Where Did He Get These Guys? – Xxqxcxqx I

A Bushman Cometh: Plorogue

The following is an account written by this very bogger from diaries he kept in real time on the ground, if you will, during his service in Freedonia’s cabal-in-waiting, The Triumvirate, as junior member to Beloved Bravehawk and, hold your nose, Call Rover Shifty-Eyed Goddam Liar.

The bottle skydived gracefully, occasionally turning slightly as it forced its way down through the ever-increasing density of Earth’s atmosphere. Had it been falling through a vacuum, it would have been falling at the same rate of descent as a horsefeather or a page torn from D.P. Kniksen’s memoirs. However, it wasn’t falling through a vacuum. It was shoving itself through hydrogen, oxygen, methane, and other stuff, all mixed up in a gasful soup. Thanks to gravity the bottle was attracted by the Earth at a much greater rate, and by a more direct route, than any feather or A5-size sheet of paper, compared to which the bottle was an express rather than local train.

It hit the ground with a whumpp, startling the turd out of a short, skinny, pretty much naked ned with a disproportionately big ass who was jogging nearby.

Having recovered from the turd’s being startled out of, the ned circled the bottle, seeking the most auspicious direction from which to approach it. He kept expecting the bottle to spin so as to continue to point at him (despite his having never seen a bottle before, he was acquainted with Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator). This was not the first time he had seen things fall from the air. Leaves and rain and hail and dust, for example. And he had been personally acquainted with a chicken whose noggin was bonked by a falling acorn. (A similar accident later happened to Freedonia’s Minister for Waging War, Übermensch Rumsfool.)

He squatted beside the bottle and examined it, afraid to touch. It appeared to have certain of the crystalline properties of hail, at least parts of it, because its color was something like very dirty water (he never seen any other kind) so he waited for it to melt. But it didn’t. Then he tapped it. It was harder than any rock he had ever touched, and smooth. It had what seemed to him a curious shape, since it seemed to be governed by a Straight Line God, sideways and up and down, except for a cylinderish section at the top, its glans, whose form and shape were something like his forearm only shorter and narrower and of a different color and texture and kinda pleated. It had a picture on it of a ned wearing a curious animal on his head and fur or something on his face, under his nose. The picture was a far better likeness of a human visage than any that he or his friends or antecedents had ever finger-painted onto boulder or cliff wall.

Once he had determined that, in its present condition, it was unlikely to hurt him, he picked it up and judged its weight by flipping it from hand to hand. It had a little round thing on the top, whose diameter was about the same as the length of the last segment of his thumb and appeared remarkably like the caps that he had seen atop the heads of bearded men wearing long white robes, although it was black and the things those men wore were white and much larger, big enough in fact to ride on a head. The little round thing seemed to be sitting on top of the bottle, so he tried to pull it off, but it wouldn’t come. It did, however, twist a bit, so he played with it and found that if he twisted it this way rather than that it would come right off. He sniffed at it, and the smell smote him like the jawbone of a you know what, and he fell right over backward, dropping the bottle but retaining the cap in his hand.

He took the bottle to his village, where he and his family discovered it had dozens of uses, amusing and instructive, and it quickly became the Best Thing of everyone around. Other naked little neds came from miles around to see it, smell it, test it, and try to steal it or borrow it or play with it under supervision.

You could fill it with water, if you could find any, and carry it for miles and then have the water there in your hand to drink or cook with, or even splash on someone, just for fun. You could take it to bed with you at night in your grass wickiup, piss in it to save going outside (although, in fact, there wasn’t a whole lot of distinction between inside and outside), and then go pour it onto the ground or on someone’s head, just for fun, the next morning. For pissing, it was just the right size to put the head of your item into, but Xxqxcxqx’s wife found it very difficult to use and in the end had to p. in a coconut shell and then pour the resulting tinkle into the bottle, which seemed to them both, as well as their neighbors when they told about it, a goddam shameful waste of time and effort. It was just as easy, or easier, to go outside and piss on a sleeping neighbor.

More: You could pound stuff with it, grain, for example, or seeds, or dandelion fluffs, but it was a complete failure as a rolling pin. It lacked the attribute of roundness.

Xxqxcxqx found quite a few things that you could do with the bottle. But the bottle became a source of trouble. If you held it while standing and dropped it, it could make your toes hurt like hell. Or, to cite an additional example, if your item were small in diameter yet disproportionately long (apparently true of many Qicxq males), it might get stuck in the neck of the bottle, and, moreover, unsticking it hurt like hell and and required a community effort.

The bottle’s usefulness came to an end, though, when a visitor, having been told of the bottle’s properties as a portable urinal, stick it up his be-hind and did Number Two in it, on it, and all around it. After that no one would drink from it, smell it, make it whistle, or even p. in it. So Xxqxcxqx decided to throw it off the edge of the Earth.

Xxqxcxqx was on his way to perform this task – the safari to the end of the Earth, which was the southern, i.e., right, bank of the Red River – when our operatives found him, seized him, bagged the bottle he was carrying, stitched him into an orange jumpsuit, and brought him in.

When I received the news of this catch, I fairly flew on wingéd feet to my Triumvirate colleagues to tell them our prayers and beseechings had been answered and unto us had been vouchsafed an In-Charge for Freedonia. Ah: kudos from Mrs. Teasdale in the offing!

Who? What? Bog Readers, and this means you, will want to know who these people are and what they’re talking about. There are two tools of non-pareil importance in following the history of the Bravehawk Conspiracy: “How We Talk,” a Bushmanese lexicon, and “Dramatis Personae,” a Registry of America’s Bushmen: The Harmful People. Czech ‘em out.