Fleas, flies, and friars!
Peddled on June 12, 2022.
“Fleas, flies, and friars! Fuccant!” I cursed mightily. “Fuccant! F———, f———, f———!” Once again I had neglected to read the instructions on the label, and ended up with the entire bottle jammed up my nose—jammed so far it would take a twenty-mule team to get it out.
Monday was not looking up for me.
Hours later, my intricate plan to insufflate enough borax to sneeze the bottle out of my nose had proven a miserable failure, but it did teach me some interesting physics about high pressure within the human brainpan. I gathered my eyes up off the floor, screwed my ear bones back together, and went back to work trying to blog out something resembling a coherent “blog entry.”
You are reading the result.
“Well, this is a silly novel—although I’m not a lady novelist!” I harrumphed emphatically, throwing down the copy of George Eliot’s 1856 essay “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” that I had been reading. “Fuccant!”
Tuesday was shaping up to be swollen with indignation.
I scratched the top of my head contemplatively, which again reminded me I had yet to find my left parietal bone after that sneezing mishap. I had thought the skull-shaped hole in the ceiling had been a clue, but then remembered: That was where I had hurled another skull last week in an epanaleptic fit, is where it was. I scratched the top of my head contemplatively again. I was unsure if I even needed that skull fragment back—my brain seemed to be perfectly happy with its newfound skylight. I sat back in my chair for a while and enjoyed the parableptic seizures roiling my brain.
“Fleas, flies, and friars! F———! Fuccant!” I cursed again when I accidentally typed “<emu>” when I meant to type “<em>” instead. Memories of the old Kimdangian emu farm on Ornithopter Street flooded into my bird-sized mind, distracting me from continuing my witless bloggery for the remainder of the day. Those emus could sure put up a valiant fight, I remembered. In one feathery mêlée, one of my eyes ended up nailed to a fencepost. That sure drove the point home: My stint as an emu cowboy would be short-lived. How I drove home all one-eyed and bleeding that day is a story best left on the pages of history. Then followed my even shorter stint as a professional poultry tripe dresser at Szczerbaczewicz & Smith, local purveyors of tripe, haggis, chitlins, and other awful animal offal, but that is so far off-topic I won’t mention it again. I promise.
Wednesday was proving to be even more percivarious than the days prior.
I slept soundly that night, dreaming about chickens, dugongs, and turtles. Yet parablepsis would intercede and leave my blog in ruins: After scribbling my rough draft all over my bedroom ceiling (Where else would one scribble a rough draft?), I began my usual meticulous ritual of transcribing it perfectly—upside-down and backwards—into my computering machine. But a sudden hoot-hoot-tooting from my downstairs, sideways, under-table clock interrupted my fervent tap-tap-tapping. I mistakenly copied “emu” as “psychotic rooster with a comb resembling nothing more than a human hand”! My doings-and-happenings-to from twelve years ago popped into my mind; when I realized it was not twelve years ago but eleven years, eleven months, and thirty days ago(!), I suffered another laryngorrheic seizure and didn’t regain any semblance of consciousness until Thursday.
A peddler of medals visited my town, selling all manner of medals, trinkets, baubles, and even… dibdaubles.
Thursday was looking up.
Alas he had no metal pedals, which is what my Trabant needed now, nor was he peddling flower petals—something else I desperately needed before I turned into a psychotic rooster myself. (That’s a long story.) So I told him to go on his way, but if he met a peddler of pedals or a peddler of petals on the road out of town (the only one, and it is full of alligators), he should send such a monger my way. I also regaled him with my story of the duck broker with whom I traded a list of popes for a pair of ducks. He found the story utterly fascinating, but much like the Catholic rite of Extreme Unction, the Immaculate Conception, and Grace Metalious, it was neither here nor there now.
What was here now was a used medal peddler trying to sell me fake medals—some not even made of metal! His Nobel Prizes were obvious knock-offs, wrapped in gold foil and not even made of solid chocolate like the real ones, but hollow—and his Olympic medals were missing two whole rings! I scoffed and told him where he could shove his medals. Once I started honking insistently, then quacking like a pair of ducks (I can quack polyphonically, you know!), rather than here, he was soon there—and then way, way over there on the road out of town. (Again, there is only one—and it is full of alligators.) I smarmed triumphantly at chasing the medal peddler away and went back to whatever the hell I had been doing, which I forget now (but I bet it involved more parentheticals).
Mayor Rhoodie’s reelection slogan, “A pothole on every corner!” was not endearing him to the voters this year as much as he had hoped. My own recommendation, “A vacuum cleaner for every home!” had apparently gone ignored. My swollen indignation welling up in my craw again, I decided to scrawl out another 37-page letter to the Mayor’s office, once more extolling the virtues of publicly-funded vacuum cleaners and warning of the consequences if our society continued to rely on market forces to clean people’s homes for them. Would my 19,000-word philippic help? I sealed it in an envelope, then another, and then another. The concentric heap of paper duly deposited in the nearest mailbox, I returned home to blog. My indignation shriveled slowly.
Friday was looking sideways at me.
I looked back, giving Friday the ol’ side-eye myself, and then made so many more mistakes translating my ceiling-blog into a computer-based blog, that I just gave up for the remainder of the day. I shriveled up into a tiny, wrinkled ball and rolled down into my basement to wait for Friday to die of old age and be replaced with a fresh, young Saturday.
Through bloated carapaces of beetles long dead did I wade, a sea of mivulation and corruption. The Fimbriated Man had begun to invade my dreams, replacing the entire Sneŗtfamily, and he dogged my every step with his usual dogged insistence. I tried to bark at him but I wasn’t a dog, so what emerged from my larynx was just more quacking and bubbling noises.
Off in the distance, a dog barked.
William Howard Taft, America’s greatest president by volume, lectured me on the proper way to wax a moustache. But I didn’t have a moustache—I had a skylight in my scalp. I bubbled some more. The leaking ballpoint pen I had been holding was gone, as I rode along in a light-duty Jeep staring at the muddy ground passing by. I sank into the mud and a bump on a log covered me. The Jeep was gone. The Fimbriated Man, all bordured gules and argent, looked on. My hypoxia was soon followed by anoxia, and then I died. But it was only a dream, so my still-living corpse, back in the real world, did not die: But since it was a corpse, it was already dead. But since it was a living corpse, it was undead. This circuitous nonsense sent me into such a porphyileptic fit that not even a fit of goose-like honking or polyphonic quacking could free me from it now. I stood on my hands, gabbling like a crazy cock wearing a rubber glove on its head, then launched myself through my front door without even opening it. (Who bothers to open doors nowadays?)
Saturday just glared at me balefully.
Bloody Friday must have tipped it off, I thought grumpily. Why else would Saturday be angry at me?
Sunday opened with me sitting in a Drunken Donuts banging on the table and making yelping noises at a cardboard cutout of Joe DiMaggio. No one knew where the cutout had come from. No one knew where I had come from either. I had just appeared as if by magic, or teleportation, or perhaps even quantum transmigration. I kept yelping. I was wearing a rubber glove atop my own head now, to keep the ultraviolet rays from reaching my brain. Other customers kept leaving. Then I stood up on my hind legs and belted out the national anthem (upside-down and backwards).
Sunday looked away in horror.
As did others—soon the Drunken Donuts on Strontium-90 Street was empty, except for the cardboard cutout of a famous ball player and a man wearing a ball of cardboard atop his head (atop the glove).
And that, children, is how Sunday ended.
“…Fuccant!”