On occasion, I have completely mental thoughts.
Take last Friday, for instance. After the every-few-monthly pub outing with the department I, while somewhat intoxicated, wrote the following sentence: “Imagine a world without fractions.”
I don’t know what that means. I can’t imagine a world without fractions.
Yet, I worked that sentence into a Sherlock Holmes drabble. It’s not a very good drabble, but that sentence — “Imagine a world without fractions” — provides the key to Holmes’ deduction.
And when you’re working in a hundred words, it’s not like you have a lot of room.
It’s not an especially good drabble, by the way. I wrote it yesterday morning, on the train, as a distraction from the meth patients who take the light rail to the office stop.
Then, last evening, I began musing on Pastafarian eschatology. What would the followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster believe about the end times? Might it involve biscotti? Or perhaps gelato?
While stumped this morning on the train by the Sudoku puzzle (which I did, in fact, complete, but not until the trip home), I had a mad idea. Completely mad.
Suppose there were a hidden Gnostic-like text about the Pastafarian end-times? Perhaps it’s called something like “The Apocryphon of…” and, well, I blanked out on a name.
In the margin of the newspaper, I wrote out the first sentence of this secret text:
“It befell in the days of Sarah the Simple, called betimes Sarah the Dissembler, that the Earth itself was greatly wroth.”
I don’t have, honestly, any idea where the story goes from there.
Spitballing some ideas…
Within Pastafarian theology, perhaps the sinking of the last pirate ship brings about global ecological collapse, and the FSM comes to Earth for a final meal — but rather than his disciples eating him, the Flying Spaghetti Monster begins consuming believers and non-believers alike. And then scientists decide that the only thing that can fight a monster is another monster (positively kaiju, that), and so they create in the labs, while the Earth is melting, the Ginormous Gelato. The two monsters battle, with the fate of the world in the balance, and meatballs, spaghetti, and gelato rain from the skies for forty days and forty nights, but neither monster falls, and so finally they are destroyed by missiles breadsticks, butter, and garlic. This, of course, nearly eradicates all life on Earth, and the survivors wake to a new dawn as the foodstuffs that have fallen for days and weeks and months from the sky provide food to all kinds of woodland creatures and nature restores itself to a new balance, and the cycle can begin again.
That sounds too logical, come to think of it.
It’s missing Master Chief. Because that has nothing to do with anything. And when the kaiju monsters fight, the world is filled with music. Specifically, “The Flight of the Bumblebee,” because “Pachelbel’s Canon in D” would be too obvious.
Really, I don’t know where these ideas come from. They’re just there. 🙂