I haven't submitted a column for way too long. Here are some reasons why:

1. My neighbor has this anal fistula and it wasn't draining like it usually does. He needed help moving his… oh, you don't know what an anal fistula is? Let me explain…
2. In a huff, my wife refused to communicate in any language but Afrikaans. In retaliation, I used nothing but Old High German. As we don't actually speak these languages, it was a rather quiet time in our household.
3. We had an infestation of sentinel octopus-beasties. Unlike all the stupid fucks who stain that giant underground honey bucket called Zion, I used my quick charging EMP array to knock them out. It's cool because sentinels are even more fun to scavenge than old VCRs. It takes a bit more than a screwdriver set, but is very rewarding. Of course, this also means that my hard drives were totally wiped, delaying my column a bit.
4. The NSA overheard me declare Rumsfeld "the greasiest, most arrogant, fork-tongued, lying sack of shit this side of Andromeda" while I was reading the newspaper on the toilet at work. I decided to lay low for a little while.
5. I read the first five pages of Jack Kerouac's On the Road and just took off. After three weeks of BO, rambling paragraphs with squished-together dialog, and hipster Beat lingo, I finally came home for a bath.
6. I lost a battle with OCD and found myself compelled to type every key on the keyboard 100 times.
7. Some cockmaster in a Ford Excursion ran my Accord off the road and into a ditch where I ended up on my roof. I've survived the last three weeks by licking the morning dew from the inside of the windows and munching on bellybutton lint. Of course, I was close enough to the McDonald's on Capitol Expressway and 85 to shout my order at the drive-through window, but after reading Fast Food Nation, it was bellybutton lint or nothing.
8. I unearthed something about which I am loath to write. I mean earnestly to refrain from striking that spark of curiosity that pulls the naïve and erudite alike into a Stygian well of madness, but I must put this down to warn others who may wish to explore similar adventures in their own bathroom. After we bought our house, we became aware of a certain superstition and lore amongst the locals, the very tales that real estate agents in the cities deign to regard or, if they do take notice, roundly deride. Having been constructed by the primitives of strange aeons (about 1969), the place languished under a certain patina of decay, but nothing so ruinous and degenerate to incite such pestiferous hearsay, or so we thought. An inspector we called in to confirm or deny the rumors did neither, only taking our cheque furtively and muttering something about "the bathroom needs work." I steeled myself to confront the eldritch horror in our bathroom, reading all the dusty tomes and flashing-GIF-benighted web sites of restoration arcana. I could feel each turning of a crackling page or click of the mouse assailing my sanity. Finally, out of weariness or desperation I'm not sure, I entered the bathroom, tools in hand. The vinyl of the floor lay gleaming, cancerous and squamous in the dim rays of my electric torch. I wrenched up the vinyl and the underlayment to expose the subfloor. I found that I could not blink to block the exquisitely, the shriekingly unspeakable that lay before me. The floor appeared as if some madman had carelessly sloshed aqua regia about in a fit, leaving a delicate latticework of rot. The horror drew my eyes to the base of the wall. Waves of Pre-Cambrian fear could not quell my smoldering curiosity. I drove the claw of my hammer into the wallboard. It gave with an unsettling ripeness. Pulling the board aside shewed a terrifying vista of reality. I must have lost consciousness for a moment, blacking out without collapsing. The decay had reached the sole plate of the wall itself, riddling it as if with an entire flight of aerolites. It's taken me three weeks to recover from the shock.

Pakeha

Columns by Pakeha