Pinefrosted Danglebars

Pinefrosted Danglebars are known throughout the Woodland Territories as having not only superb nutritional properties, but also a powerful positive influence on a person’s well-being and interpersonal relationships.
    I once had the pleasure of ingesting this said food product through the influence of a good pal of mine, Chuck Woodchuck, whose family was one of the last settlers in the place.
    No sooner had I swallowed the last piece of the bar had I felt a change suddenly come over me. The sensation started out from my belly, where a rumbling sound issued forth. Holding it with one free hand (as the other held the crumpled wrapper of the Danglebar, and I couldn’t yet find a trashcan), I could feel my stomach vibrate. It expanded to different dimensions for about seven times in this episode, and on each expansion was also compression, which left my stomach in the end pretty much on its original size.
    Then the sensation moved up to my lungs. It was as if every air sac in them was freed up from the noxious gases they had been accumulating from second hand smoke and the City Air in all my _3 years of existence.
    Suddenly, I could breathe easier, and more comfortably. I never realized how oxygen tasted like until that moment, and I could have sworn I felt every molecule of this life giving air pass through my lungs and get processed inside my body, all in the name of Keeping Me Alive. Having thought this alone lifted up my soul, and for the first time, observers could have probably seen a faint, subtle, and yet nonetheless soul-felt smile cross my face.
    To my skin the after-effects of having consumed a Pinefrosted Danglebar next manifested.
    My skin glowed. In a single pulse, a pump of the heart sending blood carrying bits of Pinefrosted Danglebar to my system, my skin pores expelled dirt and excess oils, sending them falling like a rain of fine sand to the ground. None of the most expensive brands of commercial skin care products of the day could have made a human person’s skin more pleasant to look at than what Pinefrosted Danglebars did to me that day.
    The final effect—and the last proof I needed to believe that it was working—was a sudden change in my outlook in life.
    All the old ideologies were whisked away as if by a sudden gust of wind. My mind cleared up and it was like a field trip inside the avenues of my head. The guide was someone who strangely resembled me, if only in possession of good interpersonal and tour-guiding skills. There he showed me all the bad decisions, the thoughts and beliefs that led straight to Personal Humiliation, reacquainted me with My Stupidity… and just when I couldn’t take it anymore, he made a triangular gesture with his left leg, and the scene shifted to the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life so far.
    It was the Million Possible Good Things That Could Happen To You If You Were Only Using Your Head, the guide said. As the name suggested, those good things could happen to me if only I would use my head for a change.
    “I will,” I said eagerly. “I will use my head from now on.”
    He laughed like it was the funniest joke he had ever heard in all his _3 years of existence. “Sure, you will,” he said, before disappearing completely.
    I found myself then in the middle of the Woodland Territories plaza, in front of a rolling store selling Pinefrosted Danglebars. I didn’t know for how long I had been out, but I found the wrapper still in my hand. My friend Chuck Woodchuck wasn’t with me anymore, but if I’d only looked, I would’ve seen that he was not more than ten meters from me, having fun with two high school girls.
    Presently, the vendor called my attention with the most amiable “Hey,” one could possibly utter “Hey”. He looked perfectly at peace with himself and his personal issues. Life and the world seemed to be the least of his worries. In fact, if there was anything at all that was worrying him, it was simplified by an itch that caused him to rub the index and middle fingers of his hand against his thumb.
    I realized I still hadn’t paid.
    “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “How much is a Pinefrosted Danglebar again?”

The Creature

Nobody expected the creature to take on the appearance that it had. For one, its forehead was aligned with fourteen horn-like protrusions that moved and jittered about, especially on times of agitation. For another, its skin was undeniably purple.
    “And look at its teeth,” suggested Jerry, one of its creators. “If those don’t remind you of an array of tennis rackets in the middle of a football field, you need to have your head checked up.”
    “That’s right,” said Henry A—, yet another one of the creature’s makers. “And its braided, long, gelatinous hair looks as though it grew from a paper recycling plant.”
    “Oh, shut up, the two of you,” ordered Maritess, another collaborator in the project, one who had authority over the previous two enough to order them around. “Don’t you see that his squiggly tendrils need a direct application of mushroom spray? And how’s about checking his nether regions for an abnormal accumulation of chickweeds while you’re at it? With all this soap, I kinda get the feeling that no one can be sure.”
    The two young scientists had no choice but to do as Maritess had ordered. “Ah well,” they said, “at least we’ll be close enough to witness the palpitation of its gestationary organs—and yet still far enough not to inhale its abrasive vapors.”
    “That’s right,” suddenly interrupted Dr. Pete, caretaker of the laboratory. “You know, a certain Dr. Bob once made the hypothesis that there is a far more literal interbodily relationship between that creature’s reproductive and excretory functions than the textbooks suggest. Of course, everybody in the Discipline thought it was irresponsible of him to have press released something like that, and that’s why he got demoted to being a lab assistant for the next twenty-four years of his career.”
    “That’s so sad,” said the two young scientists, “considering that his hypothesis is not at all far from the truth. Thanks to the Foo-yei Series, we now have the creature’s interbodily functions reduced to a string of mathematical equations.”
    “That is true,” remarked Dr. Pete. “Unfortunately, his morphological developments are still as unpredictable and as subject to checker board scrutiny as the words formed inside your stomach when you eat a bowl of alphabet soup on a rainy morning.”
    “That may not be as scientific an observation as you may think, Dr. Pete,” mused aloud Maritess. “For one, the latest tests confirm an optimistic Comparability Factor of his exoskeletal development to the sinusoidal curve of a Chinese mooncake when simulated in Hal.”
    Dr. Pete raised a dubious, snobbish eyebrow at this. “Is that so?”
    Maritess nodded. “Not only that. Don’t you know that the integral of the perimeter of his vertebrae, regardless of the number, from the first to the last, is equal to that of the consistency of the Pulp of Yagii¹?”
    “This creature is not something to be feared so much then?” Dr. Pete asked, looking at the creature behind his plastic framed glasses now with reconsidered understanding and renewed reverence.
    “Not at all, Doctor,” said Maritess, as she stood beside him. She looked at him looking at the creature, and at that moment she felt a deep longing to cry. She didn’t, though, and instead took the doctor’s hand in hers and pointed at the creature’s ears.
    “Look, Dr. Pete, at that pair of ears,” she said. “If that isn’t the perfect embodiment of the Gauss-Jordan-Freudian Map, every single person in this perishing world of ours needs to have his or her head examined.”



____________________
¹ A discovery made by one of Maritess’s preschool students, but had been bragged by and claimed as Maritess’s own for 2.52 years already, that people started attributing it to her.