Monday, October 27, 2008

CURRENT EVENTS (an ongoing series)

a- Anything about your micturition?
b- I wish I had better aim.
a- Oh. Yes. I see.
b- Does that help?
a- Very much. Is your hair growing thin? Would you dare to eat a peach?
b- Not at this very moment. Not at this particular moment.
a- Good. Now that is taken care of. So, this is better than rubber buggy bumpers, of course.
b- Of course. Don’t think I’ll repeat that. No. Not in mixed company.
a- Is this a poem?
b- No. Never. Nothing like that.
a- Good. I hate poems.
b- Who doesn’t? They stink. Yes, I truly believe that they are rotten. A bunch of bull.
a- Petering out I am. I walk past an old beat-up station wagon. A good old early 1970s model with fake-wood paneling and peeling verdigris paint. It is stuffed full to the gills with cardboard boxes. Some are broken down and flattened out and stuffed inside of other boxes. Some are filled with stuff. All kinds of stuff. I am prettier today than I was twelve weeks ago.
b- We get born at such odd times, don’t you think?
a- Yes, but we also get tired and angry and annoyed and hungry. Timing is everything, I do believe.
b- As do I. On this we do concur. Oh, and I also get grumpy sometimes. Sometimes I don’t.
a- That is just as well. Just the same. A small thing, really. A good thing? No. Not such a good thing, is it?
b- I’m okay with it. When the rivers are swelled with the wine of youth we go running stark naked, streaking that is, through the pastures of Heaven with boundless joy. Something like that. Yes. I am certain of it.
a- Let us try a synecdoche, if you please.
b-Could I make you a list?
a- Yes, but I only want you to include the number 8 and 9 items on the list in your response. Is that understood?
b- ‘Tis. Quite. I can only think of seven right now.
a- The other two will come. And they will be the only ideas that matter. Use your head. The first seven are the generic random ones that everyone thinks of. The last two will show your originality, if you have any.
b- I do not think that I do.
a- We will see. And no metonymies please.
b- I will attempt to do so, for a man must test his mettle. He must show his temerity and not be jejune and cowardly in his actions or he will falter, and will never kill himself with climbing to reach the stars.
a- Yes, there are benefits and bored buffalo and detrimental things too that come with the purchase.
b- Now, that price you quoted me earlier. When I asked how much these things ran…
a- And I said that they would run quite a ways if you didn’t catch them.
b- Yes, that was very humorous indeed. But, all joking aside, that price was…?
a- Eight hundred billion buckskins and zilch on the centavos.
b- An estimate?
a- An exact figure.
b- What’s the catch? I mean, excuse me but it sounds a bit on the too-good-to-be-true side there, if you catch my drift, buster.
a- Keaton? Poindexter? Brown? Or could it be that you do not think I am as affluent as I present myself?
b- All possibilities are endless. Do you feel like singing?
a- Yes! Let us try this. Moon River, wider than a mile, I’m crossing you in style, some day.
b- You dream maker, you heart breaker, wherever you’re going I’m going your way, two drifters off to see the world, there’s such a lot of world to see.
a- We’re after the same rainbow’s end, waitin’ round the bend.
b- My huckleberry friend, Moon River, and me.
a- Now. That sure was enjoyable. We can enjoy these things still.
b- Do you still drink water?
a- Do you mean when I am parched or just any old god damn time?
b- When the tap’s running with hot-water dreams and ghosts flit through the shadows of this dead movie set.
a- Oh. Then my answer would be no. I drink only limeade and cherry brandy.
b- We’re just two fellas having a conversation, that’s all.
a- That is all.
b- Sometimes when I close my eyes I see entoptic floaters. Sometimes, like say on a pluvial afternoon of washing dishes and taking out the trash and bending over to look at the dust bunnies between the crack made by the side of my refrigerator and the molding on the bottom of the wall, I cry.
a- My fingernails grow too fast. It seems I’m cutting them every other day.
b- Isn’t it strange to think of yourself as a skeleton covered with all of these muscles, and fat, and skin, and hair. And the only reason you are alive is because some bacteria find you useful.
a- My thoughts unburdened of care sluice through my head in a tidal wave of useless patter.
b- I wish I could play the harp.
a- They are speaking and the things they are saying are enormously important. Their voices are more than susurrations, more than billy clubs and boxing gloves, and they carry on the wind as if amplified from bulldozer-sized speakers. I have never owned a pet, but I once played the violin.
b- I don’t have jumper cables or pencils or a frock coat.
a- Things are never simple. Complications arise. Changes come. People never turn into fruit flies.
