A legend in his own mind, a hero in his own heart!
A lot of people were upset about the Brexit vote, but not Cedric, a resident of the Arlington Group Home for the Mentally Challenged. "Rule, Brittania!" he had been exclaiming repeatedly for weeks. Despite several heated conversations about it with the ghost of deceased CIA officer Henry Samuelson, Cedric was so certain that (despite the lack of slavery-powered colonies which had previously built the Empire) Britain was again taking its rightful place as an independent Superpower, he had regressed to again believing he was a British spy. He had sneaked out to ride a bus, Metro train, and another bus to arrive at the door of Charles Wu's Cleveland Park house and make another rescue attempt on behalf of Cordelia Buffy's English nanny, Mrs. Prudence Higgety-Cheshire.
"Oh, bother!" cried the nanny when she saw Cedric enter the backyard. Mrs. H-C was wearing a matronly swimsuit, sitting in a most undignified manner in the kiddie pool, and aiming the hose at little Delia and Delia's visiting friend while they dashed about the yard giggling. "You can't just show up here unannounced!"
"Well, you never take my phone calls!" Cedric protested, sitting down on a patio chair and wiping a handkerchief across his sweaty brow.
"How many times must I tell you that I am not interested in your well-intended advances!" She stopped shooting the hose as the two young girls ran over to examine Cedric and the stuffed bear he had placed on the seat beside him.
"That's Aloysius," said Cedric, and the girls giggled. "He doesn't like being laughed at!"
"Cedric, they're four years old! They giggle fourteen hours a day."
"My name is--" began Delia's friend.
"Don't tell him your name!" interrupted the nanny. She was fairly certain Cedric was harmless, but there was no need to throw precaution to the wind. "He likes to play a game of trying to guess your name."
Cedric did not like children at all, and barked at them to leave him alone, whereupon Charles Wu emerged from the house with a drugged bottle of cold beer to offer the annoying former member of the Heurich Society. (Charles would call one of his Pakistani taxi driver contacts to take him away later.)
"Thank you, Charles!" Cedric said, suddenly forgetting he was supposed to be rescuing Prudence from this dangerous spy (who had done something now completely slipping Cedric's mind).
Charles sent the girls inside with the nanny to eat lunch, and sat down to tell Cedric he had switched sides.
Down at the White House, Ghost Dennis was arguing with members of the Shackled about the outcome of the summit on police and race relations.
"I told President Obama it would lead to nothing, and it hasn't!" said Ghost Dennis.
The Shackled disagreed. They had been around for centuries, and argued that progress was slow but definitely happening.
"This country is descending into madness!" exclaimed Ghost Dennis. "He can't keep doing the same things and expecting different results."
"It's not like before," said a member of the Shackled. "Africans were lynched with impunity. Now there is accountability."
"It's just a dog and pony show, and then the cops always get acquitted," protested Ghost Dennis. "Can't you see the President needs to shift course? If only he would sit still long enough to hear my five-point proposal. He always brushes me away like a fly!"
Over on Capitol Hill, Congressman Herrmark was holding a meeting of the Bicameral Anti-Zombie Caucus. "Are they zombies?" was the question on everybody's lips, but nobody was really certain whether the names touted as Vice-Presidential candidates were undead or not.
"They are probably safe for now," said Herrmark's Chief of Staff, Ann Bishis, who was passing around a plate of lemon squares and a stack of memos outlining Herrmark's plan to monitor Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates for signs of brain rot. "You really can't beat Secret Service protection."
"We still believe that the zombie pandemic has been contained to the legislative branch," added Herrmark, "but, of course, we take nothing for granted. Personally, I think Trump is probably immune--I don't think any zombie would find his brains palatable enough to eat. We do need watch the others." Herrmark knew that what he was doing was more important for democracy than anything a Vice-President could do, and so did not feel the sting of envy so many other politicians were experiencing right now.
Over at the FBI headquarters, self-professed autistic shaman "John Doe" was again being interviewed about blog posts he had recently written, predicting a police massacre in Texas, a killer bus in France, and a bloody Ottoman insurrection. "That's not my name," the total amnesiac said, again refusing to acknowledge incontrovertible proof of his identity. The FBI had verified the massive gang-related brain trauma which had caused the insomnia and temporal lobe epilepsy, but he was definitely not autistic. But who could have such accurate visions? He made everybody nervous. "They just come to me," John said, again. "Ghost Henry's been trying for a long time to force them, because he says my visions always come too late to be of any use." (The FBI was still trying to confirm whether a "Henry Samuelson" ever worked for the CIA; the interrogators never discussed whether they believed he was currently a ghost or not.) "And I think he's right. I post my visions in my blog, but I can never get wide readership. I tried doing YouTube videos. CNN and Fox are always interviewing so-called experts who make predictions that never come true, but mine do! It would be nice if somebody put me on TV to warn people! I mean, I don't care about the money, because I'm a shaman, of course." (All his bills were paid by the relatives he refused to acknowledge were actually his.)
