First, many thanks to everyone who helped me through this avian mystery. Admittedly trivial compared to real issues, like a US election campaign in search of an opposition rooster without an embarrassing comb-over.
As you can see in this spy-camera photo, my disappearing hen made another brief appearance this morning. Thank god.  I was ready.
 
She ate breakfast energetically, ravenously, like an anorexic defiantly renouncing thinspo.
And then, as I watched through the crack in the door, she put her covert plan into operation: A quick, plausibly-deniable excuse to her Mom and Sister ‘Be right back, guys.’, and she ‘jogged,’ (no other word for it), in “the wrong direction” 20 meters or so, stopped, did a perfect 360 scan of the horizon for a ‘tail’, then  non-chalantly made a bee-line for her Safe-House. Under a pile of Ag-equipment I hadn’t even checked, thinking even a hummingbird couldn’t get in there. She did.
Ok, she’s obviously a trained agent. I may have a bit of familiarity with the subject, and I’d work with her on any mission requiring stealth and deceit. And fresh eggs for breakfast.

Altogether an instructive episode. Not every day one discovers he’s probably not yet insane.

     Take a look at the photo from a few days ago. How many chickens does Johnny have?
Sometimes it’s easier to count tails, then figure ‘One tail=one chicken’ and so forth.

Why is this important? Mainly because for the last three days I’d had only Two Chickens. I was very sad.  Horrible dreams of a wicked fox or jackal dragging off my helpless third-bird by the neck; me running after them barefoot and nekkid in the freezing mud and rain, the victim  gurgling at me: ‘How could you have allowed this to happen?’
So imagine my Happiness when I awoke just now at 5:30 AM and saw THREE CHICKENS waiting for breakfast!
‘Good morning, Blackie. Good morning, Red-neck 1, and… Good morning Red-neck 2!! I thought you wuz daid!”
Yes, that what I said. Out loud, for the neighbor’s surveillance cameras.
Because I just don’t trust my eyes anymore.
Two minutes to make a quiet cup of coffee, and I looked out the door again.
Two chickens! As if it had all been a dream. Was it?

I’ve now looked everywhere in my couple acres, under every tree, up on the roof… in my sock-drawer. She’s gone. Again. If she in fact was ever real. No whirring of wings, no frantic cries during the 2-minute interval, I would have heard.
I’m left with the terrifying possibility that my grief has made me delusional. That I only thought I spoke with three birds.
May need to hang number-tags on the dear things. Bird-brains, they’ll get used to it. They’ll just have to. I will not have chickens just appearing and disappearing in front of my eyes. That would be Insanity. I’ve read up on it. Pretty son you ferget how two spel, yu loose ur paswerd an u cain’t even aks fer xanga hellp.. .

Jus’ be careful with them on-line forms, is all I’m sayin’…

---

{BELOW: TODAY’S POETRY LESSON}

---

Me: ‘Yonatan Stonewall’
Address:

’1432 Nowhere Road/
Anytown, USA’
Yes, Yer Honor, dat’s my ‘Abode’
…an’ it’s all I plan to say…

The Judge: fairly typical, but vocal at times:

Seems a tad generic, boy.
You thought we wouldn’t notice?
Like-the time you listed ‘Redding’, then filled-
In your ‘Name:’ as ‘Otis’?

Me: Uh oh. I remember that. Napster. She’s got a file on me?
Well I bet this one ain’t in it:

1 7 2 9 Hardy Road, yeah my
Mom’s a taxi-dermist
Steals feathers from old mattresses
The best ones are the firmest

Judge: Not amused:

Son, remember, all this can, and
will be used against you.
You will rot in jail, you’ll eat your shoes
and, believe me, that’s a ‘dense chew’.

Hmm…‘Contrived rhyme’: deduct 10 points. But ‘tell it to the judge’.
Meanwhile; more threats and tricks:

Judge:
This Court has ways to make you talk
We can cut you like a knife
This ‘crib’ you claim on ‘Nowhere Road’;
Have you lived there all your life?

