Excerpt from "The Military History of the Neolithic Period"

...Following his harrowing defeat and narrow escape back to Sesklo, General BOUGATSA ordered his troops to strengthen the fortifications of the town, and himself retreated to the heights near the town to gather his thoughts amidst the solitude of the rugged landscape that his fellow countrymen devotedly called sacred. Still, he mused, their fervor had its uses, especially when channeled in the proper direction. Of course, this "proper direction" usually involved allowing me moments of peace like this, he couldn't help but noticing.

"I'm on yuh team!" a scratchy, male voice whined in a Bostonian accent, causing our hero to nearly jump out of his fitted animal skin loincloth. Staring at the brambles from which the voice came, he found before him a rather strange sight. A man of medium height, thin legs and a roundish figure, dressed in fleece vest, shorts, and boots, was arching his back while staring up through aviator sunglasses into the bulky camera that his outstretched arms were holding above his unusually large head. Blond curly hair and blue polyester leg sleeves, like azure pollen pockets on the legs of bees, framed the figure. Of course, BOUGATSA knew neither the words for most of the items on and around the creature before him, nor what to make of this strange apparition. Silence rained upon both men in heavy sheets. In fact, it was a friggin' downpour.


After about seven minutes of mutual inspection, the tension was broken: "Have you evuh had your sons read to you in the bathtub? It's very relaxing. I used to have my sons read to me while taking a bath all the time. You should try it." The general, though quite perplexed by the fact that the person in front of him refused to say anything that even remotely followed the protocol of human interaction, replied cautiously that he had not experienced such a thing, and even managed to interject a question regarding the purpose of his new aquaintance's presence on the mountain.

"Oh, I just like to be fashionably late!" came the reply, followed by the equally enigmatic: "I came from the bog!" By this point, BOUGATSA's curiosity had been whetted enough to hasten him past the usual formalities to a directness which he normally reserved for his closest associates. By such interrogation, he discovered that his fellow mountaineer was named John Pollini, had a wife and two boys, and normally resided in a place called California. "It's nice there, unlike this area, which has the general shitty appearance of Thebes," he insisted.

BOUGATSA swallowed his confusion and, against his better judgment--which had, it's true, let him down recently--invited this strange person back to Sesklo: something told him that perhaps he would make all the difference in the coming struggle. Unfortunately, "something" had no clue what it was talking about.

Once admitted into the city, Pollini immediately began picking figs off the trees in people's yards. In another instant, he was lowering an entire bunch of grapes into his mouth, harvested from the town constable's vineyard uninvited. Not wanting to make a scene with his new guest, BOUGATSA quickly led him to his house, sending messengers to his fellow council members with a request to convene there at the soonest possible convenience. In the meantime, Pollini had struck up a conversation with his host's young son, who was attempting to play with the cat. "Your cat looks kinda thin," the strange man observed. "Maybe you should give him some pussy nibbles."

Now, BOUGATSA was not the sharpest mind when it came to picking up on the slang used by the younger generation, but even he knew that whatever "pussy nibbles" was, it should not be spoken of around his young child. After ushering the boy into the next room, he chastised Pollini for his lack of decorum.

"Like you're one to talk," countered the offender. "I noticed that your boy doesn't even know Latin. I spoke Latin to my children from birth. Of course, when they went to school and realized no one spoke it, they stopped, but when I rescued them from the horrors of public school, they learned it again. Home-schooling is really the only way."

BOUGATSA understood little of this speech. He didn't understand that Latin was a dead language spoken by a people that no longer existed, a people that Pollini stubbornly insisted survived through him. He didn't understand that to speak Latin to one's infant offspring was both fruitless and cruel. But not as cruel as what would come.

Wearily BOUGATSA asked what the names of his boys were. "Gaius and Drusus, good strong Roman names, of course! Both their middle names are Romulus, as is propuh." The magnificence of this information was again lost on our hero...

To learn of BOUGATSA's further adventures with the creature called Pollini, how the latter came to be called Boutros-Boutros Ghali, and how he advised the Sesklians to fight in the style of the flexible Roman legion, with disastrous results, look for the appearance of "The Military History of the Neolithic Period" by John Pollini, in stores across the world.*




*let the reader note that the term "across the world" is open to numerous interpretations**

**Indeed