8/14/2000. After the final Punic War, the republic of Rome had no exterior threat to warrant exemplary moral behavior, and thus fell to debauchery and ambition. 

 vii — A Resplendent Obscurity.

          A funereal haiku offset de facto pinafores again.

          The tic–tac doughboys were foul weather G–force hoplites who went into full burst mode the moment any ditzy Rambo yelped in the interest of hysterics. They lisped at complex three–penny operettas, posed as charmingly slow–witted elders, and crash–landed their own thing, a chrome Thessalonikan kiln, at the latest stereotypical road shows of unstable Guelphish meerkats.

          Needo was left with his own fish to fry, a large and unpalatable coelacanth filched from the Castle moat, which he released as it thumped pitifully after a fluoxetine and was somewhat listlessly quaint. Without any more snoopy Sibyls to tease, he felt as morose as a sasquatch, and was wont to snore through complines while everyone else was out peddling their freeware.

          “I may intend to ban all existence,” he recited at the downtown dream embrace, “and when it shall be, sobeit in dog years, e.g., downwind of my reincarnation, only a roaming hindsight blooper will, for long periods, ever remind me of the impotence I’ve felt since being uptight during my own slumber party a few inseams ago.”

          In response, the newest glaziers appealed to an effervescent ninja from Messina, “please drop–kick this young moron before he challenges Hermes to solve Rubik’s Cubes.” While his triskedalion sidecar lurched in the background coolly, the allotted martial arts wizard amassed the four winds, froze all street time, swore upon the hilt of an aquamarine stiletto that Mount Aetna would fume back home if he failed, and as the citizens of Thebes gazed at such admirable facility, unswervingly clambered into the face of the sunrise.

*        *        *

Steeds of Coriolis force eloped toward the solar firmament. Atlas, tittering calmly, pointed out that the whelp would no longer find petite bourgeoisie to chauffeur him willingly to the presence of Olympus; at last count even Demeter herself was all too busy sowing grains to intervene. The hapless Needo, therefore, was out haranguing apathetic yoga salons on his lunch tour. Affecting to casually stamp out fresh loons, he volunteered to put paid to an incipient monotheism post haste.

          Tepid implosions of deja vu unfurled! Withered pessaries blanched redistributions of alchemic free thinking, yet their reworked out–performances, subjected to fulsome omniscience, proved alas flimsier than a terra–formed pistachio farm. Some cheap moose had refused to file an environmental impact statement under the deadline.

          Needo’s thoughts, bristling with trashy old vitriol, let loose such a stream of invective at this persistent obstructionism, that he was stunned they did not all but tremblingly deliver the keys of happiness into his mind at last resort. As it were, some neurotic joker on Asgard screwed up his words, causing this unwholesomeness personally! He hoarsely vitiated a colicky tizzy of abuse to be hurled as soon as he returned to his beeswax.

          Butta–butta–boom, the tocsins of doubt crescendoed thickly. He not only had already toasted an internet booth of dubious quality, but amid so very many final answers (unless he waltzed across Three Mile Island to affix blancmange upon the wetlands), he was unsure how long the divine Miss Eartha Kitt’s greatest smash single C’est Si Bon had stayed on the Top Forty countdown in 1957 anyway. And who would ever unswervingly believe he had haunted a funky ocarina factory in the nearest solar system? He could hardly act blowsy from 12,000 light years away.

          It had not been his last retort, they had told him, it had been the way he had finished it, so maybe he could take a flying leap across the galaxy instead. So much for etiquette, and “take that forsooth,” he yelled, hazarding a poke at his personal Yoda, who if nothing else knew that the Messinian ninja was already at large.

          Somewhat frivolously, the tic–tac doughboys also warned Needo of the impending 4H hose down at the fair edge of the universe. Thirsting for annihilation, Needo perversely sprouted awful tentacles. But at last light, he took time out for a solo terebinth, brewed by a scotch of bestial fickleness.

Circa early January 2008.

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Questioned, a man sat, in decline, a manana concept, you realize, in desserts or desuetude, pageantly wrought. His efforts could further describe a system of compressive cycles.

vi — Toward Tuffaceous Thickets.

          Bent on finding acorns, Needo hopped along in the wake of snipe–hunters roving shrewdly with rapiers. After reading in the papers about binary wasps (so tough that frayed elastic houndstooths were leveraged on the cheap) eating biased ornamental strudel indistinctly carmelized, he launched diseased theodolites numbly and, installing a messy Erlking as chief hoser, listed out to find horn.

          They marveled at decorous lettuce patches amid the greenspace of the Mostly Color Shoe Tree. Piously insular inserters dusted every swart atavism with macadamia nutshells, and a stout dour peasantry waved at you, thankful for projects, singing robust madrigals uncensored by the slovenly wasps. Stirred but unshaken, before asphodel, ermine curio shops, they sang Any Other Two Bit Easter Bunny in three languages, highly intent lest minimalist editors erase neon overkill bandwidths.

          Nude heffalumps on pentothal also edged off key merrily. The boulevard narrowly became infamous when an astral stairway, neither altogether utmost nor fraught with either lamely mild beasts or desolate, sinister stares, entranced them into issuing Theda’s adroit sell–off of Thebes municipal bond anticipation notes seven miles south of the border, which sullenly plunged for about six more weeks before they recollected their margins.

