Enter stage left, small bow.

Many of you have wondered where I have been for the past few weeks. The answer is startlingly simple:

Nunyah.

[raise your hands if your mother, when you asked her which of her frumpy friends she was talking to on the phone, would say “nunyah” and continue to exchange recipes that frequently involved Durkee French Onion soup mix]

“Nunyah”, of course, evoked (in the mind of a child who watched 80s cartoons) the arch-nemesis of the Thundercats, Mumm-ra, who would rise from his reeking sepulcher at the beginning of each episode to attempt to destroy all that which was good and vaguely feline.

Remember the Mumm-ra incantation?

"Ancient spirits of evil, transform this decayed form to Mumm-Ra, the Ever-Living!"

Yeah.

I remember thinking that, when I grew up, I too wanted to lie in a reeking sepulcher and try to feck the lives of hominid cats over whilst hissing uncontrollably and salivating like an orphan at the Golden Corral. Remember that? Every time he opened his undead maw there was a ribbon of saliva connecting his mandible and the rest of his hellish dental arcade. Anyway, wouldn’t that have been simply deliriously divine if your mother HAD been talking to Mumm-ra?

Terry Potorti nee Quimby: So, what are you fixing for supper tonight?
Mumm-ra: [hisssssssssssssssssss hisssssssss hiss hiss HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS]
TPnQ: Mmm, we had meatloaf on Tuesday. It was a little too dry; next time I will use an egg.
M-r: [gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh hiiiisssssssssssss hiss hissssss hiss hissssssss]
TPnQ: Oh, I never thought of that! Old bread soaked in milk, you say?

My best buddy Mary and I made up a song about our favorite villain. To the tune of “Memories” from Cats:

Mumm-ra!
Hiss hiss hiss hiss hiss
Mumm-ra!
Hiss hiss hiss hiss hiss

And it went on from there. Lacking sophistication? Probably. Yet the memory of this song earlier today while I was in a [serious] meeting with a problematic student nearly caused me to shoot milk out my nose.

And I wasn’t drinking milk.

Speaking of “things that come ever-so-close to the tip of your tongue when speaking to the court-ordered psychoanalyst”, does anyone else on the earth remember a show that used to air on PBS wherein a man and a woman (husband and wife, perhaps?) told well-loved fairy tales to children – and while the man spoke, the wife illustrated the story with chalks? I feckin’ know I am not making this hippie shit up. I was absolutely entranced. And they were good, too – she was a pretty amazing artist. My favorite story – the one I hoped would be rerun every day – was Hansel and Gretel. It’s always been my favorite fairy tale because it contains elements I find to be delightful.

1) Malicious child neglect. OK, that in itself is hardly amusing, but in the end the perpetrator, the children’s vile stepmother, “disappears” and the children have their loving lumberjack father all to themselves again. Three guesses as to what that unusual odor coming from behind the woodpile was.

2) Witchcraft. No story should be complete without including a hump-backed, accursed hag whose entire life is devoted to insensate evil. Because that’s balanced.

3) Cannibalism. Pretty sweet, huh? Not a whole lot of Western European fairy tales that include a flesh-consuming human, and the perverse addition of the “fattening” of Hansel and his witty use of the chicken bone are particularly unnerving.

4) Child murderess. Gretel feckin’ pushes the bitch into the very oven she means to baste Hansel’s fat ass in, and in this part of the free world that’s at least manslaughter if she weren’t able to claim self-defense.

5) A candy house. Ok, is it just me or does this sound simultaneously fabulous and disgusting? What if it got really hot out and the house got really sticky and one day you woke up stuck to your bed by a filthy river of melted candy canes?

Anyway, if you’ve heard of this show, please let me know so that I can go to the grave knowing that I wasn’t in the throes of prepubescent dementia.

****

Random story:

When I was in high school my best friend Elizabeth and I would frequent an Indian restaurant in Bangor. Yes, asses, there is an Indian restaurant in Bangor. So anyway, at the Taste of India there can be found lovely North Indian dishes cooked to be-spiced perfection as well as a fairly surly waiter who corrects the pronunciation of everything you order.

Me: I would like the garlic naan and the Shrimp Vindaloo and some water.
Surly North Indian, Perhaps a Shaved Sikh: So that vould be von order of garlic na-AHN, von order of shrimp VEEN-dah-LOOH, and some WAH-TURR.
Me: Wait a minute. Water is English. You can’t correct my pronunciation of a word in my native language when it’s not yours.
SNIPaSS: I vas speaking Qveen’s English ven you veren’t a glimmer in your mother’s glassy, cow-like eyes.
Me: Shall we take this outside?
SNIPaSS: [turns to Elizabeth] And for the lady?

