In Which Your Scribe Almosts Loses His Lunch...

From time to time, dear reader, your scribe graces the Greenwich Senior Center for lunch. Today's offering was a generous serving of roast turkey fresh off the bird, accompanied by stuffing, mashed potatoes, and petits pois, all smothered in giblet gravy. Yum! Plus, of course, a bowl of tasty vegetable soup, a fresh salad with lettuce and sliced red peppers and Russian dressing, and lime Jello with pears and whipped cream for dessert. Price for this delectable feast? All of $3, tax and tip included. The Senior Center is one of the great bargains in Town, and membership is free. All you have to do is to survive for half a century, and presto! you qualify. Nothing too difficult about that.

But the real price of the scribal lunch was far higher, alas. There was what appeared to be a crazy lady in gray wandering around, looking lost and uncertain. No one seemed to be talking to her, despite her basket of gaily-colored handouts and some kind of visual prop she was carrying in her hand.

"There's the crazy lady," your scribe said to his tablemate.

"What did you say?" he asked.

"There's the crazy lady. She lives in a world of her own making, in which she imagines things that never happened, and that have no correlation with what you and I think of as objective reality. Isn't that the clinical definition of crazy?"

"I suppose so," said the tablemate. "Is she the one running for office?"

This was a difficult question for your scribe to answer. "Well, she thinks she is," he replied at last. "But remember, she's living in her own world. It's hard to know what's really going on with her."

A short while later, a young woman came up to the table and began to solicit the tablemate's vote on behalf of Peter Tesei. Before long, your scribe heard her quoting his own blog post of four days previous. Never underestimate the power of the blogosphere, dear reader!

Your scribe finished his meal and bused his tray. As he left the Senior Center, feeling pleasantly full and relatively content, the last sight that met his eyes was Lin-Lin trudging through the rain, clutching her basket and her visual prop, utterly unattended by any of her minions, and looking every bit as gray as the weather. If you wonder why your scribe has been describing Lin-Lin as "increasingly marginalized", dear reader, this snapshot image says it all....