The Crowded Planet Guide to Lostralia

[Vertmorpheus]

Just to get your hopes up.... a lil misleading advertising never hurt anyone (people that took Vioxx excepted).

Inspired by Tarn's (not to be overly familar but Tarnicus' and Tarnicuses both look wrong somehow) magical mystery tour around some of Australia best loved areas, I figure what we need is more of the same. Of course, most of us have plants to feed to we can't be off and running around the cunt-tryside like common rogues, but I'm sure we all bring a lil sparkled of SAB magic to our daily wanderings... thinkin maybe we can post the good ones here, whether its "A Gnome Goes To The Department of Transport" or "What I Did On My Holiday To Somewhere Mediocre"... if you went out the front door in the last year and had a giggle, let us know Sincere, sarcastic or schizoaffective, your public wants to hear about it.

VM

[Vertmorpheus]

Doorknob Goes Shopping

Shopping is a pleasure. Doorknob doesn't like spending the money, but Doorknob enjoys the thrill of the chase... mainly so he can work out how to procure it at home for a third the price. To be more intune with the retail environment, our hero likes to consume absurd amounts of caffeine, carefully select an ensemble of pseudo- khaki clothing (colours vary, but the overall look must be somewhere between Great Depression and the St Vinnies nearest to well paid, Colorado action wear buying areas)... this heightens impact, as people could easily handle a rather tall hairy man with eyebrows like independently sprung caterpillars wearing angora cardigans if he was wearing a Big Yellow Shirt, but when you blend into the background til the last minute, well the expressions can be really astounding. Somewhere between " oh he was such a brute, the things he said!" and "fuck me,for sooth, where did he come from?"

Hopeful Doorknob has been shopping before of course, but generally tries to limit this to interactions with pleasant rural types at marketplaces, family owned small trading posts in regional areas, and the like. But today, spurred on by something frightful he saw on television, he is going to visit the Super Fun Happy Shopping Place. He is fearful, excited, and unsure all at once, but is not to be swayed by fears or misgivings. He will brave this Super Market, and tame it's wildest dangers.

Caffeine on board the good ship Doorknob (three tsp of instant, 2 tsp sugar, squirt hot water, top up with milk, take one every 15 minutes upon waking until consciousness sets in), lone Doorknob secures his home against other criminals, decides the world is a touch too dim and reenters the house to alleviate a little of his Nescafe nightmare with careful application of certain herbal remedies. He buys these at great expense from a sly Fakir in a local marketplace, but without them would be lost.

Suitably brightened, he travels to the allegedly super market. On closer inspection, once he works out how to get into the place to start with, very little is super about it... very much devoid of a cape, though the slashed shade sails over the carpark MIGHT pass for external underwear to the poorly informed. Many of the people moving around inside the fairly average market seem to be dead, but have still paid for a lot of things traditionally found of use by the living only...food, medicine, various intoxicants, and bits and pieces of something called a "home theatre". Lost in thought as to why anyone would want several hundred strangers in their house dropping food and semen on their carpet, or where the players are meant to be housed, let alone sated with absinthe and hashish, poor Doorknob enters the "market" proper. he can't help noticing that although you could fit a car thru the outer perimeter of the complex, and a minivan thru the human-only doors, you can barely fit a person through the pig-sorter at the "front door".

After wondering some more as to how all these monstrously obese people managed to fit in here in the first place (he decides they were left in here as 2 year olds as a result of parental "following thru" and have wandered grazing ever since...now they cant get out so the market owners let them stay as a form of noble obligation rarely seen in this day and age) he sets about finding the food. Aisle after aisle of red white and green packages leer at him, but the food itself is hard to find. There are a lot of cardboard parcels that seem to contain checklists of vague health aspirations, if the front is any way to judge the content... unsure as to whether he has enough "vitality", "goodness" and "low GI" checklists, he takes possession of a couple of parcels and makes his way around the store in search of actual foodstuffs. Progress is made slow by the presence of a large amount of people who seem poor in decision making qualities, standing in the middle of the aisles (yeah, aisle be somethinged, thinks Doorknob), trying to work out if they want a Big Box or a Small Box.

Suddenly, whilst trying to work out why the enigmatic phrase "code f - insert doorknobs aisle here" keeps booming from the heavens, our wandered spies something... is it? could it be? yes... its water! Makes sense, the time they've made me spend in here when they can't even tell me where the food is, thinks DK. He takes a bottle of the considerately provided water (apparently from some industrial area called "Mountain Spring"), and hands one to a parched looking elderly lady who goes on to explain, after slaking her thirst, that she first entered the Kingdom of the Stepladders nearly 44 years before, at the side of her beloved Bill... sad to say, she never thought to ask Bill how to find the way out until after he died from a stroke suffered whilst trying to decide between the Big Box or the Small Box, and has wandered here since, acting as a kind of wisewoman to the Large Wanderers... many regard her as mother.

