Egg Salad

One of the things that I do to help up-and-coming writers, even those who just want to write One Great Novel & take the money and retire to Fiji never to write another word again, is urge them to try to become a Master Poet like me. I tell them that when you see the world through the eyes of a poet you'll be that much more grateful for the eyes you have, not least because yours are still in their sockets and not being passed around for people to look through.

Just last night for example, someone mentioned flowers. I was immediately overcome by my Muse. In fact Cindy (ancient Muse of Other) went stark raving wild, she tried to sit on my face, I said no, please no, you're a muse, it wouldn't be right, it's like a cross-species thing, but she's a powerful Muse, she works out with weights. Finally I burbled out, "I saw a pretty little rose! / It was a sight to see! / I bent to smell it with my nose, / and it did puncture me!"

If you can write like that you are ready to write just about anything. Now all you need is something to write about. This is the second thing I always tell up-and-coming writers. I say, always have something to write about. I know that's sounds a little abstract to a lot of you, and some of you may be thinking to yourselves, "Dr. Wes is getting too abstract for me again, I just wanted to read more about Cindy sitting on his face, while I finished my egg salad sandwich."

I say in that case you have something to write about, you've got your egg salad sandwich, you've got your dreams. Now let's work on the rest of you people.

To begin with, what do you have to say for yourselves? Huh? “Egg salad?”

See how easy that was?

OK, I know some of you missed that. Tell you what, we'll try a little role playing. Pretend I have an MSW, and you are in a program I'm running. Let's say the state put you here and if you don't do everything I tell you to do I will report your non-compliance to the state and you won't get any money on the 1st and you won't be able to pay your rent.

So by the 15th, while everyone else is celebrating the fact that they make enough money to pay income taxes, you'll be sharing a piece of egg salad sandwich with your new room-mate, a large hungry rodent named Chuck who will live with you by a dumpster that you would have wanted to call Ulan Bator, by and by, but Chuck would have fought & defeated you in committee, so even that dream will have been dashed.

So you decide to comply after all, and now that we've got that little lame rebellion out of the way, I tell you I want you to try a little role playing. So I give you a hypothetical situation. I say, let's say you're oh I don't know a mathematician doing advanced mathematics research at an advanced mathematics research place, say, in Zürich Switzerland, and let's say you have spent the last few hours talking with some really old guys who actually knew Albert Einstein when he went to school there, and Carl Gustav Jung when he taught across the street, and that James Joyce guy back when he had an apartment in the neighborhood.

And these old guys, let's say, tell you all about these dead people and you soak it all up, it's stuff that's never been written down before. And while you're all talking it gets to be tea time, and Fräulein Hilda Denklosigkeit brings in tea and teacups and a platter of weird looking pastries, or cookies or something, you can't tell what they are, except that they were definitely NOT made in America.

OK? Got all that? NOW what do think you should write about? Do you hang with these old guys, take more notes, and write the definitive biographies of Einstein, Jung, and Joyce? Or do you write your own personal memoirs, reminiscing about your glory days in Zürich? Or should you write that long extended fantasy that was inspired by the time the cleaning woman came into the men's room while you were "busy" and your eyes met, and you thought, "Oh, if only she were Hilda Denklosigkeit, and not just the cleaning woman, here to scrub the urinals..."

Or do you write about your craving for egg salad sandwiches?

Answer: None of the above! What you do instead is forget all about it, come back to the US, torture college freshpeople by making them pay attention to algebra for fifty total hours of their lives, then wake up to your evil ways, spend the next twelve years of your life in therapy, live on the streets for four of them, drive a cab for five of them, lose your mind, work in a work shelter program for two years, spend six years working nights as a janitor, lose your job, take up art.

THEN you wake up one day, and say, I got to talk to people about this. There you go, you've got something to say! Just don't ever forget the part about the egg salad sandwich, you'll find a way to work it in eventually.

Next I want to see you all break up into small groups and role play amongst yourselves, taking turns as the social worker, if you all can handle that (But I don’t want you to think you’re being pressured in any way...)

Your Post-Meds Trans-Galactic News Roundup

Some of you may have noticed that last issue I took a tiny "vacation". I know what you think. You think all us folks at the Real Change are getting rich off the homeless, living in mansions in Medina, and vacationing in the Bahamas, because the officials there look the other way when rich folks like us "light up", if you know what I mean.

