The Circular Drawstring Dramatized
These poems are written, in the main, while I'm at work. That explains their absurd nature, although absurdity is also one of the foundations of my art.
Additional Material
This is the map I made at the beginning of this project. The intention behind the project was to combine a traditional novel with a graphic novel. The text part was called "A Record of Noises Made in the Forest" and the comics part was called "Lost Motorcycle Trading Cards." I consider the project a failure from the standpoint of trying to marry the two things, but a success in its own unique realization.
Now I'm going to return to doing a traditional comic strip, which will start next week and start writing a new, regular novel, but written in my usual way, which is hundreds of little pieces loosely interconnected.
Now I'm going to return to doing a traditional comic strip, which will start next week and start writing a new, regular novel, but written in my usual way, which is hundreds of little pieces loosely interconnected.
Page 200---The End
Farmer Wrongseed
And now,
here at the end of the book, you find yourself with me, old Farmer
Wrongseed. Some say I’m a mythical
figure, yet here I am, sitting on my rustic front porch in a weatherbeaten old
rocking chair that you can just go ahead and assume I made with my own two
hands, which I didn’t, ‘cause my hands never did a minute’s worth of that kind
of work—staring, apparently, out onto some lonely dirt road that leads
eventually to a big city far away, but in actuality, just the notion of my
simple rural craftsmanship and self-sufficiency, is a deception, because all of
this (I gesture about myself with backwoods elegance) is nothing more than a
stage set and you are, symbolically at least, seated before me, although we can
assume that, as a meta-character within this tableau you are a passerby,
standing in my yard. Why would you be
doing that, I wonder? The road, as I
conceive it anyway, is way down there, at least a hundred yards away, and that
where you conceptually stand or sit is just off the edge of my porch. Why would you do that? Are you here on business? It’s nighttime—what business would you have
around here at night? Are you up to no
good? I warn you, as the lead character
in this dramatic presentation, I am indestructible. Even if you did manage to kill me I would
still exist as a disembodied voice, narrating the events of the story to its
conclusion, at which time you would cease to exist too, for all intents and
purposes. See? Even now we fade to black and yet my voice
carries on, losing its rural inflection and taking on a godlike timbre.
THE END
.
Page 199
Departments Keystroke and Juggler Were Forced to Listen
to Anthony’s Snake Speech
“I try to
run this operation the way Jesus would run it,” Anthony informed those within
the scope of his supervision. “Or have
it be run,” he added, thinking that perhaps if Jesus was actually around he
wouldn’t concern himself with anything so mundane as supervising such an
operation. But then, thinking further,
Anthony realized that this second thought only made him look bad by suggesting
that his involvement with the job was beneath him. “Because I want to be like Jesus,” Anthony
summed up, collecting himself. He was
about to proceed, to tell the dozen people gathered in the tiny break room to
hear his words of encouragement exactly how such Jesus-like application to duty
was being implemented, when Frisco, one of the coordinators, put his head in
the door.
“Anthony,”
he said, “I want you to give this same speech to some of the other operations
in the building.”
Well,
Anthony was all for that. Any chance to
make his circus-like presence known to a wider range of people. In the event, however, Anthony did not
tell the other departments how his supervisory method was theoretically based
on that of Jesus, but rather told them that, inversely, their own departments
were being run in a “Satanic” manner.
“The snake
has entered the hearts of your supervisors,” he declared.
“I think
it’s all that bizarre 1970’s cologne he wears,” Ned Slipshod, medical advisor
to the company, posited. “It could be
poisoning his brain.”
.
Page 198
Mud Pretzels and Polar Bear Candy
Soon the
confectioner had found exactly the right radio station to play as he did his
work. It was one that specialized in
simulating the feeling of a hot summer afternoon in 1985 or 1986.
“So clearly
they play a lot of David Lee Roth,” Andrew laughed.
“I don’t
think that’s funny,” James replied. “And
anyway, what do you mean when you say ‘a lot of?’ That’s such poor grammar.”
“I mean a
whole lot of,” Andrew returned, getting angry.
“A large amount of something, that’s what ‘a lot of’ means.”
