FFR 188
Stranded in the Tobeatic Wilderness: A Chronosynclastic Infundibulum Revue in Four Acts
"My best advice to writers is get yourself born in an interesting place." --Pierre Burton
Somewhere between the third ring of melted sugar and the seventh echo of a loon’s lament, I—no, we, for identity, like the loam beneath my buttocks, is a permeable membrane—found ourselves encased in a tent stitched from brittle broadsheets of Maclean’s, the ink bleeding like northern sap down the folds of what was once considered reportage. It smelled of cedar, sarcasm, and the last tired vestige of
Marshall McLuhan’s toupee. Outside, the birches whispered secrets in syllabics; inside, I sucked on a Ring Pop the color of synthetic shame, its sticky surface clinging like false hope to the roof of my mouth.
Time, that tiresome old cartographer, had long since folded its atlas and wandered off drunk into a beaver lodge somewhere south of causality. Events no longer marched in measured cadence but pirouetted, somersaulted, or simply collapsed like overcooked fiddleheads onto the forest floor of my consciousness.
Thus began—or perhaps concluded—the fifteenth episode of our ongoing chronicle, Fowl Feathered Review, a publication not so much birthed into the world as vomited onto the page by some bacchanalian pressroom ghost still wearing its bowler hat and smelling faintly of mulligatawny and failed revolutions.
ACT I: The Moose Mousse Manifesto
Behold! Upon a clearing kissed by the aurora’s pale phosphorescence, there stood the moose—not as one might expect in the tidy margins of field guides or tourist-board postcards, but regal, sphinx-like, draped in an apron embroidered with the legend “Gastronomy is Tyranny.” Its antlers curved like the crooked spine of a moral argument, and in its flanks flickered the ember-glow of an existential grudge.
From its back, suspended in a cradle of moss and madness, emerged a tureen of mousse—chocolate not by cocoa but by covenant, dense as theological controversy and twice as bitter. The moose did not speak, for speech would have been redundant in the face of such sublime irony. Here was the beast reconfigured not as quarry but as chef, not as symbol of the wild but as silent adjudicator of our dietary sins.
I watched, Ring Pop melting with the inexorability of postwar optimism, as a porcupine in corduroys ladled out portions with the solemnity of a deacon at a cannibal’s communion.
ACT II: Greek Salad in Urns
Later, beneath a pavilion constructed entirely of misprinted CBC pledge forms, a banquet unfolded. The salads arrived—crisp, briny, defiant—in amphorae scavenged from the ruins of Mount Parnassus’ gift shop. Each olive glistened like a miniature Thucydides, pickled not in brine but in the vinegar of late-stage democracy.
A fiddler crab in a velvet waistcoat recited passages from The Republic in pig Latin while a gang of raccoons in tweed jackets debated the merits of neo-Platonic pizza crusts. At the head of the table sat a bust of Aristotle, wired to a lava lamp and weeping quietly into a napkin embroidered with the logo of Air Canada.
“Form follows function,” the crab declared, “but only when the function has forgotten its own name.”
And indeed, nothing here obeyed its nominal purpose. Plates contained symphonies of regret; cutlery murmured lullabies in Old Norse; even the wine, if one could call it that, had the hue and temperament of a bruised ego.
ACT III: Who Shot Liberty Valence, But Make It Parliamentary
Night fell—though the term is inadequate for what really transpired, which was more of a sideways slippage into a dream partially funded by union dues and expired hallucinogens. On a makeshift stage fashioned from decommissioned Odd Fellows’ Hall chairs and the hull of a school bus painted to resemble a medieval triptych, the frozen likenesses of Canadian oil workers took their places behind velvet ropes of gauze.
Margaret Atwood twirled a baton made of omnibus rejection slips. Pierre Berton, forever frozen mid-wink, manipulated strings attached to his own likeness. A walrus in a three-piece suit mouthed the words to
Stompin’ Tom Connors’ “Bud the Spud” while backlit by a flickering slideshow of assorted cowboy hats.
The puppets—jointed not with string but with obsolete infrastructure—enacted a tragedy not of justice but of jurisdictional ambiguity. Bullets became metaphors, which then transmogrified into tax brackets before dissolving entirely into the carpet of fake grass beneath the stage.
ACT IV: The Pizzeria Ascends
And then—the fire.
Not the banal sort that claims trailer parks and insurance policies, but a conflagration of such mythopoetic intensity it seemed less an accident than an aesthetic choice. The pizzeria, lovingly named Da Magma North, blazed in hues unseen outside the dreams of synesthetes and arsonists. Its margherita slice levitated, aflame yet somehow intact, twirling in a pas de deux with the Northern Lights, which had temporarily rebranded themselves as “Cosmic Chaperones of Culinary Anarchy.”
Smoke curled upward in alphabetic spirals, spelling out messages in a dialect spoken only by extinct species of beetles. A choir of loons sang backup to a mariachi band composed entirely of sentient kitchen utensils.
I wept. Whether from the capsaicin or the cosmic absurdity, I cannot say.
EPILOGUE: Glasses On, Glasses Off
With the aid of AI-augmented spectacles—transparent lenses tinted the color of a bruised plum—the chaos resolved itself into order. Not the dull, bureaucratic order of filing cabinets and commuter trains, but the radiant order of poetry, where contradictions kiss and paradoxes fornicate freely.
The moose became a stanza. The salad, a sonnet. The burning pizzeria unfurled into an epic wherein cheese is both currency and crucifixion.
Reality? Irrelevant. The forest exhaled, the ink dried, and I remained—Virgil Kay, erstwhile habitué of newsprint tents and metaphysical mishaps—forever editor of a review that exists precisely nowhere and everywhere at once, like a memory of a joke told in another lifetime.
Reader, if you’ve followed thus far, you’ve already crossed the threshold. Remove your shoes. Don the glasses. Suck the Ring Pop slowly, deliberately, until it dissolves into the geometry of the unspeakable.
For in the Tobeatic, nothing is ever quite what it seems—except, perhaps, the absurdity.
And it is beautiful.
Sincerely (some conditions apply),
Virgil Kay,
Editor,
Rooster,
China Wok Habitué
Tape: https://youtu.be/gqn6bDA0B9k?si=udbp52PMdIceYyKr
Movie: https://youtu.be/zACGLjd9JNY?si=Pmgd69l6THmAQ_kD
Music: https://youtu.be/E7CaTJ2SvG8?si=kOvWgb9hs6mR1cMO
