Cataclysmic Joe is what I called him…It, actually, but I’ll go ahead to refer to Joe as “him” to differ to various non-gender specified things latter in this entry.
About three years ago I went to New Zealand, land of ungodly accents. If there is one thing I hate, it may be Australian accents. In fact, the other night I went to this talent show, in which the winning talent was a team of boys, one having a “New Zealand” accent. I, although laughing at parts, was completely perturbed by this annoyance.
So as I have already displayed by the sentences above, my time in this part of our land was spent mostly with earplugs in to dilute the sickening distraction of these accents. Because I spent so much time not listening and more time just looking, I happened to ignore (more so not hear) the civilian’s warnings, which were barely implied (They live in New Zealand for God’s sake. They don’t do anything there but watch nature and protest for peace in a pacifist country). Honestly, their warnings didn’t even register with them because they were so half-assed and nonchalant; it wouldn’t be worth the New Zealanders’ time to recognize their words to Americans.
While on this excursion of deafness, I walked straight into a notorious bondage shop that was decoratively disguised as a record store. Yes, the foreboding accents could have solicited a small amount of advice to keep me out of such danger. I did not, however, hear it and was therefore suck in a ridiculous situation. To my unknowing, there is a law that engulfs the entirety of the bottom half of the equator that states that all participants of bondage shops must buy something. Well, damnit I sure as hell didn’t know, and if I had I wouldn’t have stepped on the 5.2 mile (kilometer?) wide sidewalk in front of it. I desperately bolted for the door, but was knocked out by a very large black man wearing a leather corset (this may have been worth such an extravagant day) using a “Drew Carey’s rubber hammer”. I was a perfect demonstration for all of the on-lookers who were tempted to buy such a creation. So whenever I came to, a transgendered platypus was dangling children’s play keys over my ears, not understanding that I still had earplugs in. Ends up, in places outside of the United States, it’s quite common to use platypuses to experiment on human-animal organ replacement. He got a brain. It worked and he could talk and have subconscious thought and felt things. He said he could always feel things…but never this dramatic.
So, since he didn’t have a name because the store owner always had his mouth sticky with vegemite and couldn’t open more than .5 cm, I was deemed in charge of naming the transgendered platypus. He was nice enough and I couldn’t for the life of me understand how he ended up in such a hole in the wall, but he enjoyed seeing so few people; he was pretty sure it would have overwhelmed him to be in a public place. Also, he was kind of embarrassed that he was a transgendered animal; it was a post-op. that occurred before he woke up from his brain transplant. He kept going on and on about how everyone always tried to console him by explaining that he was special and one-of-a-kind. But where he is from, it’s quite bad to be special. In fact, everyone had to be similar or else you were abandoned. (Platypus abandonment was almost as bad as leaving the Amish for the English world.)
In due time, Cataclysmic Joe (as suggested by me, chosen by him) worked out a good way to get me out of the store without having to support the “arts”, as he enjoyed calling it. We cultivated a friendship, Cataclysmic Joe and I. It was nice, too, that he was void of any accent from the underbelly of the world. In fact, he kind of had a hint of Russian in him.
He wasn’t sad to see me go, and I wasn’t sad to be gone. I don’t miss him and I’m quite sure he doesn’t miss me, but I do wonder what he’s done with his transgendered self.
I left the store and tripped over a few boxes, went to a gas station, cringed at the gas attendant’s greeting, and immediately bought an ice cream and earplugs. I spent approximately four days in New Zealand. This was day four. I left for Japan that night and hid in the lavatory for the majority of the flight, due to the chatty, old, bad accented bastard who insisted on talking to me about his non-war stories. I learned Japanese while there.