The · Most · Cracked-Out · Story · Ever

Marian Wesley and Silence Waters decided to go camping together.  It was fall; it was cold out but very beautiful because the cold weather caused the leaves of the trees to turn to all sorts of abnormally brilliant colors, reds and golds and oranges.  They lived fairly near a set of mountains in which there was located a good number of government-managed campgrounds, in state or national parks or forest service areas or wilderness preserves, and so they set a date on which Marian would ride his bike over to Silence's apartment, put his bike inside her apartment, and then he and her would take their stuff and themselves and put them into Silence's car and then drive out to the mountains to the national forest Forest Service campground where they were intending to be staying that night, which is to say the night that they had set for the first of their camping expedition, out across the mountain pass and then up the skirts of the mountains on the other side and then back into the mountains along a long and winding dirt or gravel road which went for miles and miles and miles but actually had no outlet nor civilisation located anywhere along its course.  If, while they were driving along this long and winding dirt or gravel road and something happened to go wrong with the car, such as it having run out of gas or the car having got a flat tire, which Silence did not have a spare replacement for in that event, then the two would be stranded in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by hostile animals and with no way of getting food or shelter or assistance for their poor troubled automobile - but worst of all, they would be stranded miles from the nearest bathroom.  Which would be a bad thing.   But of course nothing would go wrong with the car along that long and winding dirt or gravel road with no outlet and the two of them would arrive at their camping destination without incident, safely, and have a good and fun and happy and romantic weekend out among the trees with a lovely Forest Service pit toilet only a few dozen feet away from their campsite.

            I'm sorry, I oughtn't to mention the presence of bathrooms - waste disposal facilities, if you will - or the necessity thereof so explicitly - such a behaviour isn't usually considered a good and ladylike behaviour in most polite social circles.  However, I am only attempting to add a touch of much-needed realism to the tragic little tale of mine, all right?  I mean, come on now!  It's only freaks like you folks who don't eat or drink and plants and fungi and microbes who don't need some means of sanitarily and modestly disposing of the waste products of their bodies' digestive processes, and among most civilised persons such a place as a bathroom, be it a biffy (a Bathroom In the Forest For You) or a bidet (actually, I lied - that's not for waste disposal, it's just a weird French invention that I kind of tend to find disgusting myself, though my uncle claims to like the fresh clean feeling such a device apparently imparts - which is probably - nay, definitely - way the hell more than you or anybody else, myself included, ever wanted to know about my uncle or anybody else), being a walled enclosure for the deposition and removal of human wastes in a sanitary and modest fashion, is a necessity for life.  Except when backpacking or wilderness camping, but that's beside the point and I've gone on way the hell to long on this rude and digusting topic, and needlessly, too!  Gah!  Just- just listen to the story, okay?  Don't be a five-year-old dumbass, okay?  Jeez louise.

Her name was Silence, Silence Waters.  She was not old, but again neither was she particularly young.  She was one of those people whose age cannot be accurately guessed at, not from their appearance and not from their bearing, not from their demeanour and not from their speech.  A person might even call her ageless, but that would suggest that she was some kind of peculiar mutant who neither aged nor grew old and died, and who probably didn't eat or drink either, and may even have been able to read minds and possibly even to control the weather, but such a suggestion would be both absurd and erroneous.  Silence Waters was merely a normal female human like you or me (unless you happen to be male, or an alien, or an abnormal human, in which case I do apologise for making such a rude and unfounded assumption as to your nature - I didn't mean to be a bigot or anything, and really I am very sorry - please forgive me), and she ate food just like you or me (unless of course you happen to be some kind of a freak like, ahem ahem, cough cough, in which case I repeat the apologetic message given in the preceding set of rounded brackets - parentheses, I mean - that's what they're called - parentheses) and got older just like you and I (unless you don't age, which although peculiar is a state of being to which I am entirely open and have even a good amount of respect for, and in which case that same apologetic thingy of two sets of parentheses or brackets or whatever earlier is repeated for your benefit), and, eventually, she would die.  But to look upon her one would have some good deal of difficulty in attempting to pin down exactly how old she actually was to within a few decades.  She had grey-brown hair - mousy brown, some call it, because apparently that is the color of the fur of some particular variety of mouse, though which variety it is escapes me.  Her hair had a rather obnoxious tendency to frizz out easily, and so for this reason she most often wore it in a tight bun at the back of her head in the manner that the scary nanny from the original version of The Omen wore her hair, or the German lady Frau Blucher from Mel Brooks' film Young Frankenstein, or pretty much any stereotypical spinster, schoolteacher, nanny, seamstress, upright German lady, or turn of the century ma'am tends to wear her hair in a Hollywood production.  This look, however, fit Silence quite well.  She always got more heads turning in her direction when she wore her hair in a bun as opposed to when she wore it down, or in a ponytail, or in a braid, or in pigtails, or loose and flowing with a headband to keep it out of her eyes.  Also it kept her hair from frizzing, which she didn't like her hair to do, so naturally she preferred it.

            Silence Waters worked at the high school downtown, filing away books and old paperwork and checking children in to the school nurse's office and even occasionally playing at being a substitute teacher when all of the regular substitute teachers seemed to have made a pact amongst themselves to make themselves as scarce and unreachable as possible just when flu season had struck and all of the normal teachers were being struck down ill on the left and on the right and so the school needed to find substitute teachers more than ever to fill up the many myriads of flu-induced teacher voids.  She had a car, but it was old and loud and the muffler was breaking and the brakes squeaked something awful, and they only squeaked worse when the weather was wet and it rained.  Her car was blue, but a person could hardly tell to look at it, what with all of the rusty spots and corroded spots and the bleached out spots from when some random graffiti artist had decided that her beat-up old car would be the perfect surface on which to spray his tag in neon orange paint - his tag being the word "fuck" in huge avant-garde block letters - and then she'd had to wash it off, but her car's paint had come off with the letters, so she'd had to take off a bunch of the car's paint, too, in order to make sure that the ugly white patches the cleaning solution left behind in its wake were simply amorphous blobs and didn't still spell out the word "fuck" in huge block letters or cursive or any other kind of letters at all.  It had worked - the white spots didn't spell out the word "fuck" any longer - but she had been obligated to remove about half of the paint from her car in order to make certain of this.  Silence Waters thus developed a sort of vendetta against graffiti artists after that, but as this peculiar interest or hobby or whatever of hers has actually no bearing on the plot of this anecdote (and there is one, rest assured - a plot, I mean - it simply hasn't had an opportunity to evidence itself as of the moment) I do not intend that we should go into any further detail about it.  Slip it from your mind; it means naught, naught at all.

            Silence Waters had taken tap dance as a child for exactly one year, ballet for exactly one year, gymnastics for exactly one year, ice skating for one year and swim lessons for one year, and piano lessons for one year (these were all different years, too, mind you - she was never taking two extracurricular classes at one time).  She had then discovered the guitar, which she found she had been given an extreme passion for, and after taking guitar lessons for exactly one year, she continued to take guitar lessons until she felt that she had sufficiently mastered the use of the instrument to entertain herself, and others on occasion, with it.  Her guitar was acoustic, painted black, and was bought in a junk shop for ten dollars when she was eleven years old by her parents, Jim and Molly Waters.  Her mother's maiden name was Doran.  Her social security number was lost before she knew it by heart and so was never memorised.  Her debit card's pin number was 2242.  She did not like the taste of avocados and avoided them as if they were carriers of the bubonic plague.  Her eyes were blue.

            Marian Wesley was Silence's boyfriend, or significant other, if you will.  Marian was in his middle twenties - twenty-six, to be exact - and had floppy blonde hair with natural highlights which he detested because he thought they made him look too much like a gay rocker and a member of a teenage boy band like the Backstreet Boys or N*Sync, both of whom he had always hated and despised with as much fervor as that with which his girlfriend, Silence Waters, avoided avocados.  He said that he had green eyes, but really they were kind of muddy yellow-brown - Mexican water, his friend Felipe called it with a hearty laugh.  Felipe was from Ireland.  Marian rode his bike to work, but he had it tuned up once every two months and so made certain that his breaks were always properly adjusted, not worn down, and in otherwise altogether good shape, thus hoping to avoid, except if he happened to be hit by the least probable fluke accident, which he didn't happen to be, a situation in which he found himself, like the unfortunate biker of our earlier runaway metaphor, racing down a wet winding hill in the dark before the dawn without any breaks or batteries in his bike light, whose batteries he made certain to always keep well-charged.  His bike was a Cannondale, and it was blue.

            Marian met Silence at a poetry reading in a small cafe on the south side of downtown.  The poem that was being read was of particularily bad quality, and in the act of rolling their eyes Silence's and Marian's eyes met and locked into each other and the next thing you know they were both going to poetry readings and art shows and live music performances together with a startling amount of frequency, and they were also almost constantly holding hands, as well as kissing in public places and nuzzling each other's necks and doind all kinds of other stupid things like that, which are called Needless Public Displays of Emotion, or "get a room"s, in public places.  Obviously the two were quite violently in love.

            Marian didn't own a car.  Silence didn't own a bike.

