A stack of dictionaries, a goat, and the ensuing manure
Stacked high on June 26, 2022.
“Fleas, flies, and friars! Fuccant!” I cursed mightily. “Fuccant! F———, f———, f———!” Once again I had neglected to read the instructions on the label, and ended up with the entire bottle jammed up my nose—jammed so far it would take a twenty-mule team to get it out.
Honksday was not looking up for me.
Hours later, my intricate plan to insufflate enough borax to sneeze the bottle out of my nose had proven a miserable failure, but it did teach me some interesting physics about high pressure within the human brainpan—once again. It also taught me the old aphorism “Third time’s the charm” is meaningless piffle. I gathered my eyes up off the floor, screwed my ear bones back together, and went back to work trying to blog out something resembling a coherent “blog entry.”
If someone patiently fed a stack of dictionaries to a goat, then constructed an essay from the ensuing manure, the result may resemble what follows.
It was Pifsday. The Sun was up, bright and searing. I decided I was hungry for something more than pepperoni. After donning my stack of asshats and thirty-seven layers of underwear, middleware, and outerwear, I wandered down to the pepperoni deli in Parsimony Plaza. I would order anything and everything non-pepperonial on the menu. Alas I was disappointed when all they had was… pepperoni.
And a single flavor of tea.
No one likes Lemon Lift, I thought forlornly as I saw the box of the ungrulious tea sitting opened but unused on the deli counter. It was there, it was free, yet no one wanted one. Just like no one likes to use a toilet after a horse’s ass has been on one.
Well, I’m not one to look a gift horse in the ass. I swiped all the bags of tea and stuffed them into my pockets. “You’ll rue the day you ever put anything out ‘free’ in front of Phillip Norbert Årp!” I shouted—to no one in particular, but clearly intending to be directed to the nameless, faceless gnomes that ran the faceless corporation that manufactured Lemon Lift by the barrel, bushel, and bag. A couple people within earshot—also gnomes, I concluded—glanced at me. I grinned my most disarming, coprophagous grin. They looked away. I kept grinning, then waddled out. (It’s difficult to maintain my normal goat-like gait with that many teabags jammed down my trousers!)
Someone was crunching a bunch of ice cubes with what sounded like an ice cream scoop. But then I gleaned, from the tick-tick-ticking cadence that accompanied the initial sound, that it was just a phalanx of heavily armed Westphalian Schmongeling Gnomes out for their morning march. I relaxed. Gnomes don’t make me anxious anymore—but ice does. Oh yes, ice does indeed. Ever since I lost a tussle with an ice cube tray back in ’21, I haven’t been able to stand the sight, sound, or smell of water ice without breaking out into a cold—one could say, icy—sweat.
But enough about me. How are you this week? Are the gnomes bothering you, too? Do they invade your nightmares, daydreams, and panty drawer? They’ve been all over me lately. Ever since the squirrels all disappeared, the gnomes have harried me viciously and unrelentingly. I think it was they who ate all the squirrels. And now they were coming for me! But they’re subtle, you know—and patient! They don’t just come at you—oh, no! They wait! They abide! And they stare! They know—they know they have all the time in the world! The immortal fiends! All the time in the world! F———!
Murgsday burst through the calendar wall like the Kool-Aid Man after far, far too much PCP. Murgsday always followed Pifsday now, at least since Mayor Julian Rhoodie implemented a calendar reform as part of a cost-saving measure. The civil calendar’s week was only five days now; all the days had been renamed to avoid paying royalties to Pope Gregory xiii’s estate.
I dreamed I was a rotating polyhedron, a Platonic solid, emerging from a network of pipes, as classical music played in the background. I was heavily pixelated, and dithered to boot, but it didn’t matter. The whole world was equally pixelated and dithered, so I was not—I could not be—aware of the limitations it put on me.
I spun around rapidly, did something that made sense only to the authors of this game, and then the game was over. Some kind of music continued to play. I continued to spin. Off in the distance, a dogdecahedron barked. I just accepted my trophy and circumambulated off the screen. Another level. Another round.
Best of all, the 8-bit world in which I rotated didn’t support any gnomes. Not enough memory, I was told. So I relaxed and accepted my many-sided solidity. The classical MIDI continued to play, and I continued to rotate.
And then there was Dorfsday, which followed Murgsday this week.
Still no one had the heart to tell Mayor Rhoodie he had fallen for a scam all these years: “The Estate of Pope Gregory xiii” was nothing more than a front group set up by Nigerian Scamming Gnomes to bilk money out of cities, towns, and corporations run by ignorant idiots. And our ignorant idiot was so pitiable that no one dared tell him how badly he had fallen for their ruse. So things just kept going on as they always do, we ended up with a five-day calendar wholly out of sync with the rest of the developed world, and everyone just sighed and went back to watching horses’ asses on YouTube.
My new career as a cheese squeezer at the cheddar mill on Zubenelgenubi Street had been predictably short-lived, and it ended today after I got caught using a cheese tweezer to pluck my eyebrows in the break room. Misuse of company property, they said. Clean out your desk, they said. And return the sixteen tons of Stilton you stole too, they said. But when I told them I had already fed all sixteen tons to a flock of gnomes, they conceded that one, and just fired me. So I dumped a vat of horse urine in the vat of whey and stomped out of there like a petulant man stomping off a job site he was just fired from. If there was one thing I could always get spot-on as an employee, it was “disgruntled.”
The nearby feta farm on Zubeneschamali Street was hiring cheese teasers, a Craigslist post informed me. That sounded so similar to the job at the cheddar mill that I applied at once. My four whole days as a cheese squeezer for the Chaz Charleton Chase Cheddar Machining Co. would surely provide me with enough experience for the feta farm—and if not, I had my years of horsebuttock riding, goat-shearing, sheep-signing, and bull-drawing at Mr. Smuthabupple’s Organic Farm to fall back on.
The man ran out of dictionaries and switched to thesauruses. The goat swallowed another page. Being illiterate, it couldn’t tell the difference. Being illiterate myself, I couldn’t either.
Dorfsday came and went, with Quongsday following.
He was a gnome named Sela-Dûr, keeper of cellar doors. He stood in my way, in full gnomish battle dress, eyeing me grimly and silently. The sunlight glinted off his steel battle axe and chromed codpiece. He knew what I was planning. The gnomes always know. I was in quite the sticky pickle. Unless I defeated him at once, my laundry was trapped in the dryer forever—and then even worse things would transpire. As my reader my regretfully recall, my basement cellar is home to five large drums of bacon grease, and as my reader must again be aware, drums of bacon grease left alone to their own devices eventually get up to all kinds of mischief. If I didn’t intervene soon, the bacornucopioids would rise from their slumber deep inside those drums and begin their long, oleaginous conquest of the world. I eyed Sela-Dûr back—equally as grim, but for my crossed eyes, coprophagous grin, and the zany hooting noises I kept emitting every 8⅛ seconds. (I was still wearing that grin.) One of us would fall first.
As Fate would have it, it would be me. Suddenly I tripped and fell head-over-heels onto my buttocks. I’d been standing perfectly motionless but still tripped suddenly—and without warning—and other hackneyed clichés my editor keeps telling me to avoid. [Actually, I’ve given up on that. —Ed.] Landing on my buttocks much like a horse landing on its own horse’s ass, I let out a startled whinny and began neighing insistently. Sela-Dûr’s eyes followed me down to the floor, but he didn’t move a single muscle. [Except the eye muscles, you nitwit. —Ed.]
Well, if you’re just going to mock and criticize everything I write, Mr. “Ed.,” I’ll just stop now. So there.
[I think we’d all like that very much. —Ed.]