Chapter VII
There is a terrible affliction which befalls many people, and is known as insomnia. The prefix in means a negative, it denotes the un, the anti, the against. In addition, somnia refers to the state of sleep, and so insomnia refers to the inability to sleep. The person so afflicted has difficulty falling asleep, or once so, remaining in such a state. Baritone Juicebox suffered from this very affliction. Perhaps it is on the basis that I too suffer so, or maybe I’m sadistic and want to take out my travails upon my characters, but nonetheless, Baritone Juicebox often had trouble falling asleep, and would thusly be termed an insomniac. It wasn’t particularly enjoyable. He would have liked to have been able to fall asleep when he so desired, or at the very least, when he was tired. But out of this some creativity was culled, and he often did excellent work whilst waiting for his tickets into the amusement park of sleep to arrive in the mail of his mind.
Up until the point where he had launched himself to the moon, his life had consisted of the following: he had what was known as a job. At the same time, he had, from the age of five, been attending an institution known as school (escuala). School is a sort of establishment where members of our society gather, divided by age, skill level, and at higher grades, interest. Members of this society were required to attend school and hopefully receive an education until a certain age, after which schooling became optional. At the point where our story began, Bari had just graduated from University, which is a higher level of school that is indeed optional, though he was taught in his previous school that in order to get a job that he liked he would have to undergo further schooling. A silly process it seemed, but he bought into it. This university, though very fruitful for knowledge, was much less so in terms of his wallet, as it was for most people. Indeed, he, like others, was stuck paying for this school, and as such, being put into considerable amounts of debt. So, this education was supposed to prepare him for a job in the field of his choice. This job was supposed to be an agreement between an employer and an employee, where in exchange for labour provided, the employer would pay the employee an agreed upon sum of currency. A fair trade, it seems. Employer compensates for time and labour with a reward of money, which the employee can utilize to whatever ends he so desires. Upon his graduation, there was no prospect of finding a job in the field of his choice, not a single one that related to his studies, or one that even made him remotely happy. So, he was stuck going back to the position he had held through his last three years in school, which involved exorbitant amounts of mundane labour, so repetitive that it got to the point where when he looked back he could not differentiate between nights. Being told that he was stuck going back to this job, he considered many options, but out of that gallimaufry, he chose suicide. Silly, it seems, that so petty seeming a problem would encompass part of the reason one would choose to end their own lives, but often us humans become so absorbed in such minor details that we overlook the parts of our lives that encompass the rest of the week outside the forty hours we work. To Bari, there was no future because there were currently no jobs. Oh, how wrong he was. A future there was, but it was necessary for him to travel far from any time clocks and to seek out his own fortune.
But, wisdom was not his strong point, at least not yet, as we have seen, and so this is where the insomnia comes in. This job did not help him sleep, though it required much physical labour from him, as he was required to work all night and thusly attempt to sleep in the midst of the day, when the sun was at its brightest, and there was the most enjoyment to be had. On the days he did not work, he could not return to the schedule of most humans, the one he desired, and thusly missed out on many of the activities that they shared in. this only further drove him to madness, and caused him to be tired and irritable all the time, and so his mind was never all too clear, especially so when he came across a rocket laying in the middle of the woods. At one point he even developed an extremely high tolerance to deoxyribonucleic acid, and those trips no longer helped in sleep, and if that was no help, what could be?
And this insomnia was not the only reason he chose to end his life. Of course there were quite a few, as there should be for any decision so crucial as this. Whether any of them were high quality reasons is up to you to decide, but reasons he had, and provide them he did, and this was one of his primary ones. Some of these reasons, were, of course, a bit more private, and he wouldn’t have willingly shared them with anyone, and so I will not break his confidence. Other causes we shall discuss later on. What matters most now is that he attempted suicide, failed, and thus decided upon a second suicide attempt. One of three things happened when he was about to enter the atmosphere of the Earth, and the one which we shall discuss now is that the Earth sensed that he wanted to live, but perhaps get away for a while, and so it rejected his attempt to gain entrance to the atmosphere, and instead sent him out into space.
When he flew back into space, he drifted for a period of time that neither him nor I know, for we measure time by the rotation of the Earth and by the Earth’s rotation around the sun. Those two measuring devices were now negated, and so he drifted without knowledge of time, which is good, because time mostly serves to create stress, along with unnecessary focus on schedules and other such annoying implications. On and on he drifted through the vacuum-sea, without a set destination as he had before. He was able to survive because the Earth gave him a supply of air before his rejection, and eventually he came through that vast ocean and arrived at the Grilled Cheese Nebula, which is home to the four sided triangles.
