Hola, my tiny seafood morsels! Last time we left, you cashed in the custard business that had made you a fortune. You then set about improving your life (snigger) by looking for someone to love you. A mountain to climb, certainly! And, you set yourself to achieve this miracle by having a 'singles' night at Castle Crab with a load of new furniture to enhance the occasion. Will it work, my darling little crab type things? Or will it prove to be another senseless and futile act in the tragedy of life in a benighted universe ruled by insane gods.
Let us consult the vile and bitter prognostications and so discover. Ye gods and little fishes! It begins on something of a surprising note. You're amidst the group of hired faces (to prevent the predictable preponderance of ugliness in any gathering of your associates). And, as mischievous Mercury grinds his ghastly passage (eek) into morbid Scorpio, you find you're possessed of marvellous conversational powers. You make witty remarks about sex and money as the busy messenger gropes in the nether regions of cranky Chiron. You regale the assembled gathering with your daring plans for the future as a Full Moon blazes in arrogant Aries. And, despite the fact that the guests have stayed a week, eaten your food (eek), slept in your bed linen (ugh) and fondled your favourite bath toy (aargh), you're filled with joyful insouciance.
The rooms of your manse resound with badinage and persiflage. You display a verbal mastery like the wits of old such as Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Parker and Pope Clarence the Torturer, a lesser known but well respected ecclesiastical humorist who invented the irrepressible Iron Maiden, the hilarious Heretic's Fork and the jolly Judas Cradle. Mischievous Mercury assails the private parts of narcotic Neptune and you hold your captive audience spellbound, delivering radical yet titillating remarks upon intimacy and erotica, remarks that actually give the impression you know something about the subjects.
At this juncture, sadly, a dissenter rises in your midst, a male member of your family. This ghastly creature rises to abuse you and demean your burgeoning wit, as marauding Mars conjoins in unseemly fashion with the great Sol Invicti. Instead of thrashing the errant creature with barbed wire, forcing him to sleep in wet sheets and go without his dinner (as you'd have done in days of yore), you employ a new strategy in dealing with the recalcitrant. As a New Moon comes in loathsome Libra while jolly Jupiter cavorts with mischievous Mercury, you simply lash the creature with strokes from your rapier wit until the poor wee thing collapses snivelling to the floor. Such a simple victory against an enemy that was no real threat!
Egad, little loonies! Do you realize what you've done? I thought not! You have unleashed a horror from the unspeakable confines of your deepest, darkest reaches. A monster from the crustacean id is arisen and it can see the joke! Egad! Thus, you decide that wit will be your weapon, your stock in trade and your spiritual upliftment from this day forth. You cut a swathe through the social set with which you're involved, as vamping Venus slinks lustfully into morbid Scorpio. With piercing barbs and succulent bait, you draw them all in, hook, line and sinker, as you deliver quips and witticisms whose passage through your limpid lips is like the flow of a mighty river that courses in the wild, unhindered by the boundaries of human limitation. In truth you are a magician of the spoken word, neither verbose nor loquacious, but simply the warbling wit, the quintessential quipster and the punster's non-pareil.
You decide to give a party in your honour to celebrate Halloween and laud your ascension to the upper echelon as a lord of levity, a baron of the bon mot and a duke of jocularity. You will show them all you can rise to the heady climes of joyous personal success, rather than behaving like the miserable, neurotic wretch that everyone (quite rightly) believes you to be!
Darkling night falls and your assembled guests wait upon the jewels that promise to drip from your lips! You plan to begin the evening's entertainment with a tongue-twister about witches, in keeping with the supernatural theme.
But what's this? By all the gods alive and dead, it's a dreadful development that dreadfully develops! Mischievous Mercury slopes into perverse reverse in evil Scorpio! Eek! Egad! Gadzooks! And other quaint expressions to indicate surprise and alarm. What does this mean, my tiny nitwits of the nipper?
Well, I'll tell you. It means you're tongue-tied! The tongue twister you planned to deliver seems to have done its work in a somewhat 'previous' manner. Shriek and double shriek! At the moment of triumph, it seems you're condemned to humiliating personal failure. The silence and gloom of night deepen till your audience begins to mutter, becoming restive and aghast. Great suffering shellfish! What will happen now?
As I'm feeling fatigued and bored to screaming sobs, I shall retire to my truckle bed and my little brown bottle. Return here next month and, if I have thought of further piffle to write with regard to yet another tragic twist in the futile tale of your existence, I shall certainly do so. Ave, crustacean ninnies!
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