I read a line about "incest-eating bats" and an invisible portal opens into the Zone of the Almost-Right Word, that mysterious locale where conscious and conscience are confused, where people are oppressed based not on their ethnicity but on their ethicality, where issues arouse public sediment while people who say one thing but do another are described as hippocratic in nature.
It's not a bad place to spend some time on a quiet Friday afternoon. I close the door, turn down the lights, and reach deep into the recesses of my filing cabinet to draw out my secret stash: a list of lines from papers written by long-gone students whose names I may have forgotten but whose words come back periodically to make me giggle. Here I give you a little tale drawn from that timeless collection:
In the Zone of the Almost-Right Word lived a tireless champagne for human rights who so admired that great philanthropist Albert Schweitzer that he kept begging and pleating for money from family and friends so he could immolate his hero by going to Africa to immunize the beknighted natives, but despite his pleas, they were not suede. So he went on KickStarter and stirred up enough public sediment to finance his way across the sea and, ultimately, stumbled right into the middle of a gorilla war. Refusing to renounce his commitment to immunizing individuals regardless of ethic group, he became a prisoner of conscious, biding his time in his rank cell by doing calisthenics until the day when, tragically, he slipped on incest and hit his head on the floor. He spent his few remaining days in a deep comma, utterly unaware that the armies had declared a crease fire.
And there, my friends, we shall leave him.
(It's a sad story, but, like many tales from the Zone of the Almost-Right Word, it can be interrupted in many ways.)
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