These triangles were a rather interesting species. See, they, as the name implies, both had four sides and angles that added up to one hundred and eighty degrees. The dimensions that we live in are all integers, while they live in only one dimension, which is i.i is a term used to mean the square root of negative. So, to travel from their dimension to ours you would take the i dimension, square it, and then square it again, thus cubing it. This would put you in the first dimensions, from which it is a simple matter of addition or multiplication to attain access to the rest of our dimensions. Thusly, Bari must have floated into a calculator somewhere in space which had been engaging in just the right operations that would send him to the i dimension, and he was the very first person to do this. Lucky him.
It happened that the four sided triangles made their abodes not on any solid ground found on planets or moons or such objects, but they built them to float around space, always staying within the confines of the Grilled Cheese Nebula. Naturally, shops, parks, streets, and everything else you’d find in a city were designed in this manner, and with everything in a different place every day, getting anything done or even finding anything was a rather arduous task, unless it could be done within the confines of one’s own home, or unless you had a solid grasp on mathematics and could thusly predict where places might end up at any given time, which was never worth the math involved. The good thing for the triangles was that they required no resources. They didn’t eat or wear clothing, and everything they did as far as entertainment goes was within the space of their minds. They could have just as easily floated around space aimlessly for the duration of their lives, which was forever. Now this doesn’t mean that they never did anything with their lives, and in fact, the exact opposite was true.
You see, space calculators were rather common finds in the Grilled Cheese Nebula, and the triangles had perfected the manipulation of these calculators so that they could use any combination of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and squaring, in addition to a whole gallimaufry of mathematical functions to travel anywhere in time or space and between an infinite amount of dimensions and universes, and as such, they had accumulated vast stores of knowledge, which they held fast within their one hundred and eighty degrees. But, like food bought and never consumed, this knowledge just sat on the shelves of their brains and rotted, and they thus donned the guise of the reclusive genius, accumulating knowledge but never making use of it or sharing, which, we ar
e told, is caring. And thusly they came across as rather callous, and even selfish at times. Had they been more proactive, interaction with beings from the integer dimensions would have happened much earlier, and the universe would have benefited greatly. No other species had figured out how to use the space calculators, and the only time they were ever put to use was when they were operating on their own and someone stumbled upon them by chance, such as in Bari’s case. So, as you can tell, Bari had gotten very lucky here. He had stumbled upon their world, and everything was bound to change for both parties now.
Meanwhile, in a separate reality, Baritone Juicebox was still mulling over whether to continue life as a purported deity or to mysteriously disappear and stay with the cloud porpoises. In one billion, eight hundred million, seven thousand, six hundred, and forty-three different realities, a man named Fred was ordering a pepperoni pizza. However, in the one we’re going to concern ourselves with at the moment, Baritone Juicebox and Arthur Crouton were being told the future by a group of four and a half cowz!.
This was the future they laid out for our protagonists, or more so it was the future that could exist should they go about all this business in the proper fashion and achieve the goals laid out in the quest the cowz! gave them. There was a place that could accomplish both of their goals. It was located within the Toast Mountains, specifically at the top of Mount Hockey, which was the highest peak in the aforementioned range. To get to this mountain, all that was necessary was to cross the Fatlantic Ocean and subsequently cross several thousand miles of terrain, until they arrived at the Asian portion of the Eurasian landmass, and then find the Toast Mountains. Upon climbing Mount Hockey, they would find the first basketball court ever built, which had been constructed by the ancient Comida tribe that had lived in the region roughly twelve thousand years prior to these events. Any basketball that had once been human that was shot through this hoop from the foul line would once more become human, and the being that shot the ball would be given a single wish. Now, this seemed an easy task for our heroes, but the part that transfigured the quest from a simple journey to an epic task was not the ocean, not the exorbitant amount of walking or climbing, not any of the challenges that they would encounter on the way, but that the shooter of the ball only had one shot to make it in, and if they failed, both the shooter and the ball would turn into a salad. Nevertheless, it seemed worthwhile to try, especially considering that the possibility existed that the cowz! were just making all this up. But, on the off chance that this was realistic, and their quest a feasible one, a training montage occurred, with fast paced scenes of Arthur shooting basketballs, running through obstacle courses, climbing mountains, lifting weights, and dancing alternating. Then they said good-bye to the cowz! and left the forest. Not, of course, before a couple of the wiser antlers threw their two cents in. Proverbial ones these were, of course, as antlers don’t utilize currency. Of course, these antlers were amongst the oldest on Earth. They had seen many ages pass, enough to testify that dinosaurs had, in fact, once trod upon this planet, and were not placed there by any sort of deity in order to test our faith. Thus, their wisdom and knowledge, fortified by countless millennia and seventeen essential vitamins and minerals, was vast. Word had passed to them regarding the events which transpired from every corner of the globe, despite the globe being a corner-less sphere, and though they could not see the future, they could make reasonable estimates and confer rather solid advice. So, they warned Bari and Arthur about several of the obstacles that they were bound to encounter. I shouldn’t tell you about those though, it’ll ruin the surprise. But, many proverbs were passed down, and much advice dispensed, and even some laughs were had. All in all, this seemed like a nice start to this new adventure.
