Living on Pynchon Time

So the children are back in school, and I'm not sure whether I'll be back in school or not come January, only that, having looked into this matter more closely, the only thing weighing on my otherwise stellar application to the fine Jesuit nursing school that is as hard to get into as medical school once was is an unfortunate period (this, I should add, is a matter of conjecture, not to mention debate, among many people I know, who, due to having escaped it relatively unscathed, would prefer to remain anonymous) in the late seventies and early eighties where, it would appear, the applicant fiddled around a bit too much in the world of booze, drugs, and women. And stopped going to mass on Sunday. And probably started eating meat on his pizza on Fridays during Lent.

While this was some time ago, and while the current thinking is, officially, among those making decisions on our lives—a group getting younger each year month and day, who, keep in mind, might not have had their seventies time, and may have some bitterness about it when they're looking at your application—that what happened in the seventies stays in the seventies, I'm beginning to think that someone has seen fit to make me pay for my sins. At least nominally.

It's the Catholic way, and while the Jesuits tend to be more philosophical about such matters, more on Augustine's plane than, say, the Pope's—Lord, let me be chaste, just not yet—I have a sneaking suspicion that someone in that deciding outfit is thinking, on my application in particular: "Fuck him. I hardly drink, except when I'm depressed, or when my husband is cheating on me, or when I'm alone, or with somebody ... and I've never done any drugs, especially the fun ones that I keep hearing about from all these fuckers like, I suspect, the applicant, who, by the Grace of God, surely (and that would be just like God, wouldn't it—wouldn't it??!!), quit just in time that he actually looks pretty good for someone fifty fucking one years old, and isn't just muttering to himself in a padded cell in that way people like me, who have only fucked one person in their whole life, and that person, it just so happens, now, is fucking everything he can get his hands on, all figured people like him would end up one day ...

"Well fuck him! He is going to, at the very least, do some penance."

And, to that end, I'm out on my deck this morning, with nothing better to do than read Thomas Pynchon, his latest, Inherent Vice, which I wouldn't recommend to people who didn't have a seventies, or something like it, at some point in their life, though if they're having it now, Pynchon may be a little hard to follow.

I'm still not exactly sure of the plot, which involves a murder in a surfing community in California in the very early seventies. A private eye somewhat like Elliot Gould in Altman's film The Long Goodbye, except our man, Doc Sportello, is a doper, in a milieu of dopers, trying to crack the case.

Thus come some telling lines. Take for instance this one, on page 129: "A private eye [our man Doc] didn't drop acid for years in this town without picking up some kind of extrasensory chops, and truth was, since crossing the doorsill of this place, Doc couldn't help noticing what you'd call an atmosphere."

Indeed. An atmosphere.

Anyway, it's time I got back to my reading, and get a bowl of cereal, a haircut, before the kids get home and the atmosphere, as it were, goes poof!

Enjoy the day.

Back to School

If you don't have children, or your children are grown, off to college or living in your basement, texting endlessly, August 17th may strike you as a bit early for school to be starting. On a Tuesday, no less. Though that's when school starts—started—here in the Boulder Valley School District.

Not that I'm complaining.

The day before it all began we dropped off supplies and met our children's teachers. I hadn't gotten money to the school—didn't check a box, something—in time last spring for our children's supplies to be bought in a tidy lump by the school, and so Donna, my wife, ended up going to Target and picking them up ala carte for about the same money it would have cost us to go out and stuff ourselves on sushi.

She had the bags, six of them, three for each son, sitting on the floor when I got home from karate yesterday. I assumed we'd simply drop off the supplies, dump them into a big tub in the corner, say hello and be gone. I had to get Ian to karate at 3:15 and wouldn't have time to be lingering in the classroom and hallways, chatting up anyone I recognized or hadn't seen all summer, my children tugging on me CAN WE GO NOW? DAD!!!

