DON'T INTERRUPT THE SORROW, DARN RIGHT (Part One)

I have been working on the next installment of the "Oscar" series, but somehow right in the middle of it this showed up in my head. So I'm going to just go with it for the time being - with apologies to Joni Mitchell. The name just seemed right, somehow.

DON'T INTERRUPT THE SORROW, DARN RIGHT

At Nashville Corners I stood and watched three dozen limes roll by, right down the middle of the street. The pixilated fruit vendor had stopped to piss in the gutter and his cart had been upended by a bedridden puppet gone amok on a motorized gurney.

I was doing research. I needed to find out why, during a seven minute period in the late 1960s, every male child born in Singapore had been named Winston Churchill. The Easter Island Heads, Stonehenge, the mysterious missing Fourteenth Ring of Saturn, even our current predicament -- all of these phenomena were factors, I was convinced. Of course most of these pipsqueaks had changed their names, making true documentation almost impossible.

A drunken marionette suffering from Tourette's Syndrome came lurching by. I could only assume that the underlying genetic pattern was in the wood from which he had been carved, and therefore he was a miserable, inescapable burden to his family and friends. His high-pitched coprolalia was distracting but I had seen so many inexplicable manifestations since Kool-Aid Man had taken over the world governments that I could no longer even muster a laugh at most of this stuff. "Go fuck yourself!" chirped the wobbly little inebriant as he staggered past. Just for the hell of it I tripped up the little beggar and as an afterthought tossed a lit match onto his squirming, alcohol-soaked carcass.

Someone had drawn a seemingly endless series of pictures on the sidewalk with colored chalk; these basically amounted to quite accurate likenesses of the Keane "sad-eyed cat" prints that were once popular, though these seemed to have a rather Apocalyptic overall theme. I never realized there were so many different poses. Or maybe it was just like everything else nowadays, somebody had grasped upon someone else's idea and proceeded to carry it way too far, to disastrous results.

My hands had begun to shake and my knees were knocking. I realized that I needed an injection, and the sooner the better. Poisonous snake venom would be my medicament of choice but the street was now lined with an uncountable number of hitch-hiking mongooses, all dressed like baseball umpires and trying to wave over every vehicle that passed by, including the ailing puppet's power gurney. I figured the chances of getting chomped by a suitable viper around here just now were next to nothing.

Suddenly Rhonda's dilapidated Peugot sedan screeched to the curb and the rusty passenger side door flew open. "Get in!" she shouted desperately in my direction, while keeping her eye on two nearby mongooses - one was signalling "Safe!" with his arm gestures while crouching in front of where her car had stopped, but the other one was twisting and gyrating his way towards the open door with alarming speed.

I jumped for the door, made it inside, and slammed it shut behind me. There was a solid "Whump!" as the charging animal's chest protector slammed against the outside of the car door. I stuck my arm out the window as we sped off, making a fist with a protruding thumb and gesturing at the dazed beast. "Youuuuu're outa there!" I cried, and sent him symbolically to the showers with a flick of the wrist. It was all fun and games but if we didn't get to the garage before the sun went down we would surely be overtaken and drowned in a deluge of shaving cream pies, smashed unendingly into our confused and unrepentant faces.

* * * * * *

Rhonda floored the old French clunker. My spastic leg was now kicking the dashboard with a rhythm similar to the backbeat on "You Can't Do That" by the Beatles. This was distracting me from other business but from the corner of my eye I saw Rhonda looking quizzically in my direction.

"I need a God-damned spike!" I shouted over the roar of the overworked engine. "Should be snake bite but about anything will probably do!" As resourceful as she was I doubted that Rhonda had a back seat full of rattlesnakes. Though nowadays it was unwise to rule anything out.

At this point I looked at Rhonda for the first time and was surprised to see that she was naked from the waist down. She was pointing frantically at my lower body and the car was starting to sputter and slow down. Something would no doubt be gaining on us and it probably wouldn't be anything as whimsical as a Satchel Paige quote.

"Get your pants off! Get rid of your fucking pants!" she was yelling. I shot her a questioning glance. "It's the attachments they put on this car!" she said in response to my silent question. "Sensors in the seat! It won't run unless it feels bare flesh on the fabric. I don't know what the hell it's about - my car is now a perv I guess," she concluded with a shrug. We were winding down fast and I started peeling off my pants and underwear. All sense of modesty in this world was long gone as a result of science and society's absurd devolutions.

Once I was bare-ass the car started to pick up speed again, slowly. I didn't look back because I didn't want to know. We were still going forward and I was going to be satisfied with that. Meanwhile my foot was kicking the crap out of the glove box door and finally it flew open.

Rhonda went to gesturing again. The noise in this piece of junk was deafening as she kept it to the floor and slid around a hard left turn.

"Lloyd! In the glove box! There's some Epipens or something! Fix your leg for Christ's sake!" She was right, there were some emergency medical supplies half dumping out of the glove compartment as we slid another corner. I grabbed a couple of Epipens, snapped one open and jammed it into my quivering and jerking thigh. I also snagged a Glucogen kit just for the hell of it and started mixing that up. When it came to injecting shit into your body, in the New World Order, I figured the more the merrier. Usually something would work. But you never knew what.

Presently things started to get back to "normal." My leg was calming down and so was Rhonda - though now I was having a hard time not looking at her naked crotch.

"What were you doing out there in the open?" she asked, and with an uncharacteristic blush of modesty she pulled my pantleg over her lap. "You know it's getting close to dark and at this time of day everything starts acting like Bourbon Street on acid during Mardi Gras." I found this reference kind of ironic since most of New Orleans had lost gravity and had exploded off into space, reducing the number of working whorehouses in the country by a significant percentage.

"I was at the library. Since computers are now death traps I was trying to research some stuff the old fashioned way, with books. I'm convinced that business in Singapore was a harbinger of this whole mess. I figure if I can find at least a couple of those once-and-future Winston Churchills I might be able to trace down some timeline on this bullshit and figure out what we can do about it."

Rhonda took a final corner in the middle of Nowhere Avenue and slid the sputtering Peugot in between two concrete girders and into the garage. Pushing a button on the dash she brought the gates closed behind us. We were safe. For now. Relatively speaking.

"Lloyd, you idealistic asshole," she said quietly as she turned off the car. She sounded almost sympathetic. "It doesn't make any difference what got us here. Here we are, and now that the most powerful intellect on this planet is inside of a camera phone, we are just up Shit Creek plain and simple. You are wasting your time." She sounded like she was giving up hope. But I knew her well, and I didn't believe that for an instant.

"C'mon, darlin'," I implored. "Thomas Stearns Eliot said that the world was going to end not with a bang but with a whimper. As long as shit keeps banging the way it is now, I figure we have time left to do something about it." I pulled on my shorts, pushed open the creaking car door, and stepped out onto the concrete floor. It felt refreshingly cool to the touch.

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