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Mon - October 18, 2004CHAPTER 33Three years have passed since the author last
tapped the Enter key to input information toward the bleak conclusion of this
grim history. There has not been much to write about. No news is good news. The
weather remains pretty much the same, despite all else has gone wrong with
Materex.
There are currently seven children in and around the Palace, one of whom can already count to eight. Just a few minutes ago, in fact, little Wanda “Cookie” Trout bounced through the door and hopped onto Bambina’s lap saying: “Hi. Anybody sitting here.” “Well, hello there,” Bambina bubbled, poking her hands under Cookie’s tiny arms and tossing her into the air like a kitten, “You’re looking more like your father everyday.” “Really?” asked Cookie, poking Bambina in the nose with her fat little fist. *** Posted at 03:40 PM Imagine it all
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Sun - October 10, 2004CHAPTER 32The Gizmo had a tail like a tadpole. An inch and a
half of dull gray wire dangled from one bulbous end of the bloody latex pinto
bean, a filament so thin and pliable the author at first mistook it for a strand
from his diminishing forelock.
“What the fuck is going on here?” the author thought, instinctively reaching up to stroke his troubled forehead. But it only thudded its presence into his brain at the slap of his heady hand, and the plastic Gizmo bean skittered across the octagonal ceramic tile. His hand recoiled as if it had touched a lit stove. He discovered his hand was covered with blood. “God,” he thought, “I’ve finally gone and done it,” staggering to his feet. He teetered in front of the mirror, still quite queasy, actually quite drunk, rocking unsteadily like the sand-weighted inflatable clown in front of the door to the restroom down the hall from the Life Protector’s office. It had a sign around its neck that said: Please
Don’t Hit
Me
I Can’t Feel Anything Posted at 03:41 PM Imagine it all
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Fri - October 8, 2004CHAPTER 31Things are a mess, and it’s no use trying to
hide. Earlier today, Wanda Japan burst in on the author as he soaked in his tub.
“You worthless toad!” she screamed as she kicked open the
door.
“Wanda Japan!?” the author sputtered, his hands groping to cover his shriveled pecker beneath the crystal-clear water. “This is no time for your stupid puns,” Wanda huffed, slamming down the john lid and taking a seat. The author had no idea what Wanda was snarling about. His pun was unintentional, if indeed he had made one. The baby Japan was already noticeable. Soon the Palace would see what is fact and fiction when it comes to this incredible conception. “I just remembered something about Paul Bare,” Wanda began. But then she gasped: “Oh my God! Why have you taken off your mask?” And she bolted from the room. *** Posted at 03:42 PM Imagine it all
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Mon - October 4, 2004CHAPTER 30One day while Wayne sat at the bar not talking to
anybody, while the bar gorged and disgorged, Wanda came in, slid the paper out
from under Wayne’s slovenly arm, and began working the crossword.
“You through with the paper asshole?” she said,
politely.
“Not really,” Wayne said. “Christ,” Wanda mumbled and finished the puzzle in 286 seconds, well off her regular time. She had the hardest time figuring out that 43 down, “A pugilistic revolt?” was “THEBOXERREBELLION.” Posted at 03:43 PM Imagine it all
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Mon - September 27, 2004CHAPTER 29Wayne was the kind of guy who stumbled across Idi
Amin removing connective tissue from the abdomen of Ima Cornhusk in the office
of the Palace Bi-Lo.
“Hi,” he said, taking a seat on the late manager’s desk, “Anybody sitting here?” “We are a supremely gifted cook,” said Idi Amin, looking up from his business briefly, “She will be quite tasty. In Uganda, our American cooks would prepare this meal, but here we travel cheerlessly in a land were food is manufac-tured and no one knows how to cook. We must feed and fend for ourselves as best we can. And we can do kingly. Just you wait and see.” “Really?” asked Wayne. A queer riffle sparkled in the eyes of Field Marshal and President for Life Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, and Commander-In-Chief of the Ugandan Armed Forces. His eyebrows crinkling, Idi arose from Ima’s cool cadaver, walked over to where Wayne was sitting, waved his open palm in front of his eyes, and asked: “You are Wayne, are you not? The insurance salesman?” Posted at 03:44 PM Imagine it all
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Wed - September 22, 2004CHAPTER 28The discomfort one experiences from not knowing
exactly where anything is in the Palace differs greatly from the disorientation
which arises when one confronts the Life Protector’s portrait in the Civic
Auditorium. That portrait achieves its disquieting impact through the
artist’s precise and intentional displacement of several disparate
elements. Not knowing who or why or where one is…well, that’s not
quite the same.
