My favourite word today is ‘unsubscribe’ and I’ve been online clicking it on dozens of emails asking for my cash contributions to their battle on behalf of the good, the true and the beautiful, which one wants to support, but once you do, your name is transmitted to other righteous causes and now I’m getting appeals from folks running for city council in Omaha and a group petitioning Congress to outlaw the internal combustion engine, the chance of which is less than slight, so I unsubscribe and instead I gave to a soup kitchen raising money for school supplies for indigent kids: how could I say no? A nice red book bag, notebooks, pencils, a sharpener, a ruler, the same stuff I treasured when I started school.
I loved school. I come from fundamentalist people and every year they asked that I be excused from square-dancing in gym class so that I would not be tempted by carnal pleasure, but still they didn’t object to my reading secular literature such as Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. They were gentle people, not like the bearded men with machine guns riding through the streets of Kabul or the American mujahideen sacking the Capitol in January or Mr Roseberry in his black pickup parked in front of the Library of Congress Thursday, claiming to have explosives enough to destroy whole city blocks. Finally he had to pee and he surrendered.