Pat's drop-in hours: "define 'alcoholic'"; the Nell Gunther fork-impaling

texture · 4 Nov YDAU

• When: 4 November YDAU, 1300–1500h (Pat Montesian's resident drop-in interface hours)
• What: In Pat's transcribed drop-in snippets, an unnamed but unmistakable Ewell mounts his lawyerly first line of defense — refusing to self-identify as alcoholic until the term is defined ("I cannot deny what I don't understand. This is my position") and, in a second snippet in the same voice ("This is my position" again), styling the demand to self-attest as "duress" ("You're requiring me to attest to facts I do not possess"). [The adjacent "prescribed prayer" / "Does the word retrograde signify?" snippet (p. 0181) is a separate monologue the archive attributes to Geoffrey Day on its "sociohistorical" register — see Geoffrey Day's timeline (event 7); removed from Ewell's ledger.] The same monologue carries its own late-drinking biography, conceded as mere "incidents": "that one ridiculous so-called seizure at the Bar Association dinner this spring," a judge who banned him from his courtroom (Ewell counter-alleging the man masturbates under his robe), pancreas problems, and lost intervals of the Kemp and Limbaugh administrations — otherwise he has "held my liquor and my head as high as many a taller advocate". A companion snippet (very plausibly Ewell — as printed) complains of being impaled at supper by Nell Gunther's steak-fork over his finger-drumming ("attached to the table by tines"), demanding she "be kicked out of here on her enormous rear-end" with "her Hefty bag full of gauche clothes." The obsession with the exact definition of "alcoholic" is confirmed as Ewell's own in scene 056; the Ewell–Nell antagonism recurs (scenes 056, 074).