There Is No What, Only Duck

[from 8/11/10]

I’ve found over the years that an awful lot of people are not at all amused when I ask them the difference between a duck. They’re supposed to say, “One of its legs is both the same,” or “Why is a mouse when it spins?” or at least, “Huh?” Instead they scowl at me and say, “What’s the difference between a duck and what?”

There is no what, only duck. Anyone who isn’t amused by this surely is in for a hard life. Apart from there being no what, what else is there to laugh about?

Sometimes people refer to the Existential Choice. The thing that’s important to understand about the Existential Choice, the thing that makes it of note, is that there is no Existential Choice. It’s usually presented as a choice between being animate or being inanimate. That isn’t it. The choice is: You are, or you are.

Yesterday, a Real Change vendor was at the office and wanted to know how to get somewhere by bus. She used one of the Real Change computers to access the so-called online Metro trip planner, and entered a starting location and destination to get an itinerary. The so-called Metro trip planner then asked her to select which of one possibility she might have meant her starting point to be among.

It’s like being at a Chinese restaurant, and there is no column A or C, there is only column B. But the menu still says “choose one from column.” You can ask, “One from column what?” Sorry, there is no column what.

Most Americans are used to choices. If anything, they’re used to being inundated with choices, to the point of being unable to make decent decisions. But in reality -- that is to say, in the ordinary world away from the fairyland-Disney-World knockoff we’ve made of this country out of all the wealth we’ve grabbed -- in reality, there is no what, there is only duck, and you should laugh.

There are few choices, and few differences, in a life lived to the bone, which is the kind of life most people live on this planet. And those differences as there are, are choices between window dressing, and colors of tinsel and wrapping.

We forget that Hamlet was a stinking Prince. It isn’t “To be or not to be” for the majority of us non-Princes. It’s to be woke up on just another cold wet morning, and it’s not even my rooster to strangle, and it’s not my land, and it’s even not my morning, my cold, nor my wet, and “move on, buddy.”

When Americans think luxuries they tend to think of things. Yachts, Lamborghinis, champagne, stuff you could get in principle if only you could afford it. But the real luxury is the luxury of going to war against anyone you want, any time you want, just because you’re afraid of them.

“There is no try, only do,” said the toy of a rich director. In the real world, there’s no do, either. There are no roads there, the spaceship don’t fly, and you’re not endowed with the ability to channel the power of all life.

America, on the other hand, can kill and kill and kill, and not even be required to tally the innocent dead children that result. That’s luxury. That’s making a difference in the world, one that you don’t need to make.

When Wikileaks released the Afghan War Diary I braced myself for the predictable counter-attack. I knew the government would say that the information compromised the security of our soldiers and allied soldiers, agents and informants.

Isn’t it nice though, to have the luxury of a security to be compromised?

Isn’t it nice, to have so much security that the prospect of other nations dropping cluster bombs on our citizens is almost nil? America has the luxury of continuing to manufacture, sell, and use cluster bombs, in the face of a world-wide ban that our government refused to sign.

Intelligence is for SOCAs

Let’s talk about subversion!

“The Raging Grannies” is a worldwide subversive movement. It aims to undermine our (your!) civilization’s underpinnings and metaphoric undergarments. It takes our most underpinned, our elderly women, and uses them as weapons of mass instruction. Its MO consists of nothing less insidious than the wearing of silly clothes and the singing of horribly silly, but instructive, songs.

Who is really behind The Raging Grannies? Could it be the world’s grannies themselves? Could it be that our Mothers and our Mother’s Mothers have become subversives entirely on their own? Or are these unveiled, exhibitionistic women, who wear the silly hats and sing the silly songs, not the brainwashed dupes of Al-Qaeda?

Speaking for itself, members of the local chapter of The Raging Grannies were recently quoted singing, "Oh, we're a gaggle of grannies, urging you off of our fannies. We're raising our voice. We want a new choice. No -- more -- war." Clearly they are intent on ducking the question.

One member, and herself intent on ducking the question, indeed on ducking any and everything, is Anitra “Not an Italian Duck, But Ducky-ish” Freeman. Ms. Freeman, like the others, won’t admit to being a tool of Al-Qaeda, even to me. But regular readers of this column will know that I have spent many years in close association with Ms. Freeman, and they will correctly guess that I have thereby been afforded deep insights into her devious ways.

