HTB Chronicills - Derelict Optimus Narcoticus (DON)

This is Part 2 of 2, please read 

Sherlock Homeless

DON Harold had just landed and made his way down the concourse into a barrage of flashing cameras, jubilant dignitaries, and nodding degenerates. A giant banner stretched across the arrivals terminal which read, 

“Welcome Harold to Narcoleptic, Catatonia”.

A short, inebriated man who Harold assumed to be the mayor of Narcoleptic primarily due to the man's “I'm the Mayor” T-shirt, bowed as Harold approached or maybe he was carpet sharking. Harold watched the man pick at the small bits of fiber, paper, cigarette butts, gently used condoms, and stains on the carpet. Carpet sharking. He was definitely carpet sharking.

The sound of the cheering crowd  began to wane and Harold noticed a sense of dismay begin to rise in the unsober masses. Looking back at the Mayor he noticed the man’s neck craned to the side, the one visible eye looking up expectantly at Harold. 

Harols puzzled over the mayors odd behavior for a few seconds that were easily 11 minutes in total. His brain cells scrambled in preparation to go online, but Harold never engaged the dilapidated board with a nail in it to spur the cells into… uhm… I guess “action” would be the right word in most cases, but there is no word in the English language for the surly, begrudging, and lackluster performance of Harold’s amazingly toxin resistant brain cells brothers when prodded by a 16 penny sinker nail. In order to capture their full potential, a string of adjectives and  cumbersome analogy was necessary.

Yes, the mayor was still eyeing Harold and had been for quite the extended increment of time with increasing unease the entire time.The crowd had thinned considerably, but the remnant's cheers had morph into murmers of unrest and Harold was... was... oh, shiny thingy... distracted by a small shiny object hypnotically glinting on the floor that was so obviously a ball of burnt foil at his feet. Harold bent over to pick it up and the crowd cheered in a loud roar of approval. Unbeknownst to Harold, tandem carpet sharking was the Catatonian equivalent of a kiss on alternate cheeks exchanged between heads of state, dignitaries, and those in a romantic relationship deep enough to share Hep C.

As Harold proceeded down the reception line, he noticed a smokey looking fellow in a fez cap. “Hey, genie dude! How's it going?”, Harold excitedly called out as genie’s familiar face assumed the same impatient scowl that Harold would have remembered had he not been a gelatinous pile of seeping goo at a mystifying Winnebago recital.

The genie’s booming voice shook the ground, “I’ve been homeless for over a year since you recycled my lamp for thirty-four fucking cents, asshole!”

“Hey, me too!” Harold spat back, amazed by the coincidence that he and the smokable one had shared the same path. It's a small world after all with a triple-shit loader of bums.

“Let's get together later. I brought my tooter!” Harold shouted over the crowd holding up the brown goop dripping tube. The genie shook his head in disgust/ disbelief/ disgrunt and disappeared in a puff of the good stuff.

Harold was directed to a podium sporting half a dozen microphone shaped hash vaporizers or maybe they were actual microphones. The massive amount of narcotics he had sampled from the in-flight buffet were reaching cruising altitude. 

A hypnotic four minutes later Harold had drooled over the entire podium and delivered three rousing incoherent grunting sounds. 

The crowd was equally snurggled for the fa-fa-fa, you know what I… what? Let's go snorkeling!

The crowd looked at each other trying to decipher if this was a genuine invitation or if it bore some deeply psychedelic symbolism. When they had nearly forgotten Harold was present and what they were doing gathered here,  they heard a deafening shout...

“Snurggled for the snorkeling!”, Harold suddenly screamed as he raised his head from the pidium like a newborn sloth with down's syndrome. 

The audience immediately went wild with bewilderment. Then a thick impenetrable fog rolled in and Harold's cranium came to rest on the podium with a resounding amplified CAA-RACK!

Braincell #1 - Jesus Christ! What the hell was that resounding amplified CAA-RACK sound?!

Braincell #2 - [Looking incredulous] Have you ever thought about talking to someone about these things you hear?

Braincell #1 - I just did. What the hell was that?

