We at the Kachina Round Table did not enjoy our Thanksgiving meal at the Hôtel Adios. One of our members was absent. I speak of Orville Slack IV, the gifted writer whose practical advice on the etiquette of begging off was attracting a growing readership.
 
It seems that Mr. Slack died in his sleep during the early morning hours of one of our top ten holidays. His body was discovered by his nurse and companion, Miss Molly Golightly. Upon awakening and checking out his body heat, she immediately placed a call to the county coroner, who, after a cursory investigation of the death scene, reported that the probable cause of death was an overdose of a popular drug known for enhancing and in some cases enabling erotic activity.
 
Both Miss Golightly and Mr. Slack declined comment on this finding.
 
Orville Slack IV was born on July 4, 1910, in Slackville, Oklahoma, the son of Orville Slack III, who was begat by Orville Slack II, who in turn was begat by Orville Slack the Original. Slacks I-III were aided in their begetting by honest women, each of whom was named Mary. Like his predecessors, Slack IV scratched out a living by dispensing innovative advice on the techniques of begging off. He was also the owner and sole proprietor of Slack’s Still, which did a booming business in Panhandle County from 1919 to 1933. Upon his discovery by this editor in early 2003, he relocated to Small Southwestern City, where he resided with his newly-discovered companion in the Penthouse Suite of the Hôtel Adios.
 
He is survived by Ms. Golightly, Talia la Musa, Myles na Gopaleen, Jr., Arthur Unknown, the resuscitated remains of Ab Ennis, and the bartenders and clientele of the aforementioned hotel.
 
His ashes will be on display on the bar of the hotel’s Watering Hole from 10 a.m. to midnight.
 
Mr. Slack’s future plans include the continuation of his writing, regular attendance at the Kachina Round Table, and taking instruction from his friend and colleague, Ab Ennis, on the art of inhabiting an urn. He also hopes some day to be outfitted with the same devices his friend has recently been equipped with, courtesy of Mr. Myles na Gopaleen the Younger.

From April 10, 2007 blog

​Soon after the newly-crowned Speaker of the House, the Honorable Ms. Nancy Pelosi, bore a state-of-the-art olive branch to Damascus for an intimate tête-à-tête with the Syrian leader, the Equally Honorable Bashar al-Assad, I, as the presumptive candidate for President of the United States (POTUS) of the Dead Rights Party (DRiP), chose to follow Madame Speaker’s example by flying to Damascus, though bearing an updated, beta version of the aforementioned olive branch.
 
Premiere le dictateur Bashar le Sade and I met in the anteroom of his harem, which, he proudly had informed me as we loitered around his marble fortifications, was immediately to the rear of his gold-embossed row of state-of-the-art gallows, which in turn abutted the Royal Courtroom—all, he explained, in the name of efficiency.
 
Our behind-the-scenes diplomatic discussion began with a chat about an upcoming soccer match between the Iraqi National Team (the Bazookas) and its long-time rival, the Israeli “Doves,” as he called them.
 
It continued with an interrogation session in which he posed the question, in perfect Arabic, “What the hell are you doing here?” (Translation mine.)
 
I replied that the newly-adopted policy of the United States was that any politician within its borders was de facto an intermediary between We The People and any foreign power, whether said foreign power has the status of a nation or is merely an NGO.
 
“Ah yes,” he said, this time with a French accent. “The lady who was here last week . . .”
 
I nodded, as a token of my understanding of his reference to Madame Speaker Pelosi.
 
It does not devolve upon me here to report the contents of our negotiations. It is enough to say that when I left the Damascus airport to which he accompanied me in his stretch Hummer, we had hammered out a binding verbal agreement.
 
For his part, he agreed to give serious consideration to the distant possibility that he and his cabinet would, in future, recognize the rights of dead people to be cremated, fitted with robotic apparatuses, and given the right to vote for him.
 
In return, I agreed that We the People would require the POTUS to issue a presidential pardon for any and all atrocities he (Assad) or his emissaries may or may not have committed within the nation of Lebanon.

​They’re still making a fuss about teaching evolution in the public schools versus teaching the Bible.
 
