2002-01-21 - 10:00 PM

A purple checker-dotted butterfly zooms to the moon on a pair of silver wings, and a fuzzy orange caterpillar which looks like the couches they had in the seventies watches in envy. Purple plasma alligators that move like lava lamps stick out from the water, bite the air, and seek fulfillment, as the jelly purple plasma they are composed of jiggles with every breath and blink. The alligator snatches the butterfly out of the air, a plasma lava lamp alligator eating a polka-boarded butterfly. The tacky upholstery-orange caterpillar grins and says, "Glad that wasn't me."

A hitchhiker with yellow coffee-stained eyes breathes out a cloud of alcohol fumes and doesn't witness any of the above, so doesn't really belong anywhere in the story. He's just there, wobbling, looking around, and wondering if the first ice cream sandwiches were made out of real bread. Ignore the hitchhiker.

Life is like a 3D telescope, tunnel vision but, hey, it's 3D! Sometimes you see checker-dotted polka-something-ed butterflies getting eaten by plasma alligators while couch caterpillars giggle. And sometimes, you can only see what's really going on: a hitchhiker in an alcohol haze. The hitchhiker in this story becomes essential, if only for the analogy. Given these new facts, I'll at least tell you that the hitchhiker is trying to get a ride to Dallas.

Seasons change in split seconds, and lives end in even smaller spaces of time. The alligator has finished his meal and the caterpillar has become a butterfly, with peppermint stripes and splashing in a cup of red chocolate tea. The alligator has woven a cocoon and will soon emerge as a purple plasma grizzly bear, but not today.

So the candy butterflies around dreading the day he will be eaten by a lava-lamped grizzly bear, and the grizzly bear �thing sits in his cocoon stewing over the fact that he's all part of the hitchhikers imagination, and then the unseen narrator gets angry because the bear in the plastic wrap cocoon has just given away the ending and now she has to think of another one and - quick! stall for time! -

(The above paragraph has virtually no punctuation)

Another car on the road drives by, the hitchhiker throws his sign to the ground (Denver, not Dallas, it reads) and gives up on hitchhiking. So now where are we? He is just a nameless man who was a hitchhiker once, in those wild and crazy years, but can't do it nowadays because it's dangerous now, what with all the crime and the gangs (he says to his grandchildren). The man sits there on the side of the road, wondering no longer about the earlier anatomy of an ice cream sandwich, but instead about how he's going to get bus money back home, or if he should just settle down right there. No, in the city, not right there by the side of the road...unless he has a tent or something. Which he doesn't.

The butterfly gets run over by squirrel pushing a lawnmower, and its blue and white swirled blood gets spilled all over the forest, because it was kind of a big butterfly. That song won't leave your head, so it keeps on playing while this next set of events take place (you know the song): a turtle with peg legs falls on its back and cannot get back up, a blue bird gets picked on because he is not yellow like the rest of the blue birds, a walrus gets dentures, and the alligator we spoke of earlier emerges from it's cocoon and is now a grizzly bear, purple plasma still, and looks for the butterfly to eat, as such is the chain of food stuff, and the alligator realizes that the butterfly is dead. Things happen, but not in the right succession. Bombs explode, but the timing is slightly off. Storms occur the day after they are forecasted, and maw gets stuck in the rain. A little boy gets adopted the day after he kills himself because the adoption agency forgot to throw out his file. The alligator jumps from his mirror pond and eats the former hitchhiker, and it is only until this happens that we realize how essential of a part the hitchhiker played in the above story.