Apologetically Yours

Before you start getting any ideas, let me tell you right now how things are shaping up around here: in short, your paranoia is founded, it seems, on solid ground, and the sooner we all realize that we’ve been wasting our time trying to pick up the wrong kinds of shiny baubles and asking the wrong kind of people what, in hindsight, look like exactly the wrong questions, let me take a minute to say that it’s been the pleasure of a lifetime singing this song with you, and All Things Considered (weekdays on NPR), I’d have done it again, even though you’re a professional opera singer from the big city, and I’ve only had vague (and entirely unfulfilled) aspirations in the direction of busking, during my quieter and more remorseful moments. But no matter: apparently, with no regard whatsoever to how incredibly good I’ve been at getting on your nerves, and incredibly bad at everything else (indeed, the two facts seem proportionate, and of a similar shape when seen from most angles), it’s just, simply put, over. No more! What’s next, you ask? What’s to come? Well, the first thing you’ll notice is how your shoe laces never stay tied the way they always do in the Motion Pictures, because you almost never see a Motion Picture Facsimile Person (of the Archetypal variety, if you’re into that sort of thing) stopping to tie their shoe whilst saving the world, do you? Anyway, while you’re down there tying you’re shoe in the most unglamorous way possible, you might notice (you might not) that the world’s not ending, and if it is, it’s doing so slowly, and in a way that you can’t seem to predict or have any impact on. It just does what it does, even when your shoes stay tied, and you catch your train, which brings up another point: who the heck rides trains, really? I mean, I guess I have ridden a train from Point A to the Point of No Return a few times, but who were all of those other people? I have no idea. They seemed (to me) to be acting as if nothing at all was the matter, or perhaps everything is. And now, a poem:

Streetlight mariner cries out “land ho” from the top of the Buick LeSabre
The day/morning brightly
But there’s no one to hear the Cacophony Champagne Fiddle Orchestra
Because the playbill was printed incorrectly
And took too long to read anyhow
Plus, you can bring a drunk to rehab but you can’t forgive him sometimes

On second thought: maybe nothing’s over. Maybe it hasn’t even begun.