          Inevitably, they trundled in to rave about a nearby roadhouse which swooned into a discreet forest of boxwood and prickly pears. Inhabitants had clearly disguised their madrassah with inky strands of dissolved chloroform and local tuning forks. In duress, as a nascent Rosetta stone loomed spot on, the messy Erlking yanked the joystick too sharply, hurtled into a precipitous leeway, and screeched to a halt right next to a gingerbread house.

*        *        *

Waiting down in front, Dorothy, and Toto too, greeted them with swarms of leis and uncertain flares. They wore invidious Amish doily hoopskirts and seemed possessed by obdurate and semaphoric seraphim. Toto scooted to a loading dock around back, threw up in a sprawling, unkempt hedgerow, and piddled upon a doorstep lit by flamingo nightlights. Needo genuflected before entering, inalienably gravitating into a secret garden, which pitched steeply toward tuffaceous thickets in perpetual states of perpendicular collapse.

          A gateway disclosed a flagstone stile subsiding onto a road less travelled. Beyond, infertile ravens tumbled around the edge of time. Finth in diagonal quorums came on to tall dryads frowning breathily. “Tarry here awhile,” Toto growled, “and escape the bleak reality of the Castle. Nertz to them, eh?” The Erlking’s rabid convulsions made up for Needo’s dumbest hint.

          Dorothy, after hastily excavating the basement from upstairs, bid them enter. His watch over, Toto turned somersaults and resumed renovating a carborundum fountain out front. They peered into a tenement white–washed with sluggishness: a fugue–like atelier with double bay windows, a serrated kismet and ironing room, alfalfa urns, a polished tool shed equipped with awls, and shingle beds; ancestors, tucked away near a serpentine banister, reconciled behind a bamboo veil.

          Dorothy showed them how to bilge the head, winking ostensibly at the freshly mollusk encrusted drainpipes. The Erlking slumped into a divan overwrought. “Comme ci, comme ca,” Dorothy commented. Nodding bemusedly, Needo studied an actual small cast iron Buddha in the center of the dais. “Has anyone ever died here,” he asked?

          “Sure,” was her reply. “Edsel always liked to fool Mother Nature, but it’s nice to have refrigeration, n’est ce pas,” Dorothy rippled, wittily assassinating the rest of the pop quiz? “Well, I’ll let myself out,” Needo said, rousting the Erlking. An outdoor service was being conducted by Toto with Mrs. Hatter and dubious finth.

          Needo stammered his approbation and in the subsequent visions, felt something tap him on the shoulder. They returned to the Castle inconsolably. The Erlking shambled into his cell shared with four other Hogwarts. It was rotomontonde after the expedience incognito. He said he was totally bored with their gin rummy skills: two bickered in public constantly; one was so shallow, it was easier to drown in the Schuykill; one, a wandering finth, floated sordid cyber–forums for a living.

          In such a zoo, thoughts emptily seemed too droll for Heimlich maneuvers. “Ne quid nimis,” the messy Erlking shrugged, and about faced furtively, so Needo called it a day and was about to march to his own dungeon at the Ghost House when his lease suddenly expired. He didn’t feel like grabbing any brass rings, it is true, although tears did boil from his eyes. “I feel better than James Brown,” he wailed, and slyly hiccuped, necessitating admittance to the infirmary billets with the tic–tac–toe boys for a spell.

Circa December 2007.

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It seemed that ever since the world had ended, it was impossible to listen to your Rice Krispies™ anymore, what with all of the ambulance sirens chasing around.

v — Process and Reality.

          During the final fortnight of the reign of Augustus Octavian, mickle ersatz arenas, best depicting Ctesiphon in the springtime floods, thus regressed to the lascivious alacrity of deranged mentors.

          A hoped for scarier cult, shown always pursuing voluptuous Naiads, regaled ablutions while other caryatids tried on Theda’s silly affairs. One perhaps wondered why on Passover she had nettled Jeroboam by supposedly pawning the Urim and Thummim, which were irreplaceable, on the grounds that He had greeted her uneffusively. The vox populi, Pier Gynt, was even smellier. When Needo caustically asked, “do I need a formal mistress,” Pier sneered that life was enormous enough without needing to worry about those tomatoes, and went into his soft shoe, discomfiting sundry Hittites.

          Needo wore out some really Vedic diplomacy on the unsalted goyim, who smiled patently while knitting forth identical jet set gabardines, and began to rant at a plebe with his butt in a sling, who waltzed around methodically until formally introduced as Emmit Ibsen, confirmed Cynic, whose professed expertise on almost everything defied legend. This adversarial snipe hunt ended on an upbeat note when an irate fluorescent portmanteau, Emmit’s quondam fiancée Opal, tenaciously tooted ampersand reveilles that evening. Needo was at any rate so eager for Theda to switch off her Bunsen burner conclusively that Lemaniac drove home on short notice.

          The regular crowd wandered in. A husky janissary, a convivial farmer, and a thoughtless Elizabethan night crawler ordered some rusty nails and yelled surprise at a left–handed attorney dressed in slipshod accoutrements: “Arminius Festus Thales Eurystheus,” they chortled at the redoubtable form, who felt animated enough to itemize his pathos and was soon eliciting crocodile tears from everyone with his tales of the newsroom.

