WHAT'S IT LIKE TO NOT BE A MUTANT?

You know, I really hate it that everybody I seem to know is a mutant these days. It's really gotten to be a burn, you know, especially since several of the people I've encountered have this X-Ray laser vision they use to cook with. I don't even have a microwave.

Which naturally means I'm a loser. Though I feel like a retard. Yes, a retard in that every single person on earth--from the President of the United States who can lie with impunity and get away with it because his telepathic powers allow him to subconsciously convince millions that he's just brimming with integrity, to the almost tiny little man somewhere in a Chinese rice paddy who concentrates on his growing crop and causes it to grow more quickly--everyone has some kind of power but me.

That trick of the President's is a pretty good one, and it shows his ambition. It takes a lot of verve just to try and see if your mental abilities are strong enough to convince 59 million otherwise normally superpowered human beings to vote for you. Especially since you screwed up your entire first term, with no help from those super powers, you'd think there wouldn't be telepathy strong enough in this world to accomplish that feat, but mutants being mutants are apt to go to almost ridiculous lengths to display to themselves that the ego's gentle nudgings are in fact true and somehow part of their superpowered character. Heck, if the President hadn't had that other group of mutants to save his Presidency, mutants with the power to intimidate with a smile that emerges out of one side of an otherwise growling face, mutants with Loki-like cleverness, mutants with powerful and superhuman weapons and zombies at beck and call, we probably would have voted him out. But you know what? It's also entirely possible the President, knowing his "other" mental powers, the ones that help superhuman humans to commonsensically reason, just weren't up to snuff and that he'd bitten off more than he could chew by opting for a job bigger than he was, simply used his well-hidden mental abilities to "compel" a group of superhuman punks from the Middle East to commandeer airplanes and speed them into the World Trade Center. Think of all the mutants who died. Think of the losers like me who died, too.

Doubtless, you superhuman readers out there have already sniffed up a whiff of jealousy with your superhuman whiffer-sniffers and sense the resentment of a total loser coming straight from my room into your superhuman temples of doom. Don't worry: It's not some special power. At least I don't think I have some kind of latent superpower to make people feel cynical, at least not that I've discovered yet. Still, I like to identify with that skinny Chinese man. He's got it down, superhuman brothers and sisters. He uses his powers so gracefully, and he doesn't have to adorn himself with the superhuman costumery of his American collegues. That's part of his schtick as a superhero. He's not out to impress anybody, but impresses everybody. He just looks out at his field and convinces his plants to grow a little more quickly. He certainly doesn't try to pull the same trick on his finances. And maybe he could. If so, the fact he just doesn't look at a Chinese Yen and make it grow into unimaginable proportions is probably testament to his wisdoem: He knows how to use his super powers. He doesn't try to use them on his kids either. Like any good father, he probably values the time he gets to spend raising them too much to try to hot wire the situation and make them grow up too fast. I wish I could be like him. I think I'd make my hair grow faster.

Shoot. I'm completely powerless. I can't even dash cigarette ashes in my ashtray without getting them all over the floor. That really sucks. I sit in the dark and you know what? It's dark. I can't see through any kind of darkness. I go for a walk and it actually takes time to get around the block. I've never been able to speed anywhere instantaneously. Can't even multitask. I guess I'm a loser. Not fit to be fed.

You know, earlier I referred to my condition of powerlessness--or, let's just call it superpowerlessness--as akin to being a retard. That was a mistake. It's common with me. Since I'm so powerless, I'm constantly on the lookout for someone less powerful than I am. I've really got a lot of contempt. Man, if you're a retard, and if you're trying to read this, despite all the big words I think I'm utilizing well because it makes me feel like someone superhuman, or at least more superhuman than the people who can't read so well, like retards, well, I'm really sorry about that. I should have said something like, "Sometimes I feel like a mentally disabled person with an intelligence quotient lower than 60." Still too many syllables. Sounded way too politically correct, too. Who talks like that? Even if we think that way, we never say it. Because we think we're so super-powerful, we simply assume that the other superhumans just understand it. Political correctness doesn't play too well in Superpowerlessnessville anyway. That ain't a town anywhere on the map, and that's why it's called Superpowerlessnessville, and that's why superpowerlessness as a matter of political correctness doesn't play all that well in Superpowerlessnessville. Nobody likes people bending their words way around the subject simply to help point out that you and the rest of the inhabitants of Superpowerlessnessville, the town the superpowerful have come to save, are actually superpowerless.

And besides, and this is what really shames me, retarded people are well known for being super-strong. Get one of those folks mad at you and you'd better get out of the way because if they decide to hit you, you're going to remember it. Often, those among the superhuman who have deigned to work with the retarded have to be exceptionally well-trained in the use of their super powers. Especially when the retarded get older and, for some reason, more likely to get explosive on a whim (and please don't get me started on the obvious comparisons to the President), well, many superhuman care-workers have to have training in karate, tai kwan do and other of the superhuman martial arts.