Back in Panhandle County, there was not a great deal of fuss being made over this issue. This was primarily because nobody had heard of evolution. Also, there were no public schools.
 
Well, nobody had heard of evolution until this screwball atheist moved to town. This old guy had a monkey for a pet, so the preacher came to the belief that something fishy was going on. So this preacher, who doubled as our schoolteacher, ordered a book from Chicago. I never got to read this book because it wasn’t assigned, but Daddy Orville III somehow got his hands on it, read a couple of chapters, and burned it.
 
The preacher didn’t seem to mind. It was his book, he had ordered it and paid good money for it, but as I heard him tell Daddy III, he had read the first few pages and got the general gist and decided then and there that if he ever visited a Christian household and found a copy of it in their library, he’d have the posse out in no time at all.
 
That struck me as kinda funny, because I’d have bet my bottom dollar, if I had one, that there was not a Christian household in Pan Count that had a library. It’s not that people didn’t read back then and there. Fact is, they were highly educated. I’d say maybe forty percent graduated from the eighth grade by the age of 16, when you were expected to help out on the farm, doing your Christian duty of milking the cows, planting crops, cultivating them, harvesting them before the grasshoppers beat you to it, and spreading manure.
 
Anyway, that’s what the boys were expected to do. The girls were expected to cook, have babies, butcher the chickens, and slop the hogs.
 
So much for that human interest stuff. Now back to the atheist with a monkey for a pet. Our teacher decided to invite him and his animal friend to show and tell, as later generations of scholars learned to call it. The point, I believe, was to show the guy up, make him confess that he was an atheist who believed in evolution, and then run him out of the county to save him from the lynch mob, which in those days was considered the Christian thing to do.
 
The guy showed up, all right, with his monkey in tow. The guy was wearing the standard Pan Count outfit, cowboy boots, chaps, a gun belt, a string tie, and a ten-gallon hat. The monkey was dressed up in a funny little hat and a diaper and was carrying a box that resembled a guitar case. Fact is, it was a guitar case. “Jayzus!” I thought. “This animal is no dummy.”
 
He certainly wasn’t, despite the fact that he wasn’t toting a guitar. When the old guy snapped his fingers, this cute little monkey opened the box and pulled out what I later learned was an organ grinder mechanism and started grinding out a song called “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Maybe you’ve heard it.
 
While this song was being ground out, the monkey did a dance. We all clapped, except for the preacher, who doubled as our teacher. Or did I mention that.
 
When the song and dance routine was over, the monkey took a tin cup out of the guitar case and went around the room asking for tips. I couldn’t say for sure how many pennies and nickels he hauled in that morning, but it was no doubt enough to get him and the old man through the month.
 
And that’s how the old atheist and his smart monkey came to be elected to the Panhandle County Commission.

​My first thoughts about purgatory were formed before my first stint as a Catholic convert. I was taking a juco course on the literary classics. As I recall, a middle-aged writer named Dante Allegretto laid everything out in poetry, which was very inspiring but was so hard to understand that we sophomores had to use a slim yellow and black booklet to get the general drift.
According to Mr. Allegretto and Mr. Cliff—or to be precise, according to my roommate’s notes, which were based on the writings of the abovementioned gentlemen—there are three parts to the afterlife: hell at the bottom, heaven at the top, and purgatory in between. After you died you were assigned to one of the three, depending on your behavior in real life. Hell, I believe, was for unrepentant rapists and thieves and hit men and other low life. Heaven was for saints and philosophers who went around doing good works and praying or thinking about God and repenting for their minor sins within a twenty-four-hour time frame. Purgatory was for people who were scared to death of hell, so they put in a good work here and there and repented of their sins when they got caught.
I’d forgotten about this theory when I converted to Catholicism. This was the semester after I’d taken the course on the classics. Anyway, I was Greek Orthodox at the time but was having a hard time breathing during services. Fortunately, I had a good doctor, who figured out that my problem was caused by the overdose of incense. My new roommate was also a great help. She pointed out that the closest religion to Greek Orthodoxy was Catholicism. They were practically identical, she said, except that they had gotten a divorce back in the dark ages, probably because of the incense problem.
So I started going to the Catholic Church with a new boyfriend. And sure enough, my breathing improved. My Latin was another story. But my beau said Forget the Latin, you don’t have to use it when you go to confession.
Confession? Yes, he said, Confession, and he explained it.
My next question: Can we do it together?
Answer: No. Why not? Those are the rules. But if we did the sin together, wouldn’t it be logical. . . . Catholicism is not based on logic, he interrupted.