          Thales stated, “in the Cartesian philosophy there was room for three distinct kinds of change: one was the change of accidents of an enduring substance; another was the origination of an individual substance, and the third was the cessation of the existence of an enduring substance (A.N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1957)).” Everyone hastily evacuated as Theda’s burner, left unintended, toasted the place to a crisp. Needo sobbed loud enough to shake the hyacinths. The Ghost House was already history, to each his own, but that was Utopia compared with circumstantial aftermaths.

*        *        *

Father Time shoehorned Needo back toward the Castle post haste. A fallow ring around the moon collapsed and spongy Greenwich necklines backslid into the control variables. Time was astute, stoic, careful to offer a different blarney to everyone he met, had been, for several years, too agog at Annie revivals to showcase his offbeat libertinism, hummed Do You Know The Way to San Jose interminably, got lost (he was also newly arboreal) often enough to snatch at any unheard of straw, called shotgun as they drove around in circles, became embossed, and suggested they stop and take the rap, which Needo feigned so convincingly that four varsity runcible tarts rolled him out of there and spun him around until he finally felt at large.

          However, there was no escaping the Castle, once one entered the personal sucking zone. A dim moldy centrifuge snored soft deceptive airs, decoying them toward a depthless moat from which flamingos flapped poignantly. Peering from amidst the cluttered machicolations, the groom recalled the organized minstrelsies. “It’s only that delusional tenor with the bugbears,” he blurted, rolling out another barrel of lager.

          Presently Time flew in, and everyone broke into a fluent karaoke tandem of Hey Jude while Needo sold back his lip–synching laurels. Clutching the bandstand which, incomprehensibly, had leaned emphatically, manifold realtors lamented tout est perdu fors l’honneur. Snootily had fewer than indeed always incognito yet famous backfires launched on the spot, then they found that tightwads had detonated their belated, fickle spin–off runny crumpets. Muffled enzymes stretched mere foam Demosthenes fingers toward those laziest of baroque ersatz concrescent strip searches, causing mad empty bumblebees to hum while you out–waited Formica teardrops insomnolently.

*        *        *

Bartering vainly, Needo smoldered amid floral fumes for days in the Castle. Co–dependent with the FORTRAN fixations of otters, he limited his mixed auditions abroad to tenuous motivational communes scorned in the past, sent stimulating beige engravings to bent urchins, and tended the sterile ampersands, capably sprouting swarms of pudgy eggplants. In return, deviously shoveling each day a fertile solution of protozoa–laden cliches into a water glass (ubiquitous cellulose slow tedious discreet crystals hesitantly formed), Needo paused to watch the fogs roll out and turned the prism upside down.

          Suddenly cold monochromatic ferrets, talismans of groundswell, jangled past. Hissing jadedly at hat racks, they irreverently raved in the strictly concentric twilight. Then they fainted, heaved limericks into the distinct ocean as grey noctilucence began, and peacefully shorted out within the Castle as other live–in denizens turned in.

          Needo bestirred himself to speak with a few of these finth. All they would say henceforth was, “beholden as we are to bitterns, goldenrod, vegetable spas, tappers, bundled rates, ink forts, and effluent cultures for nudging us out of innocence, our disco is verily desultory, our life but irksome and wanting, patterned after scented circumstance, a rusted bicycle thrown into a depthless well.”

          Needo tenuously clucked at their dishabille of finest orlon, and indulged in acerbic assurances that an unexpected event would provide their collective salvation. Afoot was an unsubstantiated regression that most of them would either outgrow, or die trying.

Circa late November 2007.

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Nearly each evening, the small smoking stars descended out of a houndstooth or downstream hat, for the glimmering stand–in sincerely fought haywires in the foot plate pier. Irrelevant divas crocheted noodle blintzes, stunning roofers who’d ordained that azimuths were never trammeled by asterisk wedgies.

iv — If on the Ledge.

          Lemaniac and his better half Coral had prepped an Etruscan finger feast and a three–hour diatribe about Thebes’ otiose descent into alien licentiousness. In vivid contrast to the insufferable permissiveness of the current regime, “there was once a time,” Coral said, “when you could fall face first into the past tense and never have to worry about doing your taxes in bed ever again.”

          Situationally aware of their auspicious vitality, yet stupefied after mead that is more dingy and nearly continuous lyres, Needo heard that Theda had qualified for the catholicon. Her proofread eternity, My Haunted Bleak Rhymeless Largo, grumpily perturbed rugrats racing through the corridors, and the choir blared tinnily until two doors fell down.

          Everyone felt rapturous after a pedicure and solo warblers, gonged steerlessly by the crass, were too disposed to layover for the ring toss to realize that before this placebo dripped astray, an argent Lydian pendant was bestowed upon the brow of Theda.

          Promptly Needo had to see a man about a horse, commenced a timidly eerie march toward the piscatorum, yawned for weeks, and begged off further easier vices at last light — he charily lunged into the nearest diligence and bounced across the Rubicon.

*        *        *

Beneath the Mostly Color Show Tree, an array of penniless helots conferred conglomerately enough. They lurched out and altogether demanded Needo’s protection from the grotto of Landscape, praying, “what are you looking at?” This was a dizzy moment: his first scare, and he felt his merest reputation was soiled by malfunctional alarums.

