SOS Gab & Eti 1.32

I’ve been going around to estate auctions on weekends with Gab. He has
been collecting repossessed portable toilets, 476 of them to date, which
he started placing in a cluster behind the barn. After he got about two
dozen he figured they were getting crowded so he decided to spread them
out across the 256 acres of the farm. He now has a scattered array of
toilets amidst alfalfa and timothy. Some of them were placed throughout
the old apple orchard, which he promises will not hurt the cider this
year. The ones I like best are down near Jane’s Creek, right around the
bend where all the Hemlocks are you might remember. I think he has it in
mind, ever since he read that Newsweek article to start a Port-O-John
theme park.

I regret to inform you that you cannot yet visit us as his dreams of
entrepreneurial grandeur are being held up. The Town of Bullamanka is
requiring a ten-foot high fence be built around the property to hide
what they think is an eyesore. One guy’s eyesore is another guy’s
mansion. Gab is considering building a stone fence, as he has plenty of
stones. Unfortunately the tractor needs to be repaired and he needs a
new wheel for the wagon. If you got a new wheel please send it on over.

The other problem is Portland cement is in a big shortage. It does not
look likes things are getting any better with recently announced Federal
plans for interstate highway rebuilding. With the current supply
considerations we either get the nation’s potholes rebuilt, or Gab’s
collection of potty holes concealed, but not both.

In the mean time D. Glaucomo Lardoz has been put to work carrying the
stones, one by one, from the north pile down toward the southeast corner
of the property along the hedgerow near where the marsh mallows and
irises propagate. Gab has given him strict instructions to not trace the
same path twice cause Gab don’t want no ruts on the land. D. Glaucomo
Lardoz does not seem to mind -- he puts on his tapes and headphones and
moves about five stones per hour, large or small. At this rate I don’t
expect much progress for several months. I suggested Gab ponder building
a sled for when the snow arrives.

Eti, convinced she is an alien, keeps talking about a secret school that
she attended as a child in San Antonio, even though she has never in
this life been west of the Mississippi. She says the teachers were
Martians and little gray midgets that drove around late at night to the
local grocery stores in nondescript white vans so that they could
purchase large quantities of ground beef.

Possibly it is that I was raised amidst a community of people who
believed that Jesus was stepping out of their television set to talk to
them real personal like on Saturday nights. Or that I have been told
tales about the men in black visiting our neighborhood for the last
thirty years, with green plasma tubes running up their pants legs. Or
that my parents claim that I was mysteriously abducted for ten minutes
as a five year old from our back yard in Brooktondale. Whatever the
reason I find Gab & Eti’s most recent ramblings implausible.

Gab is upset by Eti’s proclamations of alien origin, “So where did I
come from if she is from outer space?”
Eti wanted to calm Gab down by helping him raise money to purchase
Portland cement. She figures that if he is working on his stone wall he
won’t have so much time to ask pesky questions or make a damnable mess
in her kitchen with any more of that Bird Goop stuff.

Last week she applied for a job at the Bullamanka International
Industrial Park as a sperm sorter. She passed the written test but
faltered on the physical. Her dyslexia made it difficult to remember if
the X or the Y is the heavy one and she kept pushing the wrong button.
Depending on your point of view it was either fortunate or unfortunate
she was in the wrong lab at the wrong console. Every time she
electrocuted the rat’s brain cells the poor creature tried to scramble
up out of the box and its eyes bulged. If she had remembered to take her
glasses she would have possibly realized that the white mass that kept
rising on the live-video computer screen was not male sperm. This is
another one of those epistemological problems of sign, signifier and
symbol. She finally got the job based on her husbandry experience with
the pocket microscopes and the sea monkeys. The headhunter figured there
was not much difference between the two tasks excepting in relative size
and only changed her resume slightly.
--
][<en Follett
SOS Gab & Eti -- http://www.geocities.com/~orgrease
Bullamanka-Pinheads website
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/CGI/wa.exe?A0=bullamanka-pinheads