What I know about Freeman tells me that the evil masterminds behind The Raging Grannies are truly masterful, for if she is any indication, these hardened women aren’t going to give up their secrets to the prying eyes of mere amateurs.

Thank goodness the Federal Bureau of Investigation has stepped in. America’s professional prying eyes have been surveilling the elderly female parodyists for a while now, and any day they will get the goods on them, revealing them for the threat they are. Or not. In either case we can sleep peacefully at night knowing that our trusted G-Men are on the job, protecting us from people who sing.

I wouldn’t have brought any of this up now if I hadn’t read the news from the other side of the Atlantic that Tony Blair is starting up an organization intended to be modeled on the FBI, to be named, and I swear on a stack of holy scriptures of all faiths true and false I am not making this up, the Serious Organised Crime Agency, or SOCA.

How can anything modeled on today’s FBI be called the Serious Organised Crime Agency? How about calling it the Silly Organised Crime Agency? That would fit. And since it won’t change the acronym to call it that, that’s what I’m going to call it. The acronym is perfect. SOCA to me, SOCA to you, yes.

The news stories say that about a third of the initial staffing for SOCA will come from British customs. Those are the twits who wear bowlers and carry bumbershoots and, if you’re a married man, dig through your suitcase during inspection until they find a pair of women’s lacy underpants, and hold it up where your wife can see and say, “What’s this now?” and she says, “Hey, those aren’t mine!” and you have to say to her, “Maybe they got in there by accident at the cleaners in Amsterdam” and she says, “As soon as we get home I’m filing for a divorce!” and you think, “Customs twit.”

It’s clearly better that Customs twits work in the Silly Organised Crime Agency than that they root through our suitcases. They will make excellent British equivalents of our G-Men. Blair is definitely on the right track.

That right track, of course, is the track to greater unity in our civilization, to be achieved by eliminating all traces of disunity, such as unapproved silliness and unaccounted-for undergarments, until we are all one great united government approved and accounted-for whole.

Famous Lamous

OK. I was in a really foul mood when I was writing this column for last issue, and that may have caused me to froth excessively. But to refer to it as "my lamest column ever" as one person did is simply ignorant. My lamest column ever was in fact the Sept. 1, 1997 column, which opened with the words "In a world of Labrador Retrievers, I am a duck!! (OHHH YES!! OH YYESSS!! A DUCK, I AM, a DUCK, oooooooh yesss!)," and ended with the sad admission that I was not a duck after all. When I think of lame, I think of that column, which forever set the standard of lame for all columns everywhere.

There is absolutely no possibility that any new column I write will ever be as bad as the duck column, owing to the superiority of my current anti-psychotic medication. Still, I want to try. Because, what is life without hope? If we don't challenge our challenges, what will we challenge? I, for one, vowed long ago that I would not surrender to a shallow, vain, pursuit of excellence.

I could just write "I suck" 400 times and turn that in as a column. The management of this rag has assured me that they are prepared for that eventuality. There is in fact a not-very-secret document in a file cabinet in the back room entitled "Wes sucks" that provides no less than two plans. Plan A is to run an old column (preferably the duck masterpiece.) Plan B is to go ahead and print "I suck" 400 times and to sign my name to it.

But that would be too easy not only for me but everyone else involved. It would give the proofreader too little to do. I would not feel as though I had earned my complimentary copies. Homeless activists everywhere would be disappointed because I hadn't been active enough, they want me to break a sweat. At least every other line I should insert the words "and homelessness sucks too" in order to stay on topic.

So I am always on the lookout for creative new ways to suck without merely saying so. That's why I need television.

Without television and the great communicators that communicate to me on television, I would not know how to be as lame as I am. That's why I have shacked up with a sexy rich woman, Anitra "Pay-Pal" Freeman. I sweep the floor, buy the groceries and do the dishes. In return my woman buys TV and TV access for me. It's all so I can watch Andy Rooney and learn. ("Have you ever noticed how bourgeois I am?" is an actual quote. So is "Why do you think my head is so big?" and "Have you ever noticed lots of people call themselves people-persons but nobody ever calls themselves a thing-person?" )

Thanks to television and to its cousin the internet, I have learned that the only thing that matters to most Americans is the quality of middle-class life. Even poor people in this country don't really care about what other poor people are doing or how things are going to get better so that there won't be any poor people. All they care about are the latest adventures of middle-class people like they wish they were.

