Apoplanesis (a-po-plan’-e-sis): Promising to address the issue but effectively dodging it through a digression.
“How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?” This is an important line relating to the Cvil Rights movement, what I want to talk about.
I was walking down a road yesterday. It cut through to the middle of town. It was filled with potholes so deep you could lose an Amazon delivery truck in them. As I walked along, I slipped and fell into one of the potholes. There were already ten or fifteen people down there. Some of them had been there for a week and were close to starving to death. They had no cellphone reception so they couldn’t call for help. I told them to get into a pile and I would climb up on them and go get help. One of them yelled “There’s no help for us. We were pushed down here by our boss when he decided to fire us and ‘reconstitute’ the accounting firm we all work for.”
They piled up anyway and I was able to climb out.
The first thing I did was go to the police. They told me to go fu*k myself—“It’s no crime to trap people in a giant pothole. This is a personnel decision beyond the scope of the law. You need to talk to Diane Ice at ‘Clik-Clak Accounting,’ She made the decision, she can undo it.” I was doubtful, but I didn’t want to see those people die. However, they were passive and did nothing to resist being pushed in the pothole. Why didn’t they pile up and climb out on each other themselves?
I met with Ms. Ice that afternoon. She had plastic replicas of human heads decorating her office walls. It was grotesque, but so was she. She wore stainless steel funnels on her spandex top. They were positioned over her breasts like a sort of external metal bra. I didn’t dare ask her any questions. She was fondling a bayonet and she wore a patch over one eye. I thanked her profusely and ran out the door. I heard her yell “Wise decision!” as I ran for the elevator.
I rented a tow truck to pull the people out of the pothole, but as fast as they were pulled out, they jumped back in. It was insane. I gave up after a couple of hours, hopped in the tow truck, and rode away. I went back to the pothole a couple of weeks later. It was empty, but it smelled funny.
The “Pothole Incident” was the craziest thing I’ve ever dealt with, with the exception of my mother’s “Mexican Makeover.” She came back from Juarez looking like an angry, but wrinkle-free, turtle. I had warned her, but she didn’t listen. She had read the brochure and met with Dr. Scallopini. For $500.00 it was a dream come true. But it wasn’t.
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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