These little anecdotes are just not even remotely related at all, are they?  Not a one of them has anything to do with the others, has it?  I think that the problem is that National Novel Writing Month has tainted my writing with its "Fit as Many Words into as Little a Space as You Can" stain, so that merely due to the fact that the document in which I am typing this nonsense happens to be called by "nano07" and happens to have been choked full of junk writing from the very first day and initiation of this contest like a clear pristine subterranean glacial stream into which a dump truck has dropped, like a bear making a diarrheal excretory deposit on some poor woodsman's car, its entire load of garbage - rotten vegetables, rancid milk, dirty diapers, feminine protection products, used contraceptive aids, broken glass bottles that originally held cheap alcohol, dust-filled vacuum bags and all the like, it has been polluted.  So, in other words, I am attempted, by way of my recent skipping between these many unconnected incidents, to figuratively remove all of this figurative foulness and garbage from the figurative stream of my writing.  Which is to say, in still other words, that I am currently attempting to backpedal and start over, like a bicyclist, racing down that awful steep winding hill a little north of here that I used to have to go down in the early early morning to get to an 8.30 am chemistry class when I used to ride my bike to school at six in the morning in the freezing cold and the pitch black dark that makes you need to have a light on your bike not so much to let the cars and other bikers and pedestrians know that you're coming but even more just so that you can see the road in front of you as you make your way and the wet rainy slippery awfulness that follows a night of downpouring water, who has just discovered that he has no brakes any longer because they have been cut by some undesirable element of a person who has it in for the bicyclist or else he simply let his breaks wear down because he kept meaning to change them, which is to say to get the brake pads replaced, but he kept just never getting around to doing it and procrastinating and so on until, on this fateful pitch dark morning, he realised that it was too late, because now he's careering down a slick winding road in the dark with cars coming out of everywhere and with speedbumps and potholes and stupid raised ridges of pavement intended to direct the flow of the water that runs down the hill at breakneck speeds, like our friend the bicyclist is now running at, during rainstorms.  And then the bicyclist's bike light runs out of batteries and it flickers off and then he crashes and dies and-

            Okay, sorry, but that metaphor got just a little bit carried away, wouldn't you agree?  Good, because if you couldn't agree then I'm afraid I'd have to tell you that you're a freak.  But you agreed, so that's okay.  Anyhow.  Moving on already.

            How about a little bit of trash cleanup, eh?  Metaphorically speaking, of course.  Or was it figuratively speaking?  Oh well, whatever.  You get the idea.

Dear Lord, make it stop.

            That was what Deneb Blookoblooko D'Bink D'Bonk D'Bank Ganooda Fronsniggle Bing-Tog Fliggitypuss Pop Snot Morglepookie - also known as Kevin - was thinking when the cassette tape finished playing out the silence at its end on Side B and switched back to its start on Side A and began to play over again what it had been playing in an endless horrible continuous loop for the past three days, or maybe it had been months, or maybe it had been years, or maybe it had only been a few hours, or maybe it had been even less than that - but the truth was that he simply couldn't tell because the cassette tape's contents had caused him to lose all sense of time and being and existence and consciousness and volition and defiance and sentience and so on and so forth.

            What has caused poor Kevin to find himself in such a desperate predicament as all of this, you may ask?  Well, in that case, I shall tell you.  You see, poor Kevin happened to be the Chief Executive Officer, or CEO, of a Big and Powerful Company called Big and Powerful Company, or BPC for short - not to be confused with the British Petroleum Corporation, which did not exist in this time and place, or at least not within Kevin's experience, but did however happen to have the same initials as his own Big and Powerful Company, and which was, like Kevin's company, also a Big and Powerful Company, at least in its own time and place, if not in Kevin's experience.  Because Kevin - also known as Deneb Blookoblooko D'Bink D'Bonk D'Bank Ganooda Fronsniggle Bing-Tog Fliggitypuss Pop Snot Morglepookie - jeez louise but I love the copy and paste features on these new-fangled text editors that computing machines have these days - but I digress - because Kevin was the CEO of BPC, he happened to have all of the authorization codes and pin numbers and other top secret information about his company and its finances and funds and so on stocked up in that little head of his, and unfortunately for him there were some other people who wanted to get that information from him even though he was unauthorised to give that information out to them, and so they had locked him in a small windowless cement room with embedded flourescent lights in the ceiling and cameras and speakers hidden somewhere behind the lights and had told him that those hidden speakers were going to continue playing the exact same sounds - there were not a great variety of these sounds, either - on an endless loop until Deneb Blookoblooko D'Bink D'Bonk D'Bank Ganooda Fronsniggle Bing-Tog Fliggitypuss Pop Snot Morglepookie started telling them the codes and other secret information that it was that they wanted to know.  Kevin had been brave - he had told them that he would never tell and that they could do whatever they felt like doing because he wasn't going to even so much as pay attention to it - but then those speakers began blasting those horrid repeating sounds into the room from somewhere that he couldn't sound, the same four awful noises, just repeating again and again and again forever and ever and ever and so on, on unto eternity, and then Kevin almost immediately regretted what he had said to his captors about how he wasn't going to tell the codes and stuff to them no matter what they did, because it was so horrible he couldn't bear it any more, not even so much as another second longer.  And this was why: because of what those four repeating sounds were.

            They were the sounds of the Pikachu.

Once upon a time there was an extremely unfortunate young man - well, okay, he was a teenager, really, not so much a young man as an old boy, or actually essentially just a boy boy, but yes - at any rate, there was this very unfortunate young man - boy - whatever - he was fifteen years old, by the way - but anyhow, there was this kid who was from this one world called The Land of Adventure - no shit, that's really what the place he was from was called, officially and certifiably and everything, it really was called the Land of Adventure - anyhow, this kid was from Adventure (The Land of) and he was training to be young badass a la young Marth of Super Smash Brothers Land and other video games made in Japan which I don't actually know the names of - at least one other game besides Super Smash Brothers, anyhow - or a la Roy, Marth's gay brother, and while this kid was training to be a badass he happened to get kicked off of a three hundred foot high cliff.  This is the first reason why he was such an unfortunate young person.

            However, at the base of the cliff, rather than a raging torrent of water or a menacing outcrop of horrid spiky pinnacles of rock or the gaping maw of some ravenous and beastly animal all ready to swallow the poor boy up into its stomach, there was a swirling temporal vortex of time and space and other such multidimensional incomprehensible physics-type nonsense stuff.  And so, rather that falling to his untimely and tragic death, the teenaged boy fell into the time vortex thingie and landed in another world.  Now, this other world was a horrible post-apocalyptic place ruled by bitchy and mostly incompetent teenagers, and this place was called The Place Where Star and Bend Live, because there were two boys who lived there called Star and Bend, interestingly enough.  Anyhow, The Place Where Star and Bend Live was currently, because its creator and controller was currently participating in National Novel Writing Month, and was her friend, the author and controller of this particular and ridiculous narrative, in the middle of a great power struggle between two bitchy teenage girls, one of whom was considerably more incompetent than the other, who were called, respectively, the Empress and the Priestess, or Castania and, uh, some other girl whose name starts with a Pr sound (Preden?).  Unfortunately, because I can't remember the one chick's name and because I don't want to call the friend of mine who happens to be the creator and controller of these particular females, seen as, you know, they live in the world that she created, because she is currently in the middle of matters of much much greater importance than anything so stupid and frivolous as this pathetic little work of literature - such as, dying - and I am pretty darn sure that it would be pretty darn rude and selfish of me to call her and ask what that one Priestess girl's name is at the moment and so I'm not going to call her up and find out what it is until the life and death and horror situation that she is dealing with has been cleared up, and because I don't was to have to go back and find and replace every instance of my possibly (and actually quite likely) erroneous name for the girl at a later date, and because I can't write what it is that I was just about to write because I can't remember that girl's name for the life of me and her name (and, indeed, she herself) were kind of essential to the plot of what it is that I was just about to write and so I can't maintain inspirational drive without it and so can't write the thing that I was just about to write about just now, because of all of these things, I am now going to go and try to write about something else and then return to this later. 

            I am tired.  I wonder if I went to bed right now - it being only seven o'clock in the evening - if I would sleep through the night up until the morning arrived?  Somehow I doubt it.  Oh well.

Man, okay, so I'm going to do something really really cheap here and go all meta on you all for a space of time.  You see, I had this genius genius wonderful idea for how I was going to possibly be able to make it through this whole stupid National Novel Writing Month without either giving up or shooting myself in the head (or at least wanting to shoot myself in the head) because this stupid dumbass thing that I've been writing for a few days now (I would hardly call it a story, my dear) is so incredibly inconceivably unbearably awful that I simply cannot live with the knowledge that I had some part - indeed, the better part, if not the entire part - in creating it - in creating this- this- abomination!  But now my genius genius wonderful idea seems to have faded and gone up in a whiff and a poof of smoke, smoke and mirrors.  It was nothing, don't you see?  It was all just a stupid cruel illusion!  And I hate it, I hate it all!  I don't want to do this!  ARGH!

