SOS Gab & Eti 1.15
“In a forgotten novel, Balaoo, the story of a monkey who was taught to speak
and dress like a man, I have come across a very enlightening passage. I take
stories at their word. Balaoo, the civilized monkey, used to go to the zoo of
the Jardin des Plantes at night to pick up his brother Gabriel, and, after
dressing him properly, would take him around to the cabarets. But Gabriel had
the unfortunate habit of throwing himself on anything he wanted, like a lady's
hat decorated with artificial fruit. After the commotion and their escape,
Balaoo taught Gabriel the following lesson: "When humans want to eat
something, they don't just take it; they have to show their intentions by
putting down some money."“ Alain, _The Gods_, trans. Richard Pevear.
Altuna says, “Don’t buy a dog for the Holidays simply because you have seen
one in a movie, and most of all, if you check one out of the pound this year
then please intend to keep it at home and healthy.”
Etidorpha and I were forced to communicate in algebraic terms in order to
retrace our conversation this morning. She said I was talking in "a minus 3".
It was my contention that since I had started the conversation that my
variables should logically be of a simpler order and that I had proposed "a",
whereas she had added or subtracted from (I'm not sure which) my original
statement, but obviously our tracks were going elsewhere. We chose a momentary
stasis of polite silence, then we spooned coffee, ogled her stuffed raccoon,
petted Altuna (a heavy affection hound when sober), and gummed lardy, this
time boysenberry, mustard and comfrey tarts.
I’ve been looking for technical papers on non-invasive tasting techniques.
It all started over a spate of Stop sign vandalism. Seems the kids in
Bullamanka have been using a bright green fluorescent spray paint to write
“FROG” on all the local stop signs. This is a preservation problem as the STOP
signs in Bullamanka still have the little glass marbles in the letters. So, in
a spurt of inspiration, Gabriel outfitted his cousin Somnus’ Yugo with a set
of gigantic speakers and has been driving around playing 8-track disco tapes
obnoxiously loud (I live five miles away in the seventh valley and can hear
him, late into the night, a distant syncopation slowly moving in and out of
the Bullamanka hollows), with hopes of driving the delinquents out of the
community. Last year a significantly older gentleman, an Army Corps of
Engineers inspector, put his arm over Gabriel’s shoulder one day and said
"lets take a walk and talk about stop signs". When that walk was over Gabriel
knew more about stop signs than any biffy conservator SHOULD know. Since then
Gab has been adamant about the need to keep STOP signs clean and virgin and
has been passing a petition for a Constitutional Amendment to make STOP sign
desecration a federal offense. WARNING: Anyone in the possession of a
desecrated STOP sign will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
My remark to Eti was that Gab, despite his best efforts, was only inducing a
negative impact on the reproduction abilities of crows. To which Etidorpha
responded that the Martins had recently moved to Pittsburgh. Which somehow
quickly lead to algebra.
Eti recently decided to cut back on the diet of squirrel brain tarts and
potato chips with horseradish/bacon dip after a late night conflict where she
got covered with mud, lichen, and moss, and received a skinned shin and a
really horrible rip in her best fish-nets, from wrestling Gabriel. What should
have resulted in an unaffected midnight recrement quickly rushed into a
rousing and nearly incestuous rut.
Seems Gab got himself ahold of several quarts of red, white, and blue alkyd
enamel and while somnambulating (See: Somnipathy in America) felt compelled,
possibly even patriotically induced from too much disco beat and a desire to
serve his country, to brush “Tommy Hillfrigger” on the side of their historic
fiberglass port-o-potty. The fact that Gab was running around in the side
yard, trampling through a foot of snow in the Brussels sprouts patch, with
nothing on but a cowboy hat and stars and stripes boots added to Eti’s haste.
She had not intention of waxing his mustache.
Though name recognition may be good for marketing, there is no reason the
perceptual ratings should establish the relative value of one outhouse’s
intangible assets against a dsiplay of deer antlers on a barn facade. Just as
poultry sexing reduces the complex construct of “gender” to a single
superficial dimension, so do reputational ratings simplify the many complex
dimensions of a white house’s “performance”. The whole shebang sounded like a
royal pain in the petutti, which may have had something to do with Eti
purchasing via internet mail-order a case of dynamite (an off-coast supplier
from somewhere south of Aruba) with the fabricated story that she had to
unblock frozen duckweed in the perch pond.
To be continued..... goose liver fritters..
Copyright 1997 Ken Follett
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