Gary Panter blog

Shackletina

I had just crossed a donkey with a barn owl, when I noticed the hour was late. All around the shack, the grasshoppers, crickets, katydids, grand-daddy longlegs, night-crawlers and all the many grubworms that had boiled generously, even languorously, against the windows all day and night, for three days and nights, now, had finally subsided—a waned chitinous cabin-wide tide begone.

It would be safe to say that it would be safe to go outside, soon, and take the sap buckets off the heady dutchweed stalks. The sap, extracted from the drippy thick pulpy reedy tubules by boring, insertion, plumbing and pumping, has lots of uses and advantages over lard or margarine, down this way, as a general and friendly lubricant. Things will go round and round, if you let them.

Generally speaking, you can bring the whole carriage to a hard hopping halt or you can grease those shocks, gears, u-joints, suspensions, load-bearing wheels and axles and so on, and go on ahead, put your back into it, and load the heavy iron cage onto the donkey cart. However, once the donkey cart is bearing a large iron cage with shacklettes on the barn donkey owl, darn it! Who will pull the wagon?

Who will pull it? I'll give you five bucks to help me pull this donkey tram to the nearest Roman circus, AND, AND! I split the profits with you: two for me, one for you. Hey! I developed it. I developed it! There would be no barn donkey owl, down yonder smelling up the place, to even proffer, if, if it wasn't for my invention and long and hard and endless and unremittingly relentless years of limbering up for the kill. Now it's dead. Who will cart it to the mill to be ground into pixie dust? I can't do it alone. Well, if I have to, I will, but I can't. Plus, I can't grind it around here. I would if I could. I really need to take it out to the grinder to grind it and pulverize it and pat it into pattycakes for limited consumption by discriminating parties of various cast. The grinder must be agrinding. That's all there is to it. It's a foregone conclusion. Fact, not fate. I don't make up the rules. I follow them.