          The second–story men rummaged through his odious knapsack. The plasticity of the moment was high–strung, whence from the tulgey woods, “and best hurry or they’ll steal your imagination,” a sotto voce hortolan twittered nimbly at complines, “you mental dimwit.”

          A steep refuge lay nigh, of course. Clematis streaked topographically in the foreground, and always berating the frumenty orchids, nearby Romanovs pedaled momentous theorems of irrelevance while Needo, accosted by countless actual thieves, demanded to cast a final wager.

          If attributing this to the idiosyncrasies of credulous hermits who could be estranged, they all kneeled before an echo singer. This sapient deity elbowed aside their tomahawks and decreed each ecliptic clicked and more bereft of cement than so–called thresholds arcane, adding “we’ll ring you up if you can circle around the international dateline and cough up the next day.” They left him just looking for virgins within Paris.

          Overwhelmed by his own scant fortitude, Needo’s largest bet up to that point had been a deal with Fortescue that said stalking horse led to better yet sportier designer access TV, to which the latter replied, “wouldn’t you like to know.” This dwarfed that.

         His hair crackled during the final countdown before his last ever spit in the seas of Caledonia. Those talismans on the messenger side welcome mat scrambled scrolling into the lock. Rarely spritzed powders throbbed, underlying gaseous titrates snored, and the lemon integument undid Thebes’ street theatre, blazing all the wallflowers forth into collusion with cotswolders who belabored his derivative inexpedience.

          The auguries swiftly whistled Dixie at the likes of his compunctive ilk as Needo skedaddled around the bistros, revealing control issues hitherto illuminative of erstwhile proxy puerility. A red wonderful new magic omnibus pitched in with sinister macarenas that stiffly slid into Hebraic. He germinated the mandrakes, sprouting as if from the head of Zeus, and amidst a raft of thick fichus the zygotes almost unconsciously shrugged off winter.

          Needo roved toward the back lot where, after a pause for fresh air, numerous odd wrens were out listening to desultory tremblers. Uffish twinges whined inexorably. Leaning over to warp down the coolant ratio, Needo had survived his last dive into the cauliflower patch and felt malleable to the most bizarre influence.

*        *        *

Beyond the shadow of a doubt, Mycenean hucksters pre–empted his tedious thought.

          Needo affected to reach an unassailable conclusion. “In terms of mail–in rebates, I’m feeling good and unless the turnip truck flips over, hell yes, I’ll be thrilled to buy the farm!” Their faces lit up like Yuletide logs.

          “We’d just as soon choke on owl fewmets,” erupted a rabid last come last serve from the rearview looking glass, and everyone turned to behold Lemaniac! “You’re talking serious peanuts here, and the cookbook quotes this as a standard demolition derby reject with 73,000 versts on the dial, a has–been worn out by every roadhog in the project.”

          His poignant adroit litany undermined the fiscal courtesies. Needo winced at his savior’s willful offensiveness. A pearly vapor trail brocaded the cerulean environs while condors soared into the sky and wheeled fretfully. “We don’t want to pawn the crown jewels for pottage and have to ransom our flatware,” Lemaniac asserted.

          The sulky bailiff acted unconcerned. “Of course not, don’t be ridiculous. We have presided over a regrettable misunderstanding. In all probability,” quoth he, “the greatest journey begins with a trip to the water cooler,” where a hasty confluence resumed. He played a mea culpa conspiracy. “Fine, we’ll accept any knock-off allowed by law and you need only fish for dreadnoughts.”

          Miss Elf, an innocent third party, enrolled in the contest of wits. Pulsating with resourceful happiness, she cranked out a solid lease entitlement. Heretofore Needo could unwind, yet Lemaniac interceded, “be still my missing heart.” Anew the fateful baroque outlasted fealties. Needo decided to leap at this promise to keep in touch and noodled out into the wobbly gloaming to seethe elastically.

*        *        *

An ominous silence held sway on the home stretch. If less than delighted at being sandblasted and alloyed with innocuous yarn beads, and close to dribbling on the thatched sunroof, the real reason for Needo’s cold testiness remained unresolved. He shorted out Ptolemaically, “if it were all the same with you, I don’t need to look for another day like this.”

          Lemaniac finally said, “dawg, you’re a new squirt. In Thebes, some of the people are going to take a page from this all of the time, and if all of the people out there aren’t going to prevent that anytime soon, then usually Noone will.”

          Exceedingly aware of his concertina grinding out, for the last time, She Shot Me Down by heart, Needo’s personal anthem, tantamount to having made his bed forever, Lemaniac biodegradably spotted a snow fort back at the ranch, where Needo was from the outset on a fresh tangent. They arranged with petite portfolios for a moonwalk, approached the spatial end of time, and only expired slyly hidden leaks forfeited what was furthermore a fine ancillary ego trip.

          Bete noirs felt insane. “When in the hell are you going to pay off that space monkey,” they expostulated one day? “We’re just fiends,” Needo said.

Circa early November 2007.

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Lacking a certain habituality, or a reason for any subsequent activity, yet loathe to appear driven from the scene, as it were, he’d comprehended a desire for refuge within the already written — a security of being done somewhere else, ameliorating the harsh vigil at the lintel of selfishness and its tug of insufficiency.

iii — Non–Cathartic Traditional Monoliths Which Nonetheless Bombed.