​Having solved the dual problems of (1) the depletion of the ozone layer above Antarctica and (2) the increase in the smog level across Southern California, the MJTT has not been resting on its laurels, as our plan to secure lunar power shows. We now turn our efforts to a problem that has just recently caught the attention of the world’s leading scientists: the phenomenon of the sinking universe.
 
The last century witnessed a scientific debate over whether the universe is expanding or contracting, or perhaps taking turns doing both. The current and bleakest view, of course, has been that the rest of the universe is moving away from us at ever-increasing speeds, thus eventually depriving future generations of what the philosopher Immanuel Kant called “the starry skies above and the moral law within.” [There is some contention among scholars concerning the meaning of this epigram: did Kant mean to treat the stars and the moral law separately, or as inextricably intertwined? We at MJTT prefer the latter interpretation, and have assigned two of our best and brightest thinkers to make it irrefutable.]
 
Twenty-first-century cosmologists have recently had to consider the case of the sinking of ever-increasing portions of the State of Louisiana into the Gulf of Mexico. What, they have been forced to ask, is the implication of this phenomenon for the movement of the entire universe? For example, does Einstein’s majestic theory account for this event, which, on first glance, appears to bear implications only for a few thousand shrimp boat captains? Or are we as think tank specialists obliged to rethink the whole of 20th century physics?
 
MJTT has already sent half a dozen interns down to the bayous to learn pidgin Cajun in order to discuss this phenomenon with the locals. In the meantime, those of us who remain at our headquarters will devote ourselves to the study of this intriguing development in the behavior of the physical universe and its implications for the future of mankind, womankind, childrenkind, and their pets. While our interns are conducting empirical research, we will be making use of our extensive library and expensive toys, not to speak of the afternoon glasses of sherry that are the source of our scientific inspirations.

​What must I have been thinking? The topic of neurosis and neurotics was practically exhausted in my last blog. All that was required was a nice, neat aphorism to sum up the subject.
 
As we five settled into our chairs around our private table in the Hôtel Adios Watering Hole, Ab Ennis was suddenly surrounded by tourists, the majority of whom were seeking autographs while their significant others took pictures to show their friends, relatives, and passersby as proof that they had been seen in the company of a real dead presidential candidate.
 
The rest of us, including Talia la Musa, Myles na Gopaleen, Jr., the urn-bound remains of Orville Slack IV, and me, began to place our orders with a peripatetic young woman whom we assumed to be a barmaid.
 
“Sorry,” said Mr. Ennis to a man who could have passed for a stockbroker, “but I don’t sign checks.”
 
“I’ll have rotgut,” said Ms. Mews to the barmaid.
 
“This pen doesn’t work,” said Mr. Ennis to a young student not yet eligible to vote.
 
“I’ll have the same,” said Junior na Gopaleen.
 
“That’s better,” said the candidate, betraying no sign of pique.
 
“I’ll have what they’re having,” said what was left of Slack.
 
“I don’t sign petitions,” said the presumptive Dead Rights Party candidate for POTUS.
 
“Just a teaspoon,” reminded Slack.
 
“I charge for writing my last name,” said Ab.
 
“A small sarsaparilla,” I instructed the barmaid. “With a twist.”
 
“Sarsaparilla,” explained Myles, “is a rather sweet carbonated beverage that is flavored with birch oil and sassafras, a tall North American tree of the laurel family, the dry root bark of which is used as a flavoring agent.”
 
“I’d appreciate your vote,” said the candidate, extending his robotic paw in a show of an ability to identify with the common woman.
 
“He used to be a neurotic,” Talia explained to the common woman, adding, “He was cured by death.”
 
“Two hundred words to go,” I observed to no one in particular. “Less twelve. Now, make that less ten.”
 
