Saturday, November 29, 2008

Mark My Words

If it ever turns out that, for whatever reason, I'm unable to drop $109,000 on a Tesla Roadster, a new-build DeLorean will have to do.



In the event that it doesn't come with a Flux Capacitor, I'll have to settle for the iPod jack, heated seats, and bluetooth integration kit... maybe the backup camera too.

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

On the Rediscovery of the Red Savory

The other day, I found myself standing in the middle of a chessboard, where the following took place:

Knight to C3
Pawn B6 to C6
Rook A1 to A5
Fig Newton J1 to incisor L2

Then the grayfish proclaimed to all through my ear-trumpet:
All hail the great tree of the shrouded everyman
For its diaspora has spread to twelve continents
And is broadcast to the other five in 1080p

Indeed, it was a time of accelerated enlightenment that promised a bounty of further discovery with every passing millisecond, where old habits quickly and silently faded into the teeming switchgrass, and even older ones sunk into the gaping sandtrap behind the 6th green. Jonah's gaze absent-mindedly followed the tangled loops of his shoelaces, as he pondered the fact that his name would never again be mentioned beyond the bounds of this sentence.

Excelsior! We have transcended the anonymity of a misplaced black button floating in a distant cranberry pond.

From within the sarcophagus, I could hear this voice and the footsteps that preceded him: they had become numb from frequent immersion in chilled marmalade. As the voice continue to mutter to itself about the proper aging policies for non-liquid receivables, I wondered how it was that I became suddenly encased in a sarcophagus in the middle of a chessboard. To be sure, King Tut had recently appeared to me in a dream, but his incessant circumlocution on topics that bore no relevance to my rapidly-declining home value prevented me from waking up for 37 days. The sum of 3 and 7 is 10. Knight C3 to D5. As a child, Ancient Egyptian civilization captivated my imagination (often through such vehicles as Choose Your Own Adventure Books and Super Mario Brothers), and I knew that, someday, I would visit. That day was not now; it was last Wednesday.

By the time I had found the crowbar at my feet and pried the sarcophagus open with my elbow (after I had swallowed the crowbar), it had become phosphorescently clear that I had been checkmated by the ham-and-cheese sandwich parked at G5. The hour of ultimate defeat was at hand, for I had failed to obtain the secret 1-UP contained within the Level 5 Warp Zone, and consequently had no lives remaining in reserve. The sandwich lurched forward, sometimes erratically, sometimes delicately, and sometimes in a trumpet-accentuated figure-eight pattern, as the butter-like fabric of space-time melted cleanly and evenly into Jean Valjean's cosmic bowl of lightly-salted popcorn.

And so it came to pass that, at some point in time -- or perhaps never -- I was unexpectedly quashed from existence by a common lunchbox item. But at that meaningless point where the left-hand and right-hand limits of my consciousness diverged to opposite infinities, it could be summarily stated by an unidentified, omniscient third-person narrator that I felt more like myself than anyone else ever did or ever will.