Tuesday, October 26, 2004

The Eclair

When I was pregnant with my firstborn son many, many years ago, I once craved a chocolate eclair.



Cravings while pregnant can not, by any stretch of the imagination, be compared to non-pregnant cravings. Pregnant cravings are Kodachrome cravings; high-resolution, perfectly lit, color-balanced works of epicurean art, radiating the barest hints of tantalizingly delectable aromas and flavors. Non-pregnant ones, in comparison, are faded sepia, blurry, pixellated, low-sodium and fat-free, tasteless and boring.



I could almost taste chocolate eclair, I wanted it so badly. Almost, but sadly, not quite. Every particle of my entire being was overwhelmed with desire, passionately intent on one single hedonistic thought, focused as only the ADD-blessed can focus. I knew beyond all reason that I MUST find, and consume, a chocolate eclair.



I think Wonko even stopped hiccupping (his best pre-natal talent, which he practiced at every opportunity, which means pretty much endlessly) for a few minutes, bowled over in his dark watery cradle by the intense waves of carb-lust reverberating through his world.



Real life can seldom measure up to the unparalleled perfection of a craving born in the hormone-infected imagination of a pregnant woman. Pregnant cravings are usually not so much satisfied as they are cruelly obliterated by disillusion, disappointment, and hopelessness.



But every once in a while, the universe smiles upon a pregnant woman with a craving, as it did for me that day. I found a bakery with chocolate eclairs. They were nothing special. It was a grocery store bakery with cheap pastries for the masses, not the least bit suitable for gourmet pastry connoisseurs. I didn't care. I bought one, found the nearest place to sit, and reverently unwrapped it, blissfully breathing in its sensuous chocolatey aroma. I took a bite. It was heavenly, everything I had dreamed it would be. I chewed slowly, revelling in each bite, savoring every delicate molecule as it slid across my palate.



The memory has never faded. That was the ultimate chocolate eclair, the eclair all other eclairs will forever be measured by. I've never eaten another, because I know that no pastry ever created from that day forward will be able to compare to the consummate perfection of that one most perfect chocolate eclair.

Monday, October 25, 2004

A Wee Wonko Story

Many, many moons ago when Wonko was an innocent babe... No, wait -- THAT wasn't Wonko...



CowboyAt any rate, a long time ago when Wonko (a.k.a. Ryan) was much smaller than he is now (and his brain wasn't fully developed), the kids and I were in our somewhat elderly Oldsmobile one day on our way home from Alamogordo, NM to Holloman AFB. In case you're lousy at geography like I am (the only places I can reliably point to on a map are places where I've lived -- fortunately I've lived in a lot of places), these are located 7 miles apart, somewhere in the middle of the southern New Mexican desert.



The air conditioning in the Olds left much to be desired, so to compensate we had mounted a small fan on the ceiling just behind the dome light to guide whatever coldish wisps of air the A/C did manage to sputter out in the general direction of the back seat.



On this particular day, the fan was adjusted so it would blow on Ryan, who was hot, and not on Risa, who somehow, in spite of the fact that it was 110°F in the shade, was cold. Rustin was sitting in the middle being his usual mellow self, and didn't seem to have a preference.



As we entered the base and made the sharp left turn that would take us to the housing area, momentum caused the fan to swing toward the opposite side of the car. Chaos immediately ensued; Risa yelled because it was making her cold(er), Ryan yelled because he was hot, and Rusty yelled because everyone else was yelling, and when you're eight months old, that's a good enough reason.



Using my well-developed driving-Mom talents, I skillfully negotiated the next corner with one hand and a knee, while reaching back to adjust the fan with my other hand. Somehow (and I say that because I later attempted to reproduce this and was completely unable) my index finger went through the fan housing and was instantly pulverized by the spinning blades, one of which broke off from the force of the impact. I reflexively jerked my hand back, and the fan stopped.



I brought the injured digit around where I could see it, while my left hand and knee instinctively continued guiding the car toward our destination. (Moms are creatures with amazing abilities, when necessary.) As my stunned brain gradually began to register input from the real world again, I became aware of three things. The first was the knowledge that if I got blood on the upholstery, my then-husband was going to kill me. The second was that, in just a few nanoseconds, this was really gonna HURT. (I was right.) The third was Ryan's exasperated voice emanating from the back seat:

"MOOOOOM!!! You BROKE the fan! Now we're gonna be HOT!!!"



