photo credit: nblumhardt

The rabbit magistrates conferred.

At the conclusion of the meeting, they resolved to write a law so convoluted and prolix, that no bunny or fox or human could ever hope to read or comprehend it in their lifetime. The rabbit magistrates would thus be able to make any judgment they wanted in whatever situation and have no-one to answer to. Two thousand bucks were put to work devising the Great Law. Not one of them was allowed to take a break or get fresh air, because that could increase the clarity of the document, something to be avoided at all costs. The bucks survived on sandwiches with lettuce and twigs, and only keystrokes were heard, incessantly.

It wasn’t long, though, until a not even educated young buck called Zirkem started to paw through the Law in his free time. He went through it very slowly and meticulously, concentrating on just one subparagraph spanning 215 pages. It took him two months, and after those two months he dug his way out of his mountain of notes and made an announcement to his doe-eyed compatriots: each bunny, by law, is entitled to a ration of 3300 balloons.

For almost a week, life was perfect. Every morning saw the arrival of truck convoys bringing thousands upon thousands of balloons in every colour imaginable. The world became balloons and there were many surprise encounters whilst playing and living life amongst them, often leading to new families, because that’s the rabbit way. A lively trade started in rare balloons, and all rabbits regardless of responsibilities felt they were living a life of leisure in the comfortable embrace of countless balloons.

Clearly it couldn’t last. It was no fun for the magistrates. They no longer had sway over the populace with all those balloons obscuring the bunnies’ whereabouts and activities. They called upon exception f to the subparagraph covering the ration of balloons, which was not included in or referred to from the subparagraph, but included in a different chapter and referring back to it. The exception supposedly stated that only bunnies who were diagnosed with balloon deficiency could own balloons. The bunnies, tearful about losing their precious balloons, called upon Zirkem to confirm the tenor of the exception.

Zirkem started to study the Law once more, but gave up after just one page. Instead he paid a visit to his doctor and found him willing to diagnose every single bunny with balloon deficiency who visited his office. And so the Great Queue started.

A day later the magistrates announced a 26 layers deep subparagraph of the initial subparagraph which states that balloon deficiency, being contagious, is to be eradicated by extracting the brains from every affected bunny and anyone who has ever come in contact with them. The bunny doctors refused to abide by this law. The magistrates announced all doctors were to be forced. The bunny police refused. The magistrates announced police were to do their duty or receive no lettuce whatsoever. The bunny farmers snuck them lettuce. The magistrates announced that a footnote of the penultimate paragraph states that rabbit magistrates, in case of anarchy, are allowed to live a life of outrageous excess on an island of their choosing.

And so they did. The rabbit magistrates lived happily ever after.

The bunny populace, on the other hand, lived a life of simple pleasures in their balloon world. It lasted almost a week. Then a particular kindle of rabbits mischievously popped a few balloons and it became all the rage to be a Popper. When all the ground was covered in the deflated remains of once beautiful balloons, it was impossible to grow or find food. Gradually all bunnies died unspeakably horrific deaths, with only the most wicked cannibals surviving for any significant amount of time. Blood and entrails and balls of fluff and torn plastic littered the landscape.

photo credit: trec_lit

It had no yolk or albumen, just an inflatable swimming pool and plastic books.

I learned to stack a plastic book on another plastic book. This made a tower, and it was more useful than plastic books.
I learned to deflate the swimming pool. This made a moist parachute, and it was more useful than a swimming pool.
Then I climbed up the tower and jumped off wearing a moist parachute. This made me cry. It wasn’t pleasant.

Then an egg appeared in my egg.

I told the new egg to disappear.
It refused.
I told it again.
It refused again.
I told it to stop refusing.
It refused.

I put the new egg in the tower.
I made a balloon out of the parachute.
I blew up the balloon until it blew up.

With the tower and the egg and the balloon blown up, there was nothing left but me. I felt considerably worse off.

Eventually, 8 years later, a bounty hunter broke me out of my egg. He was disappointed to see me.
“Sorry”, he said, “Wrong egg.”

In exchange for orange juice, I helped him look for the right egg. He had some quality orange juice to give away.

