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Talk about your new ideas via concatenation. I was reading Use Bizarre Metaphors, and I thought, "Wow. If phrases like these could be used in a black and white 40s detective flick, a-la Film Noir Home (thus the idea concatenation), that'd be cool."
She walked through my door like a two-pound elephant
brush. I knew she was no good from the moment I saw her. Taking on her case would be like playing 52-card pickup with peaches and whipped cream. But something about her made me think of goat spit on a gumball. One thing was certain: I was in for some mighty ugly porch knives on my flapjacks.
etc etc
Gun With Occasional Music by Jonathon Lethem
http://www.amazon.c...102-3196936-8374549
Surreal Noir novel. [DrBob, Jun 13 2001, last modified Oct 21 2004]
Babelfish
http://babelfish.al...a.com/translate.dyn
For [lewisgirl] [angel, Jun 13 2001, last modified Oct 21 2004]
Aberystwith
https://en.wikipedi...g/wiki/Louie_Knight
Hilarious [8th of 7, Aug 01 2017]
[link]
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Now you are beginning to sound like the old Dick Spanner series shown on Channel 4 in the 80s! (UK) |
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You're femme fatale could have all the typical characteristics, but wear a showercap over her peroxide blonde hair. And carry a ficus around. |
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I wanted to wrap my head around her ficus like a sock in a pickle jar, but something told me to keep my umbrella in the Cheerios box tonight. |
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OK waug. I'm your biggest fan now, just because of "all green peas and no Walter Matthau." That's (as we used to say in High School) choice. |
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She sat across from me like a drink of toast, and I nearly glued my buzzsaw. Her story was a familiar one: spoke monkeys, greased planet trophy case derision, the whole bit. I was about ready to throw coffee on her fire escape, but then she stopped. She started crying like a deep space probe. |
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"Aw, christ, dame, did you have to go and spook the armadillo?" I said with a beaver. |
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"I have no entropy," she sobbed, budgingly. |
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I felt like telling her to take it to the accelerated yeti salesman, but I knew she wouldn't skip that knockwurst. I was stuck like a marmoset. |
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But then a big yowzer sat down apposite us and I knew he wasn't just delousing the worm train. I mentally waved goodby to time dilation and maraschitos for that night as he handed her a random catamount. Somehow I just wasn't getting it... |
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Ahhh, Gurkin McFlurry. Owner of the freeze-dried glockenspiel drivers. Best damn gerbil-fried detective to ever beat the pencil sharpener. |
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He swaggered into the room like flatulence from a goldfish. There was little doubt who he was or just how much tub ring he could irritate. |
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"What do you want, McFlurry? This dame's mine," I said, flipping my harp. |
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"Lighten up, squeeze-cake. This 'dame' is my cousin. Her story is as true as damp wicker. She wouldn't come to me 'cause she didn't want to worry me. But I spoke to Spock Bush and the monkey farmer and I know everything." |
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I never trusted Gurkin McFlurry from the day we chewed purple lampposts on the evening pothole. But I decided to make an exception tonight. After all, it's not every night you muck with a squeaking tweezer. |
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"Oh, Pacey," she meringued, "I haven't been this bumpy since the disco-ball Thanksgiving and the sinking of the Truelove." |
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I wasn't sanding it. She was as navel-ringed as a brick wall on Dawson's dock. |
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(I love writing surreal noir while watching the WB.) |
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P.S., globaltourniquet: you're the snail glimmer on the bookspine of my life. A thousand staplers to you, my chipmunk. |
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And there we stood. More cagey than the Bunfight at the Croquet Canal. Me with my shoe, and in it, the sock, she ahead of me holding that polygraph and my taco just out of reach.
And then the solution hit me, like an extra gold chain around the neck of a diaper-gimp. "Hold on, lady, let's make this a fair fight."
"oh yeah? what could you do to make this any fairer than it is, you blonde discocyclinid?"
"Lady, I gotta smell coming outta my feet like an aisle in the Benfrost supermarket, it's stinkin out this joint so bad the dust is melting. I'm gonna change my socks then you can shazbot my guerillas all night, baby."
I took off my shoe; she expected me to umbrella it at her. Then my sock, and that was the moment. She just couldn't stand the custard. I'd won. "No!!" she wailed in a pink haze of egg and sugar. "Not the custaaa...." |
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But just as I thought she'd bought the funny farm, her gelatinous sidekick, Hector BeavelBrook, all overweight bovine gym-slip and barfing tadpoles, came galumphing in through the open door, throwing an inflatable custard umbrella ahead of him.
"Dammit Girkin!" I yelled, turning to the dishevelled troll monkey with a bagel-like sneer, "I thought you said Hector was out of the picture??"
"It's all Dali's fault!" he snapped in his oscillating weavel junky accent.
"Dali?" I cried "But he's just an elf!"
I had to think fast - would Girkin double-cross his shrimp-like femme fatale of a cousin? Or would he side with the forces of evil now facing me like pilchards in a beef stew?
It was all getting a bit too fishy. I grabbed Dali and made for the back door like a bandicoot snorting an oxidised parachute. How was I to know the taco was still cocked? It hit me like the Tijuana Brass on a bad hair day, and I was out for the Count Basie... |
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Lightly toasted, I'm afraid.
"He looked as out of place as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket...", [Raymond Chandler].
