107. Views Through a Telescopic Mind

My roommate Richard has been dealing with a science infection quite some time now. He's going through Kleenex like a baby goes through diapers. He's also got the prednisone shakes and the antibiotic blues. So last night, to cheer him up, I put on a movie for us to watch. It was The Adventures of Buckeroo Bonsai Through the 8th Dimension.

I'm the first to admit that it's not an in-depth movie, but it's got its moments. If you can overlook the cornball plot, the bad acting and the terrible special effects you might find something more redeeming. Nah. It's just another crappy B-movie, but we watched the whole thing. It's not as bad as the Rocky Horror Picture Show or Barbarella, but it's close.

Buckeroo Bonsai is super cool brain surgeon who is fashion challenged. I mean, wearing a gray suit, with a vertically-striped shirt and white shoes - oh momma! He gets into the 8th dimension using an "occilating overthruster" where he finds Lectroids from Planet 10. (I did it using a Calabi–Yau manifold, which is way better. There weren't any Lectroids when I went there.)

The aliens are orange-faced, greasy, bug-eyed monkeyoids with red hair or no hair, dressed in gray flannel suits with matching vests. There's also a Rasta alien. Well, I think you get the gistlessness of this movie.

I guess some of you might be expecting some kind of segway about now. Well, my telescopic mind don't need no stinkin' segway, because I'm ambidextrose and nonlinear. (I'm also a crackerjack pee knuckle player.)

By the way, did you know that snot, which is known as "mucous" by the hoity toities, is mainly composed of pollysacrorides and water. Everyone knows it's the sticky, slimy stuff that's made inside your nose and airway hangers. It's moved to the back of the nasal passages and then into the throat by tiny hairs called cecilia. And from there, you gulp it down. Your nose and sinuses make about a quart of snot every day. Think about it! If some forward-thinking agri-business set up snot milking farms across the country, we could provide more than enough nutrient rich snot to supplement the meager diets of the children in Haiti, El Salvador, and Owsley County, Kentucky.

When some of my fans write to me, they address me as Mrs. Zoe Dog. Ain't that special. Well, I need to make everyone clear that I'm a Miss because I've never had the chance to have puppies. You see, when I was young, I lived in a cage in an animal rescue center. One day, without my oral or written consent, I was taken from the cage and placed on a table in a white room. Some guy made me breathe anorexia that caused me to fall asleep. (Later I watched the videotape, so I know what happened.)

The vet made a small incision in my belly and scalpeled out all of my reproductive vestibules: my ovaries, my ethiopian tubes and my humorous. The vet then closed the incision with sutures, and dropped my ovaries into a stainless steel basin. (The other stuff was sold to a dog food company in need of meat by-products.) My ovaries were taken for storage to a dog ovary suppository and later sold on the black market to Chinese restaurateurs who make them into wonton qīng bítì , a Chinese delicacy.

As I was pawing through the newspaper this morning, a short almanac article caught my eye. (How do you really catch an eye? Does it hurt?) Among other things, it reported about a man named Learned Hand, a frequently quoted judge and judicial philosopher who lived from 1872–1961. What it failed to report was that his half-brother, Ignorant Foot, was a baboon groomer and that his adopted Korean sister, Victoria Poon, was a popular accordion player at a downtown cafeteria in Milwaukee in spite of her deformed arms. When the family got together for holidays, all hell would break loose around the dinner table.

There's one other article I just have to share with you due to its legal importance. Because of the swift and sure actions taken by our border patrol, a major smuggling operation has been taken down:

Smuggling thwarted when pork discovered wrapped in diapers
"NOGALES - A woman was caught trying to smuggle 14 pounds of pork wrapped in diapers into the United States from Sinaloa, Mexico, according to federal customs officials. The pork was discovered Aug. 5 during a routine inspection of a commercial bus at the Mariposa crossing of the Port of Nogales by agricultural specialists with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, according to a CBP statement."

Whoa, I'm in a spinning Cuizinart right now. Someone's messin' with my solar system. Are there any clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats in the room?

I'm having one of my visions. I'm in the heart of Manhattan. A man in a black suit with an FBI badge hanging from a lanyard around his neck, runs to the curb and frantically hails a taxi. He jumps in.

The agent points with his finger toward the traffic in front of the cab and shouts, "Swallow that snot! Er... follow that cop!"

I'm in the doctor's office with Richard. There's Katy the nurse. She's a young woman dressed in black. Katy has a small head and a big butt. Here comes the little brown man wearing a white coat. He injects stuff into Richard's eyeball so Richard can continue to see. The vision is fading... sorry, but pun intended.

So these two speed dating people meet in a bar. The ceiling fan whirs slowly. The barkeep polishes glasses as the patrons murmur among themselves.

He says, "Hello, my name is Aristophranes, and I write erotic poetry about lemurs."

She says, "So nice to meet you. My name is Gonorrhea, and I work in the city morgue. I guess you're wondering about these sores on my face. I thought they were just acne, but my doctor says they're something else."

A tense interchange takes place in the Sonoran Desert. The heat is oppressive. A lizard scurries under a creosote bush to escape the relentless sun. A walkie-talkie clicks on.

Cicada2 to Cicada1: "I'm about five feet under a mesquite tree, about 1.3 miles due east of Apache Juction, over."

Cicada1 to Cicada2: "You've been down there for 17 years. Get the hell up here, summer's almost over, over."

Cicada2 to Cicada1: "Roger that Cicada1. (Jeez, what an asshole. I'm comfy down here.)."

OK, I'm settling down. I'll tell you about an upcoming creative project I'm working on.

Soon I will be releasing a TV documentary called Squirrel Hunters: Brawlin' in the Backwoods with Zoe. I hope to make it into a series. I tried to get some Abert's squirrels to hire on because they look Hollywood-good, but they're uppity. They demanded union wages, food and benefits. So I settled on using some ground squirrels.

There are three locals who regularly sneak into our backyard to eat our vegetables and birdseed. They agreed to sign on. They're ugly spuds, but they're cheap. But they're not as stupid as I thought. Gufta, Mamet, and Ragnar demanded I give them on-screen credits and disability insurance. What the hell.

They worship Alice as a goddess, because last week she left some fresh corn ears in a bag on the back porch along with a cantaloupe - why, I do not know. During the night they dragged the corn behind the tool shed and ate every last kernel. Then they came up on the porch and ate a big hole in the cantaloupe, for dessert no doubt.

My show will be fast and furious with lots of spilled guts, a spattering of comic relief, and dark existential angst. I'll start production after I work out a few things with P.E.T.A. and the Arizona Game and Fish Department - just some minutia about animal cruelty, mutilation, and native species exploitation. Stay tuned!

THE CHRONICLES OF ZOE DOG