Foreswearing a Well-Earned Eubontic.

 

It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that we've got a lot of patsies. My wife and I pride ourselves on our devotion to well-adjusted evaluees. The ones who make the grade are ours for the taking. About the others, it would be the wiser course to not look extremely closely. Out of all the people who scorned the entrance to our central room, the one who stands head and shoulders above the rest has come in for the kind of awakening sometimes called 'rude'. No one is ever advised to feel put upon, especially when it comes to making diagrams on the spur-of-the-moment. By their names alone, you'd swear against your better judgment that one very peculiar individual suffered a secret hurt. We will apply each of four distinctly flavored and colored rags to the forehead, genitals, lower back and sole of the right foot respectively. In the owners' manual, it states quite clearly where our obligations lie. When any uncalled-for questions are raised in the coming days, we are to lie repeatedly, in a halting and falsely timid voice if at all possible.

The imported Roumanian basin stands a-ready. The peter-tools are flounced just so and any of the congregants who quite regularly abjure the company of trusted minions are now about to receive, under the care of Ike the Stevedore, a lesson in underwhelming the composition of our Nation's tax-writing committees. In honor of their One-Hundredth spontaneous remission, we are removing them to Spudenburg, Ohio for the annual Enforcement Festival. There will be workshops galore and plenty of opportunities to bandy about the kinds of phrases for which they are so well known. I have pledged to have everything stacked in under a minute. But, while we're waiting for that, could you help me bring a bit of sure-fire authenticity to the proceedings by attending in your incongruous naugahyde chapeau? It won't take nary a passel but it would mean so much to one very special little boy. He lives in an underground parking garage not far from here. During the daylight hours he can be spotted darting to and fro, peeking through cracks in the framework and keeping his nodule in tip-top shape. Come the evening, one or another of us will escort him, with or without spandrels, into an august body of military contractors where he will sit for hours absorbing so many life lessons that it's hard to know where to begin.

But, begin I will, and not for the first time if I'm being honest (I'm not). You see, the long and the short of it is that we're just not the kind of couple who anyone would ever think would involve themselves in highly technical missile guidance systems. Secondly, if and when you finally decide to pony up your end of the bargain, we can assure you that a content-free compartment will be reserved in your name for use on or by January 12, 2011. In the event that we enact a deceptively intuited plan, your cooperation will be consigned to a strictly 'moot' status. Please don't go telling anyone that you got the raw end of the stick. Why? Because it just won't wash, that's why! All of our subtendrils are well aware of the part you played in the collapse of the 'Free World'. Without you and that 'friend' of yours, we'd still be out in the backyard lifting thousands of containers into a place you know very well. And now we look to the skies and plead for even the slightest morsel of reappraisal. Nothing is what we thought it was, is all I'm trying to say. Is that enough? Sure?

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