Deidrebane, You Will Take Back What You Said About Dokken

I've put up with a lot over our many years of marriage, Deidrebane my dear. Your incessant coupon-clipping, child-rearing and flair with culinary dishes of all varieties. Your sunnily upbeat manner, and troubling habit of treating the neighbors with civility and respect. Your distaste for NASCAR. Your charity work for the betwetting orphans of Botswana, and your pitiable need to stay abreast of world events. It's been a long, tough slog up a rain-soaked hill, my dear, but only this last bit has been intolerable. With all of our servants as my witnesses, let there be no mistake about it: You WILL take back what you said this morning about Dokken.

The day started out innocently enough, at least for those of us who harbored no venom in our souls, waiting for the slightest Dokken-related opportunity to spit it free. I rose at noon, after a refreshing fourteen hours of sleep, and proceeded to peruse the Journal for its most salient feature: Get Fuzzy. As you can imagine, I breakfasted on a hearty bowl of disappointment. Apparently the volatility of soybean futures means more to some depraved individuals than the slice-of-life adventures of Satchel and Bucky. I feign no supernatural ability to explain these things, my dear.

Turned away coldly by the inky black indifference of the Journal, I opted instead to soothe my soul with a little skeet shooting from the bedroom window, with neighborhood birds standing in for skeet. Don't get started about my habit of ridding our neighborhood of incessantly inconsiderate songbirds, my dear, if they had the good sense not to side with morning folk they'd still be alive and in one compact, non-shotgunned piece. I shed not a tear, after their daily double-insult of leaving the late-night hours to the shrill noodling of crickets, in addition to polluting my restful morn with their whistling farts.

As you well know, my dear, for I have explained it in detail on several occasions, nothing elevates a reflective noontime skeet-shooting spree from a pleasant diversion to the realm of the sublime like the thundering hair rock of Los Angeles natives Dokken.

The moment is crystallized in my mind like a dog trapped in amber, my dear. I had just winged a squirrel that had picked a poor time to attempt traversing the power lines spanning our property, and was marveling my shotgunmanship when you burst in, as if my privacy were nothing to be taken any more seriously than the word of a Scotsman. You burst in shouting some nonsense about orphans sleeping downstairs and the weak heart trapped within the chest of our frail, elderly, taking-her-sweet-time-to-die neighbor Mrs Weatherborrow. Most of this was drowned out by the blast of the shotgun as I spied a child's kite hovering tantalizingly just over our property line, but what you said next I will take with me to my grave, possibly on a Post-It note. Turn down that noise? That noise? Oh, my dearest Deidrebane. How you seek to wound me so, and my, how you've learned just where to stick the blade.

It would have been one thing if the racket in question had been Winger, Deidrebane. They're hardly worthy of your polite attention, my dear, say nothing of your rapture. Or if it had been a guilty pleasure like Slaughter pummeling from the speakers this morning, shaking the very air and vibrating the bathtub down the hall with each well-placed bass note. Referring to the work of those gentlemen as noise could be forgiven, albeit with a healthy slathering of condescension on the part of yours truly. But no, my wife of many a year, it had to be Dokken. It's as if the very Gods themselves have chosen the method of my slow undoing.

Have you learned nothing from my frequent lectures concerning the mannered vocal stylings of Don Dokken, my dear? Have my haikus addressing George Lynch's heavenly fretwork fallen upon deaf ears? Am I the only on in this house whose very dreams echo to the strains of "Alone Again"? Please, tell me you at least remember the driving force of "The Dream Warriors" from that Nightmare on Elm Street movie we watched. You didn't think I keep renting it again and again for the filmic content, did you? I swear, Deidrebane, sometimes it's like I'm married to a total stranger.

It's fortunate for you our neighbor to the East just put up that giant birdfeeder. Some things cannot be forgiven, my dear, but given enough concussive shotgun blasts in close proximity to one's head, it's entirely possible they may be forgotten.

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