Article: 178442 of talk.bizarre From: brett@cthulu.bu.edu (Evolve or Perish) Newsgroups: talk.bizarre Subject: REPOST: a visit to the ontologist Date: 1 Dec 1994 08:43:27 GMT Organization: The Garden of Arcane Delights Lines: 46 Message-ID: <3bk2bf$llb@news.bu.edu> Summary: more angst-free fluff Keywords: very early post, maybe even my first Status: O I still remember my first visit to the ontologist... Oh, of course I didn't think I needed to go. I was nine, and what could be dorkier than one of those awkward appliances? But I felt the same way about my braces, and I guess it's a good thing I wasn't allowed to take charge of my life at that age. I don't remember what the original problem was - something to do with the charges of my component particles, I think. Anyway, it was causing trouble on the playground. The other kids would explode whenever they came into contact with me. I thought this was pretty cool, but there'd been complaints... I got to miss school the day of the appointment. The office was in one of those glass buildings - the kind with atriums in the center and all the office names are in tiny print on the tinted glass doors. I'd been pretty calm all morning, but I remember being terrified as soon as I walked into the waiting room. It wasn't the fact that I was there in the office - the muzak, the plastic ferns, and the ancient Sports Illustrated magazines were all quite familiar from all of Mom's doctor appointments before she had Katie, my baby sister. What scared me were the people in the waiting room. One of them - a gray-haired man in a suit - was surrounded by some sort of gravitational distortion. I could feel *pulled* toward him, but fortunately I was too heavy to join the pens, coins, and scraps of paper that covered him. Then there was a young black woman - well, I don't know if she was African-American or not. You see, she was unable to reflect light. And there was one poor person who had been wheeled into the office in a magnetic bottle. I never did find out what was wrong with him, or if he ever got any better. Mom and I sat down, and I stared at the covers of the magazines. Too soon, my name was called. b r e t t --