It wasn't that he didn't think things through. It was just that the deliberative process never seemed to yield the answers which informed his actions - most times it just wasn't done yet by the time he began whatever undertaking he was considering. And it was this fact that made him think that perhaps he was doing someone else's bidding, that perhaps all this thoughtful consideration was really just a charade, like a sweater put on a hog. But if that was true then who was it pulling the strings? Who was the Svengali? Who was the puppet master? He went down the list of people he knew that perhaps had benefited from some of his hastily conceived acts. Aunt Una certainly seemed pleased when he broke down and bought one of her pamphlets on safety with power tools; His friend Madge was only too happy to learn that he and his long time swimming buddy had decided that they just swam irreconcilable strokes. His brother Murtha certainly benefited from his decision to start wearing vertical stripes as he was gifted all the horizontally striped leftovers. And still he felt that behind it all there was someone or something pushing the buttons to make him do his trademark twirls. But all this was palatable, he reasoned, but what if whomever it was making his decisions showed a comparable disregard for reasoned acts - what if whoever was behind him was just as willy-nilly? How could he go on? How could he think of himself as anything but a pawn's pawn? And what is there for a pawn's pawn to do but...but wait, maybe he could take some comfort in the invisible intrinsic coherence of others' acts: maybe Lutz had a reason for practicing his jump kicks; maybe those geese had a reason for just staring at him like he was a piece of bread; maybe it all made a sense that wasn't his to understand. And he felt a peace that he'd not felt since he inexplicably began hording root beers.