But then I discovered that all the supplies had to be put in the correct baskets, which were scattered about the room, apparently to make the exercise interesting. Also, I had no idea, really, what sort of supplies were in the bags, only that, collectively, they were heavy, and I was already tired and sweaty from lugging them on foot all the way from our house, looking like some day laborer hauling buckets of cement while the other parents who had checked the box in the spring, or had smart baskets on their bikes, large backpacks one would use for a week-long trip into the wilderness, went by, happy they had thought things through a little better than I had.

I took care of Zachary's first-grade supplies first, feeling, possibly because I'm getting old and petty, a tinge of envy that, for the second year in a row he had got a looker—a hottie, as they say now—for a teacher. I wondered, as I dropped glue sticks and markers into baskets, what this did for a child, and what affect it possibly had on me that my kindergarten teacher, who, while kind and decent, was old and plump as a pumpkin, with a big wart above her eyebrow and a mustache thicker than anything I could grow until I was well into my twenties, that my 1st and 2nd grade teachers were both wrinkled up nuns wearing pre-Vatican II habits; I hadn't got a looker until I was in third grade, and really, that was only by comparison—she wasn't a nun, and was fresh out of college, we were told—and after that nothing, until I was in college, most of which I don't remember. Such were the times.

It was better than ten minutes before I finished and started down the hall to Ian's class, running into a friend along the way, who introduced me to his friends, whose son, looking weary and wearing a hospital mask, I saw now, had leukemia. My friend had texted me the mother's phone number way back in May and I said I would call her but never managed to. Suddenly, looking at the boy, at his parents, I felt like a real asshole, the worse for thinking I had to hurry or Ian—who'd run ahead to his own classroom, whose hair, we might have consoled the boy, had grown back, if somewhat darker, and not as curly—would miss his karate.

"Why's he wearing that mask?" Zachary wondered, standing beside me holding my hand.

"He's got leukemia," all of us adults standing around the boy said not loudly but all at once. The boy, a year younger than Zachary, in kindergarten, I assumed, looked down at his shoes, mortified. I put my arm around Zachary and added, "He's fighting the dragon," a term we had used in our house, and still do, and Zachary nodded, smiling as if to say, "Ah ... that." He was just a baby when Ian was diagnosed; he doesn't remember much, only that people still make a fuss out of it. To him, Ian's just a normal big brother who can be a real prick sometimes.

"We need to get going," said the mom, smiling politely, taking the boy by the hand—Germs, lots of people, lots of germs, don't linger, get him out of here! The father, staying behind, asked if he could get my number, and I said of course and gave it to him and he typed it into his cell phone, all of this taking time, of course. "You'll get through it," I said, thinking, "and afterwards you won't know what to do. Everything will feel like epilogue. You'll go back to failing at things that don't matter, fussing over nonsense."

I was still thinking we could make karate if we really hauled ass. Ian, when we finally met up in his classroom, had the same idea.

Daaad ... Let's GO!!

We never made it to karate. It wasn't even close.

That night we filled out all the paperwork that got sent home in the packet. Permission for this and that, emergency numbers. We don't really have a default emergency person. I tend to select someone new each year, and don't bother anymore to notify them as it just eats up more time. One day, I suppose, they'll just get called. "Hi, this is the school. There's an EMERGENCY, and The Bueltels have selected you this year ... "

"What? I'm in the bathtub, on a chairlift, I'm under anesthesia, having a colonoscopy—"

"We're terribly sorry, but there's an EMERGENCY. I'm afraid one of the Bueltel children is in the office. We found a Swiss Army Knife in his backpack and his parents aren't answering the phone, so ... we called you. You're the emergency person ... "

In the paperwork that was sent home there's a sheet that you and the child have to initial, giving permission for a variety of things that back in the day no one cared about. You didn't worry about someone from the media, for instance, taking your kid's picture; on the contrary, you prayed that it would happen, so you could cut it out and pin it to the wall for everyone to see, lord it over your friends and relatives, whose children, you liked to think, would only get in the paper by way of the police blotter.

