I 'came to' rather than 'woke up'. Where

I 'came to' rather than 'woke up'. Where was I? Some kind of expensive hotel room. I was wearing the same clothes I'd had on at the convention. "Hello?" No answer. I ran my hand

over my face. Then I heard a knock on my hotel room door. "Hey, open up. The ice man cometh!" Feeling disconcerted, I peered thru the peephole and saw a man holding an ice bucket.

Crap. Uncle Freddy. With all my anguish I tried not to open the hotel room door. But duty cleaved through my yearning for self-preservation and I opened the door.

"Hullo, Uncle Freddy," I said. "I suppose you want to come in?" Uncle Freddy strode in my hotel room as if nothing in the world was wrong. "How 'bout them Bengals?" he asked.

He knew that I knew that he was ignoring the elephant in the room, so I gave it some peanuts to avoid losing my incidental deposit. To no avail. It trumpeted and charged Uncle Fred

whose ability to ignore his problems until they went away kept the elephant at bay. Like Schrödinger's cat, the elephant in the room was now both literal and figurative. Uncle Fred

enough Sinhalese from Babelfish to order the elephant in the room to drop to its knees. Although Uncle Fred had a bargepole to hand, he didn't want to touch the elephant with it

for fear of falling in love. The law of drama states that the more a person professes they can't stand drama, the more they interject themselves into it. Therefore, Fred & elephant

were at a quandary. Could there ever be true love between a man and his pachyderm? What about the bales of hay? Who shot the raja? Found out next week on"The Ides of India."