Louisa’s Winds
The Natives were not happy when the Sailors arrived on their Shores, but the Sailors had come and nothing could be done but deal with them. The Natives summoned their Wind Witch, Louisa, to welcome the visitors. Louisa’s father, Aeolus, is the Keeper Of The Winds on That Side Of The World, while Louisa was installed as the Executive Managing Director Of The Winds on This Side Of The World. Aeolus’ Winds have been named, classified, and catalogued by Aristotle and countless others, while Louisa’s Winds have remained relatively wild and unpredictable for eons. That’s why the Natives sent her as the welcoming party: the Sailors would be completely unfamiliar with her gusts and gales and wouldn’t know which way is which.
Louisa creates the airs with her eight areolae. She jams her nipples into massive silver flutes the size of cathedral organ pipes. Each pipe roughly corresponds to the four cardinal directions (N, E, S, W) or the four ordinal directions (NE, SE, SW, NW). Seated at the base of the pipe within each nipple is a little Wind Pixie Pilot that controls the power and direction of the breezes. The eight (mentally unstable) Wind Pixies inhabiting Louisa’s nipples are as follows:
NORTH— a two-headed bear banging on a piano in a bathtub.
NORTH EAST— seven farting oxen.
EAST— a warren of hares waving thunder torches.
SOUTH EAST— twelve Chinese school children competing in a triathlon in a small hotel room.
SOUTH— a spiral wad of monkey hair stuck to a bathroom mirror.
SOUTH WEST— a hummingbird in a dishwasher.
WEST— three sheep tied to a ladder on the beach.
NORTH WEST— a Sagittarius moth in a green plastic bucket in the center of a cemetery.
The plan worked. The psycho squalls and cyclones emitted from Louisa's nipples so confused the Sailors that they were blown way off course and before they knew it they had sailed all the way back home. Louisa’s storms hid the shore from all Sailors for evermore and the Land remained pure, pristine, and verdant for billions of years.
The Succulent Succubus
Any time a forest celebrates the marriage of Thunderbolt to Timber, Lilith will appear soon after. The succulent succubus always arrives with her petulant pet plant, Sammy, to help her survey the scorched ritual site. Their role in the aftermath of the wedding is to essentially clean up and get the forest ready for the next wedding. Lilith and Sammy usually take up residence in the hollow of a burnt tree while they conduct their business, which can take months.
As xerophytes, they can store a great deal of liquid that they are able to dispense to the root systems and the mycorrhizae—the underground fungal networks—of the survivors, but they are also marauders who pillage the corpses of the dead. Even if there weren’t signs all over the place—“All xerophytes must be on leash,” “Please clean up after your xerophyte”—Sammy would be on a leash at all times because Sammy is a very bad little succulent. Very, very, very bad. He makes wee-wees and doo-doos all over the place, he eats the crotches out of panties, etc.. If left to his own devices, Sammy would probably eat the carcass of every dead tree in the forest. Then he’d get too fat for his little pot, crack the ceramic, and die. Lilith’s last pet succulent couldn’t keep his nose out of anything and that’s why he died with his head stuck in a bag of Fritos—asphyxiated xerophyte.
But mostly Sammy is on leash, with pinch collar, to help keep him focused on his job of distributing fluids to the wedding survivors. No one knows what the fluid actually is, but it’s been suggested that it is semen that Lilith has stolen from sailors’ dreams (one of Lilith’s distant succubus descendants will, in fact, become known as the infamous Lorelei). In short, Lilith and Sammy provide the very important service of network restoration to the underground World Wood Web.
Did you know that these mycelium networks are considered the largest living creatures on earth? Apparently the largest known is a behemoth honey fungus (Armillaria solidipes) in Oregon that is 2,400 years old and covers 3.7 square miles.
It is through this fungi network that Dacchus will orchestrate his return from the Underworld.
The Mango Stag
Robin’s Magic broke. Of the seven Sunshine Sprites, Robin is responsible for the color Blue in the Rainbow. If Robin’s Magic is broken, then all things blue will be broken: sky, water, jeans, jays, whales, Miles Davis (kind of), working class collar shirts, Mondays, the foundation of rock n roll, etc.. In short, the world would become a blueless mess.
The problem arose when Robin discovered a boy hiding in the bushes on the banks of the Rhinebeau River. He was spying on the Sunshine Sprites as they were having their morning bath and when they caught him, they were not pleased. The boy begged, he pleaded, he argued that he had only been hunting in the woods and didn’t even know there was a river here—I swear to god, I swear I never even knew what rivers were!
Pfft. Really? Where’s your bow and arrows then, huh, lil man?
