Friday, February 28, 2020

The Value of Trust in a Post-Modern Cultural Context.








It will be seen to grasp itself even as it stands. It used to be taller, by about a foot. But on a particular occasion, I'd say about seven or eight months ago, as I was eating dinner, a former girlfriend, named Jermelle Dunphy, appeared as a witness-in-distress in argyle socks, to answer an as yet unformulated question, thereby forever altering most folks' estimation of its age, gender identity, ethnic profile, positive verb designation and fully sank, still clutching a paid-for paper pantry jag, and our willingness to lift seemed to fall forward in the cups of the wee ones.





Now, it would be convenient if I said this was all a surprise, shocking even. But sadly, no. In the ensuing months as I looked the baleful cretin square in the eyes and stated my evolving dietary preferences, it became apparent that there would be neither respite nor rest, for now I was required by my religious convictions to commit one violent felony after another, without either surcease or compunction until I rid our neighborhood of unwanted elephants, sorry, I meant elements, but yes, elephants too. I mean, would you want an elephant in your backyard it you could have miniature French poodle named Frenchie instead? If you answered 'Yes', then, in conformance with the bylaws of the Drindle Prarie Homeowners Association, I am duty-bound to place an abandoned de-boxture unit at your workplace's coffee station, and just sit there like a lump of fossilized bumpher while I pay silent obeisance to the Devil Woland.





I don't know about yours, but in this State, if a person, secure in their knowledge of ontological primitives, were to so much as consider placing a planckture of bifurcated cheeves in a trove of desiccated tasklets, then that individual would be rendered unmovable, with color strips affixed to their nether side, like one too many old boys' broomstick excisions. And that's not a promise, it's a forgone duality thread. It should also be noted that we've come to fully trust your extended family, with the exception of your parents, siblings, children, grand children, grand parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews and in-laws. Your spouse is kind of a wreck as well. But hey, nobody's perfect, right? 



________________________________

Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Your Last, Best Hope.







May we now accept the wrongly worded account, issued with a baleful grin, of one so moved by our impalement at the hands of a sorrowful clerk, that, even with checks in thrall, and nightly therapy cancelled, our potentiated purposeful softening is greeted ever helpfully by one so fortunate as to reap the wind of gloves? For, to perish the bonk, our trill and her non-liquid assets will assure that, even after a cunning surgical mob delays the fray, our mask is a dozen pegs short of a way. It may hit you. I may even tinkle on your lawn. But my Haberman is lucky to be alive. Where did you get the idea that a person named Michael Shay is your last, best hope for a deliciously cold revenge served with oodles of skin?





As the dread of a pan of eyes slowly sinks in, we hold the last anonymously sourced unit to our side, skim with a sure pace, jerk the loose piece into conformance with this Territory's guidelines, and snap our gluten-free appurtenences for all to see. We are pledged to withstand the rigors of muffin-linked mob rule, but not without a sly shielding, an oxcart freizure at risk of toppling, our ever widening tooth decay profile be damned! Which son have you not yet met? Would it be my blonde pixie-tressed nightside mobster flood? You can't bake this fluffy cup, not without a period-appropriate saddle sore at least. Why would you flee my hearth with only the plows in your sack? To frighten the lonely local children perhaps? It won't do you any good anyway, so why try? It will greet you as it always does: as an irradiated germ fuels the flight to safety and to my selfishly grimy cake is added an adumbrated particle of foot.





You will not receive a fungible map in this way. Without an appearance ticket all is lost. They'll see you as a delicious victor and discard your third side for the last time. What gives it game? She'll know but no one will tell her she's lying. Our firm will donate flood relief packets, but your passionate field-grade whippet is down for the count. Who could it ever be? A truant? Your cousin? My darlingly inappropriate dentist? You'll see. Or maybe not. 



__________________________________ 

Monday, February 24, 2020

A Challengingly Abstract Account.








If, by a muzzle to tear even the sternest one, safe in the knowledge of wisdom-flows, my own time in the barrel, jerry built for hogs in a blossom, is but a step for turning, now dissolved, each theory  paced with tooth and bristle. My zero God, help me mend a board as sand masters an olvus. Shy while placing a wrist through the kit-bag, we'll never discuss the barely laid plaid sample smear of occult warrior-truth, stage four. But as harnessing argumentia evolves the gruelsome widespread discussion, owing to the chinsplint of carefulness I am obligated, once inside, to cease humming a pervasive mixodie.





