Note: Odd words or spellings or syntax that look like mistakes were done on purpose! I stole the word "vaught" from Lester Young. Wisdom has it that he used it as a riff in his speech, and that it was an imitation of the sound made by a saxophone. "Bombastically frozen confections"is the intellectual property of Rick Stangar.

THE ACTION TAKES PLACE.

JUNIOR-EYE: Lore-bath of a breaded word! This bag of shredded keys makes me wish to run through the woods, blakeful.

GRISWOLD: Let me tell you the dream I had.

JUNIOR-EYE: Mr. Glazer will release the mumbling animals to insist and bring you into line. Just try to believe it all means something.

GRISWOLD: So anyway, this dream I had...

JUNIOR-EYE: (interrupting) Scream, Friccaden, oust-ye!

GRISWOLD: It was one of those real intense dreams. I was driving on night's highway, pitch dark. Then I'm going over this narrow bridge; no guardrails and nothing but pitch dark to either side. Suddenly the bridge goes in all directions at once- a giant endless paved surface suspended over the void of babble, and I am driving IN ALL DIRECTIONS AT ONCE. But right away I try to think about it in words and the whole bridge falls away and I'm plunging into the morass of my familiar, containable reality.

JUNIOR-EYE: But don't you LIKE to sleep in Babylon with comfortable fleas?

GRISWOLD: Let me put it this way. One time this cook was cutting up a bunch of ducks, and the owner of the restaurant walked into the kitchen. The cook threw a duck at him and hollered, "DUCK!" In that moment the duck flew and the owner guy, seeing this duck coming at his face and nose, had a moment of clarity. The word "duck" meant two absolute things at the same moment. Language was temporarily melted and his head swam.

JUNIOR-EYE: I bet it scared the local dog-piss out of him.

GRISWOLD: It's the Detroit Oblate Herald. It's the time-wagon of yesterday, now. Don't you see?

JUNIOR-EYE: Sandwiches suffer bravely. Let's not forget the brave masticated Earl. The rheostat of verbal fluency.

GRISWOLD: Of course the grilled cheese must also happen. We must eat until we happen into heaven. But what I'm saying is that a mystical episode only brings out a side of perception that is already there. Recall the time you heard the crickets singing, that time when you listened long to the cricket song, listened and heard this sound that was so familiar that you had never really heard it before. And we had to hide you on the wood floor in the spare room when the landlord came over because you were so addled by the song that you were inappropriate. And you came downstairs after the landlord had gone and you told us the wood floor had spoken to you, had told you a long, long word. That floor has always spoken and it still is. It's just that we narrow our perception to deal with sandwich necessity; to survive in this continuum, but all the while the larger truth rages on. As, for instance, when the concert is over and the lights come up, we walk out and feel that the music is over, but the music is still happening. It's always happening. We just hear it better when someone's playing it.

JUNIOR-EYE: Yes, I see what you mean. Like, we look at our bombastically frozen confections and say, "This is what we BOUGHT?Ó

GRISWOLD: Yes! Street vendor Vikings laugh at we, toys from the future malt your hand. The mind goes off into it's gaggling existence, processing all the angst, hoping for a clear space to repair itself in. That Dresdenated Eyegore, that guy saying, "But look at me, I'm permanently fine.Ó

JUNIOR-EYE: Yeah, but the Celotex factory doesn't sing that song. The phone clears it's throat and continues. There's money to be made and so therefore emit poison. THAT'S reality, Griswold.

GRISWOLD: Cozen Sir Alec Thompson, Junior. Oh, worry, oh gills and gemstones. The meat of your salvation is frozen. Let it thaw in the sun with the sound of a logistic blunderbuss flapping in the wind. Describe the town. Drive on, through wet leaves and mud. Gription on an interesting oil spill nine ways from Sunday.

JUNIOR-EYE: I leap to agree with you.

GRISWOLD: Congratulations, county resident! You've been nominated to be a delegate at Gateway's Smithwax Hawaiian Convention.

JUNIOR-EYE: The hillside update, the frogfish manager. Double check the checklist. Tools in order. Quarter inch effort-thrague bracket plate, check glover threads before applying tools and torque.

GRISWOLD: Of course. Minimize time. Dust carefully. Install. Adjust the you. Squirrels insist.

JUNIOR-EYE: Insistent squirrels. If anyone doubt, be all description. And behind closed eyes I saw these shapes exploding and turning all sepia-tones and grays. Shapes so impossibly big and small at the same time. It must have been the cigars and beer. Subsequently I heaved.

GRISWOLD: Just another hat to put on. Not at all elegant in the long run. Until you're a shell of a man, all circumstantial, wearing a coat full of spiders because you have to. Now if you REALLY want to increase telepathic sensitivity...

