#277: Planet Terry

    What starts with an S and is currently on the verge of imbibing my life whole in one gargantuan gulp? While sleep deprivation, Simpsons seasons 1-8, and sprees of voracious video-essay consumption are all viable answers, I was fishing for . . . school. Gosh, pardon my French. Indeed today is my technical first day of sophomore year, but considering how things are kind of on cruise control until my teacher figures out the lesson plan, I'll be using this school week as a sort of 5-day farewell to summertime here on the blog. Sort of like a browser-based purgatory to offer you and yours truly some closure before I'm tossed into the harsh underworld of schol. Schoo. You know what, my fingers refuse to type it again, let's move along. Time for my latest character: Planet Terry! The charmed life of a planet is really something to envy. Those celestial sons-o'-guns have every last light-second of their leisurely existence planned out for them from the get-go, complete with 24-eon rotisserie sunbathing and a scenic circular route around the cosmos. Getting ripped from this Life of Riley and made into some super-sized behemoth's forearm, however, puts a bit of a damper on that. And while that may not be a concern in our astronomical neck of the woods^{[citation needed]}, for the planets of the JC-Verse, that fear is ever-present--all thanks to the final frontier's biggest, brashest and most bumbling bully. After a torturous teresecond of idley roaming amongst the stars without a physical form, the astral entity that would become Planet Terry grew sick of his isolated lot in life. Boredom turned to rage, rage turned to a century or two of astronomical temper tantrums, and then a lightbulb. He could construct himself the physical vessel of his fantasies, and the tools with which to do so were right under his spectral schnoz--taunting him on fixed axes. Tactlessly tearing planets from their orbits and leaving suns bare for parsecs in every direction, Terry built himself a celestial body out of celestial bodies, and proceeded to make the whole universe his playground. With moons for peepers and dwarf planets for palms, the makeshift mammoth is still thunderously thrashing through space to this day. For the poor unsuspecting planetoids of the JC-Verse, let's pray he doesn't accidently trip over a supernova any time soon and need a new knee. Say it with me, amen.