Saturday, December the 4th, 2004

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Hinged, Unhinged, or Neither?

The quandary that beset Dennis, apart from his conviction that in a previous life he was Veronica Lake, was whether he was hinged or unhinged, or possibly neither. Most of us would not fret about such a thing, but Dennis did. There is a temptation to say that this fact in itself proves that Dennis was indeed unhinged, and to ponder why this had not occurred to him. But it had, and it added to his fretfulness. For there was so much about Dennis that was hinged. For example, when he chanced upon poisonous toads, he scampered out of their way, rather than picking them up and taking them home, as an unhinged person might.

Dennis was adept at self-preservation in a very hinged way. When he plunged out of an aircraft at high altitude, without a parachute, he made sure that he lit upon an air current that allowed him to drift easily onto a bank of fresh-fallen snow, thus cushioning his landing and meaning that he only spent six weeks in hospital instead of being coffined up and buried in that Baltimore churchyard where lie the remains of Edgar Allan Poe.

Dennis had given much thought to the idea that he might be neither hinged nor unhinged, not in the sense that he fell somewhere in between, but that hingedness or its opposite was foreign to him, as an igloo to a Maori, or a biro to a caveman. Dennis remembered, in addition to being Veronica Lake, being a caveman. The gulf of thousands of years between these lives was a blank, however, and Dennis wondered if he had spent all that time in some kind of limbo. If he had, where was that limbo, and had he been hinged or unhinged, or neither, while trapped in it? This seemed to Dennis so monumental a question that he could find no rest.

Dennis needs your help. In particular, he needs your shoes. All of them. If Dennis' story has tugged at your heart-strings, please, please parcel up all your footwear and send the package to Dennis, c/o The Veronica Lake Building, Winnipeg. Thank you.