THE toxic smoke emitted from the devil pit suffocates the pallid light of the infernal hydrogen orb. It peers down with its billion blinding eyes from a hazy vermillion canvas. The shadows become ever more menacing as they elongate with the departure of the sun. Doctor Shnagra Vadlinger IX pries open his sustenance chamber with his warped claws for hands. The eroded enamel of his jagged teeth appears as cutting devices that some hell-bent assassin might use. The rusty colors of essential fluids cake the bicuspids of his maxilla. If this was his smile, I would hate to see his sneer.
The burnt floor beneath us shifts under cataclysmic seismic pressures and my feet lose purchase from the wasted earth. Vadlinger IX callously reaches out to envelope me with his many oaken arms and legs on my inevitable return-trip. Then I’m tossed like yesterday’s trash into an ancient midnight-black oblong box. My skull cracks on impact and Sir Homunculus escapes using his tiny malformed legs. I endure a sharp negative 82g free-fall into the devil pit as Vadlinger IX’s heaving belly rhythmically moves in tune to the horrendous cackle of delight, brought on by my timely demise.
In the grey-goose universe of banal bourgeois, I was one of the most maverick of semi-sentient beings. My hallucinogenic and vicarious re-creations of what never was, seemed to pervade my marginally-mundane mind-machinations. For this reason, I was now here: within a Stone Mason’s coffin, with a cracked cranium, and catapulted by Dr. Shagra to beyond the event horizon of the devil pit. There would be no reversal to this fate. No second chances or slow romances neither. I was down for the count and in it for the long haul to do Hades dirty-work.
Sigh….
I wonder if I could leave work a little early tonight. There is a re-run of Friends on the telly that I so yearn to see. I’m certainly not being productive. No sir! The crisp Winchester knot of my string-bean necktie makes me claustrophobic. I see the other minions in their self-contained cubicle prisons strumming their ergonomically-designed keyboards with the enthusiasm of dead fish floating in a tin can of bitter vinegar. The cold light of the neon overhead makes my digits seem like melted bars of Twix. Man, my nails taste horrid! A far cry from chocolate. The faded blankness of my LCD reflects a frenetic wildebeest of a man. Only one place to go to pass the time. Into my midnight universe. I devolve into myself once more.
I see Mama at the end of the tunnel. She is baking brick buns for Papi’s story-telling time. “So son, Mother Mary saw the second coming of Christ as another chance to ask for more Chanukah presents.” I ask Joseph to tell the story right. I wonder if all naughty boys bathe in boiling-hot barbeques at cleansing time. I don’t believe in the apocalypse, really.
I wasn’t a good Christian until I met Rama-Krishna in Rajistan. He said, “Hinduism just ain’t your thing, kiddo, but I can recommend Christ, Jesus or perhaps, Siddhartha Gautama --- Buddhism just might be down your alley. I chose the former for my hallucinogenic chemical fix that I would partake in every Sabbath and on odd numbered leap years. I believe that if we believe hard enough we might accept the skin that we wear when we wake up. Someone has to do the dry-cleaning, why not have God behind the counter when you go to pay for the service. Mine needs extra starch!
……….
What is it I think I see when I stare into the mirror? I stare deep, deep into my optical units and see portly gnomes bouncing merrily on see-saws of ivory. So that’s why I’m so zany! My munchkins are at play when they should be calibrating my internal super-computer. A little olive oil in the ear should get things running right. I stare very intensely once again into the mirror of my sub-consciousness. There I am. At my desk, dreaming up the dreadful machinations of my mind. Doctor Shnagra Vadlinger IX, that good-for-nothing shrink I see every vernal equinox hadn’t ridden me of the ghosts of my past. How I was a religious zealot on the brink of committing heresy in the name of Pope Pontious Pilot’s lovely daughter Beatrix. Or how I greedily reaped the long-grained rice of Master Fu Xong Chu in a moist paddy down by the Yellow river, 3500 years ago, while he was on the pot. I was a sinner if I was anything at all. My soul was still not absolved of the heinous deeds of my past lives….
I return to reality. The reality was that I had had it with ‘work’ for the day. I rise from my hard plastic seat just as the lead weight of the hour hand of the evil clock strikes 7. I slick back my cow-licks with my pasty Twix fingers, not forgetting to give my mutton-chops a resilient tug just to make sure that they were still there (The damn things keep coming unglued from the skin where my real non-existent side-burns should be but aren’t because my forty-something body is still pre-pubescent in nature.). I give my vertebrae a good crack as I stretch and fold like a plastic lawn-chair. Ah! I’m ready to head-on home.
