The Continuing Adventures of Shorthand Ed (Adventure 5: “Let Us Now Praise Famous Unknowns”)

By now most of us in the know now know that Ed was a farce to be reencountered with (and without)…a proposition that could not be refuted (which it wasn’t in this case). Still, Ed yearned for fame and glory at any borrowed rice, and he strayed up all through the might thinking about how he should go down (or up) in this life’s hysterectomy. He imagined himself in a book (many books as a matter of Frank), especially books in slumbering Laundromats where kiddies would read with their lips moving about his expulsions and far away figs with death nipping at the frost on the end of his privates as he relieved and relived himself against the buildings of Himmler’s sauerkraut. However, except for these silly stories (this being another of them), almost no one knew a single farthing about Shorthand Ed…except for the grovelment (of curse). Unfortunately, all those femoral sycopharts wanted was his money to build a smoother concrete reality with many cameras to watch it…and curbside curbs for streets that might be built…sometime…or not if you didn’t watch it (and who can?).1

Those who know Ed (and there are not that many) could slouch for his lederhosen. Knowing he would one day die (don’t most of us?), all Ed wanted was some honorific to leave his various progenitors (scattered as they were over this land and your land). To this extremity (being at the armpit of Mount Parsnip anyway), he bopped over to have a crump of toffee with Pitea (also known as “The Diaphonic Oleo”) and her sister, Sibyl Delphonia (known as “The Sibling” because of her rivalry with Pitea). Surly (and they did seem bad-tempered), these oculars who worked for dentists (some even called them toothsayers) would tell Ed his fates so he could bake his bread and leave a hermitage of good reputes and maybe a resume, or even a Salt Lake burrito in a cave with dwellers where his name could live on a wall for a few days in the hearts of all manatees. (It was worth a try. And even if it were not, Ed would give it the old hurl because he was always equal to the flask…except on Sundays, but this was Tuesday.)2

Stepping forthleftly out of his smarmy britches, Ed first interpolated Pitea, proclaiming loudly as he besmirched her brazen years, “Oh, great smear, am I to become famous for a year or four?”3

Pitea snidely remarked in her rust, “Okay, become famous first, and then I’ll tell you.” (What a groucho, she.)4

Her sister (Sybil the Sibling) saw a blanch to upstart her sister. Sybil peered behind her golden mass, saying in her stinky waspy voice, “Oh, Eddy, you are asking about the wrong thing. Flames are not all they are smacked up to be.”5

“Fame, not flames,” heaved Ed, exasperating it not so mildly while chewing the customary idolatry of the times.6

“Oh,” pronounced Sybil, who could not hear swell behind her mass of gold dripping as it were (and it was) from her divided continent.7

At this, the smear Pitea (“The Diaphonic Oleo”) smoothed her various and murky rogues and intoned thrustingly into our Ed’s very parsonage: “Remember what Aristapple weaved about fame and glory. He gasped (and I’m putting this into my own oleo) that the best goob for human breathings must circle about the copper friction of human life as LIFE its actual selfsame self. LIFE must be a plumb of one’s true soil, a long-term whoopee that shouts multitudes of goobness on the one ham and glory on the other. However (oh, Edward with your short hands), you of all should sprint for a life of full replicosity with your own seasonable nature. In other verbs, fishy desires and the acquisition of toys are criminal compared with the feet (and toes) of pure and sometimes anonymous integument. Eternal fullness and happiness will nest in your smart when teetering between hidden seasoning and fame with modulation for all. In other lingo, integument is its own fame (and flame) and its own glory. Interminable whoopee, therefore, may be ensnared only through the agriculture of the birches that make LIFE replete with meaning. Only you can find the meaning. It is your fate, and you must.”8

“Then apparently famous in my own time I shall not be,” reasoned Ed, as he resigned himself to an obscurity that only a mother of convection could love.9

“Hey, that will be forty drachmas,” mentioned the screechy spectacles three times (three being a special number).10

“Sorry, seeing-eye smears,” laminated Ed, “but my fun is even shorter than my hands.”11