We will request those in attendance to nod in the partuscular way to which we've become wearily accustomed, apply the boldest of all adhesives to a telltale patch of olive hued skin and begin the design in earnest, our stale kindhearted plea encountered above the pest notwithstanding. Numb to the odor of feasability and drained through an abstruded tunnel, if found in one of the above reckonings, it SHALL NOT pass with needles through teeth even though a rank of jejune junketeers are thought to solve the final riddle of color. Drink thee of my clay mounted cup, peak above a burrow, joined as Wickenham knocks each previously viscous ploy to jut the foreshadowed failure, one sorry masterstroke at a time.





In palms like this, we prefer to blend jipper and conch, the bladder of wells et seulement restrentée;  and five parsings of Beldar-as-ghost The gleem of a balefull tip of bone muddies a wastrel to gawp with pensioners in tow; the fall which becomes evermore the last best fortune in locks. As it pricks the six to touch a false bottom, feeding winter to a squib, chew and bask, paler with feinture, docks to the willemcut and seen afore cum.


My grain will apply in spaces; the saying is loudest when partially murdered. A layout encodes the drip, but a dream inferred is no badder than the screed not spurned. Wait until I lift you. Who will inviegh against a moaning drill? Is Season 5 last year's crudest recision? Did you? What?



__________________________

Saturday, February 22, 2020

Building a War in the Correct Fashion.









There, just to the right of where the Leuben's Foss is to be formally placed, we plan to entice a type of hold-out to build a war in the correct fashion. I'll be damned if even one more tunnel is discovered for our pack. There's a brightness problem; as the mire goes, so it builds each softer nuance to scale the weight of lack. And this, despite every known tracing beheld in principle's blinding quest, is an aim, based as it is, on a course to threaten the mountain-hearted like one sly, tender girl.





It seems to those of us who remain that an unidentified spoil of stolen fruit is sure to betoken a service in blame while all around the jiff is merely a prequel to an Aunt's blasted neurotypical flying hull. But nutrients, as an ablution, will trail similar olfactions as a drape will countenance barely three likely ponds to sweeten the pole. And a chip—a chip!—if it appears thrice nightly, will surely constitute the bravest species of oak to date. Six balances are frozen in the calm, stupid North; a sign, inspired by one lucky turncoat, is said to foster a rank dependence on generic insertions. This being is dull. Where did that rapid enslavement go wrong? Could you prick it with a pin? A pen? Not even selling one, is one too much. We are told by our betters to wash the paying stans with a purity that few are prepared to pretend to tolerate. Why is this even a question? Sort of an odd question, don't you?





Or is it that you, in fact, WILL NOT? It's your brick to dance on. But off THIS avenue the treatment we deserve is of a doomed fentry spot. And the dream of limpid braille taffy pulses with an insistent thrumming to a gated one's admonished, improvised flight. Say that a peak is passed and someone might be forced to risk your very shirt. This is not a warning. It IS a less than obviously feasible proposal. A bank is your final house. Reap the glow. Pile high. Now go back to the beginning and whisper. 



_________________________________

Sonic Treecombleep

Thursday, February 20, 2020

Introducing 'Bertrand Marquand'.









Bobby didn't have what it took to balance words in his head, so I gathered our things in a burglar's cloth, changed out the finger-sized Charlie Moulton wraps for rolling snap patterns and scooted to an easy fourth place, despite my devolving slumber-paste atunement. If it had not been for the length of fabric which his Dad had deployed in his role as lookout for our part of the tribe, I could scarcely see my way free to involve one or two of the others in what passed for our circular wordless scab offering in the following seg-u-monds: 


  1. the tenible wind; some folks will tell you otherwise but don't believe it, 
  2. a domed fairy hooch; as long as it's dark the clearance will scare all the right people in all the wrong ways, and 
  3. anyone who observes a chortling at distance is given a swift fake kick, lifts their flangers in place and (despite what anyone may think) the dust will actually 'do you good'.




The wanton enslavement which parallels our trickment of the Frenchine duopoly at the hands of a branching dull moonless gulch is sure to greet the insolvent demographic with a tuneless rendition of 'Brussels at Dawn', and a set of toybers is a virtual wonder of sockets and fleas. If someone disguised as 'coach-in-place' is all we have to show for maximum null affect, then it will serve us right in our waning capacity as lugs-for-truth. An imp in a mouth or a lark for peas, it no longer natters, what with the salty grins we itch to deploy. The rock you ply will be butter by the nightfull. And a sullen jeremiad, even without a fact-based, targeted paunch, remains all that we will ever hope for; as against this wish, the name I've agreed to use is 'Bertrand Marquand'. See you in Foxton Vells! 