Somehow, in spite of the blinding pain, I managed to deposit the kids with a neighbor without wrecking the car or bleeding on its interior. I borrowed some paper towels from her to absorb the blood, and drove myself to the ER.



The airman at the desk, not noticing the blood-soaked wad around my right hand that was clutched in my left hand at chest level (because it hurt even worse when it was any lower), asked me why I was there. I pushed the bloody soggy mess of redness closer to his face and said, "I stuck my finger in a fan." His eyebrows rose at the sight of all the blood, and he gave me a startled look. "Why?" he asked. I remember thinking that this was probably a golden opportunity for a snappy comeback, if only I weren't in too much pain to think of one. Mentally excusing his stupidness (after all, he WAS just an airman) I allowed him to lead me to an examination room.



After a throbbing, pain-filled eternity, a doctor finally appeared. "Oh, my," he said, looking at my bloody pseudo-bandage. (At least he was somewhat observant.) "What did you do to your hand?" "I stuck my finger in a fan," I replied. He looked puzzled. "Why?" Somewhere inside of me, my sarcastic alter-ego curled up in total agony.



To this day, I have not been able to come up with a suitable retort. I think it's the pain of the memory that blocks my creative sarcastic efforts. So there's really not a dramatic finish to the story. I just like telling it because of the sheepish look it invariably brings to Ryan's face. :)

Thursday, October 21, 2004

Orgone Energy Distraction

A couple of weeks ago my psych prof Dr. Carlson mentioned, as sort of a brief post-script at the end of our section on Sigmund Freud, a guy named Wilhelm Reich. Dr. Reich was a Freudian analyst who thought that there should be a way to detect the libido energy that Freud theorized powered the human id. In the process of pursuing this goal, he discovered an omnipresent form of life energy that he named Orgone Energy which emitted blue light and seemed to have positive psychological and physiological effects. So he created a device called the Orgone Energy Accumulator that was basically a box you could sit inside of that would collect and concentrate orgone energy into your body.



Well, me being me and all, this sort of piqued my curiosity. I liked the idea of a box that would fill me with energy, and blue is such a pretty color, too! So I went off in search of more information about this Orgone stuff. I had absolutely NO idea where it was going to take me. It's simply staggering. (If you haven't bought your Velostat yet it's okay, because after you read this you may find there are more imminent dangers you need to shield yourself against. Oh, and you might want to hold off on that flu shot, too.)



It turns out that orgone energy does all sorts of stuff. For instance, orgone energy is why the sky is blue. It's what makes gravity work, and is what produces orgasms. Concentrated and directed properly using a device called a Cloud-Buster (which makes use of the principles of the Orgone Energy Accumulator), it can be used to bring rain to drought-plagued areas. I know, I know, this sounds like a pretty amazing claim, but that's only because you haven't yet seen this graph, in an article published by the Orgone Biophysical Research Laboratory in SW Oregon, showing the rainfall in Washington State during the month of September, 1988. As you will note, for the entire first two weeks of September, there was practically no rain whatsoever. Then, for four days beginning on Sept 13, cloudbusters were used to stimulate rain, and as you can see, it immediately began raining. "In fact," the article says, "a pulsatory cycle of rains developed over the entire Pacific NW after these operations, and continued for several months thereafter."



Are you getting this? RAIN. In the FALL. In THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST. For MONTHS ON END! I am so stunned that I don't even know how to comment on this, so I will simply have to rely on each reader's own linguistic imagination to supply him with an appropriate exclamation. Perhaps something like, "Holy Cloudbusters, Batman!"



Okay, while you're scanning your vocabulary for an applicable comment, I have to digress from Orgon Energy for a moment, so you will be able to understand what comes later.



According to this website,

The Ionosphere is being manipulated by US government scientists using the Alaskan transmitter called HAARP, (High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) which sends focused radiated power to heat up sections of the Ionosphere, which bounces power down again. ELF waves produced from HAARP, when targeted on selected areas, can weather-engineer and create mood changes affecting millions of people.



The human brain is highly susceptible, it turns out, to ELF waves. And humans with special mental powers like ESP and such are even more susceptible. So ELF waves are a tool for manipulating our brains. To complement HAARP, the US military is installing GWEN towers all across the US, purportedly for use by cell phones. But what they really do is generate ELF waves, giving them the capability of mind control and "sending synthetic-telepathy as infrasound to victims with US government mind-control implants."



