Stalking Awareness Month

[franksolich]

Last night, Monday night, one of the deputy sheriffs stopped here on his way home.  He wasn’t here in any official capacity, and in fact was wearing the “hat” of a hospital security guard, a part-time job of his. 

It blows the mind, that hospitals of all places, in the Sandhills of Nebraska of all places, have to have security, but one supposes that’s a commentary on the times, after forty years of the Age of Aquarius, when we’re finally running out of other people’s money, and the entitlees are starting to get violent about there being no freebies any more.

I do the income taxes for he and his wife; he just wanted to check to find out if I was willing to do them this year, as over the past year, my “business activities” shifted somewhat towards something else.

While he was here, he noticed the presence of something new, a telephone.

“I’m really glad you got that,” he said.

I shrugged my shoulders.  It was costing me twenty-four bucks a month, for something that’s of little or no use for me; I had gotten it only under compulsion, the owners of the property insisting I needed it for personal safety because of where I live.

“Nothing ever happens out here,” I said; there’s been no problems.”

He arched his eyebrows, and then asked about the primitives; “this is Stalking Awareness Month, remember.”

He of course is aware four primitives in particular are on file in the sheriff’s office for having made threats against franksolich, but that was w-a-a-a-a-y back in 2005, during the Scamdal.

“The list is pretty outdated,” I said; “Fat Che at the time circa 350 pounds, his belly hanging out and down in front of him as if an apron, is probably now even heavier, and possibly even bed-ridden, or at least seriously ill.  He’s also seven years older, his eyeglasses probably thicker, and his asthma worse.  In fact, he may even be homeless, as his house in Elgin, Illinois was foreclosed upon, about the time the Magic One had been in office for a year.

“Fat Che’s never coming out here; he’s too old, too fat, too sick, too broke.”

We discussed the other three, and agreed the threat from them had diminished considerably with the passage of time.

“But things always change,” he said; “the way you are, you’ve probably attracted new threats.

“After all, the primitives are notorious for having no sense of humor.”

Probably, I admitted, but such are the hardships for trying to bring light into the darkness, hope to the damned, wisdom to the willfully ignorant, love to those who know only how to Hate.  But it’s a sacrifice one’s compelled to make as a public service for the Good of Humanity; it can’t be any other way.

“But you know, this really ticks me off,” I said.  “franksolich himself has never stalked anybody, doesn’t even know how to stalk, isn’t interested the least in stalking someone.  franksolich respects boundaries, the boundaries in this case being the primitives as they are on Skins’s island, not as they are anywhere else.

“But to hear hippywife Mrs. Alfred Packer’s hippyhubby Wild Bill talk, one’d think franksolich hangs around outside their houses, taps their telephone lines and internet services, opens their mail, looks over their shoulders, hides underneath the matrimonial bed, peeks in their windows, questions their neighbors, contacts their employers, follows them on the highway.

“What the primitives don’t understand is that all franksolich knows about the primitives, he learns from Skins’s island, nowhere else.

“It isn’t my fault the primitives are so blabby, so uninhibited.”

[franksolich]

He pulled out a pocket notebook.  “Tell me about the top twenty primitives,” he said.

I pulled up the list on the computer.

“Number twenty, the aspirin one, has never indicated a specific hostility towards franksolich—just a general hostility towards all that is good and decent—and so there’s no threat there.”

The next one down the list, I said, “is a perpetual loser, never a winner, and it’s always the fault of circumstances or other people, never himself.  He’s middle-aged, with thinning hair and some flabbiness, but his biggest weakness is his mind, his attitude.  A real loser.  He’s never coming out here.”

I moved down the list, to the eighteenth.  “This one,” I said, “would probably like to wring franksolich’s neck, but his old hippie ‘pacifism’ deters him, and besides, he’s pretty old, and looks like John Lennon would look, if John Lennon had grown to be that old.

“And this next one, well, he’s gotten fatter, stupider, and lazier as he’s gone through life.”

My finger pointed to number sixteen, the big three.  “Well, here, probably Lord Marblehead hates franksolich’s guts, but because Skins is his boss, he has to behave.  The old school tie; Skins would protect franksolich with his life, if he had to.

“And her—well, she’s just a rich broad in a gated community down in San Diego, one of the 1%, who’s too lazy to do anything but copy-and-paste.”

So far my visitor had written nothing down.

“And the bluegrass guy,” I pointed out, “is probably pretty old now, and damaged.

“I know nothing about number thirteen, other than that he’s one of these flaming gays, which means he could be knocked on his ass with the limp flutter of the wrist.

“And grouchy old Don here—“

He interrupted.  “Wait; you forgot her,” pointing to the one in between.

“Oh,” but I said, “if the Die alte Sau were to come after franksolich, there isn’t a damned thing you could do to protect me.  The entire law-enforcement of the county couldn’t protect me.  Every cop in Nebraska couldn’t protect me.  There’s no human agency that exists, that could protect me from her; only God.”

He looked at me, quizzically.

“You know,” I said, puffing on a cigarette, “there’s lots and lots of bad people in the world, and some evil people.  But once in a rare while there’s someone whose Evil transcends all human vision and understanding; whose Evil stretches back into Eternity, older than the rocks and the skies and the air and the sun.

