Ah, for sweet spring!

The sun is shining.

The sky is clear and blue.

The birds are singing.

Now some vagrant starts harassing you!

The deep dark creviced haunts wherein the human bile of the collective urban digestive tract you humans so witlessly call ‘the streets’ somehow vomits every April, like a great unsavory bellows, spewing its proto-human contents—that’s right, onto my lowly avatar’s six-year-old work boots.

This past Sunday, April 13, I am awaiting my massive conveyance, the tube-like land ship that has been thoughtfully staffed with numerous entertainers to occupy my jaunt across town, and to serve as human shields in case of an attempt upon my august person, or as air bags in case my chauffer’s skills are found wanting. Granted they have not the social skills I had once come to expect from your kind. Their purpose though, remains.

There I stand, beneath a humming light pole erected in honor of Warlord Eisenhower reading my arcane tome. However, before I might be whisked away like a wizard upon his carpet I am approached from behind by a short stooped Caucasiod ape. He has, in his left hand a large empty gas can, with nozzle. In his right hand he holds the means by which his kind rose from the lesser apes to rule this planet: a lighter, the source of fire! I worriedly consider the lethal implications of the simultaneous use of these two devices. He puts me at ease. I should have known by now—but you humans still baffle me in so many ways—that he is engaged in ‘addiction plea behavior’; the ritual groveling practiced by those of your kind who find themselves addicted to this combustible, or that injectable, or one of your many brain-eating liquid ingestables.

He begs a cigarette, and I have none with which to placate him. He then requests currency with which he might purchase cigarettes, and I plead poverty, something I reason he is equipped to comprehend. I breathe my own apish sigh of relief as he moves off down the concrete footpath.

I notice him squatting on his haunches down the way, before the altar of your petroleum god—having used a credit card to access the church database—and is now filling his gas can with a substance so flammable that I once advised the Hierarch of Constantinople to use it against the besieging Arab fleet—to hideous effect, I might add. From this distance this is all I can make out, as my LaFond avatar’s optics are steadily failing.

This creature has now been joined by a tall lanky member of his begrimed pack and they begin to move in my direction. When they are twenty feet away the short fellow procures a cigarette butt from the gutter, puts it to his bristly lip as he cradles his sloshing gas can, and lights the noxious stub with his lighter. I then experience a number of taut moments as he and his hairy fellow walk by, him with a lit object between the fingers of his right hand and a few gallons of gasoline in the red container in his left hand. I now more fully appreciate the sacrifices made by my colleague Jane when she studied the Chimpanzees of Gombo. If I recall correctly one of her apes toted a gas can around as well, to enhance his status I think.

Then my chugging chariot arrives.

On assignment, Regal M-116-S