Henry M. loves dnL. He loves it so very much that when he learned the product was going to be discontinued, he bought all the remaining stock in his town’s supermarkets and stored it in a cupboard, where his camping equipment used to be (and a dead bird, which upset Henry M., as it was still alive when he last took out his camping gear a year or two previous).

The bird in question:

As an aside, did you know dead birds don’t really smell?

Dead birds dry up quickly, and stay remarkably intact when kept in a cool and dry cupboard in a house kept aggressively free from flies (Henry M. told passionate stories about his legal war against insects).

Every month, Henry M. would treat himself to one of the bottles of dnL.

This is not our Henry M:

It’s a different Henry M. instead. To get back on the subject of cupboards, Henry M. once hid inside his dnL storage cupboard. It was a retreat for him, a place of escape and control and feeling at home. Much like so:

Henry M. had depleted 2 crates of dnL by the time he hid in the cupboard, according to his rule of one bottle per month plus a fair share of them due to a losing streak of self-discipline vs. addiction. With those 2 crates gone, he could fold himself into the space now available to him in the cupboard, and hid there for what he described as “half the freakin’ day”, in near complete darkness. In the cupboard Henry considered his wealth of dnL. He considered the comfort of the cupboard, and he considered that he should really learn to control himself (but wasn’t it made alright, he asked me, because of the expiration dates and the danger of the flavour changing afterwards? He better deplete them before that happens, right? I didn’t know what to tell him.)

Henry M. really enjoyed that sojourn into cupboardness. He talked about it at length with me, the only person he seemed to consider a friend. And apparently he did go back into the cupboard, and apparently when he wanted to get out again… he couldn’t. He had been able to fold himself into the cupboard, but seems to have found great difficulty in unfolding himself. This is where I come in. I received a text message:

A fair enough request, except that Henry lives in the United States whereas I live in England. We do now and we did then. This I considered a reasonable obstacle to helping Henry out, so I declined, implicitely, by never showing up.

This is his house in Vancouver, WA (not to be confused with Vancouver, BC in Canada):

He’s in the house with the basketball court out back. Might actually still be in the cupboard. Would that be possible? I never did hear of him again. Let me give Henry a call. Or actually, international rates are pretty steep.

“Rest assured there is no deeper than rock bottom”, said Professor Arkengaard. And Professor Arkengaard is at all times mistaken, which is a fine gauge as to the veracity of statements about the world. Whatever Professor Arkengaard says, the opposite is probably true.

To illustrate his mistake, rock bottom is the sub-stratum of the sea bottom, the layer below the sand. And you can in fact go deeper than that layer. Lower yet you will find the Earth’s crust, the upper mantle, the mantle, outer core, and inner core. So one can in fact go deeper than rock bottom. An alcoholic mistreating his wife is still able to drop their child from the fourth floor. This is a very real possibility. A politician dumping his country in an abyss can still be re-elected. You can always go deeper still.

Under the Earth’s crust we find nigh unfathomably thick layers of rock with the taste of magnesium. An uncomfortable location in which an invulnerable person could dig deeper and deeper, towards the core of the Earth, and the core of that core, until the perfect middle has been found where deeper can only mean one thing: back to the surface. In that sense, to sink deeper is to lift oneself up, though in the meantime experiencing a hellish uninhabitability. Perhaps it would be better to make a standing rotation when things get heated. Rock bottom is not a place you want to pass.

“Professor Arkengaard, how can one know the world? How can we step outside our worldly bondage to see with true objectivity what it is we are part of?”
“Vandal! The world is round and that is all your very small heart needs to know.”
“But the world is oblate and I need to know more.”
“Then go and find out what it is you need to find out. Enter the world, enter the books. Gather experiences. Talk to people, seek the revelation, study and reason and imagine. Waste all that time, to return in 30 years as a pitiful man made modest, knowledge having brought you no further to certainty of anything, which is to say, you’d be back at square one.

And I did go in search for thirty years. And I did find everything and I did return with nothing. But Professor Arkengaard, who is never right (which is a fine gauge as to the veracity of statements about the world), was wrong. Because the nothing with which I had started was an entirely different nothing from that with which I returned.

