whisperblend

Friday, October 28, 2005

The Gnome Comes Home

and forever after October 28 became known as St. Patrick's Day


Captain Kinerah knew she should not have had that breakfast burrito in the galley before they made their jumps. The captain of the survey ship DELOREAN made her approach and kept one eye on the intruments monitoring the status of the nearby star out here on this far tip of the arm of a backwater solar system in the spiral galaxy. The panel told her that this sun was unstable, had been for some time, and was bathing the planet below with high doses of ultraviolet and gamma radiation. She flipped the comlink switch and advised her passengers to hold on as she initiated the braking maneuver to enter the planet's thin atmosphere. Goddam snipe hunt she thought, gripping the joystick and gritting her teeth as the ship bounced along the outer fringes of the atmosphere before letting the computer take over for final approach to the landing zone. Her co-pilot should have been upfront with her, but it seems he had gotten into the burritos as well and was currently curled up in a fetal ball in his bunk midships battling the same intestinal bug she thought glumly.

Bushie the porch gnome felt the heat of the noonday sun on his back like a hot iron. His burlap garment scratched at his withered and chapped flanks as he trudged on I-10 out of Pascagoula and away from the porch for the last time. The Lott clan, bereft of all but the home in Pascagoula let the gnome go as he was of little use to them any longer. The decades of abuse they dished out for sport and the neglect they demonstrated for fun left the gnome of little use to anyone at all. Walking, walking leaving behind the spiders and Karl the black snake who had been his only "friends" for so long. Other than them no one heard his whimpers at night as the ghosts of the dead and maimed soldiers and marines, their wives, fiances, and mothers, and the children unnamed and uncounted as 'collateral damage' in the myriad conflicts he had set in motion tore at him with their skeletal limbs and milky eyes. Ever westward he slouched, Gulfport, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans where he stopped for the night and crawled under a wrought iron bench in the blue light of Jackson Square to doze fitfully, if at all.


The DELOREAN set down on a high ridge overlooking what appeared to be a dry creek bed. The team from the Imperial Archeological and Historical Institute disembarked in the glistening environmental (e)-suits and set about surveying the landscape. This team of 3 men and 2 women were specialists in early human history and they were looking for something very specific on this trip. Much of human history through the early 29th century had been pretty well preserved but there were gaps, there always are. And this team was looking for clues to what happened in the years leading up to the singularity that occurred in the middle 21st century when artificial intelligence became viable and nanotechnology matured freeing mankind from his little world at long last.


Bushie the porch gnome made his way out of New Orleans for the last time. Again, westward he trudged in the heat and the humidity, now add chafing to his troubles as his calloused, fungus infected feet dragged on the cracking pavement out of town and on to Houston and from there further west still. It was 3 days of this when he came over the road and spied what he was looking for, the remains of a small 'ranchette' now overgrown with cedar trees, and wild horses, which the gnome feared in a primal fashion. So he avoided the horse herd, and they in turn gave the gnome wide lattitude because of the smell he gave off. The porch gnome made his way, bells on his nutsack jingling, to a pinion tree by an almost dry creek, oily green water making its way south to, well, wherever, the gnome didn't care. He sat down against that tree and drifted off to a sleep with no dreams, but as he did he felt an almost forgotten rumble in his bowels, and one final release, a salt denuded pretzel in the dust. Well, better'n chokin' on it he thought. And died.

The archeologists had been working this site and a few others like it nearby for the past 2 weeks and they were almost ready to pack up and head home across the galaxy when their most senior and dedicated member, a widower named Collins saw, in the late afternoon sun, a flash down by the creekbed. He walked over to the spot and began brushing away at what appeared to be fossilized human remains fairly well preserved in this atmosphere, but still, not much more than the outlines of bones, except for 2 tiny steel spheres the size of BBs that had settled in the pelvic region of the remains, which Collins collected in a lucite jar and headed back to the ship for final departure.

Once in orbit the team catalogued their samples and Collins finally brought out the miniscule steel spheres and put them under a microscope - on one side had been inscribed the word neuticals and on the other the single letter W.

Captain Kinerah told her passengers to get ready for jump as she made her way back to the head, Collins asked her what was up and the captain, never a fastidious woman, told him "calm down pops, I gotta hit the head and take a cheney, stay away from those black bean burritos. "

Saturday, October 22, 2005

option 3

Miss me, y'all.

Never thought of the 3rd option for Ms. Miers:

C) She's Eddie Haskell in drag.


Sorry, I've been away. Computer broke and had to go out and get a new one. We'll see how long this one lasts.

Monday, October 03, 2005

The Fixer

Every Administration has one. The fixer, the one who knows where all the bodies are buried, all the soft spots, where to apply the leverage, you feelin' me? Well, because Ms. Miers has known the President for 30 years back when he was presumably still doin' coke and Jim Beam in truly herculean quantities if not passed out Tri Delts then she's seen some tings. And she knows how to keep secrets. So shrub owes her, bigtime. And so that brings us to today.