“Technically
speaking,” James lectured from behind the big old desk, “A lot is a
discreet number of items available for purchase, usually through a bidding
process, such as at an auction.”
“Why don’t
you go eat a Baby Ruth, smartass,” Andrew snapped.
“I don’t
eat that shit,” James shook his head, pursing his lips in a dismissive
frown. “Lately I’ve been eating Mud
Pretzels and Polar Bear Candy.” He
reached down somewhere behind the desk and retrieved a silver platter laden
with packaged comestibles, each bearing the cartoon mascot the Silly Billy
Candy Company.
“What the
hell is that?” Andrew wondered, his doughy little face looking even more
confused and fearful than usual. In
answer to his query the rows of heavy, banking-oriented books on the wall
separated and a sculpted foam realization of the Silly Billy Rock Star burst
into the room. A worldwide contest to
come up with a name for the mascot ended disappointingly, for the winning
submission came from outside the USA and suggested that the name be
“Bill.”
.
Page 197
My Pants Were Made in Cambodia
I was
taking a shit the other day (at the time that the title for this piece was
dreamed up: yes, the titles were conceived far in advance and with no regard to
what the accompanying text would be about) and I noticed that my pants were
made in Cambodia . There it was, printed on the tag. Oh, by the way, that tag on mattresses that
says, “Do not remove:” they always made jokes about that, ever since I was a
little kid, but even as a little kid I knew that the jokes were bogus,
predicated on bullshit, because the tags’ message in full was “not to be
removed except by the consumer” (my
italics). Why were adults so stupid, I
wondered.
Anyway, I
always removed the tags on mattresses, because I felt empowered to do so. As the child of the purchaser, I was, by
extension, a consumer. I had the right
to rip the tag off. Plus, if the tag
wasn’t meant to be removed, then why was it perforated? Tell me that, Johnny Carson, man dead from
emphysema and alcoholism.
I still
remove the tags from the backs of shirts.
I’ve never been able to stand that tag scratching my neck. Before I developed the PATIENCE for which I
am so rightly celebrated I used to rip the tags out, making a hole in the
collar. Now, since I’m a grown-up and in
my household we have scissors you’re actually allowed to use, I cut them out,
neatly. When I was living with my
parents we had one lousy pair of scissors in the house. If I used them for some crafts project my
mother would scream, “You used those scissors to cut paper?! Don’t you know that will dull the blades?”
.
Page 196
Boredom Kicks in When Abstinence Itself Becomes a Habit
“So you’re
not having sex anymore, so what?” Redsome, the banker’s son, asked his best
friend, Salavatore, as the two sat in Redsome’s father’s home office and helped
themselves to his brandy and cigars.
Feel free to picture to scene between James Spader and Andrew McCarthy
in Pretty in Pink (or was it Sixteen Candles?) if it will help you
out with your visualization as you read.
It’s funny,
isn’t it, how Spader had the longer-lived career. Between the two of them I would have picked
McCarthy had you asked me at the time all those movies came out. Of course, I was a teenager and not that
knowledgeable about the way things really work.
But Spader was such a shit back then.
All those smug, rich boy roles.
And McCarthy—God, who would have expected him to just disappear? Of course, looking back, you can see that he
was just milquetoast. What was he ever
going to do really? In a way Spader’s
lucky he went bald. It gave him a
gravitas that that leonine mop never would have.
Also,
Spader got that role in Stargate. That, more than anything else, gave his
career longevity. All those creepy roles
like Crash and Sex, Lies, and Videotape made him a critical darling, but that’s
not how you keep the money coming in.
Speaking of his role in Stargate,
that scene where he offers the candy bar to the old dude: if you were from another
planet and somebody gave you a Baby Ruth, wouldn’t you assume it was a turd?
More about Stargate: the movie was OK, but the TV
show, Stargate: SG-1, was great. It was like Star Trek, only it was much, much better. And it never really got the respect it
deserved.
.
Page 195
Feast on My Rectal Savagery
I chose to
punish my enemies by farting on them.
This was not a flippant decision born of malice. I really had to fart. Might as well put that to good use, I
figured.
