Seven Escapes: Concluding Remarks

Seven Escapes: Concluding Remarks

A scintillating saga, these seven escapes, sending spirits soaring, defying depression, promote possibilities for incarcerated imaginations, a sponge for sodden souls and spirits, appropriate advice for artless adolescents, suitable suggestions for superannuated sourpusses.

Curmudgeons who can count might cry, "Seven, swindler? The sum stands at six!"

Silence simpletons, for Sister Archipelago's supreme seventh son, jaunty Jehudiel, bettered his brothers, effecting an exhaustive escape, transcending the terminus of this text, for not even confabulation could confine him.

Seven Escapes: Sealtiel's Breakout

Sealtiel sat in his cell and sulked, believing a break-out like his brethrens' to be beyond his begetter as adept attorneys had advised police to prohibit packages with perilous perishables and thus Sealtiel, so ceaselessly smart and subtle, hardly held any hope.

Heedful of hindrances like the victual veto, the man's mother mailed him a mild monograph, a tame tome causing no controversy amongst cops for the text's tedious title aroused no apprehension, for Critical Applied Linguistics sounded stuffy, stodgy, stale, and subdued.

Sealtiel wolfed down words, reveling in reader, finding faculty in phraseology, might in morphemes, power in portmanteaus, and commenced to communicate to his captors in insipid institutional idioms, prison parlance, the lexicon of law, judges' jargon, warden wording, police patois.

Baffled, befuddled, and bewildered by the rhetorical rampage, the confused custodians conjectured they had caught a cop, withheld a watchman, locked up a lawman, detained a deputy, and with abounding apologies, set Sealtiel free.

Seven Escapes: Barachiel's Breakout

Worried wardens wilted while worrying about how to contain convicts conceived by canny creators, for Sister Archipelago continually connived and contrived and saw her sons set free, so they set in solitary her bastard boy Barachiel, preventing all pleasures, save certain self-published paperbacks and parcels procured by post.

Barachiel, mindful that mailed munitions would wind up with the warden, guffawed greatly upon emptying envelopes from his forbearer, finding not firearms, flamethrowers, nor files, but a plethora of prepackaged peanuts, and rapidly ripped them from their wrappers.

The clever criminal clambered on his cot and doused the ducts with dust, putting the peanut powder in the pipeline, ground the goober grit through the grates, and patiently paused as the particles promulgated throughout the penitentiary.

Sister Archipelago had ascertained that acute allergies afflicted all attendants surveilling her son, and since anaphylaxis acts apace, Barachile gave ear to garbled groans and strangled squalls as airpipes astringed six seconds after cell doors had been unsecured for Sunday night supper.

Seven Escapes: Uriel's Breakout

Three for three in thwarting the authorities, Sister Archipelago then set about unfettering her unpardonable urchin Uriel from his penal predicament by blueprinting another bestial booby-trap, to bring about befuddlement by breaking in from beneath, to breach the bottom bulwark of the presumed impenetrable prison palace.

Within the yard walls, Uriel decumbently drew designs in the dirt with his dusty digits, depicting dreams of deliverance, having heard of his brother's auspicious abdication, when he sensed shaking in his shanks, reverb near his rear, trembling beneath his tuckus, and he fleetly found his feet.

The ground groaned and gave way to an O-shaped hole, outstretched and open as Uriel's own orifice, revealing a roustabout from furry familia Talpidae, a sedulous scamp, a mole most marvelous, mammoth in magnitude and burly from boundless burrowing.

Sensing the scenario's significance, Uriel pirouetted into the pit and followed the faithful fellow for four fatiguing fortnights, eating only earthworms, eschewing pursuers in twisting tunnels carved through the core of our terrestrial sphere, until alighting in the French and Southern Antarctic Lands on the far side of the globe, bought a small bungalow, and lazed on the beach slurping drinks with umbrellas.