This is where the flu shots come in. You know how the government urges us all to get flu shots every year, right? Well, that's because there are these tiny implants that are injected into millions of unsuspecting Americans with vaccines and flu shots. These biochips work their way through the bloodstream and lodge in the brain, enabling the government to broadcast "voices" directly into our heads. That's right, folks, the US Government has developed technology that can successfully penetrate the blood-brain barrier. You read it here first.



And as if the picture weren't already bleak enough already... according to the same author, the chemtrails left behind as jets travel the skies are not really streams of water vapor as we were told by our high school physics teachers, but in fact they contain chemicals which alter our state of consciousness, an effect enhanced, as it happens, by the fluoride and selenium being added to our water supply. And YOU thought it was actually to prevent tooth decay, didn't you? See how gullible you are?



He also notes that the majority of so-called alien abductions (which I touched on in a recent post) are actually the work of the US military. They use these elaborately-staged hoaxes (using holographically-projected spaceships and other such high-tech illusions) as a decoy to distract our attention from the actual alien abductions (which do occur, but only rarely) and make it appear as if they are just the delusions of psychologically-imbalanced people, so we won't take them seriously.



Get ready, because we have to make another digression before we get back to the original topic, which was -- ummmm -- what was it again?



OH, yes, Orgone Energy. Right.



But first you have to know about the "Reptilians." These are aliens who came to Earth thousands of years ago and interbred with humans, creating a number of hybrid bloodlines. These bloodlines, down through history, have been the source of the ruling families of the European nations (now you know why they only interbreed with their own -- preservation of reptilian DNA!), as well as every single one of the US presidents. Yep, you got it. Our presidents, democrats and republicans alike, have all traced their heritage back to reptilian shape-shifting aliens (who, incidentally, must consume unspecified amounts of human blood in order to maintain their human appearance).



So, let's recap for a moment, because we've covered a lot of territory and I'm sure it's a bit overwhelming to try and grasp it all at once.



The US government is putting into place a network of mind-control devices, and faking alien abductions (probably at taxpayer expense), to distract us from what's REALLY going on, which is that the alien hybrid reptilian shape-shifters have actually been running the world all along, and are planning, at some point, to turn on all the ELF ray generators and turn us into their pawns, so that they can take over the world, which they are already in charge of. Wait. So they can... Ummm... Okay, let's see... They're evil and want to control our minds, but we don't know it, because... ummm, because they've brainwashed us. Yeah, that's it. No, wait... Oh, shoot. Well, never mind about all that. It's really far too complicated for the average human to understand, so just do your best to grasp the high points, and leave the rest to those who are better able to comprehend the complex intricacies of such things. The important thing is to remember that you can't trust the government. And don't let anyone stick a needle in you, and don't drink water. Or breathe. And stay away from cell phone towers. Other than that, you're probably okay. Unless you get abducted by alians, or a stranger tries to trick you into getting into his black helicoptor, or a reptilian politician tries to drink your blood. In which case your velostat hat isn't going to do you much good.



Anyway, now we can go back to Orgone Energy. Or, rather, its counterpart, oranur, also known as deadly orgone radiation (DOR). This stuff, as you may have gathered from its name, is bad. And, it turns out, it accumulates in places where there are ELF waves. BUT, thanks to Dr. Reich, who managed to get the word out in spite of being thrown in jail by the FDA (or was it the FBI?) and dying there (supposedly from heart failure...) and having all of his books burned (twice!), we have the power of Orgone on our side.



This is where those funds you were saving to spend on Velostat may be put to better use. Alien abductions, the real ones anyway, are actually quite rare; but there are ELF-generating towers on practically every street corner! This site contains a number of Orgone energy-based tools for neutralizing DOR. You can even purchase your very own patio-sized cloud-buster variant, the chembuster. The author of the website was sent one to try out, and writes this testimonial:

The very first day I set it up on the patio, we had a black helicopter visit us at 2 AM, hovering loudly about 150 feet overhead, and shining the brightest search light imaginable-going around and around our place- in an obvious attempt to both intimidate and video tape us inside our home using special infrared technology (which is standard equipment today, even on local police helicopters).



If this makes you reluctant to purchase your own chembuster, he notes that since there are more of them in use now, the black helicoptors tend to ignore them, so you probably don't have to worry about having this happen to you.