b- Stop grousing. We are not that far gone into anomie yet. Hope is something that still can spring now and again, though it would make a pretty pathetic campaign slogan.
a- I cannot tell if I am becoming neophobic or cainophobic, or if I am just existing, inside of my inner distance, in a horror vacui of somebody else’s imagining. That is all that is relevant to the current situation. Religion is the only campaign slogan.
b- Fear is its own slogan. It wears a balaclava of intimidation and, unmitigated, it horsewhips your sense of purpose. I am no longer eating raw pancake batter.
a- I do believe that complacency is gnawing away at the herringbone stitched fabric of our meanest, most base nature. Fortitude is a lost cause. We are trapped in this fin-de-siècle. I am not hell-bent on doing or not doing anything.
b- Lawdie, lawdie, lawdie…
a- Kiss my grits.
b- If one would or could even catch a phrase like a raindrop on the tongue, or become fashionably depressed, or covertly go gray, or shuffle off, winking, o’er the deep blue sea while mermaids do or do not sing for thee, well, it might smell of bleach.
a- A crash course in living the life you want to lead: Many things including but not limited to (a) crafting a misunderstanding between what your mind says and what your mind hears itself saying, that is self deception in its most nefarious state—a usurpation of the mind’s central mechanism for making up its own sense, (b) doing what one most wants to do the most that one can, (c) singing, (d) walking around late at night thinking about black & white movies like The World’s Greatest Sinner or Proust or Chipmunk songs, (e) recording the sound of one’s voice saying strange things over and over, (f) trying not to fall off of bridges.
b- Bored people sitting alone in kitchens of despair. These are the kinds of things I see when I look out of my window. I point my finger and it shoots.
a- Hey, don’t aim it at me, you Tom-Dick-Harry son-of-a-bitch!
b- Ah. A tableau of my private hours strikes you as vicious, or shall I say bellicose, threatening maybe?
a- Strikes me? You’re off your nut!
b- I’ve just got a bad case of the old unguis incarnatus, that’s all. I need to purchase some new shoes. My clothes are becoming threadbare and I’ve got missing buttons on all of my shirts. The streets get so dark at night. I can’t seem to find a good haberdashery that will stay open late, just diners and 7-11s.
a- Tell of some other things.
b- Stop signs are octagons. Most windows are rectangles. One Way signs are irregular pentagons. The Pentagon is the headquarters of The United States Department of defense, located in Arlington County, Virginia. As a symbol of the US military, "the Pentagon" is often used metonymically to refer to the Department of Defense rather than the building itself. Stop signs are retroreflective, which means they have cat’s eye. A plane crashed into the Pentagon once. I wasn’t born then. The arrangement of windows in a building is its fenestration. If I jump out of a window that is defenestration. I am not too smart. Going the wrong way down a one-way street can be a bad idea. Any new idea is like a light bulb. Breathing is important to staying alive. In the morning when the sun is bright it is easy to see spider webs in the trees.
a- Okay, you can shut up now. That’s quite enough of that folderol. Now, let us make some sugar water and sell it to the kids as bottled energy.
b- We are so mediocre. We are stunted. We are stifled. The television talks and we listen and obey.
a- This is a good chance to be somebody. I will tell you that this here caplet, this combination of a capsule and a tablet in a chalky white teardrop shape, is, upon digestion and what we believe will be an almost one-hundred percent absorption rate by your gut, going to take away your fears and sadness and your inability to feel empathy for another human being. And, after you come to believe the truth of what I am saying, which I am almost assured that you will, a preternatural desire will pervade your inner-consciousness, and will usurp your most basic instincts for survival with an obsessive, overwhelming demand to have more and more caplets. This will all seem normal. You will pay with tiny, lesser-used parts of your soul at first, but eventually you will resort to hawking your most cherished memories for a fix. This is a good strategy to keep the shareholders happy, happy, happy.
b- I don’t sleep easy. I stare at the ceiling. There are no easy answers. Nobody cares.
a- The price of gold is stabilizing.
b- The cost of breathing is going up. The profit margins must be shrinking. I place my complete trust in corporate wealth. Once there was a way to put words down onto paper and have them mean something.
a- That’s not true. That cannot be true. I do not believe such things. I am slowly turning into an idiot.
b- That is all there is to know.

