Dr. Faustroll Writes the Wrongs

Bruce Jeffrey Pardo? My God!

I had a dream last week that had Bruce Campbell, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Don Pardo in it. It was a warped and twisted dream that were I not a pataphysician and merely a consumer of overpriced and underperforming health care services, I am sure I would have shared with my therapist.

We all know that the only reason therapists, counsellors, psychologists, psychiatrists, and life coaches exist is to provide cover for HMOs and insurance companies to bilk ordinary Joe the Plumbers and others of their ilk into subjecting themselves to treatments they do not need for ailments they do not have.

Well, when I said we , I was speaking in the regally pataphysical sense where each imaginary subject of the imaginary kingdom or queendom or parthenogenidom of his or her or its confused patience has not been sufficiently tried by the health care industry, which is not at all imaginary, at least in my experience.

But to return to the point, Bruce Jeffrey Pardo, dressed in a complete Santa Claus suit, carrying a present that turned out to be an homemade flame-thrower, knocked on the door of his former in-laws on Christmas Eve in Covina, California, and — after shooting the pre-teen girl who answered the door in the face — proceeded to unload four automatic weapons at the party-goers present before setting the house on fire with his special present.

I’m reminded of Officer Clay Aiken Friendly who gave a lecture to a class of junior high students back in the 70’s before I was supposed to teach them how to write poetry. Officer Friendly was there to counteract whatever influence my long-haired hippy self in those days might have on the largely illiterate audience of the offspring of millworkers in a company town you wouldn’t recognize even if I mentioned it.

Officer Friendly gave the kids his canned lecture about the dangers of drug abuse, getting to their level by telling them no one is perfect and many have slipped and fallen by the wayside, but your family and friends and community are there to help you up and set you back on the right path to the place where all good people are fixing to go. That’s an approximation, which is why I didn’t put it in quotation marks like a good journalistic member of the liberal media might do.

And then Officer Friendly reached down to that primal place where many good moral and religious messages are born, such as those named Bruce Jeffrey Pardo, possibly.

“Boys and girls,” he said, which is as much as I can accurately remember when he began, I must confess that even I once smoked marijuana, that evil gateway drug to heroin addiction and a life in in prison, and you know what? “It made me want to rape and kill.” That I remember perfectly.

I almost coughed up a black tar lung wad. God may bless Officer Friendly, but you should steer clear of him. That’s all I can say. He and Bruce Jeffrey Pardo share this much in common: they were the nicest guys you’d ever wanted to meet.

Some people said the same about Ronald Reagan. I’m sure Adolph Hitler was a swell guy too when you got to know him.

All the monsters appear to be wonderfully ordinary people who are helpful and kind and never indicated they were capable of dressing up in Santa Claus suits and knocking on a door carrying an improvised flame-thrower and shoot a nine-year old girl in the face.

On the other hand, once again the holiday season has given us a blessed message that we should not ignore. Avoid the kinds of people who are the nicest folks you’d ever want to meet and don’t trust a Santa carrying automatic hand guns.

Peace on earth shall ever passeth understanding.

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