Four Days and Four Nights in the Wilderness

I was in the midst of a strange manic euphoria, wrapped in sheets of crystal meth, watching Return to Oz for the fourth time that day, when the vision came to me. A dream that escaped the diabolical clutches of the Sandman, and had spent two years wadding through oceans of mind gunk to get to my mind’s eye.

The phantasma came in the form of a cloud of fluorescent neon smoke, which dispersed to reveal a golden effigy of William Shatner. His address began, as all addresses in such situations do, with a song. His was a serenade of Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On, followed by an a cappella version of Napalm Death’s From Enslavement to Obliteration. Song and dance over (he also cavorted suggestively in rhythm to the music) he showed me, not with words but with his eyes, that I was to take a journey. Yes a journey, one deep into the wild fringes of society.

After I had come to, following a set of savage convulsions brought on by thoughts of giant fringes roaming fields devouring cattle, Shatner was gone. All that was left was the whiff of TJ, and ‘the Gump’ on the television. Damn you Shatner, you made me miss part of the film, I’ve now missed that bit with the hall of heads.

But I knew not to look this gift Shatner in the mouth, who knows what he’s been eating after all. I left later that day, making my way across the river on a raft created by tying all my VHS copies of Ghoulies 2 together. Now, I know part 3, Ghoulies Go to College, was better, but that’s precisely why I chose part 2 to form this boating device. Rest assured that part 3 accompanied me in my nap sack. The vessel held up pretty well considering the VHS were a bunch of old ex-rentals that I had smuggled in from Egypt.

My first meeting in this bestial trip into the wild occurred when I first hit dry land. The man was none other than Denis Franz, best known as Sipowicz from TV’s NYPD Blue. He was being crucified by a group of rowdy scientologists, who all wore James Joyce masks and chanted the ancient rite of Greased Lightnin’.

This was indeed a barbaric place.

Further on I discovered several bathing fishmongers who told me that the essence of existence is that disjointed mass of macrocosmic Dadaist fluff lodged deep within us all. I thought they had a point, but would probably be better to utilise Faheyian doctrine in their hypotheses.

I decided to set up camp at the base of a gigantic monolith surrounded at its base by a scatter of human skulls. I assumed this to be some sort of postmodernist’s joke, I could just imagine their smug little faces, all scrunched up, yelling, “we’re deconstructing the paradigm of fear, the culturally in-grained abstract associations.” Fuckers.

Turns out no. In the middle of the night the monolith turned into a massive turtle who took no pain in attempting to eat both me and my vase collection. I barely escaped.

A warlock masquerading as a wizard lured me to his ice palace. This ice palace was a wonderful place, children played in the courtyards and imps danced in the gardens singing Have a Marxist Christmas Everyone. It was truly a paradise.

Upon my second day there I began to get anxious. Someone was stealing my sense of security. A dangerous presence was near. My anxiousness was nearing explosive heights, not unlike those times when flush riveting a canopy rail and you realise that not only has someone double dimpled the wrong set, but the buck bar is nowhere to be seen! A nightmare in other words.

I was lying in my room being entertained by a limbless minstrel when the blue monk came in. Now, and I must explain, he was not blue in colour, but had the disposition only an individual with an elemental feeling of blue hue within their character has, and thus he carried this prefix through his early monk career and then, subsequently, in his later monk career. The blue was not a pejorative term implied from the sidelines by nasty fuckers jealous of his deep-rooted blueness. So get any ideas of the kind out of your god-damn head right now. He did, however, have no eyes.

He informed me that a winged shovel had challenged me to a duel on top of the hairy tower. Turns out the only stipulation to this utopia was that at any moment one resident could request combat with any other and they’d be obliged to battle till death. That shifty bastard warlock!

As this was being explained to me I slipped out via the dog door and ran down the mountain-side screaming like a little girl.

I joined a weary band of travelling geometric circles on their way to Damascus. Turns out they didn’t know a lot about Miike, or the reasons why pigtails are the pinnacle of female hairstyles, but they did happily go on and on about Michael Biehn and the social constructionist theories behind him. I don’t know what it was but after four hours of being repeatedly told how Navy Seals should have won eleven Oscars I was getting pretty tired of their orations.

I eyed a lake surrounded by a path of melted cheese, but the impassioned screams of the locals caused me not to go anywhere near it, but to in fact stubble into a hole set in the terrain. I fell tumultuously down through the abyss; men with beards occasionally poked me from the dark rim, and the intermittent sounds of yak milking filled my aural senses.

I eventually landed on a custard Woody Allen. He was squashed beyond all hope and I ran deep into an ornate cave system away from the mess.

Tunnels led me to an underground Bic factory. Here vampires fed me molten cracker juice and bathed me in a vat of mugwump jissom. They gave me a going away party once I was ready to leave, and even generously gifted me a spoon shaped like Kurt Russell.

And so that was my time in the wilderness. It was good, but I’m unsure whether I’ll go back again next year.