The hard
part (aside from holding back on farting until the situation was just right)
was gathering all of my enemies in one place.
One, small, airless place. A
place where they would be tightly packed together and find it hard to evacuate
quickly. I knew that they were such
horrible people that each would fight to be the first to leave.
Another
factor to consider was that some of my enemies were attached to people I didn’t
want subjected to the destruction to be unleashed. These were friends of mine for the most
part. Good friends, some of them, or, at
least, people undeserving of being farted on to the hellish degree that I
intended to fart. And when I say
“attached to” I mean it. These were
clusters of people, moving in intertwined (ineinandergreifend,
as we say in German) groups. I
determined to hand out personally addressed gas masks to those whom I intended
to spare. Just before the barrage I
would drop the life-saving protective gear and give the chosen ones a minute or
two to open their care packages, read the enclosed warning, grasp the import of
that message, and don the equipment.
Of course,
I haven’t even touched on the preparations I undertook to ensure that this
vengeful fart would be puissant enough to damage my enemies sufficiently, but
in a format such as this, it is important to follow the rules and end things on
time.
.
Page 194
Forward to the Blind Man
“You think
this piece is going to be about Torman and his buddies since the last we heard
from them they were blind? Well, it’s not!”
Maxwell Thermos slapped his gloves on the desktop in the fury of his fart.
“It’s not a
‘piece,’” Hinda Lunt countered, bored at the executive’s emotional antics. “It’s a film. I wish you’d get that straight.”
“Well, who
can tell these days?” Thermos fell back in his basket and gasped out. “Gravitational waves, homemade porn, dogs
voting for cows; I can’t keep track of these changes!”
“All you
have to remember,” Lunt told him, getting to her hooves and crossing to the
battery-powered aquarium globe in the corner, “Is that a film can be a comic
strip can be a cereal box can be a t-shirt.
It’s all interconnected. Just
like the sea,” she added, smiling at the little, multi-colored beings inside
the globe begging to get out.
“And a
collection of tiny written pieces can be a novel,” Thermos brought up the topic
of that day’s meeting.
“If they
are interconnected, yes,” Lunt answered, spinning about and pointing her
feather duster at the executive.
Thermos
glanced to his left, where his son Wickedbathrag sat chewing the toe-end of a
pinball machine and blinking.
“And if
they’re not?” he asked.
Hinda Lunt,
whose name was an inversion of Linda Hunt, the actress, was not an actress herself,
but a boat with three lungs and a glockenspiel that went “floop” when it
rained.
.
Page 193
Courier Crabgrass Homage to the Saxophone I Had to Rent
I had left
the saxophone my parents rented for me on the school bus. Of course, on the way over to retrieve it
from the church parking lot where the bus was parked they made me feel
miserable. The same thing when I left my
winter coat at school in third grade.
Anyway, I quit the saxophone not long after. I’m sure my parents carefully calculated the
money wasted on the whole misadventure, crying over how much more they could
have given to “the Lord.”
What
happened to that saxophone? Through the
magic of cable television’s bastard offspring, the fanciful essay, we can now
know for certain. In fact, we can now
say for certain that it was a tenor sax.
Whether it was a tenor or an alto has been the subject of much debate
over the years, my Democratic allies arguing that it had been an alto, while my
Republican supporters maintained that it was a soprano, however bent. They should both have known that I would
follow in the footsteps of Eric Dolphy and play the bass clarinet.
However,
that forlorn saxophone, purchased as part of a bulk lot labeled “machine
parts,” eventually found its way into the manipulative extremities of a Bargo
Nulph from the planet of insect skull planets.
This Bargo Nulph, named Impetro Mzad, used the alien instrument to
record the album, A Little Boy’s
Collection of School Bus Terrors, hailed by Intergalactic Downbeat as a “murky crawl through the heresies of
Trad Fusion.” Well, what do they
know? I can’t imagine that they ever
squatted down in the floor of the bus and took a pee.
.
Page 192
Isolated Park Cannot Be Exited by Traditional Means
“Then how
do we get out?” Shab despaired, throwing out his hands to the
surrounding shrubbery.
Torman
rubbed his chin. “We’ve got to use
unconventional means,” he mused.
