My mother joined the Mall Walkers because she wants to lose weight and meet new people. I like to go for walks downtown to find places to overeat and eyeball women that will never have an interest in me.

On one such walk, I walked past an attractive young woman wearing tights as pants, which is not at all appropriate; it gives them an unfair advantage. After she passed, I turned around to have a look from behind. "Nice," I thought.

I was beginning to turn back around and be on my way when I was started to see the shadow of a dog cast on the sidewalk. I swiveled my head around several times and saw no dog. I realized, I didn't see my own shadow either. I edged back away from the shadow and it followed my movements. My shadow was in the shape of a dog's. I clumsily clutched my throat as if it might make the breath begin moving again.

When I finally did start breathing, I walked along anxiously trying to ignore my situation. I wondered if other people might notice and want to put me in the circus or perform experiments.

I saw a cat and before I could stop myself I had chased it to an alley and was rooting through the garbage piles looking for it. The dog catcher captured me, and I was taken to the PETA shelter where I was eventually euthanized in the most ethical manner.

Looking backwards often casts determinism in too favorable a light. Never underestimate man's ability to find new avenues for reliving old mistakes. Knowledge of history's trivia is primarily a source of superficial comfort to those who want to look toward the future with hope, or at least indifference, but find themselves incapable of doing so.

Therefore, I admit that repeatedly cloistering myself with lonely, neurotic females has no foundation in rational thought.

Perhaps the aura manipulation technology is not yet ready for prime time. People ought to be more ambiguous, maybe. The further out on the tree limb one goes, the more likely it is it to snap.

Presently I detached the thread of spittle coming from my mouth from the floor and wiped it on my pants. I stood up and rushed to the window, searching for the source of some automotive commotion. Ted was driving the moving truck out front followed by his wife driving their Lexus. I beat my disappointment back with feigned satisfaction, "Good riddance." But really, I would miss borrowing Ted's tools and watching his wife sunbathe by their pool. She honked and waved to their house, but I pretended it was to me.

--

My girlfriend and I enjoy passing the time by perusing pedestrian retail establishments and separating that which is beneath us from that which we would suffer to enter our shopping basket. Smug satisfaction is the sweetest flavor, and nothing affords us as much of that as reaffirming our superiority over blankets with sleeves and useless culinary devices.

All of these products represent bold, albeit blind, stabs at catching the American dream, but life feeds on our ambitions and excretes our failures. Finding enjoyment in failure is as close to victory as I hope to achieve.

I stood in the mirror for 20 minutes of aura observation in preparation for product launch. While taking notes I noticed the concentric figures of my aura begin to lose their synchronization. The many shades of the veneer of melancholy were losing their cohesion before my eyes. First, the largest ring, a vibrant red lumbered off like the outline of a ginger bread man. I seemed more at ease. The green ring of my aura flickered, and then darted off playfully in its own direction. Suddenly the notes, the work, the money, even reality seemed so much less important. I looked on with disinterest as several other shades of emotion gained their freedom and scattered from the room. This was more alone than previously thought possible.

I was without love, anger, desire, any remorse at the loss of these, and completely without motivation to regain them. I stood in the mirror looking until my legs felt weak, and then sat on the floor, slowly slumping forward. My vision focused on the shiny stray fibers in the carpet and then narrowed to focus on some distance beyond that. My mind lost what remaining concentration it had and was completely filled with the fuzzy blue carpet color. The flat fuzzy blue began rolling and and separating into a black sky speckled with white stars and glistening blue sand dunes as far as my mind could perceive. A large bright white moon quickly rose in the sky and began rotating in place.

Stress and aging are inextricably linked. Through my experiments in aura manipulation I was able to relieve myself permanently of stress and related emotions and increase my lifespan many fold. I lived to see the first manned missions to earth like planets - many of which consisted of millions of miles of blue dunes. The first mission was to the planet called Ishtar IV, which had a moon almost identical to Earth's.

Initially the world's leading scientists were asked to pilot the shuttle on the century long trip to Ishtar IV in the pursuit of science, but these men refused to leave Earth without their wives. Their wives refused to leave Earth without their cats, and this left little capacity within the shuttle for scientific instruments. Instead, they sought out the one who claimed to have lived for 333 years and still looked not a day over 24. He had no family nor cats to speak of, and already knew how to operate the ship's instruments.

While sitting on the blue sands and filling the containers with rocks per my commander's instructions, I saw a pink shade meandering across the dunes towards me, I remembered its shape as the same that had left me years ago. I continued with my work for no particular reason other than it was in my instructions. When the pink emanation took its final steps toward me it seemed to greet me with pleasure. It melded with me and I was overcome with what could only be described as satisfaction. I took off my equipment and laid back in the sand smiling at the stars. I sank into the sand peacefully and never felt unsatisfied again.