Now look , this is a good pick for the simple reason that it seems to set the loony wingnuts' teeth on edge (or is that tooth). And under any circumstances that is a good thing. Keeps 'em from doing the other shit they seem to be good at and that's basically dismantling the New Deal and Great Society, setting the rest of us at each other's throats, and toppling Flinstone-level third world armies of frightened conscripts and then setting the most volatile region on earth 1) against us and, 2) on fire with populations overwhelmingly made up of disillusioned and very angry 13-25 unemployed males. But I'm not debatin' on that shit tonight, no.

Here's what I am talkin' 'bout - David Frum who used to be a speechwriter for our current manchild in chief said last week that Harriet told him that George Bush was the most brilliant man she ever met. Now from this one little bit of hearsay evidence we can make one of two conclusions, either:
A) Harriet has an exceedingly limited social circle and all reports indicate that the American people are certainly gettting their money's worth here in that all she does is work 16 hour days 7 days a week. Or,
B) To engage in hyperbole like that is to let slip the fact that she must possess an extremely acerbic and lacerating droll wit.

I choose B.

Hear ye, hear ye.

All rise

Sunday, October 02, 2005

The Loneliest Gnome in All the World

One of the oldest adages in politics and, one of my favorites as a matter of fact, is that a somebody beats a nobody. Every time.
Ladies and gentlemen I give you - - Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and, for good measure, Senator Hillary Clinton to name just two.
So it is that Bushie the porch gnome finds himself bungeed to the spare tire on the back of Boss Trent’s ramshackle motorhome on the way to the inauguration of the chief executive of New Orleans one Paris Hilton, soon to be the Honorable Paris Hilton, Mayor of New Orleans.
Also in attendance, Governor Britney Spears Federline Zimmerman Hudson Taomorino al-Hakim Jefferson Jackson Rodriguez Swett presiding. Why the fuck not, right. Right?!
Boss Trent was asked to do the Mayor-elect’s hair and makeup and so it was they hit the road that January day.
Anyway, it was freezing this January morning on the road between Pascagoula and New Orleans and Bushie was not a happy gnome. No, not at all. But, he was very rarely a happy gnome since he retired to Boss Trent’s stoop lo these many years ago. This is where he said he would be someday and that day came and people were only too happy to oblige him his dream of spending time on the porch of Trent Lott’s home in Pascagoula, the one rebuilt after the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. This is where he said he would come someday as the rest of Mississippi lay in ruins and southern Louisiana was nothing but a fetid miasma of sorrow and recrimination. Revered he was still in a few compounds in Idaho, reviled he was everywhere else.

It was unthinkable that Bushie would have moved on as a relatively young gnome after his presidency to do important things. Contribute to humanity, if you will. Write papers or articles for some faux “research institute” like the Project for a New American Century(PNAC) (the folks who provided the “intellectual reasoning” for the invasion of Iraq) or the American Enterprise Institute PNACs rancid progenitor. Or that he would have embarked on a studious retirement of bookwriting on his life and times and “service” to a great Nation. Wrtite books? Write books? Yeah, right. He didn’t read books, despite what you saw tucked under his arm on the way to Marine 1 on the South Lawn enroute to another dusty dry vacation at his “ranchette” in west Texas. Hey, screw those fancy liberal Eastern elites with their fancy reasoning and big words. You think Hank Hill read 1776? No way, hombre, not if it was 40% off at the Meglomart, no way.
Build homes for poor people or manage emerging democracy elections like Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton, puhleese – no shock ‘n awe in it people, no thanks.

The motorhome is directed to a spot in the north lot of the infamous Convention Center in New Orleans. As it came to a stop the bells on Bushie’s nutsack jingled a little. The bells were tied on his scrotum because when he first got to the mansion in Pascagoula he would wander inside and look for the liquor cabinet, that, dammit was always locked up. The bells would alert the night valet who would chase Bushie back outside and under the stoop. He would curl up staring at the black snake he named Karl, black snake with one rheumy eye and kidney stones ( Janice get research to see if snakes have kidneys), and he would imagine Karl hissing at him, something about lost opportunities and assuaging the base, and whatnot. Big fucking words to Bushie. But the nutless gnome has no fight in him. Oh no, not since his stones dried up and evaporated in that classroom in Florida. How long does a man’s testicles take to dry up and go pop. The time it takes for said grown man to read My Pet Goat in a classroom full of 2nd graders. 7 minutes, yo. You could make fun of Michael Moore all you want, hell, I might indulge from time to time but that is one thing no one can ever, ever, take away from us and that is that 7 minutes that the gnome looked around and had no one to bail his ass out. Not this time.

Boss Trent gets out of the motorhome and unclips Bushie from the back of the motorhome and flicks his right ear where the golden orb spider spends her nights and sets the leash on Bushie for the walk over to City Hall for the inauguration ceremony. In one hand Boss Trent has his beauty kit with about a gallon of hair spray inside and in the other the leash with Bushie on the other end loping along. They make their way to a line of Dons Johns at the back of where everyone will be sitting and Bushie is chained to the brightest bluest John in the row so that everyone at the event who makes their way back for a piss is invited to piss on the gnome. The gnome got soaked that day with no one for company, not even Karl the black snake to hiss his curses. Oh, for the wet leaves and mud of the stoop back in Pascagoula. Hopefully, the autumn rains will come soon and wash the sticky and the stink away.