Uncertain Ultradian

The Incredibly Boring Song About Douglas

Sample chapters from my book, 'Bun; A Series of Ridiculous Events':

On the Bright Side of Disaster is Great Opportunity

Bun liked his face. It was useful for many things; he could toss it in the air and it would always come back, good for catching flying squirrles; he could fry bacon on it and surprise approaching friends with the sparks only to serve up a redeeming meal of friendship, cementing their relationship yet further; he could cut holes in the front to peek through, wearing it like a mask. The latter was always fun on the bus, but the most magnificent facial trait of them all, thought Bun, was the ability to give someone a reassuring smile of warmth and acceptance before deftly folding the face into a sudden origami hullabaloo with the desired effect being the victim's instantaneous derealisation / hysterical shock / cardiac arrest. This was how Bun accrued most of the ingredients for his programming staff.

Bun's back hurt because he was a miner and he had Bent Lung, Bent Face, and Bent Back. They were unique diseases, hence the capital letters. He really didn't feel like writing at the moment. His fingers were too big and he had a face to match, a back to match and a lung to match. His laptop was so small that it was beginning to chafe his palms like NES control pads used to do when he was but a minor. He hacked up a lump of coal from his tar-clogged esophagus and from the jet black rock floor of the mineshaft simultaneously, although the simultaneous nature of his actions went unnoticed by himself or anyone else present. He tossed the lumps into his cart miserably. A few dwarves who were working alongside him tried to improve the atmosphere by stirring up a rousing mining song, but succeeded only in marking out the poignancy of their efforts as their tuneful grunts segued into helpless fits of desperate hacking. Bun plodded past their writhing forms in a mood more dire than ever, and was greeted by An Bob Bobbert, a Dwarven acquaintance of his.

"How goes it, Bun?" sighed Bobbert.

"I am in a mood more dire than ever. Had I the wherewithal, I would turn off the STUPID LIGHTBULB that keeps appearing in the bottom-right corner of the screen and banish him to the very deepest bowels of Cerberus for all eternity. The cruel bastard appears to taunt me into submission whenever I make a mistake. This keyboard is ridiculously small, and don't get me bloody started on how fucking difficult it is to write a book with these useless excuses for stumps they gave me as paws. This evil pissing lightbulb doesn't give a damn about that, though. Oh no. It just makes itself right at home and comfortable wherever it wants and gives me the same gormless bloody gleaming grin and says, 'I fixed your mistake for you!' FUCK OFF! Most of those 'mistakes' are put there on purpose! And why does this pathetic attempt at pineapple juice taste like fluorine!? Are they putting rat poison in the stuff that's BAD for you now as well? It used to be just the rivers and the main water supply but that's apparently not enough for these fuckers, they have to poison every fucking rat they can find, even the ones that drink cheap pineappleade like me. I bet that luminescent prick is going to pop up in the corner again now and lecture me on how rat poison is good for giving me a gleaming bloody grimace like he has, well he can fuck right off and die horribly in a farming accident, that's what I think of him."

It began to snow. Bun tucked into a Craigburger. His face inflated and he contracted gonorrhea. He reflected that all in all, he had gonorrhs d'oeuvres.

"You suddenly look like you've been through the wars," Bobbert mentioned as he started in shock at Bun's newly metamorphosised facial state.

"I suddenly have," replied Bun enthusiastically. "I've, you might say. We shall have a commemorative fry-up on me - literally!"

Everyone began to laugh until they started hacking up catarrh violently.

-

The fry-up went well, but the bacon was a bit furry because Bun'd'd a hard time keeping the bacon balanced on his face and hacking for dear life at the same time. The black pudding was the only thing that benefited from this, but that benefit was ultimately its undoing. "God in a sandbox," quoth An Bob Bobbert with a face entirely stuffed to bursting with fur and black pudding, "this black pudding is the best I've ever tasted."

"Yes, it's basically just the blood of the lowest life form I could find offhand, which was the dreaded Slug of Ural, and fur off my face fried in the grease that was coming out of my feet. I have Greasy Foot, you see."

"Ah, yeah. It's really good. You must give my wife the recipe along with any prerequisite diseases."

"Will do," snickered Bun with a wink, a nudge, a rough shove, a swift uppercut and five bullets to the temple.

Truth be told, it was a tragic and very well-kept secret of Bun's that he was incapable of indulging in normal relationships due to the abnormally high temperature of his face; for any would-be suitors of his, most romantic or passionate activities resulted in anything from scalds to permanent scarring. This was why Bun usually had sex in the fridge or dressed as Lionel Richie; either way the danger remained, but a good placebo deals with problems faster than a good solution.

