Bilbo Baggins at Group

      Hey, everyone. My name is Bilbo Baggins, and I’m a ring of power addict.
      Hi Bilbo!
      Yeah, hi. It’s been 5 months and ummm 12 days since I last wore a ring of power. My nephew and some friends staged an intervention and they took away my stash, so I had to go cold turkey. Frodo--that’s my nephew--he got religion or something and joined up with that Gandalf cult. They cornered me in my hole and went on and on for like, hours, about how if I kept wearing the ring that Satan, or Sauron--or whoever their major evil dude is--was gonna sweep all through the land with his armies of darkness and the whole world would fall into some kind of age of shadow or something.
      Whatever.
      I just knew that if I kept on wraithing it was gonna end bad. It got to where I was getting invisible like two, three times a day—as soon as I woke up I was reaching for the ring. The first few days without it were pretty rough. I tried wearing like ten mood rings at once, but they didn’t do jack, not even a buzz. By day three I was hiding behind bushes and just pretending I was invisible, which, hearing it out loud right now, sounds really pathetic. Every day’s a struggle, but I’m getting better.
      Bruce here says that I won’t really be well till I apologize to everyone for all the bad stuff I did to them when I was wraithing. So here goes. Umm, Lobelia…wow, this is hard…Lobelia, remember how you thought those immigrant elves down the hollow were using one of their weird enchantments so you never caught them stripping your fruit trees? Yeah, actually that was me who stole your fruit when I was invisible. Sorry. No, I never knew you went down to confront them about it. That must have been pretty awkward. Is that why they put that spell on your donkey? Man, I have never seen so much manure in my life…no, you’re right; it wasn’t funny. Did you ever find out how they got him in your kitchen? Sorry about that.
      What else? Oh right, Toby. Toby, pretty much every weekend I’d get hammered on Barleywine, then put on my ring, sneak into your place, and watch you and Violet rock the ol’ hobbit hole. That time that you thought the dog had gotten onto the bed but then you couldn’t find him? That was me. But man! Your family’s not called Proudhammer for nothing! Wow! Yeah, no, that was totally…I’m sorry, Tobe, I’m sorry. Bruce, let him go now; it’s OK. Sorry, man. It was the ring. I was powerless, you know?
      There’s a lot of other stuff…no, right Bruce. I’ll save some for next week. Anyway, thanks for listening, everybody. Hey man, that’s a sweet cloak brooch—does it have any kind of magi…no, no, of course not.
      Sorry. Sorry.