Bold Rapaire, Good SRS, Dear Mario, Sweet Rumanci and Bright Rustic, you are all more than anyone could ask for as friends and thread-mates.

As for the brilliant BWL, his intuition bedazzles even the mystics. The truth is I was only a few miles from Kankakee, in the sleepy little farm-field town of Manteno. And in the edges of Menote is a 60 acre plot of grassy land which back int he 1930's was developed by the State into a huge, self sufficient mental institution, with lovely brick buildings and carefully tended rows of oak trees basking int he sleepy midwestern sunlight, far from the noiseo f the madding crowd, with everything modern psychiatric thinking (1930's sty;e) could offer the overburdened soul. A loony-bin with a campus bigger than Yale's, it had everything it needed to be self sufficient, a whole two story building in red brick just for the laundry driven by its own boiler room housed in a separate red brick building, another two-story red brick building for nothing but electro-convulsive therapy, and dozens more sprinkled about with little roads and sidewalks and shade trees carefully planned into place. I tell you it was the funny farm to end all funny farms, a Hoosier Cuckoo's Nest of the first order.

With the advent of placebos and strange-sounding psychoactive drugs, all this industrial plant for the management of social misfits became obsolete. Now, we just give them pills and Fox News and they act normal. It could be someone has moved the target, given the political atmosphere, but in any case the State closed the place down ten years back.

Some brilliant entrepreneur bought the whole campus for a dollar plus back taxes and is gradually renovating all these buildings and leasing them to companies as office space.

One of these is the home of Planet Undergound, where I conducted strange technical experiments all week, having to do NOT with brassieres but with the detection of electro-magnetic fields and the extrapolation of those detections into multi-dimensional perceptions of their sources. Similar to the Temple's research projects, but different, too.

Not wanting to attract any attention, I flew back to San Diego on coach, where I selected a seat on the aisle; the center seat was occupied by a woman who was large, large, and who naturally overflowed into half of my space. To avoid inappropriate cuddling, I tried to overflow into the aisle, where I was repeatedly and unmercifully rammed by high-speed passing flight attendants and clipped by passengers en-route to the loo. As the sun set in the West toward which we sped, I prayed for a full moon to work its magic on my form; if only I could become a horse, that would get me some space!! I could neigh and rampage and no-one would dare clip me or offer me stale graham crackers!

But alas, the moon did not rise that night, and I suffered in relative silence all the way to California, where I climbed into my own bed still possessed of my usual bipedal form, and slept the sleep of the throughly fed-up until morning.

Thank you all for taking care of Our Sainted Mother all these days, you did I wonderful job!

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