Fourth, fifth, sixth… of July
Eighty-sixed on July 6, 2025.
I wasn’t allowed to attend my town’s Fourth of July celebration this year—something about eating all the unexploded fireworks last year. And my town doesn’t celebrate the Fifth of July (otherwise known as “yesterday”), so it was up to me to invent the so-called Sixth of July (otherwise known as “today”) and then celebrate it with much gusto and firecrackin’ glee.
Everything went swimmingly, but since I was the only one celebrating July 6th, I was left with the unfortunate task of banning myself for eating all the unexploded fireworks. (Also, the two sides of my brain were warring again.)
Remember, I before E except after C. Or when your foreign neighbor Keith receives eight counterfeit beige sleighs from feisty caffeinated weightlifters. Weird!
But that wasn’t as weird as the canary cannery they were building next to the paperclip factory on Zubenelgenubi Street. Like the cat-canning and dog-boxing plants, the canary cannery would be able to can canaries at a rate of over ten thousand per minute. No one asked the question, “Who needs canned canaries?” But some questions are best left unasked.
My persistent letters to the Bouillabaisse Boulevard Bulletin editor that my town would do well to reopen the horse factory on Hobbyhorse Lane continued to go unpublished. I even used to work there but that’s a story best left for another day (such as February 20, 2011).
Thursday. I realized sliced butter was even better lightly sugared, and surely was a new delicacy I could market to the world. (It turned out not to be.) I then tried sprinkling annatto all over it but that just made it orange. I then tried dunking it in amaretto but that just made it bitter. So, I just ate it all—but not while murping, oh no, because that would summon the jurjenfnurk tarnblutter and dostle the grorthorknees.
“What does that even mean?” the Left Side of my brain asked the Right Side.
“I don’t know,” the Right Side responded. “But I’m dostling the grorthorknees myself! Cheerio!”
“That sounds like a mayperk dorndongle feenoo-feeraw! And it’s not bleeven Seferenday a-yets!”
I spent Wednesday delousing myself and dousing my Morgellons worms in WD-40 and X-rays.
This delousing and dousing proved fruitless (even when I started to include a basket of oranges), so I switched to WD-41 and Y-rays, both of which were alleged to be more potent. Alas this just made the worms start to crawl out through my corneas and my bellybutton. So then I tried a basket of cabbages I had soaked in annatto. This also proved fruitless, because cabbages aren’t fruit.
My recently-invented Z-ray emitter further made the problem worse (and further furrier, as did the ferrier I tried next). And so, after a frantic, frenetic fit of apoplexy followed by blind, gibbering panic and, ultimately, witless granfalloonery interspersed between too many commas, I went deep into deep, deep hiding. This is how Becasue found me when she opened the lid of the washing machine this morning.