*
We walked towards town, and when we got quite close, we crept towards town. For the last hundred yards we crawled, and then as we breasted a small rise at the edge of town, we were on our bellies. Jim sent Mr. Hodge to the top first, and he apparently reported the all-clear to Jim, because he waved us forward…
The story continues in The Quest for Truth, available at all good online ebook and paperback retailers.
About The Quest for Truth:
Oscar's orderly paranoid world has been turned upside down by the Red Fist Army and he now lives in exile.
With the help of Penelope, Jim, and Mr. Hodge the hedgehog, he must free their hostage town, take on the Red Fist, and discover the truth about Dr. Boggs.
However, when things go wrong and Oscar loses his closest friends, he has to rely on an unlikely group of refugees with surprising mental abilities.
As he continues on his journey to freeing the town and himself, he finds out more of his own truths than he ever imagined, and absolutely nobody shoots lasers out of their eyes.
[1] You’d think the letter would have scared them off, but these guys were tough.
[2] Maybe they were friendly eyes, who can say? I admit it; he was taking my juice, so I judged him.
[3] Yes, it was an errand I had assigned myself, but it’s impolite of you to point that out.
[4] Or would he?
[5] Perhaps replacing it with an actual mouse. Those must be really uncomfortable to use.
[6] I did wonder, briefly, why General Tso seems to have been the only general ever to create his own recipe. The military should do more to encourage their officers in the culinary arts; the propaganda value of a Chinese buffet should not be underestimated. There is that Colonel, of course, but I really think the movement needs to come from higher up than that.
[7] Try it next time someone asks you if you slept well. Just say, “No, I pooped myself and spent an hour cleaning it up using your socks,” and see if they don’t just leave to check on their socks instead of consoling you for your lack of sleep.
[8] “Look over there,” they would say, pointing at my uncle who I knew very well. “Who’s that? Is that your uncle?” Luckily for them, I was not yet able to speak and insult them for their condescension, but even so I was barely able to hide my contempt behind the veil of innocent youth.
[9] Why do we use this expression? Does anyone even experiment on guinea pigs? I thought it was rats. Maybe hundreds of years ago guinea pigs were the animal of choice, but then it was discovered that they were extremely emotionally sensitive and it offended their dignity to be experimented on, or perhaps that they had photographic memories and would keep records of all they had seen so that competing research companies could capture them and pull out their little toenails until they gave up all their secrets. So now we use rats, who prefer to keep secrets because they know what’s good for them. Push a button, pull a lever, keep a secret, get some cheese – it’s a job, anyway, no shame in a job. Better than being dressed up in little hats and dresses by young girls, like what happens to guinea pigs now.
[10] Oops.
[11] This is not literally what happened, it’s only a way of representing in text form how I wrestled internally with the idea of accepting treatment for my mental illness. In actual fact, I knew that most pamphlets are far too clever to be duped by such an infantile ruse.
[12] Or perhaps a male-female team of eye and nose thieves.
[13] I wouldn’t put it past this imposter to seduce my mother and then she’d eventually have occasion to see the mole, but she’d probably just think I/he was getting skin cancer and suggest that he see a doctor. There’s a slim chance that she’d realize that it wasn’t me, put her clothes on and call the police (not that the police would do any good, you know how it goes), but it’s probably just as likely that they’d remove the mole from him before he replaced me. In any case, at around this time in my life I was no longer thinking that the Mars Corporation had hired me in order to poison me with candy and replace me with a lightly moled man. It wouldn’t really make much sense, even just from a financial perspective.
[14] A gun or even a knife are arguably more effective weapons, but these people preferred subtlety.
[15] Technically that guy who killed and ate his parents was far, far worse, but I’m not trying to weasel out of what I did. Not speaking to your mother even when she’s done nothing wrong (or even when she has, because, considering all the times she didn’t sell you or turn you in to the police for all the terrible things you did as a small child, she should be allowed a few wrong things) is pretty bad anyway.
[16] Some who know me well might say that I simply lack the courage to break up a relationship face-to-face, and that’s true, but I’d also like to think I did it for her protection, and also a bit for my protection: Captain Scott, the famed 20th century Arctic explorer, was reportedly shocked by the penguins who practiced what he called “depraved” sexual acts – in fact, he was so shocked that he recorded his accounts of them in Greek instead of English, to protect the delicate sensibilities of the public at the time. My former girlfriend who I last contacted by way of dead pheasant was very penguin-like in that respect, and frankly I was frightened of her. At least I’m not writing this in Greek now, though, because I know your sensibilities are not as delicate as the public of Captain Scott’s time. In fact, there’s a good chance that you’re pretty depraved yourself. Shame on you. Unless shame is one of the things that gives you sexual pleasure, in which case please experience the opposite of shame.
[17] Though you really have to question who’s the real weirdo: the weirdo, or the one who keeps a list of weirdos. Both, I guess, but I still very much wanted to be off that list.
[18] I’m sorry if this has spoiled the story for anyone who up until this point had hoped the big reveal at the end would be that I was actually a breakfast burrito; I was only like a breakfast burrito in this specific instance. Also, there’s not actually a big reveal at the end. Or is there?
[19] Once I opened a bottle of soda and the underside of the cap declared “Instant Win – Free Drink.” I took it to the store clerk, exchanged it, and the underside of the cap on the free bottle also said “Instant Win – Free Drink.” I exchanged that cap as well, but by that time I was no longer able to experience any pleasure at my good fortune because I was consumed with misgiving at what might be in these drinks that they were so eager to give away. I went outside, poured the bottles down a street drain, and hid under a blanket back at home with only my tears to slake my thirst, although I could not cry enough for that purpose.
