“. . . senior administration officials have floated a variety of ideas including . . . purchasing oil in the ground and leaving it there . . . “
Steven Mufson. Washington Post.
The quarantine was over at long last, thank heavens, so me and the family were out on the patio grilling up some Persian carpets. Our neighbors the Connaughts and the Fassbinders were over as well -- Shirley Connaught brought over her famous hedge fund salad and Tom Fassbinder contributed a cooler of bottled geranium sap. The kids were in the pool and a flock of unemployed fence sitters watched us listlessly from their perch. We threw rocks at them and were having such a jolly time that nobody noticed when the first idea from Washington floated in just over our heads and settled on the picnic table. It must have been early in the afternoon, but it wasn’t until Shirley tried to put out her hedge fund salad with gritted yeast knobs on the table later in the day that she suddenly yelled out:
“Hey you guys! Who left this whatsit on the picnic table? There’s no room for my salad and plum sandwiches!”
We all rushed over to the picnic table to see what was up. The thing just lay there, tired and dirty from its long trip from the nation’s capital. It was ready to expire, so I got a stick and pushed it off the table, then dumped it in the recycling bin using a shovel.
“I’m scared, Dad” whimpered little Suzy.
“Not to worry, sweetie” I comforted her. “It was just an old bugaboo the wind blew into our yard from far away on the East Coast. You’ll never ever see another one -- I promise!”
Little did I know . . .
A week later a whole squadron of ideas from Washington floated over the neighborhood, landing on roofs, getting entangled in satellite dishes, and even squeezing through screen doors to settle on the floor -- where our dog got ahold of one in the living room and swallowed it whole. Poor old Shep -- he began filibustering and foaming at the mouth, so I had to shoot him and bury him back behind the lolligags.
One of the darn things managed to sneak into little Suzy’s backpack. She unknowingly took it to school with her, where it rolled down the hall to knock over a janitor. He never fully recovered; he went around town buttonholing complete strangers to advise them to buy oil in the ground so it ferments into coal and diamonds. His doctor finally sent him to the state legislature, where he found an old brass spittoon and thought it was a space helmet. Then NASA took him to Houston, where he cleans all their rockets.
That’s what I told Suzy. Really, he just parked himself in a cheap bar and drank his face off.
Soon the floating ideas from Washington were floating constantly down around our heads like some grade-B sci fi movie aliens from the 1950’s. If you ignored them they eventually deflated onto the ground, where you could crush them with your heel. But boy did they stink! Like wet dog fur vomited up by a goat.
I finally had enough and called my Congressman in Washington. I had made a substantial contribution to his campaign, so I got right through.
“You people have got to stop letting your nutty ideas escape and float away!” I started right in on him without preamble. “These things land all over town out here and are scaring the children. They smell to high heaven when they die, and I don’t think they are biodegradable either. Their mangy carcasses are just piling up in the streets like plastic bags!”
He claimed all the ideas came from the White House -- Congress hadn’t floated an idea in over half a century. But he’d look into it and get back to me as soon as he learned what was being done about the problem.
Naturally enough, I never heard back from him again -- the dismal schmo.
When the nitrogen bombing was done for the year, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I gathered as many hashtags as I could find -- they hang out down around the Home Depot in the mornings, looking for dirty work -- chartered some planes, and strafed all incoming floating ideas from the East. If they were floating in from the west or the south or the north, that was okay -- they always proved to be harmless and were most often just ideas on variations of avocado toast. But anything that floated in from the East Coast, any kind of idea or concept, even if it was less than half-baked or innocently hare-brained, we ruthlessly shot down like a dog. My crew and I accounted for over twenty kills before those pesky ideas took the hint, floating instead over towards the needle nose pliers crowd in Biffwood County.
Floating ideas from Washington no longer bother us in our handsome city. We eat our bread by the sweat of our equity and bathe our feet in rosebuds -- with the serenity of marble angels in a potter’s field. And little Suzy has learned to snore.
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