His forehead furrowed as his memory began to take over.

He drifted off and his mind began to wander. The first thing he thought of was a poem he read in Lit class at the University of Delaware..."When I see birches bend to left and right across the lines of straighter darker trees, I like to think some boy's been swinging them. But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay. Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them loaded with ice a sunny winter morning after a rain..."

Ah yes, Robert Frost, great American penner of pungent poetry, the man who gave us "Something there is that doesn't love a wall, that sends the frozen groundswell under it" (no doubt, had he been a banker, he would have written "something there is that doesn't love a regulation"), the one who poignantly observed "Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in" ( a destination that Mark was starting to despair of reaching anytime in the near future), the one who, with Joyce Kilmer (whose parents must have had issues of their own to name their son "Joyce")--the one who foisted "I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree" upon the world (and thus inspiring a thousand caricatures of that deathless line)--spring to mind when considering poems about trees, although at least Frost, not having been born in New Jersey, escaped having a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike named after him, an indignity bestowed upon Mr. Kilmer (as if his name weren't enough), all of which rumination caused Mark to think, "Forget the rock band: I'll become a writer and write The Great American Novel!", completely unaware of Philip Roth's trenchant observation that "The great American novel is not extinct, like the dodo, but mythical, like the hypogriff."

Quote:

---

after a rain

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, a R ain E mitting S ubstantial P roportional A mounts which began to bring on the worry of the town possibly flooding ...

The new reg was void and without form, for it was without purpose, with out basis, it was....the bastard reg!

But the regulators knew this and called it good anyway.

Thus Mark had a thought about his "Great American Novel": The Bastard Reg. The bastard, scorned and mistreated, it will be a story of sadness, misery, pain and confusion... sort of like a Russian novel, only in English.

A novel to deal with the age old question: when is non-compliance acceptable? Is there, for some, a sort of divine right to non-compliance? Should everyone else, being but lowly mere mortals, be banished to Siberia for non-compliance?

And then he thought, "If you are non-compliant, and nobody knows it, are you really non-compliant?" Perhaps, perhaps not. Yet another mystery of life. But the thought of Siberia sent a chill down his spine. He went and put on his sweater made of brown yak wool.

But as he walked out of the room the phone suddenly rang loud and shrill...waking him from his thoughts...it was late, who could be calling...

His hand poised above the phone - should he answer?

Figuring it couldn't possibly be a telemarketer after October 1st, he answered, "Hello?"

On the other end of the phone a gleeful voice shouted, "Good evening! May I speak to Mike, er, Mark, uh, Choo, uh, Chow, uh...Chi hoo wah hoo ah?"

Mark replied, in an astonished tone: "Who the Heck is this?!"

Honey, its me...why do you sound so flustered?

In a hushed tone, the other voice simply said, "It's time."

Mark quickly hung up the phone and paused, preparing himself for a moment he was hoping wouldn't arrive. He ran to his motorcycle, glad that he had purchased the red side car. Although it was dreary, he had a mission. How else was his mother-in-law going to get a ride home from the airport?

The woman on the other end said "I'm calling from the democratic party.."

Mark hesitated on the sidewalk. Would his mother in law object to riding in the side car? Would she even get that it was a sidecar named Desire? And did he even really want to go pick her up? He was torn.

He was torn because the word desire was now stuck in his mind and it was envoking a primal passion in him, an arousal that he had never felt before, a hightened sense of awareness that mocked him with its powerful hold over him (and his mind was also troubled by the U2 song "Desire" which was also playing in the background of his mind like a bad soundtrack).

"Looks like she's taking the bus!", Mark muttered to himself.

All of sudden, a loud clap of thunder shook him to his very core, and Mark roused himself from his lethargy, realizing to his horror that the glowering individual before him was not his mother-in-law, but the CEO of the bank, who was carrying not three pieces of luggage, but, in order, a PERK package, a Banker's Online briefing of every regulation from A to Z, and a subpoena from ACORN (and you know how nuts those people can get)!

Mark knew deep down he could never abandon Destiny, Fate(his wife) would never allow it.

Mark gunned the throttle of his throaty hog and sent the sidecar splashing through the oversized mud puddle next to the CEO.

But what about the twins, Hope and Charity, wasn't life all about them. Destiny would understand but not Fate, she knew him all to well.

I cannot respond, after two martinis, this is just too funny! Tears again, Steve!

Breathing in the deep night air until it filled his lungs with an intoxicating mix of the diametrically opposed yet oddly complimentary fragrances of diesel and cheap cologne, the intertwining molecules of which danced up through his sinuses like drunken ballroom dancers expanding in his brain with a slow hypnotic throb whose cadence held the promised and threat of a deep yet unrestful sleep, Mark picked up both Hope and Charity, their shining eyes and silvery laughter reminding him why it was that he bothered to thread his way through the insane Labyrinth that criss-crossed the everyday world of his working life and leaned over to give Fate a perfunctory kiss on her hardened check the act of which bespoke not so much a fondness of love as it was a dutiful act of familiar submission to the person who maintained a semblance of order to his life yet also kept him chained to a colorless banality that denied his inner artistic yearnings to rip away at the intricate web of rules and regulations, not only the artificial ones that insane regulators would brew while hackeling over their ill-conceived incantations of "Business Day" and "risk-based" and "reasonable" (the very mention of which could instantly gray the roots of the most hale and hearty compliance officer), but also the unspoken rules and regulations that governed the very interactions of one person to another on the street, in the store, at work or at home.

Realizing that the intense fire that once burned in his soul, that fire that once set his heart and his gut with a brilliant passion had now cooled through years of subservience to both real and imagined constraints that governed his every movement, the constraints that demanded he provide at least $100 of local and non-local items deposited to be available the next business day, the patterns of obedience that required he put forth his best good faith estimate of how much insurance his customer was already paying, the steady drumbeat of regulatory rigor that mandated he verify the low- and moderate-income status of the clients at the local free clinic before he could approve the maximum donation of $100, and the latest legislative decree that produced an almost robotic response to snatch drivers licenses from customer's hands so he could record the required information for record-keeping purposes and maintain for five years after the account closed, Mark set his daughters down, fearful that perhaps their child-like energy and innocence could somehow be diluted by his rigidified surrender to the overwhelming morass of regulatory burden that brought a comforting order to the world at the heavy price of stifling conformity.

Casting a longing glance at his daring motorcycle, he realized that he was no longer worthy of gripping the handlebars of such an impertinent machine. It was fortunate, he realized, that he had only rented it for the day, as the Avis attendant wheeled it back to the parking area where it would await, like a crouching tiger, the next client who would seek it's sleek power to devour the road in a roar of defiance that would last but a moment in time yet ring indefinitely in the shadowed memories of all satisfied Avis customers.

He hailed a taxi from the many that swarmed the Arrival stations at the airport like so many hungry goldfish waiting to swallow up their next fair. As the gleaming yellow doors opened up, he called out to Charity, Hope, Fate and Destiny, "Anyone want McDonald's for dinner?"