Braincell #2 - No, I mean someone more... eh... professional. Someone who might be able to work through your issue with these audible hallucinations.

Braincell #1 - [Working into hysteria] What issue? You're the deaf one. What the hell are you insinuating? You think I'm crazy. You're the one who's crazy! You can't hear these obviously... 

Braincell #2 - [Withdrawing the thorazine syringe from Braincell #1's cell wall] There, there now. Shhhh. All better, now. I have some very nice white blood cells in white coats coming to take you to a nice place where everyone will hear your sounds. 

Braincell #1 - [Fading into the fog] Snurggled for the snorkeling! 

Braincell #2 - [With pity] He was bound to go fucking nuts like the others, eventually. It's so sad. Perhaps, if he had the grounding effect of a loving mildew collection things would have been different.

A generous double nap time later Harold was in his private 5-star hotel dumpster enjoying the lobster Newburg mixed with rice pilaf and marbled with piney styrene pellets. Delicious!

Aw, man that's not styrene! It's a well tenderized urinal cake. Wow! A breath freshening dessert served within a seafood entrée.  These high falutin Catatonians’ had perfected the sine qua non of bum cuisine.

After a long day of rubbing persistent skin lesions on elbows with the losers and shaky of too high to function in society, Harold retired to the penthouse suite of the tallest bridge in all of Catatonia. While slipping between the sheets of the newly pressed pages of the Narcoleptic Post-Mortem , Harold realized that he hadn't been this popular since the last time he was in the papers.

Harold drowned off into a fitful stupor, and thought… well, he tried to think… he got a busy signal, and then nothing.

Harold lifted his head like a poorly balanced potato sack atop the head of a newborn sloth with down's syndrome only to slam it back down on the extra painful table. The cranial percussion echoed through his head.

Braincell #2 - Jesus Christ! Not me too!

Harold was jarred back to a distorted and poorly interpreted version of reality where he caught a few garbled syllables of a  mumbled phrase.

“What?”, Harold reflexively replied through a sulfurous belch.

“I said, No shit Sherlock.”, the young lad's voice answered clearly.

“Sherlock? That reminds me of a the time Harold donned his tweed deerstalker cap…”, Harold droned on.

The boy shook his head and pretended to listen while he was really focused on his ACT studies. If he was accepted to Stanford he would settle to escape the endless loop of Harold the Bum stories. The application process was two hours shorter than Harvard.

Sometimes one must sacrifice quality for the sake of fucking brevity. One of the valuable life lessons the boy had learned by distillation from the mummy man who droned on nearly semi coherently in the background. 

HTB Chronicills - Sherlock Homeless

Back by poxular remand, Harold the Bum continues his zany antics in lieu of a life...

Harold donned his tweed deer stalker cap and transformed into Sherlock Homeless, the blindingly brilliant, brilliantly blind sleuth. He was searching for clues because he's really smart. Surely, they had to be here somewhere. Surely, he would find them because he was Sherlock Homeless the greatest detective from Shit bridge all the way to the trailer park. Shirley had said so, surely he was.

Methodoniclly moving from side to side with only moderate resistance from gravity, he surveyed the scene through his lenseless magnifying glass in the pitch dark blackness. Suddenly, hours had past and still nothing pointed in the direction of the perpetrator. Nope, not a fucking thing. These were obviously evasive clues attempting to elude his detection. Sherlock understood the mind and motives of malicious inanimate objects having been one for much of his life. Sherlock momentarily indulged himself to reminisce of those bygone salad days of many minutes ago, before he wore the hat of a man who couldn't decide if was either coming or going.

Things had been going so well. He'd managed to work his magic. Starting with little more than a withdrawal wracked body, a misfiring mind, and a pocket full of key chains he'd acquired in a manic misappropriation binge at half a dozen retail outlets, he had built an empire from the ground up. The true wizardry was that his vast dominion fit neatly into a tiny Ziploc baggy tucked away in his left breast pocket. Right here...

That was the moment, that horrible, heart skips a beat moment, when he realized she had left him. It was like all the worst parts of the Old Testament happening at once. No, worse, it was as if Warren just walked in to the room.

