The party is almost over and I will be off to work. The office calls, the mail piled here and there, the desk looking like a range of small white mountains.
Did you read The White Mountains as a kid? Aliens in giant tripods attack the earth and put metal caps on all the children, controlling them and turning them into slaves. Or something like that. A young hero escapes to the White Mountains. Together with a band of other brave kids, they decide to fight back! Action packed! A trilogy even, so lots of good reading.
Too bad the aliens lose (oops. spoiler. well, maybe not, it’s been a long time.) I would have liked to get my hands on the secret behind that metal cap business.
Fernando, my true right hand man, returns from that land to the south that we do not speak of. Well, we speak of it, but just don’t understand the language, being proud Americans who refuse to learn anything. It is our right! That’s what it is. Greatest nation on earth and all that crap. I hear people all the time mumbling under their breath, after they’ve heard someone speaking another language, “If you’re going to be here, learn the language.” These people seem like aliens to me. Learn the language? What language? Three-fourths the people I bump into speak in a dialect that I can only refer to as Sound Bite. Short choppy thoughts punctuated by their short choppy sentences. Prone to biting when they hear a sound they don’t understand. Keep a minimum of one arm’s length away when talking with anyone with the Sound Bite dialect.
I’ve lost my thought. Oh yes. Fernando! If I was a Mexican woman and wanted to stay in Mexico while my husband was away for ten months of the year, and I didn’t mind raising the kids by myself, and living with my mother-in-law, I would marry that man myself. But I’m not, so I have to settle for second best - employing him.
A squirt gun fight has broken out in the house! The boys must be loaded and shipped away. Pronto.
Pronto is one of those words that can or cannot be used around a person who speaks Sound Bite, depending on the situation. Avoid using it in crowded bars, within eight miles of any ongoing rodeo, or outside of a Baptist church on a Sunday afternoon. Never use the word pronto if you are incarcerated, no matter what the offense or how friendly your cellmate may appear. Your own guilt or innocence has no bearing on the matter.