From the round file, or Not every idea is a good idea

PREFACE

For the past two weeks I have been planning to start writing my novel, because if that idiot Billy Ray Barnwell can write one then it should be a snap for me. I even had the title all picked out, Finding Your Inner Fannie Flagg, but then I got to thinking how it is just wrong, wrong, wrong to choose a title before writing one single word of one’s novel. Talk about putting the cart before the horse. Now that I have actually started writing, I’m thinking of calling my book Fannie Flagg Is Alive And Well And Living In Santa Barbara, California.

I picked today, September 29, 2008, to begin my novel because it has been exactly nine months since the Republicans held their primary down in Florida to select delegates to their national convention this past summer, and the Democrats held their primary that day too although no delegates were involved because Florida was a bad boy or girl as the case may be and did something the national Democrats didn’t like at all so the big, bad, national Democrats turned Florida over their knee, figuratively speaking, and administered a good spanking, whap, whap, whap, whap, whap, to Florida’s behind, the Democratic portion at least, with a wooden hairbrush or leather slipper or razor strop if there is still such a thing as a razor strop, now there’s a picture, but Florida Democrats went ahead and had their little primary anyway even though it didn’t matter in the least because any delegates they chose were not going to be seated at the national convention this past summer, except, of course, the national Democrats rethought the issue and decided that maybe a state with more than 20,000,000 people ought to be able to get to participate in choosing a presidential candidate after all, and then all was forgiven and the delegates were seated and life went on as though nothing happened, in other words, politics as usual in the Democratic party. I swear, sometimes the national Democratic party gets itself confused with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

I don’t even want to think about politics just now because for one thing it makes my head hurt and for another the world will one day forget all about Mitt Romney and John McCain and Rudy Giuliani and Mike Huckabee and John Edwards and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, to say nothing of Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, because other truly world-shaking events will eventually occur that will push the American elections right off the front pages, I mean, what if an undersea earthquake had occurred somewhere off the coast of Africa and had caused a big tsunami to come along and wipe out Florida the day before the Democratic and Republican presidential primaries? I mean, we can never really know what’s going to happen, can we? I mean, the world has already forgotten all about Dennis Kucinich and Fred Thompson and Sam Brownback, and there wasn’t even an earthquake or a tsunami. I mean, can you remember what you were doing a week before September 11th, 2001? Neither can I, so let me jump right into my novel without further ado because, as cartoonist Al Capp used to make L’il Abner or Mammy Yokum or some other character of his say, time’s a-wastin’.

CHAPTER 1