374.24-27

The forgein offils is on the shove to lay you out dossier. Darby's in the yard, planning it on you, plot and edgings, the whispering peeler after cooks wearing an illformation.

Be especially alert for spies, agents both foreign and domestic, informers, narcs, stoolpigeons, sleuths, private investigators, and the actor who played Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but only if he betrays a thin American accent. (Alternatively, if you go to the gym and have to use a spotter for weight-lifting, make absolutely sure it is someone you have never seen before, preferably someone who is wearing cinnamon board shorts embroidered with a gamboge logo depicting a cautious jockey astride a grizzly bear.) Necessary components of your vigilance should include keeping a stiff, clammy hand on any briefcases, journals, or magazine stacks, and changing your tie every twenty-five minutes or so.

Today is your day for fisticuffs. Roll up your sleeves, skip into a fast bob-and-weave, and give your mother-in-law whatfor. With her bank account the way it is, she shouldn't be betting on the squared circle anyway.

Expect your garden to bear a prodigious crop. Since winter reigns, I assume you are cultivating an ice garden. While the minerals and nutrients in frost-vegetables are somewhat vitiated compared to "heat-vegetables," the significantly lower pest rates are enough to recommend the enterprise. It goes without saying that any snowforts you build will be nigh unassailable as long as you expend sufficient energies on tactics and logistics. Whistle or hum one of your favorite pop tunes while strategizing; Goethe's observation regarding architecture will never be of more use.

Satisfy your cravings for uncommon or exotic food items as long as there is at least one goat in sight. Goat bodyparts or memorabilia (hunting rifles, goat-butter churns, mixed doubles tennis trophies) are acceptable as long as you maintain eye contact with said object for the duration of your mastication and digestion.

625.19-21

Why, them's the muchrooms, come up during the night. Look, agres of roofs in parshes. Dom on dam, dim in dym.

Labyrinths will feature prominently in your day; their appearance can be turned to your advantage through assiduously replicating yourself. (For instance, call up many of your friends and tell each one to meet you at a different location around town; make sure the meetings are scheduled for the same time. Show up for all of them. Post pictures of yourself on facebook doing fantastical things, like riding a robotic alligator or interrogating a Manichaean. Emerge simultaneously from a number of doors in one moderately long corridor, preferably while being chased by a man in the front half of a zebra costume. In various flowerpots, bury any recent fingernail clippings that you may have managed to retain; fertilize the soil with a teaspoon of lemon juice and six ounces of crushed monkshood. Et cetera.) If you see any dirty old men astride canals, waterways, or even a leaky toilet, you will have to turn your fog lights on for the rest of the day; if you don't own a car, purchase a pocket flashlight and lash it to a baseball cap. The flashlight does not need to be switched on. If you have been biding your time, now is the moment to make that land investment you've had your eye on. While signing the papers, keep repeating to yourself: "revenge is a dish best served cold."

Obviously, any mushrooms you eat today will either have gone bad or be of the poisonous variety. That being said, trust your drug dealer with your life.

Snails & Cinnamon Buns

Today Zach is masquerading as a cartographic hoodlum, playing "fast and loose with faith" we have in the diviners that describe the upcoming shapes of our knock-kneed days and voluptuous nights. He knows just as well as you or I (and better, undoubtedly, than Pili) that "Natural Born Lovers" technically has a Mercy St. mailing address, even though the degraded portico leading to the entrance door does wrap around from Nature Ave. To fudge the facts merely in order to promote a club from which he's received "patronage," shall we say, from the owner is skeezy but not unexpected.

I think it's obvious that the reference in today's passage is to the natural food store Oreganics on Nature, managed by Bjorn Lorvas (who, in full disclosure, I should say is a family friend and a wonderful all-around person), and located further down Nature Ave., across from the Mambo's drive-thru. Their in-store bakery is just to die for; I highly recommend the schnecken -- which are obviously the target of the enigmatic "mouth of mandibles" phrase, an interpretation for which I do commend Zach, despite his clear devotion to the tawdry and meretricious in the earlier part of his explanation.

385.18-21

It brought the dear prehistoric scenes all back again, as fresh as of yore, Matt and Marcus, natural born lovers of nature, in all her moves and senses, and after that now there he was, that mouth of mandibles

Nostalgia should be paramount in your endeavors today; it is important to connect to the emotional and psychic streams that irrigate your vitality and creativity. In keeping with that, watch the special on T-Rex that airs at 8:35PM (EST) on the Discovery Channel. (Sources indicate there is a CGI promo at the end pitting a great white against a tyrannosaurus on a custombuilt jetski.) Don't take "yore" to be the Sir Walter Scott kind of yore; it's a homonym for the possessive pronoun: find "your" friends Matt and Mark, who I imagine to be two underenergized Tweedledee & Tweedledum mercenaries working for the Bank of America legal counsel, and take them to the gentlemen's club "Natural Born Lovers" on Nature Avenue. Don't tip unprecedentedly well unless you relish an intractable case of "the drip".

