The Snap

         Bob snapped. It couldn't have come at a less opportune time, but come it did. Bob, as chairman of the local Toastmasters branch in Idionville, was often invited to speak at various events, usually focused on generally ambiguous motivations.

         But this time was different. The local chapter of Manure Sculptures of America had invited him to speak on freedom of artistic expression. As he began his very typical process of fabricating his talk, the words flowed, the ideas came as a fountain and he generated his typical thirty minute talk. Bob lay down for sleep that night, the mind that generated thirty minutes of inanity, now was focused on the upcoming Superbowl, all thoughts of motivational manure, gone.

         Bob woke the next morning, refreshed, distracted and merely looking forward to completing his motivational talk for that afternoon being completed. As he drove to work that morning, he ran through the notes of his talk, mentally, still formed and driven for excellency by his years of Toastmaster training. Inane the subject may be, Bob would still deliver a rousing, moving, motivational talk, so he supposed.

         Entering the over sized facility that afternoon, Bob was continually assaulted by the smell of manure and the calloused handshakes of far too many brown fingernailed artists. Following a brief introduction by the president and founder of the MSA, Bob mounted the stage and took his place behind the podium, a brown podium, nonetheless.

         As the words began to flow, the heat from the overhead lights began to feel a little to overpowering. Bob looked across the crowed, numbering easily over three hundred sweaty foreheads and twiddling browned fingers. And then it happened. Bob choked on his own spit, cleared his throat and deviated from his well-rehearsed speech. He snapped.

         The next twenty two minutes were a blur as Bob flew off the handle, ad-libbed and verbally assaulted every form of artistic license of which he could conceive. He attacked the ridiculous medium taken by most art. He ridiculed the mockery of all the artistic in the American mindset of creativity, caricature and novelty. He briefly considered urinating in a jar and placing a small statue of the Buddha therein, to declare it a creative outlet, but then thought better of the idea, Mapplethorpe be damned.

         By the time the police had arrived, Bob had slipped into his happy place and was quoting Shakespeare.