Summer: And the Living Wasn't Easy

IT'S GOOD to be back in the pages of Cambridge's only breakfast table daily, and for those of you who aren't on my select mailing list, here's a brief summary of what I've been doing this summer:

In May I left early for Reno, Nevada, for a brief visit with Harvard Professor of Ethics emeritus Larry Lounge. Larry's doing pretty well considering the stroke he suffered while freebasing at 100 mph down Sunset Strip with a naked hermaphrodite. He soon plans to open a special ethics school for Democratic presidential hopefuls.

From Reno I took a bus to L.A., but the bus broke down in the desert and all we could find to eat in the arid wasteland were dried peyote buds.

Fortunately, after a couple of hours we were picked up by the "Up With People" touring company, so everything was pretty cool. They taught us some neat songs we all could lip-synch along with, including some old Captain and Tennille tunes. We had a swell time until the peyote set in and we started to have vicious hallucinations and were forced to kill and eat "Up With People."

AT ANY rate, the police found the bloody remains and so I had to spend some time in the slammer. Jail was OK until I told everyone I had AIDS, and they got offended and kicked me out. My feelings were hurt, but it was just as well, as I had to get to L.A. to get ready for the harmonic convergence in August.

The month of June was spent planning and developing a property in West Hollywood which I had calculated to be, first of all, one of the seven major harmonic convergence power foci, and second, the most undervalued commercial property on the West Coast. Unfortunately, it turned out to be neither, and not only did I lose a bundle, but the world will be obliterated by angry aliens at the turn of the century.

During the month of July I watched cartoons.

At the beginning of August I conceived of a great new plan. I embarked for the People's Republic of China with a proposal for the world's first truly effective anti-missile system. The idea I presented to the Chinese leader was this: imagine a whole bunch of people standing around the Chinese border. When they see a missile coming in, they all call all their friends, and these people then call all their friends. Then, when everyone in China is ready, they all jump. The world is thrown out of its orbit, and the incoming missiles are lost in space.

"But," Deng said to me, "If the world is thrown out of its orbit, won't there be a danger that the earth will be plummeted into that huge ball of fiery gas, the Sun?"

I gave Deng a good look in the eye and said, "For Christ's sake, Deng, what do you want, a safe nuclear war?" But he still didn't go for it.

When that deal fell through I really had to scrape hard to get some cash together for the trip home, and by the time I got back Stateside I was broke. For the first time in human memory the McDonald's down the street wasn't hiring fry-boys, so I took a minimum wage job working for the Michael Jackson International Corporation Amalgamated.

THE CORPORATION likes to keep its image up to date, and apparently cleft chins are in this year, so the big brass decided to revamp the product. Most of the work on "Michael Jackson" was actually done on computers, of course, but in order to keep the public convinced that there really is such a person as "Michael" they sent me door-to-door to pencil in the new cleft on fans' posters while they were away.

Most of the time it was pretty dull--but along the way I happened to run into Paulina Porzikova; she's going to bear my love child now, so I guess everything worked out OK in the end.

Well, now I'm back, and it's it's good to see the smiles on the faces of old friends. It will be a little while before this year's marijuana crop comes in, so I think I may take one more trip overseas before settling in for the semester.

Some friends of mine and I have come up with a great plan for making money in the Persian Gulf: now that so many naval ships are stationed there, it stands to reason that there will be a lot of thirsty sailors, too. Where will they buy beer?

That's where we come in. We've subleased an old cruiser from the Iranian navy and plan to stock it with cold kegs of beer. Then, when we spot a warship, we'll cruise right in front of it and drop these kegs off the stern. The sailors on the warship will then radio us their Mastercard or Visa numbers and scoop up the kegs. It's sure to be a moneymaker.

Rutger Fury, instructor of Expos 97: "How to Write Short Stories about Coming Home from College for the First Time", is a close personal friend of Jeffrey J. Wise.