But I digress. What's important here is finding creative ways to be lame. So what I want to do today is to join the chorus of hand wringing over the fate of the middle-class in America. How about if I call attention to the tragedy of middle-class homelessness? Here we go:

"That's right. This is a huge problem, people. Every day tens of middle-class people become homeless. I'm not talking here about people who were middle-class who suddenly became poor and are now living on the streets. I'm talking about people who still are middle-class and are now living on the streets.

"OK, they aren't really living on the streets because no one with money would do that. But they're living in motels and hotels and RVs. Some of them are even living in Mexico, being forced to read Spanish for Travelers dictionaries and listen to Berlitz tapes at night.

"It is all the more a tragedy because these people pay the taxes that pay the truck drivers to deliver our government cheeses, and yet no one considers their plight(s)."

Yes! As lame as the campaigns!

Old Fart Wises Off

Good news! Thanks to the Democratic Convention occupying the media, there has been no actual news lately.

This gives us here at Adventures in Poetry – meaning by us, me, Copyright Dr. Wes Browning – a chance to take stock of our life. A chance to sniff the winds of our change and dip our toes into the pools of our stagnation. To audit the account books of the psycho-social-biological records of our historic being. To see to whence we have arrived, and from whence we have departed. And to see who or what is all that in the cargo hold, and why is there a woman in our bed wanting something.

Well, first of all, we are old. We just did the dreaded calculation and discovered that our current incarnation has been breathing air for 20,000 days and a little more than an extra hundred. As a mathematician, let us put that number in perspective. That's one more than 19,999. If he saw 20,000 Republicans laid end to end, Rush Limbaugh wouldn't raise any moral objections. Jules Verne talked about 20,000 leagues, but we don't know what a league is, we're a mathematician, not a damn encyclopedia. If you saw 20,000 pigeons flying toward you, you'd wish you had an umbrella, etc.

We once saw a guy walk on the moon live on television. We saw the assassination of an assassin live on television. We saw several wars live on television, so many that we lost count, sometime around about Panama. Most of them we're unnecessary and a huge waste of lives, health, and money.

History used to happen in black and white, but now it's always in color. Conversely Red Square isn't red anymore. There's nothing left for conservatives to be better dead than, which must be disorienting for them.

We have lived to see the amazing Wolf Blitzer ask Jesse Jackson, in Jesse's capacity as a black spokesperson, why did Barack Obama, a black African immigrant running for the Senate, not speak before the Democratic Convention in Boston using the same kind of rhetoric as did Al Sharpton, a black African-American reverend who had been running for president. Why oh why, Jesse?

Just yesterday, after living a thought-filled and examined life for over 5 decades, we arrived for the first time ever at an adequate working philosophy. This was facilitated by the able conversation and intellectual assistance of our regular companion, the afore-mentioned wanting-something woman and person on whose kitchen floor we have sometimes slept, Anitra Freeman. With her help we came up with this: "Good things now, bad things later." When in doubt always refer to that formula. It's a plan of action that can't go wrong. For example, by using it, you will never force yourself to save dessert for after the asparagus again. You will know all the times that it would be better to be home in bed than. You will learn to appreciate the paper plates of life, and the other disposables. You will shower for the fun of it, not because you have to. There is the way of wisdom.

We have been homeless four times in our life. We mention this in part to fulfill our unwritten contract with Real Change and the Real Change Editorial Committee. Every column we write is required to make at least one mention of homelessness, directly or indirectly, or one local politician must be made fun of, or two national politicians, or we must directly advocate for at least two of the following: minority rights, free pizza for Real Change volunteers writers and "editors", free/more/better treatment for recovering [insert addiction here], cats.

Duck licking. Speaking of speaking of duck licking, every column should contain at least one non sequitur, and one abuse of logical accuracy, which may be the same. But that has nothing to do with the unwritten contract. We have digressed.

We have lived in the same subsidized housing for almost 7 years now, the same housing funded by the Housing Agency Formerly Known As Seattle Housing Authority, the housing that was granted after 14 months on a waiting list, the housing that was promised to me as being permanent, the housing that is now threatened by Bush Administration cuts in Section 8 funding, the housing that we will never move from until they haul my cold lifeless never-to-be-homeless-again body out of it. Or until they come up with something better. Like that'll happen.

Inspired by Super-Shakti Toothpaste (Really)

For this column I wanted to talk about the demise in court of the anti-postering law, but then a couple of things got in the way. First of all, I don't know anything about the demise in court of the anti-postering law. Except that it has something to do with the Washington State Constitution, a 70 or so page book that I can't begin to make heads or tails of. Second of all, a book that was lying around the office distracted me.

