Hi. It’s me. David. AWOL guy.
You remember. The guy who plants a smile on your face, then wipes it off as brusquely as a harried welfare mom wipes the puréed carrots from the dollar store off her one-year-old’s quivering, emaciated lips.
You may be wondering. I have been in hospital, my fine feathered friends, to have my long-awaited Personality Bypass, hence the inch-thick gauze bandages that might remind you, were you confessional-poetry inclined, of Sylvia Plath’s poem Facelift:
… Traveling
Nude as Cleopatra in my well-boiled hospital shift,
Fizzy with sedatives and unusually humorous…
Which, you will note, is just so uncannily me.
The PB, as it’s known – to distinguish it from the welfare mom’s go-to dinner, the PBJ – is a straight-forward yet time-consuming affair involving a trainee surgeon armed with safety scissors, a bossy nurse practitioner with large, jiggly breasts (think Barbara Winsor in those “Carry On” flicks), and an assortment of your closest, most goodwill-draining acquaintances as background (think George Grosz crossed with Hieronymus Bosch, executed in gouache).
First this sorry excuse for a surgical team straps you down to squelch any possible protest and then, in a procedure characterized mainly by its enduring and exquisite pain, drains into your increasingly sodden, well-boiled hospital pillow the milk of human kindness, the sparkling water of forgiveness, the boundless ocean of generosity and replaces them with various other unseemly liquids – sebum, lymph and above all, gall – until you are brittle and poisonous as a newly-dipped Amazonian arrowhead.
This all takes several weeks, as you can imagine. Thank Minerva I live in the socialist wasteland of Canada, where the wait-time for a free PB, thanks to Stephen “Death-By-A-Thousand-Cuts” Harper is now at a mere sixty years and counting. Which leaves enough time, at least, to hack off the ankle chains and change into my second pair of Chairman Mao pants. Thanks, nanny state!
We eagerly await the Americanization Brain Transplant, whereby everyone’s most-disused organ is replaced with shredded bits of the Constitution, the overweeningly-important Second Amendment thereto, and a whole mess o’ collard greens ‘n grits, thereby ensuring that a comparison of, say, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will wind up with Clinton as the chump.
Oh my American cousins, not a flicker of truth-seeking, self-criticism or apparently even five minutes of sustained logical thinking in a barrel-full of you! And while you’re at the task of hammering the last union-made nails into the coffin of the United States of Anomie with your Louboutin pumps, just load me on the Ark and be done with it.
I’ll pass the hours explaining to the monkeys why they still exist.