Side of the Almond
by John Rathbone Taylor
part 1
Setsight-Braingram:
I think I’ll think of a story, write it along 5,714 horizontal lines and say it’s a novel. Discerning humans and lots of dying animals will want to read it. I may have to be admired and be weighed down with extra lucre, but I won’t go short of marzipan. Hmm, better get my autobiography out of the way first. Hmm again: no one will notice it is a nought-o-biography if I present it in three Miltonian parts and do it right quick, right here and right now.
Chapter 1: From Spermhood to Childhood — or Paradice as a Given
My name is Geronimo T. CRISPWALKER. “Geronimo,” because that’s what Momsy said Daddo shouted when he ejaculated me, and Daddo said Momsy screamed when she extruded me. “T” is for “Tit,” because that’s what my parents claimed I cried out after my first breath. I don’t know about my SURNAME but Momsy thought Daddo always wrote it like THIS because he was a CAPITAL-ist. I’m a low-case type, though several expiring animals I have counselled say I have a dash or two of communistic icon - - ism about me.
From birth-extrusion to Hamlet-age — 30, in calendar-type — my childhood was about tit, marzipan, counselling passing animals, and Karma Yoga development.
I began my counselling vocation and figured out the karmic principle of smart action for life maximisation after Daddo reversed over Slaver. This event led to Momsy turning me on to marzipan.
We’d returned from a Sunday spin in our Hillman Minx. Halfway up the drive, we felt a bump. Daddo slammed on the brakes and shouted, “Bloody stupid cat!” while Momsy screamed, then fainted.
She didn’t scream because of the cat or Daddo’s reversing. It was because I was suckling at the time and I bit her left tit in the shock of the moment. I was only twenty-three, so I couldn’t accept Daddo’s assertion that it was my fault, not his.
Anyway, he went off for the smelling salts and nipple-soothing cream. I got out of the car and stared at Slaver. Daddo was right on two things, Slaver was bloody and stupid. I noted that he was also looking very squashed for a cat, and a bit dead.
I could have opted for a career in forensics after showing such insight, but instead I got this Certbet-Braingram: Superior life-actions are executed in a spirit of non-attachment.
I said over the deceased Slaver in the spur of that mystical moment: “Slaver old mog, when confronted with anything unwanted — like wuff-wuffs or air-guns, cabbage or car tyres, and especially prospective deadness — you should calc the loss-gain, try a mood shift and practise meta-voidance. Bit late now, albeit.”
Karma Yoga became my credo from then onwards, though I referred to it as “Catalystic Calculationism.” When I preached the Way to other near-to-deceasing animals, I always levelled with them, introducing myself as a Catalystic Converter.
I conducted my first real-time Catalystic Calculation the day after the Slaver incident. I entered my parents’ bedroom to find Momsy propped against a throne of pillows in her sick bed. Daddo was attending her.
When he saw me, he grabbed this wooden plank from behind the headboard and positioned it defensively across Momsy’s chest. It had at least twenty big nails knocked through it, and Daddo held it so these were pointing outwards towards me. I got a Ninja-Braingram: In unexpected battlefields act unexpectedly.
Voiding thought, I ran forward and kicked the daft dick behind his arthritic knee! His not-unexpected reaction was to release the plank of nails, choose an octave above baritone, let out a shrieking sound, then collapse gymnastically to the floor. Daddo was a not-untalented amateur Thespian.
The plank spun wildly in a westerly direction towards the wardrobe, whose mirror door was open. My mind’s eye freeze-framed an image of two flying planks before the real one thwacked itself, tomahawk-like, into the wardrobe back panel. Well, not entirely by itself. On its flight path, the plank’s pointy side stabbed and took Lispa with it, garrotting the poor fellow on a wire coat-hanger just before landing.
“You’ve killed the parrot!” Momsy squealed.
Completed-action observations had no great attraction for me, so I ignored this particular one, turned to Momsy and shouted, “Tit!” in the present imperative. Instead of obeying me, she dipped her index and middle fingers into a jar of yellowish paste lodged in the unbandaged side of her bra.
My jaw dropped. She thrust both gooey digits into my mouth as if to blow my brains out with a finger gun. Rather than finger this out, I found the presence of mind to conduct a Catalystic Calculation.
A Quatermassic taste-orgasm of absolutely non-cabbage-like, perfume-nutted, sweetyness flavour surged along my tongue and tidal-waved around my greater gob cavity. Now I sucked willingly on the finger paste. The oral ecstasy sent me cross-eyed and mentally inward.
I must have re-focussed sufficiently to compose an “Ooohwa, whatizzziiiitt?!” sort of question because I distinctly recall Momsy’s mannerisms when she replied. She hit me with her red flushed and imploring look, and the trembly voice I’d heard her use with that muscular fitness coach at the “So Young Again” clinic. She’d been lying on the tanning bed at the time. He was standing over the soft cow, his bulging crotch at her face level.
