Nowhere Ames and the Guys with the Ruthless Tiger

1. Previous description of space overridden. The big answer: how big is it? And how many doctors? How many stories is it tall, and how widely built is yet to be told? No one knows!

1a. ``Dictionary Apollo'' is in unstable nowhere: there's no swirling kind of bullshit around his wordy frame. ``You'll be existing in the minor leagues -- if anywhere, Dictionary Apollo!'

1b. Some sorrows to report: that stunned calf we pummeled to within an inch of its life has recovered sufficiently to slip by the native guards, and is continuing its quest to eat of a remote apple -- which experienced some emotional difficulties. Impatiently, experiencing sudden interruptions to the harvest, farmers are getting acquainted with the feelings of families who were behind their expulsion from tractor-ville. How could city people carry a grudge so rooftop in its outlook that construction of tall silos took precedence over tending to the distraught apples and pigs? One farmer lifted his hands to the night skies in an attitude we could not fathom, saying, ``I will repay my brail-learning days by wasting time marching around in amazement with jazz.''

2. In like manner, baths weren't taken, nor did cleanliness go unnoticed many years ago, when an exploratory expedition was launched by a civilization of steelmakers of religious material. Eight masochists who felt everything as tumorous: trees, oceans and rivers. They headed into stalls manned by pump devotees. The journey was long and successful. Pleasing to the sedate as well as the great. Many bad bunches of grapes were omitted -- ones whose laudability was comprimised by the most cabalistic honey imaginable: they were too sweet

3. The story proceeds murkily. What we'd like to see levelled is the blocks of logical give-and-take as the drama advances. You don't follow us? That's good! What Ames has done is not. I'm afraid we've only got a concept of the problem.

4. My work was interrupted just now: I've been working my way into comparisons since April. ``Hey Ames!'' a goat-herder said. ``Hey, stay out of my dubious affairs!'' said Ames. ``I haven't suspected you since you had that microphone through which you berated me in your spaceship with regret!''

4a. ``We keep telling you Ames: that wasn't us. Our companions smartly disguised themselves to look like us or indeed anybody else but us who looked like Rhod from the Mary Tyler Moore show!''

5. Ames' perch upon the branch of reality is precarious enough that sunshine can knock him off. ``Your bothering of me is relatively vile,'' he said. ``Can you tremble your way into a frenzy with your buttony-lipped mutter?''

5a. That Ames was then arrested we only fantasized; the wiggling of the aliens' eyebrows and my yelping like a dog providing the accompanying amusement necessary for the imagination to latch onto, giving us a boost into hyperspace and back to Earth, or at least one of the larger satellites, upon which Ames sat, grinning like a monkey.

6. ``Ha ha,'' I said. ``Yeah, the humor sure is topographical,'' they agreed. Whoa! My ego (my ``yourself'') just led me along the edge of this story's cliff, exactly like any other narrative. Defined posthumously, the Bill of Rights is analogously compacted garbage of all the freedoms you aren't allowed to have!''

6a. Impossibilities coerced bits of sense from the idea-shortage book. ``Yeah! And obviously lots of people presume you're my son!'' the space-junkies said.

7. Ames basks in fog sadly. ``Tropical tiny-hoof horses are ridden by hucksters, willing to explain what you've been seeing. Come on: the only chance of sense-portrayal shakes your spaceship to pieces!''

7a. ``Rock isn't beating scissors anymore, Ames! But a single penny can be a gentle if flimsy reminder, if you get one in brown dress like all our friends wear. We're regularly hanging out in fur, one bit at a time. Do the guys in the lunchroom know whether Truth itself will survive in the `spaceship of reason' or in the collected works of Shakespeare?''

8. Ames shrugged. ``Batman's a querulous match-making goose of a clown of a child. I offered the dolt guidance when he captured a criminal whose wish it was to stifle kronos. I grabbed a shillalah, danced with Police Chief O'Hara, engraved my knuckles in his face. Batman had a tantrum for two hours, tyrannously ordering us around, just because Robin shared some medicine with a Policewoman named Suzanne, using the framework of his hyperactivity as a veil. Suzanne got wired and flung herself at Commissioner Gordon's baseball, if you know what I'm indicating.''

8a. ``Wow! That's really lame! Batman said for us to give this guy an overlapping sort of drubbing, you know? It was bad, yeah, bu also notoriously bawdy!'' said one motley alien to the other.

8b. ``Obviously,'' said the other, waiting formerly for Ames to sign over his right to live in houses. ``Clearly our saviour reneges upon his promises due to the uncouth antics of the Cowled Juggler -- but Ames smelled-out our plan!''

9. ``I did?'' screeched Ames, aghast. ``I was inexorably counting down from ten for your blast-off when Monteverdi's opera `Orfeo' was played. What is worst is the way he revived ecstasy,'' said Ames reprovingly. ``I suppose that is how I foiled you.''

9a. The aliens bowed and grimaced. ``Proof of our foiling is how we called Robin in from hiding, told him he was much improved, and we had ream of paper to thwack him with. Next thing was we went to some isolated spot, for humping Robin off the premises. In a wobbly old car belonging to Aunt Frankenstein or someone. And she did protest. That is when we got foiled.''

10. From this angle, of course, it's in incident we would prefer to downplay. Our religious advisors shake their heads evangelically. ``Attempts to have one's way with Robin are an insult to our personal compact with the Creator,'' one says. ``You guys make me want to get out of the business and into pornography,'' says another. ``Let's launch a torpedo assault upon Ames,'' says a third. But Robin waved bye-bye to the bogeyman-in-the-snowsuit-trapper (which I believe must be the King Metaphor of this event).

10a. Meanwhile, the aliens were examining our religious advisors with openmouthed enthusiasm. ``Crosses? Wow! You made them at the mill, right? You shook splinters out of your eyebrows, peripherally observed our untucked shirttails, and you chastised us for the sin of slovenly?''

``You have truly been guilty of the sin of slovenly, so I spit at you and try to hit you and hurt you and do you harm!'' said our religious advisors. ``Planet Earth repudiates you!''

11. Ames laughed. ``The forward-moving part of Earth? Or the part that stands still and gets slapped? Yeah, there's misery spread all over our little ensemble. The masses imagine their worth to be that of TV receptors! Though my own set is but one inch wide, it endows me with a value no one can take away!''

11a. Incidentally, every backdrop you see next March at the Opera Renaissance was made possible by Disaster Opera Theatre. We work on opera, sucking down good artificial sweeteners while we toil. We tangentially sell the junky doors we salvage to the vitamin storehouse.

12. ``Excuse me,'' said Ames. ``I've just received a telegram from the president.'' Ames cleared his throat. `` `We measures!' '' it says. The telegram converses with us.''

12a. The aliens grew excited. ``You mean: `In goes the leaders and out drains the wisdom?' That is a saying we abide by.''

13. Ames squinted at their vanity. ``By my achin' fanny! You think everything has to do with you and the stupid planet you guys are from! I'm from a planet too, but I don't go on and o about it!'' Ames scratched his pound of chicken parts surreptitiously. ``I snuffed this bird myself,'' he admitted. ``I cry rose petals of sadness when I think of the suffering I went through! I've only popped up to sell those whatever-they-are things you got here. They're somewhat stale, so it's not going well. I've sold nothing.''

13a. The aliens looked at one another and at Ames' empty ledger book. ``Nought transactions!'' they howled.