Mystery of the Flaming Couch, Solved

I just had the most succulent, delicious, crazy go nuts fantastic meal I've ever experienced. It was a whole buffalo stuffed with a cow which was itself stuffed with a pig stuffed with a turkey stuffed with a chicken stuffed with a quail stuffed with an apple. The whole thing was wrapped in bacon and sausage, battered, then deep fried. Then it was boxed in a giant box of waffles, wrapped in chocolate, re-battered and deep fried a second time. Then, it was sliced thin and piled up on a 40 foot long piece of rye bread, slathered in thousand island, sauerkraut and 15 kinds of cheese. Then, that sandwich was itself wrapped in bacon and deep fried, covered in powdered sugar and served with a side of nacho cheese for dipping. And that was just the appetizer! The main course had all sortsa weird ingredients like gecko sweat and snails' eggs. I wouldn't have eaten it, but I wasn't told about all that stuff until afterward. Boy howdy am I stuffed. I just wanted to put that out right up front so that y'all know that I'm OK after the flaming couch attack. I don't want you to worry yourselves needlessly. I also wanted you to know right up front that that Charles Lindbergh is one stand up guy. Now, I suppose, though, that I should tell you about the couch attack.

When we got hit yesterday, I wondered to myself why someone would be firin flaming couches at us and how anyone saw us to shoot flaming couches in the first place. But I couldn't ask no one because there was all this bleeping and whooping and this flashing red light that just kept spinnin around, makin me think about that time my redheaded cousin Chester got stuck on the tilt-a-whirl when the operator guy started havin some kinda crazy seizure and shakin around like a knock kneed, hypoglycemic, communist spy in Central Park on the Fourth of July whose eaten nothin but cotton candy and sweet tarts all day and has just spotted George Washington pumping iron and polishing a gun at the same time. And iron pumping George Washington knows. That's right, he knows what you're up to. Well, this guy's all shimmying and shaking like that and he's got his hand on the lever that makes the tilt-a-whirl tilt and whirl, so it's speedin up and slowin down like a first time driver whose water just broke, but who still don't know how to work a clutch. Chester's head is just swingin this way and that and he starts gettin really scared. It gets even worse when the guy's arm flies out an his hand gets bit off by one of the sitty places on the tilt-a-whirl. Well, after five minutes and about eight thousand gallons of vomit, the guy drops to the ground and Chester is free. Funny story, that guy ended up movin into tow and he and Skeeze had themselves a one hand band for awhile. But, with the slow, relentless passage of time, big band music fell out of vogue and they was forced to find other jobs. Currently, I think he's teachin the third grade down at Edward R. Murrow elementary. That red light was spinnin around just like that. (I don't know if you noticed, and I don't wanna toot my own horn or nothin, but that was a double metaphor I did right there. Don't be tempted to go out and try that right now, though. It takes years of practice in bein folksy to pull that off. If you try it too soon, your nose may try to eat itself. I swear, I seen it happen once.)

Well, with all the lights and sirens and whatnot, I don't have no time to ask anyone what's happenin. I catch some small snippets of conversation;

"...stealth damaged!"

"...thirty meters and closing..."

"...tanks still at full..."

"twenty five meters and closing!"

"Drop ballast! Drop Ballast!"

"twenty meters!"

"We're not going to make it!"

"Hide Pat! Hide Pat!"

"10 meters!"

"Brace for impact"

"In the thing! Under that thing! No, not that thing, the other thing! Yeah!"

"Impact in 2 seconds!"

Then, everything went dark as I was shoved into some kind of secret compartment thing in the floor. I didn't know what was happenin, but I could hear it. First, there was this big thump and the ship rocked a little. Then, there was a whole messload of footsteps, like goin to a centipede ball, 'cept these footsteps were pretty quiet and centipedes usually get themselves fancied up for a ball, wearin ties and heels and tap shoes and whatnot. You may not believe me, but them centipedes are excellent tap dancers. They learned everything they know from watching Gene Kelly movies and copying his moves thousands of times. So, I guess it wasn't quite like a centipede ball, but maybe more like a centipede sock hop, which are currently out of fashion in the centipede world. Then, it sounded like a bunch of men with hernias were slappin a boys' choir with steaks. It was all wet smacks and grunting and high pitched screaming. Along with that, there was a lot of bangin on the floor, like goin to an NBA game when someone's replaced all the balls with bowling balls. After that, there was silence.