Yes indeed, I really do like to eat potatoes.  Do you know why?  Because they are so amazingly good, that's why!  Especially with salt and olive oil and a tad bit of cilantro or some such similar spice, broiled at five hundred degrees in an oven for twenty minutes.  Or twenty-one, although I kind of doubt that that one extra minute actually makes and kind of meaningful difference in the way that the potatoes actually end up turning out cooking and thus also in the way the potatoes end up tasting.  I mention all of these things because I ate, recently - very recently, actually, at the time of this writing, although I imagine it's a fair bit further back in the past at the time of this reading - the very same potatoes which I have just described to you above, cooked to the same specifications and seasoned in the same manner so lately explained to you.  At any rate, I thought you all might like to know what was the reasoning behind the creation of this little chapter here, which is now finished.  I will now return you to your regular programming, or at least some slight approximation thereof.  Thank you!

As I said, the world ended long before I was born, but I know how it came to be ended because it has been passed down mother to daughter, father to son, down through all the generations of all the tribes of all the people who remain so that the tale might be preserved as an oral tradition, for we no longer possess the power to write things down as text and thus preserve them indefinitely, and anyhow it's a cautionary tale to the people of the future that they don't do anything that might cause such a bad awful happening to happen again, and it's also just a good story, and it is quite obviously not the sort of thing that one really wants to let it be forgotten.  Not to mention that writing is a tedious and stupid activity, and no one has the time or the expertise to do it anymore.  Never you mind that I'm writing this - I'll get to the reason for that later.  The point is, that I know how the world ended because my mother told me, because her mother told her, and her mother told her, and so on, all the way back to Delicia Macdurgle, who told the story to her daughter, Mareen.  And now I am going to tell you, my most beloved one, how it happened, so that you too might know the tale of the end of the world.

            It was in spring that the world ended - spring was one of four seasons, which were time periods that were characterised by certain suites of meteorological conditions and weather patterns and other such phenomena, that repated themselves in sequence each year.  Spring was the season in which the plants and trees and flowers that had been dormant over the winter, which was cold and dark and not particularly amenable to providing good conditions for the growth of living things, began to emerge from their dormancy, which they had adopted in order that they might cope with the unpleasant weather patterns and such of the winter season.  Because it was spring the flowers were beginning to poke up sprigs of green through the dirt and the trees were beginning to get little delicate pink flowers on them and the weather was starting to get warmer.  It was a pleasant and happy time of year.  The cold dark winter season often caused people to become unhappy for its duration, but the advent of spring allowed these unfortunate people to become cheerful and happy again, as they had been back when the weather patterns were last more amenable to light and sun and warmth and plant growth and so on.  There was a young man who had been made very sad indeed by the darkness and cold of winter - they called it seasonal depression, and said that it really was a disease and not just a stupid state of mind - and he was beginning to be made very happy indeed by the new arrival of the spring season and by the sight of the little green shoots of plant life poking up out of the dirt and by the delicate pink flowers that were popping out of dormancy upon the tree limbs, and his name was Bobby Little.

            Bobby Little didn't know Delicia.  In fact, he never once met her, not once in his whole entire life, but Delicia knew who he was because she happened to find his journal in the wreckage of his destroyed apartment building (an apartment building was an edifice in which many, many people made their homes, with all of their houses connected and stacked up on top of each other, with only thin walls to separate them from each other) after the world ended, after Bobby had died.  She kept the journal, because she read it - Delicia Macgrudle knew how to read, as did most people back then - sometimes, and she liked the way that Bobby wrote, and there was not much else for her to read, as books were made of paper, which as we all know is very easy to set on fire, and so there were many books that were destroyed when the world ended, for there were many fires that raged when it happened.  At any rate, Delicia found Bobby Little's journal (which was a written record of everything that happened to him and how he felt about those things, updated each day - people still make them on occasion, but only the weird people who think it makes sense to write, or the people who record it in pictures on their walls or on bits of plastic or steel - but I digress), and the more she read it, the more she began to feel that she knew Bobby - even more, that she loved him.  Bobby was a lovable person.  He was very quiet, very sensitive, and a little odd.  He had, it seems, few friends.  We still have Bobby's journal, though the pages are cracked and the ink faded, for it was handed down through the family over the years, and indeed I have even read it myself, written in Bobby Little's own hand, and so I can attest that he was a real person, and that this account that I now render you is indeed true and factual, though it may perhaps not seem so to you at times.

            Bobby Little worked at the office of a very wealthy, very powerful man - a politician - whose name was Gariss, Gariss Munkoe.  Gariss Munkoe was unkind and dishonest and did not seem to think much of poor Bobby, though from what I gather from Bobby's writings, Bobby thought very much indeed of Mr Gariss Munkoe.  You see, Gariss Munkoe was tall and dark of hair and blue-eyed and very purposeful, in his middle thirties and very fair to look upon, or so I gather from what it was that Bobby wrote about him.  Indeed, from the way that Bobby writes you might even be led to believe that Bobby liked Gariss in a very different manner than that in which most men like and appreciate other men.  In fact, Bobby Little writes about Gariss Munkoe in much the same way that I will write about your father, Aega Monch, in a few chapters - that is, I believe that Bobby Little was romantically attracted to his employer - indeed, I might even go so far as to say that the poor lad was infatuated with him.  Which is unfortunate, because even through the fog of the journal writer's adoration and love, I can still tell from it that Gariss Munkoe was a real jerk, I mean, really just not a nice guy at all.  And so poor Bobby Little, even if he had been a cute and pretty young girl, would probably just never have stood a chance at fulfilling his romantic dream.  Also the relationship, as the one was in the employ of the other, would have had some bad power relations involved.  But I digress.

            Bobby Little went with some fair frequency to a nearby gym belonging to a man named Jingolf – a gym was, of course, a place where people (mostly men, as it were) went with some fair frequency to use their muscles to do stupid and pointless tasks that required much effort, such as lifting large pieces of metal and setting them back down again, or running on a rotating surface so that you never actually went anywhere but instead were merely running in one place the whole time, for the purpose, ostensibly, of improving the capabilities and strength of those muscles.  The place happened to be called, unsurprisingly, Jingolf’s Gym and Full Body Workout Station, and Bobby loved to go there.  But Bobby’s main reason for going so often to work out at Jingolf’s Gym and Full Body Workout Station was not to improve the state and capacity of his muscles, but rather for the single reason that his employer and romantic interest, Gariss Munkoe, also attended this same gym.  Bobby would go and work out and get very sweaty and hot, and then he would take off his shirt and make lots of grunting noises as he lifted the heavy pieces of metal in hopes that Gariss would hear them and look over to see what it was that could be making such noises and then he would see Bobby and, and this more obviously was Bobby’s intention at doing it, hopefully he would notice that Bobby was fit and attractive and also happened to be glistening with sweat, and Bobby hoped against hope that this observation would make Gariss Munkoe then become interested in pursuing a possible romantic relationship with Bobby.  Unfortunately, this did indeed turn out to be an unfounded hope, and Gariss never once looked up to see what it was that had been making the obnoxious grunting noises that he kept hearing while he himself was working out (and also making grunting noises as he did it, but more subdued than the grunting noises that he kept hearing coming from somewhere nearby were) and so he never noticed that Bobby had taken off his shirt and thus exposed his bulging, glistening, marvelous physique to the world for all (but especially for Gariss Munkoe his particular mad crush) to see and look upon and admire. 

            It was here, at the health club and exercise establishment, that Bobby Little came to meet Bobby Massive.

The world ended three hundred and fifty years before I was even born.  My mother told me about, as her mother had told her about it before, when my mother was a little child, as my grandmother too had been told by her mother before that, and so on, back to my great-great-great-great-great grandmother, who had lived through it.  Her name was Delicia, Delicia Macgrudle, and she was very beautiful, every person who met her said.  She had long golden hair that fell in great waves about her face, which was formed perfectly and beautifully, as if it had been chiselled out of white marble and then breathed upon by her sculptor to make her warm and soft instead of cold, as stone is wont to be.  She also had lovely eyes, which were pale blue and fringed with long black lashes, like an icy pond in the midst of feathered reeds, and dressed fashionably, for she was doted upon by many wealthy men because of her remarkable good looks.  Delicia eventually married a very rich man named Dongo, Dongo D'bokbok, who came from Norway and was, as I have just said, very rich.  Dongo fell head over heels in love with Delicia at the very moment, the very instant, the very MILLISECOND that he set eyes upon her (which is to say immediately), and he knew right then that he must marry her, for Delicia Macgrudle was the most beautiful, most lovely, most utterly desirable woman that he had ever in his ninety-four long years set his eyes upon, and he could not possibly allow her to escape like a ghost into the reaches of his memory without at least so much as asking her out on a date with him.  So he did ask her out on a date with him, because this was, as I've just said, an opportunity he wasn't about to let himself miss out on.