Synopses is the plural of synopsis, in case you were wondering. Read downwards (while reading left to right) if you’re interested in how badly a blogger can fail when imagining the plot of a romantic drama film.

1. Beaches of Venice

A man is the last guest of a Venetian restaurant before closing time, alone with a demure but cute waitress. Despite her usual avoidance of being friendly with customers, she finds herself chatting happily with this debonair crooked-nosed man. Then the man’s head explodes and strings of his brain end up in her hair. She requires a long time cleaning it out, all the while convincing herself it is pasta sauce.

2. Blame It On My Youth

A 9-year-old girl falls in love with Santa. She imagines marrying him, keeping the elves producing and being called Mrs. Clause. When she goes to meet Santa at her shopping centre, she brings him a Thermos of hot chocolate that she made herself and tells him that she thinks he needs a younger, sprightlier Mrs Clause. Santa replies that she would make an excellent Mrs Clause and is subsequently taken away by security. Then his head explodes and all the kids cry. Except for the girl. She stares, frozen in incomprehension.

3. Against The Stream

A happy couple drifts off into the open sea with their small sailing boat, having at no point had any clue how to sail. They are unable to make it to land or contact anyone, and we see a truly gripping dynamic develop between the couple as they explore the good and the bad of their relationship among the ever worsening conditions in which they struggle to survive, without the story at any point going overboard with insincere melodrama. Then the man’s head explodes. The woman is saved days later, with an enormous appetite for mint cake and potatoes with guacamole.

4. Featureless

A man with the job of changing the film reels in a cinema watches from the projector booth as the same woman watches the same unpopular film over and over again for days, often with hardly any other patrons. He never catches her face, though. Then one night the woman is back and no other seats are taken. He decides not to play the reel at all. After a few minutes of pure cinematic tension, the woman looks up at the projector booth. The man’s head explodes all over the booth window. The woman successfully reclaims the ticket price.

5. Soddin’ Cows, They Don’t Know Left From Right

Two cows bump into each other. Their eyes meet and intrabovine love awakens, while the farmer watches. Then his head explodes. It is all very alarming.

One of the most insightful and amatory questions to ask a girl when on a first date with her, aside from “what’s your cup size?” and “do you shave in a pattern?” is: “what’s your absorbency rating?”

In the UK the range of absorbency (of menstrual fluid by tampons) is as follows: Lite (light flow) 6g and under / Regular (light to medium flow) 6-9g / Super (medium to heavy flow) 9-12g / Super plus (heavy flow) 12-15g / Super plus extra (very heavy flow) 15-18g

I tried this question during a lovely first date in an otherwise underwhelming restaurant:

“What’s your absorbency rating?”
“My absorbency rating?”
“Hm-hm. Yeah. What kind of tampon do you need? Two drops? Four drops?”
“Oh, five drops.”
“Really?
“Hm-hm.”
“You’ve got a nice free flow? Plenty of blood and uteral inner lining coming out?”
“Pretty much. It’s actually 15 grams. On a normal day.”
“Grams. That’s odd. You’d think they’d measure blood in centilitres or something. Or is it the weight of a tampon after use?”
“It’s not just blood, that’s why.”
“Oh, right. Of course.”
“There’s chunks.”
“Right, right. But wait, how do you know it’s 15 grams? Did you measure it? Like, catch it in a measuring cup?”
“Yeah, I squatted over a measuring cup all day. No, of course not. It’s not like it all comes out in one go.”
“How did you do it?”
“Well, first I tried to wring it out of the tampons after I felt something was happening. Can you imagine? Really bad idea. Messy. Lost most of it. Stupid, stupid idea. But then I used menstrual cups. Brilliant. Poured it out into a measuring cup, then weighed the measuring cup on my kitchen scale minus what it weighed without the fluid. 15 grams. And of course washed it out later before putting flour and sugar in it when making pumpkin pie. In the measuring cup, I mean. Not my vagina.”
“Oh, I got that.”
“And since you’re interested, I have a fun story to tell.”
“Go ahead.”
“I once traced a rather bad smell back to my vagina.”
“Your vagina smelled?”
“Yeah, quite badly. The kind of smell where flies drop dead.”
“There were flies?”
“No! It’s a figure of speech, I guess. If there’d been flies near, they’d have dropped dead. From the smell.”
“Right, right.”
“So anyway, I thoroughly wash my vagina. Thoroughly. I used several drenched cloths, vaginal soap, normal soap… I was almost reaching for the dishwashing liquid and drain cleaner.”
“Drain cleaner…”
“And I just can’t get rid of the smell for more than a few minutes. So eventually I let myself be coaxed into seeing a doctor.”
“Who coaxed you?”
“My then-boyfriend.”
“Is this incident why you broke up?”
“No, that was because of an unrelated depilatory incident. I liked grooming him, but one time he freaked out about me having gotten too enthusiastic. I think he was overreacting, and so do my friends, but that’s his problem.”
“Yeah, and the vagina smell?”
“Oh, the doctor found an old tampon.”
“Found… in you?”
“Where else? Yes, in me. Nestled pretty snugly. Except it was falling apart. I don’t know how I hadn’t noticed that. But I’m all clean now. As clean as can be. Although I do still lift guys up to my face after they’ve been below for a few seconds, to examine their expression. If there’s even the fadest hint of disgust I can’t go through with it. But if he genuinely looks like he’s enjoying it down there, I’ll come like a crazy hag.”
“Wow.”
“That’s just what it’s like to be a woman.”

