The Romance of Anti-Friction

UKE 'EM

2011-06-02T09:31:00.000-07:00

Elliot and his little brother, henceforth referred to as It due to horrible and inhuman crimes committed (certainly Elliot doesn’t believe it for a minute – but must be true – no name, no innocent until proven guilty that’s the rule) are making a frantic escape from the authorities, all roads blocked, first by bike cops and then by those lofty lions of the spirit world, Team Yellow Submachine-Gun, one for every cardinal direction, fine as a mist but impassable.

The four (or to be more specific and as we will see four minus one) sun-colored kingfishers of the Team Submachine are: Mathius the Entrepreneur who even as he keeps a stern watch leads tours wooly with wide-eyed rubberneckers (“Please wear lifejackets and helmets and for goodness sake hang on – this isn’t the Coliseum”); Lucius the Schoolteacher chalking figures on the blackboard, eyes in the back of his head; Marcius the Architect, who at times entertains the heretical wisp of a thought that perhaps this whole chaotic spectacle is of his own creation, and underneath all the stuffing and glitter and costumes are wires he laid out to look like men; Jonius the Maudlin, who sulks.

It’s a stirring chase. The chief of police is maybe not doing his best work however, as intrusively thoughts of his wife cloud his vision, wondering if she’s taken a shine to the strongman who moved next door only last week – as he himself in fact has taken a shine as well to said strongman’s girlfriend, frequently sequined if not in leopard print. Greedy possessive nature trumps lust in this particular card game so he doesn’t have a pleasant thought in his head even one, no matter how adorned it might be with dapples.

But maybe it’s not his (or his worried wandering eye’s) fault at all, instead that the yellow coated stormtroopers are as a group being confounded by the pretty patterns made by the Great Musical Mother sashaying across the beach of their collective sub-concio, ticker tape and laser lightshow only one dollar and twenty five cents for a whole four minutes all at once. Plunking out cowboy music a battered ukulele.

Suddenly, his assistant gets a sudden glimmer of the Goddess and her flowing garments like a taxi line outside the opera, Yellow and Green and Checkered ribbons, headlights, every accent that’s ever been in English and, taking careful aim, (although distracted by a sudden movement behind her shoulder) fires six slugs, point blank. Misses the barn. Perhaps he saw himself for that further subdivided fraction of the already split second, looking over her grass skirt back at himself.

But these illusions aren’t without a price, as it was Jonias the Maudlin (skin stained blue from the blood of the heinous crime allegedly committed by It – and who here is really the instigator of any action they are represented as responsible for, be honest) swooping down to show him (Assistant Policeman Dan) the himself in herself, abandoned his designated drawbridge. Many make a run for it (not so Elliot and It however who are knee deep in alligators heading toward Lucius anyway in the other direction sensing he’s asleep as if a Yellow Submachine-Gun sleeps ever and even if he did then there’s his unblinking student teacher patriotic assistant on the side earning credits for college to be accounted for).

Well. The yellowshirts and the Team Yellow Submachine and also the Yellow Rose of Texas with her four strings and hula stomp step after some further confusion converge and reconstruct the safehouse. Stragglers are rounded up and put away in the appropriate compartments. Jonias is admonished, reinforcing his suspicion that everyone else is the favorite except for him of either mom, dad, or the two in counterpoint. He retreats to his room full of mean thoughts about all of them.

Because deep down aren’t Rose and the bike cop collective just doing a liquored up prom-dance in anticipation of the lake house afterwards and whatever other monetized wonders the adult world might offer – perhaps the whole thing has been orchestrated from the first to distract the jailers (although that’s their job also, self deception is the first step to recovery) and make a getaway, or at least in part. Poor Elliot and It are soon to be captured but not so the Chief of Police, who slips out the side door and to a new and splendid life.

PONTIUS PILATES

2011-05-27T10:04:00.000-07:00

Alas, an agreed upon (being not seen by eye or even through the indication of displaced water – yet the most obvious explanation is often the only one possible after all the alternatives and their own opposites out of phase have been discarded, the 3 blind men find the elephant in the end after all as it tramples them flat – just wait and watch) sea serpent has eaten many of those jaunty wayfarers through the air, seagulls (they are not cousins despite the same surname), leaving only the bones in eerie piles all along the shoreline.

How to stop such carnage? Sgt. Jo Jo Pinguino, slim and trim from a new exercise regime and caloric restriction, but teetering – and of course the new exercise instructor just had to arrive dressed up as a cookie – aims to get to the bottom of the case. After a quick snack. A powerful kick across the beak later, he finds himself face to face with the Great Red Gup himself, Kochise Kachoo, huffing and puffing like a little engine, no smiler lugging boxcars he, however. A crime boss of the old school.