The volumes of information on these topics is overwhelming; I've just barely skimmed the surface here, and had to whittle it down to the bare minimum due to time constraints. If you want to learn more, I suggest that you start with The Adventures of Don and Carol. I don't think I can do these narratives justice, so I borrowed this review from the Educate-Yourself.org website:

The episodes that make up the Adventures are drawn from the daily narrative that Don had written of his experiences in this country and abroad employing and deploying his anti-parasite (two legged variety) arsenal of orgone generators (the Chembuster, Holy Handgrenades, St Buster's Button, and the Succor Punch) and the characters he encounters along the way: some friendly, some not; some human and others, not-so-human.



Oh, and Dr. Carlson, if you're reading this, I haven't finished the reading for class tonight. Obviously your tantalizing distraction had a small part to play in this, so I hope you will take it into account before judging me too harshly!

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

Can You Do This?

Walking toward Starbuck's for a caffeine break between classes one day, I encountered Steven for the first time. He was seated at an outside table next to the entrance, and with the natural openness of the developmentally disabled, he looked directly at me as I approached. I smiled at him as I reached for the door.



"Can you do this?" he asked, making a circle with his thumb and forefinger and peering through it at me, the thick lens of his glasses magnifying the encircled eye so it loomed larger than life. I paused. "Sure," I showed him, looking back at him through my own thumb and forefinger. "Look closer," he instructed, leaning toward me, still peering through his circled fingers. I obediently bent toward him, leaning in as far as my sense of "personal space" would allow, and wondering what it was I was supposed to see. "Closer," he commanded, stretching toward me and bringing our faces into uncomfortable proximity. I instinctively shied back a bit, but valiantly kept myself closer than I really wanted to be.



"Can you see my eye?" he asked. I could feel his breath on my face. "Yes, I can" I told him, finally relenting to my screaming subconscious and straightening up. "How close did you get?" Steven asked. "This far," I told him, holding my thumb and finger about four inches apart. "I'm going to be on the ski team for Special Olympics," he told me. Smiling, I congratulated him as I opened the door and went inside.



The barista greeted me cheerfully. "Grande caffe vanilla frappucino?" she asked. I nodded and handed her my debit card, then peered at her through the circle of my thumb and forefinger. "What's this?" I asked, and she laughed. "We don't know, it's just Steven's thing," she shrugged.



The following evening found me back at Starbuck's, sprawled in a comfy chair in the back corner sipping frappucino, buried deep in one of my textbooks. "Can you do this?" a familiar voice asked. I looked up and smiled. "Not tonight," I said apologetically. "I have to finish my homework." He took his hand away from his face. "Can you do it tomorrow?" he asked hopefully. "I won't be here tomorrow," I replied, "How about Monday?" "Okay, Monday," he said happily, and walked away.



At least an hour later, I got up to stretch and clear my brain a little. Steven was at the register, painstakingly counting out a few coins on the counter, while the same barista watched patiently. It was obvious there weren't enough of them. "Just a minute," she told him, and ducked into the back, returning a moment later with her own purse. Adding several coins to his small pile, she said "There, enough for a small hot chocolate." She rang up his purchase and handed him the drink. Turning, he caught sight of me. "What time Monday?" he asked. "Ummm..." I mentally reviewed my schedule. "One o'clock." His countenance fell. "I have work until two o'clock," he told me. We juggled schedules a little more, and finally settled on a Tuesday appointment for our next eye-peering episode. Happy again, he sipped his chocolate.



"What kind of job do you do?" I asked him. "I put things in bags and staple them," he told me. "I have my own alarm clock. It goes 'BEEP-BEEP-BEEP!' But when the electricity was off it didn't work. Then it just went blink blink blink." He put his chocolate down and made "blinking" gestures with both hands, opening his fingers wide and then pulling them together, repeating the gesture several times. "I wonder why it does that," he added, shaking his head as he took another sip of chocolate. Then he brightened. "I'm going to be on the ski team in Special Olympics!" he told me proudly.



There's something fresh and unspoiled about Steven. I look forward to seeing him now. We play the eye game regularly. People who aren't regulars give us strange sidelong glances while pretending to read their books or sip their coffee. The barista just grins. "Can you see my eye?" he asks, his eyeball huge and blurry through the circles of our fingers. He'll stay like that, the two of us face to face and peering through our fingers into each others' eyes, for as long as I'm willing to stay there. When I finally pull away, he asks "How close did you get?" and now when I hold up my thumb and finger to show him, they're pressed tightly together. He nods with satisfaction. "I'm going to be on the ski team for Special Olympics," he tells me proudly.