So Robin turned the boy into a little blue deer.
Except that Robin did not turn the boy into a little blue deer. Instead, before her were three mangos on a mirror. The sisters gasped.
Robin tried to cast her spell again, but to little effect. One of the mangos did sprout a stag’s head, though—a Mango Stag!—but that just made things worse. The head and antlers operated like a regular stag’s head, but the “body” was nothing more than a jumble of fruit that looked sort of like a balloon animal, but jiggled like a seal pulling itself along the beach.
Robin felt bad and wanted to return the Mango Stag back to its little boy body shape, but her sisters forbade it. They said that if she turned him back to a boy, the boy would die at least six deaths because every one of them would kill him again and again—“at least six” because a couple of the sisters promised they would murder him a few times.
She begged her sisters to let her keep the little creature until she could figure out what was wrong. They reluctantly relented. Robin named her new pet, Durango (deer + mango), and entrusted his care to her closest sister, Indigo (Indigo), while she took herself to the shop to find out why she was broke. None of the sisters appreciated this arrangement, but they tolerated the little lump’s presence.
The meanest of the seven sisters, Peaches (Orange), mockingly referred to Durango as, DERRR-tango. She’d perform a clumsy clownish tango as she said it, much to everyone’s amusement. (To her credit, it really was a very stupid little monster.)
Robin was temporarily taken off of Rainbow duty and admitted to the clinic where a Catacomb Colt could open her lil Pixie skull and have a look under the hood. Turns out her Shaka Brahs were misaligned with her Chakra Laws because a Mint Spider had bitten her inner Salmon who then took a shine to bareknuckle boxing Bald Eagles. Not good. The Salmon’s surliness raised Robin’s cobalt levels into the “too blue” zone, thus putting her in danger of dying of cyananide poisoning.
Fortunately the condition is easily remedied with aural rehabilitation—any music that is not the blues will work—in this case: a recording of a mariachi band playing an Easter party at Cy Twombly’s Rome apartment.
Thanks to the soothing sounds of mariachi, Robin quickly made a full recovery and returned to her place among her sisters in the Rainbow between Violet and Indigo.
Portrait Of Psycho Pencil With Saint James’ Bathtub
While the story here is about Dacchus, the inspiration was our dachshund, Psycho Pencil. Pencil likes to refer to himself as a “Psycho.” You surely have a friend who fancies themself weird? “I know! My friends think I’m soooo WEIRD!” But they’re really not weird at all and totally basic. Pencil is like that.
“I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before,” Pencil will say, “but my middle name is TROUBLE.”
You have mentioned that before, Pencil.
“And my friends say I’m PSYCHO!”
You don’t have any friends, Pencil.
Still there is some truth to what Pencil says. He does get a little surly sometimes. Especially at dinno time, 2x daily, total spaz. Between him and his sweet brother, Waffle, Pencil is definitely the bad boy of the two. He also uses the term “bad boy” to describe himself.
This image, however, has now become an illustration for a story about the time Dacchus was hunting Wild Prehistoric Devil Horses. He gave chase across half the Underworld, but he kept close, swinging his oar, axe, and a twisted Coptic cross the whole way.
The herd led him across the Sea and made landfall on an Emerald Isle. He followed them to the center of the Isle to a large Lake. He chased them over the Lake to a small island in the center of the dark waters. Upon this island was a small pond. The murky pond had a tiny islet in the middle of it. On the tiny islet was an ancient beehive hut made of stones. Inside the hut was a small pool one foot deep. Resting in the pool was a bathtub. Sitting inside the bathtub half submerged was a little Saint named James meditating on baptism.
Dacchus forgot all about the horses when he saw the bathtub. A Saint’s bathtub? He wanted it. So Pencil made the Saint get out of the tub, which was not difficult since he was an emaciated ascetic religious twit who weighed about as much as a wet towel, and carried the Saint’s tub back home with him—reverse order concentric bodies of water: pool, pond, lake, sea—where he filled it with dirt and planted a peach tree in it.
If you’ve ever read James And The Giant Peach then you’ve partaken of this tree’s fruit because every peach in every copy of that book came from St. James’ bathtub peach tree.
The Whalzebra
Does anyone remember those Vision NSA contest videos from back in the 80s? Tahoe, Chicago (“Eggplant on the extension!”), Trashmore, Del Mar, etc.. I loved them. One of my favorite things about them was the editing of the videos themselves. There were always montage sections, like the best of qualifying or something (that’s where we’d get to see footage of elusive skaters like Groholski, Lucero, Blender, etc..) and they would be filled with these really atrocious, garish, gaudy, cheesy edit effects. The segues between shots (I think they’re called “wipes?”) were bonkers: diamond dissolves, swirling spins, imploding squares, sideways scissor cuts, psychedelic fade aways, shrink the frame, and—oh my god, the screen is flying away! etc..
