Feb 14, 2700 (a story, cool)
On the long, long deserted Long Island laid the key to Joe's apartment, if in fact there was a key. Old Joe here was an unfortunate soul who had lost almost all sanity except for the inexplicable desire to eat stale cereal in the morning with whole milk and no newspaper. But for the time being, no cereal was being eaten and no, no newspaper was not being read. And besides this is lunch, and Joe was on a lunch break, or a picnic as most would call it, but Joe insisted it was a lunch break. This time the urge to stand up and do things that would have some need of being done fizzled, and Joe laid there still in denial about all that sanity jazz and instead procured what he declared to be an unconventional sanity to make himself feel more sane. However, Joe was pleased to be a follower, a great time traveller like Einstein himself.
The sky stood above Joe's head, rather towered, looking rather, well, tower-like. Of course, being Catholic and all, a blessing was an essential part of a picnic. A blessing of great magnitude and ad hoc sincerity. For if this event doesn't occur the huge carrion ants may eat your lunch, or worse yet, carry it away and save it for later, or even worser still, they may eat you. Damn ants. Living with that damn Yeti in their damn secret underground water cave only a mere six fathoms below the city sewer system. And only Joe knew this, for only he had the fortitude to venture into the long abandoned sewer systems of long Long Island, and you have to realize what an incredible burden this knowledge was to him. The Kupulsen Yeti was just yet another bad thing that could eat you, perhaps another direct warning from the seemingly Republican God that has a quaint little house with blue and red flowers out front two blocks down and one right turn from nowhere. Sometimes he has white flowers out in front too; though I’m not surprised.
And just then Joe happened to spot a hole, not a very big hole, not really a hole that big such that it deserves to be called a hole, so much as maybe a tunnel. And Joe here, being a man of keen perception and the uncommon ability to communicate with animals, was able to make out a soft conversation coming from the depths of the hole, or tunnel rather. The words coming from the tunnel, this tunnel, were garbled, slurred even, but Joe, with his vast intellect, could understand them. Joe had heard these words before. Or words of this sort at least. And this is important because it’s not that one particularly cares about what is being said as much as the sort of what’s being said. Let’s consider this logically for a moment. If Joe asked himself what he could drown for dinner, he could quite simply choose to hear the words “what”, “drown” and “dinner” and know that the question was the sort of absolute nonsense that needed no attention paid to it. And for this instance, the sort he could recall was one day in a bar some gerbils in a cage talked for a while about politics and presidents and different kinds of cedar bedding. And something about sanity and Easter Bunny outfits.
But anyhow, we digress; the conversation was hard to hear but Joe could make it out. "Fellow COW members, we are gathered here today to speak of the great flea infestation that has befallen our comrades. Comrade COW members, if you have yet to be checked for fleas, please proceed with haste to the right side of the tunnel. Thank you." Flea infestation? Tunneling cows? This certainly doesn't add up. Joe searched his mind to see if tunnelling cows with fleas, and perhaps robotic appendages, rang any bells. Robotic appendages seemed pretty essential at the time. Two to one tunnelling advantage, at least. Any creature with half a brain, let alone the whole one required to properly be alive, would be swayed by any such argument. Really now, who can argue with statistics like that? But then, puzzled by the lack of results, he forgot the idea and tried thinking about just tunnelling cows with fleas and left out the robotic appendages part. Still, there was no use. And then it all started to seem absolutely gone wrong, like the world was melting away at the mercy of an unanswerable question as if there was such a thing. It was just then, suddenly, that Christopher Columbus, Einstien and time saved Joe. Saved him and the world no less. You see, some bored future half-cyborg, half-human, full-unaware-of-the-consquences-of-his-own-pathetic-being prankster thought it clever to alter the path of Christopher Columbus. Tried to make him end up in Antartica, then that’d old washed up sailor really’d have no excuse, but as things tend to happen, this led to that and old Chris came out of the mess stranded on New Zealand. New Zealand’s the land of tasty crabcakes from what local folk lore has to say on the subject. Though it’s quite funny how often one will flaunt one’s crabcakes for a good while. Turns out though that some tunneling cows had the perfect tunnel from New Zealand to Africa. And this tunnel, combined with Chris’s shear bargaining wit and his ability to communicate with cows and make them think he is making them think what he wants them to think when it’s really quite the opposite, is how Chris arrived in Africa, where he was promptly killed and eaten by cannibals.
Unfortunately, let's reconsider this logically for a second here, this doesn't explain the fleas, not one bit. So another idea should properly be presented. This notion must incorporate several elements which would be wholly instrumental in solving the mystery of the tunneling cows. And so Joe has an idea, one of great insight. Joe's idea was why it was good that alligators didn't grow on trees. Perhaps on apple trees, but instead of apples, there’d be alligators. Big ones. Pissed off ones, hanging by the tail. Yeah. If alligators grew on trees for instance, what would have happened to Isaac Newton? Instead of a simple apple to the cranium it would've been a mother meanie gator. And then, concludes Joe, and I’d tend to agree with him, there'd be no gravity and we'd already be floating in space more than we already are. Not to say that we could float in space more than we already are. At least not without the help of a massive machine. And of course, we’re going to need something of the appendage variety and robotic with which to grasp the planet as the capacity with which we can float in space is increased. And that leads us to the Three Little pigs, I mean say the fat one, the one in the brick house, got hungry, went out to the market to get an apple, got an alligator instead. The alligator would most assuredly eat him, let the wolf in to his brick house, and they square-dance in the pig’s corpse. Nasty stuff.
And then a closer inspection, or really just pure luck, showed some cats moving up through the tunnel. And brilliance. Aha! Cows are a cats' cover up. Clever. This leads quite logically to the conclusion that COW stood for something. Words like Cat, Wisdom and Of seemed like a legit conclusion, so he let these words be in his brain for a while. Then, while Joe was eating his lunch, his mind began to wander off, bring him back to the days of Fester Blatz and John Dallas. As you may know, Joe and John Dallas, Mr. Dallas being a small rubber cow quite capable of communication and movement, though the second was rarely seen as cows rarely do that sort of thing anyway, and there was this one day the two had time travel with robotic arms to stop a sinister plot of world domination. John Dallas' owner, Fester Blatz, owned a cat jarring company, and with each cat he jarred his power would grow, but really, this is a story for another time.
Joe suddenly awoke from his dream and remembered, ah yes, apartment keys, long lost on long Long Island. If he didn't find those keys his landlord was going to murder him, unpleasantly. The landlord thought he had it tough, but poor old Joe had been locked out of his apartment for so long he needed his calendar to keep track, but that was locked in the apartment. So Joe then again began the never ending journey for... something. Keys?... The End. (we hope)
