A vernally hibernal good time
Drove on March 24, 2024.
“It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?”
“Yes, they were eaten in a car accident.”
And now it has been twenty-five years plus seventeen days and I don’t even remember what I was babbling about anymore. Uh huh. Ho hum. Ooh, da, da-da, doo. Zigazig, ah? Zigazig, ah!
Life went on as always. My hair (which is no longer on fire!) continued to grow. I was pining for the fjords this week, pining hard. But then realized I had misspelled “fnords,” which is what I was really pining for. Then a tall pine tree fell on my head, caved in my skull, and made a sappy mess of my hair (which was still growing).
A disemphamonious aardmoose wriggled under my front door, stood before me, and—girt about the paps with glee—informed me that my dishwasher pangolin had packed up his things and lit out for Athabasca. The aardmoose then wriggled back out without even opening the door. I gave chase, trying to wriggle after it. But I didn’t fit under the door. And opening the door was out of the question for reasons I can’t enscrooble into words. (These are words. [No, really.]) The chorus deeply ensconced within my brain wriggled out to remind me it was time to feed the donuts again. I fed and watered them carefully—these donuts are very shock-sensitive and one false move could blow my palatial abode to Kingdom Kong!
Then all the wriggling stopped and I realized I was a worm.
“It’s 11 p.m. Do you know where your children are?”
“Yes, they were run over by a man-eating lion.”
At least they weren’t hit by a drunk drover. That’s what had happened to Wiebe van der Woobie back in ’20. Permitting that bloody cattle drive down Bovary Boulevard during rush hour had not been Mayor Julian Rhoodie’s finest hour. And when that herd trampled the blood drive that the Red Cross was holding on Pinnfarben Street, things just got even bloodier. The streets and the rivers ran red with blood for weeks after that.
Yet, life went on as always. My fingernails (which have never been on fire!) continued to grow. I suspected that my toenails were growing right along with them in perfect synchrony. But I forgot how to untie my shoes last S’munday so I was unable to confirm this. I did measure Becasue’s; indeed her fingernails and toenails were in sync down to a micron. So, I rested assured. Then I fell asleep.
“It’s 12 a.m. Do you know where your children are?”
“No, now stop asking me!”
The new Twelve Monkeys prequel starring Brian Peppers as Greta Thunberg hit theaters this week. Rumor is, it was stuck in development hell for years but not even the devil wanted any part of it anymore, so he finally belched it out for the rest of the world to see.
I thought back to 1997, which was a true annus horribilis: It was the year I burned both my eyebrows off playing with party balloons and a propane tank. And it was the year my dear sister Plårp kept kicking me in a hole in the ground and filling it full of spiders. It was also the year that, for a variety of reasons each more consterning and inscrutable than the last, I vowed to always use ice cubes two at a time. Never three. And never one. Always two.
1997 came and went, ushering in 1998, ’99, then ’98 again after I stole that time traveler’s shuttlecraft because I wanted to redo ’98 over and over again until I grew old and died. But it was not to be: He took his time machine back and cast me forward into 1999. That year—truly full of more horrible anuses than even ’97 had been—is when I first mused about taking up blarghing. The rest is (mostly made-up) history.
Spring tried to spring this week. But winter grabbed it by the balls, shoved it back into its box, and sat on the lid until it stopped resisting and settled down. It sprang back out when winter wasn’t paying attention. But then spring got schtupped by summer after that estival season had muscled its way into the week and would brook no competition. Autumn just sat back and watched… waiting. Verily the new season of sprintermmertumng was upon us.
I thought back to 1996 when my dear sister Plårp had shoved me into a tiny, spider-filled box and sat on the lid until I stopped resisting and settled down. She was always very attentive when torturing her brothers, so I never sprang back out. Nor did the spiders. I sometimes think I’m still in that box. Or maybe I’m in the nice comfy box I crawled into a few years later. We’re all in little boxes: Even my dear brother Grårp has been in a box since 2011. (In the ground. Because he died.)
I still wasn’t sure how to truss all these disparate thoughts together into a coherent aggrumulation, but I would try. Or die hooting.
My mind is like a freight train barreling at top speed around a roundabout. My pompiloquent blarghery attests to this. Now if only the train had brakes.
I chopped off one of the chickens’ heads. Then I chopped off the chicken’s other heads. Then I reminded my readers apostrophes are as important as commas. Then I made a soup out of them (the heads, not the apostrophes). I was all out of chicken paws, so heads would have to do. The rest of the chickens’ parts would end up on the other side of the road—headless or not. They always want to be on the other side of the road. This side is never good enough for them.
“Why did the chicken become a ghost?”
“Because it crossed over to the other side.”
Fulminant chelonitoxism struck me like lightning on Thursday. Then I remembered it was rabbit season, not turtle season. So, two fine reasons in hand, I stopped eating raw turtles and started eating raw rabbits. Or at least the cereal products they hawk on television. I thought about eating a raw hawk but they don’t fit in cereal boxes; I nixed that idea. I thought about eating a raw television, but I already had enough plastic, glass, and heavy metals in my diet. Then the rabbit on TV melted, the TV started emitting horrible squeeorling noises, and the same show was suddenly on every single channel: A bizarre lesbian encounter between Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter. I cracked open a box of Trix. Then I excused myself for a while. I needed much privacy for what came next.
The demented Democrats and backwards Яepublicans were at it again. My mailbox was bursting at the seams with a seemingly indefatigible volume of trash touting their tweets and tooting their horns.
The pugnacious impugnment of the repugnant Яepublican candidate consisted of accusations of misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, and even the rare antidisestablishminformation. This shrill, glossy caterwauling was countered with a veritable demagogic demolition of the demoniac Democrat, in the form of imputations that that candidate suffered from every paraphilia in the book, from peodeikophilia to erotophonophilia, and even the rarer anthropophagolagnia.
Not even that lighthouse in Oklahoma that I accidentally caused to be stripped of its funding last week could compare to this absurd fatuity.
I carefully closed my mailbox and cracked open another box of Trix.
What happened when I sallied back indoors was difficult to describe. It didn’t involve owls, or the fell Owl Gods, nor did it involve a man quietly identifying a piece of wood with an owl-shaped stethoscope. Nay, it was more like what might occur if Spring-Heeled Jack had taken on a rabid jack-in-the-box (and lost). The result turned out to be only slightly more useful than my degree in entomolontology, the study of being an insect. I always wanted to be a cicada when I grew up. That degree didn’t help. And now my floor was smeared with green blood and bent leaf springs. And I probably had a thousand-thousand dead cicadas in my freezer—an interesting transcurrence for which Becasue would be demanding an explanation any moment now.
Perhaps Dana Scully’s delicately manicured hands and her little feet could help me here. Momentarily distracted by images of Scully’s delicate embrace of her cell phone in nearly every episode, I slipped, fell, slid about fifty yards down what looked like a slimy water slide but which was in fact my hemolymph-soaked front steps, and landed coccyx-first in the middle of Bouillabaisse Boulevard.
Then I was run over by a drunk drover. And my hair caught on fire.
I died hooting.
[Feetnote: My best efforts to bribe the calendar-makers to insert another leap day this month have failed once more. I’m probably going to jail this time. Or at least in front of a Congressional committee investigating rampant corruption in the NIST. Oh, well.]