New- AND old-fashioned nervous breakdowns!

"Oh, my God!  Oh, my God!  Oh, my God!  Oh, my God!"

"Settle down!  Keep a lid on it until we are out to sea!"

Angela de la Paz and Dulles Samuelson heard the commotion, climbed up to the deck of their houseboat, and saw several Members of Congress scurrying onto and around the Molotov Cocktail, berthed next to them.

"I can't get the rope off!" wailed Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, winding the mooring rope tighter instead of unwinding it.  "We've been sabotaged by Robert Mueller!"

"Get a grip, Dana!" shouted Congressman Devin Nunes, shoving the California Representative aside.  "Lefty loosy, righty tighty!"

"Are they trying to flee the country?" whispered Angela de la Paz.  "Maybe you should call your boss at the FBI?"

"If those scumbags flee the country, that's a victory for America!" he laughed.

"Sh!" she elbowed him.  (They heard the engine start and saw Congressman Paul Ryan pulling a skipper hat lower against the bright sunshine in his eyes.)  "Maybe I should call Golden Fawn?  Her husband's in the Coast Guard."

"That's all we need!" replied FBI agent Dulles.  "Accusations that the 'Deep State' is harassing Republicans on their Saturday afternoon boat ride!"

"Where's the Exxon attorney?" wailed Rep. Rohrabacher.  "I thought they were supporting us!  I'm innocent!  Everybody's talking about my Moscow trip like it was evil!"

"We have a God-given right to pursue happiness wherever it might be," said Texas Representative Zeke "Slick" Hicks, leader of the secret Russia Caucus.  "That's right there in the Constitution!" 

"Isn't that in the Declaration of Independence?" whispered Angela.

Congressman Hicks sat down, lit a cigar and told the Speaker of the House they were ready to embark.  Congressman Rohrabacher was trying to strap his life vest on while vomiting over the side.

"Oh, get a grip!" cried Congressman Nunes.  "I'm sure Wikileaks will help us out again soon!  The uranium and the dossier are just the tip of the iceberg with Hillary:  lock her up!"

Angela and Dulles then saw a head peak out of the Molotov Cocktail hold, bark at everybody to shut up, then duck back in.  "Ah, there's the ensconced attorney," said Dulles.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the river, a new resident had arrived at the Arlington group home for the mentally challenged.

"This is Anne Marie," said psychologist Leo Schwartz, gesturing to a middle-aged woman wringing her hands after 36 hours in a hospital psychiatric ward.

"I know you!" cried Buckner.  "You work at Walmart!" (The woman shook her head.)

"At the ice cream store!" declared Melinda.  (Anne Marie again shook her head.)

"Anne Marie would prefer not to talk about where she works.  But ice cream sounds like an excellent idea!  Why don't you all show her around the kitchen, and you can all have some ice cream.  He watched as Theresa put her arm around Anne Marie's waist and steered her towards the kitchen.

"What is her story?" asked social worker Hue Nguyen, as they walked into her office and partially shut the door.

"Twenty years as a White House secretary until a nervous breakdown this week," said the psychologist as they sat down.  "Secret Service had to remove her and put her in an ambulance to the hospital."

"She attacked the President?!" asked Hue.

Leo shook his head.  "No, she curled up in a fetal position under her desk and wouldn't come out.  Said only Satan himself would hand out Halloween candy and comment on whether a child was fat or not."

"That's what broke her in the Trump White House?!" Hue exclaimed.

"The straw that broke the camel's back, I assume," replied Leo, handing the social worker the thin case file.  "Not much in there.  She was sedated in the ambulance, woke up calm in the hospital, talked lucidly during her psychiatric evaluation, but said she did not want to go home to her house in [air quotes] 'Trump Country'.  Her husband was livid, but she refused to let him take her back to their house in Loudoun County.  She agreed to take a bed here while waiting to see if she can go live with her married daughter in Charlotte.

Hue was silent as she read through the file, then looked up.  "No certain diagnosis?"

"Might be a real old-fashioned nervous breakdown," replied Leo.  "Rest and a break from old routines might be all she needs.  She has a mild sleeping pill and no other meds for now.  I'll stay for the remainder of the day to observe her, if you want to take a break, and I'll come back tomorrow."

The two walked out to listen in on the ice cream party now underway in the dining room.

"Leo is the best Jew you'll ever meet!" said Larry.  "I don't know where Hue is from, but she's awesome."

"We don't have any Nazis here!" exclaimed Melinda.  "You'll like it!"

"The President could have the best ice cream in the world, right?" asked Buckner.  "Not this cheap store brand?  Hue is Vietnamese."

"She's American!" retorted Melinda.

"Is Trump nuts?" asked Larry.  "This is our helping dog, Millie."

"Trump has the nuts which are straw huts in his brain on the train!" exclaimed Freddy Ritchings (AKA Brother Divine of the International Peace Movement, and host of the Church of Twitter).  "I do not see a Nazi in our house, just a mouse!  Ice cream is the dream for the team which believes in fall leaves and grieves what's up the White House sleeves.  Millie is not silly, and this dog will lift your fog!"