Disenfranchised on Election Day

Most readers of this space are familiar with voting irregularities in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, and many Americans pledged to keep a close eye out for any such irregularities in 2008. To this end, I registered last week to be a poll observer on the web page for the City Clerk on the City of Madison's web page.

After waiting a week and receiving no response, I registered to volunteer again as an observer yesterday (Monday, November 3) for the polling station nearest my home. I received an email confirmation:

Date/Time: 11/04/2008 (2:00 PM - 4:00 PM)
Location: xxx High School
To cancel this registration, click the following link:
http://www.cityofmadison.com/isevents/registration_cancel.cfm

That is the email in its entirety.

I was concerned about this lack of information but figured that things would shake things out in the end. Now I realize that I should have phoned election officials immediately since things did not seem entirely on the level.

I arrived at the polling location at 1:00 to do my civic duty and cast a vote of my own. I also inquired about where I should go to attend the orientation session for observer training. Cue shifty eyes, suspicious looks. The women at the voter check-in station I spoke with appeared uneasy as they said they didn't know what I was talking about. They didn't know who I should talk to, or where I should go. They turned to a woman sitting near them wearing a large yellow button that read OBSERVER.

"You're an observer, right?" the registration woman asked.

A somber nod. "I am an observer," she replied but declined further comment.

I gave a curt nod of my own. I could see I was being railroaded. Ramrodded. Blackballed, blacklisted. Call it what you want. I was being disenfranchised.

That's when I began some informal polling of my own. The results are staggering. Consider Table 1.1 below:

Table 1.1 - Voter to Volunteer Ratio

Clearly the odds were stacked overwhelmingly in favor of the pollsters. As a voter, I was in the clear minority.

But it doesn't end there. Consider Table 1.2:

Table 1.2 - Pollster Activities

The operation was working like a well-oiled machine. As I kept two people busy checking me in, that left over two dozen others at the ready, some watching me very closely. Too closely perhaps. Big Brother is watching?

For all the talk about coming together as a country I could still sense a deep divide in the faces of these people, allegedly from my own community. Table 1.3 shows my perception of how my attempts to help were received:

Table 1.3 - Pollster Attitudes

Perhaps the following two tables are the most damning to the system. Not only were the pollsters primarily female, but analyze these numbers:

Table 1.4 - Poll Worker Age

Table 1.5 - Poll Worker Race/Ethnicity

This election was supposed to be about change, about new beginnings, but now I see the rhetoric was just hot air. As long as the elections are rigged so only retirement-age white women get to volunteer at the polls in overwhelming numbers, nothing is going to change. How many young white men are going to be denied their right to volunteer on election day? How many will be turned away from polling places?

This experience has shaken me to the core and has shredded my last bit of hope in democracy. I'm moving to Canada where everything is perfect.

Seven Escapes: Raphael's Breakout

Wary wardens obstructed the former sister's visitations but she, the perfidious progenitor of odious offspring, continued her conniving, watching for weaknesses in the puissant prisons confining her kin, until her scheming sights set on the open-aired yard, where hostages shot hoops beneath wide-open skies.

She shipped Raphael a silver suit of shimmering scales and didactic diagrams for donning this gear, for cinching the cowl, for holding the hood on his head, to snap the suit tight to his trachea, zipped to his lips and, when absolutely attired, he should flagellate and flounder high up in the air.

The former sister abided nearby and upon sighting her sun through spyglasses in his slick shining scales, she unhooded an enormous eagle, a phenomenal female falconiform, an accipitridae of preposterous proportions acquired in Talkeetna, Alaska, and whose penetrating pupils spotted the most substantially-sized salmon she'd ever seen.

She soared over razor-wire, swooped inside the structure and, as the guards' maws gaped, snatched up the son with her talons, claws capped with rubber nubs (Raphael praising his parent's precise planning) and conjointly they soared back to Talkeetna, where he made a fine living selling dried moose meat to tourists.

