The metal snake slides to a stop and opens its twenty mouthes, and the monster with a thousand heads pours out onto the platform. A huge amorphous beast, a patchwork of colors and shapes, a shifting cloud of motion and purpose, it surges across the platform and squeezes onto the escalators, warping like an hourglass in its center then oozing briefly back into shape at the bottom before it breaks into neat rows for the journey through the turnstiles.
Picking up speed now, it breaks in two, pouring like a divided stream into east and west tunnels and out into the sun. And here, at last, it succumbs to the centrifugal force of its individual yearnings and breaks apart entirely, shattering like glass. A thousand heads scatter across the tarmac like sparks, into tiny cars that shudder, sputter to life, and roar out of the station into the waning light of day.
Home.
One of the worst things an unhip person can do is attempt to co-opt hipster/street lingo into their own stilted vocabularies. It is cringingly horrible to hear some middle aged white guy telling another middle-aged white guy that he has been “dissed” by his “ho”, or that he went out and bought some “bling” at the mall yesterday. Whenever I hear stuff like that I want to claw out my eyes and crawl into my own mouth and curl up and die.
I think the worst instance of this is the whole “getting jiggy with it” phenomenon. I’m not even sure if this was ever an authentic piece of slang: ie whether it started among the cool and slowly worked its way down the chain to the pathetic, or whether it went straight to video, so to speak. But what’s unequivocally true is that it’s now so radioactive that it should be absolutely banned from the language. Thou shalt not speak the words “get” and “jiggy” in succession, nor within the same sentence, yea verily nor even on the same day. Not even in a spirit of sarcasm. So it is written. So it shall be.
Here’s a particularly egregious example:
How many times have you been on a plane, rocking out on your iPod, when you realize you want to Get Jiggy Wit It. You stare at horror upon your entirely Will Smith devoid iPod and sob quietly in your seat.
Note the crafty dropping of the “h” at the end of “Wit”, so as to notch the cringe factor up beyond ten to some heretofore unexplored realm of horror.
These people must be stopped.
Duke Kill-Horror the Maleficent heaved the great slime-mass of his body onto his giant obsidian throne and glared down at the trembling throngs. He roared: “Bring me the lapsed cannibal!”
Two soldiers of his Praetorian Snail Guard stirred and began to move forward, slowly and methodically, leaving a trail of slime in their wake. A fraught silence descended on the throne room, punctuated occasionally by impatient outbursts of profanity from Duke Kill-Horror. This had no effect on the snails’ stately, glacial pace.
In the fullness of time, they reached the back of the throne room, where a bent and hooded and shackled figure knelt in a small bubble of isolation. The snails extruded their antennae and prodded the figure’s soft parts until he stood and followed them back to the throne, which they reached some thirty minutes later.
Duke Kill-Horror was by now apoplectic with rage. “Who hired snails?” he screamed. “Who hired snails?“
A small tremulous hand rose out of the sea of courtiers and an octagonal apple pie stepped forward on bandy legs of flaking crust. “His lordship,” said the pie, in a small and tremulous voice, “requested that his soldiers be well-armored so as to escape the fate of the Porridge Guard so recently decimated by the attack of the Breakfast Spoons of Lower Flatware.”
The Duke drew a large crossbow and loosed an incendiary bolt into the thick of the pie’s body. It exploded into a tangled but delicious cloud of apple and crust, which the ensplattered courtiers nearby licked surreptitiously off of their bodies.
“Now,” said Duke Kill-Horror, turning on the cannibal and fixed him with a smug and gelatinous smile. “Prisoner. I trust you have been sufficiently cowed by your incarceration.”
A snail guard removed the prisoner’s hood, revealing a sallow white blinking head overtopped by a thatch of unruly black hair. To the assembled masses, he seemed smaller than he had when he first arrived, some time ago.
The cannibal looked up at the great and sprawling body of Duke Kill-Horror. “I think so,” he said, slowly.
“Good. So you are finally prepared to let go of your worthless preoccupations?”
“Worthless?” said Cannibal. His thought organs felt sticky and slow, as if they were covered in warm molasses. “Preoccupations?”
“Preoccupations!” roared Duke Kill-Horror, loosing a poisonous gale of halitosis into the room, which killed several of his gerbil attendants and instantly drove the entire contingent of Nostrils from the Olfactory Realm of Sniff insane. “Your insistence on the dead-end enterprise of creation! Your playing at God! Your denial of your own essential mediocrity!”
“Oh,” said Cannibal. He lifted his shackled hands to scratch at his nose. He was trying to remember the details of his captivity, but it was all a dark blur of unremitting labor. There were no solid images to settle on. “No, I don’t think so. I kind of need that stuff.”
Duke Kill-Horror shot up from his throne, high into the air, and landed with a great crash on a contingent of Oak Balustrades from the Spiral Steppes of Dover, crushing them into splinters. He drew himself to his full height, and so towered over the cannibal, whose head just reached the knees of his elephantine, vermillion legs. “You are insufficiently committed to the craft! It is not yours! It is wasted on you!“
“Well, wasted is kind of a strong …”
But the Duke was raising his Licorice Scepter above his head, where its barbed platinum mace-head glinted malevolently in the light of the blood candelabras. “Enough! If you will not dispense with your worthless dreams, then I will do it myself. Prepare to …”
He broke off, and a look of fear flitted across his face. In the silence, there was the sound of snuffling and panting.
The Duke looked down, and let out a little squeal.
A very small beagle stood at his feet, sniffing at the air and wagging his tail.
The Duke whimpered. His eyes shifted from dog to cannibal. “Is this creature yours?” he whispered.
The beagle stepped forward and nosed the Duke’s black toenails. He looked up.
And then he began to howl.
It was a noise like the end of the universe. It was noise like a billion foghorns simultaneously passing kidney stones. It was noise like God’s wrath, on a day when He was feeling particularly wrathful about something or other.
The courtiers screamed and ran, pushing and beating and trampling each other in their haste to escape. They streamed toward the doors and drained out of the room. The effect was of a brimming bathtub suddenly unstoppered. Soon, the chamber was empty of everything but the cannibal, the beagle, the Duke, and the horrible, horrible noise.
The beagle stopped howling.
Duke Kill-Horror stood frozen in his place. Important parts of his body had deliquesced into undifferentiated masses of goo. The licorice portions of his scepter were melting down his arm, and its platinum head had undergone some sort of profound molecular disturbance, which had transformed it into a duck. The duck fluttered away.
The cannibal appeared unaffected, though the onslaught did seem to have ridden him of his stupor. He peered around at his surroundings, as if seeing them for the first time, and then looked down, and smiled. “Beauregard! What are you doing here?”
The beagle wagged his tail, and whined happily.
The cannibal glanced at Duke Kill-Horror. “You should probably go. He’ll start howling again pretty soon.”
The Duke nodded, his eyes still fixed on the beagle, the remains of his face still frozen in an aspect of pure terror. He began to retreat, taking small mincing ballerina steps, until he reached the door to his inner sanctum, and squeezed through, and was gone.
“Ready to go, dog?” said the cannibal.
The dog was. And so beagle and cannibal strolled out of the throne room and into the melancholy light of an overcast spring evening, and set off toward home.