Category: The Brain… It Bleeds!

(It’s a kind of flash spectacle, otherwise, perfectly ordinary.)

Melthuse the Hotheaded paced back and forth in his dapper robes, belt tassel swinging ominously (or so he hoped), and sandals squeaking on the marble floor. “Oh my dolorous mushrooms!” he muttered. “Oh my squamush tornadoes! This won’t do, no it won’t do at all!” There were seven thousand three hundred and seventeen turkeys loose in the southernmost courtyard (“The Reclaimed Sump” or “Nackerlee”–no one could quite remember why they were called that). Melthuse had been tasked with somehow transporting all seven thousand plus turkeys into the North Bailey, which had been repurposed as a “turkey holdall” or so Baron Krunscheeplummz had called it. Well, sure, Melthuse was somewhat responsible for the surfeit of turkeys due to an itchy nose during the Calling of Morfrost Veeberfleen, a spell to clean all the windows all at once without any need of ladders. With the nose scratching, instead, Melthuse had inadvertently cast the Palling of Morfroomp Flundersteen, a spell to summon a large number turkeys (Melthuse hadn’t known the exact number until the spell had burned the number into his brain. Not only that, he now knew each turkey by name.) He sighed and then dashed after Yoorp Domildacile, a particularly spry turkey that had only just now hopped down from the astrolabe.

Three weeks later Melthuse was still at it. “Hey, at least it’s a job,” Melthuse thought, as he pounced onto Vicanta Poolflolloper. “Only three thousand six hundred and thirty-three to go!”

(No, they’re not literally men who are elephants.)

The Elephant Men closed the door behind them and took off their blindfolds. There were four of them (not six, as was popularly assumed–to be fair, the last two had retired and just never been replaced). They all shook hands. “Nothing is more important than understanding the truth about the Elephant!” they intoned, almost simultaneously. “Yes,” said one wearing a hat shaped like a brick, “truly this wall will endure forever.” “You’re funny,” said another, whose hand had been replaced with a spear, “I’ve never heard of a wall that’s pointy!” The third man, the one with the snakeskin pants, laughed uproariously and said, “I don’t know how that snake manages to stay so still every time you touch it. You’re lucky it hasn’t poisoned you with its poisonous fangs!” The fourth smirked, “You’re all fools. How you could mistake this thin pancake for all those other things, I have no idea.” The first one said, “Well, time to go on tv and tell people the Truth about the elephant!” The others nodded curtly and turned to leave. They all left out of different doors. On Facebook, two friends (who didn’t know the Elephant Men personally) got in an argument about whether the elephant was a wall or snake. They didn’t seem to care about whether it was a spear or pancake. Go figure.

(This humble offering inspired by http://mixedmentalarts.co/blindmenandtheelephantpoem/)

(No, not that kind of ball, silly.)

Dunbar was annoyed. None of the other monkeys ever seemed to be able to remember his name. They kept calling him “guy” or “dude” or “man”. There was always that awkward silence shortly after he met another monkey for the second or fourth or seventeenth time when their eyes glazed over slightly and Dunbar could tell that they were trying and failing to place his face and trying and failing to recall his name. There was a brief period of time where he tried wearing a name tag, but the sticker and stickum kept getting caught in his fur in an unpleasant way. Oh, and don’t even get him started on the dating scene! Whenever he was down at the banana bar, the female monkeys just seemed to look right on by. If he left for a bit to pee, when he came back, it was like they’d completely forgotten him. Bummer! Well, one day Dunbar heard about this ball happening at the most happening club in all of Monkeytown. Dunbar didn’t get an invite (of course) but he decided to go anyway. He put on his best monkey duds (a white Nehru jacket with ivory buttons–donated by his friend, Harold, an elephant who NEVER forgot), slicked his hair back with some banana oil, and swung off to the ball. He showed up early. In fact, he was the first monkey there! Other monkeys started trickling in and, to Dunbar’s amazement, all the monkeys remembered his name (after reintroducing himself, that is) and chatted and laughed. Dunbar rolled out his sweet new dance moves (the Snake Charmer, the Grey Greasy Limpopo River, and the Greased Monkey) to much hilarity. Dunbar was thrilled. Soon the dance really got hopping. Dunbar was in the middle of getting down with some female monkey (whose name he couldn’t quite recall) when he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was the fire marshal, who scowled, and dragged him off the dance floor. “What?” Dunbar couldn’t hear himself say over the rockin’ tunes. The fire marshal grunted and pointed at the sign above the door: MAXIMUM OCCUPANCY NOT TO EXCEED 150 MONKEYS. The door slammed behind Dunbar. “Aw phooey,” he said.