Bun noted that he was a nauseating sweaty dishcloth of a man. He clapped himself in five-irons and gave himself a bath in the fires of Mount Doom protected by naught but a tarpaulin and six overprotective women.

Spider Diagram

Seven hundred.

"How old are you?"

"21."

"Are you a student?"

"...I'm not really anything."

Bun picked up his bottle of red wine. It was cold.

"Why is it cold? It's not supposed to be cold, it's supposed to be warm! Warm as the very kotatsus of Hell!"

He slowly pulled an eel from his penis. It was cold. One of his eyeballs collapsed in on itself. He had rigor mortis, and was legless.

Bun was a passive pacifist, so he punched people when it pleased him. He took pride in each ironic blow, because he knew that in its nature, it was unique.

Lysergic Acid Amides

Bun was falling through an infinitely large Chinese fingertrap, but his own physics were as uncertain as those he inhabited. He could "see" the walls, and there was a certain sense of declivity involved, but he was not quite as specific as he was used to being. He seemed sort of liquid in a barely aethereal way, just physical enough to be able to latch onto a sense of feeling - perhaps he was a spray.

His descent, gradual as the Heavens' dance, portrayed to him a weave: snakes in bright primary colours, living though inanimate, striped with shadow and light, writhing. These beasts breathed as one, and each contorted betwixt others of its kind with the apparent goal of fulfilling some insatiable desire - an endless, inescapable tube of life.

All irridescence in this serpentine chamber seemed to emanate from the arcing dance of a throng of phenomena. This included mainly what appeared to be ball lightning, with occasional exceptions; each phenom appeared to possess a personality and willpower all of its own, and made artful fun of self-recreation. The throng moved erratically through and around Bun's form, sparks leaping from each new contact made with his pseudo-liquid body as electric fingers bounced their careless way across what may have been his face, his stomach wall, perhaps the soles of his feet. To Bun, that infinite fingertrap may have been rife with the smells of cinnamon and myrrh and the squealed giggles of the light anomalies had there existed any such things or the senses necessary to understand them. He was sure he knew of it all somehow, however - or at least, he thought he knew - or at least, he had... or at least, he may have had... or... he wasn't... quite... sure.

He decided he was actually a manly but gay muffin.

"Manly, but gay. That's me! A macho man needs macho management! HUUH!"

He appeared to have lived his whole life on a desert planet with a very unstable climate, only just capable of supporting life - perhaps once it had been a lush world (which would explain the presence of sentient beings), but apparently something had gone wrong at best. The air was thick, the landscape was little but desert as far as the eye could see (save for a small nearby village seemingly composed of mud and rocks)... the sky was black as coal... there was no wind. There was, however, some form of well a small distance from where he stood. It looked somewhat disused, but Bun was a thirsty optimist, and besides, a macho hierophant needs macho hydration.

Bun, now as some form of muscular biped made of cotton wool and flax petals who appeared to be passing as a muffin for the time being, picked up a thick rope from where it lay in the dust by his feet and clamped it firmly between his sweaty paw-palms in a vice grip. The rope connected said meaty slabs to some apparently quite hefty object buried deep within the dread pitch of a dark waterwell which Bun found himself proudly astride, for as a MAN, he could not allow himself to be considered a mere bystander in any situation such as this; no, he was on top of it. With a quick grunt, he began to heave the mysterious weighty thing from the watery bowel of Mars, feeding the rope from hand to hand, keeping a rock-solid torsion in each arm whenever possible just because it looked cool. Townsfolk began to gather around the well in cynical hope, and Bun tried to pretend he didn't notice as cries of praise and wonder began to emanate from the growing crowd. He wasn't very good at it though, and he soon began to giggle. It was a wonderful experience, he mused as he gazed into the well - for all he knew, this might be the only watering hole in the only mud village in the whole boundless desert, and still the world could be a paradise for himself and all those who now stood by him if only the Sun would shine, the rain would fall and there wasn't a huge fucking mystery item stuck in the well.

Doctrine the cat came paragliding down on a skidoo. "Bun!" he cried, "Need any help?"

"Go away Doctrine!" yelled Bun in retort, "This is a one-man book."

The newcomer ignored him and slipped through the cheering crowd with a spectral ease that made Bun greatly jealous. He wished he could do that, but he was probably too meaty. Dammit.

"You know, Bun," came Doctrine's immaculately tongued purr, "you're not really a muffin. You're a loose conglomerate of textiles."

