A strange suggestion...

Yep. Alzheimer's is setting in. Not me, praise Shatner, but my mother. Or perhaps it is some sort of virus that saps people of good taste. Regardless, it's clearly pathological.

I get a call from Mama McGhandi tonight, and she was positively gushing about the Mother's Day card that I made for her with my roommate Animala.

It was a strange sort of murder mystery made on big cheap construction paper. Instead of drawing, I used pictures from the Internet to tell the story. It was pretty funny, I like to think. So Mumsy calls and says, "Bing, I think you got something here. I mean, you should take it and turn it into a book."

"Mom, it's like 8 pages long."

"But people will love it! They love that stuff. A little tweaking and you could even make it a children's book."

"A zookeeper gets stabbed to death! There's a picture."

"Well, you'd have to change that."

"Obviously. But that's what we call the plot."

"Now, I don't know who you should contact about this, you know, to publish it, but I'm sure you do."

"Well, you'd start with The Writer's Market, which has..."

"But you should really do something with it."

"Mom, thanks, but, really, it's retarded. Seriously, I told that to Animala while we were working on it and she said, 'Yeah, well, that's the joke, right?'"

"Think of Aunt Giselle and her business."

I have to say, I thought that my aunt was making a big, slightly goofy mistake when she started her own company, but her invention, man, it took off in ways I never thought it could. So, there is that. My mother was totally stroking my ego.

"Listen, there are a couple of things that I have to do before I can even pretend to do something like that. I have articles that need to be published and I want to start working on my book. After that, maybe."

"Alright."

"Did you talk to dad about this before you called?"

"Why?"

"Did you?"

"No."

"You go do that. See what he has to say, and then we'll talk about it."

So that's that. My mother thinks that I could be...a children's book author or something like that?

She clearly never reads this blog.

Maybe I should direct her to the children's book I once wrote for this site, Bathe Your Children in the Precious Blood of God's Anointed One, You Wretched Sinner

Once upon a time, there was a happy little bunny, named Flossy Everybunny. Flossy Everybunny had the cutest pink twitchy nose in the whole of Hoppy Bunny Village. Everywhere she went, the other bunnies told her what a cute nose she had, and she'd twitch her nose for them and hop away.

Flossy was a prideful sinner who made an idol of her nose, and when the all-powerful and all-loving LORD smote her with his righteous 18-wheeler, she found herself in the embrace of the Devil.

"Flossy Everybunny," said the Devil, "You are guilty of the gravest of all sins: the sin of pride, the gateway sin to all evil. It was this sin which lost me the favor of Heaven and condemned me to the Eternal Pits of Hell, where you shall forever more writhe in pain."

Then the Devil scooped up Flossy and set upon her a thousand angry cobras, whose painful venom would course through her little bunny veins for eternity. Then a butterfingered demon with a hacksaw sloppily lopped off both of Flossy's feet, hung them from chains that pierced her eyelids and forced her to march on bloody stumps through a river of fire. When she completed this task, and following the obligatory forcible sodomy, the Devil strapped her to a gurney and forced Flossy to listen to Diane Rehm reading the complete unedited Finnegan's Wake. AND THEN DIANE READ THE FOOTNOTES!!!

It goes on like that for 666 colorful pages. Yeah, that's not gonna happen.

HJ