A real nobody
Fettered on October 15, 2023.
I wasn’t sure if he was a somebody, a nobody, or perhaps a go-daddy. Nay, he was a real nobody all right—the nobody I was looking for. Nobody came, nobody saw, nobody conquered nothing. And Nohbdy cleverly escaped from the cyclops Polyphemus using a comely goat as a diversion, but Becasue and I are the only ones who remembers that Greek epic that way.
The Carparker-Harshbarger Parkway was blocked off again this week. Last time it was a six-weblog pileup that shut the parkway and led to the early demise of my favorite bolo tie. This time a high-speed chase ended in all the cobblestones being torn up and a rather sticky white Ford Bronco embedded in an exit sign.
I couldn’t judge the thief too harshly however, since this can happen to anyone. So instead I drove home via the bike path paralleling the parkway. A few people objected, but there are a few tasks that even a Trabant excels at: Winning a high-speed argument with cyclists and pedestrians is one of them!
Stopped at a traffic light, I saw a car with a chair strapped to its roof, which got me thinking: Almost everyone owns at least one chair. Sometimes even more. I own a few. But why do we so rarely see people carting their chairs home atop their cars? How do they get them home? Does everyone just make their own chairs out of random sticks and gobs of upholstery they have lying around at home already? This required deeper investigation and much more study, I decided. After my groundbreaking treatise on 1990s entertainment, I knew a scientific paper on this topic would be a hit.
Descended from a long line of parking garage attendants stretching back to the 1600s, the Carparkers were one of the most prominent families in my ungrulious little town. Their scions have served as mayors, city councilors, and even stumblebum stable keepers. Their marriage into the equally vaunted Harshbarger family in the 1960s only served to puff them up even more. Named by then-Mayor Mortimer Overdunk Ollanthorpe Carparker-Harshbarger after himself, the Carparker-Harshbarger Parkway opened in 1991 to much applause, acclaim, and farbenharbing emflunctery.
A scandal involving Mayor Carparker-Harshbarger caught in bed with a dead girl and a live boy forced him out of office two years later, which ushered in our current era of coulric rule by that indefatigable butt-frump Julian Rhoodie. Rhoodie is up for election this year, but after planting a million kudzu vines around town as part of a green initiative, followed by banning hot air balloons as part of his comprehensive global warming plan, he was nigh unstoppable. Not even a dead girl, a live boy, and a whole gaggle of comely goats found in his bed could oust him from office. And believe me, we tried.
“Man dies in fiery crash after robbing local sperm bank,” read the Bouillabaisse Boulevard Bulletin headline. I turned the page.
The second page of the Bulletin featured, below a human-interest piece about a local cacoepist and his long journey to orthoepy, an editorial lamenting our society’s current state of affairs: Nobody does anything anymore and this is leading to serious problems for our political leaders and their ability to convince us that they are doing anything anymore either. This brought back to mind the nobody I was looking for on Monday, and how not much—nay, nothing!—had transpired as a result of me finding him. He was nobody and nothing was accomplished by finding him and asking him to do the nothing I didn’t need him to do. The editorial concluded with a reminder that nothing means anything anymore—if it ever did. I wanted to agree but that would be something. So, I didn’t.
Then, I turned the page.
Thursday wasn’t as weird as that day I learned soft-shelled clams can catch cancer from other clams, but it was weird all right. A spate of unfortunate underdunkery at the Dunkin’ Dönitz on Hegelian Avenue had been supplanted by a furious barrage of overdunkery which lead to the rapid and explosive exjection of every butterbreading donut and breaderbutting crumpet from the shop’s ovens—simultaneously. The disaster wasn’t as disastrous as the 1829 treacle mine explosion nor catastrophic as the 1955 hamburgling catastrophe, but it was nonetheless ruinously calamitous and woefully abfractious.
Donutless and crumpetless, I went home sad and eyebrowless. I slept; I dreamed. This time I was able to put that clawed, skinless, eye-ridden demoness in manacles and fetters before she could leap upon my back, ride me like a horse, and rack and flay me again. I knew it was only a matter of time before the evil succubus escaped those chains, but for now I could dream about Chloë Moretz and Uma Thurman in peace, without those toe-visages being transformed into horrifying, screaming nightmares. A discalced Chloë and Uma sure outdid a disgruntled succubus and the inevitable distension, dislocation, dismemberment, disembowelment, disjection, desquamation, demasculinization, and defenestration that would follow.
Then, I turned the page.
The ol’ girl was reinstalled in my upper hemi-lavatory and polished to a high gloss. I could once again go like a civilized person. No more buckets, plastic bags, or unguarded truck beds for me! So, on Saturday, I sat. Sonorous flatulations once again rang out atop a well-tuned toilet. The din awoke my neighbors, rattled pots and pans off their walls, and put many under the misapprehension that the end of the world was nigh. Not even quassation by absquatch could make this much noise nor cause this much fright.
Then, I flushed.
The panda eats shoots and leaves. But the Pnårp eats, shits, and leaves.
The week ended. It had been a long, strange week, but there was one thing I learned that made it all worth it: Most people order their chairs online and have the merchandise teleported directly inside their homes, at the click of a mouse button. This lesson amazed me, so I stopped writing here.