“What does that
mean?” Shab barked. He began pacing,
deliberately stepping in puddles left by the recent shower.
“Stop
that!” Grimmery ordered. Irritation
showed in the purple bands on his neck.
“Torman’s trying to think!”
“Well,
well,” Shab addressed the shorter man, fists on his hips, “Grimmery asserts
himself! That’s a change!”
“And I am
too!” Grimmery added to his earlier statement about thinking.
Torman
stepped away from the two. He stared at
the puddles.
“One of
these might actually be a hole,” he muttered.
“Or a well.”
And that is
how they got out. Following Torman’s
lead, Shab and Grimmery held their noses and jumped down into the puddle that
lay before the statue of Elaine Klumpendour, the woman for whom the park was
named. Down, down they fell, until they
thought they couldn’t hold their breath anymore, and indeed they couldn’t, but
when they involuntarily inhaled, they found that they could breathe, for
the water through which they passed was not water at all, but oxygenated smoke
and incense, smelling of orange and then purple and then orange again. They smiled at each other as best they could,
for now they were blind.
.
Page 190
Lest the Nobility Draw their Peas through the Sink
Fighting to
concentrate on the task at hand despite the presence of a TV man dancing about
the room, the philosopher Laurence Bravepepper found himself explaining to one
of the miniature satyrs that usually accompanied him on these
drainage-screen-installation mission what a TV man was.
“It’s a
biological creature that consists of what used to be called a television set
before the term ‘monitor’ supplanted such antiquated notions of discreet media,
coupled with legs and arms. It moves
about blaring its nonsense all the time, for not to do so would mean certain
death.”
“And that’s
what that thing is?” the satyr, whose name was Cosgrove, pointed at the TV man,
the latter in the act of exposing himself to a woman (she did not look away).
“Yes,”
Laurence Bravepepper ground out the word like a stony turd from the backside of
a demon. He kept his eyes on the long
fingers of Baron Hustenslack and his wife the Baroness, scrabbling at the fully
fertilized eggs of the green earth.
“I’m sorry,
I’m sorry!” Bravepepper kept repeating.
“Don’t
apologize,” the Baron insisted. “It’s a
sign of weakness.”
“What rot,”
Baroness Hustenslack could be heard to say.
“‘Never
complain, never explain,’” Bravepepper’s satyr quoted (whom, we don’t at this
time know for certain; probably one of the Andrews Sisters).
Bravepepper
struggled with the wire mesh cup.
“Gimme them
peas!” the Baroness demanded.
.
Page 188
A Contact Mike and a Resounding Board
“They’re
the hottest band in town!” Gopig enthused.
“The hottest,”
Needsadrill repeated in that devastating tone he had developed, indicating just
how stupid he thought Gopig’s attestation was.
The other in the room, a rough half-dozen would-be youths dressed in
German approximations of cowboy costumes and waffle-cut acrylic capes, however,
agreed with both Gopig’s enthusiasm and his choice of adjective.
“We’ve seen
them called that in the local free music publication,” Weeza (a titty possessor
by training) explained, not wanting to see a fight break out.
“Well, who are
these hot, hot fellows?” Needsadrill demanded with the scalpel blade in his
Swiss army knife of sarcasm.
“They’re
called The Disappointing Pancakes,” Tetsu Androdoyama invoked the name from the
depths of his still-sharecropper-stiff overalls.
“Why are
you wearing overalls?” a passerby wondered.
He didn’t catch the answer as Blotchem Hedgebag, pushing him along on a
wheeled pompadour, kept on pushing him along so that the window in which the
passerby had glimpsed Tetsu was now far behind them. The passerby chewed on his plastic beaded
necklace in a dither of anxiety as he watched the window grow smaller and
dimmer, the scent of pancakes superceded by a willful demand for that pancake
smell to stay with him.
By securing
the college vote the band members had earned a place in the president elect’s
administration. Their manager explained
that “pot makes you vote Democrat.”
.
Page 186
The Earlier the Investigative Sandbag is Launched, the
Peopler
Inspector
Truebiscuit removed the filing cabinet from between his teeth. He stared at the end as he spoke.