"Is it a magic dog?" cried Anne Marie. 

The psychologist and social worker exchanged a glance; then Leo shrugged.  "A desire for magic help might be a rational response to working in the Trump White House."

"I think somebody cast an evil magic spell over Trump," continued Anne Marie.  (Leo and Hue exchanged another glance.)  "I think it's those evangelicals that keep praying over him!  They don't say anything I ever heard in church!  What if they're wolves in sheep's clothing?"

"Honey, they don't even bother having sheep's clothing!" exclaimed Melinda.

"And the ghosts!" added Anne Marie.  (The psychologist and social worker exchanged another glance.)  "Barron has imaginary friends, but Melania says they are ghosts and should just be ignored, but Barron is talking to them constantly whenever he walks around, and he has this dead look in his eyes."

"Ooh!" cried Theresa.  "Is he possessed?"

"I don't know!" exclaimed Anne Marie.  "Maybe I imagined everything, and I'm the crazy one, and it's normal to Tweet about football players and watch television instead of reading reports.  And why do they want to kill Hillary?  Is that normal?  That doesn't seem normal to me!  And Ivanka is like a Stepford wife!  She scares me so much!  I feel like she could slit her own children's throats and still have that phony plastic lipstick smile on her face while she talks about women's empowerment!  And she's always yelling at the cleaning staff that they're not vacuuming enough, and there's dust everywhere.  Why is she even in the White House?  I've been there twenty years!  I've typed up and filed these memos for twenty years, and I know a lot about public policy, but Ivanka keeps a giant make-up bag and hairstyling bag in the ladies room!  Nothing makes sense to me anymore!"

Just then Cedric bolted out of the dining room with his teddy bear Aloysius gripped tightly, then pulled up short in front of Leo and Hue.  "No, no, no!" he whispered.  "The Secret Service will get revenge for this!  We're all in danger!"

"Calm down, Cedric," said the psychologist, putting his hands on both of Cedric's shoulders.  "She's just venting about her workplace:  I haven't heard any state secrets."

"Don't you understand?!" cried the former CIA agent (who sometimes got confused and thought he was a British agent).  "It's all in code!  Aloysius taught me the code years ago!  It's very, very bad!  Now Ghost Henry is going to return!"  Cedric did not wait for a reply, but ran upstairs to his bedroom. 

"I'll ask the psychiatric review board to take another look at Cedric's meds," said Leo.  "But you should take a break!  I'll stay a few hours and write notes on Anne Marie's interactions with the other residents."

"Are you kidding?!" exclaimed Hue, turning her attention back to the conversation around the corner.  "I want to hear more stories from the White House!"

"Trump is afraid of staplers and paper clips," continued Anne Marie.  "He banned them from the Oval Office!  All papers have to be in color-coded folders:  blue is for information bashing democrats, pink is for information bashing Hillary Clinton, red is for Russia, green is for budget items, and manila is for everything else.  But he won't read the papers anyway!  At first he would reject anything with staples or paper clips, but now that he has the folders, he just pretends to read the papers:  he's really just reading a couple sentences at the top and a couple sentences at the bottom.  If the National Security Adviser insists he needs to read more of it, Trump pretends there's a spider in the folder and throws it off the desk, spilling the papers all over the floor!  Then he orders the Secret Service to kill the spiders, and asks the National Security Adviser to just tell him what's in the folder!  We hear everything because he punched a hole in the wall months ago when Robert Mueller was named as a Special Prosecutor, but never asked for it to be fixed--he just taped a magazine cover with his face over that hole." 

Back at the dock, Angela de la Paz was sitting on the deck of Singapore Surprise, feeling the last hour of sunshine before the clouds rolled in.  She slowly came out of the Dreamtime and smiled at Dulles Samuelson, who was sipping a beer while working on their Halloween costumes for the party being thrown tonight by her employer, Charles Wu.

"Your father hitched a ride on the Molotov Cocktail," she said, noting the involuntary shiver Dulles experienced every time she brought up the ghost of former CIA agent Henry Samuelson.  "He's never going to stop trying to control everything."

"Which would be fine if he had been good at it to start with," replied Dulles, ruefully, before abruptly changing topic.  "Hey, do you think if North Korea launches a nuclear weapon at us, you'll get a vision to warn us?"

Angela pondered this for a minute.  "I think my visions are for unseen dangers and things I can stop.  I'm not sure either of those apply."

"But you did a lot when you were in the Middle East, right?" insisted Dulles.

"I killed people," she said, looking at the horizon.  "I killed men who were hurting women.  I killed the man who killed the father of my baby.  But killing...causes more problems than it solves, I think."  And the woman once known in Egypt as a mythologically fierce she-beast got up, kissed Dulles, said she was getting cold, and headed inside.

Over at the Department of Justice, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein sat stone-faced as Attorney General Jeff Sessions berated and interrogated him about Special Counsel Robert Mueller's sealed indictments.

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COMING UP:    Mad dogs and Englishmen!