“At this rate,” predicted Ms. Mews with me (Arthur Unknown) in her sights, “you’ll have your column finished in two minutes. Just keep talking.”
 
“Does every column have to be 500 words?” asked one or another of us.
 
“Not in your case,” I replied, with something akin to pique in my voice.
 
A celebrity entered the bar and headed toward the corner table, surrounded by a pair of body-builders disguised as bodyguards. The crowd of autograph-seekers flocked in their direction.
 
The living autograph-seekers were quickly replaced by a small multitude of dead spirits, who peppered Ab Ennis with questions concerning constitutional amendments, lawyers, and the political advantages accruing, respectively, to those who had yearned for the urn to those who had pined for the box.
 
“What were we talking about?” asked Myles na Gopaleen, Jr., purportedly the illegitimate son of M. Senior, as the barmaid came with the rotgut and sarsaparilla.
 
“Neurotics,” reminded Talia, who was named after the Greek muse of comedy.
 
“My point was going to be,” explained the Gopper to our resident muse, “that if you live long enough, you’ll be the last neurotic. My reasoning is simple. Neurosis is out. Pills are in. Unless you suddenly choose the pill route, etc. Do you get my point?”
 
“Long live Talia!” said the enthusiastic members of the Kachina Round Table, hoisting their drinks in unison.
 
“Did you get your 500?” asked Talia of me as she sipped her rotgut.
 
“Yup.”
 

​At the most recent meeting of the Kachina Round Table, which was attended by all our columnists, Ms. Talia la Musa mentioned that lately she had been feeling more neurotic than usual.
 
This offhanded remark led to a lengthy group discussion of neurosis. Mr. Myles na Gopaleen Jr. started by treating us to a lengthy disquisition on the history of the term, which, it turns out, was first used by an obscure Scotch physician, William Cullen, in 1777 but had been given its canonical meaning by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), who took pains to differentiate it from psychosis, a mental condition in which the sufferer has lost the proper sense of reality, etc., etc.
 
“I didn’t say I was nuts,” interrupted Ms. la Musa as Mr. na Gopaleen paused to catch his breath.
 
“When inhabiting an urn,” Mr. Ab Ennis explained, “you’re pretty much all ash. We don’t have that problem.” (This last while turning his head to observe what was left of the former Mr. Orville Slack IV, who is pretty much all ash, too, and has been outfitted with the robotic apparatus that would allow him to move about in a humanoid fashion, perhaps even allow him, when properly attired, as is Mr. Ennis, to run for the second highest office in the land.)
 
“Exactly!” replied Mr. na Gopaleen. “Upon incineration, known also to the undiscerning as cremation, the nerves have been destroyed—a situation that prevents even the slightest symptoms of what was formerly known as neurosis, in the Freudian and, indeed, the post-Freudian, world of thought.”
 
“Burnt to a crisp,” observed Mr. Ennis.
 
“Which allows you to run for president without a helluva lot of baggage,” observed Mr. Slack IV facetiously.
 
“I’m too young to die,” inserted Ms. Mews, age 62. “I figure I’ve got maybe 30 years left, if I play my cards right.”
 
“My point,” replied Mr. na Gopaleen, who is known as Gop behind his back, and he cleared his throat in preparation for the body of his oncoming lecture, “My point is that so-called ‘neurosis’ is no longer a condition to which flesh is heir. Psychotherapy,” he continued, “is a dying art. It has been replaced by medicine. The implication of this profound change is that the word ‘neurosis’ and its cognates are swiftly disappearing from the common lexicon.”
 
He looked around at the robots and living persons that were gathered about the Round Table of the Hôtel Adobe.
 
“I predict,” he said, casting his eye on Ms. la Musa, “that should you continue living for the additional three decades for which you are planning, then [triumphantly] you will be the last neurotic!”
 
And so, his oration suddenly and unexpectedly at an end, he lifted the mug of stout before him and raised it [Ed. note: other authorities say “lifted it.”] to his loquacious lips. “Good God!” muttered Thalia Mews from the left side of her mouth.
 
“I used to be a neurotic,” offered Ab Ennis, hopeful candidate for president under the banner of the Dead Rights Party.
 
