Yet still bereft of meaning
Creamed on September 25, 2022.
And the week rolled over into another. My mistakes continued unabated.
“A vast pile of words, some strung together into loose sentences, yet still bereft of meaning, and others just cast adrift in a vast sea of glossolalia,” is how someone recently described my docile & perfunctory blog. (I don’t think her name was Borb. Nor was it Norb. Nor was it even Borbra, who was now in the nut house on Macadamia Street. She wouldn’t talk to me anymore.)
Sunday whizzed by like a panicked squirrel. I missed it completely.
Because Becasue was now in charge of the Cthulomat and all its eldritch horrors, I decided to haunt that gorgothine establishment even more than I had in previous weeks. I was voluminously ebullient the moment I first laid eye stalks on Becasue—she was efflubiously voluptuous, a big little huzzey-muffet of a girl–chipmunk. But after the Cthulomat was reduced to a smoldering crater last week, she wouldn’t talk to me. She wouldn’t look at me. My little huzzey-muffet even threatened to throttle me with her sandals just like Borbra had threatened to do!
I think Becasue blamed me for the crater. But I knew she liked me. And so I did what came naturally to me: I blamed the gnomes. Borbra blamed me, too. I knew she liked me too, despite all the evidence to the contrary. And so I continued to blame the gnomes all the more vehemently. The gnomes probably blamed me, too.
Mayor Rhoodie was again touting his “fewer one-way streets, more one-way sidewalks” initiative. The city council was utterly flummoxed by this flummery but it sounded like a good idea to me. Documenting each of my sneezes and nose-pickings has always seemed like a good idea, too. Until Thursday.
On Friday, I was shocked to learn I was out of sour cream, butter, and grated Parmesan. “But I hadn’t even gotten around to using them for anything! Where did they go?” I shrugged, blamed the nearest gnome, and moved on with my life.
In Germany, the government is now telling people to shower together to save energy. “If you shower alone, you shower with Putler!” I exclaimed, then laughed uproariously at my own joke. I went to take another shower. Then I realized I was all out of showers, too. I shrugged, blame the nearest gnome, and moved on with my life.
Time moved along. Saturday gave way to Sunday, which promptly whizzed by, giggled, and even whizgiggled.
The Cthulomat was no longer a smoldering crater—someone had rebuilt it—or perhaps it had never been a smoldering crater. I’ve been told—once or twice, sometimes more—that the disasters, catastrophes, and disastrophes that frequently occur in proximity to my doofus-shaped self don’t actually occur at all—I imagine most of them—or I just make them up to have something to whine and kerplunk about—but I’m not sure. There is one thing I am sure about, however—this paragraph has too many em-dashes!
I took a stroll down the new one-way sidewalk to clear my mind. That last paragraph sure was a doozy! Reaching the end of Bouillabaisse Boulevard, I wasn’t sure how I would get home now, but I would cross that bridge when I came to it. Hopefully it wouldn’t be a one-way bridge.
I took up a new hobby: Whenever I finish off a carton of light cream, I jam every other scrap of trash that I produce into the empty carton, then I deposit these curious packages in random places around my town’s downtown area—capless of course. Today, I proudly dropped my twentieth carton behind an oversized flower pot on Hegelian Avenue. A peculiarly gnomish-looking city bureaucrat was watching me, but the severe gurn on my face left no doubt: I was a harmless, cartoonish doofus just out for a carton-tossing stroll.
He went back to his job in the city planning department, planning out the next phase of Mayor Rhoodie’s intensive, seven-figure, four-year awareness campaign of the “do not block intersection” sign at Grimpley Street and Hegelian Avenue. I went back to chasing all the squirrels into the storm drains and finding new places to deposit my cartons.
Since there are only so many hours in a day, I dispensed with one of my existing hobbies so I could fit this new pastime in. My extensive nose log, going back to 1986, came to a close this week. It had served me well, all these years, but it was time to move on to bigger and better things. I snorted solemnly and put the tome away in the back of my closet.
It had taken me four days, but I finally succeeded in getting through to someone at TV Guide so I could lodge my complaint about the awful review they had written about my docile & perfunctory television show. But—wouldn’t you know it!—everyone I spoke to claimed complete ignorance of me and the syndicated tragicomedy based on my life! I was shocked—shocked and appalled, as any self-righteous twit ought to be—and demanded to speak to someone higher up in their office—and then higher and higher up. With each additional higher-up to whom they transferred me, I got huffier and puffier until my angry gruntling became nothing more than actual, animal-like huffing and puffing. That just made them hang up on me. I called back and—amidst increasingly labored huffs and forceful puffs—threatened to lodge myself in their doorway until they found me the right person to huff and puff at.
They hung up again. My dudgeon flying at an all-time high, I began planning a very indignant trip to Troy, Michigan to give TV Guide a big piece of my mind. It would take place right after that planned trip to Finland to gruntle at a fishbootmonger who insisted I owed him €717.
Sunday came back around for another pass—a strafing run—and then whizzed off again. I miraculously survived, then triumphantly whizzed on the ground. Gnomes began whizzing by on every side of me. Whizzing and giggling. Whizgiggling. My cuticles sprouted gnomes. My eyelashes gushed gnomes. I buried my head in a hole in the ground and waited for the horror to pass. It wouldn’t pass. I waited harder. It still wouldn’t pass. Spiders gnawed at the tips of my hair, nuzzled my follicles, and made off with my fingernails. (That at least stopped gnomes sprouting from my cuticles.)
I dug deeper into the earth but it was no use. At these depths, eyeless potatoes began to eye me again. I closed my own eyes, drawing my eyestalks back into my forehead. It didn’t help. They didn’t stop. I dug deeper. Gnomes surrounded me. I dug deeper. I finally fell out of the other side of the planet. If that sounds impossible, that’s because it is. Everything is impossible around here, which means that nothing is really impossible. That explains why I now have a dinosaur in my front yard.
A man stood on the sidewalk, sullen and defeated. His unmitigated horsedongery had done him in. If only we had two-way sidewalks, he thought to himself, I could turn around and go back again. The man did the only thing he could do: He took another step forward and got hit by a bus.
At least that wasn’t me! I giggled at the man’s misfortune. I dug myself out of the hole, slew the potatoes that had dared to look at me cross-eyed, and jay-walked home. Tonight, I would feast on French fries.
My quest for the fabled Nurklestone had been a failure. I had spent weeks planning, preparing, and making gruntling noises to myself about how difficult the journey would be. But after six weeks, I hadn’t even left my front yard.
But in one swell foop, I had somehow succeeded in transforming that very yard into something resembling a Hieronymous Bosch depiction of Hell. I decided then and there it was time to amscray.
I pulled out my pile of road maps, atlases, gazetteers, and deflated globes (kept in my closet beneath my nose log). Where would I go? What would I do? How would I get there? What would I do when I got there? How many sticks of pepperoni would I eat along the way? How many sticks of pepperoni would I eat once I arrived? And still—where would there be? And how many more questions would I ask just to procrastinate?
I started smacking myself over the head with the maps and atlases, hooting like an idiot and screeching like an owl. One by one, each map flew out of my hands, landing some distance away. Finally I was reduced to one. I tore it open, whirled around, tossed it on the ground, and threw myself nose-first down onto it. Cross-eyed, I looked down. As passers-by stopped to stare, a name came into focus.
The Sea of Glossolalia would be my destination.