Me: Haha. Who’s she, my straight-man?

“Not yet, Your Honor, things take time.”  (*rim-shot*)
(By the way, your outfit’s stunning!)
Let’s meet in chambers, have a ball
Then hit the cold earth running.

Judge: Neither amused nor impressed. Tightens the knot:

Let’s look at pictures, shall we, Boy?
Here’s one, might be familiar?
It’s either you or Myrna Loy
You decide, or we’ll get sillier

Me: Gulp. ‘They know’. Deep breath. Ignore…

OK, the dude resembles me
Let’s say he just got lucky
But-the-shades, they’re so ‘last century’
Guy’s old, and dumb, and ‘sucky’

Judge: Rustling through her files. (Letterman and Leno done that too, when things weren’t going well):

’1 3 5 9 7th Ave’,
an odd choice of a-dress?
Not sayin’ you wear them women’s clothes
But you will, ‘under duress’.

Me: Again with the homo prison-threats? This shit’s gettin’ old.
Might as well throw myself to the mercy of the Court:

Ya got me, counsel, fair and square
I am Solberg, in the flesh
Now habeas my corpus
While the meat’s still young and fresh

Judge: Gulp. Then Bang. (shuts off cameras)

I find the-defendant guilty
of ‘Impersonation One’
Postpone the Sentence Phase until the
Parties have some fun

Me: Uh oh. Might have to get drunk for this.

---

YES, THIS POST IS POETRY
Functional, practical, rhythmic, and properly rhyming.
Call it ‘Sing-song’ if you must, but it kept me out of Sing-Sing, so there.
You were expecting {blank} verse??

Man
Alone in the Kosmos
At least he hopes
Wary of Cookbooks

A Box of Baco-bits
Last one on the Quickee-Mart shelf
Praying to remain in its current state
Forever and a day

A dollar thirty eight you pay
The Fine Structure constant
A co-incidence?
And a pie for $3.14?
Also the work of cruel chance?

The food is now yours
It will soon be a part of you
Alone again in the Kosmos

Nah, who the hell knows what that stuff means. Cute formatting though

Me, I’m a sucker for the lyric-ready:

A tear is just a tear
It rhymes with ‘here’ or ‘there’
But f*ck me if I know which one?
Gets fundamentally more un-clear
As Time goes by
END of LESSON. (TEST as soon as I come up for parole.)

     Thinking I’d only have one line in this dream, I tried to make it count:
“Yes, ‘L’ is a LISA” I told the horrid man wearing  an even more horrendous suit, and put my loving arm on the LISA’s shoulders, hitting the ‘shake-hands’ button.
‘Ted’ (judging  by his paste-on name-tag), just watched her ‘shake air‘. What a charming human specimen!
“And ‘A’s, as expected, a SEX-PEC, Ted.” I christened my latest model on the spot, on the strength of the sentence-letters, (ordained by God Himself?).
I caught ‘Ted’s  left eye a-quiverin’ as he looked ‘A’ up and down, her simulated muscles meticulously bit-mapped.
“Call me ‘Ed’.” Ted snapped gruffly, one arm half reaching for his wallet;  his ‘credit-card’, (as if he had any such). What kind of a jerk/dork wears a jacket with those stupid paste-on elbow patches these days? 
‘A’ just looked at me, her eyes and fine-motion head-control doing a perfect ‘Let’s blow dis joint, Johnny.’ I hadn’t consciously programmed the ‘Doll-rejects-the-Child’ anomaly, but somehow it didn’t kill me to see that bug.  ‘Re-Name, Mid-routine’ was my only option, and I jumped on it like a Titanic life-boat:
“Fine, ‘Ed’,” I allowed, “but that makes her, AS EXPECTED, a ‘SEX-PECT’, and I’m afraid I’ll have to take her in.“ I broke the news, reaching for my handcuffs. ‘A’ held out her articulated paws with an uncannily lascivious smile. The LISA, at the ‘click’ audio-cue of the cuff’s locks snapping searched her extensive data-base and found the Book of Ruth:
‘Whither thou goest, there shall I go also.’ she quoted, and re-ran the shakehnds.dll. This time she had my warm hand in hers at least, and  hence a simulated tear ran down one cheek. I’d loved her from the first dry-run.