“That was pre-ash,” wisely observed Orville Slack IV, who knew whereof he spoke.
 
“Let’s take a break,” I suggested.
 
And we did.

​Red Riding Hood

(Recall that before Mr. Ab Ennis stood for president on the Dead Rights Ticket, he was the cultural critic of the Kachina Round Table. Here is an example of his book reviews.)
​
This story, courtesy of Jakob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859) Grimm, has many traits to commend it. It is short, has a protagonist (Red Riding Hood, sometimes prefixed by the qualifier “Little”) and an antagonist (a wicked wolf) as well as a hero (the brave, quick-thinking hunter), and delivers a moral for the benefit of the children to whom it is read.
 
Yet it is flawed. I have nothing against fairy tales. I don’t fault it for giving a speaking part to a wolf. Nor do I condemn the practice of drawing the world as a battle between goodness and innocence, on the one hand, and cunning and evil, on the other.
 
How, then, does this beloved story fail? There is, of course, the minor matter of the dietary theory that lies behind the tale. Recall the reason Red Riding Hood is sent by the mother to the grandmother’s house: the latter is weak and ill, and a cake and a bottle of wine will be just the ticket for restoring the old woman to full health. (This in the original version; later editors, spotting this flaw, sent the girl with a picnic basketful of what we would assume would be a more congenial collection of foodstuffs.)
 
Cake and wine? To restore a sickly woman to health? What were those Grimm boys thinking! I won’t quibble by saying that the mother should have included the grandmother’s medications in the package; that would be a historical anomaly. But even in that day, it was well-known, even to the peasant population, that steak beats cake in the daily diet department, and that brandy’s restorative properties are clearly superior to those of wine.
 
The mother is also blameworthy in another respect. She sends a small girl to do the work that should have been hers. Why? We are not told. Certainly there is a touching bond between Red Riding Hood and the grandmother, as the authors explain early in the story. It was, after all, the old woman who made the cloak whose properties provided the name of the girl. But what’s the relation between the old woman and the mother? One wonders. Why does she allow a frail, elderly woman to live alone, half an hour from the village in which her beloved granddaughter resides? In the modern world, of course, sending an aging parent to an assisted living facility is socially acceptable. In the time of the brothers Grimm, however, the sandwich generation solved the problem by keeping their ill parents in their own home. To do otherwise would incur the wrath of the community.
 
One also wonders why the mother gives specific instructions to the daughter of the red cloak to avoid either loitering or running on the way to grandmother’s house. Doesn’t she know that any kid with a healthy imagination will do exactly the opposite of what she’s told?
 
The moral of the story, as it stands in the first edition, is that the young listener should obey the orders of the parent. This, at least, is how the story ends: Red Riding Hood learns the lesson that if she dallies in the woods picking flowers when she ought to be skipping off to grandmother’s house, she’ll be eaten by a wolf.
 
One further wonders whether Little Girl Scout wouldn’t have better concluded that the only mistake she made was not knowing that wolves are a dangerous species.
 
In spite of these faults, one must applaud these authors for avoiding the cliché ending in which the young woman runs off with the brave, handsome prince who was wandering the woods disguised as a hunter.