(Under all this, incidentally, was the sonic equivalent of the visual effects: the most dazzling—yet generic—butt rock music produced by some mediocre studio musician with diarrhea fingers shitting all over the fret board, WEEEE! WEEEE! WAAAAHHHH!)
Every time I saw these edits I’d say aloud, “What’s this button do?” Because that’s what it looked like to me: some editor sitting at his editing bay amusing himself by opening up the “Effects” folder and trying them out on a stupid skateboard video. “Hm, wonder what this button does? … Oh. Hm. Trippy…”
I identify the guilty party as “male” because I like to imagine that women generally aren’t so “loud” and would exhibit a little more class and restraint when confronted with the contents of an effects folder—just because it exists, doesn’t mean you have to use it. Women, however, are not immune to the temptation. In fact the mother of all mothers, Mother Nature, is guilty of pressing way too many buttons—She may be smarter than all her children combined, but that don’t mean she aint dumb. Take for example the whalzebra (rhymes with algebra).
During the Pliocene era some 4.5 million years ago, Mother Nature looked at the Pliohippus (the ancestor to all modern Equus) and went, “What’s this button do?” Mother Nature presses button. “Oh! Stripes!” And the zebra was born.
She should have stopped there, but she didn’t. Disregarding all decorum and restraint, Mother Nature started using the stripes effect on all kinds of species: skunks, hyenas, pajama squids, Grandidier’s mongooses, okapi, mountain bongos, ring tailed lemurs, Indian palm squirrels, blacktail damselfish, and even whales—yes, she created a zebra whale. The zebra whale is, of course, extinct today, but it is an ancestor of the modern orca.
We still have the zebra, though, one of the most distinctive and strangest looking animals on earth. When I was a teacher I remember a young girl in one of my classes asking, “Is a zebra white with black stripes, or black with white stripes?” Kids say the damnedest things, don’t they? Although she wasn’t really asking. I could tell she had posed this quandary many times before and recognized that it had deeper ramifications beyond the skin color of a horse. Her mother, for instance, was standing beside her and wasn’t the least bit surprised by the rather profound question. That said, I still enjoyed the question.
And, as it turns out, there is an answer: zebras are black with white stripes.
Citizen Anton And The Trippy Wizard
Citizen Anton’s obsession with deer began, as far as we know, while he was the goalie coach at a local hockey camp. It was quite sudden, apparently. One day he was teaching the kids at his goalie camp how to be goaltenders, the next he was teaching them to think and act like deer. He felt that the goalie, more than anyone on the ice, needed to be lightning fast and fleet as a deer.
The exercises he made the kids do were quite odd. In one, he basically created a crude recreation of Plato’s cave. He made the kids sit on the floor in a dark room and face the wall. Citizen Anton would stand behind them holding a torch casting shadows of cardboard deer silhouettes on to the wall. Mostly deer, but sometimes he’d project shadows of objects with names that rhyme with “deer”: ear, beer, steer, queer, tear, sphere, chandelier, goalie gear, Three Musketeers, Buzz Lightyear, etc.. His hope was that the kids would always think of deer so that they would then become deer.
“If all you see is deer, if all you hear is deer, then all you hold dear is deer,” as he would say. Often. He claimed this directive came from Plato himself.
When he was first admitted here, his condition was more manageable. He seemed to have arrived at a position where his views of the world were simply “misunderstood.” “I’m not crazy, I’m just way ahead of my time!” This perspective benefits some patients because, while it doesn’t eliminate the incongruence between their inner and outer worlds, it provides an outlook that at least allows the patient a relatively positive and undisturbed mental environment and it gives hope that alignment is possible. Unfortunately, his acquiescence with this state of affairs began to erode rather quickly.
He began acting like a deer. Most of his act was routine crazy, except that he thought he could leap like a deer and he tried to jump over anyone and anything including the fences that surround the property. His continuous escape attempts made him extremely difficult to deal with and he had to be monitored constantly, stretching our already thin staff even thinner.
One day Citizen Anton really did get out. We still have no idea how, but there he was prancing around on the front lawn munching on grass. He had his thumbs in his ears, palms out, nude as usual. He had escaped, but he didn’t seem to be going anywhere.
So they set the dogs upon him. I always found it interesting that before they release the full pack, they would send out this one particular dog known as The Trippy Wizard (aka T-Wiz, Twizzy, Tweezy, etc.). He earned his name for always being underfoot and tripping people. He was a wizard at tripping.
