"I can assure you"-

I guess we all have bugbears, no matter what decade or Quarter in which we Play. One of mine has to do with the person who, in the midst of a discussion, lets go the "A Bomb" and assures me that this or that is true or has been verified by the most rigorous of means. Frequently, my sense of these people is that they belong to the same sect of Self-Worshippers who leave a discussion with the same set of beliefs they had when that conversation began.

I dunno. About 6 hours after having this discussion with a mid-Third Quarter Player, child of mid-Late Fourth Quarter friends, I had a dream that included an office at the post office from a postal worker for a water pitcher ... clear ... with thin light blue stripes that my Mother used this time of year. M and I were in this tiny Post Office mailing a giant box with a stuffed animal tucked inside. The clerk was very much like my friend, Fredericka, who works on programs for old people. She was, as in reality she is, her usual kind and helpful and humorous self, but did, indeed, wish for me to buy the pitcher on some payment plan.

I don't know what the dream was about, though I do long for those days when my Mother was about and the conversation, last night .... the "I can assure you gambit" had much to do with issues surrounding this professors experience of being treated as a Mother by her graduate students. In any case, by the end of the dream, my heart had left sinus rhythm and I was -- and still am four hours later -- in atrial fibrillation.

Frankly, especially when in this state but often during the Last Quarter, I am hard-pressed to "assure" myself that my ass is screwed on to my bottomside -- or, perchance, I just question that it is affixed securely in its proper place. Ha! If Hysteria comes from the Greek for the belief that the crazed often suffered from a wandering uterus, maybe I suffer from WAS (Wandering Ass Syndrome). Y'think?

Indeed, I do wonder what kind of Ass I am to enter these conversations with people who have little interest in what I've thought about or written about. And, truth be told, I do discount any collocutor who already is certain of their position.

Sandor Feldman -- maybe 55 years ago -- wrote up a volume on (I think it was called) 'Mannerisms and Gestures of Speech.' I'm pretty confident that I still own the book and maybe I should check on whether this was one of his speaking mannerisms that he discussed ... but I'm too tired from my heart going pitter-patter at 4 times its usual rate. If recent-past experience is a guide, I suppose "I can assure you" that I will convert back to a normal rhythm ... 40 or so beats per minute ... within another 4 or 5 hours. I'm not nearly so certain about the mounting bolts that attach my ass to the rest of my frame.

Anyhow, I'm getting older and disgruntled-er .... errrr ... and the list of expressions that annoy me is, if anything, growing. I can even, occasionally, picture myself half-deaf  in some House of Drools on Fools, shaking my cane, asking for assurances that dessert will arrive before reruns of Perry Mason end.

I guess I coulda titled this posting: Assurances? My Ass!