As I walked along the cotton candy-encrusted path to Skippydale Glen and the Bun-Bun Grove, I had realized that I was almost out of dry-erase markers. I need them to live, you see. It’s a curative odor to the beri-beri on my eyelids. I was once told by a Brazilian shaman that I could cure it by singing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” into a dark mirror 13 times, but all that did was summon a rabid Gandhi who tried to beat the living crap out of me. I escaped that burning building, but not before giving the couch a trial colonoscopy and interviewing a porcupine on his favorite kitchen appliances while speaking fluent Yiddish.
The Jolly Old Sea Captain ran the dry-erase marker shop and charged tree-fiddy for a pack of neon plaid markers. “Tree-fiddy?!” I exclaimed exuberantly, “I’ve only got but doo-fiddy!” so he called upon the mighty Loofah Mitten of Thor to summon a dollah-make-j00-hollah so I could get my dry-erase markers at last.
This mission been accomplished, I set out on my master quest to seek the meaning of life. First, I met up with a wizened old coffee table who claimed to know the way to enlightenment.
“O Exalted Queen of the Dust Bunnies,” he said, “you are about to undergo a not-quite-long-as-it-is-smelly and morbidly obese journey. To know the true meaning of life, you must build a suspension bridge made completely out of snail feces. When you are done, go watch the bloated pants in that corner decompose until I am done overprocrastinating.”
It was a dangerous mission. Where would I get all those snail feces? Of course! The French! And so I took my Tupperware and toothpick to France at the height of the escargot fad and constructed a scale replica of the Golden Gate Bridge… except it was twice as large as the actual bridge and could somehow connect Alaska to Russia if it had to. The next leg of my journey would be even harder. The pants were hot pink polyester and finely woven shag carpet, in the middle of decomposition. Maggots crawled in and out, destroying the tacky memoir that Disco was indeed, dead.
Three and a half times pi weeks passed before I heard from the Coffee Table Sage. He was on the throes of death, having a bad infestation of yellow jackets in the front left leg. It was mahogany, but gave the illusion of maple to the untrained eye. I’ll never forget his dying words:
“Your Majesty of the Dust Bunnies, take this—“ and he held out a pamphlet—“with you to the Guru of Space Mountain. From there, he’ll coach you as you discover the meaning of liffffffff….” And thus the Sage was consumed by SARS and an undying devotion to Pong.
After I had given the remnants of the Coffee Table Sage a decent burial in a homeless man’s grandpa’s tie-and-mackerel sandwich, I opened up the pamphlet I had received. It contained coupons for November time shares in an Orlando ˝-star cockroach motel, where the beds were ashtrays and prostitutes put their cigarettes in the space between the heater and the paper-thin walls. Realizing this was where my journey was headed; I grabbed my favorite pair of socks and collector’s edition ALF pogs and took the first duck on a stick down to sweet, sweet Orlando.
Orlando was a frightful place. Talking mice and electronic shark heads were rampant in that Floridian city and tourists from all over the country, nay--world were here to be brainwashed by the magic of Walt Disney. But I saw straight through his plot for world domination and went on an all-out assault against his henchmen. I left the Epcot Center that day, humming “Zip A Dee Doo Dah.”
It was in the middle of the night in my stay at the motel that they came. The ninja wizards, no doubt been sent by the Guru of Space Mountain, came to assimilate me for my crime against famous cartoon characters. It took all my might but in the end I stopped them with a single stab of my magical toothpick—for they were all highly prone to splinters and died instantly. Then I turned around and to my shock… the Tupperware was dead. It had been burped roughly ten minutes past, based on the initial setting of rigor mortis of the containers. The stiffness started in the lid and slowly moved down until the entire bowl was consumed in its own death.
“NOOOOOOOOO!” I cried, and wept until dawn.
That morning I gave my poor Tupperware a good burial in the mountain of cigarette butts piled up outside my doorway and cried as I went into the bloody massacre that had formerly been Disneyworld. No children were here today, Virginia, for all was dead. Except for me and the Guru. Dead. Some guy in a Winnie the Pooh outfit was hanging limp over the train ride. Goofy was laying in a bloody heap at the bottom of the waterfall with a bluebird on his shoulder, pecking out the brains of the man inside. As I crossed the barren path to Space Mountain, a strange miasma seemed to call me into the haunt of the formerly-popular virtual attraction, based entirely on bright lights and hydraulics.
“I see the Sage sent you. You must be strong to have reached my lair, and so I shall tell you the second leg of your not-quite-long-as-it-is-smelly and morbidly obese journey. To learn the meaning of life, one must have patience. You shall discover the ruins of the most irritating temple to world peace on Earth, even more so than the UN Headquarters in New York. Then you shall pay homage at it for three straight days, without food or drink. Don’t even think about going potty in the holy water either—I’ll be able to see that. I’m hooked up to the Haunted Mansion computers, you know—I can see everything at once.”
I nodded and departed at once for the dilapidated remains of the “It’s A Small World After All” ride and sat down. For three full days I endured the horrible nonstop music and the taunting of little robotic dolls singing about compassion for mankind and all that other fascist stuff. Finally, the Guru’s voice interrupted the song.
“You have proven yourself patient in the face of ungodliness. Go now to the Prophet of Maelstroms, who lives in the Siberian Bayou of No Return.” And as soon as the voice appeared, it had left in the manner of a blender with a cactus shoved in it set on puree without a lid.