An oversized capybara, a staccato cadence
Hobbled on October 22, 2023.
He was a man with no enemies but deeply disliked by even his closest friends. Most worshipful of his own creator, he was a self-made man: Richard Dreckers Sr., none other than the father of Richard Dreckers Jr. and the grandfather of assassin extraordinaire Samuel Dreckers. He was the biggest dick on Bouillabaisse Boulevard, too.
A solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity, his only redeeming quality was his unbroken string of victories in the competitive wafflestomping games held on Sefernday since 1957. And even that was an overly generous attempt to find virtue in the man, as rumors long persisted that he cheated at each turn. This past Friday was his birthday and he was 103 years old. No one could state for sure how much formaldehyde and adrenochrome the old coot was imbibing on a daily basis to maintain his youthful vigor and looks, but there he was nonetheless. He didn’t look a day over 99½.
Ol’ Sammy was serving twenty-to-life in prison for attempting to assassinate the President of the United States Llama Appreciation Society. He was also serving as a cautionary example to the rest of the assassins residing in the area: Everyone knows you can’t assassinate a llama lover with a booby-trapped alpaca saddle, but some people just have to learn the hard way. Samuel Dreckers was one of these.
Ol’ yours truly was serving tea and strumpets to Becasue becasue we were all out of crumpets. My big little blonde huzzey-muffet sat on her rather voluminous tuffet and I sat on a chair that I had assembled out of random sticks and gobs of upholstery found lying around my palatial abode. Geese swam by in mid-air. One stopped to pinch me on my own tuffet. Off in the distance, an incorrigible non-dirigible floated by serenely. It was a wonderful day.
My hexaflexagonal valise went missing on Thursday. I accused Becasue’s tubular, octagonal handbag of eating it, but then I realized how absurd that sounded: Her handbag was only half the size of my valise, and it was the valise which had all those sharp teeth, not the handbag. I then accused the nearest pangolin of eating the valise, since they have teeth. But the scaly little mammal responded simply by biting my nose off. Then—always a good surmiser—I surmised I had simply misplaced my valise on the long, meandering hike I took on Tuesday and Wednesday when my pathological dromomania got the best of me. I decided to retrace my steps.
I finally located my hexaflexagonal valise in a ditch by the garloid ranch on Gargamel Street. It was fully unfolded and lying limply in a pool of muddy, mucous water. Did one of the garloids escape, snatch the valise from my grasp without me noticing, unfold it, and leave it there? The idea was equally absurd as blaming a dentated handbag. Garloids have no hands! Garloids also have no teeth, so my nose was safe.
I gathered up my valise, folded it back up, and—before galumphing back home on the back of the llama I rode in on—spent a few minutes watching the garloids squirm and mivulate about, out in their pasture. Many a year ago, I had become interested in garloid husbandry, but I soon decided that I would instead take up turtle farming on Lake Athabasca in my retirement years.
When would I retire? No one knew—not even Catlips the Clown. I had retired from my Sundaily scrivenings in 1999 after a nonconsensual rendezvous with a butterfly net, then again in 2008 after you, dear readers, couldn’t stay spooned long enough. My last bout of retiremental disorders in 2012 some blamed on the horse-glue factory blowing up and drowning me in horse mucus, but the actual cause of that withdrawal into temporary eremitism was far zanier: Christmas broke out and after carjacking Santa Claus, I rode his goat-drawn sleigh over the fiscal cliff.
It took me eight years to determine how to climb back up that cliff.
The goats repeatedly pulling me back down, crab-like, didn’t help either.
I returned astride a violent spell of bubbling and squeaking and soon mistook Snarpegon the Assyrian for Sarpedon the Greek, an enormitable and humiliating mistake from which I have yet to recover. That embarrassment gave rise to second thoughts about the wisdom of devolving back into a hebdomadal diarist—but that moment of doubt only lasted 0.717 818 µs, after which I resolved I would keep twickling about each Sunday until Old Scratch comes and takes me—or I reach 99½ myself.
And then I rode off on that llama I rode in on.
The Bouillabaisse Boulevard Bulletin reran a story this week about Mayor Rhoodie’s initiative in 2001 to replace the Sefernday wafflestomping competition with poopsocking. But Sefernday was in February that year, and it was so cold that everyone’s socks froze solid. By 2002, everyone wanted to forget the whole affair ever happened: The wafflestomping tradition was brought back, our butt-frump of a mayor earned a new nickname, and the rest is history. And they all called me “Crazy Phil” back then, but what do they know? At least I only wear socks on my feet.
And I do have a toilet; what more could I ask for? More toilets? Shows what you know—I have at least a dozen toilets sprinkled about my palatial abode. Some of them are even hooked up to working plumbing! In 1988, I pinched one off in the middle, creating quite the dysplumbious dilemma. Where was I to go? My poor toilet was now cut in half! And thus ended my brief investment in scatomancy.
“Nothing really mattress,” said the chair.
“Who chairs?” replied the mattress.
He was an oversized capybara who spoke in a staccato cadence that put one in mind of a woodchuck chucking far more wood than a woodchuck ever ought to chuck. His nattering truly put one in mind of such a vexatious animal sinking its teeth into wood and gnawing, gnawing frenetically. Choking on his own occasional guffaws, when he wasn’t whining relentlessly about his elderly mother and her bouts of drapetomania and sluggish schizophrenia, his keilbosity was truly off the charts. He was Mr. Plerkle. Even with all his co-poetasters reduced to nothing more than a small, compact pile of grue droppings, he was still out there poetasting up a storm.
I was sitting in multiple chairs at the same time, whizgiggling merrily and whiffreading My Life as a Squirrel, my own autobiography, when a pangolin riding atop a zebra appeared before me and muttered, in perfect Old Assyrian, these words: “Mlaaaw! mlaaaw!! Mlaaaw! mlaaaw!! Mlaaaw! mlaaaw!!” Startled, I fell out of my chairs and stopped being so merry.
It reminded me of that year I attended the Met Gala in my giant chicken suit. It reminded me of that nightmare where I was Mike the Headless Chicken—moments before he lost his head. It even put me in mind of Balki Bartokomous and his lifelong devotion to Gorplianity. And then I remembered… it had happened before. But would it happen again?
“Did you enjoy that chicken I sent you?” a man asked. Except—there was no man here. There weren’t even any women, children, or orphaned widows. There was a comely goat here, but that was neither here nor there right now.
And the derbfine and obolus men were here, lurking in a vestibule in my atrium I didn’t even know existed. They leapt out at me and sliced my head off at the waist. Derbies and obols spilled out of my decapitated corpse. I died then.
I had died but that didn’t stop me from falling asleep. I slept and I dreamed.
I thought I was prepared, but this time that clawed, skinless, eye-ridden demoness got me first: Cackling, she hobbled me like a horse and flogged me like a dolphin. Then she rode me like a horse—or maybe like a mermaid rides a dolphin. But I woke up riding Becasue like a pig. Oink, oink, oink! I then went hirpling around my palatial abode for a full two hours before I realized that the hobbling I had endured had only been a nightmare.
The oinking, however…
I thought her hair was on fire, but this misunderstanding was becasue Becasue changed her mind and was now being her redheaded self this week. Outdoors, the leaves on all the trees were changing too: Fiery reds, golden yellows, and oranges the hue of curdled horse mucus. Indoors, I didn’t have any trees.
The week ended. It had been a long, strange week, but there was one thing I learned that made it all worth it: The parable of the pair o’ bulls was even more inscrutable than the pair o’ ducks paradox—but not as distasteful as parageusia caused by a pair o’ geese. This lesson flummoxed me, so I stopped writing here.