            As for Delicia, she noticed that there was an old man at another table in the restaurant she was in - she was in a restaurant at the time, by the way, an Italian restaurant, eating spaghetti, or at least that's what my mother called it - a restaurant was a place where people went to eat food that had already been cooked for them by somebody else, which they paid more for than they would have if they had simply bought the food at a market or something and cooked it themselves (the whole concept of the restaurant seems silly to me, but apparently people used to go to them quite frequently, and there used to be quite a lot of them around, as well - I suppose that going to such a place was some way of showing the other people of the world that you were wealthy enough to be able to afford that kind of an excessive activity, which might make them somehow think better of you, or something like that - though I still say it's silly - but I digress) and spaghetti was a dish that looked like worms in blood but was in actuality something made out of grain paste, like thread-shaped bread (which I also can't imagine) in a vegetable sauce made out of an extinct red fruit called a tomato, and Italian was the name of a particular suite of foods made or invented by a particular ethnic group or tribe who came originally from a place called Italy - but I've gotten so far astray now that I have nearly forgotten what I was originally saying - which is that Delicia Macgrudle happened to notice that a man of some years was seated at another table, situated not far from the table where she herself was sitting at, was paying quite a lot of attention to her.  Now, Delicia had had attention directed at her by men of all ages at many times and on many occasions throughout her life of thirty long years, so she had of course come to recognise the signs that told her that this man, like the majority of the other men who had paid her more attention than they really ought to over the years, was romantically interested in her, and she, being a savvy young woman and experienced in the ways of the world and how to turn them to her own advantage, decided that she ought to use this attention, and the man who was giving it to her, to her own personal advantage.  She first summoned the waiter - who was a man who worked at the restaurant bringing cooked food dishes to people and clearing away the empty receptacles which had held the food from the tables where the patrons of the restaurant sat once those patrons had completed the consumption of that food and the dishes were empty - and asked him if he would please to very kindly take a message to that nice old grey-haired fellow sitting at that other table, that man right there, yes, that was the one - if he would be so kind as to tell that man that she was interested to know if he might possibly be so good as to grant her so much as a single dance out on the dance floor - which is to say, a portion of the restaurant set aside for the patrons to dance on when they were not eating their meals, thus allowing men who had taken prospective mates to the restaurant to impress them to further their efforts to achieve a romantic bond with their prospective mate through dance (I have been made to understand that these restaurants, and in particular the better and more expensive of them, were often host to various bands and musical performers, who would serenade the people who went to the restaurants with various songs and melodies while the people ate or danced or waited for their food to be cooked and to be brought to the tables where they sat waiting).  To this request made by Delicia the waiter replied that he would like nothing better than to deliver her message to the old man seated at the nearby table, and with that he went of to that same man and delivered the message which was described just now, and the man, being interested, as we have been told already, in procuring Miss Macgrudle as a prospective mate, and seeing how a dance (he was quite a good dancer, if he did say so himself, which he did) might improve his chances of accomplishing this goal, ultimately, of course knew that he could not have asked for a better means of bringing down upon himself all of this lovely woman's precious affections.  Thinking thus, he instructed the waiter to, if he did not mind (which he of course didn't, as he was a good and helpful waiter and also imagined that serving as the courier between these two patrons of his restaurant, which is to say the restaurant where he had been employed, might incite them to give him some sort of bonus monetary reward, which was called a tip, more than the usual amount, for his troubles), to please go back over to the woman who had given him the original message to relay to him (the old man, Dongo D'bokbok) and to please tell her, if he didn't mind (which he didn't, as it has already been observed, for the reasons which have already been given) that he (Dongo D'bokbok) would be more than pleased to grant her a dance with him.  Moreover, Dongo added, he would be more than willing to give her another dance following that one, and then another, and then another - why, he would like nothing more in the whole entire world, in fact, than to dance with her until the restaurant closed down for the night (because these restaurant places didn't stay open for business constantly, of course, just like markets and peddlers don't cater to customers now at all hours of the night and the early early morning and so on).  So the waiter then relayed this other message, and the woman told him to tell Dongo that she accepted his offer of further dances, and then Dongo stood and went over to Delicia, and then he offered her his hand, and then she took his hand in hers, and then he led her down from her table to the dance floor, and then the band began to play a slow and haunting melody on strange instruments which no one has ever heard of since the world ended and which no one knows how to play anymore, and then Dongo and Delicia held each other close and then they danced, and they danced, and they danced, and they danced until the restaurant staff stopped taking new customers and the people who made the food stopped cooking it and the waiters cleared away the very last of the empty dishes from the empty tables where patrons had been sitting and eating all night long and the other people who worked at the restaurant started stacking up the tables and chairs and sweeping the floor clean and the band stopped playing music and went home.  Then Dongo D'bokbok stopped dancing, and Delicia Macdurgle stopped dancing, and the two of them stood very close to each other and held each the other's hand, and then Dongo said very quietly, "I do believe that you are the most amazing and beautiful and enchanting woman that I have ever met in my entire life of ninety-four years.  I would be exceedingly honored and exceedingly pleased if you would be so kind as to let me see you again, and perhaps go dancing with you again, at some point in time after this."

            Delicia smiled quite warmly back at him, for not only was this exactly as she had planned (for it was obvious to her that Mr D'bokbok was very well off, monetarily speaking, and she knew that that money would most likely benefit her in the event that Dongo decided to attempt to convince her that he would make her a good mate), but also because she found that she actually quite liked the old man after all.  She said to him, "Why, I would like nothing better.  Of course you can see me again, and of course we can go dancing again - dancing until all hours of the night if you should so please.  When would you like to get together and do something, such as dancing, again?  How about tomorrow night?  Surely that will not be too soon - for in my mind there can be no point in time that we see each other again after this that is too soon - indeed, I hardly think that any time will be soon enough."

            Dongo D'bokbok was exceedingly touched to his heart by these kind and tender words, and so he smiled at her (and perhaps a bit more warmly even than she had just smiled at him), and he said, "Tomorrow night will be perfect, and I do declare that, if you so wish it, then we shall dance and dance and dance forever, into all the hours of the night and straight on until morning.  I daresay I could dance with you forever and on into eternity, I do so love it so."

            At any rate, Dongo D'bokbok was to regret this remark, and sorely too indeed, for listening to him expressing this sentiment to his new sweetheart and dearly beloved was an evil spirit named Bingoslick, who very maliciously decided to test out the old man's devotion to such a statement - that is, he imagined that Dongo was making a bit of an hyperbole by saying he'd dearly like to dance with Delicia until all eternity, which is to say until the end of the world, and so waited around until the two people returned to the restaurant on the following night and began to dance with each other.  Then Bingoslick cast an evil and malificent spell upon Delicia and Dongo that would cause them to dance and dance and dance nonstop until the very ending of the world.  Bingoslick the evil spirit had a good feeling in his heart that it wouldn't take very long - perhaps just a single night and day or two - for Dongo to realise how very stupid he had been to make such a claim as he had about dancing forever, because anything - even dancing with a hot chick whom you happen to have a mad crush on - begins to grow pretty darn tiring after you've been doing it constantly for hours and hours and hours, even unto days and weeks and months - and by the time it gets to be years and years that you've been doing it for, by that time the activity, even if it was once upon a time your favorite thing to do in the whole wide world, will begin to seem to you like a living hell.

            Unfortunately for Bingoslick, Delicia and Dongo had been dancing for only a few scant minutes when the world came to an end.

"Hello, Bismuth," said one of them, tipping his hat. "I'm Jackalope Demerkle, the head of the royal turkey maintenance bureau, and this is my partner, Jimbo Garneral." The other man tipped his hat. He was bald underneath it. "Do you know why I'm here?"

"Yes," Bis sighed. "It's because I accidentally killed Snookums on my bicycle yesterday. I guess I should get ready to have my head chopped off now, huh?"

The man laughed softly and said, "Well, yes and no, Bismuth. You see, this Snookums was actually the twelfth such bird to bear the name, and the king is none the wiser. So you've really nothing to worry about, you see."

Bismuth stared at the two men from the royal turkey bureau. "What are you talking about?" he asked slowly.

"The turkey has a relatively short lifespan, Mr. Sub-salicylate," the second man, Mr. Garneral, who had not spoken yet, said. "And it would be no good at all for the king's beloved pet turkey to die, and so as each of the Snookumses has met its death, we have replaced it with a similar but younger bird, and the king has thus been kept under the illusion that his pet has never gotten old or sick, much less died. So while it is unfortunate that you and the turkey had that, erm, fatal encounter yesterday, and while you will be asked to register your bicycle under the criminal bicycle offenders list, you will not be executed for your crime. It was, after all, an accident, and it was inevitable that the turkey would die and require replacement, and not to long from now, either. This Snookums was nearing the end of his operational life."

"So... you just replaced Snookums with a new one?"

The men nodded.

"And I'm not going to be killed?"

"No, Mr. Sub-salicylate. You may continue with your life in peace. We do ask that you attempt to pay better attention to your surroundings while on your bicycle in the future."

"Of course!" said Bis. "And thank you. I, uh, I wish you luck in your future turkey-maintenance endeavours."

The men bowed and walked off, and Bismuth Sub-salicylate continued into his hedge mazes with the barrow of mulch, and all was as it should have been. And the king and his half-billion turkeys named Snookums lived happily ever after, as did Bis and Ann-Marie and even Bob, and everybody else as well. And so ended another day in Mirrglbury. And so ends this story.

The words of the poet will ever endeavour
To speak to your hearts and to live on forever.

The end.

(For real this time.)

"What was that you said?" asked Bob Pringle. "Did you just call me an ass? Because if you did, Bis, then I'm going to have to kick your ass."

