The Mad Rooster & The Dither Hen

That is the name of a short story that a genial fellow named Abraham Meddle was working on, his fourteenth &, he believed, most successful short story, the night he met a particularly embarrassing end while working (as he did his entire life) at the West Bubonic Paper Mill somewhere on or about a more or less empty township in the vicinity of West Texas.

The story was a simple one - a rooster who was not able to afford his meds (due to the Bush Administration's cruel restructuring of the Medicare/Medicaid needs policy) experienced a not unhappy resurgence of his schizophrenia & started to wreak havoc in the hen-house where he spent his idle time. The rooster, while not handsome, was the best the ladies in the house could hope for, but usually only when his demons were under control. When not, he tended to rip his (& others') feathers off their bodies, fly madly at the chicken wire, & issue denunciations of left-wing political candidates in a manner one matron described as "Ann Coulter-ish," which was not fit for polite company.

The dither hen was, as expected, a rather fussy & absent-minded old thing nearing the end of her laying cycle who managed to come up with a way to save the rooster without drugging him (using principles she gleaned from a cross between Christian Science & Scientology) & the body of the short story included inspirational & hilarious descriptions of the treatment & "cure" (Meddle was never interested in clear-cut endings) of the Mad Rooster, & possibly (it was unfinished) the eventual eating of the rooster & hen by a hungry family who were slowly starving thanks to the abandoning of the social safety net under the current administration in favor of "faith-based" initiatives, & the local churches frowning on the dither hen because Scientology is un-Christian & therefore leads its adherents to perdition.

Self Help Radio is glad to be able to summarize unfinished works as part of an ongoing series funded by the Confusion Group in association with Leanr To Rade, the adult literacy group run by dyslexics.

Self Help Radio dedicates its most recent show, Indiepop A To Z # 16, to these tireless advocates of whatever they care about. It's available, as are many other shows which these groups have nothing to do with either, at selfhelpradio.net. You may proceed there now single file.