You may all recall that last issue in this space I alluded to the fact that Henry D. Thoreau was deceased, but that certain of his concerns live on. When reading the blurbs on the back cover of this distracting book I was shakti-ed, simply shakti-ed, to learn that the book was one of Henry's concerns. No, I wasn't, but I couldn't resist saying that. Please forgive me.

Really, the Bhagavad-Gita (or the "Gita" as we aficionados like to call it) is just like the Washington State Constitution to me. It's a 70 or so page book that I believe is very important but that I can't begin to make heads or tails of. Yet, I am strangely attracted to it, in the same way that I am attracted to ducks. I keep coming back to it year after year, only to be bewildered as ever.

Part of the attraction of the Bhagavad-Gita is that it is a big poem, after all. It is a piece of the Mahabharata, the ancient Indian epic that has been called the world's longest poem. The Mahabharata is so long that I haven't even had the endurance to see the movie, much less read the book, but I know it goes on. So it was inevitable that we at Adventures in Poetry would have to mention the Mahabharata eventually, if only as an example of another way to write a poem to get noticed (write one really really long.)

Part of the attraction is that as far as its content goes, considered as a poem, the Gita is unbelievably audacious. Who starts out to write a poem about a big battle, and then has the main guy of one side of the battle say he can't go through with it, it's wrong, and then spend the remaining vast majority of their huge poem not on details of battle blood and gore but on laying out the main guy's conversation with his chariot driver about the nature of life-the universe-and-everything? And his chariot driver happens to be the Supreme Godhead, incarnated as the blue guy in those cool Hindu paintings, so He has all the answers? Can you say "cosmic"? I thought you could.

[Try it yourselves, you budding poesists! Write a poem like the Gita. Start out by talking about somebody planning to do something, I don't know, like writing a column. Have her/him stop and say, "Naw, I don't want to do it." Then spend 70 freaking pages of poetry describing a conversation between him/her and some form of God, in which the God explains everything in the world, so that the upshot of the conversation is that at the end, God says, "So, just do it. But hey, it's up to you." Then take it to an open mike. Your audience will tell you just how audacious your poem is.]

Part of the attraction, also, is that the Gita is an ancient classic, therefore written for a world that doesn't exist anymore (it has mostly gotten worse.) This makes for a lot of the difficulty in reading it, but that just adds to the charm.

OK, sure, the surface message, which seems to be that if you belong to the warrior caste, then you ought to do war, strikes many of us today as outrageously conservative and narrow-minded. But then we think, as justifications for war go, at least this one doesn't reek of hypocrisy. And we can escape the conclusion that war is justified by rejecting the premise that there is, any more, in the nuclear age, a warrior caste.

No, certainly nobody today is born with a duty to wage war. So, as an argument to preserve the status quo and keep the conquerees conquered and the conquerors conquering, the Gita would appear to have aged.

But the Gita does speak eloquently of duty. Now, the question still is, what's that?

Duck Trouble

The latest news on the homeless front, besides the fundamental legalization of Tent City, is Anitra Freeman's turn to crime.

Anitra has been sort of sucked into sort of a life of crime by such repeat offenders as Michele "Give'm Hell with One L" Marchand of SHARE/WHEEL and Scott "the Facilitator" Morrow of SHARE. Actually more like a minute of crime. But she still should be able to look forward to a rewarding career playing parts in John Waters films, if she can bring herself to relocate to Baltimore three months of every year.

For those of you who just boarded this train at the last station, that's Anitra Freeman, alias Anitra of Many Associations Freeman, aka The Duck on the Italian Menu, aka Net Mama, aka Wes's Main Squeeze, on Whose Kitchen Floor I Have Sometimes Slept.

It went down like this. King County Executive Ron Sims got a bug up his butt this year about SHARE, nobody can say why, where, how, or when the bug came from or what it was doing there, but an unidentified source has reportedly said that "maybe he doesn't get the way grassroots organizations like SHARE operate."

The upshot of Sims' dissatisfaction with SHARE was that he wouldn't let them run the Winter Response Shelter at the King County Administration Building this year, even though they ran it for something like eight years without anyone complaining about it at the time. Getting new management for the shelter took time, he said, so the shelter wouldn't open until October 15, he said, instead of the 1st of October, when it usually has been.