Friday, October 24, 2008

Nobody's Home (An Imitation)

      Gloria was better at saying things such as, “The dichotomy of the earth,” than I was. We would drive around a lot, smoking a lot of cigarettes too. The radio was always playing. There wasn’t a whole lot to say. Back then things were simple, but also complicated too, if you know what I mean. We’d pretend that we didn’t know the names of the streets in our neighborhood, that we were lost in a strange country where nobody spoke English and all the houses were for strangers. The radio would play and we would drive around and around “discovering” things that we already knew. I never had much money. She’d pay for the gas. But gas was cheap then, only like a dollar or so a gallon, and it didn’t seem like a big deal. Nothing was very important.   
 
Things were just kind of stale and it always felt like I was drifting, like maybe I would just drift out of my body if I weren’t too careful. I know, that sounds strange. But that’s just the way things were.
   
We were both about twenty-two. That’s a pretty young age to be. We didn’t know that then of course. It just seems young to me now I guess, now that all that time has gone by between then and now. One morning you are standing there brushing your teeth, looking in the fogged-up mirror and imagining things about what the day will bring, and then you suddenly realize that nobody is going to care if you leave toothpaste stains in the sink. That’s how things go sometimes. 
   
If we got hungry I’d steer the car over to In-And-Out and we’d go inside and eat hamburgers and French fries and drink soda. I always got mine animal style, which meant they put all the fixings on it and their special sauce too. I never liked the fries that much. She would eat most of what we got, and she’d always dump a bunch of those salt packets on them. We’d drive home afterwards, or sometimes I’d park the car by the train tracks and we’d smoke cigarettes and watch the trains go by.
   
When we slept it was out of sheer exhaustion, that tired feeling that you can feel crawling up the back of your legs and making your head go soft and numb. There was never much to argue about. We’d just crawl through the days, kind of stunned and dopey, filling up empty space I guess. I’d cut my fingernails or drink ice tea or turn the pages of a fashion magazine or work on my card tricks while she read out loud from all these books we had all over the floor. They had a lot of dust on them, and she’d have to take a rag and wipe them down before she started in. We didn’t own a TV or have a pet. The days just went by.
   
There was a man at the door one day. I heard him knocking while I was lying on the couch eating crackers. I didn’t have a job and just spent most of my days lying around like that, listening to things, trying to hide away from the world. I kept the shades closed and tiptoed around in my socks.
   
Gloria had a job working at a hospital. She was a nurse. It kept her busy while I was doing my lounging.
   
I tried to wait the knocking out, but it kept right on. Just these tiny fast raps, and then nothing, and then more of the rapping. It went on for quite some time. Finally, I decided to get up and see what all the noise was about. I crawled slowly towards the door, trying to keep my body below where the person at the door might be able to see in through the window that was in the top of the door. The floor was really dirty and a lot of dust got all over my hands and pants. I smelled burnt coffee coming from the kitchen. I hate the smell of burnt coffee. It was hard to concentrate on what I was doing with all of that dust all over me and that stale, sour coffee smell in there too. But I kept on.
   
