To all visitors: Kalvos & Damian is now a historical site reflecting nonpop
from 1995-2005. No updates have been made since a special program in 2015.
Kalvos & Damian Logo

Chronicle of the NonPop Revolution


 
The Essay
Show #311
Borraka B. Who?
David Gunn

Borraka B. Cromwell eased open the door to the charming two-bedroom, one bath, wood-framed, fully-applianced for-sale-by-owner cabin in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan -- i.e., the one near Indiana Grove, not the geodesic domed one-and-a-half carported cabin over on Spengler Street that the Juan Trouserini Estate had been trying to unload for two years. It was nearly midnight, but the incessant nictitation from the eyries of restless eyeballs with which the house was awash produced an eerie, flickering illumination, such as might be exhibited by the progeny of a pair of Saint Elmo's fires and a randy sunspot. As a few of the eyeballs turned their blepharospasmic gazes upon him, Cromwell fought the urge to wink back in mad counterpoint. Instead, he withdrew from his valise a CromVacWell 1000 Vacuum Deluxe with "Special Hydraulics Attachment," a contraption of indescribable perplexity and even more convoluted warranty. He turned it on and pointed it at the eyeballs. Emanating from its vacuum-tubed innards was a sound immediately familiar to the house's inhabitants: a big whooshing "wwwwwwww!" Several of the eyes wwwwwwwwed back, but instead of receiving a friendly squint from the stranger, they found themselves losing tropospheric traction and sliding towards the door. This was no social call from a neighborhood newcomer; this was an inanimate and dangerous inhalement machine! However, suction from the device not only drew the sentient orbs inexorably towards its hydraulic maw, it also began to tug on the very seams of the local space-time continuum. The eyes, no strangers to temporal discombobulation, were suddenly winking and blinking and nodding in utter confusion. A comparably big whooshing "wwwwwwww" sound filled the cabin as hundreds of optic nerve bags dashed -- which is a relative term here, another in a long string of them -- for cover. Cromwell pushed the door all the way open and strode inside, herding the soft organs back towards the kitchen which, he noted appreciatively, had a lustrous parquet floor and a large butcher-block worktable, though the cabinetry could benefit from a fresh coat of shellac. The eyeballs, in full retreat now, fled out the side door and bumped through the woods towards the green Monadnock Refuse Company dumpster whence they had emerged long long ago. Cromwell returned to the front room. His septum twitched involuntarily as umpteen scores of detached nosal appendages lounging on the stairway snuffled at him curiously. Without waiting for permission from its operator, the CromVacWell's "Special Hydraulics Attachment" aimed towards them and repeated its "wwwwwwww" battle cry. As one, the noses sneezed, filling the air with a glutinous mist that hadn't been detected on Earth in such quantity since the early days of the Mbanico planning commission in southcentral Belize 13,056 years ago. As the spray floated leisurely towards the ceiling, an extender nozzle popped out of a bay in the Attachment and tracked its trajectory. The Vacuum Deluxe shifted into overdrive and began to suck the particulate matter out of the air. The "wwwwwwww" sound from the machine increased in fervor as it filled its bowels with the sticky sternutated substance. It was clearly enjoying itself. Soon the mist cleared, but not without consequence. The CromVacWell commenced a most dreadful bucking and rearing as its tank neared Maximum Capacity Level. The air around him twisted and growled, and Cromwell figured that the vacuum was having a destabilizing affect on the local universe, too. The noses, meanwhile, were slowly drifting upstairs, whence a pair of human muffled cries confirmed his suspicions that the cabin was otherwise occupied. Ignoring the machine's vehement objections, he manually switched a control to "Exhaust." The result was swift and disastrous: the altered nosal mist spewed back into the atmosphere, prompting huge irregular swaths of time-space to debate their own existences. Parallel universes -- som On the other hand, the only misfortune -- and I realize this is yet another relative term -- that we're likely to encounter during this 311th episode of Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar is the delay of yet another dénouement in this increasingly longvoluted story, but that's the price one has to pay before one can access the more timely musical tribulations of Kalvos.