Oscar Night — we are encamped just outside the Black Gate to Celebrity Village. The ten-storey doors rumble open just enough to release a floating disembodied mouth.
ENTHUSIASTIC KID: Hey! Let’s eat some of this dirt from Mars!
Tolerance ranges vary from deployment to deployment, based on extant arousal levels on the four major indices (fear, anxiety, desire, other).
The barker— a pallid, ectomorphic Jesus in a candy-striped vaudeville suit— stands atop a raised entry platform, swinging his cane and making tricks with his straw hat. He lets a little kid pull a chunk out of his beard; its patchiness suggests he’s been letting children do that for some time.
My most beloved word-babies.
A: Our profession does not lend itself to the conversational arts.
B: At least of the vocal or linguistic variety.
A: Our methods of communication tend to be… non-verbal.
B: Direct. Sometimes brutally so.
A serial entertainment.
One man’s quest to find a mystical land, and the injuries he incurs while he searches.
‘So we will have to be careful, like spies,’ said my brother. I nodded vigorously – for what young boy does not entertain dreams of being a skilled intelligencer, pursuing secretive duties for crown and country, reliant on wits and nerve alone while plunged deep within enemy terrain?
Chosen solely by math.
Why are you here?
I hear you chuckle, and am fractionally gratified by it. You have heard me start off this address by hacking up a tired old philosophical joke, kicking off this inspirational oration with a twist of a Great Question (capitalized).