And so we walked, the three of us, life-like, out through the lobby, and into the chilly Las Vegas night, through the Convention-Center parking lot, and found the Winnebago soon enough. Well, they did. GPS.
“Wineba-go, there go we also….” The ‘A’, now solidly a ‘SEXPECT’ morphed LISA’s line to fit the scene.
‘These girls iz sharp’, I thought to myself, (and not for a second as a self-compliment). A quick battery-recharge later in the motor-home and I asked:
“So, who gets me first?”
What else is there to do on long Nevada nights? I shook the LISA’s hand one more time, then shut off her breaker. She had an excellent track record on bench-tests for being second-in-line, and seemed to enjoy the basil I added to her salad. Her name-sake wouldn’t have stood for it, but that’s the beauty of re-invention.
‘A’s eyes, (etc), were wet with promise, but I knew she desperately  wanted even more of my DNA for her built-in gene-sequencer.
But again, what’s a modest Sorcerer’s Apprentice  to do?
 Charlie Parker was barely into the second chorus of ‘Don’t Blame Me’ when I submitted, powerless, to her un-interuptible sub-routines.

---

For @chromepoet, whose recent  erudite thoughts on pornography prove us kindred souls, once again. (Although until I learn to write as powerfully and economically as he does, I’ll just call myself a bronze ‘wannabe’.

   Safety-first agency ‘Underwriter’s Laboratories’ attempted to crawl out from under the bus this week over a damning report in the gadfly biz-blog  ‘Y-Axis.com’ which detailed some ‘frayed cords’ in their top management.
The web-rag’s sleuths slothed through a slew of soggy documents in the company’s dumpster and assembled a picture of systematic over-pricing given a wink by underlings in the Front Office.
In one example, upstart down-market appliance firm Tanyo, whose 914XL Over’N Under Oven/Stove Combo threatened to undercut the competition was met with an impossible demand: “Reverse the stacking order, re-label it as ‘Under ‘n Over’ and re-apply to Underwriters.’, (along with a fee for supposed ‘services’ of $19,000 cold cash. Tanyo blinked, and the American consumer lost eye-contact with what would have been an economical product offering.
Underwriters, through their law firm, Hanover, Andover, and Underhill refused to speak with this reporter as of post date.
Still, the list of over-charged firms lengthens by the hour. Geriadiator, maker of over-the counter heat-pads for the over-the-hill under-the weather crowd, joined the class-action suit filed by Y-Axis Friday, as did Breath-alyzer Inc, whose latest device seemingly caught the eye of the vertically-obsessed Underwriters. A scrawled “Make up your minds; it’s ‘under the influence’ or ‘over the legal limit’, choose one(1)” was all they got after two months of waiting for a coveted ‘Seal of Approval’ on the newest 229XG. Company executives struggled to make sense of it; both the attached $40K bill and the challenge of issuing a statement any more diplomatic than ‘WTF?!’
This writer simply hopes that all the dog work, under the cover of darkness, by Y-Axis’ researchers will bear fruit, and that when it is all over, Underwriters will be under investigation by some government oversight commission.

     Need to do this quickly, since Tanya finally fell asleep, the little angel.
She’s my phantom daughter who gurgles up from the chilly depths of the Hudson from time to time. Never calls beforehand from her cell. (We had no cells in ”68, I’m sometimes re-amazed to re-alize that. How we even communicated is anyone’s guess.)