I sat down with Ian and we went through the booklet, in particular the part where you're advised on what can get your child suspended from school. There is a long list of things, and much to Ian's dismay we were going over all of them. You can't be initialing things, I explained, unless you read and understand what you're signing. This is how the housing crisis got started, how the Patriot Act got passed, people not reading things, overlooking the fine print—

"Now, first thing you don't want to do is call in any bomb threats. In Singapore, they'd probably cane you for something like that, for just about everything on this list, actually, cane you and send you back to class, so you didn't miss out on anything, rather than expel you, but here in the United States, in the post-911, post-Columbine era—"

"Daaaad—"

"Don't interrupt me, son. This is important."

We discussed what a dangerous weapon was. I went through the list of dangerous weapons, remembering that in sixth grade I'd taken a real German Lugar pistol that my uncle had taken from a dead German during World War II to Show & Tell, this back when you could bring things like that to school so long as you weren't pointing it at anyone and it wasn't loaded, and that there was some educational value associated with, in this case, the war booty my uncle had brought back from Germany, that I got to bring to school.

"You aren't taking drugs, are you? Hitting the bottle, anything like that? I ever find out you're taking gin from that blue bottle I use to mix my martinis and filling it back up with water and you're going to be one sorry—"

"WHAT? ARE YOU CRAZY? I DON'T DRINK! I'M EIGHT!"

"That's good, son. What about smoking? Do you smoke?"

"NO!!"

"Happy to hear it. Initial here—"

"AND WHY WOULD I TAKE A GUN TO SCHOOL? OR A BOMB? NOBODY TAKES A GUN OR A BOMB TO SCHOOL. ARE YOU CRAZY?"

"Listen, don't get smart with me. Now, it says here—pay attention!—that you can't tag anything in the bathroom, or spray paint dirty words on the side of the building, especially the new part, or be disruptive like you are around here with your brother whenever your mother or I turn our heads even for a second, because if you do, anywhere around or in school, trust me, you'll be in deep—"

"WHY WOULD I DO THAT, DAD?"

"Do what?"

"ANY OF THIS!"

"I don't know, son. For the life of me, there are things I'll never understand. Just put your initials next to mine, right here ..."

"DAAAD!!"

"And here's another thing: you can't hit on the girls ... or the teachers. It's inappropriate, and if you touch anyone in a swim suit, or is it where the swim suit goes? where you'd wear a swim suit—"

"Can I just go to bed?"

Ahh, the method to my madness. "Sure, son. We can cover the last seventeen things that can get you suspended in the morning."

"Will you read to us?"

"Sure—" The writer, reading his boys to sleep.

"Do we still have some of Treasure Island left?" he asks, my son who rejected Proust as an infant, who likes television more than I wished he did, who associates it with comfort, probably, with safety, all those movies he watched down at Children's Hospital when they loaded him with the drugs ...

"One more chapter," I reply. He and his brother fell asleep last night during the second to last chapter.

"I don't want to read Treasure Island!" Zachary cries. "I hate Treasure Island!"

I finish Treasure Island, but only after reading three other books that Zachary got to pick. Zachary is asleep now, but Ian is still awake, thrashing around in the top bunk, excited about school tomorrow, I have to think. My eyes have given out and I tell him to lie still, but he can't, he can't sleep, he says, and after a few more minutes of hearing him toss we go downstairs and curl under a blanket on the sofa and I turn on Sportscenter, catch the scores. I surf the channels and see there's a Warren Miller movie on and we watch some of that, skiers coming down shoots, flying off cliffs, flipping in the air, landing and tumbling in the snow, crashing into rocks. He likes watching the skiers but wants to know if South Park is on. That's what we'd watched the last time he couldn't sleep. "You know the guys who created this show, they're from Columbine High School, down in Littleton, just on the other side of Denver," I say, but he doesn't know what the fuck I'm talking about, doesn't care, just loves those crazy little round-headed kids and their smart mouths, he and I sitting here under the blanket on the night before school after everyone else is asleep, laughing. Before long he turns and faces the cushion and I hear a sigh. I mute the sound and sit there with him in the quiet, stroking his hair that is straighter and darker and a little more coarse than it once was. In a few years he'll be too big to carry up to bed, but not yet. Not yet.

