was in the service of the master molecules: We are DNA’s spaceships preparing for launch and trying not to get ourselves killed. Venus was the perfect place to hide from an angry coronavirus. And so to Venus I would go.
I continued to ponder. Being undead and buried did bring me one bit of relief: No longer would I have endless garden gnomes unendingly staring at me from my nonstop doorstep. No longer would I have to berate every spider plant and madder into submission. And no longer would I have to keep trying to hold my breath for endless hours in a vain effort to reduce my personal CO2 footprint. Once I decomposed into a shapeless husk of an erstwhile humanoid, all the outgassing I would ever do would come to an end.
That pleased Phillip Norbert Årp. That pleased Phillip Norbert Årp indeed.
And with that, I died.