Summer of the Jackal

Sweetness Gyorgichscka,

First, business: How are my goats growing? Send me a goat sandwich immediately; I am impatient to know how they are doing.

(Damn this new Facebook timeline!!! I cannot see their pictures as once I could, and love them.)

But my sweetness - Canada! What a country! Ottawa! What a city!

Here the streets are wind with bounty: all the delicious golden dogs you can cram into carpet bag! And the rivers, my little garlic, the rivers (and so many of them!) are bursting with ducks, geese, and tasty swimming hog they call a “musk-rat”. I enclose a sample of its bacon for your teeth to try it.

I have no more resignations. I urge you to drop all of your tools, your mud-rakes and your snake pincers – drop them at once! Kiss dear Uncle Gologrish on the cheek, pat once more the balding skull of Urpa Gagorsh, the Lucky Dullard, and buy with earth tubers the next train ticket to this magnificent place.

One thing, nonetheless, I must advise you if ever you decide to forsake the leech-fields of our cruel ancestors. The people here are not disgusting and, like we, rhino of skin – here they feel the weather, my toenail, they feel it like we feel the tears of jackal. They always talk of it! It is etiquette.

I will give you a for example: I was in the middle of driving my caravan towards the market vegetable prison, to get a nice onion for my sandwich (the onions here are so big! I could not count how big it was!)  – I am accompanied by a Canadian man in a suit who asks me for “carpool”. What to say to him?

I search my national history for a topic – I try many times. I find the 30 campaigns of Ingra Garganook-Ganur are hardly correct for a man with a Mickey Mouse tie. We are on the brink of utter silence. Grasping, I think carefully. I sweat.

“Hot!” I say finally. (This is the Canadian word for “hot”).

Ah! How he smiled! How he woke up from the torpor of the afternoon slug-ghosts – he was then the one to look me in the eye, to touch my kneecap. He smiled smilingly and said to my face:

“It’s not the heat. It’s the humidity!”

Geeschka, How much trouble this one phrase has saved me! I can attribute to it on many times the preservation of my seven souls.

It was not one day later, I am in line at the store for a “Teeh’mortons” (Canadian word for unbaptized vampire bread). Unfortunately I hit a man in front of me with my fresh hockey stick – oh he was angry! I have never heard so many “buddy!” in my life, which is the Canadian scream for “asckhragor!”

What do to? He is going to hit – I close my eyes, pray to jackal, and whimper out:

“Hot! But you know, it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity!”

All of a sudden he is all grinning fox. The man, he is I am suspect in love with me! We buy the boiling black broth together, and we roll-up each others’s rims. Salvation.

Or take further note: I am at the Canadian bank, a place where the cleverest of men can steal pens. One must converse with the pen-farmers first, however, and distract them.

“Hello sir” she says to me (I eye the pens) “how are you doing” (slow reach) “today?”

Here I nod and smile, and give the broad wink.

“Well,” (reach further) “it’s not the heat. It’s the humidity!”

“I KNOWWW!” she screams, at which point I empty the pens into my sack with the golden dogs and bacon and take-off for homewards, a-cackling.

Learn this sentences, my mossrock, practice them every day on the trip to the well and back. Sing them to yourself in the form of the witch ballads, weave them into the folk scarves, carve them onto the wishing sticks that you cast with fury at the cats of Baba Yaga.

It’s not the heat

Or agralala ichikamee!

It’s the humidity

Oh yes, by jackal

It’s the humidity

Or agralala ichikamee!

Once you have learned them, come. And bring goats – call them our children for passport.

I crunch your paws,

-Bozaqo Ape-Son Impotence Number the Seventh.