Whilst the antlers unloaded information upon Bari and Arthur, another Bari, separated from the one we were just talking about by the powers which confined him within his own reality for the time being, had just seen his very first four sided triangle. This, in his mind, took the proverbial cake, though he had seen many a sight worth acquiring cake for in his journey through space. Zany this was, as well as wacky. Clearly, this being possessed four sides, yet his instinct told him that the sum of their angles added up to one hundred and eighty degrees. To confirm this, he put his mind’s compass to his mind’s eye and did the necessary measurements, which indeed proved his instinctual guesses to be true. And since all it was doing currently was languidly drifting about space, he viewed it as being harmless enough to attempt communication with, plus it seemed to be emanating wisdom, for of that sort of knowledge he was overflowing. In addition, wasn’t it worth the risk? If he was killed or put in a zoo, what difference would it make? He was an unknown quantity of distance from home and lost in space. If he shied away from interaction with everyone he saw, he’d never find his way back, or at least he’d never find anything decent to do out there. And so he approached the triangle, and thus began a dialogue, beginning with an introduction of himself and a small amount of back story clarifying why he was there and how that had come to pass. He didn’t expect a response, because the odds were rather low that anyone living this far from Earth would understand a language such as English, but this triangle had travelled to many worlds, and understood the language quite well, and so began to bombard Bari with information about a plethora of topics, ranging from the treatment of jazz music in the Soviet Union to the proper way to prepare an omelet, and all the way to the history of the race of Galliloonians that reside in the innards of the planet Kjralaques. This was all fascinating information in its own right, but at the moment Baritone Juicebox was more interested in finding out information regarding his current whereabouts. Unfortunately, he had to wait what would equate to fourteen minutes on Earth for the triangle to run out of air in the angle he spoke from, forcing him to take a breath. Bari seized on the opportunity to acquire relevant information, and began asking the triangle some questions. He found out several things that you know, such as that they were in the i dimension, in the Grilled Cheese Nebula, and that he was among the race of four sided triangles. He also found out several things that you might not know, unless you’re omniscient or have read this book before. For instance, he learned that in the beginning of time all the triangles had had three sides, but some began evolving a fourth side, while still maintaining the necessary amount of degrees to maintain triangle status. Some became full on quadrilaterals, and many triangles kept their three sided nature. The latter two groups, though, eventually found that they had a great deal of difficulty surviving, and they all eventually died out in the region. The only other creature that inhabited the nebula was the giant squid, which seemingly could thrive anywhere in space.
In the course of this book I’ve mentioned giant squid in space quite a bit. I feel that this requires some explanation, as I’m sure most of my readers have never left the atmosphere of their home planet and ventured forth into space. Thus, they only conceive of giant squid as aquatic creatures, but the truth is that they, like many of the ocean-borne creatures found on Earth, had their origins in space. And that is why so many of them have an inherent extraterrestrial look about them. Giant squid are, however, of particular importance in this story. As I’ve mentioned, they helped Bari on a couple occasions, and would continue to do so in the future. The famous biologist Face Tennis, whose work regarding cloud porpoises I quoted earlier in the book, once wrote a volume on giant squid which contains quite a bit of relevant information.
These are some useful passages:
“While nobody is quite certain of the origin of the giant squid, most scienhistorians are fairly certain that their pilgrimage through space and subsequent inhabiting of most known worlds began towards the center of the universe and emanated outward in every direction, much like matter right after the big bang.”
“Whilst in space, the nature of the giant squid is generally passive, and they will thusly just float on until they are taken in by the gravitational pull of whatever celestial body they
encounter, wherein they have shown a remarkable ability to adapt to whatever conditions they encounter. In some instances they have been known to maintain their airborne nature, while in others they became aquatic, and some became land creatures, and so forth.”