It was a great conversation starter, and the date slowed down after we’d stopped talking about it. So I returned to the subject one more time when our main courses arrived:

“Have you ever heard of the song Gorging On Menstrual Chunks by the band Gutrot?”

“No.”
“Taste the waste?”
“No.”
“Shame.”

Skin glowing with heat on a Summer beach. It made her doze off. It made me doze off.

I awoke because she was punching me.
“What is it?”
“Stop shaking the balloons!”
“What balloons?”
“I see the pizza. It’s in the wall.”

Of course she was dreaming. I managed several seconds of pondering about what kind of story could involve shaking balloons and pizza hidden in a wall. Then I was distracted by other thoughts.

I had a melancholy thought about tea pots. We were so comfortable on this beach, but we had no knowledge of the future. There was no telling what might happen. Trembling with apprehension I thought of the possibility of beings from another planet showing up, hovering above the beach in a trendy spaceship, and bringing a tea pot. They might show us a tea pot, and smile viciously because their tea pot is so much more superior to any of our tea pots. Bloody expletive! I scanned the sky with a mind filled with worry and distress.

No, our tea pots are quite alright, aren’t they? I mean, it’s still okay to have our tea pots, right? I think so. I think it’s still pretty okay to have our tea pots. I think it’s still pretty okay.

He played the harmonica above his plate, beans in a muddy sauce, remembering his days playing with Buddy Guy. He controlled the vibrations of air in this room, his canvas. The air which he played spun a melody of traversing a valley. In thoughts and in tune he followed the river therein. The river brought him back again to the table, empty save for a plate.

Gus, sitting half-dazed on the ground in a corner of the same room, drummed a beat on the palm of his hand. “Why don’t you send me a postcard, baby…” he started singing. “A postcard, with a… dancing panda bear, or something. This part ain’t finished. But it ends like this…”

The phone rang. The room was no longer filled with: harmonica playing, bean eating, Gus’s singing or hand clapping. The phone rang and Junior let it ring. Says Gus: “Hey man.”

“Hey man. Who do you think is ringing up your phone?”
“Your girl.”
“Nah, she won’t talk to me until I get a promotion. Pick up the phone, man.”

Junior shrugged and started to play his harmonica, the notes to a song he wrote about working in the orchard in the rain, alone in a haze of dark and wet. The scents, the sound. Oceans of time. Just a guy in an orchard, cold and wet and busy and content.

photo credit: uli harder

The arms of those tall squidly humans are flailing about; they occasionally hit the bongo. The liquid turns to blue, does this indicate poison or the elixir of life?

Here follows the full story. Sprawl on the sofa accompanied by a fruity beverage.

The forest path led to an open air theatre. There was a truck parked there, at the side of the path. There were tools on the truck’s hindquarters, and a toaster. What the toaster was doing there among the screwdrivers, saws, wrenches and otherwise didn’t become clear until after a ponytailed woman came walking up from behind the truck. She had a cap on and a flannel shirt, covered with mud and leaves and light-coloured goo.

