Port of Call: Topeka, Kansas

X: You purport to a port of call called Topeka, Kansas. Does the Navy have a port of call in Topeka? The navy has a port in a landlocked city, good sir?

Z: What about the Kansas River?

X: Ocean faring ships, my good man!

Z: It’s the cereal of villainy, man. Electronic reminders coming in on radio waves and strange pings from deep space. And if they tell me there’s a port of call in Topeka, Kansas, that’s what I want to sign up for. Why the long face, sir?

X: Because you’re clearly a mad man, and we’re not the navy, and we don’t want madmen driving our cabs or interacting with our customers.

Z: Is it fair to deprive a fare of my enthusiasm?

X: We don’t call our customers fares. And please leave.

Z: Does a leaf leave in the fall? Does a leaf levy a reliquary in antiquary times — and pinion the fruit of piñon trees in the track of alarm? Pray tell.

X: Will you leave. Get out of this office now, or I’m calling the cops.

Z: Oh the cops! Always the clap trap of the mines. The sanctuary breakers and iconoclasts. May the remnants of saints never hear what you utter in gutter times of want and despair. You are a sanctimonious pontificator of flatulence, sir. Dark auguries hang from dead trees.

Good day to you, sir!

“The world has always been chaotic. Life is unpredictable…there is no form. And making forms gives you solidity. I think that’s why people paint paintings and take photographs and write music and tell stories that have beginnings, middles and ends, even when…the middle is at the beginning, and the beginning is at the end.”

— Stephen Sondheim