    Anyway, she appears on the bed, fading up into Reality like a precocious ghost-ette who’s had enough of hiding behind the curtains saying ‘Boo’ in her little 7-year-old voice.
After the usual hugs, sobs, and of course ‘Fries with that’, it’s nap-time.
“Read me a story, daddy.” she always starts, halfway before completing the half-hour chore of ensconcing her lithe little body in the fuzzy pink foot-pajamas I keep in her box on the dresser. Yes, she has her own blanket too. And it must be arranged just so, for this little pea-princess, as if we’re doing a photo-shoot for Victoria’s ‘Little’ Secrets.
I said ‘quickly’? Scratch that, I guess. But after needing longer to read this story to the little punkette than Ms. Jane probably needed to write it, I feel both winded and long-winded. Here we go.

---

I had barely gotten out the title before cutey-pie had her way with the Author:
“Probably a blond. Probably from Texas?”
I toyed with ignoring that, but previous experience reminded me that to by-pass a question from my  ‘audience’ would bring on a vitual Tarantella of ‘I’m jumping on the bed/ Just jumping on the bed, Daddy!’ until either the issue was addressed or an hour  of ‘hyper’ finally diluted the toxins in her young blood-stream. I went with the easier path, sue me.
“Yes, dearie, she did grow up in Texas, so, like duh, of course she was blond.”
“Dyed blond” Tanya felt a need to clarify.
“But after she married Mister Healy, she moved to the UK, where she wrote most of her best work.”
“He of the motor-trade?”
Did I mention the child hasn’t missed a beat since her awesome start as a Young Zygote?
“Yes, sports cars. But their marriage foundered in the turbulent waters of the late 60s.” I broke the news to my daughter, glancing at the two of us a second in the bathroom-door mirror, and then thinking better of it.
“She moved to New York in the wake of the break-up.” I continued, aware that at the present pace we might be doing this for like, 4evah.
“The Big City! If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere..” Tanya started to sing. A bad omen for a guy with a bus to catch at 6 the next morning.
“No, darling, Corning, NY.” I interrupted my miniature Sinatra. And it worked. Kinda. Mid-chorus, she pulled the blanket over her face, not before making a face usually seen in autopsy photographs:
“OMG! Bell jars!”
I had intended to get to that part, but perhaps a bit more.. um… delicately.
“Yeah, Tanya-le, That’s where they found her. Inside a jar.”
“Sealed from the inside?” She wanted the details.
“Yup.”
“She had a screwdriver?”
“It didn’t say that.”
“Philips?”
“Tanya, who cares? The point is, she was very sad.”
“Like you were when I was born?”
Long Pause. What have I done, dear god, to merit both quality-time with a month-old aborted foetus, and, a Ghost-of-Christmas-Past visit from the Deep? And a ghost-ess so indescribably full of charms that I’d gladly live in chains for decades just to drive her to hockey practice even once.
“Yes kinda like that.” I fuzzed the question.
“So someone calls the Fire Department?” she moved the plot forward.
I breathed a silent sigh.
“Yup. 911.”
“Cool. They got all kinds of sexy power tools.”
Tanya, warm and happy, dark eyes large enough for a medium-weight  tiger, pink in pink pajamas from Woolworth’s (and not ‘on sale’), under a pink blanket I’d rescued from the attic when my Mother died. and me never having had any doubts as to her gender-preference.
“Yup, Jaws-O-Life. You like that kinda thing?” I asked, neutrally, like we’d learned, stomping for McGovern in ’68.
“Awesome!” was all she said. I had a vision of her leading a band of bottom-dwelling Hudson Amazonian cadavers to construct, from derelict auto parts, an invincible machine-age automaton, which, guided by tossed-out Panasonic boom-boxes, wreaks holy retribution on Jersey mortals who thought that Planned Parenthood had offered a final solution. By super-human effort, I submerged the nightmare.
“So they pried and they pried, and they blew her house down?” Tanya wanted to know how it all ended.
“Yeah, beautiful, they left the Jaws in the GMC. And used Dollar General cheap Chinese-steel pry-bars to break the seal. She was breathing, but barely, when they opened the Bell Jar.”
“Holy Plath! You had me on pins and needles there for a second!” Tanya almost shouted, nearly waking my wife down in the salon. Prosaic to a fault, she has never believed my ‘fairy tales’, and that’s OK with me.
“So what’s ‘Predjudiced, Daddy?” Tanya asked. As simple a question as one could imagine, but with no equally short answer:
“It’s like, when people don’t like schvartes, even before they meet them.” I tried, as a first approximation.
” And that includes octaroons and mulattoes?” Tanya wanted to know the techie-facts on the subject.
“Yeah, I guess. Miss Jane had no objections, in principle, to being saved from her  depressive angst by ‘her own kind‘, but by a Mister Darkie?! No way, Jose.”
“‘Darcy,’ I believe it says in the original.” Tanya pointed out, but exhibiting at least some signs of impending slumber.
“Well, the fellow in the picture in the Finger Lake Times, “Heroes save local scribbler“ sure looked more like an Obama than some washed-up Romney.” I told her, hope against hope that politics would bore the goddess to sleep. It worked wonders.
“So she was pried and predjudiced? Nice story, Daddy. I love you…. in spite of everything.”
“Leila tov, matoki.” (‘good night, sweetheart’) I kissed her face.