In Bari’s world, giant squid were water dwellers. He actually had mixed feelings regarding them. See, the two times I mentioned him finding them, they had helped him out, but those were only two thirds, sandwiched somewhere between sixty-six and sixty-seven per cent, of the times he had thus far encountered giant squid. This third time occurred far before he had received their aid on his jump from the moon, and even before they had assisted in him escaping from the undersea volcano. It went like this:
He was in the midst of adolescence. He was about fourteen years old. Chemical warfare was raging in his body, and every opposing chemical in his mind, good or bad, was engaged, and he was thus constantly ravaged. In various attempts to assuage these chemicals, he would often perambulate about his neighborhood, perhaps showing them that by a peaceful walk that it wouldn’t be too unreasonable for them to make peace with each other. Oftentimes he would mount the vaunted milkshake hills and gaze out at those placid waters which comprised Lake Spatula. There he would reminisce, ruminate, ponder, and engage in several other actions which involved letting his mind meander over subjects both esoteric and exoteric, about his present condition, as well as the memories of the past and also planned memories that he hoped to remember at a later date, once he had made them happen. This time, as his eyes scoured the water, he saw a beady pair of black eyes gazing back into his, mesmerizing him and giving rise to temptations that would give the bad chemicals in his head a final victory. Should he give in? Flashbacks to wars he’d never partaken of began in his head. No! he should never surrender! Not to the Germans, the Carthaginians, the Gauls, the Visigoths, Vandals, British, Macedonians, or Juggalos! But all the while he could taste the squid’s words as they found their way up the cliffs to him, and he pondered them, for they seemed wise to his foolish mind. He could easily enter a symbiotic relationship with the squid and end his adolescence. Simultaneously, this would bring a temporary solution to the pangs caused by hunger the squid was having in its stomach. However, the smaller, albeit extant, rational portion of his mind told him that this was not a fair trade. He could eventually get over his issues and move on. His was a permanent solution for a problem which was temporary, while the squid’s problem was an ephemeral one, which would never permanently cease. He knew about fair trades, for he often followed the course of professional sports, and had thus developed a taste for what constituted a fair trade. Rationally, he would not feed himself to the squid. But still it seemed tempting, for the squid made it so. All he had to do was stand up, bend his knees, and then throw himself down into the squid’s waiting mouth, and he did stand up, and he did bend his knees, and ever so suddenly the external world faded away. Bari was physically within his own mind, which had now taken the shape of a courtroom.
A woman with the body of a kimono dragon but a human face presided over the court. And before him stood several other familiar figures from Lake Spatula and the Milkshake Hills region. There was a tree, and a cow, and the ground below him, and even one of the cumulus clouds that had so recently graced the sky, now shaped like a meatball grinder. He, Baritone, occupied the defendant’s position, so designated by a nametag upon a stand. The squid glared at him in an accusatory fashion that was so natural to those accusing, from the plaintiff’s spot. In turn, the witnesses spoke.
“I saw him jump”, exclaimed the tree.
“Oh, he jumped right into that squid’s mouth. I saw him! I know it happened”, chimed in that grinder shaped cloud.
“No doubt about it, he jumped”, the cow added.
“Now, I know Bari. He’s walked on me his whole life. He would never do something like that. he always seemed so nice,” the ground said in his defense.
But the ground was soon drowned out by thousands of other voices, accusing him not only of jumping into the squid’s mouth, but of other despicable crimes that were continuously accumulating on top of that one.
The judge gathered all of this information, and announced her verdict. Of course Bari was guilty. He had clearly jumped into the squid’s mouth. There was no disputing this evidence that had been put forth. But what was a fitting punishment for such a crime? Should the crime fit the punishment? Or should you be given a punishment a couple sizes too large? Too small perhaps? No set handbook was there on this subject. Discretion was the word referring to the power given to the judge in this situation. And so the question of punishment was also raised to the audience. They had seen the crime perpetrated, they, if anyone, should have the best idea for a suitable punishment.
“Force him to jump into my mouth!” shouted the squid, who could already taste Bari’s flesh in his mouth, so powerful was his anticipation.
“Ooh, I like that idea” said the cow.
“Me too, a very clever punishment you have devised this time, squid” exclaimed the cloud.
Even the ground was forced to agree that, as far as punishments go, this was a rather ingenious, very fitting punishment, though he refused to believe that Bari was guilty.
He was under orders now. He had no choice but to obey the law, for he had been told in school that the law would always catch up to him, and that this was the difference between the court of law and the basketball court:
“If I trick you on the basketball court, I might get a layup. If I trick you in the court of law, I’ll lose the case.”