[20] Which I had to give away for precisely this reason, and for several months after I constantly worried that the cat might still blow up in the arms of the new family I had given it to. After that amount of time, though, when he had not destroyed the adoptive family, I figured that either the cat meant no harm, or he was a dud. Better safe than sorry.
[21] Not that I’ve been mean to a prostitute (or a cat).
[22] Paper isn’t as bad as you might think. Each publisher has their own flavor because of where they source their wood pulp from, and each book from that publisher will have even further flavors which are subtle but still very distinct, based on the ink content, the vintage of the book, etc. Books are certainly an acquired taste (the hardbacks are especially difficult to swallow), but I think, as with all things, one can develop a taste for it. I encourage you to try it with this book once you have finished reading it, rather than putting it on the used book market. Unless you’re reading this in ebook format.
[23] My attempts to carry on what I thought was a relationship with a Transportation Security Administration officer after an airport security screening were, however, met with a series of rebuffs and a rather rude restraining order. I guess every rule has an exception.
[24] A misleading name for an insect which is neither part butter nor part fly, and certainly not any kind of flying butter as the name might suggest. W
hen I was young, I used to enjoy eating raw butter, and you can imagine my great disappointment the first time I put a butterfly in my mouth. I say ‘the first time’, because I thought maybe that one had just gone off a bit, so I tried again. And again. Actually after a while I sort of developed a taste for them to the point where I began to be disappointed that butter didn’t taste more like butterflies, and I don’t think it’s boasting to say that I’m largely responsible for keeping the United State’s population of butterflies down to manageable levels. Without my help they would surely consume us all.
[25] Although, were it to have had a name it would have been a name like Butch or Biff. Maybe Billy Bob, but probably not because that can also be a friendly kind of name in addition to being the name of a backwoods serial killer.
[26] Which might not seem like much to worry about, but a paper cut not properly treated can lead to infection which can lead to illness which can lead to death. I don’t think it ever has (the medical literature on the subject of death by paper cut is spotty at best, which no doubt causes great shame to the entire medical profession), but it could. And even if it doesn’t, paper cuts still hurt a lot.
[27] Not an actual shark, it’s just a metaphor. The Psylocybin had made it so that I wasn’t paranoid that a shark might eat me (which is a feeling I used to get even while swimming in an enclosed public swimming pool, and also, when I was younger, a feeling I used to get while in the bathtub), and I knew that it was extremely unlikely for anyone to be eaten by a shark, or even to be bitten by one. In fact, you’re much more likely to be struck by lightning than to be bitten by a shark, but people generally seem more afraid of sharks than of lightning. People even use lightning strikes as an example of how unlikely you are to win the lottery (“You’re more likely to be struck by lightning than win the lottery, stop wasting your money on those tickets and come back to bed, it’s 3 in the morning, you’ll wake up the baby, you’re not wearing any pants, etc.!”), and it’s true – almost 25,000 people a year are struck by lightning, and several thousand of those strikes are fatal. However, you never hear that you’re more likely to win the lottery than you are to be eaten by a shark, because thousands of people a year win various lotteries and only around 20 people are killed by sharks, which makes you feel pretty good about life when you think about it – you’re more likely to be fabulously/filthy rich than to be mercilessly savaged to death by an emotionless sea monster, which isn’t a bad way for the universe to have organized things.
[28] I read in the New York Times that years ago Microsoft allowed employees one bathroom break per eight hours. If you needed to go more often than that, you had to take a vacation day. They had an armed guard posted at each urinal and stall to enforce it. They had to stop the practice after certain powerful companies in the urinal cake market accused them of holding a monopoly over urine and the International Court of Justice ruled against them and threatened to break the company up into several smaller software, hardware, and bathroom companies if they didn’t change their business practices. That’s what I read, anyway.
[29] I hate saying ‘web,’ but I guess it’s better than ‘net,’ so I don’t complain too much.
[30] I’m not clear exactly how that would be done, but I’m sure there are databases you can use.
[31] Some people would find that creepy, but spiders rarely cause any harm towards humans and they eat all sorts of truly harmful insects such as the flesh fly, which spends its working day walking around in rotting meat and its leisure time walking around on your food which can result in you getting leprosy or some other displeasing disease, as well as looking out for any chance to lay its maggot eggs inside any open wounds you may have. Spiders are really just free pest control, and you should welcome them into your home; at least they won’t give you leprosy.
[32] I don’t want you to get the impression that I’m always grating parts of my body off. I’m not. It happened once, alright? Let’s move past it.
[33] Three legs would be much better for us any way you look at it, and I think the fact that we only have two legs is a black mark against creationists and evolutionists.
[34] For the sake of accuracy let me say that I believe it may actually be Benjamin Franklin who always said that particular thing, but I find that me and he are so similar in other ways it’s often superfluous to draw any kind of distinction between us.
[35] But I could not have, because my legs were not formed at the proper angle for kicking myself. This is one of the great tragedies of the human condition.
[36] Shellac, for those of you who don’t know and have thenceforth enjoyed a life of blissful ignorance, is actually an excretion from the female Kerria lacca insect. Most pills are covered with this insect excretion. So are many oranges and apples, although it is called ‘food-grade wax’ in those cases, because ‘some kind of sticky beetle poop we scraped off a tree’ doesn’t sound as tasty.
[37] I have also found this is very true, and it is also one of the most bizarre things about the human male’s body. His testicles, one of the most pain-sensitive parts of his body, just hang down openly between his legs. It’s not so with other organs. His heart, his lungs, and the lower part of his trachea are protected by his ribs. His brain is protected by his skull. Even the less important organs like his stomach and kidneys are protected by several inches of fat and muscle. His testicles, though, which are necessary to pass on his genes – essentially the entire biological reason for his existence – are just there, ready to meet any metal stick that comes along for a whack.
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