The Cactus And the Lizard

So I’m gonna tell you a story. It’s a story about a very small lizard.
Three feet long. Little pink tongue. Top hat. Nails painted purple. Lizard
lived in a ditch next to a convenience store. He usually ate the hot dogs that
were left in the trash at the end of the day. He also liked blue slushies,
Reese’s peanut butter cups and dead monkey brains.
One day the lizard, whose name was Cornelius Frantuckus, was going
on a walk to see his good friend Monchocolo the Hare, and on the way he
saw something rather unusual: a dancing cactus.
The cactus said,
“Cornelius, would you join me in this dance?”
and Cornelius looked into the cactus’s blue glimmering eyes and said,
“There is only one ocean of consciousness, but there are two joint
wooden pieces.”
And by the joint wooden pieces he was referring to himself and the
cactus, and by the ocean of consciousness he referring to something he heard
some drugged up hippie talking about at the convenience store.
So the cactus and lizard danced. The danced the tango and the polka and
the waltz, and at the end the lizard looked into the cactus’s eyes and said,
“My dear, you have so much to live for. Why did the petals of your
soul drift slowly through the wind like freedom on the wings of dying dove?”
And the cactus didn’t say anything, but merely held the lizard close to
his breast, and stroked his lizard hair, and tickled his lizard tummy and said,
“Don’t leave me, because I feel our separation would be like division
of one grain of sand, and if you divide one grain of sand, there is nothing to
keep the earth from falling apart.”
So the cactus and lizard lived together like one united grain of sand.
They went to cactus-lizard dancing competitions across the nation and even
took blue ribbons sometimes, but it didn’t matter. The cactus liked
butterscotch ice-cream. The lizard liked peppermint ice-cream. Neither of
them liked fluffy pillows. They both liked the kind that had a little bit of
oomph to them. And they lived for many years as a happy couple, and one
day they went back to the convenience store and there was a robbery.
There was a large walrus looking man with a mask and a gun and a
rope of licorice and he was holding up the cashier, who was an old man,
almost a hundred years old, whose name was Friedman Friedman. And the
lizard and the cactus marched on in, wearing the cowboy boots and spurs.
And the soundtrack kicked in which was a song from an old John Wayne
western. And then there was a shootout, and by shootout I mean the robber
was shooting at things, and the cactus was jumping on the robber, putting
his spikes in his butt, and now the robber was a real bad shot because he was
missing an eye from a time a Siamese cat clawed him real bad. Didn’t have
no depth-perception, know what I’m sayin? So he ran out of the convenience
store with spikes in his butt, and lizard spat at him as he ran, and the lizard,
his spit burned into his skin like hot skillets and he collapsed to the ground
and was buried by divided pieces of rock.
The cactus and lizard were heroes. They even got their pictures put
up on the front door of Walmart. But they still weren’t happy. They felt
something was missing. So they called up an astronaut. And they said,
“Mister Astronaut Sir, with your muscley legs and your smart sciency
brain, and your oxygen helmet, we feel like something is missing in our
lizard-cactus relationship, and we were wondering, since you got such
muscley legs, and such a sciency brain, and such an oxygeny, helmet if you
could maybe give us, uh, some pearls of wisdom, since you’ve seen the earth
from outer space and all?”
And the astronaut cleared his throat, and he drank some grape juice,
and he scratched his groin and he said that earth from space is nothing more
than the last lick of ice-cream: it’s beautiful, but it can’t last.
The cactus sobbed, and the lizard wailed, and they both licked each
other until they could lick no more, and passed away in each other’s arms.