Bobby & the Pink Floyd Glugh-Glugh Tree

( - for my friend, DELETE FRANCE - )

Today, I’d like to tell you a story about my angry friend Bobby and his amazing Pink Floyd Glugh-Glugh Tree. He’s the guy with the sandy-colored hair and the creepy squint you see me with sometimes. Not lately, mind you, but sometimes.

And to the best of my recollection – which admittedly is far from perfect – Bobby’s always been a fan of a British psychedelic/progressive rock band from the 1970’s called Pink Floyd. As long as I’ve known him, he has been. He hasn’t always been angry like he most definitely is now, though. The anger is something new.

That anger? Well, that’s just started since he got the Pink Floyd Glugh-Glugh Tree.

And really, even that didn’t start off so bad. A few weeks back – the day of the storm when the fence fell down in my back yard – it was just an anonymous envelope full of seeds and a small book of instructions. And Bobby mentioned that he had gotten this envelope in the mail. It wasn’t anything that either of us thought much about.

 

But then a couple weeks passed, the kind of weeks where you’re so busy focusing on what seems at the time like an important project that you fail to notice time passing at all, and I showed up at my Bobby’s house and there was this tree. An enormous tree, many years old you would have thought, and taking up a good portion of his small back yard. 

The Pink Floyd Glugh-Glugh Tree.

It went like this: I was inside Bobby’s house, flipping channels on his television. “Ya wanna watch ‘The Simpsons’?”  I yelled out to Bobby.

And then Bobby, he pulled out this shiny silver ball, kind of like a big ball bearing, the size of a tennis bell or thereabouts.  And Bobby, why, he wrote on the silver ball with a special thick marker, a big thick marker with a label on it I couldn’t make out, something like hieroglyphics. Bobby took the strange marker and he wrote on the silver ball.  He wrote “The Simpsons” on it.

Then Bobby took the ball and walked out back. He walked right up to that Pink Floyd Glugh-Glugh Tree and stuffed the silver ball into an opening in the trunk.  There was this awful slurping sound as the tree took the ball into its dark interior. It was a sound of gassy consumption, of a … I shudder to think of it even now.

After a few moments, Bobby took a step back, smiling from ear to ear. The tree, it emitted this gurgling sound, and a distinctive – unforgettable, even – “Glugh-glugh.” 

And out popped the silver ball!

But now, instead of having Bobby’s question written on the side, it had other writing. I can’t for the life of me even speculate as to how that writing appeared on there during the time that the ball had been inside that tree. But the ball now had new writing on it, just the same.  Looking over Bobby’s shoulder, I could make out something about Simpsons creator Matt Groening being a fan of art rock, and of a Pink Floyd reference in some Simpsons episode or other. Something about walking hammers when Homer accidentally put hallucinogens in Springfield’s canned fruit supply.

Bobby read the silver ball closely, furrowing his brow with undue concentration.  Then he said to me, “Sure.  I can watch ‘The Simpsons’.”

To tell you the truth, I didn’t think much of the incident at the time, as I was fairly stressed out from work and, well, on a lot of drugs.  But gradually, over the next week, I started to take more notice of changes in Bobby’s behavior. He fixed breakfast according to strict dietary specifications that his tree borrowed from Pink Floyd’s 1970 album Atom Heart Mother. He got rid of his faithful dog, Roy, because of the tree’s warnings about the unflattering social picture painted of canines on Pink Floyd’s Animals album. 

This, now this was getting to be weird stuff, even for me.  

Then came the day when I asked Bobby – now clearly a more angry Bobby – whether he wanted to watch the show, “House, M.D.”   Like before, he wrote the question on a silver ball, plugged the ball into the tree in his back yard. 

And the tree went “Glugh-glugh” and out popped the ball again. Like before.

Bobby read the ball.  “No,” he informed me stoically.  “Hell no, I won’t watch that damn show.”

I took a step back, a bit confused. “Um… Season Two of ‘House’ had an indirect reference to former Floyd singer Syd Barrett’s schizophrenia. And it’s on the same channel as ‘The Simpsons’, at any rate.”