"Tell us about the driver of the bus in Nice," the lead investigator said doggedly, pointing to a photo. "When did you first learn about him?"
"I told you," he repeated. "I fell down in a fit and saw the fiery truck. I never saw him." He had waited until the cup of decaf coffee had cooled down, and started drinking it now, but he had mistakenly received the real stuff. "A prophet is never welcome in his own time, they say. But then, what's the point of being a prophet?" (The lead investigator sighed; it was like this every time.) "I struggle with that sometime. I wrote an essay about it once for Reader's Digest, but they never printed it."
"You must have seen the driver!"
"I don't know anything about the driver!" With that, the caffeine hit John's nervous system like an electric shock, and he went into an epileptic trance that nobody could snap him out of for ten minutes. When he came to, the first thing he said was, "The dogs, too?"
Down in Southwest, conspiracy theorist Glenn Michael Beckmann's nervous system was having an overload of its own. Beckmann had failed to assassinate Donald Trump before he got Secret Service protection, failed to fly to Alaska to make a paternity claim on his love child with Bristol Palin (how could they put a patriot like him on the No-Fly List?!), failed to get Sarah Palin arrested for assassinating Antonin Scalia, failed to discover Darja's killer, and failed to formulate a plan to protect America's police forces from retaliation. He took a deep toke of reefer and closed his eyes to recall past glories when he was serving in Iraq [in his imagination], killing illegal aliens and terrorists [partially true], planting bombs against ___ [can't remember, but they deserved it!], invading Cuba [not even close], and leading the Hunter-Gatherer Society in its successful eradication of germ warfare [not] monkeys [only one] from Kingman Island. "I will rise again!" he cried to the mouse scurrying across the floor, and picked up a book on Attila the Hun to throw at it. And then the mouse reminded him of vermin in general, and he realized what he needed to do next.
The mouse ran out to the open balcony, where it was quickly attacked by the feline ghost pack run by Condoleezza's deceased pet, Pippin, and plunged to its death on the sidewalk below.
**************************************************************
COMING UP: Some surprising secret plans!
"Oh, bother!" cried the nanny when she saw Cedric enter the backyard. Mrs. H-C was wearing a matronly swimsuit, sitting in a most undignified manner in the kiddie pool, and aiming the hose at little Delia and Delia's visiting friend while they dashed about the yard giggling. "You can't just show up here unannounced!"
"Well, you never take my phone calls!" Cedric protested, sitting down on a patio chair and wiping a handkerchief across his sweaty brow.
"How many times must I tell you that I am not interested in your well-intended advances!" She stopped shooting the hose as the two young girls ran over to examine Cedric and the stuffed bear he had placed on the seat beside him.
"That's Aloysius," said Cedric, and the girls giggled. "He doesn't like being laughed at!"
"Cedric, they're four years old! They giggle fourteen hours a day."
"My name is--" began Delia's friend.
"Don't tell him your name!" interrupted the nanny. She was fairly certain Cedric was harmless, but there was no need to throw precaution to the wind. "He likes to play a game of trying to guess your name."
Cedric did not like children at all, and barked at them to leave him alone, whereupon Charles Wu emerged from the house with a drugged bottle of cold beer to offer the annoying former member of the Heurich Society. (Charles would call one of his Pakistani taxi driver contacts to take him away later.)
"Thank you, Charles!" Cedric said, suddenly forgetting he was supposed to be rescuing Prudence from this dangerous spy (who had done something now completely slipping Cedric's mind).
Charles sent the girls inside with the nanny to eat lunch, and sat down to tell Cedric he had switched sides.
Down at the White House, Ghost Dennis was arguing with members of the Shackled about the outcome of the summit on police and race relations.
"I told President Obama it would lead to nothing, and it hasn't!" said Ghost Dennis.
The Shackled disagreed. They had been around for centuries, and argued that progress was slow but definitely happening.
"This country is descending into madness!" exclaimed Ghost Dennis. "He can't keep doing the same things and expecting different results."
