There Is No Such Thing As Irony When It Is What It Is

"If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It" Has Always Been The Whole Of The Law And What Makes America So Great

Chapter 20

The day Wayne Trout finally regained consciousness in the Palace intensive care unit following his seizure in the Heart of Materex, the Life Protector was at his side. “Ah, Mr. Trout,” he said, “So nice to have you with us again.”

All Wayne could blubber was: “Jack would have loved this.”

***

The day after tomorrow Wanda Japan will be twenty-eight and pregnant. She’ll be pregnant tomorrow, is pregnant today, was pregnant yesterday, and the day before that.

Someone no one has ever heard of is growing in Wanda Japan. Someone no one can prepare for, no one can dream of, no one has a face for, ever in all of one’s days. Someone is growing in Wanda Japan, someone put there by Wanda and Wayne Bo Trout.

***

On Jonestown Memorial Koolaid Day, the following radio transmission was received in the Heart of Materex. “This is the way we lace our shoes,” it said in part, “so early in the morning.”

Just prior to the intrusion of the current ice age, the yogurt of human civilization was extremely concerned with finding intelligent life on other planets. The second most pressing question for preglacial mankind — after whether there was slightly more or less than one atom of matter for every eighty-eight gallons of space — was whether there was intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Many believe what made this search so crucial was most people had become distrustful of what was called intelligent life on earth.

Using powerful transmitters, mankind slingshot signals deep into the void, aimed at theoretical planets so distant (assuming they existed at all) they wouldn’t receive the messages for hundreds of thousands of years. It was this reality of the immensity of time and distance, no doubt, which led these desperate intergalactic ham operators to transmit salutations rather than distress calls.

Still, most of the scientists and technicians in the Radio Telescope Program — including the director herself — had joined in a pool to pick the day within the next six months when the planet would become uninhabitable as the result of a limited nuclear exchange between Israel and Pakistan.

These men and women did not plunge into this pool because they were morbid or cynical. They had simply fed a rabble of information into Eagle II and requested predictions on the outcome of their project. But no matter how they asked their questions, Eagle II refused to respond with a completion date or a summary of findings. As it turned out, this deficiency in conclusions and results was not attributable to continued favorable funding, as first suspected, but to the end of human civilization and life on Earth. This news was enough to disappoint even the most optimistic paradisiac.

***

Still, the team tried its best to fulfill its mission (or at the very least maintain an appearance thereof) and redoubled its efforts by scanning the endless interstellar night with incredibly powerful receivers, trusting they could capture and decipher a lesson from some other intelligent life form on the verge of extinction hundreds of thousands of years ago. A civilization which had been straining to receive its own emergency-expedited electronic first-aid overnight special delivery even back then.

“Just look at it this way,” wrote director Lucinda Dolan O’Toole, “Maybe we’ve all been a bit too serious in this, as in all our undertakings.

“Remember when we were children and played telephone? Such a simple game it required no special equipment. Anyone could play. Someone would whisper in our ear and tell us pass it on, and so we would, as best we could. The wonder of that game was how strangely and unintentionally distorted the original message became as it travelled further and further from its source — from mind to lips to ears to mind to lips…

“Consider our situation.

“Pass it on.

“Keep on trucking,
“Lucy O’Toole.”

It seems a gross injustice that no RTP personnel survived the crash of frozen sky in Cando, North Dakota. At least one of that dedicated crew should have experienced the joy of beholding and the duty to analyze the November 19th message, since it appears precisely to echo what director O’Toole implied the team might receive.

Text of the Extraterrestrial Message Received On November 19th

We consider fistfights, garage sales, halitosis, injury, and juxtaposition important. These metaphorical building blocks can be strung together to recreate an entire civilization engaged in mindless violence and wanton destruction. You can use this information to define and construct the ludicrous creature you find in .DXF format at the end of this transmission.

This creature is 15 radio wavelengths (or 6'-1") tall, and there are 26 billion of these unpredictable bipeds bumping into one another on the third planet from our star.

Our solar system has nine planets, none of them particularly beautiful, and ours is the only one where even a coldsore has a fat rat’s chance in a cathouse of superating at all.

This message is brought to you courtesy of the Koala Yogurt Company, without whose assistance we could never have afforded the radio telescope on which these symbols beam your way.

This telescope measures 3,000 radio wavelengths, or 1,250 feet in diameter. It is about to be melted down by our government to produce projectiles for use against our worst enemies, who may soon be us.

—30—

Epilog In Media Res

It occurs to me that some straggler might want to read all of Trout’s Tale in its God-given order, assuming I live long enough to publish all of it. I guess I could start another stack and publish it in order there, but where’s the fun in that?

Instead, what I’ve currently decided to do is add this epilog as an index to previous posts in the order in which they were not written, but in the most recent order they have appeared in the Hall of Records. Links will become active as new URLs are generated.

Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions.

Trout’s Tale thus far…

Frontal Matter And Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33