A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
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132 (an I who, recall, am reeling from the triple whammy of first ballistic humiliation and then Elegant Tea Time disgrace and now being the only person anywhere in sight in a sweat-crusted wool sportcoat instead of a glossy tux, and am having to order and chug three Dr Peppers in a row to void my mouth of the intransigent aftertaste of Beluga caviar)
133( which S.R. apparently includes living together on Alice’s $$ and “co-owning” Alice’s 1992 Saab)
134 At least guaranteeing the old Nadirite comedian w/ cane a full house, I guess.
135 His accent indicates origins in London’s East End.
136 (Not, one would presume, at the same time.)
137 One is: Lace your fingers together and put them in front of your face and then unlace just your index fingers and have them sort of face each other and imagine an irresistible magnetic force drawing them together and see whether the two fingers do indeed as if by magic move slowly and inexorably together until they’re pressed together whorl to whorl. From a really scary and unpleasant experience in seventh grade,137a I already know I’m excessively suggestible, and I skip all the little tests, since no force on earth could ever get me up on a hypnotist’s stage in front of over 300 entertainment-hungry strangers.
137a (viz. when at a school assembly a local psychologist put us all under a supposedly light state of hypnosis for some “Creative Visualization,” and ten minutes later everybody in the auditorium came out of the hypnosis except unfortunately yours truly, and I ended up spending four irreversibly entranced and pupil-dilated hours in the school nurse’s office, with the increasingly panicked shrink trying more and more drastic devices for bringing me out of it, and my parents very nearly litigated over the whole episode, and I calmly and matter-of-factly decided to steer well clear of all hypnosis thereafter)