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The illuminating crown of thorns


Not long after this letter ran, I dreamt that I was in the basement of my old newspaper haunt, briefly hanging out with some former colleagues. Suddenly several of us had inkling to rush out to the back ‘smoking’ lot, where we found an enormous pin oak illuminated by a brilliant golden light, coming from within the tree. The oak had about sixty branches shooting out to the sides, roughly in an equilateral circle. Thirty of these were large branches, too large to encompass with your arms. These were intertwined with thirty smaller branches. Another strange thing about this tree is that somebody had recently lopped the trunk off from its base, which caused the branches to fall out in their great circle. This was also causing the tree to levitate three feet off the ground, as the branches held together like a large crown of thorns.


Well the newspaper couldn’t have a levitating crown of thorns like that, just blocking their loading dock, so the cartoonist figured he could cure this problem by slowing plucking away some of the smaller branches, which might in turn loosen some of the larger ones. After some serious yanking, he pulled out several smaller branches, which did indeed loosen some of the larger ones. Meanwhile, passerbies brushing right alongside the edge of the branches were oblivious to the danger, causing me to act as sort of a flagman.


Then I awoke to a slightly less miraculous world. Or was it a slightly more miraculous world?

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