After a couple minutes of this silence, the door to the secret chamber was opened and they let me out. I looked around and saw a bunch of guys with mullets and Lynard Skynard t-shirts layin on the floor everywhere. They was thin as rails and ghost white. Most of 'em was missin their teeth, too. They looked like a bunch of anorexic vampires what stopped by the dentist on the way to a monster truck rally or somethin. Over by one of the windows, there was a couple of gents all in black PJs with their shirts wrapped around their faces lyin very still.

"What's all this, then?" I ask.

"This," said Alistair, "is a platoon of meth zombies led by their ninja handlers."

"Well, didn't you say this was a stealth zeppelin?" I asked, surprised at the apparently dreadful state of squimonk stealth technology. "For all the good it did ya, you might as well have painted 'We're not here!' on the thing."

Alistair glared at me. "The cloaking device worked just fine until the flaming couch damaged it."

"Well, like I said, how'd they see us to shoot a flaming couch at us in the first place?"

"They didn't," he explained, "it was just a coincidence." He went on to explain that the meth ninjas had, for a brief time, experimented with large cannons as a way to deliver their products speedily and accurately. They gave up on the idea, though, after discovering that the math necessary to shoot a 200 pound package across two states and have it land safely within a 5 yard radius was just too much work. Plus, everything they put in it caught fire for some reason. So, they retired the cannon and went on to other things. The problem, though, is that they never took the cannons apart and sometimes the meth zombies, when they were tweakin pretty hard, snuck a couch into the gun and shot it off at random. Where they got the couches from, though, was a mystery. No one could ever trace where the couch had come from because, when a flaming couch shoots through a home, the last place you really look is two states away. So, since it didn't do their clan any harm, the meth ninjas let the zombies have their fun every once in awhile.

"Is that what happened to my Mable Lou?" I asked.

"Yes, it is," replied Alistair, and yet another mystery was solved for me. Now if I could just figure out how that one armed guy played the clarinet so pretty, I may be able to die happy. Alistair went on to explain that we just happened to be in the path of the couch gun when it went off. When it hit our zeppelin, it knocked out our cloaking device and, since we were in meth ninja air space, they boarded their bi-planes and attacked us.

"Don't worry, though," he finished, "we've got the situation well in hand. All we need to do is clean up some and we'll be right back on track."

Well, we ended up having to fly around for awhile more while the squimonk cleaned out the meth zombies and ninjas, dislodged the now smoldering couch from the zeppelin's hull and repaired the cloaking device so that Clan Platypus couldn't discover the whereabouts of Charles Lindbergh's secret base. After all that was done, we finally navigated our way to what appeared to be a stretch of desolate wasteland in the middle of Montana, set the zeppelin down and stepped out.

I looked around at the scrub brush and dust and told Alistair, "Y'know, 'cept for not havin any corn or soybeans, this looks a lot like Iowa."

He looked about to say somethin back when there was a rumbling from under the ground, like the earth had just eaten a mess o' bad oysters and a whole house lifted up from below. When I say house, though, it's like callin Notre Dame a church or Gettysburg a tiff. This house sprawled out like a 400 pound housecat in the last patch of sunlight. It stretched wide as the Montana sky. When it had finished rising up out of the ground, Charles Lindbergh himself came out and shook my hand.

He said, "Sing, oh muse, of the donuts of Pat O'Neil, son of Leonard, sweets that brought to the Iowans countless cavities, and hurled down into the bags pockets of cream and frosting, left to the children and pets to lick off and the desire of their parents for sweetened breads and coffee sated. Sing from when they first encountered one another, Alistair of the squimonk and noble Pat O'Neil."

To which I replied, "Whozawatsitnow?"

Alistair leaned over and whispered to me, "The Iliad. He likes to meet everyone with a quote from classic literature. I didn't feel like bringing it up. I was going to mention it just before we landed, but, you know, meth zombie slash ninja attack and all."

"Oh, that's quite all right," I told him, feeling lost in this strange new world.

"You must be tired!" announced Charles.

"Actually, sir," I responded, "I am feeling a might peckish. You mind if I get a sandwich or somethin?"

Then, he had that great meal made and sent me off to rest before he tells me any more. It's been a mighty exciting couple of weeks and I'm kinda excited to see what's next.