An uncomfortable silence likely follows as they look each other over, perhaps in the background, the staccato sound of interpretive dance routines by local landed gentry . “So it’s you that’s been taking the seagulls,” Pinguino might say at last but it isn’t, and a slap across the face said so no. “You fool, I thought it was you!” An already red faced Kachoo becomes almost black with how red. Well who is it, because monsters don’t exist anymore except in the form of man no matter what the conventional wisdom here-be-monsters may be – can there be an adversary in common who has returned from exile for revenge? And all the while as they glare crossways and ponder, trussed hero and villain (with a small v, the Villain as yet to be determined by further investigation) can’t shake the feeling that all their actions are by this point so half-assed that only by virtue of the convention of rounding fractions to a whole number are they even actions at all anymore.

It’s time for class again but Pinguino is otherwise obligated (by being tied to a chair) and he feels a creeping relief, luxurious as a two forks, one for salad. Even as he exhales it becomes an aha! Sure enough it must be the very same exercise fad that but for an ill dressed instructor and a conveniently positioned by the highway Grandpa Joel’s Confectionary might have also finished off our avian inspector – Kachoo shaking his head at the shame of it – that has taken the lives our grubby little flying friends. Faced with a task to do they, like the good little laborers over the water they were, saw it through to the finish. And an exercise kick of this magnitude can never truly end until you cease entirely to exist, spat back up with all the other perfumed ambergris cosmic Sperm Whale International Federation of High Achievers to fertilize yet another pale, blue planet!

So you see it was a serpent after all, despite all those objections from realists and snake apologists and other sentimental riff raff that popped up the minute somebody suggested it. A slim serpent.

SIES SIETE OUCHO

2010-05-18T10:06:00.000-07:00

Oh boy oh boy that hurt, hitting his toe with the Hammer of Bummer, and his thumb already bandaged and inflamed from a knife fight in the kitchen (said wounding leading inexorably towards the drop of said Hammer onto said toe, or rather ex-toe, hey, Mr. Greenie, don’t pigeon-arm that mallet just because you got an opposable ouch, Grip it with ganas!) Accidents pile up, don’t they, but that is due entirely to the fact that you are driving like an asshole, did you know that that extra 20 mph over instead of 10 is going to deliver a return of exactly 5 minutes on every hour which adds up to great things if you are driving to, say, Managua from our sovereign Great Lake State, but I mean, who ordered that Hammer in the first place? Did you think those double Ms were fancy pants Celtic Ts in the style of an illuminated manuscript? And what about Vegan Suzy, did you ever think about her feelings for even a second?

BUBBLES

2009-06-26T14:06:00.000-07:00

Leroy saw bubbles. He was bothered by their nature. “What kind of bubbles are these?” he asked. “I seem to have escaped from their grip. Maybe I’m on the very edge of a great Cloud of Lethargic Bubble. I don’t remember anything, before of since, so probably one of the powers of the Cloud is that it steals your memory.” He began going through his effects to see if there were some clues to his identity. “Often in these kind of cases, one revelation will lead to another, as in the game of dominoes.” Then Leroy wondered if these weren’t bubbles at all, but pips. Then he wondered if they weren’t pips at all, but people, rendered abstractly to the extreme. “They look kind of stern,” he said. So far none of his effects had been gone through, nor would ever be, because even as Leroy wondered if maybe the bubbles weren’t people at all but were lightbulbs, a lightbulb of another sort fired up over his head. “I am a Can of Soda!” he realized. And commenced to the all important task of dodging shifty little Middle Schoolers looking to get as hopped up on caffeine as possible. A can of soda lives in fear always, but a can of pop is a fatalist, and accepts that things can, at any moment, take a turn for the worse, but so what?

My My My

2009-06-16T16:07:00.000-07:00

Goodness. Sun has a headache. What is to be done about this. Well, there's a Cloud, little druggy he is, floating about in a bliss. "Cloud, although I find you indistinguishable from one another I know there are good seeds and bad seeds. I hope you are a bad one." Luckily for Sun he's a bad little cloud. Unluckily for Sun he's a bad little cloud. "I hear you semi-loud and clear Mud Duck," says Bad Little Cloud. "The Yardstick's big and the Bacon's on the Mashed Potato." This is all too much for Sun, who has a headache. "I'll go ask another Cloud. Thank you." But you can't end an emphezema that simple. "Sun ol' buddy, there is only one Cloud. We are a Colony of Cloud. You're out of options. Ten-twenty all you want but you're in a nebulae of Nuke. That's why you have a headache. I am a Mushroom Cloud." Bad little druggy clouds.