All About Edwin Longwickle (Part 3)

Stop: If you have not already read All About Edwin Longwickle (Part 2), you should do so before reading the present instalment. Failure to comply with these instructions may give rise to confusion, dizziness, vomiting and impotence.

Longwickle is perhaps best known for his attempt to use Hubble’s theory of an expanding universe to explain why it is so difficult to locate one’s car in a supermarket parking lot. But what really put Longwickle on the scientific map was his two hundred page opus in which he argued that strange quarks were not so much strange as they were misunderstood.

Unfortunately, these views rendered Longwickle persona non grata in the eyes of a myopic scientific community that had little tolerance for novel ideas. Estranged from the British scholarly establishment, Longwickle relocated across the pond, where he became an active member of American intellectual and political life. Quickly distinguishing himself as part of the Manhattan intelligencia, Longwickle contributed several articles to a high-brow cerebral quarterly dedicated to the post-modern neo-Marxist interpretation of the gestation of Chinese poodles.

During this time, even Longwickle’s social life began to experience something of a renascence. After more than ten years living in sin with his own right hand, he decided it was finally time to do something decisive in his love-life…and so, on February 16th, 1963, he and his right hand were married. Unfortunately, their union proved to be anything but happy and just six months after the honeymoon, Longwickle’s right hand filed for divorce, citing emotional neglect and self-abuse.

Brokenhearted, Longwickle turned to drinking; regularly imbibing copious amounts of bottled spring water and unsweetened grapefruit juice. This apparently took quite a toll on his immune system; for shortly thereafter, he contracted a debilitating disease that left him unable to say the word ‘lobster’ without giggling. The end clearly in sight, Longwickle sought reconciliation with his estranged right hand; and though it had already remarried, the two eventually became close friends and remained such until Longwickle’s death five years later. At his funeral, Longwickle’s right hand is reported to have declared through bitter sobs, “he was the best body a hand could ever ask for!”

But it is not the many intrigues of Longwickle’s personal life that calls him to the forefront of our collective consciousness today. Rather, it is his lifelong insistence that, as far as he was concerned, there were only eight planets in our solar system (a pronouncement that would prove to be prophetic). In a 1967 interview with the Herald Press Longwickle was asked why he did not consider Pluto a real planet. Years ahead of his time, he is reported to have replied enigmatically: “because it’s fucking gay!”

Fucking gay indeed, Longwickle. Fucking gay indeed.