I wish my spoons were stronger
Snooped on October 23, 2022.
The chromomorphosis continued this week, leaving fewer and fewer trees with not a single verdant leaf. Erythrophylation and chrysophylation were harsh mistresses, merciless, and spared no leaf. No leaf was left alone, and no leaf would be left. (Except the ficus tree on Hydrangea Street. That tree was plastic.) The squirrels continued to bury their nuts and pray for a mild winter. The cats, now as leafless as the trees, preyed on the squirrels and prayed for more squirrels. I prayed that the silithicine creatures would never reemerge from their riparian caverns. I grew tired of our constant hunts and the need to keep burning things down just to stay one step ahead of them.
I sighed. It was going to be a long winter.
As the days got shorter, my thoughts turned to Longyearbyen. Was the year really any longer there than here? Autumn’s Pausanian paucity had already reached agathonic levels, and showed no signs of slowing down. By my calculations, the days would only be a couple hours long by next March!
But before March would come February, and before February, January. And before January… Christmas. As that paternostical day approached, I thought back to 1996 when my dear old Mamårp had given me a gift of a one-gallon jug of water. It was, and still is, by far the best Christmas gift I’ve ever received. Water was much rarer in those days, you see—before the bottled water industry had figured out how to bottle water and market it effectively without people just laughing at them for trying to sell, in bottles, stuff that just fell from the sky and bubbled up out of the ground.
The bottled air industry and the bottled bottle industry could learn a few things from those shrewd little gnomes.
I wish my spoons were stronger. My preferred technique to remove ice cream from its cardboard box always results in a dozen hopelessly bent spoons before I give up and just dig into the tub like a ravenous dog at its feed bowl. (One needn’t ask how my large, square, snoutless head fits into the box. Some questions are best left unanswered.)
My quest for the fabled Nurklestone had been a failure and my subsequent desire to sail the Sea of Glossolalia had been thwarted before I even set out.
The Great Rotten Fishpile of 2022 had, on the other hand, not been thwarted—it was still out there, on my stoop, burying my unwelcome mat, and feeding over a brazillion flies of every size and shape. Truly it was a marvel to behold. Each day it only got bigger. I wasn’t sure how all those fish kept dying and falling, but they did. And the fishpile grew. And the flies danced.
On Tuesday I was in the mood to chase something shiny and puffy around my palatial abode—but I was all out of butter and Becasue was visiting her family back in Squirrel Blind, W.Va. I would have to find other ways to entertain myself until my big puffy little huzzey-muffet returned with some fresh butter.
Diving face-first into that tub of ice cream also made me want to dive face-first into another fish pie. A redheaded one.
I slept, and I dreamed: I was perusing a garden when something startled me and I smacked it. It turned out to be a praying mantis, nearly 6″ long, black and red; I had injured it with my ham-fisted slapping. It looked at me reproachfully. I was beside myself with grief, but then it turned into a gnome so I stomped it. I awoke crying and giggling—crying for the mantis and giggling at the squooshed gnome. Then I dreamed my kitchen sink had overflowed—but the faucet was off and didn’t even work. An empty plastic jug was sitting upright in the sink—not floating. The water slowly sloshed over the sides of the sink, pouring down onto the floor in a thin sheet. I was beside myself with trepidation that the fnords downstairs would be angry at me when the water breached their ceiling. Then the jug turned into a gnome so I stomped it. I awoke crying, giggling, and vowing to stomp any more gnomes that brought me these kinds of nightmares.
Then an actual mare crashed through my ceiling and I woke up again. Did someone airmail a mare? An airmare? I wondered. Truly, I wondered. Then I rolled back over and reentered my night terrors.
The local newspaper informed me that the English town of Shitterton has been voted to be worse than Scratchy Bottom or even Brokenwind. My own scratchy bottom abruptly broke wind right then. Serendipitous? I paused to ruminate. No, just coincidental, I concluded.
My ceiling clock started hooting and screeching: I was late. I wasn’t sure where I was supposed to be, but wherever it was, I was late. My eyes nearly started from their eye stalks. Gibbering, I grabbed my paisley fez, donned it, grabbed my bolo tie, donned it, and then grabbed my new undersea boots made in Germany. I tried to don those, but they didn’t fit on my hands, so I put them on my feet (where they did fit—nicely).
I ran out the door, still gibbering. If I wasn’t careful, I’d be tardier than a Poughkeepsie clown in Swedish suede.
It was then that I was eaten by a moldy green telephone pole. Fate and Luck had teamed up with Discord and Strife this week, it seemed. At least Discord was a hot Goth chick.
I was out of empty cartons of cream and trash was piling up. Outdoors a massive fishpile, indoors a massive trash heap. Finally, on Friday, with the pile reaching higher than even my dudgeon could, I had to do something lest I be suffocated in my own abode like a Collyer.
Bags. Lots of bags. I needed lots of trash bags. (I also needed some geese from Gießen or even a new Vacanti earmouse, but that was neither here nor there now.) What was here was 45 long, long tons of garbage. I bagged it up, smooshed the bags down, and bagged up some more. And then I bagged up all the bags. And bagged them up some more.
And then a funny thing happened on my trip to the town dump that day. The bags I had stacked on the roof of my Snoodabaker all flew off on the way there! I should have tied them down. Imagine my surprise when I arrived at the dump and realized I didn’t have to arrive at the dump at all. I drove back home, sheepishly gathered the exploded trash bags from the side of the road, brought them to the growing midden on Middendorfer street, and abandoned them there.
I needed a lot more empty cartons of cream now. But where would I get them? For now, the question would go unanswered.
Another question left unanswered: Did Becasue’s feet fit in a tub of ice cream?
And another: How many licks does it take to get to the center of a horse?
“Thirteen-hundred and thirty-seven.” A voice called out. I spun around looking for where it came from. I spun around again. Then I spun around some more because spinning in circles is fun.
It must be the Shoehorner Street ppplurk!! again! Or the turtle herder! Again I asked—not out loud, for fear I would be eaten by a grue or worse—how many licks does it take to get to the center of a horse?
It had taken me four days, but I finally succeeded in getting through to someone at Playboy so I could lodge my complaint about the awful interview they had done with me regarding this docile & perfunctory page. But—wouldn’t you know it!—everyone I spoke to claimed complete ignorance of the interview! 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. They thought all the noises I was making meant I was doing something else with their magazine than just reading the interviews, so they kept hanging up on me.
My dudgeon flying at an all-time high, I began planning a very indignant trip to Playboy Mansion to give that letitious magazine a big piece of my mind. It would also take place right after that planned trip to Finland to gruntle at a fishbootmonger who insisted I owed him €717.
“Are you sure those are words?”
“Nope!”
“Well, why’d you use them then?”
“Because someone had to!”
“Well, why don’t you use real words?”
“Because there weren’t any! But now there are!”
Becasue rolled her eyes at me again and sauntered back into the living room.