. . .

Now you too can prevent forest fires

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury. (Any of you in law enforcement please do not read the rest of this paragraph. No, make that message. No, come too think of it, just stop reading my emails entirely. In or out. In fact, why don't you just stop the monitoring entirely, and we'll forget the whole incident. I can be generous. I am known for my generosit. I endowed a house of illrepute in Wisconsin just last fall.) I am now exceedingly stoned.

You can probably tell. Either that, or I write these odd spontaneous inoffensive-yet bizarre amazingly long and devastatingly bizarre messages all the time. And we all know that isn't the case. I've been slipping recently. All my messages for at least a few days now are very short.

Odd, too. Just when I'd been getting used to these sorts of things having little to no apparent effect on me. Is there no end to my talents? I feel even odder than usual.

And the music is skipping, which doesn't help. Or at least, I think it's skipping.

So my disordered occasional ramblings in this message can be chalked up to another casualty in the War Against Drugs, instead of another casualty in the War Against Alloni as it usually is. Claim I'm the system. Revile me as such. I deserve it. I'm a (sniff) nonconformist. I - I am not a crook. I am a lounge sweet.

Time - sense - not - working - reight. Also, analytical critical diobolical (diabolical) sense of indirection. Just so's you're aware. You can ask strange questions of me...

I realized. This is why people have been known to ask me if I am constantly on potent medications! When I'm typing irrightly, I sound like I'm greatly drugged! Yeah! I understand it all now. It makes total sense. Especially the walrus. The walrus and the carpenter.

The omnipotent carpenter.

Fear him.

So! Anyhoo, I am writing this to show people that I am among them. I am one with them. I am part. Of my bad self. And! And that I still have creative art talent and am and individual and not a Perl script or at least a malfunctioning one. A variable misincorrected on line 47. It must be 47. There is no other way. I obsess for a moment on the number 47. I stare at it. I make little Moe-poking-at-his-brain-in-that-simpsons-halloween-episode "hello! hello!" noises at it.

47. Count the syllables. 123 4! 4! 4 syllables! All we need is a seven connected with it somehow, and we will traversed the boundaries for a dislocation point, and, finding none, moving on to distant horizons of sight and sound and motion.

The train of thought gets rerailed for a moment. I was going to ask: those of you who remember my bygone days opf glory, when I split the atom, destroyed countless inoffensive little lifeforms that never did any one any harm and were kind to their mothers, and wrote long random bizarre pointless emails. How do I differ now? Am I shorter, wider, stronger, zanier, occasionally more sane? Give examples. There will be a short quiz.

The wall. The wall is staring at me. It's in league with the tiger. The tiger was staring at me. It was. That's why I had to have it destroyed. No one is allowed to look at me like that. It made faces at me, too. Faces when I wasn't looking. And plots. It was plotting with the dishrag for a while. Luckily, the towel - tiger was separated in space as well as in time, so they had little chance to meet each other. Which makes plotting difficult. I still claim the nuns were responsible to the whole thing. We must start a nunhunt. It'll be big fun! Like a witchhunt, but instead of the witches being easy to find because they wore pointy hats and cackled, they'll be findable by their black-and-white habits. And then we'll have nun-burnings, and bad jokes, and we'll all go to bed tomorrow instead.

Quick pause whilst I discover if I have email. No! None from you lazy goodforsomthingswhichIcan'ttellyoubecauseit'lljustgotoyourheads. None since I last checked not more than 10 minutes ago. I am ashamed not to be seen with you. (I am, of course, lying. I did get a message. I responded to it appropriately. It was not, however, from this mailing list. I can still blame you for not being there in my time of travail.) Why didn't I stop them? Why didn't I listen to me?

Please. Be gentle.