"In fanciful stories people can talk to the birds freely , and I wish for the moment I could pretend that this was such a story, and say that Peter replied intelligently to the Never bird; but truth is best, and I want to tell only what really happened." James M. Barrie
I have been talking with Gabriel about how to give away things that bring him back.
As we sat on our upturned buckets, well, actually, I sat on an upturned chamber pot and GO sat on an upturned red-clay flower pot; we watched the progress of the traditional Norwegian-style outhouse that he is building out of bedrock basalt. It came to him as a build-by-number kit.
He had tried the diamond chainsaw – in a great noise dirty water was sprayed all over the place and Altuna, affrighted hid in their root cellar amid Eti’s jars of pickled mushrooms and the poor dog crouched down amid the antique Phelpsian sauerkraut crocks – he sluiced down on a portion of it, an attempt to cut moons and stars and sunflower memes, but the rarity of the saw soon grew dull and he only produced bright sparks that reminded me of Robert Johnson in the evening light. What with his devil at the crossroads deal, so we sat there non-pulsed upon it.
Listen.
His attempts at levity always come out to resemble wayward turkey tracks in the surface of wet concrete.
Gab had resolved to use a sledge hammer. Set there on our pots I suggested plug and feathers, holes drilled maybe with percussive rock driller bits imagined in the machination recesses of the Society of Mammon’s Deep Rock Drillers with their many devices to plumb the depths and core of our alimentary systems for the purposes of god extraction. Our breakfast cereal with blue berries but no almonds and whole milk solid on the tongue an albuminous expansive mortar to break our inner cleavages as if we are in a perpetual movie where Yule Brenner chews, and then chews again, and again on his vodka glass.
For vitamins. Before all of our potable water is stolen and encased, or spoiled. Katherine Hepburn drank water while everyone else got drunk.
When I come to their front gate I say, “What is this smell?”
Gabriel has become enamored of the restoration of historic intangibles and thus for the outhouse museum he sets about bags of garden manure in a pile near the entry. If it is chicken or goat or alpaca curds nobody knows for sure but it sets open to the rain and heat and bacteria and ferments gaily and at a reasonable expenditure of effort for the gain of an agrarian affectation. Altuna sniffs approvingly as Altuna sniffs of all packages brought upon their premises.
Gab resolved to use a sledge hammer and to bash upon the stone with a twenty pound weight of steel.
It was not the most elegant of glanced blows as on strike of the stone the iron flew off in a random quantum of educational theory -- Heideggerian parapets -- and the stone, if anything, crinkled only slightly and let out the upturned nose of a sharp crack of stubborn defiance. It would have been so much easier if it was piles of dirt or sound-salty sand a house or three high, a multi-complex habitat of loam, in various shades of gray to yellow to black and the Scot Gab was let loose with an Irish banjo.
There is nothing as elegant to sing as the craft of a shovel in motion. Unless it be pipes in the iron hold of a ferry. We can chase chickens or a broad goose with that.
But there was another plot beyond this one where we likewise ourselves play-fellows sat upon our smoldered pots, an alternate one of which we dared only hut dream in sleep as it once again escaped our grasp when the kindly daft reader went berserker with their pads and pens, collage and erudite colors, their very soul poured out in a collaborative pantomime of raucous carnival. A caviar feast of hooligans of hooligan.
It was as if artists had been roamed around in shadows of the garden when Eve was all rapt to talk shop with the embrace of muscular serpents. And I do emphatically intend the plural, serpents, muscular. It was not one apple she bit, nibbled, nudged,, there were many to be bobbed and bobbled and Eve bobbed and bobbled them each with a thimble of a ply and kiss like a tagua nut button impressed by Eli Whitney.
But somehow to build of rock a brick house this was not even half the problem, nor a third. To look for counter charms and reverse spells in a thicket can be almost impossible to sniff out (consideration to plastic bags of wet dung set out like votive candles), to handle, identify or expect to work miracles (however infinitesimal). “I was discouraged. I'm not sure I'm up for this at all, I thought." (from the imagined annals of GO, the one now that's a frog and not a nanny dog if one can imagine that).
They, being Gab and Eti, were seemingly stuck. Their surroundings were familiar in a sense, leafy and fecundate but then totally foreign in another. A partial amnesia felt jointly in their little heads, little hands, black eyes and webbed feet was also not helpful.
Such as it is in Bullamanka in general when one is suddenly turned into a small animistic totem in the natural pantheon of small totems, if only our childhoods had started out in warp speed just think where we would be today!
“Ah, If only we had an ally to assist us in getting back." I said to no one and everyone present. Those who were not listening did not hear me.
A hook, of some sort, they need a hook, or a book. A sky book, hook the helium balloon suspended hookah... the bucket of fog, frog lottery, the Cheshire that eventually meets common sense and finds it utterly deplorable, despicable, contrastive piddle on the inlaid marble floor of temple follies.
"Where's Rufus Sandbank when you need him?" said Eti, a puzzled look on her fuzzy brown face, only made to look more foggy with half an acorn crunched to wheat flakes, loaded into her left cheek. "He would set things right; get us back on the wagon train."
360.org
I had no idea what she was talking about. Rufus Sandbank? Wagon train? That couldn't be right, I ruminated while at the same I snatched a deliciously large housefly out of the air with my tongue. I spotted another helplessly nearby, I whispered, "Eti...Watch this......"
But that was them and not us nor they others that was not them or us but altogether different nimnuts.
“You must have your Cups fit and not too wide for the place you would set them on, or else they will not take any hold. Large and wide Cupps are fittest on the thighs, lesser on the armes, and the least for the hands or feete." John Woodall
On top of the Gabriel frog’s head he thought it was a crown but what it turned out to be was a vacuum cup that slowly sucked up his brain matter. And this technique worked well when the first Gabriel looked into the mirror and noticed the double-reflection of an amphibious persona tucked away in the abscess of his brain matter.
The decal on the back window of second Gabriel’s truck is a daddy bird, momma bird, two little birds the twins a boy and a girl, the baby bird with diapers, the dog bird, the kitty cat bird, another kitty cat bird, the parakeet bird, the fish bird with bubbles that rise from the finger, the cockroach bird and the flea bird. All of them signify the same thing, “Hey a**h*le, don’t honk at me!”
Rufus Sandbank told me that after he crashed his helicopter that the cost of his flight insurance went down because the insurance company has determined that 30% of those who crash a helicopter once will never do it again.
To be comminuted... Gab wears a spiffy dress shirt and the red power-tie (THE red power tie) with a belt and no suspenders for his cameo on Meet the Depressed...