Much refreshed, but vowing to return someday to rescue all these trapped souls, relieved Doorknob finds himself in a magical place. Everything is soft and cool and yielding and every so slightly moist, tinged with a cool pink light. Too late does he realise that he has found himself in some kind of druidic grove of security camera support brackets where they leave their as yet unburnt offerings to dark gods with titles like "Prime Cut" and "Greatforstirfries!". This ghastly tableaux is ministered over by an unnerving combination of clerics... one half being large, muscled beings with pigs heads, who carry large metal rods and cleavers as signs of high office... and the remainder being timid, svelte young men that seem to be scented, sickeningly so, with a range of pomanders and fragrant resins.

Backing away from the possibly implications in horror (he recalls the goings on in the ranks of various other religious orders at this point) he finds himself suddenly stopped in his crabwalk by a spectre more horrible than those he was escaping from... an aged, wrinkled hag, face oddly fixed in a rictus grin he will later learn is called "a passion for customer service and the ability to work well within a team", offers him small sizzling pieces of corpse on sharpened sticks... it seems he is expected to eat them to prove he is of the faith, yet wonders too if perhaps they are meant as healing offerings to be made at your own altar at home... in the style of ancients who placed foot shaped tokens at shrines for sore feet, perhaps these teste shaped items will increase sexual vigour? Help him pass stones? Protect him from slingshot?

He will never know, because he has mumbled something at her and then is off, running, nearly falling in his haste to be away from these mad fiends and their diabolical rites. In the distance, as code F rings in his ears as if in a dream, he sees a warm, beckoning glow... as he gets closer, dodging yet more Large Wanderers and Indecisives who seem incapable of remembering that they want milk, and it would make sense to just get the cheapest, the glow becomes a dim image of wonder... closer still, he can see ruddy faced elves, in bright but soothing coloured cloth, moving among bulging bushels of all manner of fresh fruits, mushrooms, cheeses... there is no tasty morsel missing. Some are helping themselves, filling bags of filmy gossamer with their hearts desire of apples, crusty breads, juices. He starts to smile, then to laugh in a crazed manner as he realises he has found the food. His heart rises in hope and then...wait... something is wrong... he takes a closer look at the faces of these beautiful elves, and realises with horror that they are not expressions of joy or wonder, but of dismay and fear that many of the foods are toxic, few are remotely edible and many are probably worse for you than not eating them in the first place.

He cannot take it, crushed Doorknob. If not even the elves can be happy in the vast land of the Prepacked Turnips, then there can be no hope for anybody. He thinks of the things he has seen... the lost children, growing to monstrous size in this alien environment... the free water, provided he thinks by the shredded remnant of some resistance, some underground alliance set on helping the lost and the seeking... but he has seen to roaming bands of these lost fighters, so presumes then lost, buried perhaps under the waxy trays of poisonous apples. Then he realises... the offerings in the grove...

Horror.

Later, he awakes to find himself hungry, with no money and nothing to eat in the cupboard.

VM

[chilli]

"Indecisives who seem incapable of remembering that they want milk, and it would make sense to just get the cheapest"

Hehe, well I don't know how the hell Tarnicus (Tarn is that guy that thinks I want to bash him/wants to bash me) has anything to do with this cathartic scrawl, but I hope we will hear more of Doorknob's madcap adventures in the future... Doorknob Rings His ISP/Bank/Airport And Gets Put On Hold and Doorknob Reads A Roadmap Whilst Driving And Then Tries To Find Parking In The City When He Is Already Late For An Appointment are a couple of titles I would love to see.

Maybe eventually an anthology: Doorknob Tries To Do All The Things That Used To Seem Straightforward, But Now Are Apparently Some Kind Of Devil's Ruse Cunningly Crafted To Make Doorknob Feel Like He Is... Well, A Doorknob.

Edited February 3, 2008 by IllegalBrain

[AndyAmine.]

I like it.. I like it a lot.

[Vertmorpheus]

Mr. Knob sends his regards and thanks for the appreciation, and promises to allow me to relay some of his other adventures in the near future.

Remember, a door without a knob is just a shoddily attached wall panel.

VM

[cycle]

going to the supermarket =

I'm more visual ;)

great stuff VM.

I agree IB