Some say the world will end improbably

When the secretary told me "You shouldn't probably kill people," my first response was, "All right then, I'll kill them improbably!" But no, this week I think I won't kill the student whose cell phone emitted a loud, obnoxious ring tone in the middle of class or the one who sent me an e-mail message begging for mercy but who demonstrated his mastery of writing by spelling "you" with only one letter and "when" with three.

I also won't be killing the computer salesman who apparently sold this student a computer keyboard lacking a shift key or any marks of punctuation, but if I did kill him, I would do it by stuffing commas, semicolons, dashes, and ampersands down his throat so that he would eventually suffer the dismal fate accorded to Bennett & Ward in Derek Walcott's Omeros. (Chapter LVIII! Page 292! Look it up!)

And while I'm at it, this week I promise not to kill the person who invented Roman numerals or the poet who decided to number his chapters with them, despite the unnecessary annoyance these unpronounceable numerals add to the teaching of an already challenging poem. ("All right, class, can someone tell me what's happening in chapter XV?")

While I'm not killing poets, this week I won't kill Robert Frost, who every year causes cliches about nonconformity to be bandied about the classroom as if they counted as profound insights. I haven't decided whether to not kill him by fire or not kill him by ice, not that it matters since he's already dead.

I think this week I won't kill the person who designed the new radio in my old car, the radio with buttons so small and so poorly labeled that every attempt to change a channel or adjust the volume causes incomprehensible messages to flash across the little screen, messages that could actually kill me if I took my eyes off the road long enough to decipher them. Are car radios designed by mutants with 20-20 vision and fingers the size of sewing needles? If I did kill them, I'd make sure their eulogies were delivered via digital messages on tiny screens so that their squinting mourners would leave less comforted than puzzled.

This week I won't kill the person who decades ago selected the hideous shade of green that covers desks, filing cabinets, and bookshelves all over my building, and I also won't kill the one who put my name in blue icing on a cake so that when it was my turn to say something significant at a meeting last night, my teeth looked as if they were covered in blue fur. (Ingesting all that blue icing may be killing me slowly, but that's another matter entirely, one that Robert Frost never considered. "Some say the world will end by sugar / Some say by fat" is a promising start, but I can't go on without finding a suitable rhyme for "sugar," and "booger" isn't it.)

I won't kill the family member who suggested that an appropriate way to celebrate my tenure and promotion would be to finish up all that leftover meatloaf in the fridge (especially after he atoned for this error in judgment by bringing home piles of Panera bagels), and I frankly wouldn't know how to kill whoever is responsible for the wild winds that kept the tarp over the wood pile flapping noisily all night long. How does one kill a wind? Pepper it with quail shot? Where would I get quail shot? Dick Cheney doesn't return my calls.

All this thinking about how not to probably kill people has diminished my desire to do so. So I think this week I won't kill anyone at all. Probably.