Da Rules

It was the first of May, a fine day. I was walking, alone as usual, in the quad, smoking a pipe and contemplating the degredation of Western society. "How degraded it has become," I thought, furrowing my brow.

Ahead of me I saw my aquaintance, Zane, walking, or rather bobbing along, practically on his tippy toes. On his head was a grey fedora, of all things. From beneath his ridiculous hat his more ridiculous feathery blonde hair flapped in time to his strides. "Would that he walked faster," I thought to myself, "then perhaps his head might fly off his body."

He had recently published his memoirs and had related some rather salacious and demonstrably untrue anecdotes about my sexual habits. He was wearing a red shirt with some sort of black smudge on the front.

"Greetings comrade McClellan!" he said cheerily.

"Awww what the hell is this shit!" I exclaimed, as I realized that the black smudge was in fact the visage of none other than Che Guevara, the Butcher of Cabaña.

"You don't like it?" he asked, knowing damn well that I am a rabid distributist and that I take no truck with socialist fellow-travelers. "It is totally in keeping with your silliness and false sense of 'injustice' that you would wear such a blasphemous and obscene..." I began my monologue.

"Hey hey hey," he said, soothingly. "Take it easy. I'm just wearing it cause I like the design. It's just a style thing."

I snorted suspiciously. Come the revolution, we would doubtless find ourselves at opposite ends of a rifle, and I at the wrong end!

"How goes refighting the religious wars of the sixteenth century?" he asked me.

He smiled at, or, through me. One eye seemed to drift slowly to the side. His amblyotic stare reminded me of the young man who used to take my orders at Taco Bell. "Take whose order," I would often say to him, "Mine? Or the man behind me?!"

"Why, you seem positively joyful, my comrade, what happened? Was a banker murdered by his own tellers? Did a church burn down? Do tell," I offered as riposte. "You seem in a hurry, do you have a meeting of the Society for the Total Degradation of Society to attend?"

He looked up at the trees. He seemed not to have heard my hilarious quip, so I began again, "Don't you have a meeting of the..."

He stopped me with his stare. Again that eye. It seemed to be searching me for signs of weakness. He said, "I think you need to get laid, and if you want, I can teach you how. Its pretty easy if you follow the rules."

Really? I thought to myself. It certainly seems diffi... Wait, NO! "Rules for getting laid, what about rules for society, rules for, you know, morality!?" I had made my stand for the Law.

"I feel bad for you," he said. Bad for me? "You seem kinda stuck in the past, and what's worse, it's not even your own past. I know you don't like me, but I really think I can help you. One big night out with a chick would probably do you well."

Again the stare, and again the drifting eye. His knees bent and straightened lazily, he leaned slightly to one side, then the other... was he stretching?

I had had enough. "Strut away, now, my commie friend, in an imitation of Buddy Holliday or Nick Jagger, or whoever your pop icon du juor might be."

"Mick."

"Excuse me?" I was flabbergasted.

"MICK," he said more forcefully.

I was unaware that the Irish race was still a target for slurs. I gave him a hard glare and fixed my face into an expression that I hoped would communicate to him, even through his post-modern distraction, how I loathed all that he represented.

He shifted his feet as my disdain blazed forth from my eyebrows, his lips in a semi-pout. He let loose a funny choked laugh, "Ffhn... Well, seriously, if you want help in the chick department, just email me, zane77 at hotmail."

I swiftly committed it to memory... zane, hotmail, easy, '77, the year my wife died, also easy enough.

As he walked away I began writing a letter in my mind, crafting the phrases, hoping that my blazing disdain for his degredated societal ideal would blaze forth, hoping that this vapid fop of a twit would choke on his own tears as the degradedness of his weltanschauung was made disdainfully apparent, hoping he would email me those rules he was telling me about, hoping I wouldn't sound too desperate and alone.