Whittling the knittery
Quavered on May 8, 2022.
Monday. I decided to spice things up a bit this week: Instead of using ice cubes in strict pairs, I began using them according to the Fibonacci sequence. By Thursday, I couldn’t fit all the cubes into even the largest cup I owned, so I did the only thing I could: I began jamming the excess ice cubes into my ears, nose, and throat. This worked until today, when I ran out of both cup space and orifices. Realizing I was in quite the sticky pickle, I gave up on ol’ Fibonacci and his harrowing sequence of Death and Despair. I went back to using my cubical, icy little cubes strictly in pairs. The 2,584 ice cubes I tried to jam in places heretofore unknown to science and medicine sat slowly melting in my sink.
Gongsday. A capybara stood on my lawn, meowing. It wasn’t quite as ludicrous as Michael Dukakis riding in a tank, but it was close.
Then, Thursday. The day reminded me of that time I tried adding fiber and coconut oil to my morning coffee (which was “healthy,” I was told), and ended up with nothing more’n a cup of mucous glop instead. This was better than that time I added coconut oil to my morning iced coffee and ended up with something resembling an exploding candle frozen in time, floating upright in my coffee. Alas, being a stubborn, goat-like man (when I’m not a six-foot-tall man–squirrel), I drank it anyway—exploded candle and all. Then I went and cranched my guts out. “Goodbye, morning coffee! Goodbye, morning coffee! Goodbye, morning coffee! Flushed right down the drain!”
Twangsday Eve. No one was sure what kind of nitwittery I was up to. (Or was it whittled knittery?) News reached me that the unlucky 13th Earl of Gurney had died—by gurning, the rumor went. An earlier, scandalous tale spread by the man’s nefarious butler turned out to be not only untrue but comically so. And far more comical was the image of a man named Gurney dead by a gurning accident—his face set in a permanent rictus grin as they lowered his corpse into the ground and buried it under six feet of earth, sod, and rotting fish.
Twangsday morn. Merry Twangsday! I glowered at yet another capybara invading my lawn. Some people had woodchucks. I, capybaras. I hate capybaras. Fortunately, praying to the gnomes hiding behind my wainscoting worked wonders: A wheedling, needling mass of gnomes swarmed out from behind my kitchen cabinetry and devoured all the capybaras. I guess gnomes are good for something.
Twangsday afternoon. I wondered why there was a UL logo on my new rolls of toilet paper. It made no sense. But I did at least enjoy a vague sense of comfort, knowing that if I did plug these loo rolls into a wall socket, they wouldn’t cause an electrical fire.
Next up, Tuesday. His name was Mr. Frizippa-Pip. Or maybe it was Derple Dip-Dong. Or Glaucca Dicca-Borp. I was as confused about his name as a wizzle-nipf would be in a knittery-whittling contest. I was less confuzzled about other things, for example: The hypernobristor had shorted out in my microwave oven; it needed a set of new two-way diodes. I also needed a set of ailerons from Aerilon. My television was displaying nothing but pictures of upside-down squirrels ever since the cable company had rerouted the co-ax around the tree that Bouba and Kiki called home. It was, I suspect, squirrelly revenge.
Wûrþurgsday. One question remained: Cheese curds? Or cheese turds? That’s all.
At last, Aliphaticpaternosteringday. I stared down at my bathroom scale, watching it flicker rapidly between two different numbers, not unlike a drunken stumblebum trying to decide if he wanted to reach for the nip bottle of whiskey or the can of Sterno this time around. I glared down at the scale, trying to coerce it to make up its mind through sheer force of will. But then I realized that my “force of will” was but nothing compared to the downward force my girth was imparting into that poor electronic bathroom scale and its overworked strain gauge, so I acquiesced and just waited. It took another eight seconds for the scale to finally settle on a number—a number I didn’t even know existed in the U.S. version of the set of real integers. I sighed and began to think my omnipepperonial diet was not as good for me as I had been led to believe.