That Ralphs on Glendale in Glendale, the underground one, our pal calls it the Morlock Ralphs. I’d been calling it Beneath the Planet of the Ralphs, but English not being an agglutinating language like Sioux or Turkish or even long dead Sumerian (those poor things), one of those languages that can pile entire sentences into single words with all kinds of grammatical magic and trickery, an appellation like Battle Beneath the Planet of the Ralphs is just too cumbersome. Oddly, you could agglutinate it into a single noun (the-beneath-the-planet-of-the-Ralphs Ralphs), which is a throwback to the compounding possibilities in our Germanic past, like how the German Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän (Danube steamship company boat captain, once a real gig in Vienna apparently, unlike Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft, which was just some smart assed German messing with our minds), could be rendered in English, given a handful of hyphens, into that Danube-steamship-company-boat-captain guy, all nouned together in one big noun, morphologically. But we prefer to keep them hyphenless as a series of separate nouns, having no problem with nouns following one another like a line of ducklings behind their mother, something that seems to drive Germans batty, es ist so unordlich. However, once we verb Danube steamship company boat captain guy (and I worked with a very attractive woman once who vociferously loathed verbing anything, it made her so mad, but that’s another story, and it is, actually, though I don’t think I ever finished it), we are forced to agglutinate those nouns supercalifragilisticexpialidociously into danubesteamshipcompanyboatcaptaining, which could mean, say, verbing a series of nouns just to annoy an attractive lady you work with. The problem with that in regards to the beneath-the-planet-of-the-ralphs Ralphs (aka Morlock Ralphs) is that saying we are beneaththeplanetoftheralphing (that is, shopping at the beneath-the-planet-of-the-ralphs Ralphs) would be interpreted as beneaththeplanetofthepuking which makes no sense at all, except in strictly morphological terms. An agglutinative colorless green ideas sleep furiously, colorlessgreenideassleepfuriouslifying something just to be irritating. Not that I mind being irritating. But saying Morlock Ralphs is easier.

Journey to the Center of the Ralphs is good, too–my wife came up with that one–but I am exhausted from all this wanton agglutinating and just want to lie here smoking and staring at the ceiling.