I leave by way of the fire escape --- don’t want anyone observing my exit for fear that I’ll be followed to my brownstone palace. I scamper down the drab-stairwell, rush out the side door of the studio and onto the football field of parked cars. But it’s easy to find my vehicle as it is a jet black Aston Martin with 26” rims, mahogany finishings and Bombay caterpillar silk upholstery. It is as new as a premature baby as I just recently purchased it from my $26 million New York jackpot winnings.
At this point, you might now be wondering why I continue to work in such a dreary and mundane workplace if I have that much money to blow on a gas-guzzling V16 chick-magnet. Well, to tell you the truth, this damn place maintains my creative juices flowing. All day I pretend to do work beneath the cold, harsh light, while instead I imagine the most delightfully hideous scenarios to later write up at home. My mind requires the dismal stimulation of the office environment to be able to come up with my insane concoctions of creativity. I easily locate my car and then enter the custom hearse. The plush leather of the seat seems to melt around my chunky bottom. Ahhh! How nice it is to relax in heated cow-hide on blistery winter days like this! Wisps of snow nuzzle my windshield with their tiny tentacles. What a site before me as I leave the West Nyak lot. There are countless construction workers with there shiny orange helmets and their jack-hammers and what-have-you. Working as ants. Can be easily squashed by alien visitors. Glad I’m not one of them! Yes I am a vile man but I do have my good qualities too. For example, I have the uncanny ability to engross my fellow readers with my twisted lexicon. You see, I received my associate’s degree in funkatronics from Manchester Community College, but I have been a word-smith and book-worm debutant since the age of five. Allow me to demonstrate:
My words are weapons, ejected from my ten digits. And with my cerebral midgets I can make you fidget. Scorch! Incinerate meaning with my dreaming, I’m a bit of a boast. Haunted by the shadows of the musical ghosts playing beautiful notes. On Mandolins of flesh and bone. When no one is home, they invade my dome. On and on I write, slave to the imagination nurtured by day and reproduced at night beneath dim candle light. Words can’t adequately draw a portrait of why I’m so great, but the English language is my best mate to illustrate how my words hold great weight.
Well, that’s enough self-inflation / ego-flatulation for one day, I think. Now to come to terms with the bitter reality of my existence. I’m the true 40-year-old virgin. My boyish demeanor never drew in the ladies. Not yet! But with all my mascara and false fur pasted to my face I’m bound to reel in a few fish. The sea, they say, has enough flounder to feed a five-hundred-pounder----And I only weigh 17 stone. Now that we are describing appearances, I ought to speak a little further of my unique attributes: I have a blind-man’s foresight, a Japanese over-weight’s appetite for sashimi, my bird’s nest-for-hair is like day’s old linguini. I have a pair of left feet, my nose is inverted, my grandmother proclaims that I’m a tad bit perverted. But I don’t see it. I don’t notice my faults, I’m flawless and lawless. I can be lost in my mind for days at a time but I always find my way back. And on my return to the light of day I carry back with me cerebral plunder of wonder.
For example, I was perusing through the archives of CNN.com when I came upon an article about a blind man and his journey into the shadows of his anti-existence. I imagined myself treading the eternal midnight swamps with his leaden boots and there I was, having a visceral experience like none other. Here it is written down so you too can feel what we felt. Warning, don’t let it depress you. It’s only a story after all:
I cling to the delicate hummingbird murmurs of my heart, but my spirit is chained to the throngs of despair. The streams of memory falling from my visual caverns slip away through my fingertips like mercury. I’m terribly afraid to let go. I cannot feel my humanity. The wonderful images of life no longer can be captured. The ends of rainbows – must exist, but impossible for me to reach now. Now they only terminate in darkness. I’m blind to the silver-lining of the moon. Blind, but really blind, not the malady suffered by most who take sight for granted.
The accident yesterday rendered me sightless. When the pick-up truck slammed into the flank of my tiny Ford Focus, the glass ejected from my windshield on impact tore into the flesh of my eyes. They had to amputate (so to speak) taking from me one of my most valued gifts.
