Do You Have This Condition? If So, Seek Help!

My sources say the state department of health is expected to issue an advisory later today about this, so I wanted to give you a heads up.

At any rate, there is a pretty infectious bug infecting folks all around Texas. I’m pretty sure that, now that I am recovering from flu, I’ve got this disorder as well.

The problem is there is no vaccine, and a cure is weeks away.

Here are the signs and symptoms:

1.) You find yourself having extensive nightmares that you are stuck watching a press conference by Rep. Jim Pitts but cannot hear what Pitts is saying. You fear you have gone deaf.

2.) At inopportune times, such as in line at the grocery store, you go up to total strangers and ask them things like, “Do you think Dawnna Dukes will honor her pledge to Tom Craddick?” And, you don’t even live in Dukes’ district. Worse yet, the cashier thinks you are talking about an episode of One Life To Live.

3.) You go temporarily blind after reading pages and pages of nomination speeches in previous speakers races on the Legislative Reference Library website.

4.) While waiting for dinner at a fine resturant, you pull out your pen and start writing the names of members of the House of Representatives down on the cloth napkin and try to speculate whom they are pledged to. Worse than that, after you fill up that napkin, you snatch your neighbor’s off his/her lap and start all over.

5.) Using a calculator, spreadsheets and complicated algorithms you devised yourself, you come up with each and every possibility of how the vote could come out with the three current candidates and 149 current members (which is probably over 10,000 permutations) and then start weeping because you fear it will be a secret vote.

If you have those symptoms, then you suffer from SPEAKER FATIGUE. Luckily, severe cases may be caught only by the 149 members of the Lege who will soon be voting in the race. Symptoms of SEVERE SPEAKER FATIGUE include:

1.) Waking up sweating after having nightmares about being attacked by giant pledge cards complete with the legs, arms and heads of the speaker candidates.

2.) You have had dreams such as: (a) Tom Craddick being so desperate to reach you that, on Christmas morning, he called your 12-year-old daughter’s cell phone number and she chewed him out because she was waiting on one of her peeps to call her OR (b) Tom Craddick sent a man in Santa suit to your house with Nintendo Wii’s, Playstation III’s, and XBox 360s for all of your children. Except your children are 41, 37, and 35, and suddenly you were Jewish and it was all just really, really awkward (and you could tell from the look on his face that committee chairmanship was slipping away from your fingers).
3.)  While walking through the Capitol, you find yourself having to duck into closets, bathrooms, and other people’s offices to avoid a speaker candidate. You even bribed a Capitol DPS officer to bring you one of his extra uniforms so you could wear it through the halls if you had to leave your office, just so you wouldn’t be bothered.
4.) You have already had the phone company change all your cell phone and land line numbers twice. But they still keep calling.

5.) You tell your staff to tell whoever is calling and wanting your pledge that you caught a throat condition like Chet Edwards,’ just had surgery, and won’t be able to talk until February.

6.)  You have already used up all of your “anytime minutes” just fielding calls from Craddick and McCall and Pitts is about to put you phone bill into the stratosphere.

7.) When you look at the phone and see the word, “speaker,” you start to cry.

8.)  You start telling the candidates it is against your religion to sign pledge cards. If that doesn’t work, you tell them you were recently diagnosed with schizophrenia and multiple-personality-disorder and that your signature wouldn’t be legally binding because you would have to sign it as whatever personality you have assumed at that moment. Then, you get down on the floor and start barking like a dog.

9.) You start telling candidates they have to promise you really, really outrageous things, like:

(a) a diamond studded pimp gavel
(b) naming you Chairman of The House Select Committee     on Strip Club and Adult Entertainment Oversight                 (complete with a $1,000,000 “field research” budget).
(c) a field trip to New Zeland.
(d) that you will give all bills fair and judicious                     consideration (gasp!)

10.) You sit on your couch, in the dark, with chills, wrapped in a blanked, quietly weeping as all of your phones just keep ringing, and ringing….and ringing…and ringing.

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