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Well ladies and gentlemen, August is almost over and you know what that means.
It’s time to write about what you did this summer. When all is said and done, you’ll present your handwritten composition to your new teacher, remind them of your pronouns, and get down to some real quality learnin’.
The alternative is that you’ll just read about my adventures from recent months, wonder out loud why you keep landing on this website, and move along to other things.
Just know that the only parts of the following adventure that didn’t happen are the ones that I had generated from one of those protest-worthy data centers which keep cropping up in the neighborhood.
For what it’s worth, I failed to compose such a composition last year. Emotionally speaking, the first six months of the year were a challenge to say the least. By the time August got here, our new Weimaraner Tonka had been with us a few months and we were trying to launch a new line of active footwear for unruly dogs.
After putting a few months of effort into them, we just couldn’t find a target market for Tonka’s Chanklas. We offloaded our inventory one night under cover of darkness and agreed never to speak of them again.
Aside from the marketing challenges, those things reminded me of a chant we used to do in my formative years at the more aesthetically challenged among us.
“U-G-L-Y!
YOU AIN’T GOT NO ALIBI!
YOU’RE UGLY!
UGLY!
AND THAT’S YO MAMA’S FAULT!”
We’ve moved on to other things. Namely, that time this last summer when I was issued a double technical foul by a corrupt mud marshal.
His officiation of any and every one of the hippo gigging matches where I was a participant represented the very epitome of fraud and deceit.
Tempers flared.
Hurtful words were uttered.
Spaces became unsafe.
Worst of all, fingers were pointed.
For the uninitiated, hippo gigging is a competitive sport where teams attempt to tag, redirect, or ceremonially prod a semi-cooperative hippopotamus using a swampwood spear.
I prefer the Elbonian version, which means all the gigging is done in the ancestral mud-fields in south central Elbonia.
A few years back, the Elbonians tried adding land acknowledgments before hippo gigging. After a brief investigation, they discovered zero evidence that the fields had ever been stolen. In fact, the Ministry of Misplaced Paperwork produced extensive records stating — quite definitively — that no group should ever be credited for attempting to claim them. The acknowledgments were eighty‑sixed on the spot.
The nonsense with the fouls all started midway through round two on day three of the event.
Up until then I was fully engaged in an awesome trip which had been heavily assaulted with culinary challenges. When the Europeans went to America for the World Cup in 2026, they marveled over our bottomless chips and salsa, our free drink refills, and our knife wielding maniacs serving smoked brisket at oversized gas stations.
In Elbonia, I was torn between the Fermented Cabbage a la Hippo Broth at the Grand Mud Vat Café, and the Mud-Fried Flatbread with Pickled Bogfish from the Swamp ‘n’ Go Fuel & Eatery.
Did I say “torn between”?
I meant “torn up by”.
Taco Bell introduced a cyclospora chalupa this last summer that had a calmer effect.
Honestly, I tried to post videos from inside one of the Swamp ‘n’ Go’s frequently ignored mud cubbies. I was just a few inches above the splash zone, and perfectly positioned to give a non-verbal review of the “cuisine”.
Sadly, the Elbonian Tourism Board along with their Ministry of Intestinal Mischief deemed my colonic distress as misinformation and shadow-banned all of my dispatches to the web.
So there I was in the mud pit with my gigging spear in hand. The River Cow Honor Shaft I wielded had been carved by artisans of the Old Fenwood Forge who believe the River Cow is half animal, half ancestor, and entirely capable of ruining your afternoon.
For the previous two days, I had been physically abused and trash talked with some of the filthiest language by my opponents on the other side of the pit. Even worse was the fact that they weren’t penalized by the mud marshals for their indiscriminate use of the English language.
Woreser (I made that word up years ago) still, the quality of their gigging was rivaled by grizzled pensioners waving their canes at the kids who won’t get off their lawn.
They used cheese-puffs as lures instead of the league sanctioned pickled cabbage.
They would splash and try to startle the hippos before the conch was blown.
The taunts they shouted had not been pre-approved by the league.
All in all, we (the Lone Star Giggers) were fighting a match which was rigged against outsiders.
