Pemulis and the Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day

[Welcome to the first official Guest Blogger post on GrenobleWMD, contributed by loyal reader Gzowski. If you have a story to share with the readers of this blog, please submit it to our editors. We regret that only those submissions selected for publication will receive a response.

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[Page 1]

        Pemulis was worried.  Not just apprehensive.  Extremely worried.

        Why, you ask, was Pemulis so worried?  After all, he had a loving wife, a decent job, a kickass apartment (if you could ignore the 572 trains that passed by every day), and friends in many nations not currently subject to famine, disease, or armed insurrection.

        Pemulis was worried because his parents were coming to visit.  Not just visiting in the sense of passing through on their way to somewhere else, but visiting in the sense of sleeping in the Pemulian bed, requiring food several times a day, occupying the bathroom whenever Pemulis felt the call of nature, and generally clogging up the hall with shoes, suitcases, and other paraphernalia.

        “Qu’est-ce qu’il y a ?” asked Joelle, who, having secured a solid 80% in her German exam, was no longer obliged to practice her German at home.

        “Grrr!” said Pemulis. “My parents are coming.  They’ll want to visit castles and museums and churches and fortresses and all sorts of places likely to be full of American tourists.”

        “It could be worse,” said Joelle. “They might be German tourists.”

        “Horrible!” said Pemulis, employing a word that was later to figure largely in the title of the story.

        “We could take your parents out to dinner,” suggested Joelle. “That wouldn’t be very touristy, and I wouldn’t have to wash the dishes.”

        “Good idea,” said Pemulis.
        “And we could invite our friends, Torstar and Alitalia.”

        “A very good idea,” said Pemulis. 

        Here Pemulis made a joke about his parents, but the joke had to be removed from the narrative for reasons of political correctness.

        “On the other hand,” said Pemulis, “we’ll have to sleep on the train side of the apartment.”

        “At least we can sleep in a sort-of bed,” said Joelle, “rather than the air mattress that has a hole in it.”

        “There’s a hole in the air mattress?” asked Pemulis, aghast.

        “Yes,” said Joelle. “The air leaks out slowly until you find yourself on the hard floor at 3 o’clock in the morning.”

        “How do you know?” asked Pemulis.

        “I read ahead in the story,” said Joelle.

        “That’s not fair,” said Pemulis. “But what happens on Friday?”

        “We go to Neuschwanstein and your dad makes up a silly song about it.”

        “Amazing,” said Pemulis.

        “It’s not that great a song.”

        “No, I meant that you can read the future.”

        “Not only that,” said Joelle, “but I got 80% on my German exam.”

        “Well, that is laudable,” said Pemulis, “but not quite as amazing as seeing into the future.”

        “I didn’t see,” said Joelle. “I just read ahead in the story.  If it’s not in the story, then I don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of knowing what’s going to happen.”

[Page 2]

        “Did you just make that up?” asked Pemulis. “The snowball part?”

        “No,” said Joelle. “It’s also in the story.  On page 5.”

        Here a relative of Pemulis objected that it was not possible for characters in a story to know what was going to happen to them by reading ahead in the story that they were in. However, another relative of Pemulis, an as yet unmarried one, was totally down with it, thus proving that marriage often dulls one’s capacity to suspend disbelief.  This is why Neil Young is getting divorced after 36 years of marriage.  Or it could be the fact that he doesn’t smoke pot anymore and suddenly realized that his wife is, in fact, no longer 19 and nubile but is instead 61 and sagging.

        Later on, the Pemulian parents arrived and everyone had a great time.

THE END

        Commentary on the story was not long in arriving:

JSTOR460:  What kind of a story is this?  You can’t just end the story without any sort of denouement.  What happened in the rest of the week?

LEAFSRULE:  Yeah.  What he said.  Leafs rule.

JSTOR460:  This blog is about Pemulis and his family.  It’s not about a stupid hockey team.

LEAFSRULE:  *****

[This comment has been removed as it contravenes accepted norms of communication between civilized adults.]

RUSTY13:  Hey hey my my.  Neil Young can never die.  More to the divorce than meets the eye.  Hey hey my my.

JSTOR460:  Hey hey rust for brains!  Didn’t you notice that this blog is not about Neil Young?  It’s about Pemulis and Joelle, two Canadian kids just doing the best they can.

RHYMINSIMON:  “Can” doesn’t rhyme with “Joelle.”

RUSTY13:  Yeah, JSTOR460.  What do you say to that?

LEONARDO:  I found this latest blog to be of great personal interest as I too have often attended the Mozart Festival in Salzburg, and when Herbert von Karajan was guest conductor, we would often take the funicular up to the fortress and enjoy a tasty Stiegl brew while discussing what was wrong with the last performance.

RUSTY13:  Who mentioned Salzburg?