I saw a daddy-long-legs go by on the floor. It wasn’t interested in me. The way it walked reminded me of a guy on stilts, or some kind of noiseless dance, a way to move that seemed natural and unaffected. Without much effort it went on up the wall, and I stopped paying any attention to it.
   
The knocking kept happening. A bunch of mail was on the floor there by the door. The mailman just slipped it through the slot in the door. We didn’t have a mailbox. It was an election year and there were a lot of flyers telling me to vote this way or that on certain things that I had no idea about. A lot of smiling faces with very white teeth, their arms around small children who were smiling too. It made me feel depressed to see all of that mail there. I’m not sure why.
   
I stopped crawling and just stayed hunched over there on all fours like that. My knees were starting to hurt, but I tried to ignore that and stayed very still. I remember trying to convince myself that I was in a war and was deep in enemy territory, and that if I moved or made any noise somebody might shoot me. I didn’t want to be shot. The knocking stopped for a bit.
   
All kinds of crumbs and other stuff were on the floor. A lot of those square plastic tags that keep the ends of bread bags tied up. I picked one up and looked at it. It had “$4.19, OCT.12, P 27422” stamped on it in ink. The ends were sharp. I put it in my pocket. The knocking had stopped by then.
   
I went down on my stomach and inched my way towards the door. When I got there I slowly rose, holding onto the doorknob and sliding my back up the door. I looked through the peephole when my head got high enough. Outside the world looked like a fishbowl. A man in a suit was standing on the sidewalk with his back to the house. He seemed to be looking at the house across the street. The wind was blowing some papers around out on our grass. They got caught up in a mini-cyclone and started flying around all over the place. I wanted to know what those papers said on them. For some reason I got really tired and didn’t feel like standing there anymore.
   
I went back to the couch and lay down on it. I decided to wait for Gloria to come home before I made any decisions. There were a few crackers left in the box I’d left there on the cushions. It felt good to just be lying there on the couch, eating those crackers, staring at the ceiling, and not thinking that much about anything.