“Found
anything yet?” he asked Mason Whittlepick, his assistant on many investigations
of this type.
“The
usual,” Mason replied, getting up from a crouch over the corpse. “Except for this,” he qualified, holding up
the Crown Countenance Pinwheel, a cherished object to hardcore fans of Miss
Beulah Seraph. He handed it to Inspector
Truebiscuit.
“Think this
is genuine?” Truebiscuit asked, turning the pinwheel over between his fingers
big as cut sections of fire hose.
“Probably,”
Whittlepick nodded. “The Beulah Seraph
Collection was stolen some months ago.
I read it in the paper. None of
the items were recovered.”
Truebiscuit
put the pinwheel in his filing cabinet.
He returned the latter to his mouth and continued chewing its ragged,
water-logged end. “What about the body
itself?” he asked.
“Well,”
Whittlepick turned to look down at the dead woman. “Death was instantaneous. Skull crushed, ankles broken.” A sandbag was big as a dolphin obscured the
head, but it was clear that it was a woman who lay there dead because of the
sundress and watch, which was smaller than a man’s watch would be. A tiny death sensor on the watch’s face was
blinking, indicating that the woman had been dead for nearly two hours.
“You ever
see a Beulah Seraph picture, Mason?” Truebiscuit asked. He was thinking of Flash of the Pink Chocolate, a typical duplication of the trousers
bricked and elegant.
.
Page 184
Emerging Dialectic Stiffens on Contact with the Sniff
She tried
to explain dialectical materialism to me, but I could no more grasp the concept
than I could the necessity for a formalized existentialism. The corn dogs were sweet and greasy, like
Buck Dharma using cheap equipment. We
walked around the carnival on the last day of the state fair.
“They’ve
already loaded up most of the livestock,” I pointed out, much disappointed.
“Those are
big pigs,” she said of the last few that lay in the straw.
“They’re
almost as big as my car,” I agreed.
“Do you
think that pig’s dick is bigger than yours?” she asked me with what I now
remember (as) as much seriousness as the endocrinologist’s son presenting an
unpaid bill.
And so we
drove on to the north, heading for the largest private residence in the
hemisphere.
“Only the
Android’s Eyrie is larger,” I informed her.
“And that’s in Kumbuktwat.”
“When I was
a kid we used to come here every year,” I continued talking, driving, and
paying for everything. “One year we got
here and there was a car show on the front lawn, all vintage model
Thunderbirds.” There was no response to
this, so I guess it was a boring reminiscence.
When she
and I arrived at the grand old mansion we discovered another exhibition spread
across the lawn, this one of tractors and farm equipment.
“Do you
think that pig’s dick was bigger than yours?” She asked.
.
Page 182
The Ninth Skull Spoke of Work Standards
Richard and
Joan were amazed to find twelve skulls set in niches in the wall of the
circular chamber. They turned about on
entering the chamber, he clockwise, she counter, and met each other’s gaze with
mouths equally agape, thus confirming the copacetic nature of their
relationship once again.
“Are these real
skulls?” Joan wondered. She was taller
than Richard, but the skulls, which were indeed real, were set at a height
between their respective eye levels, so that was alright then.
As Richard
was examining one of them to make an attempt at answering Joan’s question, he
touched something, some protuberance among the ornamentation on the wall, that
triggered a sound recording. It nearly
scared the couple into wetting themselves.
“A sense of
humor,” the skull appeared to say, though its mandible did not move,” Is vital
for the maintaining of sanity—“
“Can’t you
turn it off?” Joan demanded. The
recording was loud, echoing around the hollow stone chamber and upwards to the
domed ceiling hidden in nighttime above.
Richard fumbled at the same area as before, but nothing would shut the
skull up until it played out its rather mundane lecture. Joan was much relieved when the recording
finally ended. Perversely, however,
Richard set another of skulls to talking, this one going on and on about the
connection between Art and Health.
Cursing furiously, Joan fled the chamber and sought refuge in the gift
shop.
.
Page 180
A Two-Dimensional Peach
Konglotnie
pointed to the illustration with a finger both triumphant and gloved in yellow
comic book striations.