JUNIOR-EYE: (interrupting) Remember that time we were drunk, pissing on a wooden post in the wee hours, and you said in this very serious voice, "It is absolutely crucial that we piss on as much of this post as possible.Ó?

GRISWOLD: (laughing) Yes, yes.

JUNIOR-EYE: Yes, a nematode on the far wall. The rotund nose of the great burgeoning grasshopper from Saint Alban's. We will make use of a tool which is not yet known. Yes, oxwalking to the podium. Tires sing the asphalt's praise.

GRISWOLD: Didn't some wise-man say that?

JUNIOR-EYE: A wise con man. A wise and wired con man who felt the vibrations of the tires exactly; transmuted up through the chassis and the driver's seat. The never-ending gluttony elbow.

GRISWOLD: Awe, piss on that raw Hamilton! Time is a rusted effluvium.

JUNIOR-EYE: Therefore to have lived is to live always.

GRISWOLD: I am in full concurrence on that point. As Townwalker Ted once said, "Please extrude me for my untoward enthraxulisms in the living room.Ó

JUNIOR-EYE: Varnished in a dust tent.

GRISWOLD: And the Concerto For Left Handed Oxen.

JUNIOR-EYE: Is that Elmo Tanner yelling outside?

GRISWOLD: Sounds like him.

JUNIOR-EYE: What the hell is he extolling out there?

GRISWOLD: Could be the play of rubber fish.

JUNIOR-EYE: Or a message from the loose planet Shorb.

GRISWOLD: Industrial lizards in the water again.

JUNIOR-EYE: Lambaste and castigate that meteorologist.

(ENTER GUNGA-DUDE)

JUNIOR-EYE: Hey, Gunga-Dude! What it is?

GUNGA-DUDE: Yehs, man, thass whadd... Yeah, weah, llama market shoals and goats, man. Go in where it sounds good. Let's get a big stromboli, man, and some potato shivings. Nuns and bandaged Huns, like, you know?

GRISWOLD: I'm not really hungry.

JUNIOR-EYE: Helical songs that spin.

GUNGA-DUDE: You guys are squirrels who melt, squirrels who sing! That's like, why I love you guys. Footprints of like, the transparent groundhog, man. How about some smited rabbit? You want to go to Gillie's for some smited, Junior? Let's rend some asunder, man.

JUNIOR-EYE: I ain't really hungry either, Dude, sorry.

GRISWOLD: Just a couple of town-frogs in muddy repose, we are.

GUNGA-DUDE: Yeah, well, like, mmm, hah, sheel. It's a gas regardless, like. Shabbin-glee. Sheel. Camden tree-holders, man. Loquacious fish. Can you see it? Locusts of Yale biting at your brain stem.

GRISWOLD: Hold! These are words of a beleaguered troll living fitfully under the stairs. I mean, what kind of squirrel maneuver are you trying to promulgate?

JUNIOR-EYE: Hey, cool it, Griswold. Dude never tried to promulgate anything but his own spreading joys-of. I'm always happy as Orion's crab belt to see you, Dude. That's so.

GRISWOLD: No, no, man. I was just kidding. Far be it from me to cast aspersions on Dude.

GUNGA-DUDE: You guys are beautiful, man. Hahn, sharp, sharp, that's the way...ain't no other way to nomenclate it, you know? A fuller blandishment of philanthropic hagneck never was. Askance, man? Never. Not you.

GRISWOLD: What a shelf of tomorrow this is! Shirts and shredded... awe man can't think of what it is. Gunga, you bring out the synchronomic resplendent aluminum self in me!

GUNGA-DUDE: Yeah, like, well, hawn glah... sheen, baby. Eyes to.

JUNIOR-EYE: Incense and tupperware, the colander shines.

GRISWOLD: Wax hell is upon us! The nosehair of destiny is cast!

GUNGA-DUDE: The whole idea, sometimes, is just to gambol aimlessly in a verbal sense, vaught, and let the subconscious out of it's house, as town-money all day... Like a gophed anthill in repose, a TV on the noise channel telling us the latest.

GRISWOLD: My point exactly!

GUNGA-DUDE: We just entoncify a couple of rindage cowlings and some songs from the lung and lo; Bizbee on a frisbee spins. Sudden laughter while eating, spewing half-masticated orzo like milk at a lunch table.

JUNIOR-EYE: Once I worked in a restaurant kitchen and one night the chef had this beautiful salmon laid out on this stainless steel table under fluorescent lights and I looked at this fish. I was like this human, this alien doctor wearing an apron in an air-filled room; a world no fish could imagine. It made my head swim.

GUNGA-DUDE: Smooth round plates giggle best.

JUNIOR-EYE: Besmirch the lands of yore.

GRISWOLD: Indication stipulation station. By the livers of Addison, where we slept sound.