Doing Words

As some of you may know, I finished the novel that I began more or less thirteen years ago earlier this year, around Valentine's Day, and subsequently sent it to my agent, who, back in the summer of 2006, after reading the excerpt that Narrative Magazine had recently published (see link to the left, under bio), cold-called me to see if I had representation, and if I had more for her to read. It was a very heady day. I had just given a reading a month earlier that had gone over well, surprising some of my friends who had suspected that, rather than writing all these years, I was sitting in my living room most every day sucking back martinis with my bacon and eggs while staring, increasingly pixillated, at Rockies highlights on ESPN, if not something quite a lot more nefarious and fun, that might have involved roller blades, party hats, chocolate sundaes with cherries on top—all of which, I should add, are possibilities for Tuesday morning, when the children go back to school—and now I was getting a call from an agent, a Harvard graduate, smart, young, hungry and beautiful, I would later find out, from an established house in New York.

I had 180 pages out with my editor, I told her, anxiously, so no, I didn't have anything more for her to read just yet—but would, soon, I promised. In the meantime, perhaps we could have lunch? It so happened I was coming to New York at the end of the month, on my way to Nova Scotia. Sure, she said ... and a few weeks later we met at a place in Midtown, on Broadway, an Italian place where they were showing "La Dolce Vita" on the wall, Anita Eckburg soaking wet in the Trevi ... How long have you been working on the book? she, my prospective agent, asked, after confiding that the excerpt she read reminded her vaguely of ... Mrs. Dalloway (there is nothing she could have said that could have flattered me more, and I mean nothing). I told her around ten years, give or take, that instead of writing, say, four books and throwing them in a drawer, I had just kept at this one, and somehow it had kept going with me. This, I was hoping, put me in a class with Shirley Hazzard, Harold Brodkey, Marilynne Robinson, and one of my teachers, the great measured pace novelist Carol Edgarian. Anyway, the agent didn't seem to care if it had taken me 20 years, and getting my attention once more away from Anita Eckburg's drenched visage, said she was eager to read more. Later, that fall, I would be in New York City again, this time for a friend's birthday, and would hand her 66 pages of recently edited work after having drinks at the Algonquin. Might as well be stylish about the hand off, yes? She would like these pages, too, if not, it seemed, quite as much as she'd liked that excerpt. Still, it didn't occur to me that, in spite of a signed contract (which she'd been careful to explain didn't mean much), she would, roughly a year later, when I sent her what I thought was the final draft of the book, tell me that she didn't think she could sell it. I asked her why, and she really couldn't tell me. She'd lost me somewhere in the middle, she said, and, sensing myself that the middle was the weakest part of the book, I tore it open over the next couple of years and redrafted it (while my wife was in nursing school, and later, when I was taking classes to do the same, with two young boys orbiting, after selling a farm, while the financial world was falling apart), and then sent it to her again, last February, though her opinion, regrettably, didn't change. I was more braced for the disappointment this time, however. Rather than getting kicked in the gut, it was more like I'd finally summited a mountain after a long climb only to run into a couple of twelve year olds in hoodies, brandishing screwdrivers, telling me they wanted money, right now, and that if I was thirsty, due to blood loss from my screwdriver wounds, there was a half a can of Red Bull leaned over there on a rock, next to where they'd pissed. Anyway, they were leaving now ...

Not to say my agent, my former agent, perhaps my agent again should I get her something that she can sell, wasn't kind. I'm sure it isn't easy to give a writer bad news. Most of us are assholes on a good day, and this was not a good day. Yet she wasn't, and isn't, the sort of person who lives up to the stereotypes, who puts a bad taste in your mouth, and that made it all the more dispiriting. It would have been nice to at least be able to hate her.

I haven't done a thing with the manuscript since ... but, hey, that is about to change.

