Dugongs abound in my ear canals!
Tiled over on August 19, 2007.
I awoke this Friday morning to the sound of music once again erupting from my bed cushions. This angered me, so I set fire to my bed cushions, and, for good measure, immolated my collection of broomsticks and even the pile of moldy oatmeal cookies I had been keeping on the floor of my pantry. The oatmeal cookies writhed and screamed in pain as they blackened, shriveled, and went up in thick, greasy smoke. (That ought to teach the little buggers not to spy on me ever again!)
Howling in fury at the sudden eruption of cacophony from the pillows in my sleeping room, I gruffly pushed past the pile of lawn gnomes accreting in the doorway—hanging from the door jambs, swinging from the rafters, drifting, twirling, whirling, and swirling, as such Bavarian Piling Gnomes are wont to do—and hurried out into my kitchen to ferret out the conspirators responsible for the nefarious music-eruption plot. As I bounded into the kitchen, dugongs started pouring out of my ear canals like so much tepid bathwater, barking and yelping like dugongs are wont to do when they’ve been plucked from the ocean and jammed into someone’s rather small but extensively hairy ears.
I fell to my knees and began prying up the evil ceramic tiles covering the kitchen floor, as more and more dugongs flopped out of my ears and began piling up on the floor around me. These dugongs were big. I mean, really, really big. They flopped around, beating on me with their flippers and demanding the return of their stolen “bukket,” but I pressed onward, intent on getting to the bottom of the conspiracy even if it meant digging straight through my kitchen floor and down into the basement.
And then I’d dig my way to China if need be.
“You’re all against me!” I shouted to the abortifacient skies looming balefully overhead, only visible through the cracks in the duct tape covering my kitchen windows. (I had taped up the whole place to keep the gorillas from returning! Poor Ravna.) “Each and every one of you murderous tiles! Evil tiles and vile dugongs! Vile dugongs and evil tiles! Out of my house forever!”
Remembering poor Ravna and the gorillas only increased my blinding rage by a factor of at least 65.423 002. I began pounding my fists against the destroyed floor in front of me, at last breaking through—and then falling through—into the basement below. Unfazed except for three broken bones and a six-inch gash on my forehead, I stood up and started to tear that place apart, too. Boiler, circuit breakers, washer and dryer… nothing was spared. Protesting dugongs flopped through the hole above me and condemned my act of destruction and demolition, but I would not cease—I tore the entire place apart trying to find the bed cushion music conspirators, alas to no avail.
As my house was once again transformed into a disaster of epic proportions, I collapsed due to exhaustion around 6:45:23 p.m. on Friday. I dozed peacefully for fourteen hours, dreaming of an endless forest of legs, feet, and toes belonging to Alyssa Milano. (Toes make good leaves!) I only awoke after the bed cushions had once again started blaring “Gargle My Arglebargles” by Three Fat Fish. (From what my moles in the music industry tell me, this song topped the charts from 1983 to 1999—but it isn’t entirely clear which charts my hairless, naked little friends mean.)
How these musical bed cushions had made their way to the basement still eludes me as I write this. But the bed cushions themselves—now disguised as a series of mysterious plastic pipes attached to the wall—would elude me not one whit.
“Arglebargle?!” I bolted from the cement floor and began ripping the obviously fake plumbing from the walls with my bare fingernails. “Arglebargle!? Or foofaraw!?!” Water began to spray everywhere. Slamming my head into the cement walls, while whining like a petulant little girl, had little effect on the blaring music, so I once again set fire to everything around me, including the very water pouring from the destroyed pipery.
(Allergy information: Phillip Norbert Årp was manufactured on the same equipment that processes tree nuts.)
The fire, quite naturally, spread upward and outward from the basement to engulf my entire house. I ran out of there faster than a baseball bat out of Hell, squealing in panic as flaming bits of wood, tar, and plaster fell down around me. The gorillas, bellowing and howling in fury as they emerged from my spare bedrooms, quickly followed me out the door. Ravna followed, too. The dugongs exploded one by one, their bloated bodies unable to handle 9,000 °C of anger-driven flames.
Again homeless, I settled down for a nap on my front lawn as the neighbors gathered around once again to stare and gawk at my latest antics… and to quietly conspire amongst themselves to continue their plots to ruin me.