The people are not what they seem

What kind of bizarre nightmare is this?

First, I return from my patrols to find my fortress festooned with all manner of bizarre absurdities: owls, blackbirds, red curtains, oversized playing cards, and sheets of clear plastic. The Woman lays out a freakish smorgasbord of cherry pies and symmetrically arranged stacks of donuts, and the Man morbidly places at the head of the table a gravestone bearing a single and unfamiliar name: Laura Palmer. Who?!

Then the whole place suddenly becomes bathed in an eerie, dim red light, and strains of unholy brooding music swell up out of nowhere. And finally, to my horror, they arrive: a coterie of grotesques from some insane and psychotic land called “Twimpeegs” — who they are or why they were invited into my lair is totally beyond me.

But they are a freakish lot: one-eyed cheerleaders and weirdly bewigged knaves; black-clothed mysteriosos encrusted in coffee beans; prim factotums toting portable recording instruments; bloodied forensic scientists and pie-diner nymphs who look suspiciously like “The People In The Walls” I knew so many years ago; even a folksy law officer, scentily reminiscent of Fabio's Doorman, who does nothing to subdue this menagerie. And as a final twist on this mindbending scene, the Rodent himself suddenly appears encased in a woody, leafed vessel that makes him look like some kind of... log.

This unearthly assemblage mingles and murmurs well into the night before dispersing back to this “Twimpeegs” from whence it came. Good riddance, weirdos. Don't let the one-eyed jack slap your ass on the way out.

As for me, I mainly keep my eyes on those silent, unflinching birds. A monstrous black owl to my left; a sinister raven to my right. Allies? Adversaries? Or mere corpses frozen in rigor mortis? I give myself a good chomp on the haunch to be certain this isn't some unfortunate dream. But no — come morning, the scent of cherries and coffee still lingers in the air, and the winged undead still stand their disturbing statuesque vigil.

This was all three nights ago.

Tonight, the world appears to be no closer to a resumption of the sane stability we once took for granted. Tonight, the army of little people is loose upon the land. In their impish regalia they stalk the streets and demand their nougaty tribute.

Tonight, I stay in and try to sleep off this nightmare.

I do not recognize your specious government programs

Do I look like an idiot?

The Man certainly seems to credit me with no more sense than a hatchling. Either that, or he has me confused with my lesser fraternal counterpart, whose limited stores of wit are now so securely encased in blubber that I wager they'll make a beautifully preserved specimen for feliopologists to noodle over five centuries from now. Chilling thought, that our generation may be represented before posterity by our thickest fellows.

But I digress. The point being, the Man has unilaterally and without cause altered the feeding schedule. To be precise, he has chosen to delay the dispersal of pellets by an audacious 60 minutes. Needless to say, this not only disrupts my carefully structured evening rounds and cuts dangerously into critical patrol time, it also leaves me undernourished and in less-than-optimum fettle at precisely the time that the vermin emerge from their trenches and set about their nightly encroachments.

To the Man I have expressed my displeasure at this treacherous delay in no uncertain terms. His explanation, weakly rehearsed and poorly regurgitated, invokes some niggling temporal policy involving the taxation of daylight. Oh, please. Do not involve me in your top-heavy bureaucracy, you petty commissar!

This “daylight savings” program smacks of shoddy science, if you ask me. As if we could tithe away a portion of our summers to be preserved for the darker, colder months. Ha! Where were these precious reserves last January, when half my territory was swept away by the icy torrents? I tell you, either these “daylight savings” are pure fabrication, or, on the off chance that they do in fact exist, are being skimmed and funneled off to special interests.

So take your extra hour of daylight and stick it where the sun don't shine. I expect my dinner at 6 o'clock sharp, and that's 6 o'clock Shmooltime.

The big bad uglies are back

The season of the crunchy brown leaf is upon us. I recognize this not only because everywhere I go I trod upon foliage that is both brown and crunchy, nor because of the hysteria of chittery squirrelling that's going on in my yard right now. No indeed — the truest and surest indicator of this season's annual manifestation is the ritualistic spectacle of putrescence that issues forth from the Big Box.

The imagery is as familiar as it is nauseating: slimy bug-people and improbable lumbering lizardoids; toothy winged rats and hairy boogermen; rusty-implement-wielding misanthropes and unkempt practitioners of questionable science. And the requisite goo and ooze and spurty gurgling nastiness that always follow them.

This is the Man's doing. (If not, then he is surely the willing catalyst.) Night after night, he soaks up these unpleasant transmissions, and always with increasing relish, until ultimately the army of little people come to our door in their macabre disguises and demand restitution. It is a long and tiresome and wholly incomprehensible season.

Improbably, the Woman buys into this nonsense. She who fears even the most insignificant of leggy bugs somehow possesses the constitution to ride along on this grisly caravan of gore. She even seems to slip into a mild psychosis of her own, in which she festoons my fortress with a small army of miniature gourds.

Trying times.

I did, however, discern a barrage of images within the Big Box the other night that actually commanded my fascination. It was a documentary of stupid people (nothing new there) who found themselves menaced by strange, gargantuan hairless mole-rats with the ability to take human form. These oversized vampiric vermin, even as they chomped and squished their way through the inept human population, were beseiged by an army of righteous warrior cats, led by the champion law-enforcer Clovis. And for all their mysterious powers, these unearthly mole-creatures were rightly terrified of the formidable force that had gathered to dispense justice.

It was a glorious battle and a moving finale, as scores of my compatriots leapt upon the scaly forms of these rat-demons and slashed them to pulpy lumps. I don't believe any of the human participants survived the melee, except perhaps the one young woman Clovis had put under his personal protection.

There's a lesson in there. Let us hope the Man has been keeping notes.