______________________________


Tuesday, February 18, 2020

A Bicycle Ride Into the Jaws of an Elusive Mystery.








One who says of a peculiarly mollified Associate Vice Assistant, that she, what with the long-form fiction she writes in her spare time, is most certainly NOT an asset to this organization, will need to begin planning for an abrupt transition into a titular vacancy behemoth, as long as I or my team have anything to say about it. Why did this come up? Well, it was about three years ago that I plunged into a veritable whirlwind of non-stop pilferage to add to my already sizable collection of apparently useless momentos of the 1964 World's Fair at Flushing Meadows in the Borough of Queens, New York.





About the time I realized that my now eleven year old vintage Harcourt divan would need replacing, I saw an ad in Popular Mechanics. I'm sorry to tell you that for the life of me I can remember neither what the ad was for nor in which issue of the magazine it appeared. I do remember that there was some kind of diagram on the facing page. My wife was having a heck of a time with her cigarette lighter and the Sanitation Commissioner was getting on my case about a toxic discharge which stained the carpeting in Holbrooke House. In the event that my mistress, Diane Fridner, is found perusing romance novels in the local second hand book mart, don't call me surprised. I've never had it better, but I do seem to remember calling out a name in my sleep which rhymes with the first anniversary of my last piano lesson with a gentleman known to one and all as simply 'The Maestro'. He was one of the few people I've ever known to announce publicly his preference for aquamarine Prescotts. This guy was a real 'piece of work', as you can see.





So, when my turn came it was all I could do to retain what little composure I'd managed to accumulate. I knew what I had to do. I removed my clothing, said a silent prayer to Third Father, hummed the third movement of Beethoven's Fifth in a desultory fashion, rode my ten-speed into town (it was still dark) and approached Officer Steve Linden. This is where things really get good. Unfortunately you'll have to wait to find out what followed until after my next hypnotic regression so I can finally piece together what brought me to my current status as Acting Chairperson. It should be a real doozy! 



_______________________________

Sunday, February 16, 2020

Science Is Our Friend.








A leaf she has trouble remembering comes up  in conversation. But it seems that even as I search my booklet her attention wanders to a wafer which resembles a membrane on an adjacent table. I'm not enamored of the gent seated there, but consider the pros and cons of holding my fire until the room is cleared. If a cloth is removed from blocking the eyes of the willing, the card that is secreted in my vest pocket with its scattered, if obscure, markings, should add to the falsely  festive atmosphere and aid our eventual escape. It's how we lure them. Whether and how they fall will engender a veritable perfidy of branching options, none pretty, all but one silent. Science, though, is our friend. Please be kind to it.





Base numbers are my secret weapon-of-choice as I skulk into this or that wafted plain of battle. Even so, there is a rumor about concerning the numbering of days for that other base. You know the one I mean, right? A camp for same is almost fully prepared, more than one in fact. As the days are counted and mental atmospheres occluded, our sharper victory hooch undergoes the final abrupt conflagration. All is now readied. A willing participant is now headed to France. It knows not of what one smells.





A tortured metaphor creates its own equilibrium but a separately nested telltale talking point derives its power from the hamfisted nocturnal diadem in my neighbor's oddly slotted pastiche. But even so, it gives life to a briefly rested nanobot. The Senator I once fellated has metastasized into a molten soiled pantry dish. Why have it any other way?

 A germ lives its whole life devoid of single-use hazardly masked trophy pawns. This is where a robot befriends a toad and a paler version of the ever popular Brophin Game leaks into a shrinking pool of Anabaptist whiners. It just takes adjusting.You'll see.

Only in a zesty marbled olfactory gemstroke can a worm make a telling misdeed sing quotients to break the sand. Sand, we might add, is sometimes all it takes to encase a gopher in a dream of silent masterful onanism. But if free parking seems to 'get the thing done', then I'm sure we can work something out. Speaking of 'work', does it? (No)

But the tribute to a stolen weekend pursuit of the world's best whole-earth rare mental gifts will compound to a raptly genuine floating privilege checked by a sudden eclipse of standards in the service of victory over a whispering veteran of a four-laned course at twelve. This is a drain on our national will.


_____________________________

Persons younger than thirty five years are prohibited from either reading this or even meeting someone who might consider thinking about a person who might have read this. Now you know why. It's because we're counting on people in your position to maintain a hold on power in the long run. Everything depends on it.  Thank you and goodnight. 

