In the mind of the average stable genius, mollusks consist of clams, mussels, oysters, and scallops, but you’re not an average genius, and word is you’re not even stable, so you don’t know that you didn’t know for the longest time that most people don’t know that they weren’t aware that in the greatest country in the free world there are several billion species of bivavles.

And more in the greatest country in the enslaved world.

I’m exaggerating. There are only 20,000 bivavle species in the whole universe, give or take, according to the fake encyclopedia media (so who really knows?). And most of them are concentrated here in southwest Florida, from what I can tell from walking the beach on Marco Island.

So now you now: I’m vacationing in warm and sunny gun country. While here, I’ve been feeling out my family’s interest in visiting an alligator farm, where the kids can watch their dad wrestle an animal determined to pull him into the water and drown him. But what a rush it is for dad, I’m told: the primal battle; the prehistoric nature of the animal that has sunk its teeth into your abdomen; the feeling of desperation as you realize that the ‘gator has squeezed the air out of you and has probably already won the battle.

Once rescued from certain death by the 7^th-generation swamp dweller running the farm, I challenge the kids to memorize the shells we’ll be encountering. They totally ignore me at first, assuming I’m performing my usual leg-pulling nonsense, until I jump up, all excited. “Make a chart,” I say. They look up from their devices just long enough to scowl. I explain: “You can note the shells you collect, the dates and times and where you found them. You can connect with other children your age doing the very same thing! Imagine how jealous your friends back home will be to know that you’re making charts and filling in data, while they’re spending endless hours staring at their boring devices. Heh, heh.”

They’ve stopped listening. They care as much about finding a Scotch Bonnet on their morning walk as they do about discovering Van Hyning’s Cockle in the bottom of a bucket.

Slinking off to eat some conch fritters and gator-tail while cleaning out my AR-15.

In the future, we’ll all own bomb-proof pods that we can move about the landscape in. The pods will be made of material designed to be invisible, but over time dings and dents and street goo will accumulate on their surfaces, and the shell encasing each of us will become apparent. It will also become apparent when we go to hug each other and end up colliding before we get close enough, ricocheting off one another like bumper cars, and falling on our asses.

Yes, it will be difficult to ride a bike, but this is the price you pay to be in a protective, impenetrable pod.  And at the end of the day, you can enter your garage and park your bomb-proof pod, go inside your bullet-proof house with its not-quite-invisible protective geodesic dome, exchange a few hugs, shower up and hit the sack! When you leave again the following day, it’s back into the pod.

As my friend Mark likes to say, “That’s Freedom.”

The pods will be heavily-used by school children, who must never venture out without a protective shell, needless to say. There are many dangers out there, and our spineless leaders would like to help but they have a long list of moments of silence to attend to before they can eliminate dangers. It’s one of the oddities about being a leader.

Keep in mind that these pods are on back order for a couple of decades.

It drives me crazy that I can only semi-automatically text using my smartphone. How can it be 2017 when there is this kind of restriction? You’d think that in a free country I’d be able to fire off texts as quickly as I’d like. The kind of 21^st century America I was told to expect (in my previous life) is one that gives its citizens the means to let texts fly in rapid fire succession whenever they damn-well please. But wait a minute: you almost never have anything important to say!

That’s probably true.

And still, that way of thinking assumes that informing my spouse about the ripeness of our avocados, the status of my commute, and how many scoops of ice cream the kids ordered for dessert are trivialities. And whatever else I’m thinking.

In the next few weeks, I’m planning to go fully automatic by way of attaching blue tooth-enabled probes to my head and hacking into my phone such that my conscious and semi-conscious thoughts are streamed to everyone in my contacts list automatically. It’ll be a Cat-5 text storm. I want to inflict maximum texting damage. You’re going to be swept downstream by my flood of texts. But don’t worry, if the text flood is too overwhelming I’ll throw a bunch of rolls of paper towels out to you so you can sop-up the flood.

Looking for additional storm-related texting metaphors, so send if you got ‘em.