Friday, October 18, 2013

MY LATE SON: Please bless this trephine with the air hissing out of the hole in my head.

Master, please remove the stone. A painting of a man having a stone removed from his head. The stone is being removed by a sham doctor. If you are a sham doctor, then you have to achieve a balance. You can't get so big and successful that you'll get caught. If you convince people they have stones in their head, and if you convince them that you are good at removing them, then you can't get so good and so big that they realize that it's all a sham. If they realize that it's a sham, then you won't be able to be a sham doctor any longer.

But, you also don't want to be so small. If you are so small--if you are so slightly regarded as a sham doctor--then that means that you don't have enough patients. You don't have enough suckers who don't have stones in their heads but who think they have stones in their heads. If you don't have enough suckers to operate on, and if you're not getting their gold, then what that means is that honest work is more profitable than your sham.

It is sad when honest work is more profitable than your sham. There is one instance, though, in which it is okay for your sham to be less profitable than honest work. That one instance is if you love your sham. Sometimes, a sham is another person. Or it's an animal. Or it's a nice piece of clothing. Or it's a knife you don't have to sharpen too often. The knife holds and edge, but the knife gets rusty, so you have to oil it up often.

Master, take away the stone. My head has been shaved. I have my mouth open. Take away the stone, Master. Porfa. Take it away. Por favor. Porfa. Muak. Q tal. The sham doctor. Gold coins coming out of his ass and going down a hole. Trapped in a glass ball. The inside of the glass ball is oily and greasy and dirty, but I clean the outside of it. The outside of it is clean. It is oily and greasy because you are in the inside of it, shaming yourself.

Glen Baxter is an excellent cartoonist. His cartoons are funny. They are humorous. They are a sham off which he makes no profit. It is a sham that loses money, that loses profit.

Some would say that a sham that loses money is not a sham, but, of course, that is not true. It is simply a bad sham. Or it's a bad sham from someone's perspective, but not from the perspective of someone like Glen Baxter, who makes comics even though he stands to make no profit.

Like the successful scarecrow, he is outstanding in his field.

In one comic, he has this line:

"The insurance salesman moved in brandishing his policies."

"The insurance salesman" is the subject of this sentence.

"The" is the definite article. Or it is a determiner. It acts as an adjective in that it modifies "salesman."

"insurance" is an adjective here. It can also be a noun--like in this sentence: "I do not have health insurance."

"salesman" is a noun. It is a concrete noun, a count noun.

"moved in" is the main verb. In this verb, "in" is not a preposition. It is a particle that goes with the verb "to move." You can tell that a verb has a particle if you can replace that verb and particle with another noun. Here, one could replace "moved in" with "advanced."

"brandishing his policies" is a participle phrase that acts as an adjective. It modifies the subject of the sentence, "The insurance salesman." Really, to punctuate this sentence using Standard Edited English, Baxter should have put a comma in front of "brandishing."

"brandishing" is a participle. It is a verbal.

"his policies" is the direct object of the participle.

"his" is a determiner. It acts as an adjective.

"policies" is a noun. It is concrete and count.

Master, take away the stone. I have a sham, but I don't profit off it, so it's really a meditation. It's the mistake I can make forever, and no one gets hurt. Or everyone gets hurt, but in such a minute way.





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