JSTOR460:  What blog are you reading, LEONARDO?

LEAFSRULE:  Habs suck.

RHYMINSIMON:  OK, here are some rhymes for Joelle:
        So fell
        Toe bell

        Low smell

        Oh hell

        Pretzel

[Page 3]

JSTOR460:  “Pretzel” doesn’t rhyme with “Joelle.”  The last part of it does, but it still doesn’t scan because the stress is on the first syllable in “Pretzel” and the stress in “Joelle” is on the second syllable, or it would be “Joel,” which is a man’s name.

RUSTY13:  Also, “Neil” doesn’t rhyme with “Joelle.”

PEMULIS81:  You are all crazy.  I don’t want you reading and commenting on my blog, even if it is actually a guest blog and full of ridiculous stuff that I didn’t say or do. When I write my own blog, it’s full of dreamy stuff suggesting that beneath my edgy tech-savvy exterior beats the heart of a romantic philosopher, a Kerouac for our time.

LEAFSRULE:  Who’s Kerouac?

TSNINSIDER:  Kerouac was drafted 13th overall by the Islanders in ’87, but he never got further than the AHL and retired in ’93.  He now runs a bed-and-breakfast in St. Thomas, Ontario.

PEMULIS81:  Not that Kerouac.  A different Kerouac.

LEAFSRULE:  Quack, quack.

JOELLE:  Pemully-Pooh!  Your parents are here.

PEMULIS81:  Haven’t I asked you not to call me that?

JOELLE:  Yes, but it’s funny.

PEMPARENTS:  Where should we put our shoes?

PEMULIS81:  Grrrr . . . . . 

        At this point in our story, a train went by and the conversation was lost in a cacophony of trainlike sounds.

        The story continues on page 4.

[Page 4]

        “Hey, hey!  Rise and shine

        It’s time to visit Neuschwanstein . . .”

        “Christ!” said Pemulis under his breath.  “What now?”

        Pemulis Père had intruded into the room where Pemulis and Joelle were pretending to be asleep.  This intrusion was less well received than it might have been by the junior Pemuli.

        The last two lines of the song were lost as Pemulis Père was giggling to himself, an action of which he was all too often guilty.  Pemulis Mère was pretending not to have heard.

        Neuschwanstein, in case you are ignorant of the history of the place and too proud to quickly consult Wikipedia, which is what the rest of us do, was at that moment resting comfortably on a mountain in southern Germany, awaiting the arrival of the Pemulis clan—father, mother, Number 2 son, and daughter-in-law.

        Now Pemulis Pater was singing his song in the shower.  Pemulis was grinding his teeth, in the certainty that some of his remaining hairs had fallen out in the night and found their way into the mattress of their pull-out couch, which they were soon to offer to a Pemulian friend, the vivacious Sophie, on whom Joelle intended to keep a watchful eye.

        In deference to our digital age, a cookie has instructed the story at this point to give way to advertising, in this case for Oktoberfest wear.

        The story resumes.

        A Pemulian relative:  I’m not related to anyone in this story.  

        Another Pemulian relative:  I’m marrying an Anglican, so I’ll believe almost anything.

        The ghost of DFW:  It’s not my fault.  I keep telling everyone here, “It’s not my fault.”

        A Pemulian friend:  If I had read this first, I would never have bought a car from Pemulis because of his weird relatives.

        “How much further?” asked the parents of Pemulis as they climbed the road that would take them above the  tallest spire of Neuschwanstein, bent on securing a vantage 

[Page 5]

point from which they could, if not battered to exhaustion by Chinese tourists, take a photograph of the castle, built by the mad King Ludwig, who died in mysterious circumstances—a fate considered appropriate by all the servants in the castle, who had long harboured thoughts of hurling the king from the top of any one of the towers of Neuschwanstein, so long as his descent was swift and fatal.  As we know, it is difficult to get loyal servants and keep them, and this was true even in King Ludwig’s day, when the old and faithful might be replaced at any moment by the younger and prettier, as Neil Young is hoping to do as soon as the divorce is finalized.

        [Here followed an extended account of Neuschwanstein’s role in the Second World War, a story that regretfully did not make the final cut, but you can look it up in Wikipedia, which has been previously recommended.]

        Later that night, Pemulis and Joelle awoke to find themselves less well insulated from the hardness of their floor than they had anticipated when they retired, their air mattress having exhaled steadily during the night until it ran out of breath entirely, while the vivacious Sophie slept on, blissfully unaware of the painful drama enacted only centimetres from where she lay.

        “Can we fix it?” asked Joelle.

        “I don’t think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell,” replied Pemulis.

        The story comes full circle.

                                            THE END

        “Is it really the end?”

        “It’s The End.”

        “But what about the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day?”

        “That’s today.”

        “Today?”

        “It’s the day you read this story.”

        “Oh.”