Over at The Mental Couch, the big outlet where shrinks get their furniture and rubber-room fixtures, they also sell colorful, washable placemats that list all mental disorders. You’ll find Nuts, Half-Nuts, Nut Boy, Nut Meg, Donna, Astrid, etc. A perfect stocking stuffer in case you run out of feet.

Is it a dumb question to ask what exactly is a mental disorder? Experts used to say the only dumb question is the one that doesn’t get asked. New research, however, suggests that the only dumb question is the one asked by an actual dumb ball. And, according to the new Lost or Never Received Mind law, every dumb question now requires a dumb answer. To wit:

Let’s say you’re in line at the company cafeteria and you order the goulash. You then remember you had the goulash yesterday. You slap your forehead hard enough to forget all your cares and woe and there you go, singing low “Bye Bye Blackbird.”*

Then you say “Cindy, I had a brain fart. Could you give me the tuna-mint surprise instead?”

Cindy fixes you with her only eyeball—very hairy as it happens.

“Goddam it,” she says. “I already scooped the goddam goulash onto the goddam plate.”

“Heh, heh,” you say. “Sorry.”

“Sorry? You think goddam sorry’s gonna put this goddam goulash back in the goddam pot?”

Cindy’s supervisor, the former wrestler/narco mule Ten-Ton Herman Mangold, steps to her side.

“Goddam trouble Miss Cindy?”

“Goddam guy ordered the goddam goulash,” she explains goddamitly. “I scooped it and then he starts singing and throws a goddam disorder at me. Wants the goddam tuna goddam instead.”

Mangold’s eyes enlarge to the size of goddam macaroons. “He did what?”

“Look,” you say, “I’ll take the goddam goulash. Forget the goddam tuna.”

“That’s a goddam double-disorder,” shouts Cindy. Goddam Herman looks over your goddam head and snaps his goddam fingers. Two mounted transfers from the goddam TSA ride in on cardboard palominos and cut you out of the herd.

After roping and throwing you to the ground and heating up a battery operated branding iron, the one whose name tag reads ‘Goddam’ says “You never step into a chow line until your mind is made up.”

“What’s the first thing you do when you get up in the morning?” asks the second horseyman, who seems high on purple sage. His name plate reads Callahan.

“Um,” you say. “Pee?”

Callahan spits tobacco juice on the branding iron which sizzles happily. “First, you make up your bed,” he says. “Then you pee. Just like at lunch: you make up your goddam mind, then you order. Then you pee.”

“Will everyone quit saying Goddam,” says Goddam. “That happens to be my name and it’s funking with my faroukle.”

As Callahan readies the branding iron you detect a napalmic bouquet of wintergreen-flavored tobacco gob impregnated with the amoebas of pre-historic buffalo halitosis.

“You think we got nothing better to do than dump your goulash?” Callahan asks.

“If everybody did that,” says Goddam as his cardboard horse dumps corrugated poop onto the branding iron “we’d have chaos. And the terrorists will have won.”

Off topic, Callahan says “I love the smell of burning cardboard-horse-shit in the morning.”

You consider mentioning that it is actually ten after twelve, but some hidden inner strength intervenes. You say instead “How ‘bout them Cowboys?”

Later, applying I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter to your still glowing ass, you try to look at the bright side. Of course you can’t see the bright side from that angle. Still, you at least consider yourself one step ahead in the game of building your personal brand. Too bad yours will forever read “Goulash Disorder.”

*Nice work, Paul

©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2013-2016, all rights reserved.