Martial arts. I tried that when I was a just another superpowerless teenager, when all the other kids on the block were discovering their super powers. It was like Christmastime on that block. Girls discovering they could freeze a boy in his tracks with just one look. Boys who discovered that their superhuman skills in throwing a ball through either a hoop or over the heads of other superhumans was a superhuman power in itself that lent them superhuman rewards like college scholarships, hot dates with superhuman beauties and even special perks delivered them under the table. None of that did much good for me, nor did karate classes. Even the mental discipline involved in karate was a futile exercise. After all, why even bother to hone your body into a superb fighting machine when everyone around you is invulnerable? Why even think about developing excellent abilities to relax in an instant, like a Zen Master, when relaxation gets you nowhere in this world where the superpowerful are everywhere?

I suppose martial arts works for some. Take Chuck Norris. He's a short little runt. He probably grew up with an inferiority complex among dozens of superhuman humans. One day, he got to reading his Justice League of America comic book and found those ads for Charles Atlas strength training in the back. Some of us are old enough to remember those: That lame picture of that guy getting sand kicked in his face by a beefcake dude while he's trying to impress some babe on the beach. Has that ever happened to you? Probably not. You're all-powerful. Even though I don't have the ability to see for thousands of miles, I think I can still see it in your eyes that you've never had sand kicked in your face the way I have. Anyway, I bet Chuck Norris, 13-year-old wimp, saw that ad and decided to change his life. I might be short, he thought, but I can compensate. I might not be a superhuman, but I can fake it. The funny thing was, he met a group of superhumans in Hollywood who all had the power to bestow superhuman powers on losers like Chuck Norris. He became superhuman by the graces of the superhuman. I've never met one of the superhumans who gave Chuck his superhuman powers. O.K. Maybe I have. They just never let on because they didn't like me all that much.

How on earth is a guy supposed to compensate for his own superpowerlessness when everyone around him is endowed with all sorts of super powers? Everywhere you look, the superhumans rule with their superhuman powers, and the list of those powers is almost endless. Absolute masculinity. The ability to become the center of the universe at will. The power that allows some superhumans to just look at another and instantly become superior to them. Others look at strangers and, even if the strangers are superhuman, they're suddenly sheared of all their powers. The superhuman women all have irresistable beauty. Ultra-grace. Those are only a few powers, all of them the super powers I just don't possess. I have none of those. Most of those superhuman powers are beyond my comprehension. In this world of superhumans, sometimes I just don't know who I am.

I do share a small circle of friends who found each other because we didn't have any super powers. Like the people on the television show, Mutant X, superhumans had been experimenting on each of us for a long time. One had been subjected to the superhuman power to alienate by dozens upon dozens of superhumans who concentrated all their power on her. She was almost dead by the time us superpowerless humans found her. Our leader had been terminated by a group of superpowerful businesspeople. He said the experience of being subjected to the superpowerful effects of this strange "termination" thing was excruciating. We believe him. Since not one of us has even one single vestage of a superpower, we've gathered together for our mutual protection against the throttling assaults of the superpowerful world of the superpowerfully endowed.

We live in a hole in the ground. Since we're so superpowerfully superpowerless, we really couldn't do a whole lot better. Together in our hole in the ground, we look out upon the world and try to think of ways we can help the superpowerful feel even more superpowerful than they already are. Actually, we don't have a whole lot of choice. We could spit on the ground in front of most of those superpowerful folks and they'd use their superpowers to transform the gesture into "food" or "manna" or "ambrosia" given by the super-superpowerful gods to help them become even more superpowerful. Gawd. We're just a bunch of losers. Most of the time, we find ways to intervene in the lives of the superpowerful, mainly assisting them in their superpowerfulness. Sometimes we simply let them help us: This reinforces their superpowerful self-esteem. It makes them feel superpowerfully good, for if there's one thing the superpowerful have on us superpowerfully superpowerless losers is that the superpowerful have an almost cosmic power of feeling superpowerfully good all the time.

Sometimes, us of the superpowerless set sit around and watch televison. Television is a device designed by the superpowerful that helps them feel superpowerful all the time. Everyone on televison is so superpowerfully beautiful that the superpowerful who are also superpowerfully beautiful get a superpowerful reinforcement that tells them, yes, you were born in the right place, you superpowerfully beautiful person! Thank God you're alive!

The television has a different effect on the superpowerless. We sit there in the darkness, knowing that the unearthly blue rays of the machine are ensuring we never develop any latent superpowers. One girl, who has oftentimes said that her superpower is superpowerful ugliness, sometimes sits and looks at the television with a blank face. Even when the television turns off, a little bit of that blank face remains. But regardless of all that, we superpowerless people do what we can to keep up our spirits. We often cheer for the superpowerful of the world. When the superpowerfully rich on television say something superpowerfully funny, we laugh our puny little superpowerless laughs.

