By Scott Sullivan
Editor
Know Body
No Nordic day’s complete without a dip ringed by icebergs, glaciers, stone faces … dash inside for a sauna with thawing mermaids. I was a hemisphere away, joining Ron and Maggie Conklin imagining conquering the South Pole, seal pups, penguins, except they were there.
The Tierra del Fuego Tigress did not like swimming. Alone I lapped ice bergs doing an I-M: butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, crawl. Pittsburgh, St. Petersburg, Burger Kings bobbed beside like dream clouds. Doing the back-, I spouted water heavenward like a whale. The sauna was blazing when I came back.
“Thanks, for heating my rocks,” I told the Tigress. “My skin’s braced, tingling.”
“Like the towel’s nap?” she purred.
“Zzz.”
“Again?”
I woke up looking through a camera, lens cap at last unsealed. Molecules became light vapor. Condensation.
“Condense further,” she said. “Atomize your image. Does gravity bond electrons, protons, neutrons? Show or don’t.”
“I need sound,” I said. Robert Johnson landed in his blue Terraplane. “Sweet ride,” I admired.
“Detroit’s Hudson Motor Car Co. made them from 1932-38,” the Delta Blues King said. “Slogan: ‘On the sea that’s aquaplaning, in the air that’s aeroplaning, but on the land, in the traffic, on the hills, hot diggity dog, that’s Terraplaning.’”
Rand Paul and alleged fellow medical expert Robert F. Kennedy Jr. showed up with spoiled meat from a Wuhan, China, wet market, Clorox to wash it down.
“Fauci’s a fraud,” cried Paul.
“Graduated first in his class from Cornell Med School 1966,” I said.
“Yeah?” said Paul. “My dad was a 12-term U.S. Senator who got me into Duke Med School even though I didn’t graduate from Baylor. Then I became an eye doctor.”
“I’m a Kennedy,” said Junior.
“What are your degrees in?” I asked.
“Politics, law, the usual family schools.”
“Medicine?”
“Take that mask off your lens,” Paul said.
Ron and Maggie were off shooting mesmerizing ice formations so abstract they had to be real (see Page A6) except when they melted into watercolors.
“Global warming’s a hoax,” Paul said.
“Why’s there condensation in my lens?” I asked.
“Tighten your focus,” the Tigress said. “Hot rocks will do it.”
I knew there was gravity just like the fetid stench of politics, but needed glass I could see through. Philip Glass and Einstein showed up.
“Near the two poles, gravity’ is skewed,” said Einstein. “The geographic north pole, where latitude and longitude lines converge, lies in the Arctic Ocean 10 degrees distant from the magnetic north.”
“Compasses,” Glass added, “don’t point pure north, but to Alaska.” In walked Sarah Palin.
“Ya know, I ran twice for Congress last year,” she said, winking. “I saw the Russian spy balloon comin’ …”
“Not the Chinese one?” Paul asked.
“I don’t trust Chinese meat,” Palin said. “I shoot, skin and eat moose with onions. Saw that Russian balloon comin’ from …”
“That was Fauci’s wild pitch from the 2020 Nationals-Yankees baseball game. A little off mark,” said Kennedy.
In walked Cindy Gamrat. “How’s that inoculatin’ the herd thingy goin’ for ya?” Palin asked.
“Todd Courser said that, not me,” she objected, though apparently not too hard to him “after we got caught en flagrante at the Lansing Radisson. I changed family values. Now my name’s Bauer. How ya’ doin’ with your Todd, Sarah?” she taunted back.
“I don’t go for catfights,” the Tigress said.
“I could use a hot toddy,” said Johnson. “The drink, I mean. Let’s all take a ride in my Terraplane”
“Hot digity dog,” I said.
“The South Pole really is semi-fixed place with a marker planted on Antarctica,” Glass said.
“Let’s go there,” Johnson said.
Tundra and ice flew beneath us. “What happened to the Russian spy balloon?” Palin asked.
“The Fauci wild pitch?” Kennedy corrected. “Shot down off of South Carolina.”
“Near Fort Sumter?” asked Palin. “Revolutionary War started there. I read that in a newspaper. Same one where I learned RFKJ is a medical expert.”
“’Potato’ is spelled p-o-t-a-t-o-e,” Dan Quayle added. “I know: Grandpa Eugene Pulliam was a publishing magnate. Plus I really was Vice President.”
“I’m supposed to show gravity with these lightweights around?” I groused. “All I see is light vapor.”
“Hot rocks will do it,” the Tigress said
“Can we talk about quantum physics now?” asked Einstein. “How can I prove constant variables without light showing gravity? What kind of shooter are you?”
“I can shoot a moose,” Palin said. “Watch this.”
“This is the South Pole,” Sarah,” Paul said. “There are no moose.”
“Mooses,” Quayle said.