15 + 15 points
Everyday Life by You
April 12th, 2011 6:09 PMThe Ørder of the Wild Onion
Everyday Life: Choose Your Own Adventure
The rising sun brings you up, young adventurer, filtering in through the skylight and prying open your sleep-crusted eyelids.
It is a new day heroic SFØer: Rise and Shine! It's time to tumble out of your ØwO dormitory bunk bed and fall in with the rest of the gang, all lining up, clad in our matching standard issue
Wild-O Ønderwear ("zunderwear"), locking arms now and all bracing to sing the morning song in glorious uni-voice:
♫♪♫ The Morning Song ♪♫
We sing of the Ørder that ever was, and will be,
For it holds the wildest, the best, nothing but we!
A treasure upon earth! An embarrassment of wealth!
To what do we credit this glory? To nothing but ourself!
Until every last free flag has vanished,
The Wild Onion presses on in unending praxis!
Our foes, evermore, beg to be banished,
We acquiesce, collect their tears, and sharpen our axes!
Oh, for love of game and spirit to go unwasted,
Without us, wild and ørderly, little of glory would be tasted!
And to what does all our merrytasking portend?
To nothing but everyday life's very end!
The end to the end to the end,
Wild Onions are we, and nothing else would we ever wish to be!
The magnificent structure which houses this atonal yodeling is a maisonette erected last century, not far from that old Bubbly Creek, by Timothy Blackstone, an acquaintance of those sisters over there at Nativity of Our Lørd who wore hair smocks and liked to cultivate pharmaceutical plants up on the roof (a tradition young Likes Music has lately revived), a few of them hardy enough to survive winds and frost, but most returning, as fragments of peculiar alkaloids, to rooftop earth, along with manure from a trio of prize Iowan Saddleback sows quartered there by Blackstone's successor, and dead leaves off many decorative trees transplanted to the roof by later tenants, and the odd unstomachable meal thrown or vomited there by this or that sensitive epicurean—all got scumbled together, eventually, by the knives of the seasons, to an impasto, feet thick, of unbelievable black topsoil in which anything could grow, not the least being wild onions.
Likes Music hustles up to the roof to pluck some fresh specimens, and Markov nods appreciatively. Markov has become famous for his Wild Onion Breakfasts. Potential messmates throng here from all over Chicagoland, even some who are allergic or outright hostile to wild onions, just to watch—for the politics of bacteria, the soil's stringing rings and chains in nets only God can tell the meshes of, have seen the alliums thrive often to lengths of a foot and a half, yes amazing but true.
Markov strides away, headed for the kitchen. Routine: plug in superb blending machine won from a Hoosier last summer, some poker game, table stakes, somewhere in the southeast, never remember now.... Chop several wild onions into pieces. Make coffee in urn. Get can of milk from cooler. Puree 'nions in milk. Lovely. I would coat all the booze-corroded stomachs of Chicagoland.... Bit of marge, still smells all right, melt in skillet. Peel more wild onions, slice lengthwise. Marge sizzling, in go long slices. Light oven whoomp blow us all up someday, oh, ha, ha, yes. Whole wild onions to go on broiler grill soon as it heats. Find marshmallows....
Well, everyone up, eagerly anticipating the feast, but for now it's time for the rest of us to commence with the morning routine:
*calisthenics
*trust building exercises
*primping
*et cetera, et cetera
Finally, we hear the longed-for sound of Picø manning the cowbell, calling us all to breakfast!
With a clattering of chairs, upended milk crates, benches, and ottomans, Markov's mob gather at the shores of the great refectory table, a southern island well across a tropic or two from chill Tim Blackstone's medieval fantasies, crowded now over the swirling dark grain of its walnut uplands with wild onion omelets, wild onion sandwiches, wild onion casseroles, mashed wild onions molded in the shape of a Chicago bull rampant, wild onions blended with eggs and scraps into batter for Wild-O (née French) toast... tall cruets of pale wild onion syrup to pour oozing over wild onion waffles, a giant glazed crock where diced wild onions have been fermenting since the summer with wild honey and muscat raisins, up out of which one dips foam mugsfull of wild onion sweetdrink... wild onion croissants and wild onion kreplach, and wild onion oatmeal and wild onion jam and wild onion bread, and wild onions flamed in ancient brandy Markov brought back last year from a cellar in the Ozarks...
The breakfast table is a little like Arthur's round one, only it's shaped as such: Ø. This allows a maximum mingling interface for all diners. Plus it's fun to stomp over the top to sit along the inside plank. Samantha Ebay lays herself out across the southeast corner and declares: "Now we are Qnions!" The room's amusement is general and boisterous.
People gut-chuckle and yelp and tickle and flash, all pretty mundane, it happens every day, and then someone tosses an enormous pancake right on the still-prone Ebay's face before giving her a giant (blind) hug. Ebay speed-eats her way to daylight and playfully headbutts Dan, her mystery hugger, to the floor.
Rumblings of the dinning hall.... A full scale food fight is narrowly avoided. There is usually at least one per day, however, provisions have been implemented with an eye toward delaying all food-based warfare until the latter meal of the day, otherwise, as in the past, w.onions had oftentimes found themselves still committing acts of sauce and fruit-centric bombardment from morn' to well into the evening, enveloping the whole of days-on-end in this manner, unable then to turn the Ørder's collective attention to the external world, where it is so desperately needed.
As things are structured now, w.onions are turned out into the street after breakfast with a nearly brutal regularity, all for the greater good really. On the eve's return, the dinner fights have functioned in a relatively self-regulatory manner thus far, though occasionally the eveningly détente has to be enforced by a temporary curfew and/or the chaining of certain select w.onions to their bunk beds.
On parting, all of the Ørder rank-and-file hug and kiss and cry, for sometime (most always) unwilling to part.
Eventually it gets to be too much, and a senior member, for the good of the outer world (deprived of our gifts whilst we are all cloistered away together), has to play the cruel taskmaster, and act to drive our select gang out the front gates. Today, the deed has fallen to Sass Afrass, and she has taken up the ceremonial droving whip, an item with which she is not unfamiliar.
To be blunt, she has skills with all manner of flagellating tools, she's unparalleled in any game of lash and tickle. The leathern ends whistle through the air, leaping out at the tail ends of escaping w.onions. Out in to the world we go.
What will you do today?
- March with Markov
- Declaim with Dan
- Parade with Picø
- Nightwatch with Naming
- Scholasticize with Samantha
- Sing with Sass
- Laugh with Lady Minirex
- Learn with Likes Music
- Go off on an adventure by yourself!
Too long, didn't read.
Like everyday, you wake up at the wild onion compound in the Big Onion; there are pillow fights, organized stretching and yawning, a glorious breakfast, multiple trips to the vomitorium. Along with the other agents of the Ørder, you are forcibly set out into the world. Choose your own adventure.
There is no End.