"It's not like before," said a member of the Shackled. "Africans were lynched with impunity. Now there is accountability."
"It's just a dog and pony show, and then the cops always get acquitted," protested Ghost Dennis. "Can't you see the President needs to shift course? If only he would sit still long enough to hear my five-point proposal. He always brushes me away like a fly!"
Over on Capitol Hill, Congressman Herrmark was holding a meeting of the Bicameral Anti-Zombie Caucus. "Are they zombies?" was the question on everybody's lips, but nobody was really certain whether the names touted as Vice-Presidential candidates were undead or not.
"They are probably safe for now," said Herrmark's Chief of Staff, Ann Bishis, who was passing around a plate of lemon squares and a stack of memos outlining Herrmark's plan to monitor Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates for signs of brain rot. "You really can't beat Secret Service protection."
"We still believe that the zombie pandemic has been contained to the legislative branch," added Herrmark, "but, of course, we take nothing for granted. Personally, I think Trump is probably immune--I don't think any zombie would find his brains palatable enough to eat. We do need watch the others." Herrmark knew that what he was doing was more important for democracy than anything a Vice-President could do, and so did not feel the sting of envy so many other politicians were experiencing right now.
Over at the FBI headquarters, self-professed autistic shaman "John Doe" was again being interviewed about blog posts he had recently written, predicting a police massacre in Texas, a killer bus in France, and a bloody Ottoman insurrection. "That's not my name," the total amnesiac said, again refusing to acknowledge incontrovertible proof of his identity. The FBI had verified the massive gang-related brain trauma which had caused the insomnia and temporal lobe epilepsy, but he was definitely not autistic. But who could have such accurate visions? He made everybody nervous. "They just come to me," John said, again. "Ghost Henry's been trying for a long time to force them, because he says my visions always come too late to be of any use." (The FBI was still trying to confirm whether a "Henry Samuelson" ever worked for the CIA; the interrogators never discussed whether they believed he was currently a ghost or not.) "And I think he's right. I post my visions in my blog, but I can never get wide readership. I tried doing YouTube videos. CNN and Fox are always interviewing so-called experts who make predictions that never come true, but mine do! It would be nice if somebody put me on TV to warn people! I mean, I don't care about the money, because I'm a shaman, of course." (All his bills were paid by the relatives he refused to acknowledge were actually his.)
"Tell us about the driver of the bus in Nice," the lead investigator said doggedly, pointing to a photo. "When did you first learn about him?"
"I told you," he repeated. "I fell down in a fit and saw the fiery truck. I never saw him." He had waited until the cup of decaf coffee had cooled down, and started drinking it now, but he had mistakenly received the real stuff. "A prophet is never welcome in his own time, they say. But then, what's the point of being a prophet?" (The lead investigator sighed; it was like this every time.) "I struggle with that sometime. I wrote an essay about it once for Reader's Digest, but they never printed it."
"You must have seen the driver!"
"I don't know anything about the driver!" With that, the caffeine hit John's nervous system like an electric shock, and he went into an epileptic trance that nobody could snap him out of for ten minutes. When he came to, the first thing he said was, "The dogs, too?"
Down in Southwest, conspiracy theorist Glenn Michael Beckmann's nervous system was having an overload of its own. Beckmann had failed to assassinate Donald Trump before he got Secret Service protection, failed to fly to Alaska to make a paternity claim on his love child with Bristol Palin (how could they put a patriot like him on the No-Fly List?!), failed to get Sarah Palin arrested for assassinating Antonin Scalia, failed to discover Darja's killer, and failed to formulate a plan to protect America's police forces from retaliation. He took a deep toke of reefer and closed his eyes to recall past glories when he was serving in Iraq [in his imagination], killing illegal aliens and terrorists [partially true], planting bombs against ___ [can't remember, but they deserved it!], invading Cuba [not even close], and leading the Hunter-Gatherer Society in its successful eradication of germ warfare [not] monkeys [only one] from Kingman Island. "I will rise again!" he cried to the mouse scurrying across the floor, and picked up a book on Attila the Hun to throw at it. And then the mouse reminded him of vermin in general, and he realized what he needed to do next.
The mouse ran out to the open balcony, where it was quickly attacked by the feline ghost pack run by Condoleezza's deceased pet, Pippin, and plunged to its death on the sidewalk below.
**************************************************************
COMING UP: Some surprising secret plans!
posted by washingtonwaterwoman | 2:17 PM
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