Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
eversed herself Ruthlessly, in effect negating herself, in pri-
  

    
mate-like willfulness.  Sickening, she then reverted to writing lo
  

    
st-puppy flyers and Romance Novels for a liv-
  

    
ing, and hiring a healthy Double to sit in on the Supreme Court
sessions.  This arrangement worked beautifully, until t-
  

    
omorrow, when reality reverses itself and she st-
  

    
uttered between tenses, sometimes There Then, sometimes Here Now.  Now
she was here, at the candy store, signing an-
  

    
agrams, then she nags a singing ram, after which she sang "Am A Raging
Sin", the classic torch-bearer song of the Naughty Girl Olympics. But
that was all after the fac-
  

    
totum immemorial, the Eternal Butler, took her hat and coat and would not
give them back.

"But I need them for the per-
  

    
fection of my existance!" she zenned, and promptly forgot them in her
sudden oneness with the uni-
  

    
formed security guard who insisted on examining the contents of her tra-
  

    
shy underwear drawer and getting into an in-depth examination of her
most controversial positions.

She tried to abstain, but that was quickly vetoed by the immoral ma-
  

    
hout, who had assumed the title and role of First Sockpuppet of the United
States, and was attempting to expunge abstention, absinthe, Absorbine Jr.,
and other things starting with the letters "ab".

It was all because of that traumatic incident with the boi-
  

    
ling cauldron of cioppino (plus some, uh, unauthorized herbs), wh-
  

    
istling Dixie, and Dixie's husband coming home ear-
  

    
ly with a bucket of clams which the young Sockpuppet-to-be *knew*
Dixie had already put in the cauldron.  Sockpuppet, who was only nine
at the time, and had never before seen time bend, had always remembered
Dixie saying, "Oh, Georgie, dear, don't worry, there's two sides to
everything -- it's the A-B pattern of the universe, you see."  The
whole incident had done a slow burn on his psyche, until one day, while
dre-
  

    
ad-locking his bicycle to the postman, for fear of theft, he fell to
the ground pointing at each foot in turn screaming, "Sock!" "Puppet!"
"Sock!" "Puppet!" and then at passersby, "Sock!" "Puppet!" until two
identical nice men in the white coats came and he shouted and pointed
"Sock!" "Puppet!" at them until they fell down laughing and the postman
laughed and the bicycle laughed and they all laughed and they were
laughing at him at him "Aaaaaaaaaarrrrrrggggghhhhh...."

Anyway, that's one story of how he came to be known as "S-
  

    
ockpuppet" and to have such an aversion to words beginning with "ab-".
 His handlers le-
  

    
ft no stone unturned in covering up this debacle before his can-
  

    
dor waxed; silenced, he became wan and thi-
  

    
nkish -- if there is such a thing.  Gazing at his navel, he as-
  

    
sumed the po-
  

    
sition of gratitude that people are just writing a line rather than an e-
  

    
pistle, since Channeling For The American People takes in-
  

    
credible amounts of patience.  You have to choose your w-
  

    
hereabouts carefully, and have an undisclosed location to g-