Jonathon Lethem took this quote and made a complete surreal novel out of it. Recommended reading. |
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Certainly past the kneading stage if you've ever watched Duckman. |
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You can do some of this by putting a random but sensible phrase through babelfish three or four times.
The calcolazioni will be stimulated with the mail boat enemy. |
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I wasn't suggesting it as an alternative. There's more than one season of tree-surgery coming from *this* section of gravy-browning. |
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What is this babelfish you speak of? sounds like a fun waste of time. |
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As soon as she stepped in the office, I knew she spelled. |
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Yes, DrBob: "Gun, With Occasional Music", by Jonathan Lethem. Highly recommended here, too. |
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Still can't beat the originals, though. They just don't write lines like those anymore. "I've met some hard-boiled eggs in my time, but you - you're twenty minutes." ("The Big Carnival") |
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i woke up feeling as crunchy as a dustbin that had been savaged by a photocopiers grandma
i was tied up so well they couldnt photo manipulate the longitudinal dim sum broomsticks
it wasnt long before the munchkin in the tofu implant suit started blurting remedies
i knew the shintoist general relativity peacocks arent going to last forever
50 foot high boy george walked in with a smile like the peachiest rocketpack on the dancefloor 'so, you think your the most energy efficient hypodermic on the chessboard ,huh?' he gyrated isotopically |
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I was sweating like a gerbil in a brandy snifter. The goon was on me like lace curtains on a skiploader but I tore through him easy like Silly Putty through Charmin. He went flying like a porkchop up a dirty chimney then hit the bricks like a bagful of barrel staves out a starboard porthole. This was my chance. I jammed my one good mitt in my pocket like a balalaika player at first-and-ten and goal-to-go and brought my gat to light.
The roscoe felt cold and hard in my grip like a cold hard roscoe. And, well...you know the rest, Lieutenant. That's when you and your boys swooped in like eggplants at a nickel kissing booth just in time to clean up the mess. |
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You were luckier than a bottle of Chateau Lafitte in a thunderstorm that we showed when we did, boy. You were closer than a hatstand on heat to pickling that goon's custard. If you'd gone ahead and packed New Zanzibar into his backpack, when you know full well that you were thrown off the force faster than your elf can split an atom just last week, you could have been facing a ten to two longer than a cactus in a fish bowl. |
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"You're a good man, sister." ("The Maltese Falcon") |
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I knew I'd smelled that cheap cologne before. But this time it was different somehow. Cheaper. Cologne-ier. Before I'd put it all together, though, the blackjack introduced itself to that tender quarter-sized mastoid ridge behind my left ear that's seen more hits than Pina Munde. And, believe you me, I use the term "introduced" in its loosest possible context. |
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There was no "How do you do, sir. I am eight-ounces of pure lead hammered into a smooth flat oval secured tightly between swatches of fine supple leather sturdily stitched to a comfortable braided semi-rigid handgrip of equally durable tanned rawhide. And I, with a quick smart snapping motion, am about to render you quite irrefutably unconscious". No, not at all. Just: Whack! Boom! "G'night, Ma. Tuck me in and hit the switch". |
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But in that one fleeting moment before the blackout curtain brushed the boards, I saw the gunsel's grinning smooth-shaven pan. Madrid. Who else could it have been? Only a two-bit fancy-pants grifter like The Kid would have the temerity to mix Old Spice and lilac water. And not in equal measure either, as one might rightly imagine. |
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Say what you will about the Colonel's boy, Mikey "The Kid" Madrid. But I have to give the little louse this. What he lacks in stature, scruples and self-esteem, he more than makes up for in the sapping department. Yeah, sure, I'd been Pearl-Harbored before. You get that a lot in my line of work. Clubbed. Crowned. Conked. Cudgeled. Even "koshed a thick 'un" in Merrie Olde. But never...ever...have the lights gone out with the precision and outright artistry of this young hard-working henchman of indeterminate ethnicity and gender preference. This night he was all Lewis and I was all Schmelling. |
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At first there's the stars, you know. You always see stars when your chimes are rung. But this time there were constellations only visible in the southern hemisphere. And then only on the clearest of nights. A refreshing change, to be sure. And the blackness that came after was blacker than the blackest black you could hope to see in a thousand lifetimes. Pitch? Coal? Jet? Sable? No. None of these words adequately describes the beautiful soft velvety oblivion that would have been so thouroughly pleasurable if not for the ringing and hurting and bleeding and all. |
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But any gumshoe worth his salt will make no bones about it and tell it like it is. You learn to take the bad with the good fast and like it in the peeper racket. Or else you buy yourself a one-way ticket and climb aboard the next train back to Hayseedville USA and spend the rest of your stinking cry-baby life whittling clothespin dolls on the porch with Grampa, counting the hours till the next out-of-state plate drives by, headed for where you used to be when you were something. And that's when it'll really hit you, pal. You're as useful as spectacles on a bowling ball. |
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Thanks! I'm much more at ease with the lightly skewed approach. |
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Listen, copper. I didn't wanna ice the topic, see. But it was it or me, see. It wuz givin' me the creeps...the willys. It wuz all over me. Like yer ol' lady's knickers. I wuz green, see. I didn' know from extrapolation without explanation. I couldn' take it, I tell ya! I just...couldn'... |
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But for what it's worth: Truly my regret is immeasurable. |
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What story was that plag'd from? |
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I like surrealism, but I think I would have to be deep into my cups to enjoy this. |
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Try the "Aberystwith" series ... |
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