Seven point three hundred
Paltered on February 25, 2024.
[According to the IT Morlocks that plumb the technical depths and intricacies of this web blob so that I don’t have to really know anything about computers, today heralds the release of version 7.300 of Pnårp’s docile & perfunctory page. I still have no earthly idea what this increasingly pointy little number means, but the IT Morlocks assure me that it’s big and important, so there you have it. One of my IT Morlocks (I think his name is Blorb) also died recently in a blogging accident.]
The Ford was found on the road dead and the Kia was killed in action. I pressed the button, put it in gear, and went vroom! a lot. Because the car couldn’t, I would have to do it for her.
The Fords were dead and the Fnords next door were dead. Were the Fnords next dord dead too? Who could say? Perhaps the Hammurderer knew the answer to this puzzling, fnordbitten question.
It was all that paltering by that poltergeist haunting the Arby’s bathroom in Squabbletown that did it. Not just sent me down that garden path of a sentence, no—but also convinced me of the wisdom in renaming my memoirs to 368,000 Gallons of Laundry Detergent: A Life. And so, I did so.
This week, I finished boogling the last of my bagels. A worldwide bagel shortage began last year, still shows no sign of abating, and at last—alas, at last!—I finally boogled the last of my bagels. My cavernous pantry was now completely depleted—the last bag o’ bagels had been boogled away. I was bagelless.
My PhD in applied fecology sure came in handy when I tried to explain to the plumber what happened to the downstairs half-bathroom, too.
At least I still had Becasue and both her feet, so there was that. And Becasue’s resplendent feet still had those goatskin sandals. And I still had three hundred points on this pointy, poindextrous weblog. And something someone somewhere did not have anymore was a cow liver abiding in his freezer. But that is a story for a later paragraph.
Andrew Wakefield’s newest theory that mercury was responsible for everything from ebola to inflatable rats was surely nothing more than conspiratorial snake oil—but again I got lost down my garden path; I barely escaped with my life. (Those carnivorous cacti really can hurl their spines great distances!)
I slunk back indoors, skunk-like, and fed a skink to my pangolin. Where did the skink come from? She was slinking about my garden path. Skinks are repelled by skunks but attracted to skanks, so it had a strange symmetry to it. I wish we had more vowels in English so skǽnks could be a thing. But they’re not. I slunk away.
A panentheist? Or a parenthesis? (Or a pair of them?) But no, that liver did not abscond with the runcible spoon. The truth was far worse. Next Thursday is a day that shouldn’t exist. It only comes around once every four years—and when it does, bad things happen. Terrible things. Once-in-four-years things. The ending of last week and the onset of next week fills me with tension, trepidation, and embolismic apprehension.
“Pfnk!” I began shouting. I wondered how much pake I still had in my pantry. “Pfnk, pfnk, pfnk!”
Is this even Ǽnglish ǽnymœrǽ?
Whœ cǽn tǽll?
A liver hung from a tree. Blood dripped from it and formed a small, dark puddle on the ground below. It may have been a hobo’s liver, excised by the latest serial killer that was stalking my town in the early morning hours. Or, it was a cow liver that someone disposed of rather hastily by chucking it up there. It was difficult to tell.
Mind the gap. Mind the accidental gap.
It was then that three-hundred sevens descended from the sky and beaned me in the noggin. All three hundred of them. It was an ominous sign if there ever was one. But what could I do? Pray for four hundred of them? Four-hundred sevens seems a bit much. Hopefully eight point zero will interrupt all these sevens and send them packin’.
I wondered about that cow liver again. Did its erstwhile owner buy it in haste and stow it in his freezer, only to realize he had no idea what to do with it? Perhaps it sat enfreezered for years before he finally, in a mad bout of cleaning his fridge, decided to throw it away. But as we all know, a liver cannot simply be disposed of in the trashcan, nor can one be flushed down the toilet. With no other options, the man must have taken it with him on a hike and thrown it up in the first tree that looked appropriate to host a thawing cow liver.
Yet a serial murderer was on the loose. Christmas Tree Shops had been his latest target. I remember when Kmart used to sell yarn and Christmas Tree Shops sold trinkets and baubles to hang from your Christmas trees (or someone’s nipples). But now they were all abandoned, destined to be devoured by hordes of hobos and hippopotamuses. I always wanted my own hippo. But when I tried to snare one in the parking lot of the nearest shuttered department store, I quickly learned that those lovable creatures are really big—and despite their harmless appearance have really big teeth. I also earned a new hoof print near all the other ones on my forehead.
Next week, there is an extra day. Perhaps I shall be able to find more bagels to boogle. Weird things can happen on extra days, you know. Maybe I’ll find more bagels to shove in my gaping maw. Maybe I’ll even find more baubles to dangle from Becasue! Or maybe I’ll die of an embolism. It would be the right day for it to happen. The right day. The right, right day.
“Stendec! Stendec!” I end this with. “Scti ar! Scti ar! Valp!!”