Watering the water clocks
Watered on January 28, 2024.
With Easter having flown right by me—and that rabid rabbit rapidly tearing my scalp off as it passed—it was time to get back to bigger and better things. But first, I had to regrow my scalp and all its hairs. That rabbit not only had my scalp but also had plenty of hairs of its own, so off I went, chasing after it, on a magical journey from here to the other side of the street where it disappeared down a storm drain. Worse luck, I didn’t fit down the storm drain, despite my best efforts, so I had to give up the chase. I frowned and deflated. My usual, Pompeiian pomposity had been replaced with the sullenness of Sulla. I tried to deflate some more but I still couldn’t fit. I gave up and trudged home, only suffocating under the 34′ of snow burying Bouillabaisse Boulevard once or twice.
My cozy, 157-room abode would provide me with some manner of comfort—unless those damnable gnomes had burned it down again. (They do that. And then they dance.)
Returning home, I found my big little redheaded huzzey-muffet all afliver with crunkfire; I quickly forgot the whole cunicular affair. Bunny rabbit be damned, I would find something else to make dinner out of.
Crunkfire fully sated, Becasue and I slept and we dreamed—we slept the sleep of Siloam and we dreamed. Not even that clawed, skinless, eye-ridden demoness could turn these dreams into nightmares. But a 34′-tall rabbit smashing through my bedroom wall like the Kool-Aid man hepped up on PCP could.
On Wednesday I took stock of all the provisions I had cached so, unlike last year, this year I would survive the winter. I had sufficient “food” to last until 2025, and happily most of it was actually edible. I had sufficient toilet paper to last until 2026, and much of that was edible, too. I would run out of toothbrushes just in time for the founding of the Federation. And then all my teeth would begin to fall out. Bozo the Clown was dead and now so was Sports Illustrated. Kmart had long since molded over in its grave, too.
On Tuesday, I forgot about Hitler again. Drat. But Tuesday came before Wednesday, and now it was already Thursday, so that made things okay. Tuesday is old news. Let bygones be bygones. Bye-bye, bygones! An attention span the length of a gnat’s dick helps keep things in perspective. President Piggy-Man was on the TV again falsely claiming that moonbats are a healthy part of an American breakfast and that drinking ammonia cures baldness. But I knew both were toxic—the moonbats even more so!
Now Bed Bath & Beyond has joined Kmart in that big abandoned parking lot in the sky. Who would be next? Would the Spend-O-Mart collapse into a black hole of retail despair and be renamed to 20240130-SM-Horsefly-1 on Tuesday? It would be a good name: There are always a ton of horseflies buzzing about the produce section there. Perhaps it’s time for everything to die. Perhaps the snow encasing every outdoor surface in my town—and many indoor surfaces ever since my roolf collapsed—would die soon, too. Time to die, snow. Time to die.
I confessed those were all words—but in the order in which they appeared, they meant little to nothing. Meaning is important when stringing words together, something I frequently struggle to remember. (Just like I struggle not to be devoured by pangolins each time I open my dishwasher.) I like to use words. Words make a tasty salad, especially if they’re smothered in ranch dressing and spruce mustard.
My grandpooty liked to use words, too. Ol’ Philbert Nyarlathotep Årp was always full of words—when his mouth wasn’t full of filberts, the nut that that ol’ nut doted on more than any other. And when he wasn’t devouring filberts or fighting off mubbleducks, he would wander about the house muttering dourly in Egyptian, recounting his long life in the court of Amenhotep III tending the water clocks, watering the cats, and catting about with Nefertiti beyond the old pharaoh’s back.
On Friday, the Sun reemerged from behind the clouds, turtle-like, and began blazing its killing rays down upon us all again. As Luck would have it however, 34′ of snow piled upon everyone and everything is quite the shield against those vile beams of death! Until it all started melting. And melting. And melting.
The gushing snowmelt brought to mind my own previous life in 1379 b.c. as a water clock waterer in the holy city of Karnak. Working alongside my grandpooty, ’twas indeed good, honest work—watering those clocks until they grew lush and green and could tell the time like no one else’s. Not even my vaunted ceiling clock could tell the time today as well as a well-watered water-clock could. My water clocks were known the land over for their accuracy and precision—until that night someone took a whiz in one of them and everyone was late to work the next morning.
When the melt was over, I ventured outdoors once again. I turned my eyebulbs in every direction: The snow was all gone, almost as if it had never been. Except for the stack of dead owls at the end of my driveway, you couldn’t even tell it was winter. I hooted nervously, not the least bit owl-like. I worried there were Houthi hiding in the puddles ready to hit me over the head with missiles if I strayed too close.
Then that rabbit popped up out of the storm drain. I drowned under all the snowmelt, and that was that. Not even my PhD in theoretical lagomorphology could help me out of this predicament.
[Feetnote: In fact, the never-ending snow ended so abruptly on Friday that it never actually even started. There was no snow, there was no melt, and there wasn’t even a rabid rabbit. I hallucinated it all apparently.]