It always came down to shnick and shnack — table throwing, ear slashing, glass breaking, hitting the host, cussing a family member, jumping out of the window, crashing the car — dysfuntio-fabulations of a sordid kind.
Always.
“What do you think?” she said tiredly, looking up at the doctor.
“Alcoholism,” he replied.
“He just likes to drink,” she said.
“Really?” he mused.
“He is a genius,” she said. “He has done what no one else has done. I want him to be able to do more of that. Throw more paint.”
“Here is the deal,” he replied, “and you are not going to like it. He is sick, and you, you are sicker than he is.”
She schnacked. “Your fired,” she said.
He schnicked.
“Bring him in again.”
It didn’t end there. It never does.
What?
He was suffering from pycho-socio-sicko-chthonico. He had a case of the egotisticomatrio-cyclical-patrio-addictio-protopathia.
What?
It was some kind of variation of abyssopelagic-anhedonic self-disgustico.
Are you sure?
Yes, I’m sure, and it was compounded by heredio-familio-rejecto-emphatica tinged with non-confessional, decompressional nilio-justiofaticom.
Do you mean he was dysfunctional and depressed and he was to proud and insecure to admit that?
Yes, he was.
What kind of fable is this, and who talks like that? And how is it that I am even allowed to interrupt, and contribute and why do we get this summing up and moralizing in the middle when that should be presented in the action and then given up in one line at the end?
It’s a modern kind of fable, a kind of fabulo-emperico dialogue. And by the way, the reader can interrupt the story. They always do, and they always add to it.
Will you just finish?
No, it’s not completely fabulized yet.
Really?
Really! There is more action and then the moral. A fable always has a moral at the end.
Okay, what’s the moral of the story?
I’ll get to that. But first, more action. It scrambled up all fumble-di-medicalio. Got it? It morphed drastofastically into artistico-competico-doministico bombasticus.
Okay? That’s action?
Yes, and then came the climax: a tragico-auto-fininico!
Finally!
He was coming home one night, drunk, crazy, girls in the car and he went off the road. The car flew into the air and his girl friend came flying out of the window, and the huge, shiny, powerful, bling-ridden, paint-covered sheet metal flipped several times through the air — like thrown paint — and came to rest upside down in the woods.
He was dead.
Is that really how it ended? That is so sad.
Yes, those are the facts, post-conclusio, moral-emphatica. Now get out of here, and don’t ever do that to yourself.
Modern Fables and Antifables 