Orville Slack IV: My Sex Life

[Ed. note: Recall that Orville Slack IV is running for VPOTUS on the Dead Rights Ticket. Here he comes clean on the most intimate of matters.]
​
Of the many letters I have received since my death upwards of eleven moons ago, the majority have shown an unhealthy preoccupation with my sex life.
Though I consider this curiosity an especially acute form of perversion, I am also aware of my responsibilities to the many admirers who have taken the time to write me. They are, after all, my fans. Being an American icon, I feel compelled to answer their most frequently asked questions.
Q. Is there sex after death?
A. For most dead persons, no. For Protestants, no. For practicing Mormons, very probably. For Catholics who have chosen the purgatory route, definitely. For Islamist terrorists, the opinions are mixed. For voting members of the Dead Rights Party, it depends. On what? you ask. On whether your urn has been outfitted by the robotic device designed and manufactured by Myles na Gopaleen, Jr. and Associates, a.k.a. the Myles Junior Think Tank (MJTT), and whether you have purchased the Luxury Edition, which includes all the right sex organs. The $25,000 basic robot comes with a 36 month, 36,000 miles warranty. The Luxury Edition, which will run you $100,000, is warranted for 10 years or 10,000 orgasms, whichever comes first.
Q. Are you now, or have you ever been, married?
A. When I was alive, a woman back in Panhandle County proposed to me daily. Her name doesn’t come to mind. I wish I could say the same for her face and figure. Face like a chimp. Jugs like an unmilked Holstein. And no, I’m not presently married. Incidentally, I took the Luxury Edition option and am presently assembling a small harem, consisting of a mix of similarly-outfitted women and living ladies in the eighteen-to-sixty-four-year age range. For more information, you can usually find me at the Hôtel Adios Watering Hole or the vicinity. Ask for Orville . . . Oh yes. The woman’s name was Florence. Owned and operated the only bar and grill in town. Proposed to every male patron who walked through the swinging doors. Her father died before she was born—at least that was the general theory. It would explain the need. I don’t imagine there was that much of a lust factor. She must’ve been, oh, in her eighties.
Q. When you were alive, did you have any extra-marital affairs?
A. I wasn’t married, so No.
Q. What about the ladies? Did you fool around with any married ones?
A. I tended to keep away from that type. Lots of jealous husbands, and bear in mind that this was back in Panhandle County, where a cuckold’s best friend is his 12-gauge shotgun. So I specialized in widows. They tend to be grateful. I picked up this insight from Ben Franklin, the guy who invented electricity. Lived half his life in Pennsylvania, the other half in Paris. Paris was probably where he got his theory about grateful widows. Never been to Paris myself. Wonder if they’ve got a branch of the Dead Rights Party? I’m thinking of course of an auxiliary branch. Motto: American Voting Rights for dead Frenchwomen and their deceased English-speaking parrots over the age of etcetera.
So there you have it. My sex life.
Now, get out the vote! And you might also want to vote yourself.

​We at MJTT have temporarily turned away from our theoretical work and have been working on a more practical matter: a rear bumper on which is attached a streaming marquee.
 
The need for such a device became obvious to me while motoring on the local interstate. I observed that well over 84 percent of the vehicles on the road sported bumper stickers advertising their owners’ political and/or religious views, announcing their child’s academic achievements, or displaying a clever jest. Of these vehicles, approximately 91 percent exhibited two or more such stickers.
 
Given the speed at which the ordinary interstate vehicle travels, a high percentage (roughly 95 percent) of these brief missives are difficult to read. The exception, of course, is rush hour traffic, during which the poor motorist who is stuck behind a sticker-laden bumper must suffer the boredom of reading the same damn messages over and over again.
 
The solution to both circumstances came to me as a bolt from the blue similar, I surmise, to that which struck Isaac Newton, Madame Curie, Albert Einstein, and others of our ilk. Why not invent a bumper equipped with a large, legible streaming marquee capable of exhibiting an unlimited number of messages?
 
Such a marquee could be preprogrammed by the vehicle’s owner. It could also be programmed on the run on a smart phone for the odd occasion. (I am thinking of the many instances in which I have come across a car with a wobbly rear tire, a situation that has incited me to pass it, honking and pointing to the dangerous wheel, an act that often as not has caused the driver to respond by flashing an obscene gesture.) Our invention would eliminate that inferior mode of communication. The discerning driver would simply type a short message—YOUR LEFT REAR TIRE IS WOBBLING—and proceed to pass the offending vehicle, then moving adeptly into the proper lane.
 
Granted, not all messages would be so magnanimous and humanitarian. I can envision a Volvo driving along advertising the fact, MY SON IS WORKING ON A PH.D IN SELF-ASSEMBLING MONOLAYERS AT CAL TECH, followed by a Hummer whose driver is furiously programming in the information, MY SUN IS MIDLE LINEBACH ER FOR USC & CAN BRAKE EVERY BONE IN YOU’RE SUNS BODDY.
 
But I have a firm faith in the essential goodness of humanity. I believe that 54 percent of the drivers on the road would use this invention for positive purposes.
 
Patent pending.