“Everything alright?” I asked.

“Oh, Jesus! Go away.”

“What happened?”

“I smeared pudding on myself.”

She was lying, it occurred to me. She was probably disinclined to explain herself to a creepy guy just showing up on a quiet forest path carrying a dead cat with a sign around its neck (It said “I can has cheezeburger?”. I found it like that.)

“I’ll be out of your face, but if I can just… I couldn’t help but notice you have a toaster on your truck.”

photo credit: massdistraction

“Yes, how else would you warm up grain products?”

Good point. I forgot what I answered to that question. All I remember is a dog came running out of the forest and went straight for this flannel lady, straddling her leg while she hugged his face and confided things to him.

That reminded me of an encounter with a cow. I didn’t want to forget the experience, so I told the woman it.

“You know, I saw a cow this morning. It was alive but motionless. That is a great thing about cows, when you don’t have to watch them all the time because they won’t do anything crazy or wild. They can’t hide anything, since they’re naked, and have no interest in hurting you. Except if you scare them with a dog, in which case they’ll trample you to death. You should probably be careful with that. I have a great understanding with cows. I just nod to them, as if to say “Howdy cow, everything grass?” It’s a particularly dumb thing to say, but that came out this morning when I met the cow and I don’t make excuses for myself or hide the truth. I said that. And so… he answered “Meh.” That’s a good way to converse with a cow. That’s all you need. You feel content having inquired after a cow’s state of mind and the cow has shared something with you. It’s so much better than if cows were wild, that would be terrible if dancing cows were real. They might step on your foot or trample a drawing you made that you had just put down for a second, assuming it would be safe on the ground. There aren’t many places in nature to put stuff on or in for safekeeping. That’s one thing that’s interesting about nature.”

She said: “Yes, and I love Britney Spears. HUGE fan. You should look into her.”

I didn’t quite understand why she would bring it up, or whether she was making fun of me.

I said: “Alright, that’s fine. An ironic criticism on the exploitation of our psyche by the marketing rationale in which the images and interests of our mental landscape are formed by the invention and direction of iconic puppets and…”

“No. No, I just really like Britney Spears. Her songs are edgy and catchy.”

This caught me off guard. Who says such a thing? Especially a flannel-wearing woman?

“Besides”, she said, “You’re talking in circles.”

“Do the circles intersect?”

“Can I just say you’re annoying me? I’ve got to drive this truck to the garage.”

“Are you bothered by the limited range of things you can have as a pet?”

“I hate you.”

“You can tie a string to just about anything and take it for a walk.”

Well, that was something she agreed on, at least. Although she did this thing whereby she deliberately screwed up her eyes all higgledy-piggledy, like she was cross-eyed. Then she asked whether I wanted to watch House MD at her friend’s place. I answered that I didn’t, but when she got in the truck she still opened the door for me and told me to get in already. I wasn’t too at ease with some of the sharp tools scattered around her truck, and wondered how badly it would embarrass my family if I was messed up by a flannel-shirted woman, turned into chunky bits by a woman who really adores Britney Spears. Or so she says. With all this pondering we had already arrived at her friend’s place. It was a nice sort of stone/wood/marble place (basically a house made out of several materials) not far from the forest. It looked worn by time, but that gave it a cosy and authentic feel. There was also another dog. It too looked beaten up.

photo credit: Alexis D.

After the necessary awkward introductions the woman’s friend seemed not too surprised or bothered that I had been brought along. The friend’s name was Eileen. She wanted to watch a film about French farmers getting up to no good. I liked the beginning where someone tried to grow a plant. I didn’t have the heart to ask Ms. Flannel for her name.

We did watch House after all. It was the House episode where a main character dies (I won’t say who). It was over before I knew it, and the hostess offered crunchy biscuits with tomato and some type of cream sauce. When she had been making it in the kitchen Ms. Flannel had joined her and I had overheard them saying: “He’s a smart enough kid, but you know how smart guys are the worst idiots.” I wondered if that was about me.