Now I just need to try to fall asleep myself.

For OBL, an inspiration always.

Sorry, you’ll have to click here to see the full horror, it can’t be put into words.

And there we are, text, as if  hiding behind a string of spit from prying-eyed Readers.
Too many sites have fallen for this tragic bait. I have no idea what the attraction is.
I can see an obsessive dieter doing it once, as an in-joke, but for anyone hoping for serious readers? The impression given is somewhere between
1) reading through an eighth-inch crack in a door-frame, or
2) wrenching out someone’s final words on his death-bed, one last-breath syllable at a time.
I’ve been tactful to this point:
Number of times I modestly called the format-fiasco into question in a carefully mono-syllabic
comment: 11
Number of times I’ve been  acknowledged: 0 {MAKE THAT 1, and very sweetly, too. Thanks, DJ.}
And so obviously,
Number of times I’ve succeeded in making the world a wider, better place for humanity: Zilch=0/0.

Yes, I’ve never expressed my claustrophobia in irate terms, never once typed:
You Fool! If you personally get all orgasmic over seeing ‘approximately’ hyphenated approximately 3 times on a single line, that’s none of my business. But why force anyone ‘normal’ to indulge your fetish? Call me when you lose your lisp, so to speak./JS
That’s pretty much the
End
of
Rant.

IF
U
CN
RD
THS,
UR
NOT
USNG
UR
PER-
IPH-
ER-
AL

VIS-ION.

---

---

Wu: Hey guy, why don’t you just carry a ‘stretcher’ when you visit sites?
Me: Thought I was doin’ the jokes here.
Wu: Two can play this game. And where’s my rim-shot?
Me: Yer Mamma’s a rim-shot. Anyway, bro, there is a work-around.
Wu: All ears
Me: You just highlight teh whole damn ribbon of spit, hit ‘Copy’, and paste it into Notepad, then read it like God intended.
Wu: No joke. That’d work with the suckers who scribble their purple prose on a purpler, dense-as-sin, street-map of Manhattan too, right?
Me: Guess so, but I hardly ever care by that point. Figure they’re prolly lost in the subway system anyway, metaphorically speaking.
Wu: Metaphorically speaking.

      Yes, way back in 20’01, before I knew the joys and horrors of Xanga, Ms Muse had already mewed into my ear: “If you must talk nonsense, puhleese try ‘n make it rhyme.”
“Yer sayin’ my ‘mind is on vacation, but my mouth is working overtime‘?” I asked, calmly.
“Nothin’ personal.” she backtracked, “It’s just today’s mantra. The Front Desk, you know. We’re sayin’ that to everybody this week.”
I struggled to deal with the news:
“Bu-but, I thought you were mine alone?”
“I am, Johnny, I am.”, and she wrapped her inspiring arms around me till I almost fainted.
“Today at least.”

