I could call it a dis-oriented expression rather than just an express but how far can such things be pushed? It’s not easy putting things on top of other things, like getting into the “top-25.”

As noted, in previous posts, we understand the mechanism of the frog-scorpion steam engine. And I’ve told you about the murder. Now we have to see what we can make of the murder’s dis-oriented expression.

Let’s start with gumby engineers. This is another Monty Python reference, where we have to take about gumby brain specialists, but it’s the same deal.

Why so much Monty Python today? Well it’s an available and accessible way to get a sense of the absurd and surreal. What we know about all professions (being in ones ourselves) is that they are performative. Surgery is done in a theater.

The challenge for audiences with the gumbys is understanding that the members of the troupe point this at themselves as part of us. It is inclusive. We are all absurd, surreal creatures banging around and calling it modernity. When we start to question it, what do we say?

“My brain hurts.”

So of course gumby engineers design and operate the frog-scorpion steam engine, which drives on unconscious phase transitions. Where does the train lead? To murder, as previously mentioned (and as quickly and expressly as possible). It is the waveform-song of Thanatos if you want to do that dance. It is kind of a hurky-jerky, uncanny dance, like the Monster Mash. The gumbys remind me of comical depictions of Frankenstein’s creature. They express the same condition: the ruptured, sutured, and necrotic quality of identity. They are also “bizzaro-world” creature, residents of htrae, the backwards progeny of a flawed, duplicative “supermen.”

Now, if you think the steam engine is also the engine of critique, then I suppose the “gumbys” would be others, those who have not had the veil lifted. In that case, you would imagine yourself as a critic to have risen above all this. If you are a contemporary cynic, then you’ve breezed past it. You have become habituated to the cognitive dissonance of life’s absurdities. However, as an affirmative cynic, I look upon the pronouncement of gumbys and I resemble that remark. Of course, knowing that about myself means knowing other things I’d rather not admit to right now.

So I am tempted to elide all that, just slide right past, and recombine all that nonsense into some less surprising, controlled hallucination. Just as the critic rises above and the other cynic breezes past.

Carry on, elision.

Carry on! Elysian.

Kyrie Eleison. (down the road that I must travel). Lord have mercy. What a bunch of gumbys! (We are.)