          For a moment, Needo, passed out in a horrid daze in a neural alley, had transcended Chekhov.

          Below him sullenly stretched the smilax pansies of acidic Thebes. He caught a synapse by the hair, unsmelt after fifteen beers but immediately rechargeable, and felt the Ginzu quicken in flush fanaticism. “Patron,” he implored from his horizontal vantage, “must the sea and sky merge awash in these banshee blowsy tracts?”

          “It’s pitiful,” Lemaniac agreed, “but not as such perhaps as the mosh pit you crawled out from under.” Singing born in the U.S.A. biodegradably (the Amway distributors had inferential debates over whether ginseng foretold exhaustion), Lemaniac bothered to apply capably interchangeable allotments of may the force be with you to the offensive languorous aging dudes at the Prince of Idiocy, who’d said they rewired aloof omens there (wink, wink).

          “O jeepers,” thought Needo recently. Inhibited toward any sex or prurience, he’d purposefully sworn off even the most craven one and dones, and did nothing to dispel his game, listlessly numb to the spurious sybaritism of overt assessments. Enigmatically career–minded, Needo felt out–sourced from the get–go, privily traumatized, and yet straightforward — at last light burn the mojo, then get a new carapace, and finally deluge the fitnesses earnestly of late.

          “Weep, ye roaches, for just past yon gazebo lies the rock and the hard place,” Lemaniac announced to an as yet unassembled audience. Half–listlessly enigmas toiled in Atlantian fugue. They flowed all the way back inland for a verst or two, and unheard of calypsos muttered of chapters untold, where no gods dared the overhead gate, so wishful were hexes pressed in reprisal for an outright domain battle between the Ark of the Covenant and a sostenuto de–tox center for Cubist expatriates.

          “So they have an open bottle return policy,” Lemaniac explained, “they block out the sun from dusk to dawn, and damned be he who cries ‘hold, enough.’”

*        *        *

To Needo’s further amazement, theatrical Illyrian field hands, familiarized far from the Maypole, wore sackcloth casually. One might waltz five blocks from the edge of tomorrow before one wilted beneath endothermic filaments. Away from the creaky sympaticas of noisy Sherpa, another station, on the threshing floor of the reparations center, was neatly detested by an immense chanticler, Flip Kelvinator, who was to play Ewell to Lemaniac’s Early.

          Already angling nimbly for the saki, which he hyperactively mixed with Kahlua, Flip tossed this neatly back. A four alarm fire escape artist, all but certified, he indicated that Needo could use a vacuum cleaner for his cuticles under an adamantly clerical street lamp down on the corner.

          While Needo milled around losing his bearings, presently the dirty bird surfers trooped topside. A stucco blend yawning semantic Utopian elf, Feet Rebus, said under the influence that he was at risk of rating a sob story. The cheesier surfer, res ipsa loquitur, engaged a livelong dispute with the Kelvinator over omnipresent sealing waxes.

          “Avast,” the latter indicated, “you’ll soon learn that, to avoid amending their ways, the surfers will try all usable forums to coerce anglers. So look sharp, whipper snappers, unless you want to make the vital statistics home page.”

          Needo kept munching sunflower seeds unhappily. In the interim, the distant pier spun rather sea–sickeningly. resipsaloq appeturnanced an introverted hard sell, saying “I’m warier of terms specifying such obscene underlying causes! Look to the vampire — at least he can make deals and say it not spray it!” Needo grasped a stanchion which lurched wickedly.

          But lo, from the crow’s nest a shout rang out, “Charybdis anathema is nigh!” And ere they could come about, the awful craft boxed around the compass, swaying loudly in crazily ragged lexicons. “Shovel sand into her ballast,” the Kelvinator coughed, and everyone complied, although Needo felt like hanging from the yard–arm instead.

          “Dipstick,” came Lemaniac’s stringent yell from the poop deck, and they grabbed a jolly boat from the davits with little regret. Needo fully took leave of his senses as they flailed back onto the roadstead towards the mainland.

*        *        *

The Mostly Color Shoe Tree was a teensy weensy sangfroid bansai, frescoed with pincuses, cytoplasms, and perspicacious wiggle worms. The hills, per se, only sufficed to antedate random doily hecklers in a basically sweatier situation. “Here here,” the mimsy borogroves chorused, “he’ll earn what they can’t pay him to do.” Let’s all go out the back door of the Castle affably before the travelogue (201 millimeters) untimelily records our straitened lot.

          Did Theda mention that they looked into the mirror proof airlock doors with swift hurrahs? If so, they were lent to a miscarriage of travesty. No stone would fail to signal for a left turn to justify this misunderstood type.

          “Haha,” Needo cried out during this last concrescent evaluation. Somewhere back on the farm, detached commensurate screwballs had upped the voltage toward galactic rasp sonars, daring lurid thermal crossovers to turn up on Myspace (now flooded with junk), and his voir dire et cetera adieu fomented unrealistic quotations. As usual, oolong tea leaves fell near vinculums atop the nexus of the somewhat mystical.

          Issued only denim cookware and asked nicely to leave the building, Needo managed to fly to the moon and rousted a gerund fancier on the spot. “Whereas at the Castle,” he later observed, “I’d be enveloped in a honeycomb of recondite severity by now,” assuredly ephemeral Vaudevillians rattled neon curtains instead. It mattered little that he had handsome teeth and enough cash to last through a chillier week.

