duck
duck 
goose!
DYP! is preparing to gratefully gorge on duck and a half-dozen pies, and will resume publication next week.
Somewhere deep in the woods.
Not an old growth forest; not even really a new growth forest, if by old growth we mean anything still alive as it was during the 17th century, and by new growth we mean trees allowed to grow, tended by lumber barons or hunters or naturalists in the 19th century. Just somewhere deep in the woods, a woods that grew without encouragement or intention where previously the land had been agricultural or grasses or, less likely but not impossible, flood plain or industrial center.
It was the deep woodsiness of a left, a right, straight on the trail, across a brook, along a pond, two lefts, a right, a sharp right, a steep incline, a left, across a field, through a campground, two rights, and then a clearing.
It was a deep woodsiness that was ideally approached with a compass and a topographic map, a knowledge of orienteering, some sense of where the North Star could be found in the night sky, and a flashlight with a spare set of batteries. The deep woodsiness would be best accompanied by a set of strike anywhere matches treated to remain waterproof after submersion, a bottle of insect repellent containing DEET, a backpack full of energy bars or GORP or trail mix or MREs, a sleeping bag, a canteen full of water, a portable Coleman stove, and the intention to actually be deep in the woods.
None of these things was present. No compass. No map. Neither actual nor theoretical knowledge of orienteering. No recognition of the constellations of the night sky, although -- wait -- there's Orion, and there's the Big Dipper. No flashlight. No matches. No insect repellent, no food, no sleeping bag, no water, no campstove, and no desire whatsoever to be somewhere deep in the woods.
A quick inventory yielded: one corkscrew, not attached to a Swiss Army Knife; one bottle of wine, empty; two cloth napkins; two glasses; an empty plastic container that had once contained strawberries flown in from a year round greenhouse somewhere. The glasses had not been used, since by the time the wine was actually opened the presumably worst part of the day was over and so it was glugged straight from the bottle. Not elegant, but efficient.
If there was a way to spark two sticks together then a fire could be started which could boil water in the wine bottle, but even that chain of events presumed finding the nearest stream, filling the bottle, finding two sticks, lighting them, remembering how to build a fire, and then having the means to extract the water from the fire as well as putting the fire safely out, or safely keeping it contained until morning and then putting it out. None of which seemed even remotely probable, there being only so much woodsiness a person can take during the day, much less at night without a flashlight or a sense of direction, with the wrong shoes.
A sweater would be useful, or a jacket. A lighter. Knowledge of edible weeds, berries, and mushrooms. The ability to create a bow and arrow using a tree branch, a shoelace, and a sharpened stick, and then to use the bow and arrow to down a squirrel. All of which would require the hypothetical knowledge of not only the creation and use of archery equipment, but also building a fire, impaling a squirrel, and, somehow, skinning and roasting said squirrel over the aforementioned fire.
Anyone in possession of that skill set would undoubtedly have a knife as well as strike anywhere waterproof matches or would be skilled in starting fires just through the concentrated powers of the human mind, and, to be honest, such a person would only be lost in the woods by choice and not through a series of ill-considered decisions. Even with a brain clouded by wine and bad luck, this paragon of outdoorsiness would recognize the North star, have eyes acclimated to seeing by moonlight, and would have been able to return to civilization probably in twenty minutes, thirty, tops. None of this was useful.
There was a book of poetry next to the empty bottle of wine and unused glasses, and the best use of that poetry at this minute was to tear out the pages, crumple them into kindling, and get to work with those two sticks. But what was one actually supposed to do with two sticks? Form an X and rub one back and forth along the length of the other? Concentrate just on an inch or two in the middle of the sticks? How long were the sticks supposed to be? Quarter diameter twigs or inch diameter sticks? Or was it best to spin the tip of a twig on a single point on the top of a log? What precautions were necessary to prevent a lawsuit from the park system for burning down the woods?
If there had been any wine left (which there wasn't, so the question was academic) would dumping some over the sticks or log or crumpled pages of poetry help start the fire (alcohol fumes) or retard the creation of a flame (moisture)? How the hell is a person supposed to find sticks in a clearing on a moonless night without a flashlight? Would a page of e e cummings burn brighter than a page of Walt Whitman, would Emily Dickinson char and smolder without ever catching alight, would William Carlos Williams burn as brightly red as his wheelbarrow?
In any case, would a fire attract mosquitoes and coyotes, or keep at least the latter at bay? Do coyotes eat humans? Do they eat humans if they are really hungry and the human is asleep? Do they kill you first or just start gnawing away on a calf or thigh? Do they have rabies, and even if the victim wakes up to a half-consumed leg and is somehow rescued and taken to a hospital and receives rabies shots, can the leg develop gangrene or some other nasty infection, will the muscle ever grow back?
Aren't dandelions supposed to be edible? Just the leaves, or the yellow flowers, too? How can plants be identified in the dark? Oh! A shooting star. That was quite nice. And a second. Not exactly warming, but the night sky is rather pretty, in a random, chaotic way, with all those bats or whatever flying about.
Wasn't there an article in the local paper about vampire obsessed teenagers gathering in clearings in the woods on moonless nights to drink the blood of live sacrifices? If they were just mischievous suburban artsy types they would provide a way out of the woods, but if they were hard-core drug addled devil worshipers in black leather with knives and booze it would probably be best to steer clear of their activities. How can one really tell the difference, though? Although satanic obsessed truants are probably less likely to wear velvet and call melodramatically into the night sky, it is perfectly likely that there might be some overlap between the populations, and at any rate teenagers are unpredictable at the best of times and can be unintentionally violent. All those hormones.
Coyotes might be a safer bet for nighttime companionship, and coyote pups are actually quite cute, though they might not play at night. Is that a harmonica?