Lead-filled eyelids shut under the heavy pull of gravity, no longer resisted by the precious aqueous organs. Uncertain neural vibrations lull me into a deep sleep from which I never awake. Trapped within my subconscious, I wander barefoot over desolate hills of sulfur until I reach a rejected city. The anti-California alleyways are empty, the inspirationless boutiques that once catered to the rich and famous are now lined with mold, the walls choked with hemlock. I enter an abandoned café. Here, the ghosts of my darkest dreams greet me in the false pretense of hope. The colors all around me are drab but at least they are there before me to ‘appreciate.’ I have only seconds to do so before the muddied greens and browns fade to grey. The holographic specters howl my name, and beckon me to follow them out of the store and into a garden of thorns and midnight black roses.
There I stop and rest beside a lightly crusted-over pond. There are fish with no eyes, blind like me. They wriggle and squirm in the fetid water hopelessly in search of sustenance. I reach for a thick patch of weeds nearby and tear them from the soil and throw them into the water. Better than pulling out my hair, I think to myself. A cold and biting gale whips across my flesh penetrating me to the bone marrow. Why can’t my dreams free me from the prison of darkness that I now I live in? I cup my hands to my face and begin to cry.
Something miraculous then occurred. As the warm tears were released, prisms of color became my tears. Each droplet falling from my eyes cast color creating a beautiful backdrop of sight before me. The grass was dressed in deep vermillion tones, the walls of the café that I had left turned a rich brick color. I peered up into the sky and noticed the heavens canvassed in a variety of pastel hues. Fuchsia, aquamarine and a vibrant yellow penetrated looming puffy white clouds. It was wonderful! But the sight was not to last. My tears dried up and as they did so, the vibrant colors gradually became marred in dirty brown. I picked myself up and dragged myself into the tired horizon, never to see anything again.
We now submerge from the darkness and into the great beauty that is my life. I’m Flat-faced Snorbelgorf by the way. I’m Icelandic. I have three loves: the love for my memories, the love I hold for my Vietnamese pot-bellied piggy named, Pigmaleon the Third, and my distinct buckminsterfullerene brain. Made of 64 interwoven sheets of neural carbon nano-tubes, I use my bucky-ball for predicting the future. I acquired it in Laos from a senescent junk-man named Queen Zuzzette. Yes, he was a tranny—maybe still is, I don’t know. Anyhow, these three loves fuel my life like a nitroglycerine-laced enema one would take if one had eaten one-day-too-many spoonfuls of mango chutney marinated Lufthansa falafel. And I had done exactly that, on more than one occasion after being high off of Eucalyptus Vaporub, which I found to be quite effective in alleviating the skin irritation I got from wearing my false mutton-chops. You see, I was a big fan of the Beatles back in ’62, and somewhere along the way of living I got to emulating Ringo Starr. I looked like him (after apply the prosthetic hair pieces) and I could bang out a dandy rhythm on my vintage kettle drums I picked up on the fly on a brief visit to Turks and Caicos in the Caribbean….
Where was I? Ah yes, my bucky-ball. What a magnificent apparatus! Why, without it, I would have never chosen the correct 22 digit combination for the winning lottery ticket. It is simply absurd what my bucky-ball can cook up, prophesy-wise. This unusual instrument also has helped formulate most of the story-lines that have sublimed from my dense brain. It’s like an intellect doppelganger: it augments the potential of my unlimited cognizance while at the same time makes me semi-clairvoyant. Use of my prosthetic brain has negative repercussions, however. Son of Johosephat! It makes its owner a little more pre-pubescent with every wielding. My last go at it, made my voice crack. Son of Johosephat! Now I sound like some poor emphysemic school girl when I first arise from my crib. It takes an hour or so before my voice begins to resemble a cowardly lad asking a girl out for the first time.
Why do I dispose of myself in a crib at sleepy-time? Well, first, it’s a rather cozy nest, I must say. But the real reason I prefer the crib to the socially-acceptable bed is that I have a fear of falling from high places. When I was a wee tod, my mum couldn’t stop me from rolling off of whatever elevated location or furniture I could I climb onto. It was all fun and games until my pet snail, Norgburta, found herself in my trajectory of free-fall and had an untimely demise. I was mortified! Truly dismayed! I shudder the thought of falling on anything even as small as a cicada or grasshopper. I mean, aliens coming to our planet to make mashed-potatoes of construction workers is one thing, but harming creatures with even an iota of intellect is too much!
