Severance Overdue, 8.7.26

It was a capital afternoon, like so many others before it. At least in recent times, that is. Scruffy Rudolf had been up to his characteristic reindeer games for a couple weeks now. Doing this and that; whatever it is. The silly lil puddin' was playing hide and seek with the belongings of others.

He hadn't done it, but if he had he'd have hidden whatever it was – didn't matter what. We were headed up the escalation ladder, which was predicable. From subjunctive to conditional, back and forth, for hours on end. A charnal house on pay-per-view video, even. And predicted.

Old Rudolf played reindeer games all over the house. But it wasn't Christmas and the others grew weary after a truncated season of hate, almost less than an instant. Extreme measures were contemplated and carried out, even if with cerrulian aplomb. It was all for naught. No grade school theatrics could make that little boy whole again. Neither reason, nor fishing for trauma, nor calibrated psy-ops in kind could deter poor Rudolf.

He wanted to join, but didn't ever learn how. And so the veneer of respectability was built since that lonely poor soul received her poison pen letters – which sent her to the asylum. For the rest of her life. Other half-outsiders went into the Klink, for a while, but rallied, on behalf of Rudolf's Reich.

Foreign self-sacrifice on the altar of a lovely small town boy. Excitable boy? That one dug up her grave / and built a cage with her bones. The other one sang too resplendant of diggin' up dem bones blending Tanya's devil doll, to less than rave reviews of The Authorities. Others without guns were consulted; they too proved incapable – interested, to be sure – but threw up their hands, to be sure.

1 1/2 page dissertations were manuscripted out on form 302, to no avail. The soft authorities had a rule book to follow: legislative mandates and due diligence and all of the rest of it. Go back and forth, bug Ken yet again. Surely the Gemeinschaft will spring into action?

The others were and remain utterly out of the question. For the time being. And so poor Rudolf is left to play his reindeer games merely zur Zweit. The star of this vampiric feeding frenzy was looking in the mirror, trying to find the skeleton key Ablenkungsmaneuver. It's the this and that of the world, is all. And the other. Vati dearest wants to play – and all the experts say: just play along, you know, for old times sake. Can't do it.

And the other walks around having seen it all before. The old guise was possessed of a slightly more attuned loving gaze. And so tore ass all the way from the Northeast Kingdom down to the O-hio. And back. Cracking jokes and making friends. Strangers make the best friends, by the way. They're not comparing, they're just living.

But distance did not make the heart grow fonder, the embers were cooling, if too gradually. The Greeks knew what fathers really want from their uppidy sons, and so it's time for a revealed vacancy, an automatic ritual of iteration, elaboration and this that and the other. It's just the babblings of an odd duck, and that is true. But ducks can quack and sure they sing unintelligibly sometimes, because why not? Doesn't everyone's song ring hollow most of the time? It's an atonal kind of sound, the pitch escapes most everybody.

So he flies around, here and there – West Union one day – doing this and that, whatever it is. Anyways, the essence of the thing will never see the light of day or disturb the ears of any man, woman or child. Select strangers from the green mountains to the mightiest tributary heard fragments of the farce, under the gauze of jokes, mostly. When the blinds became transparent, the laughter ceased, and tear drops fell / like the falling rain.

But, it's the summer driving season, and there is plenty of lemonade to be squeezed out of the routinized casual cruelty of this world. So drive around buck up the youngins' in the bars, their premature agony out for the world to see, at the drop of a hat. Watches them run like chickens with their heads cut off serving breakfast. Herr Klamm turned up and wrote a sternly worded letter to the General Manager and mentioned his contacts in Cleveland and California, as pertained to the Absentee Landlords, for kicks.

And so you count your lucky stars and know that suffering is the only thing worth living. Where once it laid so heavily during the salad days, it now just provides propulsion forward. Where? Nobody knows and nobody seems to notice. And nobody seems to care. So go west, young man! Out there in the great wide open / under the skies of blue. Out there somewhere, towards new and vast yawning vistas, to say nothing of the prospect of new pages of glory, never to be written.