"I didn't say that you're an ass, I said that this is ass, Bob. You heard me say it: 'This is ass.' I said it twice. But you know what, Bob? You are an ass, while we're on the subject. You are an ass."

"What did you say?" Bob growled.

"I said that you're an ass, Bob! You heard me say it! Now what are you going to do about it, hmm? Why don't you just down here and throw bologna sandwiches at me, huh? Or are you not bad-ass enough? Are you just a smart-ass ass-wipe, BOB? Yeah, you ARE!" Bismuth was standing now, his eyes furious, shouting at Bob, who was growing more and more angry-looking, while Ann-Marie Roche-Moutonnee simply stared at the two testosterone-infused males in their contest of dominance in stunned speechlessness. "It's your fault that Leelee left me, you asshole! She loved me, and you made her leave! Why, I ought to kick your dumbass ass to Nearest Seaprot! How could you do that to me? I thought that we were buddies! And then you had to go and screw everything up! I could have been something, and then you - you - ARGH! OO! You just make me so mad!"

Bob Pringle leaned towards Bismuth, his eyes narrowed in evidence of his fury, and said in a snarly, cautioning tone, "Oh yeah? Well, let me tell you something - Leelee Bingoslick was about the stupidest person that I have ever met, so you ought to thank me for telling her that you were a spy for the government who was going to turn her into a pumpkin at some point! She believed me, you dumbass! And it's not my fault that that piece of ass just happened to choose you instead of me - and you know what? It's just as well, because all I wanted was to get some ass, and let me tell you, BISMUTH, her ass was a FINE ass, and it was MINE ass, not yours! So you can just forget about her having loved you or whatever the hell it is that you've got the crazy-ass idea of what she thought of you. Her ass should have been mine, and I wasn't going to let a jackass like you have her in place of me, no way! Even if we were supposed to be buddies! And do you know what else? Your artistic flower arrangements were UGLY! And I hate you! Gah! I'm going to ride over and tell the royal authorities right now that you killed the royal pet turkey Snookums on your bicycle, and then you'll be beheaded, and then we'll see who owns your ass, won't we? Won't we, BIS?!" And on that note Bob Pringle ran to his blue bicycle and jumped on to it and rode off at his top speed, and Bismuth ran after him shouting, "No! No, you can't! You asshole! No! Get back here! NO!" Then he fell over with his hands on his knees, panting and breathing hard while Bob Pringle rode off into the distance shouting back rude obscenties and cackling cruel laughter. Ann-Marie walked over to him and put a hand on his shoulder.

"Well, Bis, that's too bad. I'm sorry that you're going to die. It was nice to know you," she said.

"Yeah, thanks," Bis replied, glaring over his shoulder at her and speaking in a tone that told exactly how much he really appreciated her remark. "That's such a comfort, oh yeah. You're such a great friend, Ann-Marie. I'm so glad that you were able to help me out in these troubled times. Get your hand off me," he snapped, shrugging her hand off of his shoulder. Then he got onto his bike and rode home, and Ann-Marie dumped the last of the sandwiches on the dead turkey and tossed the bags away and rode off towards her home. The plastic caught a warm, favorable breeze and rose into the air, higher and higher, like the soul of a dandelion in a drifting golden sunset, and eventually joined the heavens like a child's birthday wish, carried on the smoke of dreams. It smelled like Muscovite incense.

"Donker!" shrieked Fruit Bat. "Quit looking out of the window! I'm in a lot of pain here! Pay attention!"

The king looked mournfully back at her, thinking about how he had not touched a single drop of alcohol since that fateful day when he, under the influence of its horrible after-effects, had so stupidly agreed to marry such an awful, awful woman, and dreaming about sitting next to a radio with all of his pals listening to the football game - which was probably over by now anyhow, and here he had gone and missed the whole thing, no thanks to stupid old Fruit Bat his wife - and then suddenly there was a screaming, crying, red-faced little baby in her arms and she was saying, "Come and look at your son, Donker!"

He did. The child was fat and hideous.

"What are your going to name him, Your Majesty?" asked the midwife.

"Ummm. Binky," said the king.

"No way!" cried Fruit Bat. "We can't name him Binky! Binky is a stupid name! We will name him Doris after my uncle."

"What?" said the king. "Are you nuts? You don't even have an uncle!"

"So what?" snapped Fruit Bat. "I just spent eighteen hours giving birth to this damn kid, and I get to choose what its freaking name is going to be, got it, Donker?!"

"Yeah, yeah," he muttered. "Whatever. Doris. Doris Binky Block."

"No," replied Fruit Bat, "Doris Myelin. After my other uncle."

"Whatever. Doris Myelin Block."

Fruit Bat rolled her eyes.

And so it was that Doris Myelin, also to be known as Binky, first received his name in the midst of his parents' usual marital strife, and it can likely be inferred that this clime of negativity and unhappiness had a certain and definite effect upon the boy. It is also true that as he grew, it became clear that he had the astounding intelligence quotient of a retarded sherpa, which is to say a low one.

Young Binky's favorite activity was a game that he called 'The Chicken Game'. He would sit in the middle of the floor of his nursery with a host of wooden toy dogs and wooden toy horses and wooden toy people and a little wooden toy carriage, and then he would pick up as many of the toys in his two pudgy little six-fingered hands and throw all of the toys into the air, shrieking in glee as the toys clattered to the floor about him - sometimes on him - and often breaking in the process - and then he would scream something unintelligible and do it all over again. He went through a lot of toys this way.

"Why is it called the Chicken Game, Binky?" the nurse would ask. And then young Binky would giggle and shout, "Chicken Game! Chicken Game!" and roll around on the floor cackling maniacally before throwing something - a toy, a priceless porcelain teacup, a valuable piece of furniture, the nurse - across the room. As you can see, he was a highly articulate boy. The saddest part of all of this was that the Chicken Game was the boy's favorite game from about age two until he hit, oh, death. At a very old age. At a point long after this story will have concluded. So you can imagine how helpful it was when Binky was a young man, and the royal bureau chiefs would be trying to talk to him about affairs of state, and he would be, instead of listening to them, sitting on the floor of his old nursery with mounds of toys and things in his hands and throwing them at the ceiling screaming, "Chicken Game! Chicken Game!" like, well, a two-year-old boy. This would be one of the main reasons why Binky, also known as Doris Myelin, was considered to be such an incredibly bad king.

There were other reasons. His compulsion about bologna and mustard sandwiches was one of them. His need to have the royal hedge mazes constantly re-mulched was another. His obsessive worship of a mangy old turkey named (by him) Jim James Jack Billy Betty Boop the Twenty-Third, Esquire, or else, affectionately, known as Snookums, was a third.

Actually, there's an interesting story there, behind the whole turkey thing. But unfortunately I haven't the time to tell it to you here, because, you see, we are fast approaching to conclusion - the long awaited, much anticipated finale of this remarkable tale, which I know that you have been dearly hoping for during the most of your reading thereof. Yeah, don't pretend that you haven't been begging for it to end - oh, please, PLEASE let it end! - but now that it's finally here I bet you're actually sad about it, aren't you? Ha, I knew it. Well, here you go, friend, the time has come, the walrus said, to speak of many things: of shoes, and ships, and sealing wax; of cabbages and kings; and why the sea is boiling hot; and whether pigs have wings.

Now, after having just read many, many accounts of the various kings of Mirrglbury and of their various reigns, you will have noticed that Mirrglbury has had a lot of very bad kings over the years. Now how, you are asking, how could Doris Myelin possibly have been worse than any of these kings? Like, for instance, how about that guy who burned down the whole city, way back at the beginning, Lars Bockwit? How could anyone possibly be a worse king than him? Or what about the dude we just read about, Dinkplutter Block, who nearly plunged the country into bankruptcy with his outrageous spending? I mean, this Doris Myelin had really better be a bad king in order for you to be claiming that he was the worst king that Mirrglbury had ever had. Because that's really saying something.

Well, I know. And believe me, he was. Allow me to prove it to you.

"Jorkulhaup!" he gasped, spluttering. "Wha! What are you doing here? You're supposed to be dead!"

The young man grinned at him and said, "What are you talking about? I'm not dead! I did it! I found the wooly mammoth like you said I had to do! It took me a while, to be sure, and there were more than a few times when I was pretty sure that what you had told me to do was a total setup because, you know, the wooly mammoth is supposed to be extinct and all, and here I was thinking that it was impossible and that you had just told me to do that so that I wouldn't be around, you know? Because then I'd be gone and then you'd be able to take over the throne for yourself and all. But I did it! I totally found the wooly mammoth, just like you said, but, see, he was so nice to me that I just couldn't kill him in glorious battle like you told me I had to do. So instead of bringing back a dead wooly mammoth that I had killed in glorious battle, I brought back a live Wooly Mammoth so that you can talk to him yourself! Isn't that great? I think that's much better than killing it in glorious battle, you know? I mean, don't you think that kindness and exploration is more worthy of greatness, right? What do you think?" He stood there in the front of the royal banquet hall, in front of the great royal doors of the banquet hall, waiting eagerly for assurance that yes, indeed, taking the last living member of a species back home with you to show to people is definitely far and away more worthy of greatness than killing it in glorious battle could ever be. But no such thing came.