“That,
gentlemen,” he declared with the sonorous intonation of the emperor’s most
trusted general, “Is a peach.”
“There is
no emperor, however,” Sarah explained to the class. One day this room would illicit no
particularly strong memories in those of the children who returned to it. That was where the Mickey Mouse hat
hung. That was where the kid with the
crew cut stood and snapped his fingers trying to summon up some word or concept
momentarily lost.
“Were his
fingers gloved in yellow comic book striations?” Daddy asked, not for
information, but to mock the words, to bring humiliation and shame. The Indians used shame, apparently, rather
than corporal punishment, to bring their children into line. Daddy used both.
“So what?” Clyde demanded. He
too maintained an image like that of some warlord from the other side of
Mars. He turned from the window with a
dramatic gesture; if only the batteries in his cape weren’t dead. “We know that the princeling enjoys… damn,
what’s the word for fruit that has a ‘stone’ in it?”
Konglotnie
frowned, waggled his eyebrows. He glanced
at the audience. Surely someone out
there knew. The word would be recovered
soon enough and all of this would be moot.
The battle campaign would be for nothing. A thousand ships with more firepower than
I’ve…
.
Page 178
Paver and Presenter Yawn and Prize
Now the man
without a wig drew up a chair in front of the microwave oven as if it was a TV
and watched the macaroni and grits boil over the side of the bowl inside the
oven. His eye betrayed an involvement
with the proceedings similar to that I must have displayed watching The Six Million Dollar Man as a
child. I had the doll and
everything. You could roll up the rubber
skin on his right arm to do work on the expensive electronic components
beneath.
I was
watching Lover Come Back the other day
specifically to absorb the details of Rock Hudson’s apartment décor. The movie was made in 1961 and the apartment
displays the best that a highly paid bachelor in early sixties Manhattan could hope for in design. Most of it I liked, especially the abstract
expressionist art on the walls, but, as with even the most modern of
presentations, there were hangovers from previous eras (the past) that I just
didn’t care for and, seen from my perspective fifty years on, found jarring. Painted wood is a prime example. Especially wood painted salmon. A lot of black too in that apartment. Flowery gold ornamentation no good either. Mirrors bordered in golden flowery wooden
frames. Still, I’d take it.
The
addition of two boiled eggs to the bowl was like a poorly conceived return to a
classic series. Rock Hudson shaved off his moustache and joined
Doris Day on a cross-country bus ride back to where it all began. The Krautrock soundtrack conveyed an
atmosphere of oppressive dread. Despite
earnest prayers, the gypsy statue could not swap their bodies back.
.
Page 176
Farms Acquired and Lust Without Regard for Yachting
“So,”
drawled Old Fartbasin as he stood on the Stormsens’ back porch and gazed out
over their aquatic acreage, “The ocean comes right up to your back door.” He made a sound to accompany his musing, sort
of a low, dying lawnmower sound, comprised of many ‘m’s strung together like a
rope bridge over a mountain ravine: ‘m’s connected by wet rabbits of
indeterminate vowels, a bridge, in essence, that no one would cross without a
baby goat under each arm and the snow-covered temple steps on the other side.
“Yep,” Ale
Stormsen replied absently, his thoughts more than halfway occupied with a
vision of someone falling to his death.
As the body slammed into the rocks below Ale wondered why two smaller
bodies, furry and four-legged, bounced away from the impact. Strange.
He shook his head and turned to his visitor. A big man, old Fartbasin was shaped like one
of those squeezable bulbs that new mothers use to clean out their babies’
noses. A straw hat with a transparent
green visor sat atop his pink-skinned, white-stubbled head. “But we’ve made the best of it.”
Old
Fartbasin nodded, noting as he drifted away into a death sudden, but
long-expected, the tufts of sea-sorghum that showed themselves above the
troughs of the gentle ocean waves. As he
collapsed on the Stormsens’ back porch he had a last passing notion that he too
was among those waves, bobbing up and down like an unsinkable vinyl toy.
The
Stormsen children, stopping short as they crowded onto the porch, thought the
old man looked funny.
.
