Poison Pie asked me to save this space for a diatribe against doctors, whom, he says, everyone naturally mistrusts. I'm reluctant to oblige him. After all, I'm trying to write a "feel good hit of the season", as they say in the business. Yes indeed. And slander has about as much to do with feeling good as do doctors, which is not to say that they are at loggerheads with each, but rather simply to imply a not-so-carefully calculated degree of suspicion and ambivalence. How much calculation? Less calculation say than goes into the calculation of anathema, abomination, and/or dark antitheses. Just the right amount of ambiguity to assure that one friend I have who stumbled into medicine that I have not altogether forgotten that he used to write poetry.
	Well, this story has really wandered astray. I think it is time to take a little break.