ROK FINGER'S DESK IS NOT PUBLIC PROPERTY
the commune's Rok Finger is recooperating in an area hospital  

Monday, Oct. 1, 2001
If there were only one message I could have emblazoned onto a tee-shirt that I would be required to wear from that day forward, like an albatross around the proverbial sailor’s neck, it would be this: "ROK FINGER’S DESK IS NOT PUBLIC PROPERTY". I’m not exactly sure how this scenario might one day come to be, but for this and a thousand other contingencies Rok Finger is prepared.

This choice of messages would be a timely one, as the world is obviously in the dark on this subject. Countless times I have come into the office in the morning to find multiple staples gone missing from my stapler, alarmingly thinned rolls of Scotch tape, and once even a hoagie stain on my desk in the shape of South Dakota governor William J. Janklow. But the most gruesome violation was saved for today, when my defenses were lowered by a freak elevator mishap at the commune’s West 194th Street offices.

I began this day, as many others, with a quick bath of mineral salts and baking soda. After a breakfast of frozen pot pies and coffee, and taking a few minutes to enter a submission in Swanson’s “Ultimate Pot Pie Ingredients” mail-in contest, I drove to the commune’s offices. Leaving my car with the gang of slouchers on the street who pass for parking valets these days, I steeled myself for another rigorous day of columnisting. I entered the elevator and reached up to depress the button for my floor, proud that thanks to the new lifts in my Floorsheims, I no longer needed assistance in selecting the higher floors. But right as I was about to press the button I experienced a sudden blinding flash of light, and the next thing I knew I was laying on the floor of the elevator, groggy and disoriented. I’d had an experience that can most easily be explained in two words: alien abduction.

Where the aliens took me and what they did to Rok Finger’s anus are anyone’s guess, but no other scenario explains the blinding light, lost time, and the clearly disoriented witnesses who shared the elevator with me this morning. As they stood and gaped, gasping non-sequitors like “Rok Finger’s had a stroke!” and “Somebody get the paramedics, we’ve got a dying midget in here!”, the signs of alien skullduggery were unmistakable.

I took leave of my fellow abductees when the elevator reached my floor, and quickly made my way to my office, eager to take refuge in the soothing hues of it’s simulated wood paneling. But believe me people, refuge was not to be mine this morning: some nogoodnik has befouled my office! Gone are the framed pictures of Arvelyn, my wife of thirty years, and Checkers, the horse I once rode at the State Fair. What kind of soulless being would make off with my Successories desk calendar, leaving this half-empty can of bull semen in it’s place? And what of these countless BMX posters that mar the walls, are they the work of a God-fearing man? Are these Jennifer Connelly pin-ups supposed to be a reference to my alleged marital infidelities with the Mount View girls’ soccer team? And what to make of the cheesecake photos with Hugh Downs’ face taped over them? A possible affront to my sexuality and the Finger bloodline?

Whoever committed this outrage, they were highly fond of basset hounds, that much is clear. There are enough porcelain basset hounds in this office to open a gift shop at the mall, should a basset hound-themed mall ever be erected.

The more I sift through the detritus left in my office, the more puzzled I become. Why leave months of dirty laundry on my office floor? Who would etch “SLAYER” into the armrest of my chair? And what could the six-foot cardboard cutout of Sonny Bono possibly mean?

Looking out my office window, it seems that even the view has changed. The pleasant panorama of the aggregate dredging facility has been swapped with this pedestrian vista of a girl’s dormitory shower and sunbathing roof. It seems that scofflaws spare no expense when pulling a jape on Rokwe- hold the phone! Someone suffering from this obvious level of mental disorganization couldn’t possibly have had the building rotated in one night’s time! I’m on the wrong floor! Good God people, in all of the pot-pie-themed excitement this morning, I must have forgotten to put the new lifts in my shoes!

Happy day, faithful reader! Happy day! To the ninth floor!