A very large drainage pipe was in the process of being installed in a particular location in the neighborhood in order to mitigate chronic flooding issues.
“Look at that thing,” the neighbors all said.
Or: “That’s the biggest goddamn drainage pipe I’ve ever seen.”
All of them, that is, except Mickey McFarland, who said, “Bah, I’ve seen bigger drainage pipes than that. The problem with you homebodies is that you’ve never been out west. Everything is bigger out west. Compared to out west, we live in Puny-ville around here. Puny little mountains, puny little valleys that are more like divots. Our rivers are so puny, they’re basically the size of the marker lines you would use to draw one of those big ass rivers from out west on a map.”
Well, no one really took what Mickey McFarland had to say seriously since he was the type of clown who was never impressed by anything. For example, when he went to a museum displaying the art of American photorealist painter Norman Rockwell, all he said was, “The only reason anyone liked this stuff is probably because cameras hadn’t been invented yet.” And when the museum docent on duty pointed out to him that in fact cameras had been invented during Rockwell’s era, and furthermore Rockwell often made his paintings by working from photographs taken with cameras, McFarland shook his head in a manner meant to display befuddlement and disdain and said, “In that case, it seems like all he did was take a perfectly good photograph and make it look a little less realistic, which, to be honest, anyone with a pad of paper and a pile of markers would be equally as capable of doing.”
Getting back to the occasion at hand, that is, the installation of the very large drainage pipe, even though nobody took what McFarland had to say seriously, that doesn’t mean they weren’t annoyed by it. After all, there had never been a lot to distinguish this neighborhood from any other neighborhood until this huge fucking drainage pipe came along, and now Mickey had to be a total buzzkill by running his mouth off and minimizing the whole thing. On this account, Michael Sproat, the organist at the local Lutheran chapel, piped up (as it were) and said: “I’ll bet if a massive asteroid was about to bash into the earth and kill us all, McFarland would probably just be like, oh yeah, whatever, it’s really not even that big.”
No one thought they’d actually get a chance to find out whether or not this was true, but as luck would have it, not too long after that, a massive asteroid did bash into the earth, and in the moment prior to impact when, blotting out the sun, it suddenly became visible, Mickey McFarland just shrugged his shoulders and said, “Pfft, I’m sure the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was a lot bigger than th–”
“–at,” he continued, when everyone who had just been killed by the asteroid (which was everyone) reunited in the sweet hereafter.
Then he paused to look around. In every direction, there were mountains that sparkled in the bright yet soft sunlight as though fashioned from gold and silver, and endless green meadows stretching like soft carpets between forests in which the patches of moss were as thick as down pillows, and speaking of dinosaurs, there were dinosaurs milling about, along with examples of every other imaginable animal species, both those that had been extinct already at the time the massive asteroid struck and those that had still been living, and every dog that had ever lived was there, too, and they bounded about in the high grass and yipped and yapped and were both hungry and full at the same time, and as for the humans, there were billions of them, infinite billions, for there was every human that had ever lived, but somehow the whole situation did not feel overcrowded like a New York City subway car at rush hour, not even close, and everyone’s flesh was youthful and dewy and unblemished and for anyone who wanted to make love there was another who at that very moment also wanted to make love and everyone spoke and understood the same language notwithstanding the fact that it was a language no one could recall having known or even heard before, and in spite of this mysterious common language they all spoke and understood no one was talking about politics.
“Pretty nice,” said Mickey McFarland, at last, “but in terms of a wide variety of creatures living in peace and harmony in a super cool location, it doesn’t hold a candle to the circus.”
Which might seem like a weird thing to say if you didn’t realize that when I earlier referred to him as a clown, I wasn’t speaking figuratively – for though he was long since retired at the time of his death via massive global catastrophe, McFarland had indeed earned his living performing under the name Dingleberry Slapwhacker as a gagman in a traveling circus.
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