So SHARE said, OK, but there is (was, this is all history now) still a need for a shelter Oct. 1 through Oct. 14, because the cold weather won't wait for the County to get its act together, and it's not safe out there even in good weather. Therefore SHARE offered to run the shelter those days. But the bug in Ron Sim's butt made him say no to that. "Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin," he might have said, but he evidently didn't, forcing me to make it up.

I'm not making this part up: Each night of Oct. 2 through Oct. 14 the County put up "no trespassing" tape to keep people out from under the overhang at the entrance way to the Administration Building. SHARE then went ahead and ran a sidewalk shelter in front of the Admin. Building every one of those nights, vowing each night to cross the tape if it should happen to be raining at the beginning of the night.

The office of Ron Sims referred to SHARE's sleep-out as a political stunt, without explaining why politics is bad for SHARE but OK for Ron Sims and his office. The unofficial SHARE position is that it was NOT a political stunt, they needed the shelter for survival, etc., but nobody at SHARE has explained to me why SHARE continues to let Ron Sims and others characterize politics as a bad thing when homeless people engage in it, but all part of a civic duty when anyone else does it. Politics are the means by which Americans set about choosing what's right, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Finally it rained on the beginning of the night of Oct. 12.

Six people were arrested -- Anitra, Michele, Scott, Claude "Cowboy" Nalls, Ted "Tex" Shirey, and Richard "No Fancy Nickname That I Know Of" West. The two women of the gang were cuffed and locked together alone for more than an hour in the SPD holding tank. There, Michele was forced to listen as Anitra, now hyper, theorized extemporaneously on the sociological origins of warfare. Eventually bail was set at $190 for everybody, and all but Scott got out by the next day on their personal recognizance.

I'm going to go out on a limb here, risking domestic turmoil and tumult, to say that I think both sides overreacted in this incident. But in the words of my unidentified source, "The county overreacted FIRST, so there."

Also, on a stupidity scale from 1 to 10, what the County did was a big fat 9, and what SHARE did in response was at most a 5, only slightly more than half as stupid.

To put those numbers in perspective, using scales from 1 to 10 (and how many of us haven't, be honest) is itself an 8 already.

Atomic Duck Is Here

Last time I promised that I would nag Mayor Paul Schell in this issue. But as I think of how to begin nagging our Mayor, images of cartoon characters fly around and about my psyche. I find myself thinking especially of Atomic Mouse, dispatching mobs of zoot-suited wolves. This is not because I believe that Mayor Schell in any way resembles Atomic Mouse dispatching mobs of zoot-suited wolves. Actually, having seen him and heard him speak, I would picture him more as an Atomic Duck dispatching mobs of publicly inebriated squirrels.

But I don't want to have to justify that statement. Instead I would like to ramble incoherently all over the page, until I can figure out what I am talking about.

Don't you all miss the good old days when we could solve all of the world's problems with a great big heaping helping of atomic power? Remember when Mr. Atom was your friend? I sure do, and I loved my friend Mr. Atom.

Oh, sure there were problems with atomic power, but they were minor compared to the benefits. How did we know? Because really, really smart people worked it all out for us on their sliderules and their computers, that's how!

Thanks to Mr. Atom our electric bills would drop to almost zero. We would have so much cheap electricity that we would never have to dig up coal or drill for oil again. Guys wouldn't have to wear hardhats anymore. Eventually every house would have its own supply of plutonium running its furnaces, ovens, TVs, radios, hair dryers, washing machines, refrigerators, and charging the electric flying cars that would take us to our vast atomic powered and fully automated amusement parks, that we would spend all our lives in, now that labor would be unnecessary.

Even our farms would be operated by atomic powered robots, and we wouldn't even have to bother to pasteurize our milk anymore. We could irradiate it, and get rid of nasty germs once and for all!

When everything is new nothing can be imagined to stand in the way of the march of progress. Yesterday it was Mr. Atom, today it's Ms. DNA and her little sister Ms. Clone. Whole armies of genetically engineered cloned pigs, each patented and owned by the latest incarnation of the spirit if not the flesh of Dow Chemical, are going to grow on their backs human livers, kidneys, hearts, eyeballs, hips, lungs, assorted glands, limbs and appendages. Every conceivable beneficial drug, including miracle drugs not yet discovered, will be harvested from bacteria cleverly engineered to eat only stuff that we have no use for, such as torn nylons, used styrofoam, and Brussels Sprouts.