So what’s my private life like? You would like to know about that, my intrepid reader. But wouldn’t you first like to dive into another dark whirlpool of my mind? This one is about a future that just might actualize if we are not careful. Who knows!
At dusk the darkness creeps across the destitute canvas of the sickly sky like phantom fingers. The dreamers hold their breath as the dying rays of the incensed orb rapidly fade
Time punctuates every throbbing heart in this era of dread and the chaos of imagination rumbles like thunder in every mind. The children in bed cover their heads with sheets of lead. The cancerous x-rays cascade down from the ionosphere as the last light lingers, but their poisonous tentacles fail to penetrate the cold, heavy blankets tightly wrapped around the younglings. At least they can dream. In a brief reprieve from the sea of misery, their thoughts gently roll amongst fluffy marshmallows for clouds and interlacing rainbows floating in a vibrant stretch of blue. The curiosities of the kids rapidly lead them to beyond the golden horizon and into a world diametrically opposite from their own. There is no poverty of happiness in the direction that they venture toward.
During the daytime, it is a different story altogether. A great sadness deeply saturates the skin of the waking populace, trudging along like zombies from shack to factory, factory to shack, over and over again. There is immense poverty here but also sequestered wealth. At the end days of an industrial revolution, the laborers are merely a step beyond an existence of dismal slavery. There is no savings to look forward to. Only mind-numbing repetition day in and day out. The adults are no longer able to dream. The governing party has driven the populace with an iron fist and dark deception is in abundance of what really happened to cause the sudden and irreversible decay of Earth. The planet's manganese core now emits deadly radiation as the ozone dangles like cob-webs against the thick, polluted atmosphere.
The only hope lies in the minds of the children. They are the future cosmonauts. They will guide humanity out of the misery and into a new dawn. But not on this planet. It's a lost cause for poor, wasted Mother Earth. No, the children's scion will find shelter on the quartz-encrusted heloid satellite of Jupiter, called Ganymede. Of course, they would have to come up with a way of transporting the 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of remaining ocean water of Earth to their new home if they hoped to survive. But survive they would.
The years melt into decades, and then the kids who are no longer children, revolt, and overthrow the oppressive reign of tyrannical rule. A century roles on by and now the kids have developed the appropriate technology to escape from the toxic inferno that has become the planet they deem 'wEarthless.' They cast aside their lead-lined blankets and depart in there floating cities to begin their 26 year journey to Jupiter’s largest moon. For the first time, they find themselves as extraterrestrials sleeping in warm beds with soft, soporific pillows and sheets. They resume their dreaming at night. No longer are their dreams fantasies, but instead, they take the form of ideas and hopes that will help them bring in the dawn of a new age.
Home at last! It’s a 45 minute commute from work to my home in Upper Queens, but without my hotrod of a vehicle, I’d have to tack on another 27 minutes to the trip. I have my own parking spot within a small cave within Brooks Park. Just like Batman!
I cooked up that piece one day while I was delivering a profoundly philosophical monologue to Pigmaleon the Third. Piggy listens all so attentively to my ramblings. It’s such a delight having him here by my side after a long hard day of work. I scratch his gristly belly and he makes these little snorts of pleasure that are infectious. I just start snorting alongside him! So who am I really when the weekend roles in? I like to travel, you know that already, but I never venture afar alone. Oh no, I call up my kid brother, Ryykevek and out the door we go. Since coming into wealth, we’ve taking a few exclusive tours to exotic places around the world in the relatively short time since the big winning. We’ve traveled down the Yangtze River by junk boat, traveled via the trans-
Siberian railway, had a French-style picnic in a hot-air balloon above the Magnetic South Pole and we even have had the privilege of taking a tour of the private catacombs half a mile below the Great Pyramid. I tell you, you haven’t seen million dollar dust until you’ve known intimately the private chambers of the ancient dead! So what’s next for Ryyki and me? Well, we are on the short-list for an orbital adventure into outer-space. When extra-planetary tourism kicks off in the next couple of years or so, we’ll be the first to lift off! I can only imagine what sort of bizarre tales I will be able to concoct using my prosthetic cerebrum when it doesn’t have the pull of gravity to impede its neural conductivity!
I have so many stories to share with you, my patient reader, but now the hour is late, and they will have to be told another day. I will leave you for my succulent special unagi and tamago roles that await my rumbling belly. As we Icelanders say in Old Norse, ‘Skal!’
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