“There’s some Evil only God has the power to overcome.”

He still wasn’t getting me, but I was too tired to explain.  Instead, I pointed out that as long as God is with one, no one can be against one.  “There’s a medieval prayer in Latin I learned while in speech therapy—it was one of those ‘practice’ exercises I had to repeat over and over again, for years, to help correct the speech—and it’s in Latin so God may understand what’s being said—that should take care of her.”

He looked at me as if I were Bozo from Outer Space.

[franksolich]

“Remember that old horror movie from the mid-1970s,” I reminded him.  “The one where the eyeballs in the girl went up inside her head, her head twisted completely around, she vomited shit, and was suspended standing in mid-air, emitting all sorts of foul odors and curses—well, that’s how the Die alte Sau would react, upon hearing these words.

“I don’t think you could do anything to protect me, but God could.”

Then we returned to grouchy old Don.  “He’s in his late 50s, retired from the assembly-line, a Chicago ‘tough’ who grew up knocking heads and breaking legs, and then advanced into union violence; he’s probably in reasonably good shape, built like a boxer maybe.

“But he hasn’t indicated any animus towards franksolich, so he’s probably cool, copacetic.”

The visitor pointed to the name of the mountain man primitive, the number ten top primitive of 2011.

“Oh, him,” I said; “he’s 65, 66, years old and recently had a chunk of his brain removed.  The sour-assed choleric type, always writing crank letters-to-the-editor. 

“And number nine, well, she’s as formidable as a battleship, a cross between Margaret Thatcher and Ma Kettle, but she’s a woman in great pain, so no danger there.”

The next one was already on that old list, the list from 2005.  “Well, she’s aged decades the past seven years, and is senile now, utterly ga-ga, goofus, out of it, from overuse of mind-altering pharmaceuticals.  Her brain-cells are petrified and fossilized.

“She wouldn’t be a problem herself, but since her two sons—half Latino, from their father’s side, not hers—were recently let out of the Big House in California—drug offenses—it might be a good idea to keep her on the list.”

To number seven: “God forgive me for saying this, but white trash.”

To number six: “God forgive me for saying this, but white trash.”

And then we discussed the next one.  “You know, I saw a photograph of him for the first time yesterday,” I aaid; “he’s more frail and feeble than I’d pictured him.

“However, he is a caporegime for the d’Alessandro crime family of Baltimore and San Francisco, and could probably call upon his subordinates Louie “the Persuader,” Alphonse “the Dentist,” Manny “the Orthopaedic Surgeon,” and Joey “the Undertaker,” to deal with things.

“I’d keep on the ‘watch list’ any automobile bearing Maryland license plates with Italian-looking guys inside it, to check to see if they have baseball bats in the trunk.

“Now this one,” I continued, “is a guy from New Jersey, his brain fried some decades ago from psychedelic drugs, and parts of it removed; in his late fifties, short, squat, and heavy.

“However, he’s obsessed with routine; doesn’t like change, even in the slightest way.  If he had to eat Rice Chex rather than Corn Chex for breakfast, it’d ruin his whole life.  He’s in no mental condition to come after franksolich.”

The third one was of concern because of his geographic proximity to franksolich, circa 200 miles.

“Oh, but two things,” I said; “the first is that it’d cost him about sixty bucks for gasoline, round trip, to come up here and do harm, and he’s not the sort to pay his own way.  If somebody else paid for the gasoline, he’d do it, but if he has to pay, he won’t.  It’s pretty safe to speculate nobody else is willing to pay.

“The other thing is, I know what he looks like in real life now—not by plan or design but only by random chance—and would know to stay at least eight feet away from him, lest he slip on the floor, coming down on top of me.  In which case the rescue squad would have to pick me up with a spatula, and deliver me to the mortuary on a cookie-sheet.

“The second one’s young and looks reasonably healthy, but because of his constant heavy drug use, he might as well be armless and legless; he’s more incapacitated than Fat Che.”

“The last one there looks pretty dangerous,” he advised, “especially given how you managed to rattle her cage; you really really really upset her, pissed her off.”

“Yeah, she does have a lethal weapon,” I said; “her mouth.  But the thing about her lethal weapon is that while it can wreak damage and injury on other people, it’s utterly useless against franksolich.

“The bell-shaped one can come up here all the way from San Diego, sit herself down at the dining room table and unleash her lethal weapon, her mouth, yakking and chattering and nagging and pontificating and flapping her jaws 24/7/365, but it’d have no deleterious effect on me, because I couldn’t hear her anyway.”

[Wineslob]

 

[JohnnyReb]

Frank should write a book, "Dreams from my DUmmies"...and he won't need a ghost writer.

[Dblhaul]

Great stuff!

[shadeaux]

I have tears in my eyes and I am laughing my ass off !!

This was priceless !  God I needed that laugh today.  Thank you Frank.  You silly cuss.

[franksolich]

I have tears in my eyes and I am laughing my ass off !!

This was priceless !  God I needed that laugh today.  Thank you Frank.  You silly cuss.

One wonders if the primitives would see the humor in it.

Probably not.