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Wouldn’t even need the Chair to break ties. You and the rest of the old mother F*L*A*Ccers’re history, Squirrel!”
Iron Lass: “Kareem! Langvicht! ”
Everyone quivered in their chairs anxiously, clasping their hands about their ears in anticipation of my blowing the Mind Whistle™ either at Kareem’s epithet or to circumvent the inevitable Flying Squirrel retaliation.
But apparently retaliation was not inevitable. Festus simply sat silently staring at Kareem, hurling neither invective nor his chair. Instead, he methodically bent and tore the logogenic Elect X-Man pamphlet into a primitive origami squirrel.
Dissecting the Flying Squirrel
F estus,” I probed, seizing the moment, “shredding that tract isn’t helping you to focus your psychemotional microscope upon the slide of your pain. What, precisely, do you feel—you personally—right now?”
“What do I ‘feel’?” he sneered. He tore at the remains again, erecting two snubby ears on the paper squirrel’s head. “Did you actually ask me what I ‘feel’? I ‘feel’ I’m surrounded by morons!”
“Festus,” I said, tapping my whistle. He grimaced and shoved his palms against his eyes, rubbing hard enough to make me wince. “I’m asking not for your assessment of the rest of the group, but of your psychemotional state. Try using an ‘I-statement.’ ”
“An ‘I-statement’?” he snorted. “If I use an ‘I-statement’ you’re just going to sic that goddamned dominatrix whistle of yours on me!”
“No, I’m giving you permission, because right now we’re not in a free-for-all. You have the floor.”
Festus glared. Grunted. Glowered.
Finally: “I feel frustrated. There. Have I satiated you?”
“That’s good, Festus. Talk about that.”
“It’s good I’m frustrated?” he said. I raised an eyebrow at his playing dumb.
“I feel frustrated,” he begrudged, “because I’ve devoted my entire adult life to this organization, tending to it like a Shinto priest to a desktop grove of bonsai, cherishing it, protecting it…and now that I’ve arrived at the correct time, the appointed time, the right time for me to lead it…a—a goddamned dilettante lindy-hops his way in here with lies about a Hawk King endorsement and a sense of entitlement bigger than his Afro and acts as if he has a right to lead. I feel nobody has the ‘right’ to lead. You earn that goddamned right by investing decades of service—not milliseconds of presumption—earning interest and building capital of public confidence, collegial respect, and heroic loyalty, which I was intending to reinvest right now, in the traditions of our noble fraternity originally enacted by Hawk King.”
Wally returned from the rest room. Perhaps because of the anxiety level in the Verbalarium, the air seemed almost to tingle. “Excellent, Festus,” I reinforced. “You’ve done a fine job of—”
“I’m not done, Miss Brain. Bad enough to have our election turned into a midway freak show, but since the end of the Götterdämmerung to have to bear witness every day to what the slugs in the slime-trailing liberal media are saying about us—”
“ Bor -ing,” said Syndi. She got out of her chair, turned on her hip-speakers to the thump-whump ing tune of her spring Top 40 hit “Boom! I Hit It Again,” and, activating her Power Pumps, began high-speed rocket-skating/dancing around the room.
Festus: “Turn that goddamned jungle music off and sit down!”
Wagging my whistle, I warned Syndi to return to her chair, but I was reluctant to risk the whistle’s overuse because my patients might habituate to its stimulus. Wally, snapping his fingers, conceded that he found the tune “kinda ketchy, though a mite Jezebellish.” I asked Festus to continue, but more loudly.
“—I feel humiliated!” he seethed above the bass line and drum snares, “ vi olated because the papa-goddamn-razzi are trailing around a bunch of teenybopping costumed incompetents who’re
Iron Lass: “Kareem! Langvicht! ”
Everyone quivered in their chairs anxiously, clasping their hands about their ears in anticipation of my blowing the Mind Whistle™ either at Kareem’s epithet or to circumvent the inevitable Flying Squirrel retaliation.
But apparently retaliation was not inevitable. Festus simply sat silently staring at Kareem, hurling neither invective nor his chair. Instead, he methodically bent and tore the logogenic Elect X-Man pamphlet into a primitive origami squirrel.
Dissecting the Flying Squirrel
F estus,” I probed, seizing the moment, “shredding that tract isn’t helping you to focus your psychemotional microscope upon the slide of your pain. What, precisely, do you feel—you personally—right now?”
“What do I ‘feel’?” he sneered. He tore at the remains again, erecting two snubby ears on the paper squirrel’s head. “Did you actually ask me what I ‘feel’? I ‘feel’ I’m surrounded by morons!”
“Festus,” I said, tapping my whistle. He grimaced and shoved his palms against his eyes, rubbing hard enough to make me wince. “I’m asking not for your assessment of the rest of the group, but of your psychemotional state. Try using an ‘I-statement.’ ”
“An ‘I-statement’?” he snorted. “If I use an ‘I-statement’ you’re just going to sic that goddamned dominatrix whistle of yours on me!”
“No, I’m giving you permission, because right now we’re not in a free-for-all. You have the floor.”
Festus glared. Grunted. Glowered.
Finally: “I feel frustrated. There. Have I satiated you?”
“That’s good, Festus. Talk about that.”
“It’s good I’m frustrated?” he said. I raised an eyebrow at his playing dumb.
“I feel frustrated,” he begrudged, “because I’ve devoted my entire adult life to this organization, tending to it like a Shinto priest to a desktop grove of bonsai, cherishing it, protecting it…and now that I’ve arrived at the correct time, the appointed time, the right time for me to lead it…a—a goddamned dilettante lindy-hops his way in here with lies about a Hawk King endorsement and a sense of entitlement bigger than his Afro and acts as if he has a right to lead. I feel nobody has the ‘right’ to lead. You earn that goddamned right by investing decades of service—not milliseconds of presumption—earning interest and building capital of public confidence, collegial respect, and heroic loyalty, which I was intending to reinvest right now, in the traditions of our noble fraternity originally enacted by Hawk King.”
Wally returned from the rest room. Perhaps because of the anxiety level in the Verbalarium, the air seemed almost to tingle. “Excellent, Festus,” I reinforced. “You’ve done a fine job of—”
“I’m not done, Miss Brain. Bad enough to have our election turned into a midway freak show, but since the end of the Götterdämmerung to have to bear witness every day to what the slugs in the slime-trailing liberal media are saying about us—”
“ Bor -ing,” said Syndi. She got out of her chair, turned on her hip-speakers to the thump-whump ing tune of her spring Top 40 hit “Boom! I Hit It Again,” and, activating her Power Pumps, began high-speed rocket-skating/dancing around the room.
Festus: “Turn that goddamned jungle music off and sit down!”
Wagging my whistle, I warned Syndi to return to her chair, but I was reluctant to risk the whistle’s overuse because my patients might habituate to its stimulus. Wally, snapping his fingers, conceded that he found the tune “kinda ketchy, though a mite Jezebellish.” I asked Festus to continue, but more loudly.
“—I feel humiliated!” he seethed above the bass line and drum snares, “ vi olated because the papa-goddamn-razzi are trailing around a bunch of teenybopping costumed incompetents who’re
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