Komik kemik.

"The funny bone."

Two mornings ago I came home to find something inauspicious on my porch landing. In a perfect world it would have been a putrid carp wrapped in a Serbo-Croat language newspaper, but as it was, it was pretty damn close. It was a sinew-covered neck vertebra from an unknown terrestrial beast, and from the size of it, it might have been from a rhea or a bushbuck or per'aps Luther Vandross. [Where the hell has he gone? More importantly, do we give a fairy's twinkly ass?] So, I did what any one of you might have done when confronted by a gore-covered ossicle: I prepared a fresh cup of Citrus Clorox and bleached the eff out of it. Now it lies on my desk, gleaming white and startlingly clean, begging me to play with it. Clearly it is meant to be the centerpiece of a grisly necklace; my three wisdom teeth will provide merry accoutrement.

[When I had my wisdom teeth removed, the fun nurse assistant-lady asked me--while I was under the influence of about seven quarts of Novacaine--if I had any questions. I nodded.
"Cuh Ah haff mur teef?" She looked at me as if I had been sexually assaulting a gravid she-goat.
"What did you say? I think I understood, but..." So I repeated my question and she grimaced. "Well, sure, you can have your teeth, but that's weird." Since she didn't know me at all, I had to let that one slide. How could she have known that that was merely the tip of the iceberg? She took them and scraped most of the pinkish tissue off and put them in a wee baggy. When she handed them to me [holding the baggie like it were a jar of warm sputum], I wagged my vestigial tail with sheer delight.]

The bone on my porch, however, presents a set of profound questions. Why was it there? Who put it there? Would it make a good broth? As I see it, the possibilities are these:

1) Nature. Perhaps an airborne crow/bluejay/raptor of some kind dropped the sinewy treat on my porch, having dispatched/consumed the unfortunate, and still unknown, former owner. The crow and the bluejay in my neighborhood usually spend their time feasting on the rabbit/squirrel smorgasbord on Henderson, but hey, if opportunity knocked, they'd sure as hell answer.

2) Neighborhood dogs. Several of my neighbors have canine companions; I know this not so much from having actually seen the beasts, but from having seen their nearly human-sized steaming feces littering my yard. I'd leave poisoned hotdogs out for them, but it's not their fault: better, perhaps, to crouch in the bushes and shoot their owners in the neck-paunch with Papuan blowdarts. Maybe it was they who snuffed an unfortunate woodland beast and left part of its remains on my porch. Hmm.

3) Someone hates me. The obvious answer is, of course, that it is an omen. Someone out there is trying to tell me something. Someone out there wants me dead, and the grim bone is a clarion reminder of their intent. Well let me tell you something. When I find out who you are, ye of the sinew-covered vertebrae, I will cut you so hard that your mother's parakeet will speak Portugese and then weep blood. Don't effing eff with me, mothereffer.

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In other news, a pet store in Michigantown, Indiana, burned to the ground recently, killing all of the pets.

*pause for a moment to reflect, you insensitive freaks! dead pets!*

But that's not the end of the story! The fire killed all the pets... all the pets but one. A red-eared slider turtle survived, kept alive no doubt because he was immersed in water. Now renamed "Lucky", the turtle was taken out of the rubble by the store's owner, who promptly noticed that the heat had done something strange to the turtle's carapace.

It had seared the face of the Hooved One himself onto it.

Apparently, one can see "very clearly" the "eyes, horns and goatee" of Satan broiled into the shell of a turtle. I don't know whether to vomit, weep, or wander the Sinai for forty years. The Corn: it's a special kind of place. People sell their parent's ghosts. People get gored by their pet gnus. People find shelled reptiles that have the visage of the Judeo-Christian anthropomorphism of evil seared upon their carapace.

Apparently, I belong here so bad that there can no longer be doubt of it.

I remain, as ever,

Dom