How Jeff survived the British Desert and acquired the tentacular violin…

This story is completely true, and we all have one. More to come…

“Two weeks in the desert will change a man,” Jeff muttered, his voice scoured by sun and heat. “Glistening lakes ever in the distance, shimmering silver on the horizon, filled with sweet, cool, life-giving water. They were lies. Lies! The Madness. The Heat. The Sand, woe, always the Sand! Chafing... chafing... chafing..."

The insane fire faded from his eyes and finally he slept like a dog (dreaming of chasing rabbits through endless fields of grass). Jeff had wandered into the Great British Desert not twenty minutes before. The desert, located in Mauritania, is really quite puny, and if the frequent thunderstorms aren’t enough to keep you away, then bear in mind that you can get a pretty nasty sunburn when it isn’t raining.

A shaft of light streamed through a porthole and pierced Jeff in the eyeball. He awoke, shackled to the bulwarks of a Spanish frigate heading for the South Seas. He heard sea chanteys. A skeleton was chained up beside him. And, dear lord, is that a parrot? Suddenly he realized this predicament was entirely too cliché. Breaking the chains, but leaving the bulwarks relatively unharmed, he battled his way to the main deck and dove into the sea, declaring, “I don’t know how to swim!”

It wasn’t long before he was thrown up on the barnacled shores of a giant’s armpit. Palm trees grew from a thick, sweaty mat of hair and Birds of Paradise nested there. For days he roamed savannahs and glens, for grass had grown where skin should be. And, in a moment of complete cosmic psychosis, the giant exploded, and Jeff was launched high into the air.

In many ways, Jeff’s life is best described as a series of massive explosions…

The mystery of how the tentacular violin came into being is… a mystery. All anyone knows, and that includes Jeff, is that one day he arrived at band practice, opened his case, and gasped (For over an hour. One long inhalation, causing a massive low pressure system that still lingers somewhere over the Atlantic). The old violin had been replaced with one carved from the tentacular hook of a giant squid. With reverence that even the Pope would find awe-inspiring, Jeff’s trembling hand reached out and grasped the object. He took the bow and slowly drew it across the glimmering calcium filaments that stretched across the instrument. The violin was silent. Then, imperceptively, a tremulous note sang out. A primal scream escaped Jeff’s lips. His left brain fled, and his right brain left, leaving him in the middle with nothing but the most celestial instrument he had ever seen.

Thankfully, Jeff managed to piece together the semblance of a mind. Practice continued as usual. And, though the spectacular tentacular violin has yet to define its true origins, no one in their right mind, or their left, dared question where Jeff got it.

And thusly went going just so did the story go, and so it is today.