          The charade ended with a summons to the Ghost House. Why that didn’t sound so bad was a stumper, evoking a treacly ragtime dim age of bourgeois refinance, mental pictures of an old Polish vanilla sesame chateaux, sprinkled with eerie vitriolic film hauteur, and perhaps some moldy Sargasso horticulture collected off the wall.

          Lemaniac invidiously tethered his rocking horse to the sidewalk and seethed in symphonic fortitude. “For want of an outlet mall, perish the thought,” he recited over his blood–red porter, “we might as well deck the halls of every brick house in town.” “That’s a hell of a mentality, to deal and not count the cost,” Needo awkwardly affirmed, this vehemence disconcerted by the craven beige facade of the Ghost House.

          They entered in an anteroom silence and rang for an insipid automaton who always felt pointless, as attested by an interim lantern beam turned to unveil a dread, airless lean–to, unfinished but for two ottomans, an open and shut casement, and an ersatz schrank warped fast in the dank atmosphere. Lemaniac yelped at the junkyard dog who witlessly sniffed their baggages. “Aside from bygones and all that,” he said without irony, “inevitably the commended gets one last upper.”

Circa October 2007.

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. . . how he lives on through the rabid seriousness, albeit continuing to maintain its invalidity.

ii — Re–Ornamentation.

          A gusty amphitheater, moldy with acorns and erectly innate agates, zeroed in on Needo’s last day as an antinomian. In defense of his freeware, Adonis he was snot, and the uninformed were wont to wince at his shabby airs.

          As tepid doubts intromitted, a warm, gluey morn, clutching his lunch sack on the way to the forum, disorientation briefly set in. A paternoster failed to avert few wrong turns, and he found the parsnips and sage budding. Herein turned a vermiform solute, and a grizzled tree surgeon, who formed a dubious take at this fevered apparition, later said that they’d rarely condoned such primeval small tyros in the pews during his own matriculation.

          A kinked preview of an arras, behind which sedulous utmosts phosphoresced, embrocaded the three fingered groom, a classless society filled with disarmed graduate teaching fellows, some cool tusks, and numerous unlisted boys in fatuous gigue, who lounged in solvent hyperactivity, rabidly sponging off distant benefactors. “For Thebes,” they ranted on second thought. Needo sat with his iPod, stiffly averting destruction.

*        *        *

Urgent roses were sent in as the groom displayed ingenuous euphoria. “Let the barbarians enter the city,” he sniffed! Here was a millennial ombudsman who lackadaisically fended off the bartering hordes. He recalled his role in the anytime she didn’t return my call evasion farce. To raise the ante, old misgivings boiled up inside Needo, who gave hissies a bad name. “Here all order expires,” he huffed pensively.

          The groom took a powder. “You’re on an end of file forsooth, baby.” He calmly monitored Needo’s complexion, which for sure was slightly rattled. “Man, you reprobate, bliss up. You’re passed to float out of here in a jiffy. In the isles, ask any blind sage who smokes, ‘yea, though I remember our Mycenean port,’ let it be said as if dirges, dragged up from the moors of Thrace, merited your doom. Categorically deny any comments or excerpts of worse stories, and fill the air with intensity.”

          Needo couldn’t believe that sucked primo, inasmuch as millions of disaster films might well have foundered. Yet, soon even greater returns were evinced at the right hand of the Father. “You must be off to see the Prince of Idiocy,” the groom said, and debunked myopically. “Where is the point,” Needo, feeling nervously limp, inquired hoarsely as everyone tossed up his or her cookies?

          “Well, it’s obviously right next to the Mostly Color Shoe Tree,” the groom raved gravely in stentorian subtexts, blithely indicating the interview was over. Needo posed an unwilling objection from this erstwhile haven, but honked for Him and left the room. Quickly enough, Hera’s rival seemed grateful for the latest version.

*        *        *

Needo resorted to modeling therapy. He knew the Mostly Color Show Tree was lost somewhere in the Mountains of Biathanatos. Unknown whatevers aside, Godot awaited here. Perhaps somnambulist recreants lurked within each ectoplasm, thereby forelimning any return to the Castle.

          After a wild conviction mislaid, that buttressed an adamant picnic, he revived this opinion that tickled a fancy: somewhat impervious to getting over it, there remained a long tortuous magic carpet ride. He beheld the Ptolemaic exits in a crisis, yet determined these were neon by law, and stalled to placate the illusory Prince of Idiocy.

          “This bites,” he yawned certainly, by no means rinsing off the toxins from far too many Tammany bosses after a pointless samovar tedium ascent tovarisch at Thebes’ ether stanchion. Thunderous off–key castanets on the clothesline obscured his incessant entry into the building mystery, dependent on the mutant vole who countermanded the rotisserie and reveled in ignorance of Needo’s arrivaderche.

          Summoned, the calm gerrymander, a colonial Wedgwood, and a frazzled vintner, who all were combed over sternly, listened to his sob story and dialed for take–out numbly. “Ere more spackle than I’ve splashed waited for fries with that,” a lewd adjunct mimsy film–noire tenant cameo’ed, in order to gentrify condominiums exceedingly readjustable.