“It’s, it’s ‘marzipan’ s-son,” she said. “You can have as much of it as you like... A-and for as long as you like... A-and then maybe you won’t need my t-tit any longer, eh Geronimo, d-dearest?”
I finished the calc bit weighing the quantitatives and qualitatives. No contest. I even got a Whynot-Braingram: Be an optimist. Pessimism is always there as a fallback.
So for my mood-switch I flipped from tit-deprived parenticidalmania to marzipan-maxed Geronimellowia.
Momsy blarted with joy for several months, and Daddo did have to have that plastic knee replacement, but I got the dividend. I meta-voided CRISPWALKER problem-family dissonance for the next seven years!
As I said to the deceasing Lispa at the time of the sort-out: “Lispa old bird, you should have beaked, ‘Om Polly, Om Polly’ chants twice daily and got the physical as well as metaphysical zen of non-attachment to your birdstand. One never knows when one might find one’s self in the flight path of another’s spikey brickbat.”
Chapter 2: A Fright of Passage — or Paradice Sodding Well Mislaid
I took some time getting over the loss of my parents. I lost them on my thirtieth birthday. I had been hoping for a birthday surprise, and I got one.
On that day, Momsy and Daddo drove me to the Hospital for Subliminally Unsame Citizens and left me there with a cake. It was one of my favourite places, and they did get the event off to a great start by driving the Hillman thirty times around the car park. Rotating myself to watch them made me dizzy, but I thought it was kind of neat. Better than having to bend forward to blow out thirty flaming candles and rendering myself completely breathless. After seven years glutto-dieting on marzipan, I was somewhat on the large side. At nineteen stone I was also prone to wheezing.
I threw my anger tantrum and the cake when the Hillman commenced its thirty-first circuit. If the cake had been a Mega-Marzipan Mouth Mauler, I would have only thrown the tantrum. It wasn’t. It was a Sticky-Toffee Tooth Tearer.
The pivotal issue was that on this day of numerical celebration, I was inevitably high-revving on the calcs’ front. I thought Momsy and Daddo had got my age wrong! Alas, it was even worse. If I’d known French, I would have said, La merde la plus sérieuse.
Thirty-one per cent of the distance around its extra circuit, the Hillman suddenly swung a right, accelerated, and disappeared out of the car park, sort of totally without me. I needed no Braingram to initiate a Catalystic Recalculation and revision of my current distemper. For the circuit-to-age calc, I settled on 30 + pi. For the rest, I chose delayed shock, wailing, and shitting myself inside my trousers.
To say the least, the birthday didn’t finish off so good. To summarise, it got worse.
The car-park attendant — who alerted reception, who called the doctors, who attended the nurse who slipped on the squashed cake and sprained her ankle and screamed at a frequency 132 megahertz higher than my wailing — took no pity on me.
He said: “Young man, sir, you mustn’t get upset and shit yourself just because that innocent young woman who cares so much for other human beings screamed so loud when she sprained her ankle, when she slipped on that squashed cake, the cake that I saw accidentally fall several yards out of your hand on to my car-park tarmac. No, no, no, sir. It could be much more unpleasant for you if you carried on wailing and I had to ram my police-issue baton down your miserable little throat to help you compose yourself. Now, get your mess up and get the hell out of my car park, you cack-arsed, pong-ridden, fat twat.. sir.”
To ruminate, these were the days when my mood always lifted in response to caring attention. However, in this instance, I had a hunch that the car park attendant’s mentoring might have a slight uncaring edge to it, so I sped up my temperament adjustment time to nine nanoseconds.
I recall that my self-pity consequently vaulted upwards from the equivalent of freezing-point Kelvin to self-motivation on a par with boiling-point Celsius — a record high for this area of the car park since, well, the previous Tuesday when the same attendant caught Nekro Phil Yak, a fan of mine, trying to teach a dead woodpigeon — name of Whitedump — how to masturbate. Nekro was a Category D15-WOTGUDD Patient, i.e. one permitted a daily quarter of an hour “Walking Outdoors To Glean Unsupervised Disposition Development.”
On that former occasion, the car park attendant had threatened to do something exceptionally squint-producing to Nekro with a pair of rusty garden shears, so my boy Nek’ managed to mento-normalise in less than eight nanoseconds! He trousered what the attendant called his “beef bayonet” at warp speed and buried Whitedump in less time than it took him to say, “Feather to Nether” and one “Amen.”
On that present occasion, I got a Meinkampf-Braingram: Obede and survive. I by-passed the calcs and shot my right arm out in a vigorous Nazi salute to the car park attendant. He wondered if I could sustain this gesture while using my other hand to remove my Daffy Duck toothbrush from behind my ear, mop up the remaining Sticky Toffee cake with it, and brush this confection in with the existing contents of my underpants-rear? I feigned a mood shift into willing enthusiasm, nodded, and obliged him.
Copyright © 2020 by John Rathbone Taylor
