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"I used to do a turn in the army. I was really mad back then... [a] loony! I'd never have any music to introduce me, which was a big deal. Unheard of. I'd hop out on to the stage. It used to take ages. Hop, hop, hop. As I got nearer to the microphone, they'd hear this doddery voice going 'Do do do... do do do.' When I'd eventually make it to the microphone I'd stop and say, 'I must be a great disappointment to you all.' That's it. There's no joke. It's totally irrational. A lot of people don't get it. Still don't." - Spike Milligan
"What will be is. Is is." - James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
1. The Dim Bulb "If you guys don't listen to me, we're going to end up in that box again!" - Davy to the other Monkees, Head
The young man (boy, really) played with his fingers in the garish light cast from the lone bulb in the concrete bunker. He scratched at an imaginary itch on his right hand (just below his thumb) to take his mind off the man in the lab coat who sat across from him at the beaten, scarred, wood table. It didn't work. And whoever this man in the lab coat was, he was insistent about paperwork. He had three inches clipped onto a weathered clipboard which he flipped through with precision.
"Can I offer you a glass of water?" asked the boy's captor in a calm, sensitive tenor.
The boy, Kurt, continued to scratch the imaginary itch, which had leapt magically from his right hand to the left. Eventually the falseness of the itch would be deduced, and the lab coated man would disappear out of the cell and return with... God knows what. He had seen torture hundreds-if not thousands-of times on TV, and he was glumly certain that there would be no commercial breaks for him.
"Can I offer you a glass of water?" The question was repeated without urgency, like a forgetful waiter. The itch now leaped with the dexterity of a trained flea onto the boy's