GUNGA-DUDE: The rivers. In my school they never taught us to respect water or soil or dirt or sun. Man, we live because there is water and dirt and soil and sun. They should teach us better.

JUNIOR-EYE: The wax owl has elucidated, gentlemen.

GUNGA-DUDE: Friends of the creature.

GRISWOLD: A whole bevy of Ôem.

JUNIOR-EYE: Let's not over-ridiculate the owl utterings.

GRISWOLD: Perish the thought!

(ENTER FULVOUS TREE DUCK)

JUNIOR-EYE: Fulvous! What's up?

FULVOUS TREE DUCK: What the famous hell is all this? Are you guys terminally haggard on Visigoth Tobacco again?

GUNGA-DUDE: Why must you flounce the foot-worn enunciator? Have you got any Visigoth?

FULVOUS TREE DUCK: The holy wisdom of fruit bats if I do!

GRISWOLD: Hanch of heedless hell.

JUNIOR-EYE: Owling and speeching to the wires of laxalt. Those who would yarbonify, it stimulates.

FULVOUS TREE DUCK: All this talk of turgid owls is too much. You fellows had better straighten up.

(EXIT FULVOUS TREE DUCK)

GUNGA-DUDE: Dorian fish ladder.

GRISWOLD: Now you can re-live those moments.

JUNIOR-EYE: It's the old war, the war against deviled ham.

GUNGA-DUDE: We hope you've enjoyed the planet Earth. Tune in next week.

JUNIOR-EYE: And Gene the caustic pissant making the cooler door squeak and clump within reason.

GRISWOLD: Ah, the Carlinus lounge. You were really waxed that night Gene got all salty. You were out there. Like a bird in the weather.

JUNIOR-EYE: Out in the weather.

GUNGA-DUDE: Breathing space and knowing time.

GRISWOLD: Humanly un-physical.

JUNIOR-EYE: I don't really give a flying piss in a hell wind. Indicate non-verbally the cyclone wilderness of Azneppy. Cigar eating lawn hags know how.

GUNGA-DUDE: So, your aim is to surf with the elders? Or do you simply seek another Status Valley suntan? Many will urge you towards Crabskin tree lotion, but only you can know the medical corn of an imposter-free soul.

JUNIOR-EYE: Just let me be.

GRISWOLD: Just let you be fried in beer-fat and emoluments? Let you go on with your crapulous beer puddle endeavor?

JUNIOR-EYE: Griswold, why are you such an ancient, distinguished frog?

(ALL LAUGH)

GUNGA-DUDE: Hahn, shewy. Rectilinear, man. Vaught.

GRISWOLD: Junior-eye, you are funnier than Johnny Carcinogen.

JUNIOR-EYE: Meanwhile Griswold here just keeps yapping away like nobody's relentless hamburger.

(ALL LAUGH)

GUNGA-DUDE: A cubicle for antelopes. Your kitchen in outer space.

JUNIOR-EYE: Midnight at the auxiliary howling station.

GUNGA-DUDE: Threshold of fascination. Amorphous silicon under a telling hat.

JUNIOR-EYE: New cars and the Lord game show. Truth about feet.

GRISWOLD: Truth about feet! Truth about feet? We beat the world senseless with a brutal wrench. We stand in line for our hate and resentment. When we are ready we rise up. We rise up in a mighty pile, all dead. We rise up in a dead pile where we have killed each other in haste and exhaustion. We rise up upon one another with complete disregard for the foliage. If the world got drunk on a cactus pill and we melted the guns in a barrel in the back yard there would be no more war for a while. We'd piss in the barrel of melted guns out back.

JUNIOR-EYE: Goose-flesh cheese on pizza island.

GUNGA-DUDE: Heed the signal tree.

GRISWOLD: A wagon in the theater of life's street.

GUNGA-DUDE: Learn smith-welding and troddling. With permanent schnapps for breakfast.

JUNIOR-EYE: Corned beef is my only carriage.

GRISWOLD: You have the word "luncheon"in all your songs.

GUNGA-DUDE: He can tune the drinks and he can drone on.

GRISWOLD: Secondly, and not first of all, Tofu Baxter tells me that Abe's cane baked the wind.

JUNIOR-EYE: Bring untidy Sasha.

GUNGA-DUDE: She moves in room barefoot uttering constant serenade.

JUNIOR-EYE: The pain of jewelry.

GRISWOLD: The geese of matter. Fashion bombers of God, Lolita.

GUNGA-DUDE: Pattern of giant worldwide music. Old wine-guy's dog.

GRISWOLD: Society's ashen bridge. The mud doctor weaving always now.

GUNGA-DUDE: Accepting known vibrations of blues harp. We shift chattering suns.

(CURTAIN)

COPYRIGHT 1997 DOUGLAS CLOUD ALL RIGHTS RESERVED