Stinky swings and Diogenes bites

/ Doug Jacquier

These two less than serious tales are in response to the Six Sentence Challenge presented each week at Girlie on the Edge, with the prompt word of ‘strike’.

Beaten by a stretch

As the striker on the old stadium clock struck six, Steve ‘Stinky’ Stilton swung three bats to stretch his stiff arms, all the time chanting in his staccato stentorian voice ‘Today I will not strike out!’

When it came to his turn to bat, he manfully stemmed all thoughts of distress and strife, stepped up to the plate and stared at Sebastian ‘Stretch’ Santanna on the steppe known as the mound.

Stretch wound up and, with striations bulging on his pitching hand, hurled a white satellite in Stinky’s direction and he watched it seem to orbit the strike zone before landing slap in Solomon ‘Stumblebum’ Silverstein’s catcher’s glove and the umpire, Segacious ‘Sightless’ Schickelgruber’s voice howled ‘Steeeeerike 1’, stabbing his finger into the ether.

Stinky steadied his sticky resin-coated hands and blinked away the sweat beginning to stream down his brow and stated firmly to himself ‘Saw that coming, all part of the plan, stew in your juice, Stretch.’

Stretch arched his slender spine and span like a top before delivering his famous well-disguised sliding gesunder ball, with a vicious curve at the end, that steered clear of the edge of Stinky’s bat as he swung, creating an air stream that rivalled Hurricane Katrina, and Sightless yodeled ‘Steeerike 2’.

Mustering all of his muscular and mental strength, Stinky picked the straight-as-a-die sucker ball emerging from Stretch’s fingers and felt the tinny but satisfying thwack of aluminium on leather and then saw in horror that the ball had lodged teeth-shatteringly in Stretch’s mouth, as Sightless intoned ‘Batter out’ and swept his arm toward the bench.

Diogenes, dodgy knees and doggedness – Extract from Wackypedia

Diogenes, the Ancient Greek, lived in a clay wine barrel and laughed at the pretensions of men, hence the expression ‘a barrel of laughs’.

He carried a lamp in broad daylight in his search for a man, arguing that the brainless residents of Athens did not qualify for that term.

When Alexander the Great visited Diogenes he asked if there was anything he could do for him and Diogenes replied, ‘Yes, get out of my sunlight. I need to warm my dodgy knees.’

He was often called dog-like, which he took as a compliment because he believed dogs live in the present without anxiety, have no use for the pretensions of abstract philosophy, and instinctively know who is friend and who is foe.

Where he differed, he would often say, was in the fact that ‘other dogs bite their enemies, I bite my friends, to save them’.

The first cosmopolitan (he invented the word), he was stateless, homeless, shameless and free, on strike from alleged civilisation.

27 thoughts on “Stinky swings and Diogenes bites”

  1. First story, I imagine it to be the nightmare of someone with a lisp!
    Second story, not because I’m partial due to origins- not at all, just pure, head on, truth!
    (I miss the accurate depiction through words right now.) Let me offer you a couple of pints of beer instead. Cheers Doug!!

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  9. Of course I love the alliteration and clever word play in the descriptions of the baseball game and I learned a new word. A dictionary tells me ‘gesunder’ in Australian is a corruption of ‘goes under’. Is that a load of – well, balls?
    And I might suggest submitting your Diogenes story to Wikipedia. It’s far more entertaining than theirs! Great stories, Doug.

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    • Many thanks, Jenne. In baseball, which I played in my teens, a gesunder ball is a deceptive pitch that dips late and goes under your bat, as you guessed. However, in Aus, a gesunder was a chamber pot i.e. gesunder your bed.
      As for Wikipedia, I tried to be a contributor once and it did my head in with all its pedantry, secret handshakes etc. No place for writers. 🙂

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