As some of you also know, I applied to the Regis Nursing Program earlier this summer. Out of 380 applicants, I was one of 180 who was selected to be interviewed. Of those, 96 would be taken. I discovered late Wednesday, on the Regis website, that I was not one of those, but part of the next group of 40 or so "alternates." Which is to say that I still don't know if I'll be going to nursing school in January. Certainly I can't plan on it. Between five and twenty-five accepted students, for one reason or another, will decline their acceptance between now and January 9th, and Regis will replace them from my unranked group of forty alternates, a group that, for one reason or another, will also grow smaller over time.

I was reminded when I called the point person at Regis minutes after finding out, near crazy with despair but trying hard not to show it, that the process was intensely competitive. Still, I had aced all my recent science classes, taken, many of them, while I was finishing the novel. I had considerable experience in health care, a child who had survived cancer—what the fuck?

Yet when the last class of students has an overall GPA of 3.5 (a number formerly associated with admittance into medical school, not nursing school), an overall GPA in the high twos, early undergrad transcripts all but stamped with Misspent Youth perhaps tend to stand out. As I suspect they did.

Still, I'm an alternate. I should probably be pleased.

Fuck that.

For some time now I've wondered what I'd do if I didn't get accepted. In these abstract moments suicide is generally, for vainglorious reasons, no doubt, at the top of my list. It was the same way when I was working on the book, thinking, What if this doesn't work? What then? Well, I could always kill myself ...

Similarly, if I didn't get into nursing school at age 51 ...

Easy come, easy go.

But, as that movie "The Anniversary Party" pointed out, children rather rob us of this option. Never mind that I'm too much of a coward to do it even if I had Alzheimer's.

And Donna, who'd get quite an insurance payout if I staged it well (ran my car off a bridge, say, as opposed to taking both barrels to the head, which would be derivative, but never mind), claims she'd rather have me than the money, at least this was still true last week—

So ... I may have to get back to where, according to Donna and few others, I belong in the first place: Doing words.

And possibly editing other people's words. Which pays better—nearly anything does. And I'm good at it. And would likely enjoy it more than wiping other people's asses, getting sputum shot at me ...

Yet, you watch, those Regis people, now that I've had this Come-To-Jesus Moment, will probably let me in, just to be perverse, to fuck with my head.

I guess we'll see.

I'll keep you posted.

And btw—I'm back.

Happy 50th, N Howe

Rattle & Hum, the senior partners at Dewey Diddlum & Howe, and all the various consultants and help that steal us blind, would like to wish the only person who does anything at this outfit a very delightful and delirious mid-century, milestone birthday—a day late, it seems (one can only hope you're so busy, providing for Dewey's and my continued leisure, that you didn't notice).

Many happy returns, good friend, timely provider of olives, and tireless doer of all the work. You're a good man, and thankfully in fit shape, still—don't ever change.

Welcome to the club, and bottoms up!

Les Diddlum, Of Counsel (part-time)

Dewey Diddlum & Howe LLP

You Pay, We Care

A Short Post from Les, from our Legal Team

Dewey, it's great to see you doing something other than nothing, which is what our firm expects from both of us, but still, one lives to be recalcitrant. Glad to see the wisdom is getting passed around. Our author was greatly concerned about lawsuits, particularly from my litigious partners, but I assuaged him, but not until he brought me some olives. Speaking of which, my martini is getting warm, here in the tub ...

Be well, and best,

Les Diddlum, Of Counsel (Part-time)

Dewey Diddlum & Howe LLP

Death Panel: A Definition

Now comes N. Howe, the sole working partner in the august firm Dewey Diddlum & Howe, retained by this blog should things get out hand, with our Word for the Day—or term, in this case, a particularly obdurate one that has suddenly entered the lexicon.

The term—Death Panel, from the Middle English, deeth (it goes back from there): to die, and the Latin, pannelus, or piece (to include the vulgar usage), might conceivably sort out, from strictly etymological piecing, as it were, to mean: A piece of death ... which wouldn't be far from the mark, perhaps ...