And so he, of course, did not want to attempt to trick the law, especially knowing that it resided so close within his cranium. And he jumped, and fell, as the squid said, into its mouth. But the squid’s mouth was a wormhole. It was a rip, somewhere, in the space-rhyme continuum, and when he fell through, he embarked on an adventure that we’ll discuss more of later. For now, the problem at hand was that the Grilled Cheese Nebula was under attack.
And so, Bari tried to marshal together every bit of knowledge he had garnered from watching those civil war reenactments as a child, and protect his newfound friends from what was coming. I’m sure you’ve noticed by the drawings I’ve included thus far that I’m not very skilled as an artist, and while I might be able to convince you of what’s going on with a basic image, there’s no way I can create anything with any sort of detail. As much as I enjoy making bad drawings, for this case I’ll stick with words. What was attacking the Grilled Cheese Nebula was a species which possessed the body of an earthworm, but with bat-like wings which pounded air downwards, and further spread their awful stench. The triangles knew quite a bit of the nature of war and fighting, but they had never practiced it, and were clearly at a disadvantage. Once again their knowledge failed as a result of not having used it practically. And so they were forced to flee. To the nearest space calculator the masses thronged, hurriedly calculating while an occasional brave one would wrestle one of the beasts, and all the while, Bari, too, had switched from attempting to utilize his knowledge of civil war reenactments to imitating what he had seen from professional wrestling. The problem here was that he had always watched more interviews with professional wrestlers than actual wrestling matches, and was thusly at a loss when it came to executing the moves. Fortunately, with minimal damage done, they escaped into another part of space. And this part was familiar. Bari had no idea that he would be so glad to once again view the moon of his home planet. He had presumed that he was lost to this area forever, and perhaps had put the thought in the back of his mind, in an old trunk where he stored things that perhaps he’d like to revisit in the distant future, once he had sufficiently forgotten about them and was able to romanticize the past. But before he could take in all the nostalgia properly, he found himself being verbally pelted by the triangles. Some equated his arrival with the arrival of the beasts. Some viewed it as his duty to eradicate them and save their beloved nebula, in a classic tale of a young and loveable,
but flawed protagonist having to become a hero out of necessity. Naturally, if he had arrived, and those horrid creatures had arrived in such proximity, he had brought them with him, in some sort of terrible extraterrestrial caravan. There were, fortunately, wise ones amongst the triangles, ones who could see things are they were: a coincidence.
Elsewhere, Bari was gazing at the moon, where he might have seen himself if the conditions were met that he was in the proper reality and he had a sufficiently powerful telescope. Neither of those conditions was met though, and so he was simply gazing at the moon, his eyes perambulating over the sky, as Arthur Crouton slept peacefully beside him. As a basketball, he found sleeping even more difficult that he had as a human, something he could have scarcely imagined before. Luckily, basketballs don’t require much in the way of rest, and so he was able to lie on the ground and ponder all night. Looking at his planet’s lone satellite brought back so many memories. Fortunately he was in a better place than he was at the time. Things didn’t seem so bad now. He was, in a way living the life he had always wanted, except for the part where he was a basketball. He could overlook that though, at least for the present. That was what they were journeying to remedy. But it was only the very beginning now. This was the first night after they had met the cowz! and been given their quest. Though, thinking about the subject, he wouldn’t mind staying a basketball, so long as he could live a life like this, living in the woods, walking and being outside all day, and probably battling mystical creatures on a fairly frequent basis. All he missed now was his accordion. Indeed, his dream had once been to somehow manage to live off of riding his bike around and playing accordion in random places, earning an income to spend on pizza and chocolate milk, plus whatever travelling expenses he happened to incur on the way. Maybe there were accordions to be found in the wild. He had never known pizza or doughnuts to be plants until now. Who knows what the other possibilities consisted of. Maybe every food he loved was to be found in plant form. And maybe, just maybe, the same held true for musical instruments. At the very least, maybe he’d find someone willing to part with their accordion on the way, or he would find conveniently placed ones laying on the ground along their way. At this point, he wasn’t willing to rule anything out. And still the moon gazed down at him, as he gazed upwards at it. And with these thoughts of a better life, and for the first time in a long time, content with his life and the direction it was taking, which was East, he fell into a restful sleep. Though it was late, and the sun would soon rise, he still was able to garner a decent rest, which he would need for all the future adventures and mysterious encounters he would encounter in the future.