For a moment the sound wavered, then disappeared, then came back. Using the logic that murderers were unlikely to play the harmonica, finding the source of the sound became the best action plan yet. It seemed to be joined by a guitar, and since any self respecting bluegrass group probably also had a fiddle, it stood to reason there would also be a campfire. Ghost gypsies were rare in this part of the country, and there hadn't been any jail breaks lately -- they couldn't be worse than devil worshipers or coyotes, and they might have beer. It was worth a try.
DYP! : convalescence edition
The bionic DYP! returns next week.
You know there ain't no devil, it's just god when he's drunk.
-- Tom Waits
Maybe constructing a universe out of pieces of parts from miniature golf courses was a bad idea. It seemed so efficient at the time: windmills, castles, toadstools, mountains, all scaled to the same perspective, all executed in the same color scheme, laying about the Universe Creation Warehouse in odd corners and heaps, left over or cast off after other projects, just waiting to be either melted or recycled or somehow integrated into another project.
And there was all that leftover AstroTurf, cut into odd lengths and some unexpected shapes, to be sure, but just rolled up and propped against the walls of the Universe Creation Warehouse, and it wasn't like there were any plans or pending requests or potential blueprints for football stadiums either created in patchwork or made to scale to fit the leftover pieces of AstroTurf. So there was no obvious reason not to combine the pieces of remnants of AstroTurf with the beckoning promise of the miniature golf elements to construct a new world, a world made of seconds but founded upon thrift and fantasy.
Besides, it had worked out so well, the universe that was constructed only of aquarium parts. That world was, what was it now, eighty five or ninety percent water, maybe with some rocky land masses that protruded in odd corners to give turtles places to perch, and the undersea adventures that were enabled by the acres and acres of divers and treasure chests and boat skeletons and rock formations with holes and hiding places, the multicolored pebble floor, the constantly shifting backdrop paper, the filtration systems that were state of the art, top of the line, now that was a world.
Things started going wrong when the intended population took up residence, yes, that it true, what with the fish attacking the scuba divers and the turtles eating the snails and the green murky sludge that kept coating everything, then the damn starfish and sea horses formed a cartel against the fish and, oh, yes, there was the issue of irregularities in the water filtration system, so in the end maybe that wasn't the best designed world, a lone turtle committed suicide off a corner rock into the void of space after the rest of the ecosystem collapses: but it was such a beautiful, graceful, colorful world when it was newly formed.
Of course, the miniature golf and AstroTurf world was never as posh, as swanky, as the underwater aquarium world. It wasn't supposed to be; it was to be a world of light hearted, gently ironic humor, filled with technicolor opportunities, family friendly, irresistible even to those who saw themselves above such things. The world would attract tourists, even, from parallel universes, drawn by a playground of altered reality and the chance to practice their golf swing.
The fatal flaw of this universe was perhaps the peopling and populating of it with a race of creatures designed to fit naturally with the landscape: real cows, scaled down, in purples and reds and blues, that could eat AstroTurf instead of grass, people designed in sizes and colors, with costumes and customs established around the castles and windmills and unexpected juxtapositions of the putting green, an entire economy and ecosystem sustained by molded plastic and AstroTurf, and not put off by the frequent invasions from intergalactic tourists on holiday, with no regard for the locals. So some type of adjustment period was to be expected, but the extent of the actual difficulties -- really, no one could have foreseen them, not even myself, and I'm omniscient and omnipotent.
What -- what's that -- you think I should cut back on the booze, on the effervescent ether, that I'm getting high off of clouds and refuse to stay sober during the seven days required for each world's creation? Who do you think you are, and do you really think you have any right to be so impertinent, do you think I don't know my limits, that you, sober, short-sighted as you are, could possibly hope to even conceive a fully operational system, much less implement and execute the plan? Are you so sure of yourself?
It's been tried before, I've given dissenters the chance to build their own world, either from a kit or from scratch, and they inevitably fuck up. One of them forgot air. Air! Who would design a world in a vacuum? Why bother? Of course nothing took off, it was beyond static, and then it spectacularly imploded from the external atmospheric pressure of the universe.
Then there was the smart aleck who designed a world without orientation, no up down, north south, gravity or magnetism. Egalitarian democracy, he said on the plan, equality for all. Well, that world literally wasn't bolted together, and as soon as he let go of the pieces everything flew in every direction possible and it took millennia just to get the pollution of the pieces of his world out of the systems of all the other worlds. A clean-up nightmare, I'll have you know.
Then there was the no-man-is-an-island designer, went to the extreme of reconciling fears of ennui and loneliness by creating a world of interlocking pieces, so whenever two of anything came together, matched or not, predator and prey, friend and enemy, flora and fauna, reality and dream, they locked together and that was that, no hope to ever be separated again, and the chains became longer and longer until the entire world was a seething, squirming mass of beings who couldn't escape from one another's grasp, so I had to put them out of their misery with a flash freezing and then a sledgehammer to separate the pieces and return the useable parts to the Universe Creation Warehouse.
You see, everyone thinks they have a better plan for the world, everyone is convinced they know the solution to the puzzle, their system is superior in every way. So you're welcome to try, but just use the leftovers in the Universe Creation Warehouse, stay away from the pristine models, and under no circumstances even attempt to use the prototypes.
Damn you, give it up already about the miniature golf and AstroTurf experiment. So it had some problems with planned obsolescence and material strength and population demographics, and I don't care if you do think it was completely tasteless and unnecessary; that world was zinger, and the intergalactic tourism numbers were through the roof.
On your way to the warehouse, send over another dirty martini, will you? I've got to get this next project out by deadline, and I'm three days behind schedule already. Thanks.