This grim history was to be supplemented by a pocket atlas. The reader would thus be able to locate the Palace landmarks mentioned along the way as easily as preglacial travellers could make their way from Pittsboro, North Carolina, to Boring, Oregon—or vice versa—without prior knowledge of either place. Yet, how could anyone have foreseen the unfortunate victualization of Ollie Oxenfree? Surely, the reader never expected the Palace’s cartographer to be into tete de femme farcies by Idi Amin. Ollie himself expressed awesome surprise as preparation began. Posted at 03:45 PM Imagine it all
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Fri - September 17, 2004CHAPTER 27One day while the bar expanded and contracted,
during one of the expanded periods, Wayne came in and leaned his elbow against
the counter beside the
author.
“Working again, huh?” Wayne smirked, “Some people work all the time.” “It’s nothing,” the author replied, “Just making some notes,” he said, suppressing his true alarm. “You can’t fool me,” Wayne said. “I know work when I see it. I wasn’t born yesterday. How much are you getting paid for this?” he asked slyly, patting the author’s pad while checking to see his tie-tack was jabbed precisely in the middle of his chest in a level-headed way. The tie-tack looked like this: WET
Posted at 03:46 PM Imagine it all
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Thu - September 16, 2004CHAPTER 26The vent pipe from the furnace ran up through the
back of Wayne’s bedroom closet, and it was August 20th before Black
Jackrack managed to peel back the flashing far enough to claw his way out of the
empty house and into the crawlspace below. There he discovered six or seven
surrogate Jack E. Blacks frozen into a thick
bathmat.
“Wacka wacka,” Jack said, slapping one of the stiff dead felines with his left paw, “Wacka wacka,” before turning away from his freeze-dried impostors and wandered toward the opening beneath the back steps. Two and a half to three feet of senseless snow piled up in the pasture beyond, while egg-size flakes continued to fall. “Wacka wacka?” Black Jack asked, paused briefly at the indeterminate threshold between the frosty crawlspace and the blast-frozen wasteland beyond, and briskly skipped out with a fart into the dead white world. *** Posted at 03:47 PM Imagine it all
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Tue - September 7, 2004CHAPTER 25While Dewitt Madison was known as Deadeye, Dias the
Mechanic was noted for three
things:
Dias had rolled three identical games of backgammon in succession, travelling around the board unmolested from start to finish without wasting a single face of the dice. He had once beaten Paul Bare in one turn with the miraculous assistance of doubles on doubles, and Paul never got to roll the dice at all. Posted at 03:48 PM Imagine it all
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Sat - September 4, 2004CHAPTER 24Isolde was killed in Germany by a meteorite the
size of a pinto bean.
Three months after the death of Lickety-Split, she had gone to the PX and used her dependent ID card to purchase two gross of assorted pot pies. Through a typically insane error in paperwork, Wayne had become a Spec 4 in the reserves, despite his dishonorable discharge. Isolde loved Swanson’s pot pies. No one knows why. She had badgered her parents unmercifully about the merits of these tasty and tiny stew-filled pastries, but after three months of her best browbeating she hadn’t managed to get them to buy (much less taste) one. So Isolde had finally taken matters into her own hands, and now, arriving home with the trunk crammed with dinner pies, Isolde reminded her parents of their favorite saying: Waste not want not. She laughed as she said it, knowing now they’d be forced to try this good new food, because that’s the American Way. Posted at 03:49 PM Imagine it all
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Thu - August 5, 2004CHAPTER 21Wayne was the kind of guy whose wife went home to
see her parents every weekend. The astute reader has not forgotten
Isolde’s parents lived in West Germany. Yet when Mr. and Mrs. Trout
finally made it to Cateechee where Wayne had taken a job selling encyclopedias,
Isolde still insisted on flying to Frankfort every Friday afternoon, arriving
back at Greenville-Spartanburg on Monday morning. Since Wayne’s sales
territory covered Lexington, Union, Richland, and Kershaw counties, he was gone
from Sunday afternoon to Friday evening. Hence, he and Isolde rarely saw each
other.
The fact is Wayne and Isolde were the kind of couple who never spent an entire night together in their five years of marriage. ***
Posted at 10:54 AM Imagine it all
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Thu - July 29, 2004CHAPTER 23Imagine the author’s surprise when
he discovered that 30 days had passed since last he worked on this grim history.
He has been playing backgammon, doing crosswords and staying out of the bar.
This regimen was prescribed by Materex. It was hoped the author could be
rehabilitated, and he did confess to a sense of well-being he couldn’t
remember having felt since earning his Life-Saving Merit Badge to become an
Eagle Scout.