          Needo’s instinct sagged, while his spurious pokes at antiphony reeked of prodigious disbelief. On the other hand, offline hang–ups notwithstanding, “did it look like we’ll be crash landing in Eden before sundown,” they dared to ask?

          Wistfully eerie ushers assured them in Newspeak that they would briefly generalize the latest tactile experience: an aggregate leaning exercise, they foretold with displaced grins, amused by their plight. “Most arguably, Lemaniac will be arriving tomorrow to pick you out of the line–up.”

          Greatly flustered for a moment, Needo genuflected before the mysteries, thanked Him with monotonous emphasis, and left the building. Theocratically (for years before, he’d been turned upside down for an adjustable rate mortgage, ostensibly for minor sightlessness, albeit actually due to bland admissions of smoked glass when one was once sick), Needo somehow seemed dust–binned forth in an apostate way. He swarmed over which expedients might come in handy, fantasized about Miss Elf breath–alyzing the ticklish situation, revised the last course of victory to badland no–hopers thrice his age in glum comfort, and brought near beer to spin out the rest of the story waiting until dark.

*        *        *

Beneath a pearly deck of ultimate tearless cumuliform, will–o–wisps were leashed to an unseemly at–large Lemaniac raving within minutes of the promised land. “He really looks like a bug lamp,” was Theda’s initial take. Natheless, she’d never expected a cross between the dark shadows of her over–the–counter days and the Spanish Inquisition.

          Lemaniac glossed over her kitschy intellect, and a lively if domineering conversion began. “Ah, to be or not to be a nerveless bas–relief again,” he said wistfully, regarding the musty sights as lost forevermore. “Did gardenias float in a punch bowl of old hats, bard,” Theda asked?

          Lemaniac snorted, not to mince words, but for two rupees, he’d chuck an almost pathetic, loud rabbit hutch into this side of the Mississippi. The essence of communal representation on cable access was non–existent. Forty three times, he told the story of last come last serve rejects being fired next door. One Saturnalia, an entire hive had swarmed around the skids attending an interior sous–chef school in Landscape. He ranted vividly about traits of depredation and urban legend, but at the mention of his zone parade, Theda held forth upon old servers. Wherever they were recently, undercurrents of destiny began to thicken in horizontal afterthought.

          “If we’ll swear off licentiousness,” she fulminated, “appearances will antedate mickle delusions.” “They could have told me that.” Lemaniac, taken aback by her caustic salary demands, ended a short silence by adding, “and sue me if I didn’t as yet understand the import of Your Highness’ ruby slippers.”

          Before letting her out, Lemaniac handed Theda thorough brochures describing each sleepy farmlet they’d driven past. The talk of the town in the Mostly Color Shoe Tree area focused on who would be the next Belle of the Dust Bowl. Silliness was closed to their field. Lest they kept full of illegibly migraine frame actors, Katrina seemed oh so close but fully comatose. That Landscape was the gherkin of the area was indisruptable. Self–made at great expense was an Ivanhoe of hobnobs. Specific grooves ran from LeCram, too laid–back to be an also–ran, and expanded up to twenty clicks from the fair yield.

          There were also enough ice houses to refill a quart ere sign-on, though frogs, so Lemaniac tended to sneeze at the bouquets. Usually a pittance of remorse, derived from way back, was enough to change the subject. Off the clock, Lemaniac had expressly denied vapor rubs for the stationery sonar. Dreamy Pilates instructors whooshed over incarnated wergilds — they all screamed of their many crops. He’d reserved doubts toward Theda’s house of cards — those wombats never learn. Of their burden, that of dealing to the variegated pukha sahibs, he’d blithely washed his hands long ago.

Circa late September 2007.

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After a few uncomfortable moments straddling around the SeaTac orange barrel circus, the stuffed elves look for an all–night tropical fish food store.

i — Rapture: A Gusty 90210.

          Iliads ago, back when tappers idly misled umbras, one Mississippi acted as if beta cameos were a foaming retail de jour. Apropos of all extant shaking in, erupting only what had been, as oolithic flows of darkness ended the debate over who was on first, murky auctions over groggy gin or rancid seltzer grew elated when He saw the somewhat ark which spoke few words often au courant, cementing what many blogged ears couldn’t extinguish.

          Instantly live, as the rough wordless lyrics bonded out loud, He shook a candlestick toward a somewhat twilight if crayfish dawn. Many wireless reactions chronically undermined any eras of love. Needo went downwind to the rest area, stargazing at blandly atomic batholiths, and caromed desultorily in hard–pressed rivulets. Poor foster itsy Bitsy was having her locks mistaken in each neap magic carpet ride. Forsooth, sang Needo as Theda, her grasp of the rhymeless word schisms soaring in consecrated tantric clip–on bow ties, pined, after awful terrawatts of work, “my new lysergic haven fell face first into the past tense.” Hollow and incidental, he left with dubious mystique.

*        *        *

They were yawning vapidly or at Edsel owlishly as she picked out an ideated form ohm toaster. Into maybe tattered Samsungs tonight were there moments of mickle giant awkward robes, avast herbivorous cables unformed, one bulwark paperfront — Where Is a Dr. Emeritus? — all told Xerxes this scuttled, yet beside Streisand and a lone set off bold garish ad nauseum else, to herald the exaction of myopia, crazy Mother Niobe strobed him toward their portmanteau.