HA! You DON'T know what I mean! I don't get paid squat for these so-called columns, and my vacation was in fact a med-induced nightmare!

Yep. I'm on the med-train. I'm on meds. Or am I in-between my meds? Only my state authorized psychiatrist knows for sure, assuming she catches me when I'm in-between symptoms. But others of you may be wanting to know – hey Wes, since when you talk to aliens?

Good question! It all has to do with the internet! A few weeks ago my state authorized psychiatrist ordered me to take new meds that make me drowsy, and drowsy. Instantly, give or take a few weeks, the following message appeared on the internet in front of my face:

The Big Bang is often described as a big bang. After a bang every thing should be moving away from every other thing. But my high school physics teacher told us collisions happen. How could that be?

From pity I responded as follows:

Let me try to penetrate your thick cranium. First there was nothing. Then there was 2.356x10 to the who knows-how-much kilograms of stuff. According to the (known to be false in this context) theory of Albert "Bertle" Einstein: when stuff appears out of nowhere, space comes with it. At first the space is all curled up in a little ball. But then it spreads out really fast. But some of it, near the really BIG chunks of stuff, doesn't spread out so much. That's where stuff gets stuck in the corners of space and bumps together.

Some little time later I noted the following note from Anitra (On whose kitchen floor I have sometimes slept) Freeman:

To summarize Dr. Browning, the galaxies are running away from each other, but some of them don't run fast enough.

"Since when do galaxies run?" I thought. "Galaxies have no legs, they can't run!" I thought. No sooner did I think that, then I received the following in my "in" box:

This is your Universal Internet news update of the day.

Number of hits to our site yesterday: 235,696,777.

Breakdown: 235,696,767 hits estimated to have been due to electromagnetic fluctuations resulting from a gravitational wave disturbance propagated by a minor spiral galaxy which two days ago inexplicably sprouted tiny little legs and began running around aimlessly.

10 hits from a planet called "Earth".

There were also ten messages recorded on our office voicemail. Nine said "How in hell do I get off this galaxy?"

One message said "Mrs. Elroy P. Feelgood, widow of the late Mr. Elroy P. Feelgood, formerly of Pissatchoo, WA, and now living in Miami Beach, Florida, wishes to announce that she will be one hundred years young tomorrow, God willing. Otherwise she will be survived by her good-for-nothing lazy bum son, John.

Our message to Mrs. Feelgood: "Get a life!" As for the rest of you, "the trick is to rub two sticks together," and "How many times must we have to repeat that?"

In other news, there were 953,465,368 supernovas yesterday, killing roughly 10 to the 25 sentient lifeforms. Traffic was light, weather moderate, visibility 11 billion light-years in most directions.

Sports news: The much ballyhoo-ed Universal Reverse Time Travel Races were called off today owing to the failure of the participants to comply with known physical laws. A committee was formed to investigate. We have however learned that ticketholders who had been planning to watch the races from the finish line were reimbursed approximately one million years ago.

Our happy news of the day: You can still read this!

There you go… I hope that clarifies matters…

Pooky For President

People often wonder how I can be so cheerful all the time. After all, they observe, I am dirt poor. Also I don’t have any compensating assets. Also Dan Quayle is running for president. Then there are the things that they don’t mention, like my brain-implant, remote controlled by Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, or the fact that David McCallum hated being thought of as Ilya Kuryakin.

Well! What keeps me going is my friends — especially my extraterrestrial friends, whom I know will some day, soon, come in force to vanquish my enemies and create an all Man from U.N.C.L.E. channel.

Meanwhile: Dan Quayle’s candidacy has motivated one of my best friends to enter the presidential race himself, so that there can be a “clear alternative” to Quayle.

“I’m not an alien at all,” Pooky Glax is quick to point out, “as much as fifteen percent of my birth probably occurred in Idaho, New Mexico, and Disneyland.”

In fact, Mr. Glax, or Pooky, as he prefers that I call him, is proud to call himself an Extraterrestrial-American. He is a sentient life-form of the quantum-disturbance type. He is over forty, at least fifty percent of the time, but don’t try to pin him to an age or he just might lurch through a wall!

I met Pooky Glax a few years ago when we were both homeless in the University District. Even back then I was deeply impressed not only by the depth of his ideas but by his deep compassion for his fellow sentient beings. Such as, when he dumpster-dove for transistors Pooky always saved out dill pickles and donuts for me, even though he had only half a pocket to put them in. That’s noble!

It’s probably not surprising that, given his background, Pooky assigns such a high priority to making housing more generally available in this country. (He favors a rotation plan.)

Though Pooky may not technically be an alien, he must constantly feel marginalized in a world that will always have far more certainty than even his own boundaries. Or at least parts of him must feel that way at different times and places. Thus, much of his platform naturally expresses his own personal struggle against that certainty of our world that so violates Pooky’s diffuse sense of being.

Take for example his call for universal bagpipes. If you ask him for clarification, Pooky chitters, and forms what passes for a grin on his presenting surfaces. Then he says it louder, “UNIVERSAL! BAGPIPES! [Chitter! - Chitter! - Chitter!]” Clearly he does not intend to be clear on this plank.

Then there is his interest in seeing that Tahiti is eventually selected as the site of a future Winter Olympics. On the face of it, this would seem to be a quite definite goal, although one that certainly should not concern the President of the United States of America. But then Pooky talks about where Tahiti might be towed, once they have learned to really trust us, and all sorts of possibilities emerge.

What would be the consequences of a national licensing of ducks? Who knows? And that puts Pooky firmly in his element.

Pooky Glax’s most radical proposal: a random national wage, so that everyone who works can, as he says, know from time to time what it means to have their work undervalued. Characteristically, Pooky declines to say how a random national wage would be implemented.

“Chitter!” is his only comment, but the impression I get from talking to him about it is that the implementation would be very confusing to everyone, in somewhat the same way that our current system now is so confusing to janitors and others like them who have to clean up after it every day.

Pooky says to me, “people think they need more certainty in their lives,” as a large fraction of his right side flickers and momentarily tunnels to Prague and back, “but actually they need less. I hope that during the course of the coming campaign I will be able to convince them of this: that in our time, the less sure we are, the better.” And he continues, “If we go where we are sure, at best it will be like a life in line at Disneyland, never getting on a ride. Is that what you want? Just to be sure that Mickey will say Hiya, Hiya, and shake your hand, before you die?”

I suppose I should mention that Pooky is not always so predictably in support of uncertainty. He is definite in his insistence that the Food Stamp Program be expanded to cover glass, transistors, computer chips and other silicon products, every third Thursday, in prime numbered years.

And of course, as you could have predicted, Pooky promises that if elected he will seek federal funding to bring about an all Man from U.N.C.L.E. channel. So he has my vote... as we knew he would!

Get The Lead Out

This issue I want to talk about plumbinglessness.

I don’t want to talk about individual plumbinglessness but since I can’t spend an entire “column” talking about collective plumbinglessness, because I don’t know that much about it, I will talk about something closely related to individual plumbinglessness. Namely, the subject of Mark Sidran having relieved himself inappropriately.

Now I don’t really want to single Sidran out for this sort of discussion. I want to include prosecutors, and lawyers who have been prosecutors, like oh, I don’t know, maybe Henry Hyde, Asa Hutchinson, or that Hamilton Ham-Burger creep that was always sneering at Perry Mason. But on my way to including them I’d like to make an example of Sidran, in obedience to the Silver Rule (Do Unto Others As They Do.)

Let’s look at the record. Mark Sidran is a lawyer. Therefore he has a college degree. Therefore the facts indicate that Mark Sidran has been a college freshperson.

At this point, Mr. Sidran might, if he were honorable, immediately confess that he has relieved himself inappropriately.

Or, he might not. But I ask you, the reader, to use your common sense!

Not only are we talking here about a lawyer who has been a college freshman, but one who has a clear motivation to lie, until now, about having relieved himself inappropriately, because he prosecutes other people for doing so.

But let me suppose that you are not ready yet to accept that Mr. Sidran relieved himself inappropriately during the time that he was a college freshman, in spite of the overwhelming proof based on circumstantial evidence, guilt by association, logical surmise, and the fact that over and over again I have been talking about Sidran relieving himself inappropriately.

In that case, let me remind you that we do not have to establish any one instance of inappropriate relief on Sidran’s part in order to prove our case. It is enough to convince you that he has committed this act on at least one occasion, without actually having to specify that occasion.

I’d like to continue this discussion until you have all agreed with me in order to make me stop, but my space is up. Therefore I simply will remind you, my reader, of your wisdom, and encourage you to look deeply into this matter as you have always done in the past. And having looked deeply, come to know, deep in your hearts, that Mr. Sidran has relieved himself inappropriately.

So let’s talk about collective plumbinglessness. The first thing that I learned about this when I started studying it last night is that at one time all of Peoplekind were plumbingless.

In fact, the word ‘plumbing’ is Latin for ‘Lead-Pipes-R-Us’, and there was no plumbing at all until the Dawn of the Lead Age, which in turn had to wait until about twelve hours after the Twilight of the Get the Lead Out Age. So there was a long time, before that, that people had to relieve themselves inappropriately, for eons.

Even after there was plumbing it might have been better if there weren’t. Science now knows that the widespread use of lead pipes causes guys to wear dresses, have sex with their sisters, sleep with horses, and , eventually, to allow their cities to be overrun by Swedes, Norwegians, Finns, and Canadians. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

In fact Swedes and Norwegians did overrun the main city of the Latins whom I mentioned above, but unlike certain patronymic precursors of Henry Hyde, who had previously overrun it, they stayed (and he has had the gaul to complain about that?)

Well, anyway, one thing lead to another (Get it? Ha, ha: ‘lead to’!) and pretty soon no-one trusted plumbing anymore. So even though there was still plenty of lead to go around, everybody went back to doing it in the river for about a thousand years.

Why did they stop? Was it because some prosecutor stepped in and said, look here, these Dark Ages must end or you are all going to jail!? Or was it because people started to get the idea that plumbing was a good public investment after all?

Yes, it was. And there are still other good public investments that may yet be made.

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!

Count Thy Days

Lately I’ve been asking myself a lot of questions. Questions that go to the heart of what will have to happen before we humans and quasi-humans can really claim success in this grand experiment we call “life in the big city.”

Where does hypocrisy come from? Is intelligence an actual measurable quality, or is it, as the Jesuits might say, merely the absence of stupidity? And if you lack stupidity, can you be said to suffer a deficiency? Were Einstein, Feynman, and Mr. Wizard stupidity-impaired?

But above all, where does this authoritarian business come from? I don’t just mean politicians. I mean control freaks in general.

Even poetry isn’t free from these incredible control freaks! Only two days ago I was shocked to receive the following unsolicited “poem” by “email”:

Q. Oh what saith the Lord(ess)? What might a poem be?

Might it be prose yet sweeter, with rhyme and strict meter?

Might it be words upon paper, shaped like a tree?

Might it alliterate like maybe pickles 'n peter?

Might it assonate like bats and classy cravats?

Might she personify and curts-eye and bow and say "Hi?"

Oh Lord(ess)! Please hear our pleas for clarity!

We can't stand all of this mystery!

A. Oh, stop it. And your rhythm's off anyway, you twit.

This message has been brought to you by the Evangelical Church of Non-Rhyming Poets of America, Reformed.

Can you see what’s happening here? And it doesn’t end with rhyme!

It doesn’t end anywhere!

Being a scientific sort, when faced with a puzzle such as this I immediately think of experiment. In this case, dealing with a serious psychosocial problem, serious psychosocial methodology is called for. But you can’t get those kind of drugs anymore, so my next idea was that I should voluntarily become an authoritarian. Then I will be able to report to an amazed and astonished world my findings as to where my head has gotten to.

So. I have become a rabid proponent of the Julian Day Calendar. You may not have ever heard of the Julian Day Calendar, but I’m sure you’ve heard of the Julian Year Calendar -- the one that preceded the Gregorian Year Calendar which we’ve been using lately.

Well, the Julian Day Calendar is a Day Calendar, not a Year Calendar. You count days. Doesn’t that make more sense? Don’t answer that, I don’t care what you think, because I am being an authoritarian, and I have just decided for you that counting days makes more sense.

Want to know how you’ll figure out when years start and end? Why should you care? What, are you raising pigs? Don’t you know pig-farming is a waste of time, you should be in the slaughtering business, that’s where all the money is now? What, do I have to explain everything to you?! Look, how do you know now when it’s high tide? You look it up in a chart, that’s how. YOU LOOK IT UP. You don’t make the rest of the world calculate time based on the number of tides that have elapsed since the Red Sea parted, just so you don’t have to keep a tide chart handy!