(Well, there’s that one piebald mutt over there who’s laughing.)

Gregor knew that someone was writing about him. He knew that his every move was being typed out on some vast machine hidden inside an even larger network of machines connected all over the world. No matter what, he couldn’t discern _how_ this was happening. He supposed that surveillance equipment had simply gotten to subtle and refined to detect. It’s not that Gregor could come up with any good reason why someone would by typing up his every move. He supposed there was a dossier about three boxes thick by now with all his comings and goings, his bags of (itemized) groceries from the grocery store, the route his each particular stroll happened to take as he meandered through his neighborhood, and etc, etc, etc. Some days he would try to do things that were especially hard to write up in text form, or so he imagined, like making odd, nonverbal shrieking sounds that (he hoped) would defy typing up in onomatopoeiac fashion. Sometimes he would talk quickly and only while others were talking to make transcribing his dialogue tedious and uncomfortable. Or sometimes he would speak in sentences that he imagined might be difficult to punctuate, by adding odd pauses and emphasizing words in all the wrong places. Yes, Gregor’s most cherished joy was imagining driving his watchers to distraction as they typed furiously away on their devices.

(I’m talking about figs! Sometimes you write about the thing you’re thinking about. Other times, you don’t.)

Caroline Squeed liked Moby Dick and The Old Man and the Sea and Don Quixote and Mrs. Dalloway and the way that Gertrude Stein would just write words over and over and then they’d start to feel like different words after awhile and then, hey weird, she’d wake up with drool on her cheek and those words were still there on the page, but also in her brain… somehow. There was no dissuading Caroline from it. Either she liked a book or she didn’t. Some books were terribly written but delightful. Other books were delightfully written but terrible. Some books were neither here nor there and there was no rhyme or reason why she liked one or not the other. Someone one book by an author would rock her world and then, later, another book by that same author would leave her cold. A 10 cent book down at the old user book store would fill her with glee and the latest from the most popular of authors would leave her with a hollow feeling inside. Reading upside down sometimes helped when a book was not to her taste (not the book upside down, her upside down–the book would be right side up, relative to her position. You know, like an astronaut would think of it). There were a few times when she even read books about readers, but they were mostly pretty dull. There was that one book by Calvino that was about a reader that kind of worked, if you liked that cleverclever sort of book. Still, Caroline wished she could figure out the Rosetta Stone for herself and books. It would certainly make finding new books to read a whole lot easier.

(And other things to ponder while playing Uno or Too Many Monkeys.)

Klorb the Al’Ataxian came to the edge of space. There was nowhere else to go. So he turned around and went all the way back. Somehow, it seemed longer on the return journey. “Must be the constant expansion of the universe, assuming all those astrophysicists were right. Otherwise, it’s just my brain. My old alien brain, playing funny alien tricks on me. That are surprisingly like the alien tricks those funny human brains play. But what do I know? I’m just an alien.” He saw many strange and mysterious and wondrous intergalactic sights. But at a certain point, when you’ve seen 5,000 binary dwarf quasars, you’ve seen them all. But Klorb never got bored (or “borb” as they called it in his language). He credited his upbringing or perhaps it was genetic predisposition towards having a vast capacity to endure sameness. And space sure was mostly the same, with only a few, relatively speaking, bright spots of not-sameness scattered about. “Yup, it’s just a whole lotta nothing,” Klorb said for perhaps the 423,127th time.

(No, this isn’t a computer thing.)