When House was over, Ms Flannel said: “Just so you know, there isn’t going to be any weird lesbian stuff or anything, alright?”

“What?”

“We’re not going to make out with each other or seduce you. You need to be aware of that.”

“What?”

I was allowed to stay the night and I had nothing to get back to, so I stayed. A night of many dreams left not a trace of them, not a nebulous image, when in the morning the croissants were aglow, the jam was sweet and the oranges transmutated happily into enlivening juice. Outside we inhaled a sky, fresh on the respiratory tracks, a morning in the mind. Truly a different state of affairs from ramblings about cows and fruit. There was a hill at the back of the house, with wild overgrowth, a place to look out across the expanse, and we climbed towards it.

In one version of this tale we’re in awe of the view, a few lights still on in the town in the distance, we’re making merry about getting lost among little streams and juniper bushes and open areas of soft sand and sparse islands of trees. In a different version I’m arguing with the women about the aquarium. They were of the opinion we should go there, have coffee and then go look at the fish, and then have some more coffee. I like fish, but not coffee. I suggested I have tea myself, but they were not to be persuaded; all three of us should have coffee in their opinion or it wouldn’t be right.

This morning, as said, the croissants are aglow, the jam is sweet, the butter salty and the oranges fresh. We inhale a new sky, as said, fresh of each other and the morning. The night left no nebulous traces, as mentioned before, but was dormant in our mind. There is naught but the table and the mountain, the plateaus around which we wander.

Lisa, turned out to be Ms. Flannel’s name. Later, when we were at the aquarium after all, I said: “Lisa, your eye is dangling from your bag.” Her eyelashes hung like oil-drenched wings from her handbag. A drop of mascara attempted the jump and regretfully splashed apart on the floor. With a last exertion it wrote ‘help’, but too small to be noticed by anyone.

“What do you mean by that?” she replied to my initial comment about her dangling eye, and pinched her empty eye sockets. A man at a piano added a D minor. Genius. This same man would later blow my mind by telling me that it is a necessary fact that at some point it has been the Winter Solstice in 147 AD, and that somewhere on that very day it must have been half 1 in the afternoon, and that sheep already existed. Who knows what that could have meant on that day. And that was the genius of this man. He could, with a single tone, invoke an entire world and let your mind fill it up.

Lisa was still staring at me.

I remember she asked me something, but what was it?

“I said, what the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Of the mist that I can see scrambling up from the water, of that mist I know this: it won’t pass through the walls. Mist cannot do that. But of myself I do not know if walls can keep me here. I don’t remember why I said that Lisa’s eyeball was dangling from her bag. Most female apparitions in this place carry a bag in one form or another, but not Lisa. Lisa never used one. She did have an iguana as a pet. And a healthy pair of green eyes. But no handbag.

“It was just nonsense, Lisa. Who knows that someday I might say something of value, so I’m in the habit of just saying everything.”

She looked at me searchingly and then brushed past me, up the stairs to the fish nursery.

Suddenly it occurs to me that the pianist probably wasn’t Russian. Why had I assumed he was Russian, or even a pianist? I decide to go to the toilets, behind the stairs. Thank goodness, no-one is there. From my backpack I take two of those giant orange witches hats. Those giant orange pawns, and striped tape. I bar the toilet for ‘construction work’ and go into a stall with The brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky.

photo credit: clstal

Before I’ve finished reading the slogans and conversations on the stall door, twenty minutes have already passed and I decide not to open the book. Packing the cones back in my backpack, I feel a hand on my shoulder. Another hand bounces by across the floor and comes to a screeching halt. A flake of nail polish attempts the jump and regretfully lands on its back on the floor. With a last exertion I whisper ‘help, I’m stuck in a reality that just keeps going’.

Ever danced with the devil by the moonlight?

Lucifer walks the beach of Galway

The track of a cloven-hooved bi-ped

Arrived just in time for New Year

Rents an apartment, hires Chinese

Dusk sets in, Lucifer stares outside

The sea is mildly wild, quietly upset

Lucifer tosses away the cold rice

Wanders out to a hellish nightclub

Takes a young girl back to his place

Drives away the depression of it all

In the morning locks the bathroom

To file his horns and pee the poison.