
Things to Get You in the Mood
October 14, 2016
Amateur Sleuths Unite (Short Story – 4185 Word Count)
November 3, 2016Although I really try to stay knowledgeable about the political atmosphere here in America, I ‘m counting the days till this election is over and done with (only eleven days to go – YEA!!). Since most of you know about my political leanings, it should be fairly obvious I’m not a fan of Dimwit Troglodyte, and hope he gets a one way plane ticket to Bangladesh after all is said and done. Then again, why should the people in that country be forced to deal with him.
This was an essay I wrote before Labor Day, and sent to the usual suspects with typical rejections. One of those entities was the editorial staff of “Shouts & Murmurs”, the humorous column for “The New Yorker” magazine. I wasn’t that surprised that I’ve never heard back from them. Somebody once told me, getting anything published in “The New Yorker” is analogous to climbing Mt. Everest with rusted roller skates attached to your feet. Not wanting to wait till sometime in mid-January for this piece to get rejected, I’m posting this to the blog. Enjoy!!
Word Count: 743
Let’s Build A Wall
A certain mango-haired Mussolini type currently running for President of these United States has proposed that we need to construct a wall along our southern border to keep out certain undesirables. When you get right down to it, this is a darn good idea. So good that our crack team of imaginers is currently envisioning an entire series of fence-like structures being constructed throughout society. Let’s envision some of those possibilities?
If it weren’t for these types of safe enclosures we’d have utter chaos. Your ice cream confectionary shop is a classic example. You walk into the place and what would it be like if you noticed that all those frozen sweet treats were just lumped into one big pile. Besides tasting kind of strange, (you ever eaten orange sherbet mixed with double fudge brownie?) the confections might also look a bit funny.
Now I know what you’re thinking, the partition containing the ice cream (a large cup basically) and a wall are two completely different barriers, but they aren’t. The frozen dessert container is a way of separating the different brands of the concoction. Order is completely, and totally maintained.
What if you’d had a wall to separate the nefarious elements from the fine upstanding pupils in your grade school? Everyone knew (including all the teachers) that Rufus Beauregard was the ultimate bully at PS #92. Maybe it was his having been held back from advancing to 4th grade five times, and as a result he happened to be three sizes larger than the rest of us. Or maybe it was the fact that his parents happened to be former circus sideshow celebrities and he inherited all that extra poundage and girth.
Whatever it was, Rufus had perfected the refined practice of stuffing you and others into those 2’ x 6’ lockers. Not to mention forcing your mother to budget extra money every month to purchase a new set of underwear for you. What if you and your fellow students had a wall to separate your entire group from Rufus? Pretty good idea don’t you think?
Let’s take this one step further. It would’ve been easy to have all of you (including Rufus) devote all your time in wood shop to constructing a well built, heavy duty partition instead of all those poorly built cutting boards and bookends. Totally logical use of shop class time and energy don’t you think? Darn right it is.
Actually when you examine the overall situation, we don’t even have to build an actual physical wall. Language barriers do a pretty effective job separating us from the lower societal elements. You’ve been trying to learn Italian for the past twenty years. At this point in your life the chances of becoming proficient to the point where you can read Dante’s “Inferno” in its original written form are about as feasible as the Bhutanese Navy establishing multiple beachheads off the California coast.
What we really need to do is make it harder to learn and understand the Spanish language. Obviously we can’t do any thing to make learning English harder, since that’s difficult enough as it is. How about getting some Spanish language linguists to institute an entire set of complicated, convoluted, non-sensical, completely bizarre rules and regulations for speaking their language. That way folks who speak Espanol, vs. those of us who speak the proper lingua franca have very little, to no chance of actually communicating with each other. Thus an artificial, but at the same time, effective barrier is established to separate us.
Here’s another idea; What if each person had a way to build an efficient barrier every time we didn’t want to confront a nuisance of one sort or another? At the snap of a finger, a wall appears out of nowhere and separates you from various work colleagues, neighbors, persistent polltakers, or that god-awful barker at the subway entrance who delayed the clandestine dinner date you had with your mistress?
An instant partition that miraculously appears at the drop of a hat? This idea is almost too sweet. I’ll get my top people on the project, and tell them to start heavily strategizing at their next water cooler session.
We could go on and on about the tremendous contributions a well built, effectively constructed wall would do for America, but we won’t. Suffice to say a barrier of some sort is necessary to protect us from ourselves.