He worked as the evening lifeguard at the Parkside Y, and one night, feeling alive and invincible, he lied about his age and enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. Sixteen weeks later, he lay motionless in an intensive care unit in the Philippines, recovering from eight rounds of M-60 machine-gun fire, the depersonalization of two fragmentation grenades, and a savage bayonetting which commenced at his groin and was raked up through his breastbone on an unnamed hill in the endless Vietnamese night. Although he never knew it, his bed formed the exact geographic center of a complex of 162 clapboard wards identical to his. The overly suspicious reader may choose to view these facts as metaphors, but accounts of the young man’s struggle to regain marginal utility and self-esteem were routine two decades before the ice age slammed in. Few experts had given him a liver’s chance in Kampala of ever sitting up straight in a wheelchair, but there he was, less than three years back in the States, fresh from 33 innovative surgical procedures at the North Carolina Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill, slouching slowly across Bowman Field on his crutches toward a class in political science. Posted at 03:49 PM Imagine it all
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Tue - July 27, 2004CHAPTER 20The day Wayne Trout finally regained consciousness
in the Palace intensive care unit following his seizure in the Heart of Materex,
the Life Protector was at his side. “Ah, Mr. Trout,” he said,
“So nice to have you with us again.”
All Wayne could blubber was: “Jack would have
loved this.”
***
Posted at 10:55 AM Imagine it all
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Sun - July 25, 2004CHAPTER 22Backgammon does not have its origin in the lengthy
philosophic discussion between Frater Breathe and Brother Cowers during the
final retreat of the last crusade (hence the name backgammon, or “game for
the long road back”), because Materex says
so.
Still, one of the oldest backgammon boards in Europe dates from the middle ages and was tested during the Inquisition with such success that the modern polygraph is patterned upon that original backgammon design. At one time, the privilege of moving first was decided when he-who-knew-which-stone-was-where held his clenched fists before his opponent, and he-who-had-only-luck had to choose between hands. If he-who-had-only-luck chose the white stone, he won the right to move first, but if he chose the black stone, well… Posted at 03:50 PM Imagine it all
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Thu - July 22, 2004CHAPTER 19Earlier in the day, the author suffered a nervous
breakdown, but Materex says it’s nothing to worry about, a trifling
inconvenience. For years, the author was notorious for his religious devotion to
decay and decrepitude. He routinely went for days without sleep, subsisting on
beer, cigarettes, marijuana, and an occasional bag of pretzels, as if he were
still a student.
Many of his close friends had either died or
abandoned all hope of imaginative self-destruction by the second year of
graduate school. Some had settled down to respectable jobs within months of
taking their degrees, and they gradually lost track of one another as the author
drifted between periods of work and no work in various capacities, in numerous
states. Others had simply grown tired of each other’s jokes.
The author was lying when he implied he had worked
as a journalist for the past 25 years. He seldom lasted a full twelve months in
any position, since his views were so strange and stridently expressed that he
was asked please to find more suitable employment by one boss after another. The
author was the kind of guy whose attitudes and opinions did more damage to any
organization’s security and morale than his contributions were
worth.
Posted at 10:56 AM Imagine it all
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Sun - July 18, 2004CHAPTER 17There were 33 captives in the pitch-black back of
the van at that early hour on August 17th, and not one had a clue to his or her
predetermined destination. If this were a work of imagination and insight and
not merely the harried and often incoherent document of the end of human life on
planet Earth, one might be tempted to lean back and appreciate dramatic irony as
it reveals itself in ludicrously lurid detail during the infancy of the current
ice age.
Still, there were those who found nothing at all infantile about the advance of vast sheets of ice, some of which are more than a mile thick and have pulverized the world’s longest undefended border for scores of months now, reducing auto assembly plants, baseball fields, concert halls, and dairies to BB-sized pellets as they grind southward, pushing a lunatic migration of grim and grimy mammals before them like lint balls before a janitor’s broom. Posted at 10:58 AM Imagine it all
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CHAPTER 18Wayne was so proud when he learned to tie his shoes
that he never bought a pair of loafers. Even his slippers had laces.
“Slip-on footgear leads to slip-shod performance,” one of
Wayne’s teachings might have been, if he had had any teachings and sold
work boots instead of insurance.
Posted at 10:57 AM Imagine it all
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Thu - July 15, 2004CHAPTER 16here are no books in the Palace, so there are
probably few books in existence anywhere. The process by which books were
produced during the last hundred years of civilization resulted in the
disintegration of the paper on which the pictures and the words were printed. In
rare cases, a book might last as long as an entire generation. During the thin
years preceding the current ice age, most editions had a projected lifespan of
33 years, if the publication were immediately encased in aseptic shrinkwrap upon
exiting the bindery.
Posted at 10:59 AM Imagine it all
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Sun - July 11, 2004CHAPTER 15On the morning of August 17th, even before Wanda
told Wayne not to worry, no one had put out his eyes, the pitch-black back of
the van was already quite crowded, and Phase Two of The Plan had gone into
effect.