“Try as you might to not get busy with Twizzy,” our security personnel would say, “you’ll go down easy with Tweezy.”
Citizen Anton, seeing T-Wiz sauntering across the lawn towards him on his tiny legs, thought nothing of outrunning the silly creature, but before he even completed this thought, he was flat on his face.
The dogs pounced upon him.
And he paid dearly for it.
The Porcelain Cowboy
My high school math teacher, Mrs. G, thought she was part frog.
In the 50s frogs were used for pregnancy tests. An “irascible zoologist” named, Lancelot Hogben, discovered that injecting hormones (from an ox’s pituitary gland) into the brain of a desert frog known as The Porcelain Cowboy (Xenopus tropicalis) would cause the frog to start laying eggs. At the time, it was known that the urine of pregnant women contained hormones that were made in their pituitary glands. Hogben wondered if those same hormones could trigger the egg laying of The Porcelain Cowboy?
Turns out they do. When you inject a pregnant woman’s urine into The Porcelain Cowboy’s brain, the frog will lay eggs within a few hours. Thus the frog became a very reliable living pregnancy test and women everywhere started pissing on frogs.
Mrs. G had evidence that her mother performed the frog pregnancy test on herself, but incorrectly. Amidst our protests, she produced a page from her mother’s diary that read, “Rubbed porklin’ [sic] cowboy on my hoo-ha today.”
The date of the diary entry coincides with the pregnancy that resulted in Mrs. G’s birth day and thus she insists that some of the frog’s DNA—or, in her version of events, an entire tadpole—entered her mother’s hoo-ha, swam up the vagina, and into the womb where she quietly lay. Mrs. G claimed the tadpole infiltrated her embryonic brain, grew into a frog, was born with her, and controls her behavior. She called the frog her vestigial twin, an amphibious homunculus.
We knew about Mrs. G’s frog because she was often hungover in class and in that condition she’d complain about her affliction. The frog, she would say, was responsible for all of her “wrong choices.” Like attending Sunday afternoon BBQs. And getting drunk. And snorting drugs all night. And sleeping with “sleazebags.” And.
I recently learned that Mrs. G had been a track and field star before she was a teacher and that she still holds the world record for women’s long jump, set in Leningrad in 1988, at 7.52 m (24’ 8”). We had no idea. But it makes her crazy frog story more plausible.
Sheep And Tides
In Peter Greenaway’s film, Drowning By Numbers, there are a lot of control issues in play, much of which is illustrated through numbers (the numbers 1-100 all appear at some point in the film, often in the background) and games. The father, Madgett, and his son, Smut, are fanatical about inventing and playing peculiar games that all have a very Lewis Carroll-esque flavor to them: Bees In The Trees, Dawn Card Castles, Hangman’s Cricket, etc.. One of my favorites is Sheep And Tides.
Sheep And Tides is played in ocean shallows with a grid of nine sheep. Each animal is tied to a chair upon which a teacup and saucer is set. Sheep, we are told, are particularly sensitive to tides so when the waters begin to rise the sheep will move and jangle their respective teacups. Players each select a row of three sheep. The first row to jangle all three of its cups wins. A full game is played over 24 hours and three changes in the tides.
A passage from Douglas Keesey’s book, The Films of Peter Greenaway: Sex, Death and Provocation, provides an interesting analysis:
“Sheep And Tides enables us to see how many of our games treat the natural world as one big gameboard and Nature’s creatures as our playing pieces. This game, like most others, betrays the anxiety we feel about Nature’s unpredictability and potential threat to civilization (tides rattling teacups), and it shows our rage for order, our compulsion to clock Nature so as to foretell and forestall Her threat. (It is for this same reason that Madgett counts sheep before going to sleep—numbers give us the soothing impression of a world according to our desire, even as we are actually losing control and falling unconscious.) Finally, Sheep And Tides is a game like most games in being a competition between men over money, with the winner of the bet being the one who can best predict and control Nature, ruling over Her by using the rules of the game—the grid (of 3x3 sheep) and the count (of rattling teacups).”
The lesson, of course, is that we do not control nature.
Mary
Joseph was slightly annoyed that his wife, Mary, made them late to their appointment at the Census office because, as usual, she took forever to get ready in front of the god damn mirror.
Women! Joseph thought shaking his head. Am I right, guys? Am I right?
Joseph had once harbored dreams of becoming a standup comedian, but abandoned his hopes to concentrate on carpentry and fishing.
