After lunch I turned off the computer and noticed that there was a tickle in the back of my throat, the sort of irritation that makes you think of wet sandpaper being the universal standard for raw flesh and blues hysteria. My throat felt the way Tom Waits sounds, amplified aggravation in the center of the soft tissue, red and familiar like a bully's smirk before he knees in the nuts and bitch slaps you more time when you try to sneak out of school via the custodian's entrance. There was nothing I could do about the damn condition at the moment, but I did have a half bottle of Tussin , some generic syrup for the alleviation of sore throat, cough and yet manly enough to expel the grubbily greased mucus from the deepest of chest resonating chambers. I drank it one gulp, a semi sweetened version of the cruel cures your grandmother used to force down your throat with a funnel and the business end of a high heel shoe. It was awful, and all at once the store room started doing jumping jacks, my stomach declared itself a sovereign nation, my eyes saw through the thickest walls of the building and could the lips of cops writing crime novels behind billboards when they weren't getting hummers from bums who need one more dime for some Blue Nun. I was stoned on something, and suddenly the phone rang, or I thought I did. All I remember, really, was that I answered something.
"Gewekeekek" I said into the receiver.
"Hi, I need a red rubber octopus..."
I paused.
"Don't we all" I answered.
And then the sun exploded.
The gnome’s beady plaster eyes see through the black screen mesh into the maelstrom of mousekey blues and cold gruel greens, telegraphing a staccato itch to the scalp of the BG King as he savagely reposts the Spiders and G-Men rising out of the pixilated ooze of all-encompassing cyber uber-reality. A twilight hush falls upon the shoulders of sentient lawn statues and sidewalk sentinels up and down the gem-dubbed streets of this perpetual tourist camp, this bungalownia of sea-kissed torpor, as the bird lime builds upon the palm fronds and the living spirits of "Leisure...Pleasure" shamble forth from Chip’s Liquor to ruffle the fine hairs on the neck of the last Pump House gangster…
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