Friday, February 14, 2020

The Subtle Effects of an Unknown Color.









It's the way they can't speak for each other that gives us pause, but now whenever a paw is raised and a house comes to know its origin the old-fashioned way, then and only then can a phrase, raw with portentsial now give a fist its play, come father or son. It is said to amount to a still anonymous botheration, if Penfeld ticks the seven boxes, defeats the dreaded Hump, rides a scaly mule, utters its final verb, and now delays, one sorry trip in a rhyme, to pull it, pulse it and re-employ a fitness regime thought lost forever, now and what?





'You heard me!' the lips move, no sound emitted. This will be enough to slot you into my veinous trust decoy. You can tell if, by about the middle of the third round, the one eye with which you imagined that the bargained for future would come to naught, views my slathered nightshirt, bereft of the winking owl motif, once required a now unused appalling left foot which grazed my correct shoulder; should you say? Why yes! Of course! What kneeling rested flop could it take? 

And now a bomb, re-enforced  with micronutrients, envelops delight, assures a fight, entombs the light, restores her sight and all at once the velly pelted nodule is revealed to grow with vigor and whim, astir with wholes unblanked, but forever thanked. Fuck you very much.





Now, if no one minds, I'll slip into an oft-repeated account exploring the devious magick of tree-rings. An insect-of-choice, as no one has read about for ages, is required to perform this paltry stunt. The sly Red Beetle, a nocturnal creeper, features bluff removable antennae. Tweeze six at a time, pronounce the Wyrd of Binter, sprinkle with a powder brought from home. Now mount six of the shattered rings at garbled points, assess your breath, and pulse the lipids for a triumphant delay. If all is in order, now clasp the bartender's left eyebrow, whistle bars four through seven of the Number One Billboard Hit from the third week of June 1967 and finally remove your false hat. Thus is equaled completion. The healing sand will now appear in a damp envelope in the break room at work. Your task is almost done. All that's left is to drape yourself in a blue cheesecloth chemise, think on the subtle effects of an unknown color which rhymes with a little-used vowel, and just sit. Before leaping. You're done! (not).



_______________________________





Wednesday, February 12, 2020

For the Record: The Account of One Louis Shriver.















Everyone stood and I took the opportunity to wonder aloud if the treatment accorded the small-boned and newly nameless family that we were here to memorialize would ever be looked upon as the vile episode that in the end it turned out to be. By alternating small and large-ish steps in a counterclockwise cordon, beyond the handful of Los Angeles' best and broadest, I made my way carelessly to the rear where, fortified with sugar-free gum and ample serveens of licktoast, I jotted my amprimonter, withheld a dip to the hard stop, dropped nothing and wheezed into a boiling room, where, much to my shock and delight I was very much the best dressed denizen in this locale of adumbrated pith.




Where the accent comes from is anyone's guess but caution is advised since one too many catchwords could get you seriously wooed for a doomed mayoral run. If the numbers still refuse to 'add up', then your last best chance at an ounce of relief is to creep willfully yet silently, arch your hindquarters like a desiccated molerat and utter those not-so-famous last words; 'I'll have one too!' When it comes to that, one sorry felon is as good as the next, only this time the gate to a silent tomorrow is one furrow too many to clasp the wing of density.




My decades in the Slurveen Vipperschott have accorded to my presentation a negative gravitas which assures that any somnolent assistants in attendance will endure a modicum of pansified ennui. Not to be outdone by one or another of the trailblazing nincompoops, I bite my lip, step forward and forever hold my withered piece over a flame of house-flavored spandrels. As the hours fly by like so many non-designated periods of duration, it seems that the one and only planet that I have heretofore refused to call 'home' is the fabile detensification facility which greets me with a nod to a pitch of gloom. This can't rattle my game. Why? Because it' s already baked in! 


_________________________________

My name is Louis Shriver and I hold myself 
utterly blameless for the above account. 

Monday, February 10, 2020

The Foretelling of an Approachable Figment.








It doesn't matter whether you walk together back and forth or not. When you needle a shy officiant with lost tables and looser tails, this could be where one shamefacedly approachable figment is foretold as a stream which befits a telling pain.


Why balancing the stranger's plate with a parallel module beneath your heifer's shirt is a better choice for all concerned, is painstakingly nuanced while an upbraiding proceeds without protest. The standard guilt-jar applies, filled as it is with a salient breeding odor. But alone among the many, the doubt is a surefooted concealment of a rigged Persian master- turncoat assiduosity which delights the 'girl' in each of us.