Fast Ed the Bartender shuddered and twitched on the gritty floor between Rapid Ray and Pooh Bear, their new brains aching to burst from the catatonic depths in which boggling made them founder, while their old brains went about the business of keeping them alive. Sugarporn was coming around, and she dangled her legs from the storage shelf over the cab of Sam & Dave’s U-Haul Adventure-In-Moving rental, her head wedged between her knees. She was treating herself for shock as she’d been taught in a first aid course at the Holtzendorf YMCA. She was humming a tune whose words went like this: It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas… *** Posted at 10:59 AM Imagine it all
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Sat - July 10, 2004CHAPTER 14One day Wayne sat at the bar not talking to anyone
while the bar ached and yearned. During one of the aching periods, Ming Toy
Epstein came in, sat down next to Wayne, and said: “Remember my boy
friend?”
“Not really,” said Wayne, without looking up from The Greenville News. “Well, he’s in the Peace Corps in Malaysia,” said Ming Toy. “He’s been gone for three months, so he finally writes me a letter. And what does he write me about? Some guy from Easley who fucks pigs in Traveller’s Rest.” “Really?” asked Wayne, without a bit of interest. “Yeah,” she said. “There’s this farm outside town where all they raise is pigs for people from Easley to fuck. You give this fat guy 25 bucks, and you can slip the sausage to any porker in the place. No restrictions. Except they don’t serve Jews.” Posted at 01:20 PM Imagine it all
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Fri - July 9, 2004CHAPTER 13Let’s all take a
break.
After eight nights and days without sleep, the author feels light-headed. Fortunately, his morning meditation seems to have soothed the recurring migraine, and this afternoon has been reserved for preprogrammed merriment at the Doomsday Celebration. These words glow in green on the author’s VDT: Fie, good riddance, and a pox upon it! One would better dig for wigglers to dangle before emasculate fish. The Palace does have a pond, a hardy impoundment of roughly seven acres, reasonably stocked with bass, bream, catfish, and crappie, nestled among the potted petunias, rhododendra, and schefflera set in the Timothy-Green of Astroturf National Park. Many was the Palace resident who passed a leisurely morning at Kickapoo Lake — until the butchering of Rapid Ray, that is, but this isn’t the time to dwell upon unpleasantries. Posted at 01:22 PM Imagine it all
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Thu - July 8, 2004CHAPTER 12Cindy Gnomoure had no name at all when Sesame
Sweetpea and Cecil B. Cecily spotted her in a ditch along I-85. The Cecilys took
the child to a place called Possum Trot Valley on Pigeon Creek in the Byrd Roost
section of Craggy County near the Village of Relief, about twelve miles from
Nowhere, North Carolina.
The Cecilys are variously described in the Hall of Records as subsistence farmers, migrant workers, and self-sufficient agrarians. Their meager income derived from gathering deposit bottles and growing a half acre of marijuana. By age four, Opal Cecily, as the girl was then called, was smoking royal quantities of the family’s cash crop, and to this day, Cindy swears she grew up on a large farm in the Midwest with her dog and Auntie Em. Posted at 01:23 PM Imagine it all
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Mon - July 5, 2004CHAPTER 11By the fifth day of his incarceration, the poet had
mustered enough energy to stray from the corner of his cot. He either stared
vacantly through the triple-glazed, cross-barred windows looking out on the
Chapel Hill campus or with disbelief at the small magnifying mirror above the
wash stand where Howdy Doody grinned back at
him.
Few events should have had so unsettling an effect on the poet, for he was an avowed absurdist and often maintained that the human condition was simply an elaborate Punch and Judy show without end. Each puppet stumbled onstage to be beaten and kicked and spat upon before being yanked from the production with no explanation, retired from the company with no compensation, and stripped even of its costume. Posted at 01:24 PM Imagine it all
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Sat - July 3, 2004CHAPTER 10Wayne was the kind of guy who couldn’t take
no for an answer, but he couldn’t take yes for an answer either. It was as
if Wayne never doubted whoever he asked his eight questions could take hours to
answer each one. One day, Wayne was convinced, someone would give him the
ultimate answers to the eight questions, but he couldn’t explain how he
would be able to recognize them. Especially since it took at least 72 hours for
even the simplest concept to crystallize in his mind. Whatever you said about
Wayne was pure paradox.
*** Posted at 01:25 PM Imagine it all
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Thu - July 1, 2004CHAPTER 9Sean Locke is dead, and grief is the order of the
day. He was an odd fellow, but he had endeared himself to the Palace populace
long before the onset of the current ice age. To be frank about it, Wanda Japan
and her irreverent band have been well-received, even harbored and protected by
the righteous citizens. The Life Protector knows this. Materex know this. It is
impossible to guess what President for Life Idi Amin Dada knows.
Sean Locke is dead and everyone misses him dearly. How can such things be? What God would allow even one Sean Locke to end up as fodder for Idi Amin? *** Posted at 01:22 PM Imagine it all
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