Last night Hans, Sylvia, Jester and I were sitting around for the first time in ages, not sure what we wanted to do.  Having each tried a wide variety of ineffective ruses and tricks to get one of the others to go get the rest of us something from the refrigerator, we dismally turned our attention to the TV in hopes of satisfying our cravings audio-visually.  Coming across an old episode of "The Dating Game" on cable, we instantly decided as one to crash it and did so.  Jess may have lost a bit of fur squeezing through the front of my 25" picture tube, being a wide-load feline and all, but otherwise we all soon found ourselves safely ensconced in the four Eligible Bachelor chairs.  A thin screen between us and the Cute Young Thing about to probe the core of our being with her deeply naughty questions was all that protected us from immediate ravishment. 

Here is a transcript of our visit.

Oh, Just For The Record: 

Hans is my very post-modern imaginary European friend, probably from Liechtenstein, and quite possibly 28 years old.  Last night, as always, he was sporting an over-sized army surplus raincoat with Bertrand Russell's "The History of Western Philosophy" in the pockets and a wild mane of curly brown hair under a borrowed beret. 

Sylvia is my long-time imaginary female companion, now 36 or so, and, as a one-time contestant on "Jeopardy!", the most media savvy of us all.  A knitting accident early in life left her paralyzed between the waist and the ankles.  Her passions in life are smirking knowingly at me and winning tap dance competitions with her still incredibly mobile feet. 

Jester, of course, is Jester, my beloved gray cat who harbors the impossible dream of becoming the next Yanni.

Now, the transcript....
 

Cute Young Thing:  If I were a viaduct, what words would you secretly spray paint on my sides in the middle of the night?

Me:  "Slippery when wet if you're lucky."

Hans:  "Those WPA guys really knew how to build these things, didn't they?" 

Sylvia:  "Yet one more rampless structure in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act."

Jester:  I'm sorry, I've been taught spraying is bad.  Would it be alright if I just scratched something nice on your decking instead?
 

Cute Young Thing: Suppose we were on a cruise ship that hit a reef, sank, and left us stranded alone together on a deserted isle.  How would you protect me from wild monkey attacks?

Me:  I would selflessly throw myself between you and the monkeys and spend my last moments feeding them chunks of my living flesh so that you might have enough time to carve a canoe out of a tree and make your escape back to the life you deserve.

Hans:  I would remind them that nearly all monkeys are vegetarians and that attacking you would clearly be a fruitless endeavor. 

Sylvia:  I think a better question is, "How might we best protect each other from all those less highly evolved species which can't understand or accept a loving relationship based on mutual respect, equality, and our fundamental right as human beings to associate with whomever we want, however we want, with or without the aid of jellies and creams."

Jester:  How big did you say the monkeys were?
 

Cute Young Thing:  It's now 5 years since we were married.  My biological clock has been ticking louder and louder.  Suddenly, it starts chiming like Big Ben himself.  By the time you get home from work, I'm convulsing on the bedroom floor with horrible pangs of baby hunger.  What do you do to help me?

Me:  I gather you up in my arms, carry you gently to the bed, and assure you once again that just as soon as every orphan child on earth is properly fed, clothed, housed, and adequately supplied with Legos, we can think about making one of our own, safe from the jabbing finger and nasty looks of Old Man Guilt.

Hans:  I rush to our emergency contraceptive kit and break out that Jorge Luis Borges quote about how sex, like mirrors and anything else which reproduces the human form, is a terrible, terrible thing.

Sylvia:  Convulsing with sympathy pangs, I run right out and stick up a sperm bank, not returning until I have in my hands a bag of small, unmarked genetic material.  If I don't make it, just dig under the old oak tree on Old State Road where fate first brought us together at the Tap Dancing Nudists Foot Loose And Fancy Free Fair.  The goods will be there, stashed safely in the Gerber baby's rattle and wrapped up in a bundle of fairy tales - I swear it on a stack of spring-fresh diapers.  Why am I willing to do this?  Because sharing your abdomen with another living, growing creature is obviously the only way a woman can find true fulfillment and I hear tapeworms are out of season.

Jester:  I'm sorry - could you repeat the question?  My mind seems to have drifted, since I don't have a penis and all.
 

Cute Young Thing:  If I were a lone tree in the forest, and you were a big strong woodsman attracted to me by my exquisite foliage and sweet smelling blossoms, what poem would you carve into my bark?

Me:  That little thing by Vonnegut which really sums it all up, I think.  It goes like this:

We do
Doodily-do, doodily-do, doodily-do, doodily-do
What we must
Muddily must, muddily must, muddily must, muddily must
Muddily do, muddily do, muddily do, muddily do
Until we bust
Bodily bust, bodily bust, bodily bust, bodily bust....

Hans:  Eliot's "I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of forgotten seas."

Sylvia:  Your gently waving branches bring to mind a passage from Sappho which has always ranked high among my favorites:

Equal to the gods seems to me that man who sits facing you and hears you nearby sweetly speaking and softly laughing.  This sets my heart to fluttering in my breast, for when I look on you a moment, then can I speak no more, but my tongue falls silent, and at once a delicate flame courses beneath my skin, and with my eyes I see nothing, and my ears hum, and a cold sweat bathes me, and a trembling seizes me all over, and I am paler than grass, and I feel that I am near death.

Hans:  That was my second choice.

Cute Young Thing:  Jester?

Jester:  "Love to eat them mousies/Mousies what I love to eat/Bite they little heads off/Nibble on they tiny feet."   Ummm, B. Kliban or Tennyson.  Vigorous licking of my butt seems to have left me dazed and confused....
 

Cute Young Thing:  Finally, what words to live by do you have to share with me, the most important woman in your life, and the millions of people now watching us starting our lives together?

Me:  For some reason, I am suddenly put in mind of an old Kleenex ad from the 1920s.  "I laughed until tears came into my eyes.  And when someone handed me a Puffs to wipe them away, I laughed all the harder."  I guess what I'm trying to say is, why settle for second best when you can blow your nose on a sweet-smelling softie like me?

Hans:  As Gustave Flaubert said in 1857 and Dan has just now so eloquently if unintentionally confirmed, "Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars."  Call me.  If nothing else, we can mingle our long, existential silences and let the stars go fuck themselves.

Sylvia:  "Keep your eyes on the stars and your feet off my groundhogs"  - that's what I always say.  

Hans:  And here all this time I just thought it was your wheels pleading for oil.

Jester:  Got milk?
 

It was sometime after I managed to disentangle the flaps of Hans's raincoat from the spokes of Sylvia's wheelchair that I noticed Cute Young Thing had selected the mechanically-gifted cameraman #2 to rewind her biological clock.

We finally found Jess in the next studio on the set of an old "Galloping Gourmet" show, passed out from acute heavy cream intoxication.

Next Sunday, I think we'll just stay on the relatively sane side of the cathode ray tube and play a few hands Rummy.

If I can keep Jess from marking the cards, anyway....
 

My wife, Amy, was originally scheduled to appear in last night's installment of life but was prevented from doing so at the last minute by a terrible clothing accident.  She was pulling up the left sleeve of a hot, tight top when her hand slipped off the cuff and careened out of control up her arm before striking her squarely in the collarbone.  Although the resulting third-degree bruises left her unable to participate in last night's festivities, she did manage to make it into work today - possibly without even hurting herself further.  

All of us here at "Almost A Jester's Journal" humbly thank you for your concern and prayers in advance.