The Dilemma of Arrival.

 

When the signal is given, more often than not the insertion of  a covered flag, one and then the other of us will rise to the adjacent landing and deliver our pledge. As the seconds tick by and my time grows ever shorter, I'm faced with a dilemma. You will be reminded of a conversation we had on the stairway of a domestic field hospital. Me with a small scrap of wood, you with an oven-ready comestible. As the judges make a lukewarm effort to hide their fealty to a hidden Authority, more than ever I'm aware of my unfitness to hold a position of leadershit in a world gone mad. It's not for nothing that I've neglected to offer segmented resources to several of our challenged co-termers. They live with our name burned lengthwise on their wooden candy boxes. This helps them to never feel unloved when the time comes for a rank evaluation. I am now ready to ride in the only carrier left on this island. Yes, I will take every opportunity to demonstrate peasant dances during the once-per-week recreation period. Otherwise I'm occupied for hours at a time distributing secret recordings of high-level meetings that occurred in the late Summer of 2005.

When we, as a group, are dismissed without even a token examination of our stress injuries, I make haste to appear in a casual outfit at the entryway of our autogenous Stability Seminar. There I am greeted hand and fist in a manner to which I've renounced an oath to behold. In the basket which follows my sublimated hand signals, anyone interested will be able to look for themselves and verify what I've said from the very beginning. A tattered bland cloth and a used testing cylinder are all I've got left. Beyond that, even the feral children with whom I've shared the random bon mot will be quite happy to tell any of our discouraged visitors that they need not feel their way through a darkened corridor without putting up a fight. In the event of a 'knock-down-drag-out', they should be given a chance to state in as simple and direct way as possible why they haven't become ever more familiar with our baroque procedures. If they come at you with a pre-tested lotion, please offer no resistance. It will get you precisely nowhere. If, however, you lie quietly using only your eyes on a recumbent nurse, then we might be persuaded to line you up for a spot in one of our Evening Presentations of the recent past. What will it take? Not one this dark, that's what.

______________________________