Teach a man to proverb...

There is a well-known saying among my people: When the hydrangea wilts, when the aspidistra droops, then shall the gastroenterologist speak the truth, but not before.

It is spoken gravely by sage elders as we gather at communal ceremonies, it is promulgated as a choice bit of wisdom and care is taken to pass it on to young folk so they in turn shall pass it on to their own children in due course. When the hydrangea wilts, when the aspidistra droops, then shall the gastroenterologist speak the truth, but not before.

Now it is true that my people are a very silly and frivolous people, perhaps the silliest in all the world, but is there not some grave insight summed up in this short line? Is it not the crystallization of a nation’s experience and knowledge?

I dunno, I’ve never understood it, but there has to be, or else people wouldn’t say it, right? I mean, people say It’s always darkest before the dawn, and never in history has there been a bad situation that’s ever become worse over time, has there? No, bad things always get better.

Or take the impeccable folk wisdom of the rock group Fleetwood Mac: Thunder only happens when it’s raining. There has never ever been thunder without rain – that’s just meteorology. I mean, Fleetwood Mac wouldn’t lie to you about meteorology. Stevie Nicks doesn’t lie!

So I went in search of the origin of our great folk proverb, a quest which started in the National Library of Chalazia in the City of Kermunkachunk. I had to take great care at this time as the city was convulsed with mass killings carried out by the Chalazia Children’s Theater Troupe, a savage faction of youthful mayhem-dealers and run-amokkers. As journalist Mark Leyner, who’s covered the civil unrest in Kermunkachunk extensively, notes: “These are young people who’ve traded their exuberant devotion to musical theater for an irrepressible desire to kill and be killed.”

Stepping past the unspeakable atrocities being carried out on Joyful Freedom Square, I made my way into the archive to research the folk proverbs of the rather unbalanced Chalazian people. Here I found that the proverb dates to over a millennium ago, as the source describes it “way way way waaaaay back”, back to the very dawn of gastroenterology itself.

It originates, says a crinkled parchment in the dustiest stack of the library basement, in the Radial Highlands which surround our beautiful if deranged land on all sides, cutting us off from the world – along with the yellow crime-scene tape that stretches all along our borders. [NOTE: Our source Leyner states: “In actuality, the yellow markings visible from space are a Neolithic geoglyph akin to the Kazakh Steppe earthworks or the more recent Nazca Lines, ‘made by removing the top layer of the bluish-white reflecting salt flats [that once covered all of Chalazia] to reveal a bright yellow subsoil.’”)]

I pocketed the parchment scrap – indeed there was nobody to stop me as the library staff had to a man and woman been slaughtered by the tiny terrorists of the Children’s Theater Troupe out on the square. And I made my way to the Sleaze Bar in the Dodgy Quarter of Kermunkachunk, where such things are arranged, to contract forthwith a black-market jitney to convey me me into the Radial Highlands.

My jitney driver was called Federandokyliemartin-Joebob Spikes, or Fed for short, and he drove an unusual vehicle that was literally indescribable, so I won’t describe it. Fed drove me out to the Radial Highlands and for an extra €100 note (for the legal tender currency of Chalazia, the Greentop, has crashed through the floor or soared to the stratosphere through ultrahyperinflation, not sure which, and only Euros issued in good old Brussels are valid here) he introduced me to a tribal elder of the Mammamus or Sucking People.

I was led into the ramshackle lean-to that served as dwelling to the tribal elder, a wizened old androgyne known as LittleBig MamaPapa, and made to smoke a peace-offering pipe of preserved iceberg lettuce. At length, after smoking the hallucinatory fumes of the lettuce, I was bidden to speak.

“Tell me MamaPapa, what is the meaning of the well-known saying: When the hydrangea wilts, when the aspidistra droops, then shall the gastroenterologist speak the truth, but not before? I am unable to make it out, for I have no inbred distrust of gastroenterologists nor indeed of any other internal medicine specialists. Yet it is accounted a great wisdom.”

“My son, what does it mean? In asking this question you mistake yourself, for is not the meaning apparent in its very radiant transparency, its crystalline apparency?”

“Er, no... If it was, I wouldn’t have risked my life and spent a fortune on a quest to discover its meaning, would I?”

“Well then, it means: Six of one, half a dozen of another. It means: It never rains but it pours. It means: Faith will move mountains.”

“Are you saying it’s just a babble of empty words devoid of all meaning except what the listener may ascribe to them?”

The elder shrugged. I had my answer.

Now I know, I never fail to pass on these words to younger and less experienced people who may be in need of them. I have children of my own and I tell them: When the hydrangea wilts, when the aspidistra droops, then shall the gastroenterologist speak the truth, but not before.

And there I sit in the evenings in my rockingchair, high on crystal meth, happy in the knowledge that my children will tell their children this saying, and that the chain will be unbroken.

With apologies to Mark Leyner for abuse of Chalazian mythology and lore from The Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit.