TRANSIENT ISCHEMIC ATTACK

He thought it might be a stroke when he scrutinized the faces of everyone else in line. It was a blockbuster, the kind that keeps you out of showers, off beaches, or away from Catholics for a very long time. The faces blanched like the cloud of witnesses that judged him every time he left Dagmar back at the farm so he could go to the movies.
      His wife cared not a bit for P.T.'s weekly visits to the theater, his cigars, nor his addiction to Coca-Cola. So he sat down, deciding right then to get rid of all three.

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This story began as a novel, which was to address: the twilight of an agrarian economy in Iowa, (circa 1978 before the Crisis), misogyny and the art of love in rural America, the erosion/erection of culture by Hollywood, the actualization of the community of public queues, the steel and tenderness of the human heart, the act of repentance, and the redemption of humankind. I was finished after a paragraph. As I smiled smugly to myself, a creeping realization came upon me: "I'm never, ever going to get paid cash money for this, am I?"

It is, as they say in the movies, based upon actual events.