sketches & vignettes

Aug 20, 2008 - 12:15 PM PST

There is a boat in the southern ocean tonight. It's carrying Chinese dollbabys to Ecuador. It will founder and sink. The pop-eyed monsters of the deep ocean will nearsightedly inspect the dollbabys. They will affix their imprimatur to show they've been there, something like our own terrestrial INSPECTED BY NO. 36.

...

The hospital eyeball, turns, revolves, rotates, dances, bounces down the hallway looking in on each bed; the patients smile to see him so. He is their ambassador of goodwill. Eye. Just an eyeball, with a little bit of optic nerve hanging off him.

Someone dipped him in Dr. Shadow's Elixir. They got drunk and dipped Eye in, along with several scalpels, a knee hammer, some tongue depressors, and a brace of latex gloves.

It was a strange Founder's Day Weekend in Elk Grove, Illinois, that summer, to be sure.

...

Satellite never really worked for us.

We tried it. But could not get the wireless signal to work. So we issued everyone cords. Which ran up from their homes to the satellite in space. It was quite something to see -- a forest of skyhooks all converging to the same invisible spot in the sky. And up there in space, a disco ball draped with a spaghetti of slowly moving cordage.

Well, it worked until morning came and the planes got off the ground. They snapped those things like crazy. Severed cords collapsing to the ground in riot of crazy spools, like syrup being poured. The television company scrambled to repair them, but they couldn't fix them fast enough before they were severed again by the next flight from Octagon to Chicagao.

Finally, we gave up, left the cords to the storks (who made gigantic, astonishing nests out of them), and retired to our parlors to clap and sing and perform sketches and vignettes.