Now, he was on this case like so many others, such as the Case of the Un-missing Bar and Grill Hose or the Eighth Street Garage Inquiry, but this case was different. This case was personal. This case was close to his heart. At least, it had been until the object of his desire had vanished from his left breast pocket. Now, he would stop at nothing, extended pauses due to nods notwithstanding, until he was reunited with her. That beautiful, tiny brunette baggy of yore.

How he pined for her when he realized she (the baggy) had run off and left him like yesterday's high. She was all he ever wanted, all he ever needed, but mostly all he fucking had left! This is why he specifically put it in his left pocket, because it didn't seem right. There had been so much more just a few hazy, muddled, incoherent increments of time ago. But now, as Sherlock sleuthfully stumbled through the darkness everything seemed like a drug induced nightmare!

"Oww!" Howled a well camouflaged urban outdoorsman type chap whose groin was being compression checked by Sherlock's size twelve sneaker.

"Sorry, so sorry, my good mongrel", Harold offered quickly but insincerely to the previously half dazed and recently half testicled miscreant. The stranger was fortunate that Sherlock had worn his golf shoe on his right foot tonight. Seizing the opportunity to take a statement from this potential suspect/witness/mostly suspect who lay rolling and cursing wildly at his feet. Very suspicious behavior, indeed!

Sherlock demanded, "I say, has anyone told you that you bear a striking resemblance to Gordon Gano?"

[Incoherent moaning with a festive smattering of profanity]

"What, what? Yes, indubitably." Sherlock Homeless absently chimed in reply to the continuing groans.

"Very well then. I'll cut to the quick since you seem to be previously engaged. I'm on a bit of a fox hunt, you might say. Tally-Ho! My quarry is one-inch tall, translucent plastic baggy last seen in the vicinity of me. I had it and now it seems to be gone. Have you seen, touched, or ingested anything matching that description recently?"

"Gone, baggy, gone, yeah the bag is gone!", the suspect blurted out.

"Precisely", Sherlock was on the right path. His instincts told him so, and it was the only path on this side of the bridge.

"Gone, baggy, gone, yeah the bag is gone!", the man shouted as he gripped his crotch protectively.

Meanwhile, back in the deepest recesses of Sherlock's opiate enhanced skull bone...

Braincell #1 - "Did you hear that xylophone music?"
Braincell #2 - "What's it sound like?"
Braincell #1 - "uhm... Like a fucking xylophone!"
Braincell #2 - "I'm drawing a blank here."
Braincell #1 - "Seriously? You're a fucking brain cell and you don't know what a xylophone sounds like?"
Braincell #2 - "Gimme a break, dude. I majored in mildew husbandry, not audible hallucinations!"
Braincell #1 - "Fuck! That's all I can say. Fuck!!!"

Back on the other less sensible side of Harold’s brainbone…

Sherlock applied the NCIS Gibbs technique, "Regrettably, yes, the baggy is gone. Now, what have you done with her?"

"Gone, baggy, gone, yeah the bag has gone away. Gone away."

A confession! Sherlock reached into his left breast pocket to pull out his Scotland trailer park back Yard identification to make the arrest. Out came the big joker playing card that doubled as his badge and a little plastic baggy flew into the air whimsically spiraling down before his eyes.

Reunited and it feels so good!

She had returned to him. How he loved her so. Harold’s face took on the look of a newborn suckling at their mother’s breast, then faded off into Narcoleptic Catatonia. He was addicted. 

The young boy whispered under his breath, "No shit, Sherlock."

Go to Part 2 of this story by clicking on the brain cell below or check out the clues to the mystery.

Clues to the Mystery and Bonus Blatherings

Q: Who the fuck is Gordon Gano?

A: He's the vocalist from the 80's band The Violent Femmes.

Q: Who the fuck are The Violent Femmes?

A: Let me go on like a blister in the sun

Q: That's retarded.

A: That's not a Question.

A: The Femmes also recorded a song called Gone Daddy (baggy) Gone with a chick in the video who looks a lot like my friend, Alison.

Q: I didn't ask a question.

A: Fuck you.

Q: Can we go now?