    Someone teach that girl to quit while she’s ahead, but seriously…
When you scan the Front Page, do you pause upon seeing a title which radiates an active brain behind the keyboard? I know I do. Hell I’d even click on a Thin-spo if she had the  calories to simply title it “On the Verge of an Urge to Purge.“ Eww. Or even Religion: “Me, my God and my Dog in Ogden“, although lots of Mormon posts seem to throw in an extraneous’M’.
I have subs like MelFamy, for example, who would rather eat a barge-load of worms than post without a title-to-die-for. His latest, “They shoot sunrises, don’t they?” delivers both super shots of the Florida locale but also gives the gawker that happy feeling of knowing there’s a mind behind the find, so to speak.
And as Chrome-Poet discusses poetically on his current blog, killer lines have a habit of slipping out of reach unless promptly tied to the bedposts. I’m thinking that they are actually only germinated under the warmth of blankets, a place where too few think to bring a pen and paper.
     Of course, an entry doesn’t live or die on snazz alone. Pity the sucker with a zinger lead and nowhere to take it to lunch.
But by and large the two appear together in the better restaurants. If I were more industrious I’d continue to cite examples from nearly all of my eye-catching Xangan friends. The two above are simply the fish of the day.
If I were less humble, I’d even cite a recent one of my own: “In these Cursory Times, at least Nursery Rhymes”.
And so, for me at least, if you want me to gobble up “What I finally found for breakfast”, just title it “FUN with FUNEX” and I’ll be there, enticed, faster than the toast is tossed from an un-tested toaster.
 

    And I’ve done some of that. (‘How many milligrams in a pound, man?’)
But we’re not here to discuss my habits…
I have a new sub, a nice well-behaved high-school kid. I’ve watched his interactions for a couple days and while I perhaps disagree with a few of his conclusions, no one can dispute that he voices his thoughts on issues with calm respect. That’s enough for me.
Now some readers may remember an admittedly corrosive and divisive blogger who used to haunt our playground. For some reason he/she was terminated; not sure of the details. A while later there was what many believed to be a reincarnation, returned from the Second Great War and perhaps a bit more well-behaved. That blogger seems lately to be AWOL.
    So imagine my surprise when, after reading a few dear posts from a new kid whose high-school photo profile reminds me so much of my own school-daze, I start to hear rumours that he may be the Great Satan, albeit in as convincing a disguise as one could dream of creating. And indeed, some of the heavier-foot-on-the-throttle kiddies here didn’t even wait for the light to turn green before rudely calling the kid awful names. For some reason this disgusts me.
    Look, I am two very long steps away from piling onto their trashing band-wagon.
1) For some reason, trained scientist that I am, I await proof of his satanic majesty before changing my typically even-tempered demeanor. As I mentioned above, the fellow’s debating style appears, albeit based on a small data-base, to be entirely typical of a well-read and bright young kid. I see no ‘confrontationalism’ so far.
And 2) Even were it proven that he is no other than the Troll we love to hate, someone please tell me how, in the name of your sweet Jesus, we have decided to give ex-miscreants zero room to re-think their actions, to vow to ‘do it right’ this time, to fit peaceably into the Xanga matrix.
     Searching for personal extremes in order to understand what the detractor-crowd must feel, I plug in the few humans so far in real life who have wronged me. And yes, if your life has been ruined by Curtis, I suppose I can deal with ‘Never Forgive, Never Forget.’
But in general, if a blogger’s only War Crime is calling me a hallucinating fool, albeit un-dressed-up’ as a model he never met and asked for her picture, I’m quick to let it be.
   After all, on substance, he may have been correct had he called me those names.
I’ve already admitted to hallucinations. Can foolish thoughts be far behind?

