CHALLENGED VALUES

INTRODUCTION Nothing in the following lines is fiction -- except for the characters’ names in the stores, and the one-to-last paragraph. The timeliness, incidents, monologues, and descriptions are as real as you and I. Moreover, please do not feel troubled or confused by the freedom I have taken with the usage of the personal pronouns. They reflect my conviction of people’s unwilling togetherness in the same catboat in which we all find ourselves so often. On the other hand, it is likely that at times there seems — not everything that our senses tell us is always true -- to be a lack of concatenation or uniformness from one paragraph to another due to the fact that some events or incidents may appear tied together neither in a timely manner nor from a contextual view. Therefore, I would sincerely appreciate your additional effort and ability to mentally fill in the blanks and gaps, tie together, and arrange the apparently missing parts into the intended meaningful whole...