A Tragisty in the Making.

 

There is a person about my size who is considering asking his adoptive parents some increasingly uncomfortable questions, or so I've been told. So far, I've refused to make an issue of it, beyond making a few discrete inquiries of certain fair-weather acquaintances who we share in common. One of them was said to be 'on the warpath'. Another needed spinal surgery. A third requested to never be seen in my company after the 12th, when his papers will be fully withdrawn. I failed to see why any of this was an issue. Boy, was I wrong! Here's the thing: it's just not what you, or anyone under your direct control, thinks it is. It involves a terrycloth bathrobe which was a Framers' Day gift to me from the Leipenzoid Auxilliary. Sure, I'd done some work for them over the years, but I never expected to be dragged through the mud as I was on that particular day. And, I mean that quite literally, by the way.

Once I secured his head to a particle board palimpsest, made a  robo-call to the Centre and had a quickie tooth extraction, it was my turn to gloat because now, at this ever-receding time, some of us had started to get the idea about where we needed to go to have certain 'things' resolved in the most painless way possible. Her knees appeared to be stuck to the outside of my windshield but her fabrications never became any more interesting, believable or mundane. As I helped her walk under her own power, it occurred to me that I still hadn't received her materials in the mail as I'd been promised more than once. This set up a powerful conflict of interest between the place I'd reserved in the SkyBox and the outflow I knew I had to count on to get any purchase on the hold-outs who never stop spouting slogans when I or my daughter take to the airwaves. There's a complicated weaving process which results in livid make-up artists struggling to fill what remains of their last solid meal from this side of an internal penflict.

My most mature Belgian colleague has made it a habit to bring me preliminary designs with the expectation of instant results. When I try to make it clear to him that that's not how the game is played, he stalks off into a wooded area for a mandatory 'cooling off period', after which I try to knock some sense into his woebegone skull. On the third impact he generally 'sees the light' and it's all I can do to detain him for questioning by a certain very dubious authority figure. It turns out they knew each other in flight school and now I'm the one who's up a creek without a paddle. When I hand over my portfolio with a negligible fiver secreted at the midpoint, the tables turn once again and I'm being hailed as the latest 'hometown hero'. I like to tell my kids that they don't make them like that anymore. Generally, they stare up at me with their oafish eyes and mumble words to the effect that they hope I'm not going to 'snap'. What do you think I do? I'll tell you what: I snap my fingers and they're out cold! Now who's laughing? Not me, buddy, not me.

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