A caution: "mouth of mandibles" may prompt you to think of chittin-covered xenomorph jaws protruding at all angles like a Czech Hedgehog or one of those brobdingnagian telescoping K'nex spheres that hang from the atrium ceilings in metropolitan science museums. Don't be put off by that misconception! "Mandible" is an archaic adjective for a comestible -- something that can be eaten -- so the unnamed male here is merely munching on some goodies (ricecakes smeared with crystalized honey, a bleeding twist of red liquorice, too much gum). Take heed, though, as gustatorial overextension may disgust your observers and admirers -- perhaps that crinkly-coiffed [lady / gentleman] with the paisley eye-patch I see approaching from behind you? Well done, sir or madam, well done!

The Porridge-Kitchen Story

I think that an incident that occurred a few months ago sheds some light on why Zach omitted what is probably the most important part of yesterday's passage -- but don't let me get "ahead" of myself (excuse the pun ... which you'll see). We had just left a -- I believe the phrase translates best as -- "porridge-kitchen" (? any help from Germans here?) on Bindestrasse. Zach was swinging (a word I use for the sake of poetic description, the reduced pendulum action of his arms being a common topic of conversation amongst his detractors) his ebony cloth shopping bag, which contained some bulky mass I can't quite remember and also a thin topbound pad of celadon notepaper from which some of the sheets had turned back around the spine and come frilling out of the top of his bag, creating quite an exacerbating rustling for someone with my sensitive hearing. He was walking on my right, and I, since we were walking northeast (having turned right out of the "porridge-kitchen") was closest to the street, acting, I'm sure, in the subtle masculine capacity which Zach subconsciously assigns me when we are in public, even though I know a number of people who've expressed no surprise when it's revealed that he considers himself the more masculine of the two.

Anyway, as we talked, we approached a natty old woman who was on the inside of the sidewalk and pushing one of those terrible streetpurpose shopping carts, the kind about the size of a rolling suitcase but that look like a giant metal basket and are harnessed to an invisible rattle-machine that appears to use as fuel the odor given off by slowly decomposing worsted peacoats and loose guttersoaked boot laces. So we rapidly catch up with this tottering octogenarian and her clunky purse-on-wheels, but Zach is so oblivious to the woman's presence that I find myself getting pushed behind him, diagonally, to make room for the three of us abreast on the narrow concrete. It is only on obtaining this new position, arranged like a flopeared rook in mid move on Jim Henson's (R.I.P.) muppet chess set, that my eyes are drawn to a languorous unfolding in the soft depths of this woman's pushcart, a domain which I had thought, until then, contained only the corpulent messes of translucent plastic shopping bags cannibalistically stuffed with the cadavers of other members of their own brittle species. Then this gaunt monkey (I don't feel right using "gaunt" to describe a creature with so much fur, but it's really that cheekbone pattern of facial fur that gives those munchkin simians their hunger artist aspect) climbs out of that jerryrigged ballpit. And then I think, boy, it's carrying its fragile little head as though that cluster of sticky shopping bags adhering to its scalp is much heavier than it must be. But as the monkey reaches over, tremulous, to grab at the leafy notebook plumply calling to it from the next bag over, what I had thought was a clump of shopping bags resolves visually into a huge, hairless, bubbly lesion. As I trip in astonishment, grabbing Zach's arm and bringing it around and down, his wrist descends and, for a shining moment, before the two bodies are united in a spray of blood and pain when the monkey sinks its fangs into his skin, it looks like a David Lynch shrunken zombie is beginning to scale the heights of skinny brain mountain. So that probably explains Zach's aversion to mentioning strange heads. And probably cabbage, too.

409.11-14

 -- Goodbye now, Shaun replied, with a voice pure as a churchmode, in echo rightdainty, with a good catlick tug at his cocomoss candylock, a foretaste in time of his cabbageous brain's curlyflower.

An auspicious day for studying. Play archaic music in a space possessing fine acoustics; your presence in the aforementioned room is not mandatory. If possible, eat caramelized coconut shavings. Try not to antagonize any of your pets (cats, rabbits, an overly familiar arthropod); take special care to avoid tantalizing any animate beings (including robotic prototypes) with leaves of greenery. Take note of the dawn, or, if you have allowed it to pass unregarded, remember that the crepuscular mist of twilight is its empyreal mirror image.

379.35-36

We've been carried away. Beyond bournes and bowers. So we'll leave it to Keyhoe, Danelly and Pykemhyme, the three muskrateers

The phrase "carried away" is a red herring, at least if it is considered idiomatically. You and your companions will literally be conveyed elsewhere. Don't get your panties/boxer-briefs (black, striped, polka-dotted) in a bunch by failing to interpret figuratively the mention of "bournes and bowers"; kidnapping, abduction, rapine: these are all eventualities which you can safely preclude from the day's worries, unless, of course, you are in a geographic or sociopolitical position which renders those possibilities a daily threat. Guard yourself against gentlemen or ladies approaching you in a manner which indicates they wish to hoist you above their shoulders, release a rousing cry of camaraderie, and dash your limiting preconceptions to pieces. A facile suggestion occurs: hold hands with all of your companions all of the time, or prime yourself for ersatz weeping (one could easily read muskra-tears) if danger should loom.

Do not eat any fish. Disabuse as many persons as possible of the notion that D'Artagnan was one of the Musketeers (Mousquetairs) of the title; that honor goes to Athos, Porthos, and Aramis.