SOS Gab & Eti
SOS Gab & Eti, a tale of Bullamanka, satirizes outhouse pretension, historical revisionism, historic preservation, and the glorification of mundane objects. It uses rambling, digressive prose to tell the story of the Orgrease family's attempts to deal with their inherited portable toilet, and the ensuing chaos. The narrative jumps between Gabriel's ghostwritten memoir, the siblings' current predicament, and bizarre historical tangents, including their ancestor Matthew's prolific family, Judge Uckerknobb's conspiracy theories, and Pastor Jicklo's surreal teletransportation experience. It further explores the "Walking Outhouse," the debate over preserving or replacing the Orgrease toilet, and the George Washington Shat Here Foundation's quest for presidential excrement.
SOS Gab & Eti
SOS Gab & Eti 1.04
A state historian accuses Gab and Eti of trivializing history. Dr. Eldunker studies outhouse fires, fearing the "thought police." The narrative connects fires, sewage, and Gulliver's Travels.
"We call a shack a shack and not a structure." Mies van der Rohe.
Gab and Eti were contacted by a highly agitated state historian who was concerned that they were usurping the levity of his life's study to make fun of the otherwise serious and pedantic. As noted previously, Dr. Alphonse P. Eldunker, Ph.D. emeritus, made them painfully aware of the unique history of infamous outhouse fires.
Curiously, Dr. Eldunker has made a thorough scientific study of smelly things that burn in the night. He has read over 40,703 original documents, while sitting in environmentally conditioned research latrines, and interviewed no less than 2,567 individual experts (that is a lot of ants, termites and milk snakes), many of them on difficult-to-locate videotape (including 24 hours of the Empire State Outhouse, on behalf of the Warhol Society). Search words, "coffee enema".
Dr. Eldunker stated that though his cogitation is meticulous and unregulated he could not at this time release any significant findings for fear of his theories being usurped by the thought police who have been staking out his penthouse behind the orange barn with their black helicopters, and therefore jeopardizing his erratic employment and pension. Once again we are faced with the problems of limited access to information in an important area of historic preservation that I'm sure all of us really care a lot to hear about.
Alphonse did reveal that Nero was playing more than a fiddler's tune and that it was not for want of milking a cow's udder that Chicago burnt. It seems that, as Alphonse phrases it, the modern engineering of water pollution control plants (a cleaner term for sewage facilities) stemmed from an original impetus to preserve the built environment from the hazard of being torn down and/or pissed on by flaming developers. Which reminds us of Gulliver's wine-induced fire watch, an heroic attempt to save an admirable structure, and gives us a thought to seek out Swift's comments on privies.
Burglum, burglum burglum a many hundred cries at a moonshine midnight -- according to Gulliver the fire that burned the Imperial Majesty's apartment was caused by a maid of honor reading a romance. Since we read not romances, not even in audio books, we may never be as prepared for an emergency as an expedient giant impressed with the warm thoughts of a full bladder. But we do drink bathtub alcohol, on social occasion, and if called upon to urinate late at night there is no way to tell how many elements of the built environment or very tiny architectural clusters of chickweed along the roadside that we have saved with the quench of our misdirected flow. But for our anonymity of person, being not large ourselves in scale or scope, we would likewise find resentment and the high steeple would move over to leave their ruins for the low hut.
To be continued... forget about the bus.