"You Will, Oscar; You Will."

I mentioned recently as I was describing my Thanksgiving that I puttered around the house and muttered to my cat Mimi. In fact, I don't just do this on Thanksgiving, I do it all the time. And since I wrote that entry, I've been paying more attention to what I say to the cat.

It would seem that my half of the dialogue pretty much bypasses the conscious portion of my brain and just flies right on out of my mouth. The result is that I'm as surprised as the cat about some of the things I say. Many of them sound like familiar words or phrases but are really spoonerism-like creations of my murky Id. (Actually, a number of these phrases have wound up as Hulles blog titles.)

Here are a few examples of what I'm talking about:

Looking in refrigerator: “Oh my GOD, honey, there's been a meatamorphosis in here!”

Responding to repeated curses for having an empty food dish: “Okay, Stinky, let's get you refooded.” (I like this one so much I now use it all the time.)

Grumbling about some imagined slight during the day: “So put THAT in your pump and stoke it.” (???)

Singing a Counting Crows song: “I belong in the cervix of the Queen...” (Eeugh.)

Sorry about the last one. I also adapt another Counting Crows line when I sing it to my cat, but since it's a homonym she never picks up on it: “I deserve a little Moor...” I always imagine a Moroccan pederast when I sing it.

Back when I lived with a wife and children I used to sing my adapted song lines to them, much to their feigned amusement. I'm quite sure one reason the kids turned out the way they did is because of Post-Adolescent Stepdad Singing Trauma. They inform me that years of expensive therapy have ultimately turned out to be a waste of time; it's incurable. The kids are the Post-Adolescents referred to, by the way. I'm still an Adolescent for all intents and purposes, as they would attest.

Now that I think of it, my singing was not the only torment to which my poor kids were subjected¹. Every night after dinner I would finish my glass of milk, then go into the kitchen and put tap water into the glass without first rinsing it. I would come back into the dining room, hold up the glass and proudly announce to my family, “You could go canoing in this!” (White water, get it? Jeez.) Now this wasn't funny the first three hundred times, but after a couple years this lame joke began to take on a life of its own and develop its own surreal humor. And I'm all about surreal if I'm all about anything.

Okay, at this point I have a confession to make: my intent in writing this blog is not to amuse you or edify you or give you dessert recipes to get your date naked, it's really to implant certain phrases into your brain that you can't get rid of. These are called engrams, according to my masters in orbit somewhere beyond the Planet Formerly Known As Pluto. They tell me that once enough of the proper engrams are graven into your neural system you become their pliant slave and will submit to repeated anal probing with nary a whimper. I don't find this explanation totally convincing, however. Why on earth (so to speak) would you want to perform anal probing without the whimpering? It takes the fun right out of it, at least for me.

But my masters are different than you and me. Just how different, you'll have to wait a month or so to find out, according to their fiendish timetable.

Just a hint, though: don't watch this year's Superbowl ads in the fourth quarter. When you go into the kitchen to get refooded, stay there until the end of the game. You were warned.

-- Hulles

1Heather, see how lucky you were?