 Blame helmets but do not gripe to a doddering willful shill; it will get you used to each simpering braggart that holds his own shirt for others to comment upon, with a link to a breathtakingly sorry monster. You give it your last all-at-once glance and we can't help but try to approach quietly, not willing to disturb even one fretful bailiff, hat in bands, brat in the sand, clashing on one handy demand. A large hand—the largest—may arrange to be created in a startling, crafty, below-the-surface sure-fire, connect-the-spots, ample growth hysteria—downstate frail operations be damned!



The dread which focuses her trailblazing occipital gnostrum is said to give strength (and oodles of noxic trim!) to one so heavily bolded as a circuit conceals its own best approach to grill a jumper's sly, numberless series of ospints with Venn verghules  of flim. Which, as a non-oxidized soporific windfall should slit the chambermaid's precocious piss pouch, with gangles afore ye, and birts to the weer, atrocious at intervals, anointing vapid profiles.



The slate of beguilements breeds the last hole out of its ruin. This cruddy stun-gun will keep a slim majority safe from just some of the loose borderline fantasy participation asparmicos. Why gather toward oneself the surfeit of garden variety prefab gender-queer semblances when all it would take is six or five or even just one profile to botch the peal? You have it, we get it, they lose it, and now it won't earn a stump for luck or bunnies. But, wait a minute, could any of this be?



________________________________ 



Saturday, February 8, 2020

Testimony of a Post-Modern Bendicant.









If we had agreed to instantiate a re-taming process with respect to an errant party of jocular pantiewaists, then our adherence to a doctrine, no longer enumerated in plain-spoken down-market demotic, would stand a not very small likelihood of straining on a vein of a tastemaker's turgid imbroglios. 



This is where our very balanced feeling profile becomes a no longer crucial factor when considering with which lineament to gird our appetite for candied liver and ossified folio pranks. If, when wandering outside the range of any old stand-fast day-over-day studio jag, a creamy, nephritic (but hardly senescent!), solemn impostor's attempted moment of carping should be enough to hold a team of waders to but a minuscule increase in a shaded dullness that wipes our plane in a beam of wetness.




But when the penitent slips a soldier's desk through a concealed slot in the House of Grades, my grand studio plot is revealed for all to see in a series of purloined manila back-stories. The crease will likely condemn all who function at speed to graze wantonly with a fantasized truculence befitting only the most tractable of splintery supposition weasels. This is where an actively necrotic assailant will hold thirty-one unclad hostages in a donated craft brewery to seek restitution for anonymous testimony in the Hykes Farber foster puppy scandal.




The Bendicant at work.
And now when we hold a pallid force field at bay, our fingers doing double duty with ancient rice crystals, the treatment that is our due is all but certain in this or any other season. The word we give is a grieving widower's ticket to the 'appointment television' of tomorrow. Thus it sits, jangled shafts and all. Your mileage may vary, but not without a change of clothes.


___________________________


[Please note: this is the Bendicant's version.]

Sonic Sly One:

Thursday, February 6, 2020

The Projected Appearance of Microscopic Fissures.











If and when you decide to attempt to contact someone through a cardboard-lined tubular shaft in a temporary soil-based construction, it might be worth considering whether a crucial moment has passed. If so, there will be time to breathe softly through the used handkerchief we have every reason to believe you carry, for this movement can only be enacted at irregular intervals to be decided with a great deal of care. 



There is a cycle of blame which goes to your first trial plaything; also a watch should not be necessary. The name that I've assumed for the remainder of the task is not generally pronounceable while holding one's foot more than sixteen inches aloft. We will ensure that a healing silence will prevail when the person known to all involved as S-3 is compelled to anoint my infant adopted daughter with a balm of creosote and seluphid oil. The map that was found to be fatally inaccurate is even now our final desired guideline when a daunting appearance causes microscopic fissures to bloom as if from nowhere. 




Each of our handwriting samples is still on file with a Central Office now buried under countless tons of counterfeit baldness formulae with appealing wrist-averse alignments. This will accrue to the benefit of our noise-abatement stakeholders and their plethorae of daynight-phased ovular rink plaudits. If we feel the need to initiate a strategy of skulking about warily, you and a person to be named later will be requested—required even!—to barely notice what all have chosen to fret over in a frankly brazen State-sponsored crop support regime. This is why the character who bases all of his instrumental noodling on a half-baked ribald horizontal gutsiness can never take the day. As it concerns a bell made of bone, a limbic gust may be all anyone has to hope for. If it comes to that, your day will be smooth and rubbery. Why give it more than it can take?