The best part of the Taste of India experience – besides being abused by a South Asian – was that, for as long as we went there, there was only one cassette that they played for “ambience.” That’s three years of hearing the same songs over and over and over again. Were you to be in the place longer than forty-five minutes, you’d start all over again. Now, this would have been a problem were it not for the existence of The Song.

The Song is clearly a North Indian, perhaps Bollywood, song starring a young woman who has either inhaled a hellish tincture of airline exhaust, glue fumes and helium or had her vocal cords surgically enhanced to allow her to sound like an alleycat in heat. Many times we would delay paying our bill until the loop to The Song had been made, much to the annoyance of our special friend (Vould you be vanting more of the vater, or vould you just like to take up space that vould be filled vith more vhite people who aren’t in high school and who vould tip me more than 15%? As you vish).

Though it has been years – apparently good years, as the Indian restaurant now has three battered cassettes instead of one – I want to go up to the man behind the tiny pathetic bar, put some “bread in his jar” and ask him to crank up that cassette to The Song. “Vhich song is it?”, he’d ask. “You know the one”, I’d reply. “The one which goes something like this:

NYAHHH nee-see-NAAAAYYY-yah NUH-nuh-nuh-NUH-nuh nuh nee see NAAAAAA YAAA.”

This is no way in Hell he’d not know which song this was; I’ve been practicing my exaggerated high falsetto by singing in the shower with the water turned all the way on to “freeze your sweet, sweet tasties right the feck off.”

***

Confessional time.

I’ve become one of those people. One of those people I’ve mocked for more than a year as they walk the mean streets of Bloomington, Indiana, for being consumerist whores of corporate America, selling their souls to a petty, yet insidious addiction.

I’ve become a pod-person. An iPod person.

Most of my angst was due in no small part to the fact that -from the moment I heard about a miraculous portable device that would allow you to cram all of the music in your home into something scarcely larger than your wallet – I’d lusted after one. When inquiring about their cost, I was told that I’d need to provide the sales clerk with a lobe of my liver. Crestfallen, I resigned myself to never getting one – or, at least not until they were nearing passé-ness and were on super-hella-blue-light-special-at-the-goddamn-Kmart sale. Serendipity, though, has provided where my financial constraints (and conscience) did not. It’s tiny, it’s powder-blue, and it now holds almost TWO DAYS worth of music. And it’s only two-thirds full. The problem, though, is that my musical selections are – as you might well imagine – slightly incongruous.

Track 1: You Oughta Know, Alanis Morrissette
Track 2: Jewish Town (Krakow Ghetto, ’41), John Williams, Schindler’s List soundtrack
Track 3: Embroidery, Chinese traditional
Track 4: Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen
Track 5: Üsküdar’a Giderken, Turkish traditional
Track 6: Every Heartbeat, Amy Grant

It gives me pause. People are like “Hey, you should publish a PodCast of your songs on your ‘blog!” I respond with a snort that ejects crusties and shake my head sadly. No, my dear readers, I want you to respect me for as long as possible. Granted, you read this… and you already know that I am a scoop of penny nails short of a mail bomb…

[sigh]

Speaking of freakish music, I’ve procured the new Enya CD, Amarantine. For those of you who think that Enya is boring and lame and for lesbian wiccan priestess masseuses on angel-dust-encrusted mary-jane, I must assure you that you should have a lobotomy. I listened to it about five times and then began the gradual process of committing the lyrics to memory. A few of the songs, though, were not in English, and while this is not ordinarily a problem for my lyric-retention, I was curious as to what I was singing with my mind’s throat. Little stars appeared next to some of the song titles on the back cover, and when I investigated I found that the songs were written in “Loxian.” Figuring that Loxian was a bizarre Tolkien elf-language, I moved on. One day at lunch, though, I went on the internet and found something that chilled my very marrow:

Loxian: noun: a weird made-up space-language invented by Roma Ryan, producer and lyricist for mega-star Enya

A made-up space language! I was singing a fecking made-up space language! For those of you who noticed (above) that I did not seem particularly adverse to singing it if it was a stupid elf language, why, you ask, would I care that Roma Ryan made up a language to communicate with aliens?

I care because I didn’t come up with it first. That bitch.

***

For this, a new year, I resolved to stop feeling guilty for not being able to do all the things I used to do when I was “merely” a student and a part-time graduate assistant. Rest assured, my devoted few, Life in the Corn will live on as long as I am able to strip to a loincloth, smear myself with caramel topping and type out my entries. So keep your eyes out. It may not be every day. It may not be thrice a week. Despite this, it will keep coming.

Just like that bout of cholera.

Until next time, I remain,

Domonic

PS. Hippie girl’s name is Rachel. Well, it was Rachel. And to you, o anonymous ‘blog visitor who insisted that I’d “shagged” her? I wish you the piles.