Right here in the good ol’ days, I whip up a pot of millet every morning. The morning meal round these parts is called breakfast for all you flaky new-agers out there. I know mealtime routine sickens all of you, but I have to subsist and millet is a damn fine way to start another day of subsistence.
I prepare it in a pot. Yeah, I know it’s old fashioned and stuff, but I cling to my pot like it were my first child. It serves all the uses of a first child, as well. Besides millet, I can make soup in him, store dried fruits, boil tar for the roof, etc. In a way, actually, a pot is better than a first child. The latter, you have to skin, gut and bone before any good use can come of it. I suppose afterwards, though, all the bits and pieces can be stuck together this way and that to create a great many tools.
Anyhow, I prepare my millet in a pot. I boil about 118 millilitres of water and 118 millilitres of llama milk with a dash of nutmeg and a palmful of cinnamon. When that lactose gets good and frothy, I add about 0.000118 cubic metres of millet. The heat goes down to as low as possible and I put hardened skin from my first child over the top to trap steam.
Around 1392 seconds later, it’s ready for eating.
My mother calls any grain I eat in the morning sorghum. I’ve personally never tried sorghum, knowingly, but am sure it is, with proper preparation method, as tasty as millet or quinoa. She grew up on a farm near Seminole. Very near Seminole, in fact. I’ll attempt to find the approximate place on the map. As the sordid funk surrounding Christián always says - Hang on a sec.
I pilfered that image from Google Maps, baby.
The point is that she grew up on a farm and only knew sorghum as a grain for livestock. She abstracts this idea out to any other grain unknown to her. Oats, though also fed to livestock in this glorious country, are consumed regularly by humans, as well, so they are exempt. Millet, quinoa, bulghar and surely others are firmly in the category of sorghum. Of course, these other grains are widely eaten by humans in countries on the outer rim of the cosmos. IE, not part of Texas.
They are all sorghum to my mother.
Shambal sits in his room wondering idly about his sorghum crop. He tends to worry like an old woman about temperatures, rainfall, sowing times and whatnot when he surely shouldn’t. One can attribute such paranoias to excessive boredom.
There is a surfiet of boredom on his (he laughingly calls it his) moon.
His mind drifts back to a note that daft neighbourly cunt sent him recently. They’d been trading notes for ages now. The small slips of poignant words are better thought through than hours of idle conversation. Shambal much prefers this method of communication. He can muse and ponder as he paces his room, sows his sorghum, or contemplates an octatonic progression he’s wanted to play on his ukulele for ages.
He always forgets fingerings on the ukulele. The daft neighbourly cunt blames it on dementia. Shambal laughs it off as drool splatters uncontrollably over his steaming plate of sorghum.
There you go, my compatriot! boasts the daft neighbourly cunt knowledgeably.
My saliva is freeflowing! It is a faucet! It is an indication of my love for my precious sorghum! he retorts.
Shambal’s solution to his fingering dilemma is to retune the instrument to a differing set of pitches before each practice or discovery session. He briefly contemplates the ukulele as it leans limply in the corner. His thoughts drift quickly back to the daft neighbourly cunt’s note, however.
Here’s what it says:
There was a fork in your proverbial road, my friend, and you chose the way more recently paved and travelled since you were hoping to meet more chicks.
The daft neighbourly cunt certainly got this right. He followed convention instead of turning fate on its cranium and forcing it to follow him. Convention left off on his expansive dirt patch on a moon far from any chicks. No no no…. chicks had been outlawed in his quadrant. His daft neighbourly cunt’s quadrant, also, which happens to be the same quadrant, actually.
No chicks means no shagging. Shambal misses shagging more than most anything from his previous lives. Fate made him a sorghum farmer, instead. Sorghum is said to provide eternal life. Eternal life is an escape from responsibility and an escape from haste. Sorghum is a good compliment to this lifestyle. It’s easy to sow, grow and harvest.
His (he should say their, but he is also a cunt) moon is excessively arid. The temperatures vacillate between 24 and 36 degrees during all seasons. He corrects his thought and blames it on previous lives. Only one season truly exists here.
He sometimes apprasingly and other times lovingly stares at his planter. It is also lazily leaning in the corner (though in a different corner than the ukulele). It’s always set to 4.213 cm. Its interface is easily programmed to plant parallel rows of seed. The sandy soil is first wetted to a depth of approximately eight centimetres. Therefore, the contraption makes two sweeps through the whole of the field.
Shambal is delighted watching the process. He even forgets about shagging for most of the time, though once he wildly masturbated as the planter (who we’ll call José from here on out) sped along row afer row, back and forth, fluidly. He didn’t actually realize he was masturbating until his own fluid splattered up over his chest and chin.
Time is measured by growing season. After José’s poignant journey, he counts 143 days before harvest. A routine set in quickly after his arrival and after the first few growing seasons. 94 additional days always go by for Shambal. He calls the period post-spawn. He likens it to a calm after a child is born (a remnant of memory from old lives) and before it is made into pot coverings, flutes, fibrous baskets and various scaffoldings. The time is pleasant, tranquil and mostly spent on music.
He shakes off these thoughts and rises. Deciding against any form of creativity, he gives the ukulele a swift kick. Shards of bark and wax scatter over the floor. A few splatter over his table. Oddly, they form a near perfect oval. He thinks to himself at this strange phenomenon:
I’ll measure the shape and use it for the next instrument’s construction.
He removes his red pen, which is by far his favourite, from his skin pouch and flips a leaf of parchment in front of him. He scribbles his return note to his daft neighbourly cunt.
It says this:
For sale by owner - another ecosystem teeming with life awaits its apocolypse and some dim ape just has to come up with the cash.
Smiling, he crosses through the last word. He time and again falls victim to residue from former lives. The word’s replacement is obvious.
The note now reads:
For sale by owner - another ecosystem teeming with life awaits its apocolypse and some dim ape just has to come up with the
cashsorghum.
