Parabolic Pedanticism: An Airbrushed Adventure

The old sage stood boldly, as if in a foreign land, surrounded by his enemies, he held a divinely constituted army in his palm. When he spoke it was from a seeming tower, warning an incredulous mob against an invisible enemy. His voice, clear and certain, penetrated the atmosphere.

“Once, in another time, as I meandered about town, I passed a fast food establishment which shall remain unnamed. Feeling somewhat peckish, I glanced at the menu and was instantly mesmerized. The meal which greeted me looked so delicious that I had to fight the temptation to taste the actual photo. It would in fact be folly to attempt to aptly describe the deliciality which simmered before my eyes like an oasic mirage in an alimental desert; suffice it to say I ventured in and laid my money down. With the efficiency of Batman’s utility belt my order was placed before me looking rather like a cheap, trashy Elvis impersonator. Although tolerably tasty, my feeble imitation failed to deliver the ambrosial satisfaction prophesied by its airbrushed counterpart. Following this disappointment, there ensued a nuclear war in which my innards surrendered faster than an Italian in Northern Africa and faced merely with the prospect of another encounter raised the Parisian white flag, echoing the resounding sentiment of Patrick Henry, “Give me gourmet or give me death!”

Being by now polyphagially challenged I scraggled my way home, collapsing in front of the tv. I was aroused from my stupor by the sight of the most perfectly edenic being I had ever before beholden in my life, prancing about on the television screen. Adorned in strategically designed, figly apparel and sporting exquisitely airbrushed skin framing immaculately proportioned, photoshopped cosmetics, she fluttered about in a celestialized conception of eidetic imagination.

At this moment, there rumbled through the door an adjectively innocent maiden whose seemingly thunderous footsteps emphasized my hypnosis while accentuating her less fortunate figure and elementally photoshopped countenance. Due to my krameric reaction, I found myself contemplating the ceiling, back to the hard floor and one leg creeping over the back of the couch while the other flailed helplessly in a desperate attempt to find grounding on the couch’s arm. Gaining, at least partially, control over my body, the voices sped frantically around the inner circumference of my head in search of my splattered wits. As the search and rescue team began to bring in survivors, my optical guerillas peered cautiously from their position between the backrest and arm of the couch and reported sightings of skin seeping through a crackling, fig colored blouse, vacuum-packed to the shape of an ordinary female body. The stragglers now began to return and I lifted myself from my conditioned bunker to politely embark on a verbal voyage of tactful inquiry. The timbre of an out of work siren intimated the dawning of a digestive apocalypse forcing the recollection unit to confirm this prior engagement. Consciously timorous I endeavored to persist.

As we drove down Thunder Road, casing the Promised Land, we were assaulted by an ostentatious barrage of perfectly contrived, deceptive temptations in the form of imposing, salient advertisements, billboards, gonfalons, oriflammes, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Overwhelmed by this petulant sea of illusory degradation and trapped in a cycloptic cave, I felt like a lone, armored seaman sinking into the depths of Charybdis while Scylla swept from the rocky, Messinaic cliffs in her depraved pantophagal debauchery; another swimmer in the alimental desert. Seeing through the glass darkly, a vision of recessed chaos glimmered delicately as it cut meekly through the shallow, self-promoting savory famine.

Like an unobtrusive, but penetrating beacon it stood, somehow detached and independent. In the surrounding snafu, it exuded deific calm.

Led by iron volition, I endured the milieu until landing, through much telluric travail, safely beneath the arborous gaze of an unpretentious edifice. We disembarked and entered, void of visual testament, clinging only to the diaphanous hope of refugial escape from visceral Armageddon.

A pleasant ambiance greeted us as a genial hostess showed us to a modest, unencumbered table. A rather plain menu presented a white page, neatly speckled with a quaint, typed font. Again, with no iconic validation, we ordered. In a cordial manner our culinary venture appeared and, as charming conversation ensued, a sapid restoration dawned on the eastern horizon of the trophic wasteland.

As he concluded his lengthly narrative, the crowd began to stir in riotous misunderstanding, but before the mystified hoard could adequately voice its failed comprehension, he raised his hands in a plea for silence. He then continued, “With eyes to hear and ears to see, he who finds shall seek and he who opens shall once more knock.”

He brought his hands slowly together, his large sleeves dangling to his waist, inclined his head slightly and turning from the crowd, vanished from sight.

Copyright © 2008 by Layne Cockcroft

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