There is no better way to ensure loneliness than to adopt the sensibilities of the porcupine. When our spines are their sharpest and our cores are their hardest we are unable to feel the subtle emotional emanations around us. To the most sensitive, these fields resemble hundreds of vibrantly colored rings that repeat the outline of a person. These are the findings of my independent research conducted prior to 1987.

To be in tune with these fields is to understand which emotional response is correct at a given time, say after a girl tells you that her grandmother has died and she is living all alone in that old house. The emotional field emanating from said female would indicate quite clearly that the correct response is sympathy and perhaps subtle non-committal but overtly casual physical contact - say between your palm and her shoulder.

To those of us who are insensitive to these fields, of course, the most obvious response is to ask if she has a boyfriend and needs a roommate.

Work conducted more recent than mine by such geniuses as L. Ron Hubbard and Tom Arnold seems to indicate that these emanations are in fact transferable and malleable so that one person can ostensibly change emotional states while their internal emotional indicators remain constant. However, it is important to note that more research in this area would be required to make any definitive statement.

Pending that research, I would be able to make the processes and techniques by which one may be able to transfer or alter their sentimental auras available to you for the small nominal fee of 200 dollars.

So far I have had one taker on this offer, or rather, a potential taker - my neighbor Ted who has so far stubbornly refused to produce payment for my child care services already rendered. I spoke to him at length of the importance and potential of having the ability to control how others perceive his emotional condition while he was in his garage packing all of his family's belongings into boxes and stacking these inside of a moving truck. He seemed nervous, but I continued, "And so you see, even your very own wife could be made to believe that you were romantically interested in her!" At this his expression changed to one of disbelief. He gathered his wife and daughter who had been packing boxes in the garage with him and the three scurried inside the house and slammed the door. I stepped into the front garden. Peering through their window blinds and now yelling I continued, "Your daughter for instance, could be protected from the guilt of being an unplanned pregnancy!" The blinds slapped shut and everything was quiet except for a sprinkler in the distance, cht-cht-cht-cht-cht.

The Cleavers are not as widely admired as other messianic figures.

When I was 5 years old and living in Tennessee, I fell in love with a brunette named Erica. She rejected me. Her family found out years later that she favored women and she and her girlfriend were leaving to live as hermits in the mountains, all at once. I foolishly felt responsible.

Anyway, they lived up there in the mountains in a shack on some old man's land who was too old and ignorant to kick them off. Erica and her girlfriend didn't have any money, but they managed to sustain themselves on a combination of alcohol, mushrooms, and mutual devotion. Soon after discovering the nutritive qualities of psilocybin, they began descending on the town late at night conducting what they called "raids." These amounted to little more than streaking through the empty streets while under the influence of mysterious shamanic substances.

The sheriff's deputy would see them necking on the sidewalk or licking window glass and collect them and their clothes in his squad car, blushing. He dropped them off at the tree line and said next time he would have to arrest them. He told that lie to them many times, but he never even mentioned the girls' excursions to another soul.

One night the town was celebrating some pagan holiday centered around evergreens and fat men in red pajamas, and so the sheriff's deputy had the night off. He wasn't there to collect the stray children and send them back to their shack, and so they stayed out later than usual.

The last thing Erica remembered was her girlfriend unbuttoning her blouse and reciting a poem about Ursa coming from the sky and all the girls of the village hiding their bodies and fleeing into the forest.

They woke up next to the river, which reflected their bruised faces back at them. They would never find out what happened, but nine months later their son was born. They named him Eric, and told him that his father was a bear and that Erica's girlfriend was his guardian spirit. They believed they had discovered this information with the help of several peyote buttons.

Eric still believed his father was a bear when he was eighteen years old, the same year he brought cut wood into the village to trade for alcohol and caffeine and met the love of his life. She had red hair and was called Sunflower by everybody except her father, who had named her Charles, after himself. As this situation may have indicated, Sunflower's father was insensitive, and so she was eager to run back into the mountains with Eric and hide from the universe.

They were enamored with each other, and they began their life in their own shack on the same wooded land on which Erica and her girlfriend still lived. They spent the cool summer evenings in a shaded hammock protecting one another from the chill of the wind. Early in their life together, Eric lured Sunflower into the tall grass by the shack. He believed he was seducing her, but she was still a child in many ways. Charles, the state of Tennessee, nor I would have approved.

When Eric was finished he stood above her as she quietly cried in the grass. He said, "My father was a bear," and his silhouette floated away against the dusk sky.

Eric woke up on the floor of the shack the next morning. Sunflower was pressing her squirrel rifle into his chest and crying. "My father is a huntsman."