Oh my darling froops and bolallies, come closer and listen to the tale of the bumjous and cloogy woes of Olally Von Clintock. Olally, she of the dandelion eyes and moustache nose, bestrode the mighty velocipede as it whooshed south-southeast down the brumbly country lane. Olally, of the pinwheeblie hat and consternaturlich countenance, brummed a bootful sung and all the flapjous birds spiraled about the sky. For surely, my freeling somebodies, this one’s sluicing wheels spining away in the sun, the puddles spluttering by, the countrariwise onlookers gasping, their mud bespluttered faces crimbling aghast at the speed, the delicious speed, the eyeblinkering speed. Olally Von Clintock vooshed past, darkened spectacles shuttering away the glare of the soonday sun. Yah, no flares gonna blind this one as she futurists past, try to paint this in motion! Can’t. There’s too much. Paint streaks, broad dumps of color, it’s just a child’s fingerpainting spree. And she’s gone. The woes? I lied. There’s none. Cepting all the mournful frolks that cry, weepweepy sob, into their cuticle beers, lampshades, and mountebanks. Yah, these townfrolks are sad. Gonna be crying for a while. Poor slobbers. Wishing they had some speeding time of their very own.

(Where’s the muffin man, I ask you.)

Dolores Keye Smythe-McTaggart Rumpole Doolally (“Dot” to her friends) loved baking pies. Pies of all kinds. Once you’d had a bite of one of her pies, after you got over the initial shock, a shock a bit like being thrown out a bus or tumbling up some stairs, why, you never quite lost that craving for her deliriously delicious pies. No matter the flavor. “I’m a pecan man, through and through,” Dave “Jacuzzi” Johnson crowed one day, before taking a bite of her cherry pie. That man never took another bite of a pecan pie til the day he died; forlorn roaming through diner cherry pie never filled that aching void. Dot’s kitchen always smelled of something or other baking in the oven. Indeed, it seemed like that oven never got turned off. Good luck finding the knob to do that. It did get pretty hot in there and Dot drank copious amounts of iced tea and lemonade with the occasional mint julep when things were getting harried. Kids were always just wandering in and out all the time, hoping for a taste, grabbing a little dough on the way, maybe a pitted cherry or a cooked apple. Some even tried to steal cooked pies, but no one yet had succeeded. Kids would occasionally form gangs of conspirators to try and plan a heist, some plans getting quite convoluted for the 7-12 set. The older ones would just sort of linger and sigh, rolling their eyes, until Dot took pity on them, remembering her own time wandering through adolescent purgatory. Frankly, the adults weren’t much better, but Dot had less sympathy for them. “Man up, Frank!” she’d say, “You’ll get your slice when it’s ready.” No one knew what spurred Dot to bake so frumiously day after day, but she did and she seemed to take some pleasure in it. Funny thing, no one ever saw her take a bite.

(One thing I’ve never seen, like, a whole mess of them bouncing down the road.)

Sometimes there are some ideas and they bounce around, all around. Other times it feels like a stagnant pond and maybe there’s some smelly algae in there, but not much else. Maybe a salamander or something. Sometimes things are quiet. Other times there’s that mysterious hum that won’t go away. Sometimes I can barely keep my eyes open. Other times I can’t put them shut. Sometimes each step in the process feels like wearing cement shoes. Other times it’s smooth sailing and where’d the time go? Sometimes other times. Sometimes things are opposites. Other times they’re not related at all.

(But it came out more like Bigfoot.)

“I’m not saying names have power,” Gregor Von Climpten said, terrifying horn rims perched ominously on his nose, “but let’s put it to a vote, shall we?” The room shuddered in unholy silence. “All in favor, please say ‘Aye’.” Silence there and nothing more*. “All opposed?” Still more silence. Silence like a thick, dark pudding long past its sell-by date. And maybe left out in the sun for a bit too long. “Yes. Yes. I see.” That second yes had been drawn out a little too long for just about anyone’s comfort. There were some who’d quite forgotten when the meeting had started. Others who were no longer sure when it was set to end. At least three glanced mutinously at wristwatches that were no longer there, having been replaced by the silenced phones in their pockets or satchels. “Clive.” Clive shuddered and spilled cold coffee on his tie. “Clive.” Gregor seemed to relish saying that name, the power it invoked over Clive, who had somehow managed to spill more coffee on his tie while mopping up the first. “Would you please read the minutes from the previous meeting?” Clive stammered a bit and knocked his glasses off his nose. As he fumbled for them, he said, “But I just read them–at the start of the meeting, I mean. Like we normally do. Don’t we?” he squeaked at the end. “Clive. Clive, Clive, Clive. I think you’ll find you’re wrong about that.” Gregor smiled, if you could call it that**. Clive read the minutes again.

 

* I know, I know. Geeze, we all sometimes indulge our worst impulses. Sometimes.

** You couldn’t.