And again, how do we know all that's right? Because people who are really really smart, smarter than we are, tell us all this is so. Nothing serious can go wrong with the invention of these pigs and those bacteria. Oh sure there will be some minor problems but nothing that these really really smart people (smarter than we are) won't be able to fix on our ignorant behalves.

But I shouldn't be letting myself stray so far from home. None of this could possibly have anything to do with our Mayor, who doesn't have to solve all the problems of the world, who only has a rather medium sized city to look after. Given how much smaller the arena of his problems, and how much simpler those problems are, he is perfectly capable of having all the answers. He is an authority after all: he is a certified urban developer!

Take those public inebriates for example. Now you might think that the problem with public inebriates, particularly in the wintertime, originates not in the fact of inebriation, which goes on behind doors also, but with publicness. I.e. you might think that no one who had a choice would choose to drink outdoors, in the cold, if they had warm places indoors in which to drink. And that the solution to the problem of public inebriation might lie in attacking that fundamental cause.

But no. You would be wrong. The problem, according to Paul Schell, is that these people can buy 40-ouncers of malt liquor at Korean grocery stores in the neighborhoods in which they hang out. So all we have to do is identify those neighborhoods, and pass special laws for just those neighborhoods, restricting what can be sold there.

And which neighborhoods would those be? That's easy! They are just the same neighborhoods that decades of city policies have driven Seattle's homeless. The same neighborhoods in which most of the shelters and social services are concentrated.

Neighborhoods of a kind that in another age and another country were eventually called ghettoes after enough special laws were passed applying just to them.

So I guess what I'm saying is this: Hooray, Atomic Duck is here to save the day, he'll put our public inebriates away, then ghetto-ize them into sobriety, because he knows best, he's the authority!

Duck!

"In a world of Labrador Retrievers, I am a duck!!

(OHHH YES!! OH YYESSS!! A DUCK, I AM, a DUCK, oooooooh yesss!)

When everyone else blows (be-lowws! YEAH! Ha -Ha -Ha!), I suck!!

(Suckity - suckity - SUCKITY -- SUCK! - YEAH)

A single ROtini in a plate of LINguini --

Or a lonely LINguini in a plate of ROtini --

(RotiNIni, TahiniNIni, RotininiNIni -- teehee - knee)

What the hell is I am is what I am?

is what by any other name

is --

(! - extraneous bang!)

-- is I couldn't ever -- possibly --

-- or could I? -- feel so lame.

Phththbbbbtt!!"

-- that was just one of the several fragments of writing found among Dr. Wes Browning's personal effects yesterday, as police collected evidence in the hopes of clearing up the month's long mystery of the missing homeless satirist and would-be poet.

Dr. Browning was a frequent contributor to the Real Change Homeless Newspaper of Seattle, "making a difference in people's lives right now, please leave your message at the beep, and someone will answer your call as soon as possible... "

Dr. Wes Browning, AKA "Copyright Dr. Wes Browning", was best known for his monthly feature entitled "Adventures in Poetry", which pretended to amuse Seattle readers with its supposedly subtle blend of political and poetical humor. He received his doctorate from, of all places, Cornell University, in 1979, for Mathematics. He received his "Copyright" from the StreetLife Gallery, 1994, where he had the audacious gall to make fun of another homeless artist, since deceased, for using the "copyright" symbol far too much.

But Mr. Browning had always laughed out loud at that sort of death, that is to say, the usual sort, the sort that doesn't repeat on you, the sort that doesn't come back and race you around the ping-pong table all night long. In fact, Mr. Browning has laughed at just about everything and everybody. Maybe it's best that we're rid of him. Who needs people like that anyway, always making fun of everybody, never taking anyone seriously! What a creep! Thank God he's missing!

As Anitra Freeman, fellow editor, and oft-time benefactor of Mr. Browning puts it, "He did a wonderful lap-dance. He had a very talented nose. I am not going to tell you what all he could do with his nose. What a probiscus! I'm going to miss his nose. Maybe, just maybe, I'll miss the lap-dances. But definitely his nose."

Think about it. Guys who write poems. Guys who lap-dance. Guys with prodigious noses. Do we need them? I say no. What do you the public say?

"What the hell is I am is what I am?

is what by any other name

is --

(! - extraneous bang!)

-- is I couldn't ever -- possibly --

-- or could I? -- feel so lame.

Phththbbbbtt!!"

Ahhh, ok, I am not in reality a duck. Sheesh.