She pulled the trigger and the bullet entered his chest and sucked the breath from his lungs and the pride from his heart. She pulled and pushed the bolt and pulled the trigger again as he reached up for her. His arm fell lifeless, and Sunflower dug the bullets from his body and buried them deep in the earth in the shadow of the shack. She collected the casings from the ground and turned them in her hands in the shadow of the shack until the appropriate time.

Sunflower carefully uncovered me and picked me up with one hand by my ankle. She raised me until our eyes met and said, "Your father was the first bullet. Go to school before your brother is born, or he will surely kill you."

I obeyed my mother and went to school. I sat beside Erica who was coloring at the art table and told her "Keep hold of your senses so that you will know when to hide yourself from Ursa."

Erica smiled and switched to the brown crayon. She continued to color the bear's fur and his picnic basket. She wasn't able to understand my warning, so I just said, "I love you, mother of my mother," and helped her finish coloring the bear. This is the only completely selfless act in the history of man.

---

Satisfied with what I had written in the box labeled "Family History" and, admittedly, in some of the white space around the page, I handed the form back to my psychiatrist. She looked impatient and said only, "That was your time. It comes to 200 dollars, please." I handed her my paycheck which coincidentally totaled 200 dollars. She ignored the check and me until I walked to the door to leave. "Come back when you have the money." I nodded.

I took my check to the bank to have it cashed. I was pulled into the center lane where I pressed the button to be served. The canister for my check didn't come. Impatient, I hammered the button repeatedly and used colorful language to indicate displeasure. I put my hand into the tube to see if I could feel the air fluctuating.

The canister shot down and broke every one of my fingers off so that I was left with only my palm and five bleeding nubs. I put my check inside the canister and it shot back up. I collected my fingers with the good hand so that they might be reattached. The canister returned violently with my 200 dollars and tore all of my remaining fingers from me.

I left the bank with the 200 dollars and my ten fingers in my lap and drove myself to the nearest doctor with my bleeding palms.

I stepped into the waiting room struggling to hold my fingers against my chest, and the doctor emerged immediately. He asked me with suspicion, "Are those your fingers?"

I was speechless.

The doctor continued "Of course they are! I am required to ask that by law." He took my fingers from me one by one and took them back into his office. I sat in the waiting room until the idea began to formulate in my mind that nothing much could be accomplished in this manner - my fingers and I in separate rooms. The doctor reentered the waiting room just as I stood up, but now he was wearing a chef's hat and balancing a platter on one hand high above my vision. He walked toward me and lowered the platter until I was face to face with a crystal dish whose rim was decorated with 8 of my very own fingers which were now curled up and blue. The dish was filled half way with thick red sauce.

"Your cocktail, sir," the doctor said. "Now... I know what you are thinking, but it is common knowledge among the gastro scientists that you never serve the thumbs."

This is not what I had been thinking. "Actually," I began, "I was wondering if perhaps you had forgotten the words of Hippocrates."

The doctor frowned as he spoke, "Alas, I am not trained in the ways of the Greeks. I live only to serve the Lord Mammon. That will be 200 dollars." He slammed the platter into the seat next to me and stormed off with my 200 dollars, closing the door behind him. Since my cocktail cost 200 dollars and I couldn't turn the door knobs to exit the room until I calmed down and my palms stopped sweating, I sat down to eat grudgingly.

Before I had finished the planning phase of eating a finger cocktail without the use of thumbs, the police stormed in and arrested every one in sight (namely me) repeating "This is the biggest unlicensed massage parlor bust in years!" in the waiting room, in the squad car, and both ways down the hallway to my jail cell they repeated, "The biggest unlicensed massage parlor bust in years!" The automatic door closed behind them and it was quiet and lonely.

I waited there for eons until my mother came to get me. She crawled onto my forearm and apologized, "I came as fast as eight legs could carry me." My mother spun a web in a high corner of my jail cell and I climbed into its center. She wrapped me in her web lovingly and drained my body of its fluids - lovingly. My gracious smile was mummified onto my face.

Her abdomen bloated with my spirit essence, my mother jumped from the window sill of the jail cell and sailed the winds into the forest on a single thread. In the safety of the wood she spun a likeness of me from long strands of web. Every day she added sticks for bones and stones for eyes and more and more web until finally I spoke, "Thank you, mother," and I walked into the forest to find dinosaurs.

---

Truthfully, that is the entirety of the story I told your daughter, and so I cannot understand why you would not pay me for babysitting her. It is just as well that you do not bring her back because she consumed the majority of my Captain Crunch and imbibed an unfair quantity of purple drink and left a terrific smell about the place. I will bill you for these damages in the amount of 200 dollars which I desperately need to reattach my fingers in any case.