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-
- . . .without a doubt, everybody in the world has some sort of dire
- fear; for some, it may be something reasonable (such as
- apeirophobia, barophobia, or levophobia), but other people have
- irrational fears such as claustrophobia or ailurophobia -- but me,
- I'm different; I'm not sure if my fear has a name or not, but it's
- a hideously debilitating problem which has caused me much terror,
- pain, and difficulty throughout the sentient part of my existence
- in this dimension - the fear of ending a sentence, particularly
- this one: I know not what causes this fear, this compulsion, this
- obsession with continuing a sentence long past all sense of
- grammatical correctness (let alone comprehension by the reader),
- but I am driven by this horrible anxiety that, should I eventually
- use some sort of punctuation to bring this rambling stream of cons-
- ciousness to an end, I will suffer something so awfully, immensely
- evil that I am forced against my will to continue spewing forth
- words, clauses, and parenthetical documentation (like this one
- (heck, some of it's even nested) being used here) in a feeble
- attempt to dissuade any harm from befalling my physical or
- emotional states; in fact, once I was driven by my fear to write
- over seven hundred words without using so much as a period (except
- in ellipses, which don't count), question mark, or exclamation point
- to bring a logical stop to the sentence and let the poor reader
- catch his (or possibly her) breath and reflect on what the heck it
- was all about (heaven forbid any soul should attempt to diagram
- THIS) and whether or not it was actually me speaking, or some
- mutant hell freak possessing my soul and forcing my fingers to
- dance across the keyboard without ever coming close to any of the
- endmarks of punctuation, bringing a stop to the erratic verbiage
- emanating from the deepest recesses of my cerebral cortex and
- causing massive hemorrhages among several of the illprepared
- readers, resulting in permanent debilitating paralysis of the
- lowerregions of the torso and limbs; thus was I responsible for
- more than twenty cases of this affliction, furthering my fear that,
- if such were the results of NOT ending a sentence, than whatever
- could happen if I did end a sentence would be so direly menacing
- and destructive that I was forced to continue; in fact, this sentence
- did not really begin at the top of the page -- it was
- originally started several millennia ago (Standard Galactic Time)
- in a distant galaxy, and I have been continuing its plot thread
- since then: the sentence (collectively known as "The Sentence") now
- spans just under thirty-seven quadrillion words and is larger (when
- written out in longhand, 12 point type, single spaced with 1-inch
- right, left, top, and bottom margins) than a fully-grown Vortibeast
- of Andrexelon (which, by the way, is completely illiterate and
- communicates by rapidly flagellating its magic nose goblins in
- rhythm to the swaying of the silicon trees which are quite common
- there (Andrexelon, not the nose)) and, due to its ever-growing
- size, must be stored on a seventeen-gigabyte hard disk and kept
- locked away in a secret government hangar submerged within the
- bowels of Idaho so as to prevent the massive sentence from falling
- into the wrong hands/tentacles/sensory receptacles, where it could
- be used for bizarre and sinister acts against all of humanity (not
- to mention arachnids EVERYWHERE) and result in the downfall of
- past, present, and future civilizations clinging to the knowledge
- that the noncompletion of the sentence holds the very balance of
- Chaos and Order in its [figurative] hands, and the ending of the
- sentence will surely cause such drastic chaos and mass carnage that
- all (except for the news divisions of those networks covering the
- global crisis) will suffer pain of such monstrosity that surely at
- least one person will disembowel his entire collection of the
- Encyclopedia Britannica with a frayed rubber band out of the fear
- that armed bands of renegade nominatives might leap from the texts
- and seek to devour the flesh and blood of living entities
- possessing the vitreous fluids that the words need to survive as
- two-dimensional objects in a three-dimensional world which, in
- fact, happened when I completely finished the seven hundred-word
- sentence mentioned above some time ago in the ancient realm of Mu
- when I was just a young lad and unskilled in babbling like a total
- idiot about nonsensical subjects just to postpone the downfall of
- carbon-based life forms such as the Grand Vizier of Mu, who once
- remarked to me that "In the Time of the Celestial Wombat thine
- profound passage shalt come to an end with a cataclysmic
- exclamation point, and the heavens shall bleed forth bile and the
- seas shall turn red with a light, frosty coating and man will kill
- man, brother will kill brother, and lungfish will kill lungfish in
- the final battle between the forces of Good and the forces of
- Steve" and ever since that monumental speech I have been writing
- this epic tale of beauty, truth, and invertebrates in the vain attempt
- to rewrite the future and defy all that the science of
- astrology stands for in the universe and to, at the very least,
- wait until the cataclysm can occur at a really cool time (like on
- Friday the 13th or during the Superbowl or on a Monday) when the
- arrival of the Four Horsemen (John, Paul, George, and Ringo) would
- throw the cosmos into such a vast disarray that I could easily
- utilize the mass confusion to usurp control of a (conveniently
- located) star cruiser and blaze away into the nether regions of the
- universe and conquer other civilizations with bizarre literary
- techniques (I could pun a world to death, for instance, just as
- long as I'm on Geno's side) and creatively inserted subliminal I
- will win messages wielded against the hapless send me lots of money
- inhabitants of wherever it is I invade with my one-man army of
- toxic materials and plasma cannons aimed at centers of
- civilizations unexpected to combat my literary onslaught of
- maniacal adjectives that have been subjected to the cruelest
- experiments ever gleaned from the recesses of a "human" mind and
- used with no apparent reason against other sentient creatures for
- the mere purpose of psychopathic desires and a personal vendetta
- against any form of life capable of creating The Dukes of Hazzard
- or some other torture of similar ilk brought about by network
- executives possessing brains only capable of quasquicentennial
- flashes of brilliance somehow believing that creatures capable of
- rational thinking could enjoy watching drivel obviously written by
- dozens of maltreated gibbons forced to pound furiously at
- typewriters with blunt screwdrivers and producing vegetative
- scripts pasted onto the back of warmed ice cubes just sitting
- around liquefying into a large watery puddle of faulty prose and
- gibbon food, similar to what one may find withering away in a
- maggot-infested corner of this eternal manuscript, obviously
- dropped there during the infamous Gibbon Revolt of 2364 which
- nearly caused me to cease producing this sentence (and almost cease
- living, as well - which could have proven to be merely a minor
- setback) due to the revolting gibbons revolting across the land
- against their evil tormentors, the tormentors' families, and
- anybody else in the general vicinity (gibbons are not known for
- their ability to discern complex shapes well, after all) who looked
- especially tasty and/or covered in bananas (I apparently fell under
- the latter category), attacking those victims with misshapen
- avocados (which compromised the gibbons' food) and the detached
- limbs of prior victims until the gibbons were dispatched by an
- experienced commando team of elderly janitors wielding phasemops
- and pulse brooms in an astonishing display of the power of hightech
- cleaning equipment in the hands of experts. . .
-
-
-
- The previous passage was an excerpt from The Sentence, Volume
- MMLXIX, (C)4035, Coiled Green Line Press
-
- *** EOF
-