A furlough named phlegm

Pamville News editor’s note: The following column is an editor’s note from Pamville News editor.

In a show of solidarity with all of the people placed on furlough due to the government shutdown caused by the complete incompetent failure of the House and Senate members to do their job to keep the United States running, North 40 columnist Pam Burke is not writing a column this week.

Upon hearing this, as the editor of Pamville News, I sent one of our bravest reporters around to her home to fetch her, or as I said, “catch her in a bald-faced lie.”

The reporter used a couple of specialty tools, possibly sold to him by a locksmith of questionable ethics, to “check” to see if Pam’s door was “already unlocked.”

He said her door was “unlocked eventually” and that he “entered her home to see if she was OK.” He went on to say, in the statement he gave to law enforcement — while being interviewed on charges of breaking and entering — that Pam “seemed ill,” but later felt that “perhaps her condition was not dire.” As he assured me he thought it was initially.

She was, he said to me in a whispered conversation over his cellphone, wracked with coughing that “sounded as if a lung would be coming up anytime” and hacking up a lot of “unpleasant” bodily mucuses. Her face was red, with bulging veins and bugged-out eyes, and she seemed to be having difficulty catching her breath between coughing spasms. The description did, indeed, sound dire.

I told him to approach her with caution and stealth “to ask if she needed anything” or if she was, in fact, faking an illness. I admitted as much to the police during my own interrogation.

My reporter said in his statement that he “approached Pam as instructed,” but does not have any recollection of the events past his fleeting thought that he didn’t think a slacker humor columnist could go from “coughing hoarse to attacking force” in such a short moment.

The concussion the reporter sustained while Pam was “defending herself” from a “perceived threat” seems to have knocked some of the timeline from the reporter’s immediate memory-recall.

He does remember regaining consciousness, duct-taped to a chair, while Pam tried for five minutes to explain to the police dispatcher between coughing spasms that she had captured what she thought was an intruder — but which I maintained in my statement, under oath, was simply an attempt on Pamville News’ part to check on the well-being of “a cherished staff member.” I did say that.

Much like the great author Henry David Thoreau used his two days in jail (as a tax protest) to illustrate points in his great social piece “Civil Disobedience,” I will be using my night in jail — for conspiracy to kidnap and accessory to a crime — as the basis for my first book: “How an irresponsible Congress brought down the greatest nation, and the editor who loved that nation.”

And Ms. Burke has agreed to drop charges against me and the reporter if I swear to the Pamville News owners that she is protesting the plight of the people and not simply drowning in snot and sore from coughing and coughing and coughing.

She says protesting for her fellow Americans sounds more noble, less phlegmy.

(I have to agree at [email protected].)