King Dinkplutter Bump just stared at him, along with just about everybody else who happened to be in attendance at the royal sumptuous banquet. He was aghast, he was stunned, he was utterly unable to speak. Finally he cried, spluttering, "But how! How can you still be alive?! How can you be here? And how in the name of the holy ponies' flowing manes did you manage to find a wooly mammoth - a living wooly mammoth? They're extinct! EXTINCT!!! That means that there are no longer any living specimens of the species in existence! I think that you've gone crazy! I think that you're full of it! I think that you just made up the wooly mammoth and then you came back here and thought that your fantasy was real and - and - and... And what the hell is that? ...Oh my pony. It's a wooly mammoth, isn't it? Oh, oh..."

For just at that moment young Jorkulhaup had stepped back into the foyer and motioned at something to come over and shouted, "Hey, Wooly Mammoth! Come on in here and show all of the nice people that you're for real, man!" And then through those great big doors into the royal banquet hall had stepped an enormous four-legged animal that was so tall that it had to bend down in order for it to fit through the door, with a great long nose - a trunk - that nearly dragged on the marble floor, and a pair of great curved yellow tusks like teeth sticking perpendicular out of the edges of its mouth, and the creature's entire body was covered all over in thick mats of shaggy brown hair, like dreadlocks. The ground beneath it shook as the creature walked. Clearly this was a wooly mammoth - for it was indeed wooly, and it was incredibly mammoth. And it was definitely, positively, absolutely alive. The many royal guests of the royal sumptuous banquet screamed at the sight of it and cowered under tables and ran in terror from the room, or at least to the back of the room. As to Dinkplutter Bump, well, he was just about ready to have himself a nice myocardial infarction, by which I mean, in strict medical terms (or jargon, as my friend Darrell would put it), a heart attack, or at least to lose control of his kidneys (well, okay, technically, I suppose, it's not the kidneys but the bladder that one would have to lose one's control over in order for one to make oneself wet one's pants, but there's really no need for technicality here, right? I mean, seriously), but he in fact did neither. Instead he stood quite still, gaping and spluttering and making his mouth move as though he might say something but not actually letting himself say anything at all. And as to young Jorkulhaup Bortvelding, well, he just stood there happily next to his friend the wooly mammoth and smiled - or rather I really ought to say he beamed - at everyone in the room. He looked very pleased with himself and with his wooly mammoth and with the reaction that his wooly mammoth had received, and he also looked rather proud of himself and of his wooly mammoth as well. "You see, guys? He is real. And he is really a very nice wooly mammoth, too. So don't you all think that this is really worthy of greatness in the history books? Or at least, if not greatness, then certainly some kind of interest, some kind of real notoriety, right? Right, you guys? Come on, you all, give me a little bit of support here!"

King Dinkplutter Bump had finally found his voice by the time that the other king had said this, and then he spluttered and said, "Well - well - well I don't think that it will really count until you kill it in glorious - in glorious battle! Come on, now, Jorkulhaup, we're all waiting! Prove your greatness! Kill the wooly mammoth!"

"Naw, I don't think so," said Jorkulhaup Bortvelding. "I like him too much to kill him. Wooly Mammoth and I are friends now. We really did try to fight each other, really we did. We made a valiant and serious attempt to have a glorious battle, but you see, man, it just didn't really work out. Our hearts just weren't in it. you know? Because neither of us really wanted to kill the other, you know? So, here he is and here I am, and I guess that is the only way I'm going to be able to achieve my dream of greatness is to kill this wooly mammoth in glorious battle, well, then I guess that I just won't be able to achieve my dream of greatness. Which is too bad, but, well, oh well. You win some, and you lose some. But- Hey, why are you wearing my crown?" he asked suddenly, having noticed for the first time that in his absence the royal advisor had usurped the kingship and driven the country almost into bankruptcy. When Dinkplutter Bump only made more spluttering noises in response, Jorkulhaup began to frown. "I'm serious, Dinkplutter. What did you do? Did you really just make up all that stuff about killing wooly mammoths in glorious battle to achieve greatness and historical notoriety in order to get me out of the country so that you could take control of the country and drive Mirrglbury to the point of nearly bankruptcy with your excesses and corruption? My great ponies, Dinkplutter, how could you do such a thing? Why did you do it? You were supposed to be giving wise and royal advice! I trusted you! I depended on you and then you betrayed me just so that you could be surrounded by pretty young women and throw huge and excessive and sumptuous banquet parties? I can't believe it! Why, I ought to have Wooly Mammoth here trample you underfoot, just to try and teach you a lesson about - well, about something! You're just scheming, self-serving ass, aren't you?!"

"And so what if I am?" King Dinkplutter Bump exploded, spluttering. "If you were gullible enough to believe all of that nonsense I told you about finding wooly mammoths to achieve greatness, well, then you don't really deserve to be the king, either, do you? And - and can you blame me? I mean, all that I ever really wanted was to have beautiful women constantly throwing themselves at me, to be able to buy anything I want for myself without having to worry about how much it's going to cost me or how I'm going to ever pay for it all, and to have the power of life and death in these my two hands! I mean, is that really too much to ask for?"

Everyone stared at him - the wooly mammoth, the true king of Mirrglbury, the beautiful girls, the distinguished guests, everybody - in utter incredulity.

"What?" said Dinkplutter defensively. "What?! Look, I'm sorry, okay?! Get off my back, people! I know you guys want all of that, too! Why don't you just admit it, hey? You're deluding yourselves! You all think that you're so special..."

"You know," said Jorkulhaup, "I guess I do forgive you for taking advantage of my gullibility and sending me out on that wild goose chase - well, okay, wild wooly mammoth chase - just so that you could take over the country from me and drive it into the ground, financially speaking, because, you know, if you hadn't done all of that, then I would have never met my friend Wooly Mammoth here and then, well, I don't know. But it would suck to have never met him, because he really is a cool guy - wooly mammoth - well, you know what it is that I mean. So, you know, you're okay, man. Will you give me back the crown and the kingship of Mirrglbury again?"

The old royal advisor kind of frowned, but then he sighed and shrugged and then nodded. "Yeah, I guess so. Okay. It's yours. Actually, I don't really want to be the king of Mirrglbury any more," Dinkplutter admitted rather sheepishly. "Because really, it's not going to be much fun being king after the country goes bankrupt. So, yeah, you can have it. Here, take it." And he held out the crown to Jorkulhaup, who took it from him and put it on his head and smiled.

"Thanks," he said. "And now I'd like to introduce you all to my friend here, Wooly Mammoth."

"Hi," said the wooly mammoth. "I'm Wooly Mammoth. It's a pleasure to meet you all."

And so it was that a new era of peace and prosperity was entered into by the people of Mirrglbury. Jorkulhaup was made king again, officially, and the old royal giver of wise advice to the king Dinkplutter Bump was given a retirement stipend and sent to live with his nephew, who had of course been taken out of his job as the chief royal treasurer at once and put into a new job as a filing clerk in the royal bureau of census information and very old and very useless records of tax returns, where he performed very well and received many commendations for excellent service from his boss. Eventually he was even promoted to chief filing executive in that very same royal bureau. His uncle never again gave any advice, wise or otherwise, to anyone, especially not to the king. As to Wooly Mammoth, he became an instant celebrity in the town, and spent many years living happily in a large estate on the city's boundaries, where he was often visited by important diplomats and famous personages and, of course, by beautiful girls. Eventually he met an attractive young wooly mammoth who had found her way to Mirrglbury all of the way from some place on the other side of the ocean whose name I do not choose to relate to you at the moment, or, indeed, ever, because she was one of the very last of her species and when she had heard the rumours of a handsome male wooly mammoth in Mirrglbury, she had hurried there at once in hopes that she might have finally reached her soul mate. As it turned out, she had. The two were married and had twelve kids, all of whom they named after glacial and periglacial landforms. Eventually they moved to a vast and sprawling range in the arctic steppes many hundreds of miles north of Mirrglbury, but though they rarely made the long and arduous journey back to Mirrglbury to visit their old friends, they did often write and they managed to stay in touch, and when Jorkulhaup did finally die, Wooly Mammoth and his family were there at his bedside to wish him goodbye and to let him know, in no uncertain terms, that he was the greatest of the Mirrglburian kings that they had ever known. For had it not been for his intervention and kindness, then the two last wooly mammoths would never have met, and the species would have died out with them, alone and sad in the alpine tundra, each having never even known that their soul mate was alive on the other side of the world, and that would have been a real tragedy. The twelve Mammoth children were especially grateful.