Monday, October 20, 2008

The Flu Shot Line

If there were some kind of ersatz Statue Of Liberty in the lobby of the Geary Street Kaiser Hospital waiting room, on its plaque would be engraved, at least during Flu Shot Week, “Give me your deformed, your cranky, your morose patients botched beyond all repair.” I would keep the part in Lazarus’s poem about them being wretched refuse. And maybe add something about them standing in a line that snakes all the way around the building and out into the street, where some of these expendable masses narrowly avoid becoming the latest statistic in pedestrian mortality reports. The prophylactic promise of the flu shot, though it may just be a psychosomatic panacea, has become matter-of-course each October for these hypochondriac folks, most of whom are either pushing eighty, strangely disfigured, dripping snot and saliva or other unrecognizable types of bodily fluids from every orifice, suppurating ad nauseum, and who share the same bitter, maligned facial expression of abject resignation. They come in on walkers, in wheelchairs, electric Rascal scooters, and hobbling along with canes. Crotchety, scowling, crookedly bent over, hacking up a lung, drool hanging from their dentures, they stand in these block-long lines and wait for their prized flu shot. Kaiser has a Flu Shot Clinic that they run for a two-week period every October. All it really is, is about five or six nurses armed with needles at fold-up tables. An ever-alert security guard monitors the lines, sending the next patient to the next available nurse as they are freed up. Usually there are two lines of people waiting on the half-dozen nurses giving the shots. Why there are two lines, and what is the difference between the two lines, are subjects of much conjecture and debate among those standing in the lines. Often times fights will break out between members of these lines, which are only divided by about ten feet, and the poor security guard will have to step in and separate the warring factions. In actuality, nobody really knows the reason for having two lines, but I assume it has something to do with making the wait seem shorter, as having them all stand in one line may send the thing all the way out to Ocean Beach, and Kaiser doesn’t want sand being tracked into the antiseptic environment of their hospital. So people stand and wait and curse their luck, chewing their gums and shouting at the voices in their head to shut up. A certain sanity is severely lacking in these valetudinarians. Facial tics, unsightly wounds, limbs shaking with Parkinson’s, outrageous Tourette’s-like shouts and coprolaliac jeers, random acts of selfishness, and mayhem abound. Watching the people in line is not a completely unpleasant way to spend an afternoon. In fact, it can be very entertaining, for those with a more sick sense of humor. I once saw an octogenarian woman spit right in the face of a morbidly obese man sitting atop a high-powered Rascal—fully stocked with dual front coil springs, mid-wheel drive, shocks, and power brakes. The guy glowered at her and screamed, “You will be dead by the time you reach the front of this line, you fucking whore!” while the sputum was still dripping off of one of his numerous chins. The old hag just leaned on her walker, which had cut-in-half tennis balls attached to the back legs, and gave the corpulent fellow an icy stare while contorting her haggard and bird-like features into a horrendous grimace. The fat man’s face got red and bloated, more than it normally was, with many veins throbbing and a few white boils looking as if they were about to pop, and I thought he might buy the farm right there, but the spry and fearless security guard was quickly on the scene, and diffused the situation by offering the over-sized Rascal rider a free bag of doughnut holes from the bakery next door. This security guard is a man to be admired. He has the Herculean task of keeping the warring nitwits in the line, well, in line. And, remember, he also is the one who controls the flow from the front of the lines to the nurses with the needles. This is no small job, and I think he is well underpaid for doing it. He doesn’t complain though. Mostly he just stands there signaling people and shouting, “Next!” each time a spot opens up. How he regulates both lines at once I will never understand, but he makes it work. The lines both keep moving at a pretty much constant and equal rate. It is a thing of wonder. I stand there in the hospital lobby on long autumn afternoons of dim sunlight and breezy susurrations of wind, and I watch them, the botched, the lame, the undignified afflicted, stand in those lines and wait. By the time they make it into the actual lobby they’ve already been standing in line for quite a while on the sidewalk outside. Their hair is tousled. Leaves and trash are attached to their clothing. The skin on their faces is rugged and sun-chapped. Small children, come only to keep their grandparents company, have hit puberty. People’s dogs have died. It is a long and torturous wait. It always amazes me how patient these people will be, waiting all that time in line just to get their precious flu shots. These same people who probably hit the gas through yellow-turning-red lights; who might make mad dashes, using their shopping carts like Bumper Cars, at Safeway to get to the checkout line first; who run across the street against traffic to catch a bus that is just closing its doors; who waggle their claim check in front of my face in the pharmacy, complaining that they just don’t have time to wait, “In that big old long line,” and screaming at me, “Just help me, come on, all you’ve gotta do is just grab my pills and give them to me. I cannot wait! I want to talk to your supervisor!” Most of the time they aren’t even that nice about it. All I know is that they spend a hell of a lot more time waiting in this flu-shot line than they do in the pharmacy’s line. But, for some reason, they all seem to have the time to do this absurd thing every year—to stand there in the flu-shot line through rain, sleet, and, well not snow in San Francisco, but any other kind of inclemency of weather, and they hurl much less acrimony at the nurses than they do at us pharmacy clerks. It baffles me. I don’t question such things though. I just stand there and watch them as they come in through the propped open doors of the hospital lobby: the deformed, the cranky, the morose; as they come in single file, knees buckling, faces straining and burdened, arthritic hands holding on for dear life to the bars of their walkers and canes; as they come in from the street, strabismic, looking lost and craning their necks to get a peek at what they think might be the end of the line, the place where a nurse trained in the delicate art of phlebotomy will have them pull up a shirt sleeve, wipe down a spot on their upper arm with an alcohol pad, ask them if they are allergic to eggs, and finally will give them that shot, that injection of a killed influenza virus that they believe will ward off sickness, and maybe some fear and trembling unto death too. It is not for me to say that they are wrong, that they are suffering from a delusion forced on them by a government that is only interested in making money for drug companies, that they are lonely and scared and are just looking for something to give them comfort during a period of hopelessness and uncertainty. I just stand there by the wall, eating an egg salad sandwich on my lunch break and trying to whistle, watching them come and go and come and go, this steady stream of people, all of whom are spending their time in this way, waiting, waiting, and waiting. It is a very important thing, their waiting, and it is profound in the most basic and everyday sort of way. It is something to be doing with this time that you are allotted to be alive in. Waiting. No different from me. No different at all. I stand there against the wall in the lobby of the Kaiser Permanente on Geary Street with my sandwich in my hand, and I smile.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