So let’s see, what have we learned by being authoritarians? Well we have learned that we are over 18,000 days old (18K in the metric system). We have learned that when we rant on and on about Julian Days, nobody cares. In fact we have learned that we are not legislators or executives or police so therefore we can’t make anyone care. We have learned that authoritarians use the editorial “we” way too much.

But most importantly, we have learned that authoritarians think that they are right. Therefore they do not know they are being authoritarians. They think they are pointing out truths. So it doesn’t do any good to tell a control freak to stop it.

Next issue: We nag Paul Schell anyway! Just because we can!

Smells Like Your Uncle

OK, it's winter, I expected to be cold and miserable. But La Niña? What!? As I swear on an oath to the Almighty Butterfly Effect, they must now be making this nonsense up as they go along. Next year -- LOOK OUT! It's El Tío! Escape the planet at any cost! (The weather's not too hot or too cold, it just smells like your Uncle Joe smells after two six-packs on top of Mama's "Last Days" Burrito and Nuclear Beef Enchilada Plate, with extra guacamole.)

But that was just the start of it. Now look at us. The tabloids can't even keep up. The impeachment resolution having just been passed as I write this, what do I see in the Enquirer but "Hillary Goes On Rampage in the White House." So they've completely given up telling us unbelievable stuff, you can get that in the mainstream papers. Now the tabloids are trying to shock us with "Fight Breaks Out on Jerry Springer Set", "Madonna Reportedly Had Sex Last Night", "Scientists Don't Believe in Sasquatch", "Seattle, Boston Joined by Highway" and "Monkeys No Longer Thought to Fly."

Meanwhile, the mainstream papers have gone off the edge. Last month we only had to pick up one of Seattle's highly respected dailies (I won't say which one, who cares, they're both full of it) -- NOT an irresponsible tabloid, to read that a "homeless" man shot and killed a Metro bus driver. A "homeless" man that, it turned out, has LIVED IN THE SAME APARTMENT FOR THIRTEEN YEARS.

Next, thanks to that little senseless bout of SCAPEGOATING, there came a call for the downtown Free Ride Zone to be discontinued, so that what hadn't happened the day after last Thanksgiving on the Aurora Bridge might never not not happen ever again. Are you following me?

OK keep hangin' on: most homeless people in this city who avail themselves of the Free Ride Zone would be inconvenienced by having to hike around that one and a half mile long area all the time, but that's nothing that most of them aren't prepared to do if they must.

Therefore they could all bring themselves to say to Seattle and especially to downtown's retail businesses, go ahead. Go ahead and kill the program that has done more than any other to turn around the consumer exodus to the suburban malls. Do it just to spite us, even though we are just as peaceful as the rest of you are, and had nothing to do with the tragedy of the 359 Express. We'll live.

Meanwhile, the gutsy Democrat that I didn't actually favor in the 1992 primary (I voted for the poet) is now at risk of being replaced by an android from the moons of Uranus?? An android who only got elected at all because he was a running mate, because ever since that Jefferson/Hamilton screw-up that's just the way we do things? Or was it Adams/Jefferson? Don't any history teachers email! Just let me tell you what I'm talking about here.

OK let's say I'm getting a little cous-cous (a grain) on the side. But my wife is known to have the meanest right in the Free World, you can read about it in the tabloids. And say some pip-squeak of a latter-day Torquemada asks me if I ever had that particular grain, and I say yeah but it wasn't any big deal, and I don't tell him anything more.

And let's not forget to mention that by this time it is all too evident that Nuevo Torko will bend every rule in the modern inquisitorial handbook.

So now I'm supposed to resign, so that an android from outer space should replace me? Whose wife is even weirder than mine??

Well, enough of my bad mood. Allow me to greet the New Year with a song.

A Bratty Annoying Song For This New Year

[To maximize annoyance, repeat each line just

until threatened with a massive air strike!]

by © Dr. Wes, me

Let's all sing a bratty song, song song song

How could such a thing be wrong? wrong wrong wrong

See the ugly Ne-eww Year, Year Year Year

We'll kick it in it's silly rear, rear rear rear

Poke it in its stupid side, side side side

Then we'll all go run and hide, hide hide hide

While were hid we shouldn't squeak, squeak squeak squeak

The better that we all can peek! Peek! Peek! Peek!

Peek at a politi-ician, shun shun shun!

Engaged in fornication! Fun fun fun!

Make the scoundrel RE-zign, 'zign 'zign 'zign

Never let 'em 'cross that bratty line!

-- Line line line! --