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feet-sticky-beerness
"Well, smack me upside the bologna and call me 'Slappy!'"
Only it didn't come out like that, it came out more like "WELLSMACK-MUH UP-SAYDE THABALLOH-KNEE AND CALL ME SLAPPY!" If there was a way to capitalise letters more than they usually were that last word would have been two line heights of everything else. It must have been very strange, standing a good bit away, hearing a thunderous 'SLAPPY' boom and rumble around the airwaves, without any sort of context at all, sloshing up against your ears in the middle of a page turn of the daily paper or maybe another sip of the old smoothie, a small sip, to make sure you didn't get an ice cream headache, which you did, nine times out of ten, when you had a smoothie.
It must have been strange and a bit nice. Non-scary, anyway. Because being the recipient of the exclamation and standing quite close to the source was pretty damn scary.
And getting the full context
The full context was this:
A large man, mustachioed, wearing a hunting cap, the kind with the ear flaps. The kind I always pictured Ignatius J. Reilly wearing.The resemblance to the A Confederacy of Dunces character, however, stopped there. Because Ignatius was a literary character, and Rasselas was not literary. Oh, he was in name, his parents must have been big Samuel Johnson fans or something, but again, I'm going to define the end of something by saying that's where the literary-ness of Rasselas, the big mustachioed hulk with the booming voice, stopped.
The context also included the mall, a great big wide space that looked a bit desperate, void of people, save for the big man and myself and maybe a few peripheral people that always lurk in malls but never seem to make much of an impression. A balloon floated suspiciously as if it couldn't quite work up the energy to float up another floor and press itself, also desperately, against the glass of the sunroof, but neither did it want to give up the whole way and touch down on the ground, where some sticky-fingered little kid could grab hold of it and whisk it off through the mall, up and down the escalators until closing time struck and some security guard had to pry the balloon from the little kid's fingers and haul him down to the information desk, where his responsible parent was waiting to collect him.
And that was it, most of the context, anyway. That the man had just paused, jumping repeatedly off the miniature jungle-in-a-box that stood in the middle of the space in an effort to capture the balloon may have been the last relevant bit of context you needed to complete the picture.
To be continued...
disclaimer:
For the love of... if it stays this hot, and it's only just June, mind (yes, our tenth anniversary, I'll take the time to note), our fingers might have melted off, and then what're we going to do for typing?
As you may have guessed, I'm back. 'I' being the Head Editor, and this is where I went: California, scouting out locations for the new business (the software guys) and the old (the magazine-like guys). So we ended up a few yards from the Los gatos brewing Company. Which, I might pause a moment to pat myself on the back, is probably what they're referring to when they say location, location, location.
William Murphy is, for the moment, back in Worcester, Mass., home of the... well, home of City Hall, the Worcester-version, and the T&G, which is apparently owned and content-ed up by the New York Times these days. Or so I hear.
And most of the rest of the family is here, enjoying the sun, the pool just down the block from our office, and the brewing company.
What all this sun and drink is going to do for the content of Sane, I have no idea, but it will probably look something like what we've been doing for the last really long time. In dog years, and now, just this month, in human years.
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