I still have no clue what the point of the ritual is, or what I'm supposed to see. Maybe I'll never know.



Maybe it doesn't really matter.

Friday, October 15, 2004

More on Alien Abductions

I received the following message from Mike Menkin today. He thanked me for posting his website (stopabductions.com) and offered some additional websites and information for me to share with you. The photograph he mentions is definitely worth a look!




Subject: thought screen helmet

Date: Fri, 15 Oct 2004 12:06:42 -0700

From: Mike Menkin

Organization: Lasentec



Thanks for posting stopabductions.com. You may be interested in my other website, aliensandchildren.org.



For information on alien abductions see ufoabduction.com



I still make thought screen helmets and give them to abductees to try. They are not for sale. It takes about four hours to make a helmet and costs about $35 in materials.



Your readers also may be interested in the real photo of a real alien on stopabductions.com and the section on intelligence.



Michael Menkin



See also:

Valuable Information for my Family and Friends

Just When You Thought You Were Finally Safe...

Sunday, October 10, 2004

Valuable Information for my Family and Friends

Midterms are looming, so I'm going to resort to entertaining my blog fans (yes, both of you!) with reruns for a few days, until I have time to think again. (I'm doing a lot of thinking, actually, but unless you enjoy reading about stoichiometry and redox reactions and limiting reactants and such, I'm pretty sure you'll prefer the reruns.) So here's a little bit I wrote one day when I was sitting around being sick, and entertaining myself by doing random Google searches and seeing what popped up:



Finally, the information we have all been waiting for: How to Make a Thought Screen Helmet. No more laying awake at night worrying that aliens are coming to abduct you! All you have to do is follow the simple instructions on this website to make your own thought-screen helmet, rendering you invulnerable to those pesky alien abductors.



According to this website,

The thought screen helmet blocks telepathic communication between aliens and humans. Aliens cannot immobilize people wearing thought screens nor can they control their minds or communicate with them using their telepathy.



And an alien who cannot control your mind cannot abduct you. In fact, according to this website, in the past five years only TWO people wearing thought-screen helmets have been abducted! If that's not a convincing statistic, I don't know what is. I'm going to go right out and buy a case of velostat sheets!



This part is worrisome, though:

"However, people can still be overcome by the Mantis alien (leaders) direct hypnotic-staring procedure as described by David Jacobs in ufoabduction.com. New devices and methods to overcome their hypnotic control ability are being tested.



So, in addition to washing your hands after using the bathroom, wearing your seatbelt and avoiding dark alleys in bad parts of town, PLEASE avoid making any direct eye-contact with mantis aliens.



Also, if you do remove your thought-screen helmet for any reason, be sure and put it in a secure place, because aliens like to steal them.



See also:

More on Alien Abductions

Just When You Thought You Were Finally Safe...

Wednesday, October 06, 2004

Peer Pressure and its Deleterious Effects (on Hermit Crabs)

When I was living in Japan back in the late 80's my mom, my youngest brother Tim and his then-fiancee Erin came to visit for a few weeks. My mom grew up in Japan, so our outings weren't all the usual gaijiin sight-seeing kind of things. Although we did some of those too.



Mom wanted to go shopping, to places the gaijiins didn't frequent. Places she remembered fondly from her youth. One of the BIGGIES was Japanese grocery stores, where she would browse happily down every aisle, looking at every item, buying whatever she could that she couldn't get back in Texas that would make it home safely in her suitcase. Which was a LOT, because the Japanese were already years ahead of us on packaging things in stay-fresh packs (like they're selling tuna in now). (You can get condensed milk in squeezable tubes, like toothpaste. Is that cool or what???)



On one such outing I had long finished my shopping, and she was still only halfway through the store, Tim and Erin in tow. So I handed out Pocky Sticks to my kids to keep them entertained and chatted with a couple of Japanese people who came up to give them 500 yen coins for the chance to stroke their blonde hair for good luck.



We finally ended up standing in an out of the way corner next to the fresh seafood counter while we waited. I was sucking the chocolate off a Pocky Stick and idly staring at the trays of various clams, shellfish, and snails, all of them so fresh they were still alive, although very sluggish, since the trays were on ice.



The tray nearest me was piled with some type of saltwater snails the size of my fist, and I was noticing how they were all uniformly the same size and species (Japanese meticulousness at work, since I'm sure they come in varying sizes in nature!) when one of them caught my eye. It had the same shell as all the rest, but instead of a snail inside, there was a dead hermit crab, his lifeless legs hanging limply out the opening. His cold tolerance apparently wasn't quite as high as that of the snails. He'd obviously been mistaken for one of them, because of the way he was "dressed".



