Batting the package
Semiquavered on May 15, 2022.
Pepperoni in hand, I stared out my over-sink, between-cabinet kitchen window. The Sun was up; clouds passed by lazily overhead. Off in the distance, the Doge balked. The nameless dread that usually filled yours truly as he stood under the baleful Sun was replaced with a nameless calm.
So I named my nameless calm “Calm” to make things clearer. And indeed it was Calm. I was Calm. Calm indeed. I swallowed another stick of pepperoni whole.
I moobled back into my living room, Weeble-wobbly as always, and plopped myself in my Hopeless Slack-Ass® recliner. My television continued displaying nothing but grainy, upside-down squirrel pictures. Another stack of Finnish dunning letters came in the mail this week. Bouba and Kiki were still exacting their revenge upon me; even the postman was in on it now. (I didn’t even want those fish boots!)
I peered out another “window,” this one in my living room. (My house has dozens upon dozens of these transparent “window” things.) Out in the street now, two cats were batting a pair of squirrel gonads back and forth between them. Somewhere, gelded squirrels ran through the trees, chittering in falsetto. Perhaps Bouba and Kiki were now the last of their squirrelly lineage.
The day continued relentlessly. Sunday night’s boxing match between Chris Poole and Lon Poole was all that people talked about today. But I was too busy to engage in idle gossip: I was chasing down the last of the geese that survived the recent anserine catastrophe and dispatching them with gusto and glee. The little buggers honked and honked, and I twisted their heads off and made Christmas dinners out of them seven months early. Calm washed over me again—peaceful, refreshing Calm.
It kept getting half as long but twice as good.
I returned home at 8:18 p.m., after the Sun had finally shriveled up and died below the horizon. It was time to take the crazy meds that the assemblage of cranks, quacks, and tomfools had prescribed for me recently! But I confused “sublingual” and “subungual” again, and this is how the horse pill I was supposed to take sublingually ended up under my horse’s hoof instead. (You didn’t know I had a horse, did you? Well—I don’t.)