But no. Our Man N Howe, in what little spare time all his other work allows, provides us with a more apt definition for the times: "Something that distracts from the real issue being discussed and that itself has no basis in fact or reality, but tends to create an emotional response in the uninformed. See also: 'red herring.'"

Our esteemed, overworked advisor in matters legal and otherwise also notes that the term, not surprisingly, has been verbed in legal circles, as in, "Your honor, the prosecution/defense is clearly death paneling me on that point."

This not surprising evolution of usage follows precedent from, for instance, the word impact, which over the years has been verbed into impacted (formerly only referring to one's tooth) and impacting, both of which generally announce that the person using the terms is an idiot, but not always.

That is all for now.

RIP Ted.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Health Care

A man comes in holding a shotgun, along with a sign that reads: Keep Government Out of My Medicare! There are others who come in, who are coming in, sitting down. Some of them have signs, too, but I don't notice them. I notice the guy with the gun. I think: this is like one of those dreams I had when I was young, when I was sitting in class and looked down and saw I wasn't wearing any pants. In fact, I'm pretty sure this is a dream. Why else would a dining room table be sitting in the third row, holding up a sign that reads: No Death Panels for Me!

While keeping an eye on the man with the gun, I ask the table what that means. Why would anyone want death panels for a table? Does he mean dividers? An extender?

The table replies (the fissure in the middle, where the divider/extender would go, moving back and forth, I notice, approximating the movements of an actual mouth) that you never can be sure what the government will do, especially one run by a foreigner who hates white people.

But tables? What does the government have against tables, I ask?

Who do you think took my chairs? he replies, and I shrug. How should I know who took his chairs. He goes on: When the first chair got taken, I didn't say anything. Then the second and third chair were taken. Still, I kept quiet. Finally, the fourth chair, my last chair, was taken. Now there is no one left to stand up for me.

When? I ask. When the Nazis come? I look around. Where are the Nazis?

You think this is all pretty funny, don't you, the table scoffs. You won't someday. Believe me.

I look over at the man with the gun. Carefully, dream or no dream, I ask him if he is aware of the fact that Medicare is, in fact, a government program. Along with Medicaid and the Veterans Administration. That around 55% of health care costs in the United States are picked up by the government, and so we're already over halfway to socialized medicine in this country, and have been for quite some time. In fact, I add—and here's the real kicker—these government-run programs are considerably more cost-efficient than their counterparts in the for-profit insurance realm.

That's impossible! a very small woman in the front row, holding a picture of President Obama, a mustache like Hitler's drawn under his nose, shouts.

Why is it impossible? I ask, keeping my eye on the guy with the gun.

Because everyone knows that all the government does is piss away money, you dumb son of a bitch.

I know, I know, I say, trying to be agreeable, since the woman looks meaner than the seventh grade nun who taught me math. And yet, I go on, perplexed, I have to wonder why the insurance industry is so worried about getting into competition with such a profligate bunch. You'd think they'd welcome the opportunity to make a point, about the glories of private enterprise—

They took my chairs! the table, interrupting, shrieks.

Right about then I notice a little man with a big head standing just above my left shoulder. He looks like Kazoo, from the old Flintstones cartoon, but I don't say anything. Remember, he says, half the people in the universe are below average.

I nod ever so slightly. I don't want the people in this room, in my dream, if this is a dream, to think I'm having a conversation with a little man with a big head hovering a few inches above my left shoulder. That would be crazy.

And keep in mind, he adds, that we have nutjobs, too. Only, I've noticed, Earthlings provide better entertainment for theirs. Especially this part of Earth. I like this part of Earth. It's very exciting, don't you think?

Who's he talking to? I hear someone in the crowd say.

I look out at the crowd. Why are you here?

To listen to you, comes one voice. To voice our concerns, comes another. When does the Bingo game start? comes still another.

What are your concerns? I ask, not really knowing what else to say. There's no way out, I see, but the door in back, behind the guy holding the gun.

