Update on the 'Sally Merkel' situation.

 

I've looked through all my files and I can't find anyone named 'Sally Merkel'. Some folks on loan from another department are quite adamant that that can't be right. Why? Because just the other day as I was drying off from an obvious mishap, a statement was read over the public address system which made a hash of all of our previous efforts. Even though the name appeared to be that of a popular donor, the application process alone could take a week or two. Once it was resolved in my favor, there was only one thing left on my plate: a somewhat dry grilled cheese and tomato sandwich. Someone had placed a small piece of paper on a table in a nearby building. This building had been designed by a distant relative who had participated in a certain number of parades back in the 1950s. I'd been told that his headgear was the envy of the entire Unit. People had trouble convincing me that my picture of the thing was way off in the distance where some could experience difficulty breathing if the air continued the way we expected after a year like that. Like what? Please try to be more understanding. It's true that some will continue to get old and possibly die from trying too hard.

In case anyone has an inkling that the image they've cultivated for lo these many years is apt to receive some serious scrutiny, it should be a relief to learn a self-effacement technique once known only by default on the strong side. If the other one inspires needling and jealous talk, then the recommendation is to don a favorite jacket and enter a field hospital bringing only a notebook, a flashlight and a cup holder designed for Berber infants. They will hold them all day and then look into the tiny hole while wishing this would never be an issue. All the other victims received financial consideration in lieu of reputational apostomy. This is how it will all 'go down': at first a sound will be heard, it could be any sound at all, just so long as you can hear it. Then some people will come in sopping wet. You are to pay them no mind but instead count the number of times their heads move in the average second. Next you'll want to be up on your Antasian History. This could take some doing but in time those who look like they could be next will be all but watering your plants for all you care. By now you'll be set up to take the reins and make a major haul. It might be minutes before we find out if your body is up to the stress. Sometimes people chicken out right about here. To guard against that, we recommend that you spend some time getting reacquainted with our Rules of Engagement. Should you need a piece of mildly colored string to be attached to a portable antenna, you can pen a short note to our man at the Arena. He'll be able to complete all the paperwork in about three months. After that you're on your own. It never gets simpler after that, but you don't see me complaining, do you? Be quiet.

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Life-Lessons Learned on the Battlefield of Contemporary Existence.

 

The saving grace is—and was!—that my feet, normally used to walking on the eggshells of modern social conventionalism, have attained a hard-won anchoring that only rank stolidity can provide. Three prior children of my fourth wife have duly arrived and have the run of the place which they've so long sought to deny. I can't say that I mind hearing them out. The vestibule sounds like a nice spot. I'll happily arrange to help them go over some of the pre-scripted remarks so that no one can say that they 'just made it all up'. That's just the kind of thing which some temporary health officer could be counted upon to blurt out, as if out of nowhere at all. The funny thing is, he never struck me either on the head or the arms, even if I thought nothing of breaching a contact flow. The availability of edible materials is never far from our thinking process. Someone whose opinion often gains parallel access wants it known that his flavor preferences run to the decidedly 'mild'. This shouldn't make him an object of scorn even as he goes about seeking redress in a haplessly forlorn manner.

Now the children are arrayed in a half-circle between Partitions 7 and 9 (the odd numbers encode signals from the Western periphery). Normally I prefer to go from one to the other, but on this night, as on all others, I have them taken at face value, if nothing else. They can be depended upon to redirect their innate fury at the one person whose bona fides will, in all likelihood, never effect the state of play. For my part, I can't understand what role I'm meant to play in the ongoing discussion. If the specialist requires that I cough into a marked linen sack, then so be it. If, however, someone is so bold as to make our asking price an object of rank vituperation, there will be no alternative but to inquire as to the national standard which he maintains at height in our corner grove. A person of his ilk will be given all the time he needs to feel settled. The shoes will be offered in consolation. If he becomes moist in return, I will see to it that his list is settled before injuries are sustained in the medium term. Here we mean minor scrapes and bruises, nothing more.

How have we not let the Bastion get the better of us in the foregoing eras? Anyone is privileged to guess color schemes and guiding principles. But, if they determine that one of our embattled former appointees is to be given the shortest of shrifts, then we're all but certain to detect barely muffled sobs during a post-prandial dunking session. Because, you know what? That's just what we'd expect you to say if you were held to task in a barely willowy pilot-beam. They've all but wrecked our expectation of leaving Stage 3 before someone gets violently ill. I can't tell if they've had too many ribbons applied. Some say that they can smell the difference. There's one thing you need to remember: that's a damnable lie! Mis-statements have a 'funny' way of becoming the Gospel Truth in this Ministry and Pastor Joe could use your help putting out this latest fire. Are you on board with our most secure stranglehold? Or, can we count you as 'black-pilled without context'? It won't suit our plans to have you snuffed out for good. That will be followed by a relaxing dinner on the Veranda. Please say you can't make it. It would be a real shame. Not sorry.

