Mobile, AL – Fenster McDougherty was born with fifty percent more brain matter than the average human. That was good enough to make me come calling. On the bus I tried to do some research on his condition, but got lost in the Reader’s Digest joke section. Can’t believe that’s not more popular. I also found that buses now have those little air conditioning nozzles like airplanes, but the graffiti in the bathrooms is still violently racist.

In Mobile it wasn’t too hard to find Fenster because his mother, Frances McDougherty works at the bus station. I introduced myself and the lovely woman asked me to wait an hour until she got off her shift handing out religious tracts to passersby. I helped out by taking a handful of Buddha Kind of Likes You and another handful of Shooting Skeet the Middle Way and giving them away.

When Mrs. McDougherty bundled me into her car, I was so excited to meet Fenster. I imagined he must love his hometown so much to stay here when someone who must be so smart could be off studying loop quantum gravity at Harvard. He must, I thought, be helping to improve Mobile in so many ways.

Frances, as she asked me to call her, showed me into their back yard, some cool lemonade in hand. And there he was: drool pouring out of his mouth, his feet twitching and occasionally repeating something about Marmaduke. Frances told me later that the extra brain matter caused damage to his normal functioning. He shows no savant tendencies, though he loves the Buddha so much that he occasionally makes up his own koans, such as this one:

Disobedient, Marmaduke obeys Mr. Winslow.

Winding my way north today. Toodles!