From the Heart of the Smart

"I must be insane," I told myself, staring into the bitterly brick wall. It was that kind of an evening. I had just gotten drunk off a moistened turtle. I turned the corner looking for a towel. But what I found was myself, instead.

"I must be insane," I told myself, and then I ran faster than a very, slow, cat up the walls and into the sky. The sun was getting hotter and whiter. Then I woke up in a white room, covered in pads.

"I must be insane," I told myself, since clearly I was hallucinating. There was no way I was in a mental institution.

That was tough. Because I knew I was in space, really, and every sane person around told me so. "You must be in space," the one-eyed troll Mitch told me, over poker. "Otherwise, why would these cards be so sparkly?"

And he was right, and I knew that, but it was tough. Once you're really crazy and you get it in your head that you're actually in a mental institution, instead of floating among the cosmos, it's pretty difficult to go back to the day-to-day hassle of encountering aliens and coasting the borders of burning nebulae. I kept passing stars and asking, "Is it time for my medication?"

"No," they harrumphed, "we're stars, not nurses. You're not in an institution. You're just in boring old space, and you need to come back to your family of transcendental astral gods."

"My family isn't a bunch of transcendental astral gods," I would counter. "They're middle-class suburbanites who are worried that I've been institutionalized. They wonder how I'm going to get through school. My dad is trying not to be disappointed in me."

It wasn't until I encountered a cluster of white-hot space squirrels that I ended my insanity. It was really simple, actually. They just asked me what I was committed for. I muttered that I was late for dinner. But then they offered me cherry ice cream and... well, I was intrigued.

So now I'm back in the cosmic throne, taking lollipops from elves and giving them to elfephants (only the good kind). And I'm glad, too. But I do miss being able to eat normal ice cream.

So that was how I spent my weekend. And now it's Monday, and I'm back, and this blog is perilously blank. It was a long Sunday, perilously blank. I rolled up to the bank.

Cash money.

A poem, for you:

James the barber slipped and fell
And landed on a mouse,
And when he got up, he could tell
That he was being sued for physical and mental anguish.
One thousand dollars for the plaintiff,
And a block of cherry cheese.