The marina where I eat my lunch, a bastion of … please hold while I look up “bastion” to see if it means what I think it means. OK, a bastion of … now “bastion” looks funny, bas-ti-on, you know, when you see a word over and over and it seems wrong all of a sudden, what I called “when words go weird” back when I was little, years before the Fox network even existed. I had a theory that if you wrote down every word that went weird on you, it’d spell out a secret message, and, as a bonus, if your own name went weird on you, you would die or have bad luck or be cursed.

Typically a bastion of peace and maritime tranquility, interrupted only by a periodic rum-soaked sea shanty (in Josh’s Imaginary Mindscape he lives near a pirate cove instead of the soulless, tepid Long Island Sound), today instead featured special guest-stars Cop Who I Know Is Glaring At My Expired Registration and Crazy Man With Distended Belly Who Is Glaring At My Expired Registration When He’s Not Searching The Ground For Maybe Cigarette Butts Or The Remnants Of His Shattered Mind. Was my enjoyment of the 1970s-era Steve Martin comedy bits I was listening to in my car affected by this Glaring? And howsabout that sandwich, did it suddenly taste like ashes in my mouth, thanks to the Glaring? And what about the guy I almost ran over after peeling out of there, the one I know was Glaring even though he had on super-big sunglasses, so big that maybe he was actually blind, what with the cane and all? Did he sully my sweet lunch hour by drawing attention to the blatant illegality of my car? Yes and YES and Y-E-S.