Epanorthosis (ep-an-or-tho’-sis): Amending a first thought by altering it to make it stronger or more vehement.

My name is “Risky” Pelmore.

I was driving to DC from New York—actually I was speeding to DC from New York. I was going 95 and I didn’t give a damn. My SAAB would do 140. I said out loud “I’ve yet to begin to speed” and pumped my car up to 98. The faster I went, the faster I wanted to go—I hit 105 and started to slow down. What the hell was I doing going 105 on the interstate? I got the SAAB down to 70 and set the cruise control. It would keep me in check.

I was going to DC to March in a demonstration against government regulations, all of which had been proven to cause cancer in moles, which are very close to people in the food chain, according to Dr. Longjoint at Hoboken Community College. He claims to know more about everything than anybody. People call him a crackpot out of sheer jealousy no matter what says they call him an imbecile and burn his pamphlet “I Know Everything.” To retaliate, he burned copies of Newton’s “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy,” which he claims has led Western Civilization astray by counting too much, and popularizing accounting. He firmly believes that “the answer is blowing in the wind, and that the growing prevalence of wind turbines is blocking the answer with their big propellers. If they aren’t outlawed soon, we will never find the answer and become even more stupid than we are now. I can feel the truth as a very faint breeze when I get near a wind turbine and get hit on the head by chopped up Crows and Chickadees that fly into the propellers. It is ghastly.

The demonstration in DC has been organized by “Citizens Against Safety” (CAS). We believe that if we keep making things safe, that we will become extinct as a species. “Survival of the Fittest” will no longer be operational. “Safety” will deprive us of our evolutionary maintenance. For example, wearing hard hats on construction sites is leading to thin skull syndrome. It used to be, being thick-skulled was a condition of employment on construction sites. With the mandate to wear hard hats, that is no longer the case. Construction workers may have paper thin skulls leading to accidents around the home, and they may frequently wear their hard hats at home—including in bed. Probably, the worst effect of safety is overpopulation. How are we going to deal with it? I think getting rid of seatbelts would help put a dent in the population, along with getting rid of smoke and carbon monoxide detectors too. Maybe traffic lights too? Anything we can do to increase the death rate will help with overpopulation.

CAS is agitating for the abolition of the Federal Department of Safety. We don’t want the government intervening in the lives of people who would otherwise be dead. Nobody stood in Ben Franklin’s way when he could’ve been electrocuted discovering electricity. But look at today. Dr. Longjoint was not allowed to fly his handmade rocket ship to the moon, because it didn’t meet so-called safety standards. For example, he was cited for building the fuselage out of tin foil held together with zippers. So what? He is a free man and he has a right to act like it. Get off his back Uncle Sam! He is not a pawn in your game! And oh, one more thing: life jackets. If you want to risk drowning that’s your business, not the US Coastguard’s. God! It makes me mad!

I hope to see the Scissors Brigade down in DC. They March carrying scissors with pointed ends up. They drive the “safers” crazy with the simplicity of their potentially fatal risk-taking.

Well—see you in DC. Until then, safety last,

POSTSCRIPT

Risky crashed into a bridge abutment before he got to DC. He wasn’t wearing his seat belt. He flew through the windshield, hit the abutment with his head and rolled onto the highway where a dump truck ran over his legs. He is in a coma now and his mangled legs had to be amputated. Friends from CAS sent him flowers with a note: “Way to go!”

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)

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