The thought that struck me, gazing at the sad little dead hermit crab, which I thought to him silently, was a very typical mother thing...



You *see* what happens when you hang out with the wrong kind of people?!?

Monday, October 04, 2004

The Somewhat Eccentric Rogers Household

My kids are forever shaking their heads and grinning, saying "I love living here!" 'cause between Jeff and me, you just never know what to expect next.



Recently I got it in my head to pull up some of the landscape blocks from the front yard and put them around the fruit trees we've planted in the back yard. I've been thinking that if I build raised flower beds around them and then wrap wire fencing around those (to keep our two pygmy goats out) it will look nicer than just having wire around the trees. And I hate the way the front yard is done with all the concrete blocks, I've been wanting an excuse for a long time to pull them up and make it look more natural.



So anyway, I dug out the wheelbarrow and loaded it up with blocks, then I realized that neither of the back gates is accessible. One is buried under blackberry vines and the other isn't very sturdy and is braced with all sorts of "quick fix" stuff to keep it upright and closed -- whatever is handy when someone notices it's sagging again. Firewood, random pieces of rope and baling wire, an old laminate countertop, a trash barrel, etc. (Sheesh, makes us sound kind of redneck, huh!) And not only did I not like the idea of moving all that stuff, I wasn't sure how I'd keep the goats in the yard once I did.



So the obvious solution was just to wheel the things THROUGH the house. It was the shortest route, too. So off I went.



On about the 3rd load, Rusty came wandering out of his room just as I was lunging to pull the wheelbarrow up over the step at the front door. The blocks weighed more than I did, so it took a couple of tries each time.



Rusty didn't even blink, just said "Need some help, Mom?" and proceeded to walk over and lift it over the hump for me. Then he helped me get it around the corner in the hallway, before getting himself a drink from the kitchen and heading back to his room. He never gave any indication that he noticed that what I was doing was in any way unusual or out of the ordinary.



I'm pretty sure my kids are the only kids in the WORLD who would help their mom wheel a load of muddy concrete blocks into the house without batting an eyelash!

Wandering Wombs



I was reading in my psych text recently about how back in pre-Freudian times when women suffered from "hysteria" they decided that it was caused by a "wandering womb". The root word of "hysteria" is from a Greek word that means "uterus". The malady had various manifestations, including spontaneous blindness, partial or even full paralysis, inability to speak, unexplained pain in various body parts, and of course a multitude of mental illnesses.



Since they thought then that only women suffered from this malady, they naturally deduced that it must be caused by the uterus, because men don't have them. Yep. Then, to explain why the pains and paralysis would migrate to different parts of the body, they came up with the idea that women's uteruses would "wander" around inside of them, wreaking havoc wherever they went.



It raised some interesting questions in my mind. As well as an observation or two. For instance:



What if a pregnant woman's womb decided to "wander"?



Did other organs and body parts also spontaneously take off on jaunts around the anatomy?



Could it be that perhaps all those 18th and 19th century artists were actually realists, and that people back then actually LOOKED like that?



The whole corset thing suddenly makes a lot of sense, too. I'd be wearing a full body corset, myself. Lock those rebellious body parts down and keep them where they belong!

Saturday, October 02, 2004

Just Because You're Paranoid...

A while back Jeff told me a story of a woman with paranoid personality disorder who thought that the Mexican Mafia was following her around and talking about her on their secret phones.



A nurse at the hospital she was in said she had come to him one day, eyes wild, saying frantically, "They're back, they're BACK!" "Who?" he asked. "The Mexican Mafia, with their secret phones. They're HERE and they're after me again!" She pointed down the hall to a new Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) who had just been hired. A Hispanic CNA, named Juan. Who happened to be walking down the hall talking. To nobody. (Actually he was talking on his cell phone, with an ear bud hands-free thingy that you couldn't see from their angle.)



The clincher was, Juan used to work in the care facility that this woman used to live in. And she left there. And he left there. And now she was here. And so was he.



Mexican Mafia, following her and talking on their secret phones. And how is anyone going convince her otherwise? Shoot, maybe she's not paranoid at all. Maybe she's right and they're really after her.



And everyone thinks she's crazy, so nobody believes her.



Except Juan.