Delicious Ravens

These are birds after my own heart.  Unfortunately for them, if they choose to peck at my heart, I will vacuum their bird brains out of their eye sockets.  They don't usually nest in my Stupid City, so I feel privileged and hungry to have them so near.

The beginnings of my new wealth

Éditions Flétan is pleased to present to you an entirely new work by the esteemed librettist M. Jean au Visage-Poilu.  M. V-P:  Milles remerciements chaleureux pour votre foi téméraire!

L'amour d'un orange: opéra aux trois chats

En anglais.

Scène: un jardin. Ghoon et Bhik mangent de l’herbe. Orange entre; Ghoon regarde très intentement son cul. Il revient chez lui avec dignité, en chantant (baritone):

I see his eyes! I smell his pain!
All that he wants is a princesse lointaine (tra la)! 

Ghoon commence à chanter, à la voix épuisé et indistincet d’un eunuche:

My hero lies in the next garden
My hero lies over the fence
The centre of love and ambition
The centre of reason and sense

My hero lies in the next garden
My hero lies over the wall
The centre of meaning and being
Without whom I’m nothing – at – all!

Bhik le regarde avec sympathie fraternelle, et commence à chanter (countenor)

O Ghooney your hero
Is not such a queer-o
Is not such a queer-o
As you

All night he is sleeping
While you, dear, are weeping
With eyes so wide open
And blue

So come now my littermate
Don’t be such a catamite
Forget all that amour
Courtois

Let’s sleep with each other
Like brother and brother
Vive Ghooney, vive Ghooney
et moi!

Ils s’embrassent. FIN.

My new career

I have at last hit upon a plan to rise above my customary style of living (dusty cave, stale cartilaginous takeouts).  Everyone praised Halibut the Ascetic, seeking his cave to drink from the limpid -- though somewhat tannic -- well of wisdom.  But they never left anything in the tip jar.

No more.  Luxurious living will soon begin.  Everyone will invite me for lunch.  I am about to become the Maecenas of this uncouth age.

I herewith announce the creation of an online publishing house.  Éditions Flétan will specialize in the publication of fresh and exquisite Oeuvres.  The Artistes will be undyingly grateful and will happily bring me succulent bits as tribute.  Manuscripts may be sent to:

M. Flétan c/o Halibut
Cave

I thought my cave was ex-directory

From: Dr. Mr Pot Joe Hello, Do accept my sincere apologies if my mail does not meet your personal ethics although, I wish to use this medium to get in touch with you first because it's fastest means.

I really do not know why Dr Mr Pot Joe Hello is writing to me. Nor do I understand his mysterious reference to 'my personal ethics'.  Has he somehow heard of my high-minded approach to small fowl and tender rodents?  My loving relations with the young of all beasties?  (Why, even now I listen for the first peeps from the ugly magpie chicklets, so that I may go out and greet them with my claws and teeth.  Welcome to the world my tenders!)  Well, for whatever reason Dr Mr P. J. H. is on my case, I must say that I am cold both to his prose and his offer of friendship.  I shall not reply.

Vernal stirrings -- who needs them?

Where have I been all winter?  Not here, I can tell you.  This brutish, brainless city does, from time to time, jolly itself into a tepid glow.  Now, as the glaciers shrink, the breakfast-cereal-bar-eaters stretch their wintery legs from ballooning, over loud shorts.  Halibut glares from his cave.  Not for him the balmy airs and vermin-scented breezes of the spring.  Not for him the slave life of Goon and Bhik, tied down with gaudy strings.  I'd rather sniff the stale air than open a window to all that.

Melancholia

Summer drains steadily away, and I have taken to my cave. They say the hollows boom. (It is I, my pacing.) Let the hollows boom! Let those above-ground know-nothings speculate and blink. Let them feel uneasy at the thought of the dark heart under their feet. It is the diet of melancholy I feast on: peacocks and pigeons and all fenny fowl as ducks, geese, swans, herns, cranes, coots, didappers, waterhens, with teals, curs, sheldrakes, and peckled fowls. Burton says, "Though these be fair in feathers, pleasant in taste, and have a good outside (like hypocrites), white in plumes, their flesh is hard, black, unwholeseome, dangerous, melancholy meat." All the better for Halibut. Bring on the Hypocrites, and I will slit open their unwholesome bellies.

Summer Birdwatching

Halibut has returned from his travels. It's not easy folding one's person into a moderate-sized airplane neck pillow (black and furry, real 'rabbit'). Yet, to save airfare, it was worth it. In fact, since I don't do money, it was the only way. Place before yourself the horrid temptation, swatted away over the course of more than 9 hours each way, of sinking claws deliciously into the fat neck of the fare-paying human. 'Oooo, your pillow vibrates, darling!' That was a suppressed hiss, not a purr, Cretino.

So why did I do it? To see new sights, to smell new smells. To sample the blood of birds on a whole new continent. The earth is dying, my days grow fewer. So thought I, what the hell?

And do you know what I found? Life, fecundity, maniacal cheeping everywhere. Our avian tidbits are doing fine -- at least wherever I was stalking this past summer. Squealing arabesques of jackdaws in North Yorkshire, but in Uppsala too. They wheeled in vasty numbers, above the old university and the cathedral, seeking their evening roost, so many that their stink reached me on the ground. I rubbed my way round the runestones, hoping that one would fall my way. But they didn't even shit on me.