Joseph had to admit, though, that the wait for his wife was always worth it because Mary looked absolutely stunning when she emerged. As he helped her mount her steed, however, it seemed to Joseph that his wife had gained a little weight. She was, in fact, covered in an inordinate amount of attire: cerulean scarves, cobalt kerchiefs, a beryl frock, an indigo tippet, a navy mantilla, an ultramarine mantilla, sapphire shifts, various turquoise raiments—an azure ensemble, strange as angels dancing in the deepest oceans, twisting in the waters, she looked just like a dream. What was she hiding? Joseph mentioned the warm desert winds, but Mary briskly waved his suggestion aside.
It was clear something was wrong with Mary. There was something about Mary. She had a meltdown in the Census office as she was filling out her documentation. Mary was deeply offended by a question on the form that requested her origin.
What is this person’s race or origin?
A. Jew.
B. Roman.
C. Egyptian.
D. A Painting by Pieter Bruegel The Elder.
Joseph calmed her down and showed her the fine print that said her answer was completely voluntary. Mary declined to answer, but she still didn’t like it.
The next day Joseph learned that his suspicions were correct, and then some. Mary had gained weight. Because she was pregnant. Then she gave birth to a baby boy.
Joseph had not yet been with his wife. He had never seen her naked body or partook of its delights. And yet he was now father to her bastard child, responsible for its upkeep.
Yet he had never been with her.
Joseph grew angry.
Titania’s Forge
The trouble began when Neptune’s only daughter, Shelly (Goddess Of Shells), had the bright idea to play Sheeps And Tides right outside Titania’s Forge. The ancient Anglo-Saxon game—which some say originated in the Old Testament—is most famously performed in the Peter Greenaway film, Drowning By Numbers. The game is easy to play, but difficult to master:
Nine sheep are arranged in three rows in coastal shallows. Each sheep is tied to a post near a chair that has a teacup upon it. The object of the game is to guess which row of three sheep will be the first to react to the turn of the tide by jostling their chairs and rattling their tea cups—sheep, as everyone well knows, are very sensitive to tides. A full game is played over the course of 24 hours, or three tides.
As Shelly would soon learn, Titania’s Forge is probably not the best setting for this docile sport because it is the place where all the world’s rivers converge to deliver the snowmelt they have transported from the mountains for processing. When the deluge enters the Forge it is first transformed into seawater and then assigned to various oceans. From the oceans, the waters are converted to mists that the Forge’s Large Offshore Haldron Collidor and Nuclear Electromagnetic Semi-Super-Semiconductor (LOCH NESSS) gathers into giant storms in the skies far out at sea. The storms soon dissipate as they return to land where the now gentle clouds give birth to snow that is again deposited atop the mountains. Ad infinitum.
Unfortunately for Shelly, and her game, this year’s weather was much warmer than usual, so the snowmelt was much greater, and Titania’s Forge was forced to swallow a massive flashflood, plus nine sheep, nine chairs, and nine teacups that ultimately clogged the Forge’s pipes.
Shelly so solly. Titania not pleased. Since Dacchus was in the Underworld, and she hated calling their plumber, she decided to try and fix it herself.
First she tried some drain cleaner, which is stupid because it rots pipes. That didn’t work, so she went at it with a plunger. Plumbers love plungers because they usually compact the clog, as it did here. Next Titania sent a gigantic industrial snake down the drain, but quickly realized it was too large for the Forge’s sensitive drain. The toilet augur she attacked the clog with next showed promise, though. It was able to snake through the Forge’s labyrinthine pipes and, while she made contact with the clog, it wouldn’t budge.
After wasting nearly a day on trying to clear the clog, Titania struck upon a brilliant idea: I’ll send my Sea Wolf into the drain to scare off the sheep.
With the promise of a sheep buffet at the end of the pipe, the Sea Wolf eagerly dove into the hole, foregoing the requisite “sheep’s clothing.” As the bitch—for it was a she Sea Wolf—raced through the pipes she emitted an eerie underwater howl that raised the hairs on Shelly’s neck. Then came a long ominous silence that they presumed meant the Sea Wolf had reached the clog.
After a spell, the Forge’s overflowing top bowl suddenly drained as the water was sucked down the gurgling pipe. Cleared! The Sea Wolf emerged from the dark hole with a mouthful of bones entwined in a web of dental floss.
My sheep! Shelly gasped.
Titania removed the net of bones from the Sea Wolf’s jaws for a closer look. These aren’t sheep bones, she said, these are pork chops.
Pork chops? Shelly said. Who would throw pork chops down the drain?
I bet I know who would eat a pork chop, then floss their teeth and throw all the evidence down the drain, Titania said drumming her chin, I bet I know who…