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This is a personal message for you, and you alone. [ALL OTHERS ARE PROHIBITED FROM READING]

 

 

As we move into a new month, I think you're going to see people who've been shielded (so far) from your way of doing things start to develop rashes neither in nor near their armpits. The fact that up till now they've resisted complaining about the way you've been said to treat a particular landscaper should not put you at ease if and when you discover some discolored markings within a mile of the parking facility that you made pains to avoid starting sometime just after the holidays. No one I've talked to thinks there's anything coincidental about it whatsoever. In fact, they're after me to launch either a probe or a whispering campaign. I don't plan on doing either. What I WILL do is take my good sweet time and make it a priority to include you in a round-robin I'm organizing that is supposed to kick off at just about the same time that your Mother is to be released from the Missouri State Correctional Facility.

I've resisted talking with you during my lunch hour because the way you've been observed to move your fingers while spitting into an empty cup makes my brain hurt. The one time I took you to a specialist, someone presented me with a pamphlet where nothing about our situation was even mentioned. And I found that a little bit hard to swallow. Even when I was digging under your house while you were away, I still had a not-so-funny feeling that certain people would start looking into beginning new types of activities. To a person they look down, smile, don a new outfit and traipse in front of my townhouse as if they haven't got a care in the world. Now they want me to include them in my secksual proclivities. It's plain to me that you've been telling tales out of school. Now I'd like to put in my two cents worth, if you don't fucking mind, okay?

In the space between where one thing ceases to begin and another starts to fade out altogether, you'll find that there's often a minuscule puck (about the size of my left thumbnail seen from five or six miles away). It's no longer purplish but has now taken on a golden hue. At this point I can practically hear you hissing as you sit alone in you den. I know for a fact that there's a Penn State pennant mounted on the wall opposite your blanching unit. People who've been there recently assure me that you still have trouble remembering the time we talked about a particular TV show. You've been known to try to influence a few of the younger members with tasteless remarks—often at my expense. Why do I get the feeling that we're on a collision course? Do you know that I've legally changed my name since our last fist fight? Would it surprise you to learn that one of our mutual acquaintances is modeled after a moderately well known figure from recent history? Is there anything?

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The 'Ruth Wingate' Scam Exposed!

 

In my native tropsicks I am  known as 'the salinder'. It is my duty to goad well considered trustees to banish non-compliant doofusses into a majestically lighted cylinder. There they will be approached individually, as well as in groups of two or three and made to lie down in the company of ground penetrating rebar. Unannounced as all reasonable measures should be, the insertion is set to be guided by defrocked clergy at the drop of a bat in a vat of fat-free unguent. Then we will apply a plainly astonishing amount of fletcher in the vicinity of their necessary foam. By the time my wife arrives from the Coast, all venerable assailants are to be engulfed in a hidebound tragisty of their own behooval. For this, and this alone, we are naked in the wind. You have a sour puss. Have you heard that before?

Once  up-wind from the Almighty Chauffeur, we are assaulted with mounds of pasty tumbwitch and annointed with a requisite dollop of feminized, neutrally colored lempodizical bolus. I acquired each of my companions by pretending to be a person named Ruth Wingate. As I grew more confident in my impersonation, I began adding touches of grim humor into my otherwise stentorian manifold. In the days before 'the problem' presented itself as if it emerged from a virtual nowhere, the barn where I'd discovered the final hoovers was sold to an outfit from 'down the way'. People started asking questions. I went all out and bought set of sawhorses to partition a peculiar area until further notice. No one knew where I got any of the firearms that were displayed in my shed. I said I'd put them aside if I was left alone in the shade. They aren't laughing now. No, why?

When trusted partners bestow a flammable nocturne upon a breeze-activated dimswitch, our final vapid loop engages a voluble societal pathogen in a gambit of absorbency and treacle. My own jamb is perfectly effective if, after one too many off-kilter bromads kites the spy, a pre-eminent physicalist is induced to shred his recent paper and take up residence in an immaterial goo. That will make our point very clearly but not before we rescind any late-century bluster that found a way to survive in the hack-infested igloo of socialist realism. Do you still have one?

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