He replies: We already told ya. We don't want the government running off with our health care.

And my chairs! the table chimes in.

Yeah!!! a lot of others shout.

But, I put in, hesitantly, Medicare is a government program.

You see? the man says. That's exactly what I mean.

Which is?

The little woman in front, with the Hitlerized Obama poster, says: You're just plain fucking stupid, aren't ya. You're nothin but a below average nutjob.

I tell them I really have to go. That I have an appointment with my psychiatrist.

The man in back slides the action on the shotgun he's holding. Not so fast, motherfucker. First you tell us where you stand.

On what, exactly?

On the Health Care Debate.

Oh, is that what we were talking about. I wasn't sure ...

That's cuz yer stupid, the little woman in front reminds me.

Well, actually, I'm in favor of a single-payer system, I say. I figure if I'm going to be shot, it might as well be over something. Maybe the noise of the blast will wake me. I look over my left shoulder to see if Kazoo is still there. He is, looking absolutely delighted. He confides to me that that's what they have on his planet, a single-payer system.

Medicare for Everyone! I shout, jubilantly, waiting for the blast. I'll either be a martyr for the cause or I'll wake up.

Amazingly, there is no blast. Not yet anyway. Kazoo, I can tell, is disappointed. The man with the gun says, I don't want no young whipper snapper taking my Medicare ...

No no, I point out, he wouldn't take it. He'd just have it. Rather than being uninsured and getting treated anyway when he runs his crotch rocket into a tree, and have those costs get passed on to all of us, since hospitals can't be looking like fancy hotels and not have something in the way of revenue to pay for it. I think we all agree that none of us want to be sick in some shitty-looking hospital ...

Let him get his own health care, the man insists. He has worries enough, wondering whether the government is going to take his Medicare.

Well, I admit, that is sort of the American Way. A patch quilt. Boutique plans, or the shit. The veterans have their health care, the old people have their health care, the poor people have theirs, people with good jobs have one kind of plan, and those with lousy jobs have another. Used to be if you had a job, I continue nervously, you had a plan, but that isn't necessarily the case anymore. And a lot of people who have jobs, who have a plan, have a really terrible plan, and they don't realize it, and don't care, until they get sick. And then there are all the people who are sick and can't get a plan, since why would a for-profit, private insurance group, whose job it is to make a profit for their shareholders, want to write medical coverage on someone they know already is sick? What kind of insurance company would do something like that? Unless it was required that they had to. I mean, you wouldn't take statistics in school unless you had to, right? What kind of nut would take statistics out of the kindness of his heart ...

You look like the sort, says the little woman in front.

I ain't never been sick a day in my life, says the dining room table with no chairs around.

Several in the crowd come running, offering to insure him on the spot.

Just tell me the government isn't going to run off with my Medicare, says the man holding the gun.

If you take that shell out of chamber first, I reply, bravely, foolishly, it's hard to say still.

He pops the shell out of gun, slips it in his pocket.

The government isn't going to run off with your Medicare, I say. We dope-smoking boomers aren't going to let that happen, I can promise you. It'll be our swan song. Wall Street bankers will be down to making five figures, from actual, non-subsidized by our tax dollars profits, before that happens, trust me. Look for boutique nursing homes. The return of candy stripers. I'm not kidding. Look what the boomers did for coffee. Remember when all you could get with noodles in it was spaghetti and meatballs? Seriously, you sleep easy tonight. Your Medicare is safe, as well it should be. Can I go now? Please? I'm feeling a bit sick—

Well, doncha be gettin sick in here, ya dumb son of a bitch, says the little woman in front. I wanna play bingo afterwards, and I don't want it smellin to the high heavens in here when I do.

I look up to see what Kazoo's thoughts are on leaving, but see he has already left. Poof. Off to someplace more exciting. The man in back with the gun agrees with the little woman in front. Get the fuck outta here, he says, opening the door for me.

Have a nice night, I say.

The door slams shut with a bang behind me, but I still don't wake up.