Bun started down at his body in shock for about half a second before remembering he had a reputation to uphold, and spat bitterly. "My arms may be heaving this great and terrible weight up from the very depths of Hell, cat, but I still have two feet left to kick with. Take your toothy mistake of a grimace elsewhere before I find myself forced to - HOLY -"

Bun was cut off mid-sentence as a couple of children in the surrounding mass poked a digit each into a certain Chinese fingertrap. In an instant hundreds of thousands of tons of flesh thundered across the sky, and the people scattered shrieking and screaming in absolute selfless terror, assuming themselves bereaved of all around them, instantly giving up shibboleths lest the untold horrors of this cataclysm be placed on their heads by whichever one true God had suddenly decided to make himself known. The two kids tried to flee in different directions, but they couldn't - their fingers were stuck together.

As this chaos unravelled around them, Doctrine, now perched atop the scalp of a Bun deep in the belly of shock, began to chant a slow series of melismatic syllables that seemed only to coalesce into words within the mind about a second after having been spoken:

"May your land be raised like tar from underfoot by force, May your last Sunset not come before the Sun sees its final day; May your Moons collide and wreck in space, leaving only night; May your black currents run a sickly pale through grey bones As ash is coughed and hacked from dying rock, As ash snows up from deep beneath the crusts."

There was a silence to his chant that Bun would have strangled out of him had his arms not been on an indefinite strike. With a silken trot the cat made its way down from the scalp to the opposite side of the well. As Bun screamed internally for his body to move, he barely noticed through his panic the sudden manifestation of ball lightning in seemlingly random locations throughout the immediate atmosphere. A charge rose in the air until all those in the vicinity could feel it on their cheeks; Bun recognised it. It was black. He turned to Doctrine, finally forgetting the peril smashing its panicked way through the skies.

"May your very clouds of Heaven come down as fog to engulf us all, And may your Fates themselves cry out and be demolished As your infallible is proven untrue..."

"Wait, you mentioned something about black electricity! Did you know this was going to happen!? How did you know!?"

Two solemn seconds later, Doctrine opened his eyes suddenly and gave the space above and to the left of Bun's forehead the deepest, truest look of utterly astonished glee that had ever been expressed and collapsed, shuddering violently and completely limp, down from his perch into the depths of the wellshaft. Not a sound was made.

The charge in the air rose yet further, and the totally stunned and dumbfounded Bun found himself beginning to giggle uncontrollably despite his rapidly collapsing mental state. The fingertrap kids were nowhere to be seen, but apparently they remained among those few who had decided not to throw themselves into the well in a bid for death, for the rumble and boom of infinite amounts of flesh being smacked and hammered far above was only becoming more and more frenzied. Occasionally one picked up a barely audible creak of unimaginable volume that instantly caused violent nausea, as if the fabric of the very universe itself was tearing itself apart at the seams in the throes of a mad and desperate fury. Perhaps every minute or so, if keeping track of time had been an option, Bun found himself and everyone around him heaving bitter bile over the sands. Often many would fall to their knees afterwards to beg reality to finish this cruel and inconsiderate game, to REALISE what it was doing to them and have mercy, only to shove their prayers aside as another squeal tore down from the shrieking sky and a new vicious flow of stomach acid erupted uncontrollably from deep within their bellies... except once.

This final sound, the most horrific and banal wail, accompanied the ripping asunder of the universal wall, which nobody had ever noticed before. The fingertrap was broken at last, and a water vapour of untold purity flooded through from wherever had been on the other side of the wall, altering the entire atmosphere of the planet all but immediately. The sky became light, a single beam at first, but then as it was halved and it parted the shadow that had hung above them all their lives was discarded into space, and the villagers of Mars gazed in awe over the deserts under their first sunny day. The ball lightning creatures, enthusiastic as ever, began to fizzle and grow thin, spreading widely and dissipating into the air more as sheets than spheres. The black charge that had been almost torturously ticklish segued its feel from a tingle to a warm and satisfying glow that was experienced more in the heart than on the surface of the skin. Within minutes, white yet unimposing clouds coalesced over the village, catching the Sun's new rays of shine and stretching over the horizon in long streaks of matchless, paradisical beauty. The beings that had caused such turmoil by their indescribable clash vanished before the survivors could think to thank them for whatever selflessly kind yet Hellish deed they had performed on that day.

This was how the new and final pantheon in Martian civilisation came to be. Future generations worshipped North, God of Cockfighting, and South, God of Cockfighting, telling their enthralled progeny great legends about the two warring deities' grand and ferocious battle in the Heavens to determine who would be the victor of the most immense and monolithic cockfight in the history of time itself. Eventually the bout ended in a draw, and having finally made peace, the two decided to join forces in order to create in abundance the precious element of water. This action, a feat of infinite, unconditional love and generosity, brought boundless bounty, health, prosperity, peace and comfort to the people of the world forevermore. It was hilarious.

This website and all materials therein, thereon and thereof are � Peter C Drysdale 2009.