_______________________________ 

Tuesday, February 4, 2020

A Virtual Truth and Reconciliation Commission.








In the waning days of last year (that would be 2005 as I write this), just as I was completing my Certificate, I was abducted by two mentally ill (OCD and Bi-polar respectively) foreign government employees who accompanied me to Tubb's Village Café for a round of French Toast and tuna melts and an impromptu quiz-show type interrogation. It was plain that this was 'all in fun', but I still felt not a little jumpy and out of sorts. When I adjourned to the Men's Wash Room for a much needed oppo research availability, I discovered to my chagrin that my former Press Secretary, Alphonsus Heims, was waiting there in the third stall to introduce me to what eventually became a rather severe flurineum addiction. I say all of this because it's important for anyone reading this to have at least the barest idea of where I was coming from in those very turbulent times.





So, once I crossed over into Latvia I knew I had my work cut out for me. You see, at about this time I had received my final stipend and was casting this way and that for a new way to make the 'ends of things' arrange themselves in what would appear to any unbiased observer as a 'chance meeting'. Once I extricated my wallet from an unobtrusive pile of discarded rusty knitting needles, I retrieved the one-way bus ticket that my former supervisor had gifted me the previous Arbor Day. You may choose not to believe this, but that ticket amounted to a 'get-out-of-jail-free' card and I wasn't about to lose even one second to get my ducks in a row or go out with a bang trying.





I stipulated to my estranged attorney, former Attorney General John Mitchell that I was basically 'done' with redheads and from now on it would be brunettes or nothing! When I arrived in Seoul, South Korea at 10:19 PM on October 12, 2011, my head was in the clouds but my feet were firmly planted in the muck and mire of quotidian existence. I never much liked fly fishing but now I had no choice. As a representative of the Future Farmers of America I had certain duties, even when, for no fault of my own, I smelled like shit (literally). 


So it was that I marched myself up to the third floor, adjusted my hat, softly hummed a somewhat nuanced rendition of the Four Seasons hit Big Girls Don't Cry, grinned sheepishly at the receptionist, staged a multi-year battle with duodenal cancer, placed third in the Nairobi Ultra Marathon, opened a bartending school in the Azores and decided that I'd finally just 'had enough' of life (you know the feeling, right?). Yes, it pains me to admit it but I committed suicide not once but THREE times. Each attempt was successful, astonishingly so!





As annoying as it is, I, for some non-obvious reason, feel compelled to divulge that the above account is completely untrue, in each and every detail—a fabric of lies, if you will. If anyone reading this decides that now would be a golden opportunity for them to own up to their own half-truths, fibs, outright blatant falsehoods and self serving prevarications, now would be a very good time to do so in the comments below. Or you can just . . ..... 




______________________________


Sunday, February 2, 2020

My Solemn Promise.








There's a sign across the street from my son's weekly numerology class. The boy's mother, who I  met briefly years ago, has threatened that if I reveal in this blog the message on the sign, then I can count my days remaining in polite society on the fingers of one hand. Since I'm missing the ring finger on my right hand due to a forced chemical spill back in the late eighties, the ambiguity of my time estimation is somewhat flinty or even odd.




It's my practice when arranging for non-apparent disappearances of persons, places or things to sometimes just take a short break, let my hair down (what little of it is left) and coach at-risk youth in the fine art of antique doily restoration while arranging for their indictment on major felony charges. Usually within a day or two I'm back on my game, scoping the ponies at Rickter Vells. When my niece's chauffeur, Richy Sneff, called yesterday at 3:42 AM I knew what to do. The tools I needed, however, were lacking—missing actually—due to the structural obtusion in the treehouse I call 'home'.




Three days after the 'hunting accident' that claimed my best friend's sister-in-law's French poodle Frenchie, the weather finally cleared and I was free to go. 'NOT SO FAST', I heard someone thinking. Normally in this type of situation I can remain unreasonably calm, but whether you know it or not, friend, these are not 'normal' times. Not by a long shot. So, while I can't promise that I'll return to Brooklyn before Founder's Day, there is one thing I CAN promise you. So what's that? you ask, right? Okay, here goes: I'm going to get up every morning and go to bed every night working my butt off for Our Great American People! If your life and the life of every person you know have not significantly improved within one month, then please sue me. I dare you. 



___________________________