Sunday, April 20, 2008

Cherub With Chest Hair

Your Horoscope For Today:

James Watt, after watching a kettle boil over, was sufficiently inspired to invent the steam engine. What you'll invent after witnessing an overweight epileptic eat tacos may, quite possibly, bring about the end of life as we know it.


How cool would it be to wake up from a coma and have the first words out of your mouth emerge in a language you didn’t speak before you lapsed? If my wife can be trusted to tell me the truth, this has actually happened, and on more than one occasion.

Can you imagine? Aunt Shirley went around the bend five years ago and you’re pretty close to the stage where you start to plant flowers in her navel when suddenly the lights come back on. She sits bolt upright in her bed and begins to greet you in Arabic or Serbo-Croatian! How neat would that be? How long do you think it would take the hospital to find an interpreter who could speak the Papua New Guinean Kewa dialect? Meanwhile, Aunt Shirley is trying to shove a bone through her nose and build a fire next to her respirator.

Do you suppose that all people in vegetative states are really getting intense Berlitz courses in the language of their choice and won’t be released back into the world until they’ve passed their final exams? That might explain why some folks never get back... they just can’t seem to memorize the proper verb declensions and formal/informal derivatives.

And who is teaching these somnambulistic courses? Are there teams of metaphysical language teachers flitting around in our cranial midsts, merely waiting to seize the opportunity? 'Mrs. Herbstreit, go to Moberly, Missouri, you have a new pupil... one Mr. Bob Church... he wants to learn Middle English.' Then, she smacks me on the head, puts my lights out, and school starts. Meanwhile, I get a four or five-year vacation at the Randall County Institute for the Simple, matriculating patiently while my vocabulary skill levels soar to C- levels before graduation.

Just think... if I could master Middle English, my dream of becoming a thane would finally come true. I’d love to think that I could graduate somewhere before my window to the world finally slams shut... it might erase the horrors of high school. Sweet...
(Final note*** No babies were harmed in the writing of this piece.)

11 comments:

hfurness said...

Une roote paspt thy neede shoote on yon miste dy songe.... I was asleep when that came to me - keep studying young Chaucer, but dondt stope penning thy thoughts.

Anonymous said...

Bob - This piece is precisely why I come back over and over - Simply Brilliant, Cogent and friggin funny...

Anonymous said...

i think Rosetta Stone would actually be cheaper...

a funhouse mirror piece...always like a carnival over here, man...

i love carnivals...

Bubba said...

Harry-- marie þat is clepid maudeleyn... bauf-humplefgt!

Poetman-- You are too kind, my friend. I shall yet make you regret ever penning such words...

Fork-- Me, too! I wish everyday were carnival-worthy. Thanks for stopping by...

Scot said...

what will you think up next--lmao (not middle English)

Anonymous said...

Is it true?

I'm gonna be googling.


Don't learn Middle English though, Bob. If you go all Chaucer on us, it's gonna be damn hard to keep up.

kaylee said...

I would settle for
basic English
and maybe some hard core
rap.
But that just me
FUNNY STUFF HERE.. E OD
GUY/

KLK

Anonymous said...

I was gonna say, oh grow up, but then i worried you wouldn't get that i was appreciating the cleverness of the photo and writing complementing selfprotraiture thingy. Middle english, olde english, double dutch latinisations, would you like a diploma from the you crack me up university cos you have earned one many times,

R.L. Bourges said...

what happened in my case - and you are the first to know - is that the experiment went awry. I was in the middle of vegetating in Hebrew when the Classical Greek program started up. Then some ding-dong piped in singing the Muzak version of Hare Krishna. They put my brain back together, sort of, but every so often the hills spring alive with the sound of reticulating chookyes racing through the tales of Odin in ancient Norse.
It's a problem.

Bubba said...

Lee-- So it would seem... unless, of course, you happen to channel my subconscious and start to recieve Hopi war chants intermingled with audible slurping sounds, at which time your brain switches the whole thing off rather than risk the same sort of overload that necessitated the coma in the first place... worra, worra...

Bubba said...

Gingatao-- It is so neat when you stop by and I get to mess with your head a little... it ranks right up there with watching you putt out on eighteen, knowing full well that you'll soon be forfeiting a goodly portion of next week's meal money on Guinness for your friends at the Nineteenth Hole.

It pleases me greatly that you're getting a giggle or two. Thanks...