Page 175
Premiere Consolation Ritual Accompanied by Big Changes
“A good
name for the band would be Bumper Crop,”
Stanley
suggested to his colleagues. He raised a
glass brimming with bourbon to his lips and downed a mighty portion in one
gulp.
“No, no,”
James countered. “It should be Grouch.”
James had already taken a drink of the same bourbon, although not as big
of a gulp as Stanley ’s. Still his throat burned.
“Grouch has
been used already,” Tommy responded for Stanley, who was momentarily unable to
do so. “I’m sure of it,” he added
quickly, noting that James was about to object.
During
Stanley’s subsequent coughing fit the band collectively imagined their first
album as a modern-day retelling of both Black Sabbath’s and Public Image
Limited’s inept histories. A woman
attached to the Annual Spastics and Cripples Parade (a rock ‘n’ roll theater
parody presentation) entered the practice studio and handed each man a
questionnaire.
“What’s
this?” Stanley
gasped.
“It’s just
a questionnaire,” Rhodonda assured the singer, who also served as the band’s
guitarist, though his skills in that latter area left many people, including
his bandmates, longing for the fleet facility of a Steve Zing or a Lita
Ford. “Your answers will be collated and
a selection from all the participants’ will be printed in the parade
guidebook. It’s just for fun,” she added
with a smile.
“Just for
fun,” Tommy repeated, holding up the bottle of bourbon to the light and
estimating the potency of its remaining contents.
“By the
way,” Rhodonda by-the-wayed, “What’s your band called?”
“As of the
moment we’re still the Silly Billies,” said James.
.
Page 173
An Alternate Spelling Posited by the Triskelion
The class
was restless. The lecture hall was hot
and the students still hadn’t fully recovered from Professor Grantig’s catfish
bait experiment. When the professor
asked them what they thought of Don O’Shea’s suggested change to the spelling
of the word “initiation,” one young man, sitting in the front row and just
stepping into his first beard, snapped, “Who cares?”
Grantig
looked stunned. He was hot too;
unsightly sweat patches had formed under the arms of his shirt. But he was from a generation which heeded not
such things. What mattered was the
English language and its imperceptible evolution. Before he could formulate the appropriately
moderated chiding, however, a three-legged wheel creature burst into the room.
“I smell
catfish bait!” the wheel creature roared, snatching at the shirtsleeves of the
students it passed on its way to the rostrum.
Of course,
not one student realized that the Triskelion, for so the creature was named by
Professor Grantig and his colleagues, was examining them for signs of
hypocrisy. Indeed, even the one or two
among them who realized that some disturbance was underway did not actually see
the Triskelion, rolling on one foot after another. (This makes no sense.) All of them were too busy being further
absorbed by the collective digital world consciousness on display before them
on their phones and laptops. Professor
Grantig welcomed this initiation into the mindset of today’s youth.
.
Page 171
Independent Bog Selector at Dawn
As a member
of the Independent Bog Selectors’ Association of America I work outside the big
bog selector chains. This means that I
don’t wear an easily recognizable uniform.
Often I am challenged by people who want to know why I am poking around
in their bog. You’d think that my
clipboard and flashlight would be enough to clue them in. Suspicion is just part of the job. I’ve gotten used to it, tiresome as it is.
Some
people, however, are intrigued by the idea of working as a self-employed bog
selector. I find them just as tiresome
really, because they want to waste even more of my time asking me questions. They want to know all about the work, the
hours, the remuneration, the protections afforded by the Association. I am usually polite with them, but I keep
working. I like to be out of the bog
and back on the road before dawn. Not
only is it difficult to judge a bog properly and fairly during the heat of the
day, it’s damned oppressive. I’ve seen
large prehistoric mammals overcome by the heated vapors rising from a deep
black bog under the rays of the sun.
Obviously
this limits the number of bogs I can inspect and recommend for selection, but,
as I am also a licensed mammoth and mastodon fur collator, I am able to put the
daylight hours to good use as well. My
wife doesn’t like my being gone for weeks at a time, but she enjoys the
benefits of being a member of the Independent Bog Selectors’ Association Ladies
Auxiliary. It keeps her busy.
.
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