Seven Escapes: Gabriel's Breakout

Upon visiting her second son, the former Sister Archipelago presented him a pair of surgical gloves, smiling sweetly at the guards as she declared her desire to shield her son from the filth within the walls, but Gabriel, bless his scheming soul, presumed her purpose and upon returning to his chamber, disrobed and donned the green mitts, then fingered his fanny, invaded his void, clutched his rectal rim, and proceeded to pull.

The skill requires steady tension so the skin cannot go slack, to persistently pull as the flesh folds inward despite discomfort, until achieving an epidermal reversal, achieving a converse corpus, producing bone scaffolding adorned by gummy organs sheathed in mucus.

The overpowering putridity prompted the guards to probe and on sight having seen the spectacle, and socked the cellblock in lockdown to catch the culprit of the monstrous misdeed but, discovering naught, declared the prisoners' insurmountable innocence and cast the carcass in the trash.

The former Sister Archipelago waited at the dump, found the fetid form and placed her foot on his forehead while she tugged on his rump, peeling him back until his right self was on the out, as she and God had intended.

Seven Escapes: Michael's Breakout

The guards knew not what to do for there was no precedence for mothers visiting sons on conjugal visits, and wishing to avoid trouble (and packs of raving lawyers) they provided a private space replete with supplies such as soap, condoms, tissues, sheets, pillows, and towels, as the entry for Wikipedia prescribes.

The curtain had no sooner closed than the former Sister Archipelago crouched on the gurney, spread her legs and bore forth a dwarf from her elasticy folds and, wasting no time, Michael opened his mouth wide, and in clambered the contraband creature, masked behind molars.

The former Sister Archipelago split after sixty seconds and the guards shared smiles that knew not half as much as they supposed, ignorant that Michael bore in his mouth a miniature mason, a maniacal misfit midget, a villain who could vomits tools from a sleeve sewn in his stomach.

That night the dwarf hacked up his hammer, coughed up his chisel, and then scored the stone, worked on the wall, stripping away layers of shale like some mad excavation, until he butted a block loose with his fists, and on the brisk breeze floating through the hole Michael tasted the flavor of freedom.

Seven Escapes: True Stories of Inspiration

On the thirty-seventh Sunday of 1966, Sister Archipelago birthed septuplet sons in the alley beside the Basilica of Saint Mary, where Father Samuel Sizemore found her and mercilessly defrocked her on the spot, blind to the witnesses--mewling babes, seven sightless mice, screwed faces shriveled pink, baptized by outrage.

Years passed, unsavory episodes supervened, a series of sundry crimes committed, and one by one, the seven sons of Sister Archipelago were brought before unbiased judges, tried by unprejudiced juries, and were condemned to hard time in Level Six prisons, with walls as high and sturdy as those of fabled Troy—-yet we all know how that story ended.

Reader, this is an instructional tale intended to elevate the spirits of even the most cynical crank, as the stories of these men's liberations speak to the ingenuity and perseverance of the human soul—-and if the remorselessly guilty are capable of such feats, just think, to what unparalleled heights might the innocent soar?

(to be continued...)

Date On This

Date on this:

In 1159, A Woman of No Importance bid farewell to Congress II, quoting a line from a ballad: "A gun turret exploded aboard the USS Iowa."

In 1393, India announced ''Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.''

In 1439, Oscar Wilde recognized the Soviet Union atop a Soviet rocket.

In 1549, the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical ''The United States Went Off the Gold Standard'' opened against Nazi forces.

In 1983, the play ''Jews living in the Warsaw Ghetto'' opened on Broadway.

In 2178, during World War 47, tens of thousands of began a valiant but futile battle for American independence.

In 9751, Gen. Douglas MacArthur had launched his first satellite "Carousel" from the Netherlands.

In 9981, sailors were killed at the Haymarket Theatre in London when relieved of their Far East command by President Truman.