Next Stop: the Couch

This is to alert psychiatrists to keep their couches dusted off.

At
a party the other night a man was telling about a recurring dream. In
it he would go up to a tobacco counter and ask for a certain brand of
cigarette. At the mention the young lady behind the counter would turn
into an old crone and cackle menacingly, "Show me your tattoo!"

Unable to do so he would ask for another brand, at which she would pull a knife on him and snarl, "Prove you’re a thinking man!"

And so on until he settled for a candy bar.

ONLY IN L.A. —
A certain all-night restaurant near MacWestlake Park is rendezvous for
people who have no particular place to go except home after the bars
close.

The other night a man came in and asked for a piece of coconut-cream pie.

"Out!" commanded a stalwart gal named Trudie, who presides over the place.

"All I want is a piece of coconut-cream pie," he said plaintively.

"Out," she repeated. "You’re 86d!"

"But why?" he pleaded.

"Because," she said, "the whole idea of a grown man asking for coconut-cream pie at 2:30 a.m. is repulsive, that’s why!"

INQUIRY
Tell me, dear beatniks,
Is it really a crime
To write plain ol’ verse
With both reason and rhyme?
–TERRI McDANIEL

DISCLOSURE here that I can talk to squirrels is still reverberating fiercely.

A
lady named Mary Louise confides she has had some interesting
conversations lately with Buster, a possum which forages in her back
yard for her dachshund’s leftovers.

And North Young, the
Malibuite, was glad to read of my squirrel talk because now he doesn’t
feel so silly about telling of his linguistic rapport with Sid and
Smitty, two silverfish which adore his library shelf.

A couple
of months ago he found them having a ball on the A section of his
collegiate dictionary. They stopped chewing long enough to exchange
greetings with him, then proceeded down Page 46, wolfing great chunks
of "arcanum" and "archeology."

But when they got to the bottom
of the page he noticed they were spitting out syllables of the
next-to-last word. After that they disappeared and North concluded they
must have gone to the nearest Lepisma mental hospital.

Well, the other day they showed up again, completely cured, breakfasting normally on an old Maugham novel.

"Ever find out what caused your nervous breakdown?" North asked.

Sid and Smitty stopped chewing long enough to reply in unison, "Oh, sure, we were trying to eat ‘archaic’ and have it, too."

SPEAKING OF
dictionary backtalk, Jim Bassett came upon a fascinating standoff. An
"inverted mordent," he discovered on Page 1306 of the big book, is a
"pralltriller." And what is a pralltriller? An "inverted mordent."

It isn’t as bad as it sounds — it’s a musical term.

AS
vice president of Chaos Unltd., I feel it is my duty to report that
while visiting a friend I picked up a book titled "A New Model of the
Universe," by P.D. Ouspensky, and found a bookmark in a page with this
sentence: "Why is it that people do not understand that they are only
shadows, only silhouettes of themselves, and that the whole of life is
only a shadow, only a silhouette, of some other life?"

I don’t know, but let’s not nag about it.

MISCELLANY — Stand
back, everyone, for the Whirley Whirler, being boomed to replace last
year’s Hula-Hoop madness. You twirl a plate on a stick and hold it
aloft . . . well, maybe you do.