And as for King Jorkulhaup Bortvelding? Well, he managed to pull Mirrglbury out of its downward financial spiral and to prevent its falling into bankruptcy once and for all. No, he managed in fact to usher in a new era of prosperity and wealth and well-being for the people of Mirrglbury, and their gratitude knew no bounds. Eventually Jorkulhaup met and fell madly in love with a beautiful artistic flower arranger named Diane, who married him and gave him a son and a daughter, Dinosaur and Phylodont, who grew up to be wise and wonderful young people and to have wonderful and happy families of their own. And as he realised the joy of having children, and grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren, Jorkulhaup Bortvelding, now very old indeed, came to realise something. He realised that he didn't care any more about whether he was remembered as a great king at some distant point in the future, about whether he was recalled as being heroic or anything like that. He realised that what really mattered was that he had made the lives of people - the people of Mirrglbury, his wife and family, and Wooly Mammoth and his family, to name a few - at least a little bit better - that he had made them happier - and that he had given his love and that he had been given love back. Because in the end, what was greatness, really? True greatness - that was in love and kindness, in charity and generosity. True greatness didn't come from killing a fearsome beast or exploring and conquering distant lands - true greatness came from helping Wooly Mammoth and his wife Missy to get together - it came in granting financial aid to Mirrglbury's small business owners so that they might have a chance at becoming great themselves and helping their own families - it came from giving jobs to poor people in the city until the unemployment rate was less than one percent - it came from bettering the national education system so that the literacy rate in Mirrglbury was more that ninety percent - it came from repaving the roads so that people could get to visit their relatives or to tend their fields for food to feed their families easier and faster and safer - and most important, it came from helping the woman that he loved more than anyone else in the world to raise two amazing, wonderful children to become wise and responsible and loving adults, and in helping to care for six beautiful grandchildren, and in being able to make it possible for that one tiny great-grandchild to come into the world, and in the fact that that world - a world that he had helped to create - was a better world than the one that he himself had come into. And that was all that he needed to know.

Although, of course, Jorkulhaup Bortvelding is remembered still today as one of the greatest kings that Mirrglbury has ever had, if not the greatest of all. So it just goes to show that just when you realise that you don't actually need what it is that you've been lusting after for your entire life, that's just when you're going to be able to get it. And that is what they call irony. And speaking of irony, we are nearing the end of the book, so I'm thinking that it's about time that we got back to where we started from, don't you? So we're going to discuss just one last king before we return to Bismuth and the turkey, and that one in brief. And so I ask your attention for one last little history lesson.

"I am a great king of Mirrglbury," replied the great king of Mirrglbury.

"What's that?" asked the wooly mammoth.

"Me," said the great king of Mirrglbury.

"Oh," said the wooly mammoth.

There then followed an awkward pause. The wooly mammoth coughed. The great king of Mirrglbury looked at the ground and kind of scuffed his foot around in the dirt.

"So..." said the wooly mammoth.

"So..." said the great king of Mirrglbury.

"So, what's your name?" asked the wooly mammoth after another awkward and uncomfortably silent moment had passed.

"My name is Jorkulhaup Bortvelding," said the great king of Mirrglbury.

"Jorkulhaup?" asked the wooly mammoth in surprise. "Isn't that the Icelandic word for a glacial outburst flood?"

"No," said the great king of Mirrglbury, "that's 'jokulhaup'. My name's pronounced the same way, but it's spelled with an 'r' in between the 'o' and the 'k' instead. There's no 'r' in the Icelandic word for a glacial outburst flood. That's spelled J-O-K-U-L-H-A-U-P. But you were close. Everybody makes that mistake." The great king of Mirrglbury paused to cough and clear his throat (politely behind his hand) and then said, "So, uh, what's your name?"

"Wooly Mammoth," said the wooly mammoth.

"Oh," said the great king of Mirrglbury.

"My parents were extremely literal individuals," the wooly mammoth explained, clearly a little bit regretful of that fact and its results insofar as his name had been concerned with it.

"Well," said the great king of Mirrglbury sympathetically, "I bet no one ever has much trouble in remembering your name. I know that I'll be able to remember it just fine, and I never remember anyone's name at all. So that's okay."

"Yeah, I guess so," said the wooly mammoth, but he still sounded a little bit resentful and forlorn about his name and his literalist parents. It had been kind of hard to grow up with a bunch of people who took everything at its face value. Wooly Mammoth's brother and sister had both been extremely literal individuals as well. None of them had ever once been able to appreciate a single one of his jokes. Thinking of this, the wooly mammoth had a wonderful idea. "Hey," he said, "do you want to hear a joke?"

"Okay," said the great king of Mirrglbury.

"Okay," said the wooly mammoth, getting excited. "Here it is. So this one geologist walks into a bar, right?"

"Yeah, 'ouch'," said the great king of Mirrglbury with a roll of his eyes. "I've heard that one already."

"No, no, no," said the wooly mammoth in a rather dismayed tone. "I don't mean literally! I mean, you know, a bar - a drinking establishment, you know? Sometimes they have food, and sometimes they have music, too."

"Oh," said the great king of Mirrglbury. "You mean like a wand, right?"

"Yeah," said the wooly mammoth, nodding. "A wand. Well, anyhow, this one geologist walks into this wand, and there's another geologist in there having a drink. And this other geologist, the one having the drink, well, he has this rock sample with him. And the the first geologist sees it and he goes over to the second geologist, and he says, 'That rock sample's nice.' Okay?"

"Yeah..." said the great king of Mirrglbury.

The wooly mammoth was getting really very excited now, because he was approaching the punchline of his joke. "Okay, so then the second geologist looks up from his drink and he says, 'No, it's slate.' Ha ha! Get it? It's nice? It's 'gneiss'? Slate? Ha ha ha!"

The great king of Mirrglbury frowned for a moment, then said, "No, I don't - oh, wait. Oh, wait, now I get it. Ha ha! Yeah, yeah, that's pretty funny. Geologists do have the best puns, don't they?"

"Yep, they sure do," the wooly mammoth replied, nodding in agreement. He was very pleased that the great king of Mirrglbury had understood and appreciated his joke.

"That was a pretty good joke," said the great king of Mirrglbury.

"Yeah, I'm glad you liked it," said the wooly mammoth. "I could never tell any jokes to my family, because they were all extreme literalists and none of them ever thought that any of my jokes was funny because they all took them extremely literally. Like, I'd be like, 'This horse walks into a wand,' and then before I could even finish the joke they'd all be interrupting me and they'd be all like, 'That's stupid. That doesn't make any sense. Horses don't go to wands.' And then I could never finish my jokes. So seriously, man, thanks. It really means a lot to me."

"Sure," said the great king of Mirrglbury. "No problem. Glad I could help you out."

"Yeah, me too," said the wooly mammoth. Then there was another long and uncomfortable pause, this one longer and more uncomfortable than the first had been. Finally the wooly mammoth kind of looked around and then he turned to the great king of Mirrglbury and said, "So, um..."

"Yeah..." said the great king of Mirrglbury.

The wooly mammoth coughed again, and then said, "So, uh, what brings you to the Arctic glacial steppe on a, on a day like this?"

"Well..." The great king of Mirrglbury scratched his neck nervously, then sighed and said, "Um, well, I'm kind of supposed to kill you in glorious battle. Um... yeah..."

The wooly mammoth stared at him. "No kidding? That's really why you're here? You're not just lost or anything?"

"Nope," said the great king of Mirrglbury, a little regretfully, with a sort of shrug. "I kind of wish that I was, because you seem like a pretty cool guy... for a wooly mammoth, I mean."

"Thanks, I guess," said the wooly mammoth, looking at the ground.

"I really wish I didn't have to, man, I really do," said the great king of Mirrglbury with a pleading look in his eyes. "Because I don't really want to kill you."

The wooly mammoth looked up. "Then why do you have to?"

"Because if I don't then I'll never go down in history remembered as a great king of Mirrglbury, and then I lied to you about what I am, and I really don't like to lie."

"Oh," said the wooly mammoth. They were both silent for a moment. Then the wooly mammoth said, "I guess I see your point. Yeah, I guess you do have to. But you do know that if you try to kill me, then I'll have to fight back, right?"

"Yeah, I know."

"And I'm not going to be careful. I mean, it'll be a case of kill or be killed, you know? I really don't want to have to kill you, but I may not be able to help it, you know?"

"Yeah, yeah, I know," said the great king of Mirrglbury.

"But, you know, it's nothing personal, man. You're a really cool guy."

"Yeah, thanks. You too."

"Thanks, man."

There was another long silence.

"So, um... I guess we should get started, huh?" But the great king of Mirrglbury didn't look too eager to get started as he said this.

"Yeah, I guess so," said the wooly mammoth, but he didn't look very enthusiastic himself.

A long, long, very awkward silence. The two looked up and met each the other's eyes. Both seemed to be saying, Please think of a way for us to get out of doing this.

Then the great king of Mirrglbury sighed and drew his sword. "Well, I suppose we can't put it off, forever, huh? So, um... You know, man, like I said, really it's nothing personal. I like you. I'm very sorry that I have to kill you."

"Yeah, me too," said the wooly mammoth. "I'm sorry that I have to kill you, too."

"It was nice to meet you."

"Yeah, you too."

Silence.

And then, at last, at long, long, last, the glorious half-hearted battle began.