          A fatter check kingpin, still hand in hand with our better half to Kelso, whooshed into the lounge. Defective though scratch was his media telly salute, and orotund they listed a mealy blight since Niobe, disgusted in acute smatters, gradually titrated a fix. Rotations crept into her concourse as impleasantly Needo found Miss Elf doodling patently in a familial serious fad. “Motions scarier ought you interpreted, ayes, well what’s his name 90210 wicket?” Aptly running one of the lecterns, she’d minimally steered tomes. Somehow, she shaded hens in ever all cultured panegyric. A switch met hey mustard seed sunk in depths, for nevermore could he recall them.

           Needo held more than enough ersatz crochets and Valkyries with Niobe to determine aluminum aspects of end states. Definitely syncopated vacant ironing crews, wherein throes of Plantagenet mudguards let down, wore waspish if lenient sensuous facile pistachios in the wash. When he sullenly lunged at crazy Mother Niobe’s detergent, mimed don’t squeeze the Charmin’, and asked, “are you flush,” she said to morph or else defrost time in many ages.

          Bye and bye ant compost, Needo floated into the sky with the jubjub bird. His old letters saved mix and match flirtations with outlying criticism, so basked in an abrupt sense of dyslexia, that he wolfed all eel rolls benignly whisked astern. In a matter of hours, the still swarms of gravity fell few and far between, our snaffled uptime was loaded, and as fetid planets in skedaddle, dodging hairy crash nets, formed immaterially, anon mousy loud ectoplasms blankly feted the acidic oasts, a sweet urn in sooth.

          Needo mentioned that art deco resilience on depeche were soberly slowing down. A flimsy plinth dipped in a wild bank run, and they blooped doubtlessly, too dizzy to see clowns rapidly dissipate. “Blow me down if ash, simmering lazily, outshines the ditty of saffron,” exclaimed Cisco, an excitable salt mentally sired in measly recognition. As for the Zen landscape of a vista fifteen beers ago, ergo of an older ingrate insular cabal, he’d resent its existence for apostrophes, caring only to mind festive elves in consequence. Dispatched and compunctive, the sillier wagered their polymer jewelry amidst the industrial wheel of the couth barrio.

*        *        *

Mists of an absinthe, cooler, rhapsodic Mecca, wafted in slim tetrahedrons throughout Cisco’s vacuous hairnet, soaked the loosely goyim elephant confabulation. After hours in decontamination, coarse suns abroad dyed a tinny twine ingenue from gold ingrown blatant glow worms.

          The loneliness of the plot helped his baggages. They thought the preamble was ordained brightly. Picaresque bumps slobbered on the Astral Range and laughed off the vast blue specific hinterland. Behind them lowly laid butterfly lattes, chilblains of the sank penguin. Down in front a group of high schoolgirls ad libbed their treacherous wooden hearts. Their aspect, mannered and vaguely flamier, let slip overhead their fey weird heedlessly formless blings.

          Needo, though miffed and bent into fying them askance, misused a lumpiness and was all but messed over. A fat free for all, which was amative in theory, mentored avid terrarium scientists. As the talk–of–the–town girls disembarked leapily to pine for crumbs, Needo fell out of the heavily scented and heated gulf stream. Beckoning to the plaid andante climacteric ally, it was a short hop to the mercy seat. He thanked his obstetricians and then toured the pricier berm in the altogether. His actions had seeded a hustling crosshair in contrast.

           A prism, emplaced under a divariegated obelisque, shunted the afternoon delight into early desert eddies. Had he hoped for tempestuous greetings, but felt debased when Noone, forthcoming with resolute efficacy, in a blue pick–me–up arrived?

*        *        *

Just then, the sun’s tattoo winked theoretically, gleaming in far–off ripples. It paused on a tousled harlot near the outskirts of Thebes who remembered how, despite being somewhat evasively to a gong vetoed over her opposing folderol, they’d traded basely their orderly regimens in exchange for communal motions, defying Neptune’s roundest whorls.

          Theda, once reverted, was an official pestilent film ale servitor. She gazed along the narrow street, highly at odds with chard–based horticultures. She was droopily fated to visit the indigo confessor’s quarter. A trimly astringent concierge tucked her accusatory display of unlissome disco furniture into the back of his van, kept a copy of her terse and grave mea culpa, moped (though roughly) between referrals to local icons of strategic impetus and bull rings, and clocked herein.

          “Doth this displacement reek of permatint artifice,” Theda asked? “Nay,” he admitted inwardly. Yet her unease sure deemed him to add, “you can steer forsooth tie–dyes, if that will give you the time of day. Have a nice worldview.” That was end of the first outing.

          “Me, you don’t need,” a so–called if lukewarm welcome mat proclaimed. The empty quarter reeked of old hose, offal, oleander, ink spackled housecoats, losers, a kitschy anisette, quivery old mushrooms, landless yet facile entities, and rewind decor nearly effaced her cold stare heretofore succinctly dazed. She had done with it all and yet, leaning toward a banjo remake of last year’s elite Morissette paean to the really weird, spent that evening’s watch in Sportier Lo–cal Sorbets, revealing the inner banana in us all.

Circa early September 2007.

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