“House is on Fox!” Bobby shouted at me angrily. His face was drawn out, distorted, animalistic.  “FoxNews attacked Floyd’s Roger Waters for some political statements he made during a concert two years ago!  They are a part of the subhuman, highly mobilized anti-Pink Floyd conspiracy in the corporate media of this country! Get’em up against the wall!”

Needless to say, I didn’t go to visit Bobby for a while after that.

But that wasn’t the end of it.

A few days later, I was talking to Bobby’s sister, Anne. I was talking to her on the telephone. I was talking to her about some local news.

I was talking to Bobby’s sister, Anne, about local news when I heard – clearly and unmistakably – across the phone line, a distinctive “Glugh-glugh.”  I heard it clear as day, and then Anne said to me: “Don’t quote me something from that immoral pro-Chevy paper, the Houston Chronicle.  Those bastards would like to see Ford Motors go out of business entirely!”

Evidently, you see, Anne had received seeds for a Ford Motors Glugh-Glugh Tree in the mail. Her Glugh-Glugh Tree spit out propaganda from a pro-Ford perspective and, like Bobby’s tree, was slowly becoming sick back there in the flaky Houston soil.  Slowly becoming poisoned.

Then the day after that, one of my co-workers brought silver balls in to work that explained everything in the world from the perspective of chicken farming. 

Glugh-glugh.

And I switched on my radio, tuned it into a talk station.  A caller was complaining about his ankle, which he’d recently sprained.  I heard a slurping sound, and I heard a Glugh-glugh, and the host screamed, “Liberalism! Liberalism caused your sprained ankle!  And it caused the storm last night, and it gave my dog heartworms, and liberalism stole my shoes and caused my Uncle Arthur’s pancreatitis!” 

You can’t hear the glughs in Multiply blogs, but they’re there, just the same, I know.  I see the signs – the entries about how if we don’t advocate the killing of each and every Muslim, it means we want to be forced to pray to Allah.  The pro-Hillary entries, which nothing but an insanely evil Hillary Glugh-Glugh Tree could ever explain. Ron Paul supporters with that faraway, glazed-over look in their eyes.

And don’t even get me started on the rantings and ravings of my neighbors, the Sneetches, the ones with the bellies with stars.  It seems that most of the evil in the world is caused by a well-organized cabal of Sneetches without stars on thars. 

In the end, with the glugh-glugh filling the air wherever I went, I decided to hightail it back to where it all began. I went on back to the house of my angry friend, Bobby.  I found him out back right next to the tree. And the tree’s thick roots, they’d grown into his body and grown into his head.  They’d wrapped ‘round his eyes, though somehow, he could still see.

 

He could sort of still see, anyway.  The world he saw through that root was just a battleground, a non-stop battleground between pro-Pink Floyd and anti-Pink Floyd forces.  And no matter who you were, if you were not rabidly pro-Pink Floyd (in a really crazy way, actually), then you were the enemy.

I was the enemy.

“Would you like to watch TV or get between the sheets / Or contemplate this violent freeway / Would you like something eat?” Bobby sang, shouting out in a strange and menacing way, complete with faux-British accent.  “Would ya like to learn to fly? / Would you like to see me try? / Would you like to call the cops? / Do you think it’s time I stopped? / Why are you running away?”

I hold in my hand at this very moment an envelope I received today. An envelope full of seemingly non-threatening seeds. Just, you know, seeds.

Seeds for a Freethinker Glugh-Glugh Tree. A tree that would tell me how to think in a way that defies authority, that spits in the face religious and political institutions, that does not apply the boring rules of society. The information on the balls it would spit out, well, they’d brainwash me into seeing the rest of the world as brainwashed. 

And of course, based on what I’ve seen around here lately, the rest of the world might really be brainwashed, thanks to all these goddamn glugh-glugh trees.

But I think I’ll just flush the seeds, anyway. Or maybe I’ll throw them in a drawer and give it more thought in the morning.

It’s been a long week, and I’m a bit tired.

I mean, do you want the seeds? Life is so simple when every answer is there on the silver ball. Glugh-glugh…