It took Jorkulhaup a year and a half of a year again to find his wooly mammoth. (You knew that he was going to find one, didn't you? I mean, come on, you knew it all along. Extinction means nothing when the fate of a nation and the self-esteem of some random young man who is named after the Icelandic word for a glacial outburst flood, except that his name has an 'r' in it and the Icelandic word for a glacial outburst flood does not have an 'r' in it, is at stake. Of course he was going to find a wooly mammoth, I mean, seriously, folks. Clearly you have not watched enough bad movies or predicatable soap opera television shows in your life. Go and watch more of them. There will be a test on "Predicting Plot Devices" in the morning. If you do not get a perfect one hundred percent on the test, then you will be taken out and summarily shot. I send my apologies to your family in advance. Thank you. That is all.) But he did find it, despite the scheming of the wind and the weather and that stupid old Dinkplutter the so-called wise royal giver of advice to the king. Hmph. What a load of hooey that was. But, yes, anyhow, moving on. Wooly mammoth.

"You need to go out and find yourself a wooly mammoth to fight and kill in glorious battle. Only then will your noble deeds and heroic life be told of and sung of down throughout the generations of history. This is my advice to you, and I do heartily and solemnly guarantee you that if you can but fulfill it, then all of your dreams of greatness and memorableness will at last be brought to come to fruition, but only if you follow this advice of mine, and to the letter. My blessing is with you, and may luck and fortune be upon you in your quest."

Then the royal chief advisor and giver of advice to the king Dinkplutter Bump bowed his aged head low, and rose, and bade his farewells to the king, again wishing him good fortune on his quest for fame and fortune in the annals of the histories and great kings of Mirrglbury, and left. Jorkulhaup Bortvelding watched him go in bewilderment and dismay.

Now, there are a couple of different things which can make a king good enough to be considered 'great'. One of them is the king's quality and skill at being a statesman, that is, what he does for his country structurally and politically. Mr. Duncan and his wife after him are good examples of that - they set up the municipal structure that was to be maintained in Mirrglbury, and which was in a great part responsible for the maintainment of Mirrglbury itself, with only a very little amount of change made to it, cumulatively, over the many years, and this (the fact that the legal systems that they developed and put into place lasted for ages and ages and made Mirrglbury's great economic and political success possible) is a good measure of and testament to their true greatness - that we (by which I include the people of Mirrglbury) are okay to be calling them (the Duncans) great kings in their own right, because they were, and we're justified, and I'm rambling, sorry. Or else a king could be called great because he led the country out of a horrible situation. An example of this would be Duncan, who overthrew King Tanya when Tanya was making the people of Mirrglbury miserable, and then he turned out to be a pretty okay statesman too, so you would be okay saying that Duncan was a great king too. Which he was. And then, of course, a king can be great because he made he nation great through conquest - the only king of Mirrglbury who would apply in this category would have to be the illustrious and often mentioned Bruce Wendell Frogman the Third, because he founded the nation in the first place. A king can also be great because he fostered cooperation between his own nation and its neighbour nations, which, alas, no one in Mirrglbury ever did, except maybe Duncan when he brought in citizens of the neighbouring nations to assist him in conducting his revolution, but not really, because fortunately for the people of Mirrglbury and the people of their neighbouring nations Lovely Valley and Nearest Seaprot had always gotten along perfectly well and were really not any of them of the sort for going to war with eachother, for conquest or otherwise, defense or boredom. They just didn't do that sort of thing. They were a peaceful lot of peoples, the peoples of Mirrglbury and Nearest Seaprot and Lovely Valley. So that category doesn't apply. And of course a king can be great because he just happens to be a great man whether he is the king or not - like, for instance, maybe he's particularly brave or kind and generous or intelligent and creative, and usually all three of them together at the same time. And I guess that I suppose that the Duncans would apply here, too - all three of them. So, as you can see, Mirrglbury was kind of sort of lacking in the "great kings" department. Even if you count King Tulip, and you would only count her because she invented the worship of the great ponies, which was kind of a big important thing because, thanks to all of her wonderful and possibly utterly insane influence, all of the future generations of the people of Mirrglbury - of which there were many - would grow up worshipping the great ponies themselves, and I suppose that if you're the founder of an enduring state religion of some kind, or any kind of popular religion that lasts for a really long time, well, then maybe it's okay to call you great. But it's kind of iffy. And, you know, greatness is really a very subjective (by which I mean really not objective at all) thing, and whether someone is considered to be great really depends on who it is that you ask, and on what their perspective on the issue or person or whatever happens to be, and on what your personal perspective on the situation also happens to be, and so on and so forth, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's kind of a complicated issue, as you can probably see by now. So now you understand why what's-his-head wanted to be great.

But this answer that Dinkplutter the royal advisor had just given him in answer to his question was not exactly the answer that dear old Jorkulhaup had expected, nor was it quite the answer that he was hoping for. Because, as you see, the wooly mammoth had, unfortunately for Jorkulhaup Bortvelding, gone utterly extinct some many hundreds, and possibly thousands, though probably not, of years before Jorkulhaup was even born in the first place, and so the finding of the wooly mammoth seemed at the moment to be impossible, and certainly, at any rate, to be harder to accomplish than the whole "killing it in glorious battle" bit. "I wonder if it's okay if I just find a dead one and stick my sword in it and call it good," wondered Bortvelding rather glumly, but no sooner had he said this to the empty room before him then the old advisor's voice came echoing towards him out of nowhere, and certainly not from within hearing range of such a quiet private remark of despair, "No! It has to be a live one! Quit complaining and do it! I'll take care of Mirrglbury in your stead while you're gone! Now get out and slay your fucking mammoth, kid! Time's a wasting!"

"What the hell," muttered Jorkulhaup to himself in annoyance and chagrin, and then he stood, grudgingly, at further nagging cries from the unseen royal advisor, who was really beginning to get on the young king's nerves, and trudged reluctantly down to the stable, where his royal sacred horse was waiting, looking around stupidly and munching on a wad of hay or alfalfa or something or whatever the hell it is that horses eat. Hay. Hay is for horses. Yeah, that's what it was. Anyhow, Jorkulhaup put a saddle and some armour of the sort that the horses in old movies about knights having jousting tournaments wear, you know, with the mask and the spikes on the mane and all, and then he strapped on a sword and some armour of his own onto himself (this armour being of the sort that the knights wear in those movies, not the horses, except of a less stiff and robotic nature and somewhat lighter, because the Mirrglburians were of a fairly practical nature, and at any rate they hardly ever fought anything, and even when they did fight anything it was bunnies or wolves or rabid jackalopes or some such not-very-dangerous creatures, and so there was not much need for armour in Mirrglbury anyways, and so really all his armour consisted of was a patented Bunny-B-Gon clawproof vest, an Anti-Antelope helmet with polarized UV-blocking visor, and thigh-high Possum-Puncture-Proof riding boots, which might be quite effective against small and adorable woodland animals a la Bambi, but would really not help him very much in the case that he would have to in the future defend himself from the titanic curved ivory tusks of a rampaging bull wooly mammoth, which was too bad, because that was exactly what he was seeking out for himself at the moment - but who ever thinks that far into the future? Right now all he wanted to do was to leave the town as soon as possible so that he might quickly get to some place where he couldn't hear that damned advisor shrieking his damned advice in his ear) and a bag of travel goods onto the saddle, and he hopped up onto the horse and, with a shout of "YAH!", spurred the horse into a gallop and rode off into the mountains to find his damned wooly mammoth and then hopefully to kill it.

Unless you don't smoke. Because really you shouldn't, at least not very often, because you could easily cause yourself to get lung cancer or emphysema, which are both pretty darn nasty ways to die. So in that case, well, I don't know what you want to do with it, but you don't have to smoke it if you don't want to, honest. I'm not going to force you to do something that you don't want to do. And you should never let anyone do that to you, ever, you know. Because that's not okay. So. Don't let people make you do things that you don't want to do.

Jorkulhaup Bortvelding spoke quietly to his chief minister of the giving of advice to the king, who was also known as the royal chief advisor, whose name was Dinkplutter Bump and who was an older man who had been chief royal advice-giver man to these past three kings, which made him way too old to still be alive, and yet he was still alive after all of these years. And said the young king Jorkulhaup to the chief advisor person Dinkplutter, "My most esteemed chief royal giver of advice to the king, please tell me, if it is within your desire, for certainly it lies within your power, o wisest honored one, of how I may become a hero and a person who has many interesting adventures, that I may not suffer that same sickening fate what fell upon my most unfortunate yet dearly esteemed predecessors in this glorious office, that is, that my reign might be recalled in the years to come by future generations on into the eternal unseen future as a great and heroic reign worthy of songs and tales, rather than a reign so easily written off as not worthy of even the slightest footnote of a mention due to its sheer and desperate lack of event. I have no wish to join the honored company of my dear ancestors in that respect. I would rather be as my true ancestor and father of my soul, the great Bruce Wendell Frogman the Third, whose life and deeds are still spoken of to this day, so many hundreds of years after he once walked this fair land. Please, o wise royal advisor, tell me how this may be done."

Then the royal advisor Dinkplutter Bump furrowed his brow and fell into a deep and serious period of deep and serious thought on how he might be able to answer the young king's posed query, and how he might at that same young king in his (the king's) quest for greatness and memorableness. Dinkplutter the advisor thought on this topic for a very long time, but then one day, after many weeks - or maybe it was months, it's just amazing how the time flies, and it's simply impossible to keep proper track of - he finally had reached his conclusions and he went to visit King Jorkulhaup Bortvelding and to tell him of the Error running style: Style code didn't finish running in a timely fashion. Possible causes:

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