Exercise 4 - Lance

How can I tell Lary that his conspiracy theories are growing tired, that we started calling him Fallen Stalin once we figured out that his revolutions were pointless, and on top of that he couldn’t grow a sweet moustache? The thickness of this midwestern heat makes it harder to think, makes me long for the evenings when the air seems more breathable and less like oatmeal in the lungs and a shroud of sweat and tiredness over the body. In my hand is a damp napkin, it smells like the black sharpie that so crudely illustrated Lary’s last out-blasting theory. It’s the Girl Scouts, he determined, that were the next phase of economic and socio-political corruption; they were the ones we needed to watch out for. He reasoned that the combination of adorable little salesgirls who guilted the known world into cookie consumerism; which undoubtedly followed with the unfathomable promises of boxes and boxes which some could not afford or did not want; which surely would be followed by the collectors and the thug tactics that come with unpaid debts. On his napkin, there was a sketch that looked like the etch-a-sketch version of a graph of exponential growth. On the left side was a “$” and the along the bottom the word “shenanigans,” and hovering above all of this was the worst possible stick figure of a Girl Scout. He must be stopped before this fixation progresses, before the end result is cookies crumbs and jailtime. And I will be the one to stop him, but he has thrown fists for less than this before.