A Letter To The Editor

Dear Sirs,

After perusing your latest findings ("An Introduction" [Wonderings, September]), and I must say much intense lucubration on my part, something odd has come to my attention. Though obfuscated as your article was with misconceptions and deconstructivist folderol and hokey shenanigans of razzmatazz and questionable merit, I still stared with gawky haste, incredulously, at the page when the whole roundabout hatful of solecism ended on the inglorious note of, “Grande Geoffrey And His Bestial Micro Media Flash Dancers.” I could not help but wonder, what in the world? Is this some type of code that I am not aware of? An acronym in disguise? And also, excuse the excoriation, but nobody reads Branch anymore, and just as many acolytes of Wellmeyer exist as kids there are who still play the original silver-box Nintendo Entertainment System. Referring to their findings in any but a facetious or sardonic, if not even mordant sort of way, just seems plain silly, even to an old timer like yours truly. Next time maybe you should just use Rudyard Kipling as your scimitar to slice up these unanswerable questions into little nuggets of frass, to give one even the remotest (dare I say foggiest?) notion, or your basic bare-bones rudimentary understanding, of this thing we humans do called being alive.

Yours Truly,
YT



Dearest YT,

Thank you for your kind words. We here at Autotelic Monthly wish to congratulate you on your speculating, and though you do intuit some of the substance of our meaning in the correct portion of our piece “An Introduction” [Wonderings, September], you do not completely comprehend the exact nature of your correct surmise, i.e. that the terminus of the aforementioned work is a type of acronym (actually a backronym, though of a rather bolwderized sort, just as a book is a Box Of Organized Knowledge according the late great Mr. Burgess.) So, at this time we would like to congratulate you on your Brobdingnagian accomplishment, and also reveal to you the initialism’s exact meaning, though some erudite pedants might refer to it as an alphabetism. GGAHBMMFD. Yes, that is it. That good old mnemonic device for remembering the notes on the magical scale of imagination. Or, as many of you may be more familiar with it, “Good Grades Always Have Been Making Me Feel Good.” Thank you for your interest.
—AM

PS—Rudyard Kipling was a pussy.

