There was a knock at the door. Uncle Larry opened it to find a tall, tanned and buxom woman standing there, wearing a paisley dress and carrying a bag which said "La Cocina" in large red lettering.

"Hi, I'm Betty. I came to deliver your food", she said with a smile and a hint of a Spanish accent.

"Um, okay", he said, opening the door wide. "You can call me Uncle Larry, come in. " She smiled at him again as she entered the apartment, closing the door behind her. "The kitchen is just through here", pointed Uncle Larry, leading the way. Betty was thinking to herself that while the house was clean and tastefully decorated, it still seemed strange that this 'Uncle Larry' would be wearing a black studded goatskin wetsuit and a leather mask in this July heat.

"Okay sir, the total comes to fourteen dollars and fif-" but her sentence was cut short. Uncle Larry had lunged forward suddenly and clamped his hand over her mouth from behind. Betty tried to scream, but the hand was tight against her face. She tried to claw at the hand covering her mouth but the studded leather gauntlets he wore were seemingly impermeable. He spoke softly but firmly into her ear, "Don't make a sound, you high-brow cyprian, it's time for your lesson."

Betty was still struggling as Uncle Larry walked her forward and pushed down with his foot on a nearly invisible button beneath his gleaming white espresso machine. As it clicked, a cunningly hidden trap door clanged open in the kitchen floor and Uncle Larry pushed her into it.

After a short fall, she discovered herself in a darkened room with a cold marble floor. As her eyes became adjusted to the darkness she could barely make out a table and chair... and what looked like chains on the walls. Suddenly a door on the far side of the room opened. It was Uncle Larry. He had in his hands a scarlet leather whip, a book, a pair of handcuffs, and the bag of take-out food from the restaurant.

Betty backed away slowly toward the opposite wall. "What... what are you going to do to me?" she asked, her voice fairly trembling with consternation.

"I am going to teach you a thing or three." said Uncle Larry as he set the food and whip down and proceeded to light several candles. "Tell me, have you ever heard of a book entitled 'Discourse on Method'?" He turned and tossed the book towards her which she involuntarily caught. "It's by René Descartes, celebrated mathematician and physicist, who is also widely thought of as the father of our modern philosophical studies."

Betty looked at the book in her hands. She had heard of Descartes, and knew he had developed the idea that the thinking mind was somehow more real than the body in which it is housed, but other than that, she didn't know enough to hold an intelligent conversation on the subject. "I know of the Cartesian mind-body split." she whimpered, hoping that this would be sufficient to placate him.

"I see. Then, as you are now my own Cartesian machine, you must also understand that Descartes claimed that the complexities of conscious thought could never be explained by the operations of mere matter, and that emotions were due to the overall nature of the personality of the individual; correspondingly called the Cartesian affect."

She was in over her head. She was bluffing, and they both knew it. Uncle Larry then reached into his pocket and pulled out a switchblade. Betty heard the click as the blade was revealed and she froze in fear. Uncle Larry tossed her the handcuffs. "Put these on," he said, "and tell me more. And I promise you, unless pain is something you enjoy, you had better know enough to hold an intelligent conversation on the subject."

Betty cringed as she heard this, and grudgingly she slipped the handcuffs on her thin white wrists. Her mind was reeling, running in disconcerted circles. Descartes... what else did he say? And when? Oh, why oh why hadn't I paid attention in school? Just then the click of the handcuffs brought her back and Uncle Larry motioned her forward. "Come here," he ordered, grabbing the chain on the handcuffs. He suddenly swung around and put the chain through a metal hook secured to a rope hanging from the wall.

Uncle Larry then pulled on another rope and suddenly Betty was lifted up and suspended about a foot off the ground. He stepped forward and ripped her paisley dress off with a single arrogant gesture. She moaned and then blushed, embarrassed that the sensations of Descartes and ripping paisley had turned her on.

"So, tell me," said he, "we were discussing Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa Raison et chercher la Vérité dans les Sciences... now tell me what else you know." Her hands hurt, and she was confused and absolutely naked, but she was strangely aroused. "Please," she begged as her supple breasts slalomed back and forth, "school was so long ago... and besides... Malebranche concluded that the intellect and physical body are not only significantly separate but actually independent of each other. The appearance of any true interplay between them arises from what is in fact merely a symmetry of circumstances between our mental and physical domains."

"Wrong answer, you pretentious harlot," and with that he picked up the take out Mexican food and the whip. He turned quickly and gave her a quick lash with the whip across her heaving buttocks and then threw a steaming handful of refried beans and cheese at her unprotected midriff.

"Santa Maria!" she cried, "Please... I swear... our ideas of bodies do not result from any causal influence that physical objects have on our senses; rather, they are produced in our minds directly by God..."

"No, no, no, no." he interrupted, "That's not the answer you pseudo-intellectual strumpet. How dare you suggest that it is the authority of god alone that secures a parallelism between the action of the mind and body? Descartes stated that 'the only alternative is to suppose that the soul is not joined immediately to any solid part of the body, but only to the animal spirits which are in its concavities, and which enter or leave it continually like the water of a river." Uncle Larry flicked the whip again across her bare buttocks and she let out an appetent yelp. He then grabbed hold of her hair, sharply pulling her head back.

"But I can't read French!" she screamed.

Uncle Larry threw her head back down and picked up the book. "You meretricious high-brow tart," he shouted back, "Descartes expresses his frustration with the limitations of traditional philosophy and with the inherent restrictions of theology, and he himself seemed to have viewed the mind or soul as a kind of incorporeal gnome dwelling inside the brain. To him, only logic and mathematics deserved deference, because of the cohesive reality, the concrete truth, which they extend. All else is speculation." He shook his head in disgust, and proceeded to provide her with a generous helping of his corporal lash.

Betty then began a tirade in Spanish as Uncle Larry snapped her buttocks with the whip over and over again. He couldn't understand everything she was saying, but he guessed from her febrile writhing that she was almost ready to literally explode with erudite passion. " Wait," he said as he reached into the take-out food bag, I have just thought of an excellent use for this bottle of Sierra Mist and this beef and cheese Chimmy-Chonga..."
CONTINUED WITH MEMBERSHIP...