The final straw came when a malcontent on the other team turned his rear toward us and let one rip. His butt was fully submerged at the time, so the resulting mud bubble rose to the surface like a fermented cabbage burp taking the scenic route through the digestive tract of an Elbonian hippo gigger.
He then suggested that my mother was a hamster and my father smelled of elderberries.
I looked at the mud marshal and asked if he was going to red flag such Pythonesque behavior.
“Nope.”
So I did the next best thing.
I pointed at my opponent.
I held that non-verbal admonishment for twenty two seconds until my teammates could get my arm down and pull me away.
The pointing, of course, was enough to earn a red flag.
It wasn’t just a red flag.
It was a RED FLAG.
In Elbonia, it’s not polite to point, especially in Elbonian Hippo Gigging.
That behavior got me a five minute time-out in The Slough of Reflection for the next round.
As round three began, I found myself sitting on a stump in the middle of the Elbonian equivalent of a penalty box. As I sat there in reflection, the world continued to spin.
The remaining members of the Lone Star Giggers who had not been flagged remained in the bog. It wasn’t about me.
It was about my team.
They continued their gigging admirably, but deep down, I knew that my behavior would cost them.
As I refocused on what my team was doing, I noticed an attitude change swelling among the crowd. This wasn’t even my crowd. It was the crowd that had been carted in by the Elbonian Ministry of Mandatory Jubilance to cheer on the home team. Over the course of that event, the crowd turned on its team like the Russians turned on Ivan Drago.
They began to chant.
“HOO‑RAH MOO‑VAH!
SLURP‑TAH GROAN‑GAH!
RIVER COW RISE,
MUD MARSHAL FALL!
THUMP‑THUMP‑THIGH,
SPLASH‑CRY‑CALL!
HONOR‑SHAFT STRIKE,
HIPPO HEAR ALL!”
Okay all those Europeans visiting America to watch soccer had nothing on this crowd. They were really getting into it and repeated their chant over and over.
“HOO‑RAH MOO‑VAH!
SLURP‑TAH GROAN‑GAH!
RIVER COW RISE,
MUD MARSHAL FALL!
THUMP‑THUMP‑THIGH,
SPLASH‑CRY‑CALL!
HONOR‑SHAFT STRIKE,
HIPPO HEAR ALL!”
A league official (who coincidentally enough had a unique birthmark on his flesh-toned dome) shot a glare at the mud marshal.
The non-verbal cue was all that was needed, and the mud marshal sprang into action. He ran back and forth among the crowd waving his Sovereign Gigging Baton in a menacing fashion at the chanting crowd with every threat he could think of.
The chanting continued.
“HOO‑RAH MOO‑VAH!
SLURP‑TAH GROAN‑GAH!
RIVER COW RISE,
MUD MARSHAL FALL!
THUMP‑THUMP‑THIGH,
SPLASH‑CRY‑CALL!
HONOR‑SHAFT STRIKE,
HIPPO HEAR ALL!”
By then, I had joined in and was dancing my own little Hippo-Haka right there in the middle of the Slough of Reflection.
In all the commotion, the mud marshal lost his sense of situational awareness. So much so that he had stopped paying attention to the hippo which was being gigged by my team.
When he got too close, the agitated and less-than-cooperative river cow head butted the mud marshal about six feet into the air. The accidental Elbonian acrobat did a couple of oopsie-daisies in the air, and landed head first in the mud pit.
When all was said and done, just a pair of legs were above ground, and they were adorned with a muddy pair of some of the ugliest chanklas Elbonia had ever seen.
Let’s just say I’ve seen them before.
A day later, I was on my way back home. Although Elbonia is small, their Commission on Excessive Travel dictates that one must partake in no less than two connecting flights with a layover minimum of three hours. I was photographed getting off the plane on one of those layovers holding a souvenir. It was a small, taxidermized hippo holding a bottle of Dr. Pepper.
So that’s what I did this last summer. Everything else that may have occupied my calendar fails in comparison.
Oh, there is one other thing I did at some point in mid-July.
I moved my bedtime back and started going to bed earlier.
This improved my sleep score by giving me longer, deeper sleep. I spend more time in REM, and my dreams have become more vivid than they ever have been.