Saturday, October 11, 2008

AN INTRODUCTION

A variance in individuals, who when asked to communicate in a show/tell fashion, ergo reveal things about what it is to be the person who they are, in this resolute and at times highly articulate way, has been established with an aberration rate of less than .013 times the previously held acceptable “norm” for behavior in such individuals, i.e. those who are exhibiting these “anhedonial” or “hybrid lugubrious/ennui otiose/torpid inclined” symptoms (e.g. staring at leaves until they fall from tree branches) such as those ere thought to be classified into (of course in a streamlined all-or-nothing take-the-cake-and-eat-it-too type of way) obsessive or egoistic objectivism coteries, or also, even though never penetrating a façade of no-bullshit-warped-impression-illogical and untenable deviations from the baseline rate of change, give or take a couple decimal points worth of distraction (e.g. kids playing video games and acquiring what was years ago commonly referred to as “Nintendo Thumb” with symptoms ranging from mild discomfort to almost total immobility of the opposable digit rendering such child unfit for accomplishing even the most basic of tasks necessary for his or her survival, which of course would include properly gripping a doorknob or tying ones shoes, and also, needless to say, putting the prospect of playing said video games on hold while the child was “laid up” and nursing his or her affliction, therefore exhibiting a marked increase in attention span for this N.T. period, very similar to a shortstop going on the 15-day DL with a bum elbow and, when he does return to take some tentative B.P. realizing that he was over-swinging on changeups and is actually a better hitter when he doesn’t try to do too much and just tries to be patient, stay back, keep his front shoulder in, and make solid contact, where as the child has less to divert his or her gaze from the simple velleities of their little lives and in this NT phase the child will tend to lessen his or her “distraction rate” to a degree very semblable to the one proposed for our purposes here) there is really no evidence either way of said individuals fettered to this mindset modifying his or her actions or reactions to comply with the “mores” of the cadre whom they happened to be grouped/involved/immersed/tempered in or to. Assuming an omniferous and constant rate of change in a subject’s modality (said subject being the before mentioned “type” and also being held in thrall by the sway/aura/menace of his or her specified “others” or coevals residing in his or her same grouping) and that he or she are even slightly amenable (slight=.0001% of the lowest common known rate of change versus rigidity as defined in the Lungst-Foreman analogy where the snake is not the mouse but is, by happenstance, inside both snake and mouse at once, i.e. nobody knows what the hell to think anymore so just forge on ahead and shut the hell up about it already) there happens to be a picayune, though not always diminishing, differential in the subject’s patterns of accepting/rejecting his or her status as a human being. Now, if we take into account the Darwinian nature of this survival/fitting-in pattern displayed so across-the-board or ubiquitously by these subjects when placed into what we believe to be their proper cadre, there often times seems to be a bifurcation in their previous modes of making sense of what they ascertain to be their idea of the world, though not the typical Branch-Wellemeyer sort of splitting (presuming that this paradigm-shift-incipient, and some would say insidious, formulaic, if not fatidic, dispelling of held notions, indeed has some validity, spuriously flim-flam and debatable as it may be) that we have observed in the flippant/irate field tests w/r/t parameters 6 and 14 of their so resilient, sanguine, and unyieldingly adamantine way of conducting these experiments, though I am not here today to belittle their findings by making disparaging, uncouth, gauche, or otherwise sinister remarks about their means of attaining them, i.e. slash, burn, burn, burn, slash, burn, burn, slash, um, oh yes, burning bright in the forests of the…no, that is exactly not correct, but, well, you get my point. It is too uncomplicated to be rationally explained or expounded on with tedious palaver by the likes of me, and for all of our intents and purposes here…well, that is not for me to say. So, let’s move on then. Okay. Now, this being assumed as tacit, this bifurcation of thought process that occurs in the subjects in these very specific instances, we can now look upon a symptom as being a thing apart from the condition that engendered it. We can make up our own sense, or own innocence in a sense. We can make matter matter before we pay the mind any mind. In a more simplified way we can winkle the sickness from the shell of disease, take it out and start to comprehend it, get our hands around it, and begin to make those cooing noises so often associated with post-coital bliss or speaking motherese to an infant. It is in these things, and in these things alone, that we can place our trust for building a truer and more shining example of what it means to be a human being living in this world. This is our goal here, right folks? So, without any further ado, let’s bring out the next act. I think you are all really going to enjoy this one. Hey, I think I hear them now. That tinkling of bells, the steady hum of the dishwasher, the faint buzz of the television set. Yep. You guessed it. Here, all the way from the smoky valley of Bulloondurf nestled in the steep foothills of Brymtin Canyon, where the houses are all flanked by movie screens and the rivers flow full of gasoline and the flood lights shine all night long…Yes, they’ve come a long way to be here folks, and you know what? They are really quite charming in person, just the nicest and most polite young people I’ve never met. Really. I just can’t say enough good things about them. So, come on folks, let me here you out there. Let’s make some noise! For the first time in National Bandwidth history, live and in all their hi-def glory, I give you…Grande Geoffrey And His Bestial Micro Media Flash Dancers!