---

Wu: Aha… By positioning yourself nicely on the line, you’re cool with however it turns out?
Me: Right you are. Either there’s no rubber mask, just more kid the whole way to the center….
Wu: Or an Alien inside. Boo! And carrying a Cookbook.
Me: Haha. I ain’t scared of no aliens. I’m inedible, first off, plus, seriously, all they got is  keyboards.
Wu: So he could take off the mask here, right here, on your site, no problem?
Me: Of course. Assuming there is one. Otherwise it’s called ‘flaying’ Ouch.
Wu: So this post is like a Neutral Landing Site, you could call it?
Me: Yeah. ‘We await in Friendship’
Wu: Unless they’re really, really gross ‘n scary, then what?
Me: I’ll just run away and hide.

Once upon a time there was an Old Man and a See-saw. (No, I haven’t a clue what a hemming weighs; sue me.)

Having said that, I would be derelict in my duties not to add that we’re talking ‘OLD MAN’ in ALL CAPS, and ‘See-Saw‘ in, at the very least, italics. Not your garden-variety geezer+playground equipment.

That having been said, I feel a need to mention the sucker’s name. Santiago. Hope it rings some bells.

The reader is likely wondering by this point: ‘Nu, the see-saw? Also apocryphal?
Yes of course, A squeakingly loud, but otherwise ordinary run-of-the hamster-cage teeter-totter, in a drab but pre-Soviet-inspired Cuban play-lot.

On this tantalizing background, I feel an obligation to add here our Heavy-weight Heroine, Marlene.

Admittedly, we have at this point only a name, and perhaps a clue as to her seminal Quality which will serve to drive this story into the Nobel’s lariats.

And so, allow me to estimate her weight as ‘in the neighborhood of 13 to 15 stone’. A Google search of this term will quickly reward the fastidious reader with the similarly-antiquated equivalent in pounds, of 182-to 210. Quite a nautical feat that, on Batista rations at least.

Obviously, given what I’ve revealed at this point, ‘We have a major anomaly, Houston.’ Santiago, attracted for reasons only hinted at in the final chapters, has, let’s call it a ‘thing’ for the profoundly obese. However, as a proud bearer of the Iberian ‘macho, but kinder, gentler‘, he needs to express his ‘amour’ without undue emphasis on the fetishist aspect of the beast.

And so, dear reader, on the albeit sketchy background we have at this point, let me position our two allegorical characters on a proper stage, where they ‘meet cute’, and all that rot.
 Marlene, sea-weed in her  comely locks, mounts her half of the see-saw, coyly challenging a fit suitor to lift her into orgasmic bliss.

Having described her goal as ‘orgasmic bliss’, I would be remiss were I not to point out that, prosaically, we’re talking about three and a half feet of vertical elevation, not including the libidinous contribution of the rococo ‘Tru_2_life’® wooden seats. Santago consults Archimedes…

Having mentioned the Greek, I’d be a fool not to throw in that “Give me a rock and I’ll move yer world, girl.” churned through Santiago’s thoughts like a shark in an undertow. But how to finesse his use of a ‘mother’s little helper’, to hide the awful truth of the weight disparity from Marlene’s pubescent eyes?

And so, frantic last-minute Book-reporters, I throw in here a gratuitous Deus ex Machina, a man-made ‘rock’, whose concentration of Uranium and other heavy metals will shortly fuel  the Bay of Pigs, not to get ahead of our story…

(At the risk of repeating myself): ‘Having said that’), I ask the reader to revel in the Happy Ending.
Santiago, with his small-but critical-mass ‘found-boulder’ neatly inside a shopping-bag on his lap, lifts the ecstatic Marlene to a place she’d only dreamed about. Santiago’s atomic-age manliness is redeemed, and so what if they both later succumb, arm in arm there on the Havana beach, to an undiagnosed teeth-glow, hair-loss Finality. Fishin’, fission, what’s the big dif?

---

Having said all that, I feel, like, real shitty. Having written this goddamn shameful Hiroshima horror-show of a 7th-grade assigned reading, I frankly have no idea what to add. Probably, having said that, I should quit here. Having said too much.

---

For OBL: With thinkers as cogent, original, and useful as she on Xanga, the rest of us can just relax and post our breakfast menus.