Just So Much Love With Two Alternate Endings

(Memo to Domin-Nik: The NNNNNNC (Nick-Nik's New Nik-Name Committee) meets Feb 29 of alternate Leap Years. Please submit a formal request on Form NNNNN 275-987nn-09387-NN-028n (available at all Circuit City stores). In the meantime, how about The Great Pool Shark-Nik?)

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VIOLENCE

Meanwhile, The Great Dance-Nik asks whether or not Plotnik is planning to see The Lieutenant of Inishmore at Berkeley Rep. Sadly, he missed the opening and now will be out of town during most of the rest of the run. Apparently, this play was deemed impossible to produce for quite a few years, and at the Berkeley Rep run there have been rumblings by people offended by the violence, and in particular violence to animals. This fact, of course, makes Plotnik want to see it all the more, on the assumption that a play that offends a lot of people has to have something interesting going for it.

DYNAMITING CATS

Most of all, the subject reminds him, as it will all Tiaposians, present and emerita, of the time The Great Nguyen Sanchez/Goldberg/Jones brought her friend, whose name has been forgotten but who dearly loved animals, to the Tiapos meeting at The Great Wallace-Nik's beautiful home in Inverness. She walked in as Brother John Horan was reading his fantastically funny story which involved, if Plotnik remembers correctly, dynamiting a cat. In Brother John's defense, it was not a gratuitous dynamiting, that cat needed to be removed for what seemed like a plausible reason, and the story was very funny, but not to her, no. She never came back.

POOPSY DOG

Plotnik was at the coffee shop buying his French Roast beans yesterday and there was a woman on the bench in front of Martha Brothers with a little poopsy dog on her lap. The woman was talking to another woman on the bench. She said: "Oh, they just give so much love. They climb on your lap and they just love you. They just love you."

Of COURSE the little dog had on a little red sweater. His ears perked up and he bared his teeth and snarled at Plotnik, with just so much love, as he passed by. Plotnik is not someone who particularly appreciates little overbite poopsy dogs with their nasty tempers and barks that sound like fire alarms in Hell.

WHAT PLOTNIK SHOULD HAVE SAID

He wanted to say "Your little $*%&^! excuse for a dog should be (silently) run over by a Prius," but Plotnik remembered that he is the spiritual leader of a minor Western religion whose non-Twittering aspirations may be cutting into its universal acceptance, but he is nonetheless responsible for displaying a proper example for his faithful flock. So he simply smiled, walked in and bought his beans.

ALTERNATE ENDING

When he came out to the street with his coffee beans, the dog and its owner lay dead on the street, blood puddling in crimson coagulations on the deceased dog's sweater, once sweater-red, now, heh heh, blood-red. The second woman stood over them with a bloody hatchet. "I TOLD her if she said "they give just SO much love" ONE more time I'd cut her and her dog's head off with an ax, and, well, she wouldn't stop, so..."

ALTERNATE ENDING 2

When he came out to the street with his coffee beans, both women were eating the dog. "He gives so much, y'know, meat..." said the first woman.

ALTERNATE ENDING 3

When he came out to the street with his coffee beans, the women and the dog were gone. No, wait, this is what really happened.