You know, I've been sitting around, looking at this dingy place in which I try to live and I've realized something superpowerlessly important: I don't even know how to tell a story. This isn't really going anywhere. I'm sitting in a dark room, typing. I can't type very well, either. I peck out the words with my middle finger. When I told my superpowerful psychoanalyst that, he mused that my use of the middle finger to type out everything I am saying could be a Freudian Slip: I'm shooting the world the finger. And it's true: Sometimes I'd really like to do that. But how? Even when I was at work one day, I thought I'd impress the superpowerful person in the cubicle next to mine with my superior (or so I thought) ability to type with only one finger on each hand. She wasn't impressed. She sped up her own typing until I couldn't even see her fingers moving. I don't know what she was doing, really. Whatever it was, it couldn't have made much sense to me, a superpowerless being. Her super powers, aside from being able to type super-fast a number of superior collections of numbers I can't even comprehend, also has something to do with the ability to put everybody else down. That's part of her job.

Like the boob I am, I sometimes think about the President. He has a lot of super powers. In addition to his telepathic powers of persuasion, he has the ability to mutate into the stupidest person on the earth...something obviously designed to fool everyone. How else could it be? He's the President! How could the President be stupid? This is called psychological judo. He throws everybody--even the superpowerful--off with how stupid he seems when he turns on his super-stupidity. Then they feel sorry for him and vote because the superpowerful democratic impulse means looking out for the nobodies in the world. And since the President has the superpower that allows him to seem like a nobody better than any superhuman human on the earth, he won the election. All he had to do was act stupid. Need evidence? As the days ticked off to Election Day, 2004, the President became stupider and stupider. By Election Eve, he'd made Koko the Gorilla look like a genius. That's a super power I can only say I admire.

Some of my superpowerless friends kid me by insisting that my super power is the ability to become a super-victim at any instant. They tell me that my ability to make people feel ashamed because of their superiority is almost legendary. And my ability to make people feel guilty? They say it's just amazing. Maybe I'm just feeling smaller than they are.

Which could be a super power. Except I can never hide. If I was truly getting smaller, I'd be able to disappear. Which is often how I feel around all these super-powerful beings. Just take a look at the Vice President. He exudes an intimidating aura of superhuman arrogance--definitely a super power. I've seen arrogant people wither everyone around the the powers he utilizes. Why do the superhuman utilize powers so dangerous? Because they can. But I can't do those things. I don't try to use my powers of arrogance to accomplish anything, mainly because I really don't feel all that arrogant. What's there to feel arrogant about?

It's also interesting to note that, like the television, the superhumans in charge of the world have also developed amazing technologies designed to make them feel even more superhuman than they really are. They drive superhuman cars and they price them at superhuman prices. One afternoon, I was walking with my typical superpowerless shuffle, and zap! A superhuman, driving a superhuman SUV at a superhuman speed. She had this look on her face: Everybody, look at me, I'm a superhuman, and I'm in control.

It was obvious: The woman had the superhuman power to drive at superhuman speeds and maintain a superhuman control over everything within her superhuman vision. Most admirably, she had the superhuman power to keep the police from finding out. How do they do that?

So here's a picture of me for you superhumans to take to bed with you: I'm five foot four inches tall. I weigh one hundred and ninety five pounds. Fully clothed, I look like a stuffed hamster. I'm almost bald. My face is so fat it looks like a deformed pound cake. I've got eyeglasses wrapped around my face (there's no other way to describe this) and the frames I found in a fifty-cent bin at a flea market. No matter how I try, I just can't get away from shirts that make me look like Charlie Brown. And everyone around me, including you? Six foot six inches. Solid steel. So handsome they make women swoon on sight. In possession of the ability to have sex at will. Able to drink massive amounts of liquor in a single sitting. Perspicuousness to the vanishing point in the ability to understand football. Able to burst into flame at the slightest provocation.

This disparity between the superpowerful and the underendowed is maddening. Oh. I know. That's obvious. Why did I write it?

And I can't disappear. I stick out in a room. I don't know how many times I've tried to go to fashionable bars or nice restaurants, only to discover that if I have any super power at all it is the ability to stand out like a broken cup on a tableful of expensive china. Don't feel hurt, they say. They don't know what it's like to be unpowerful in a world full of supermen. And that's another super power those men have: The ability to never feel pain. The super power of never having to cry. The super power of never having to hide under the covers on Monday morning. Although I have met many of the superhuman race of America, I have never known one. I've passed the superhuman dozens of times--or rather they've passed me--yet they are perplexingly out of reach and unknowable.

I heard on the news once about a revolution instigated by the superpowerless. Not surprisingly, they lost. What made them think they'd win? I think I'd rather sit around and moon over superhuman women.

Some superhuman women have distinct abilities to make the superpowerless completely disappear. Some are empowered to inflict sharp pains in the chest. Others create intense anxiety. How do they do these things? One of their superpowers is that they can make the superpowerless sit around and moon over them so easily that they don't even have to think about it. Some of us superpowerless men have become so desperate that we're actually afraid to moon over superpowerful women. Instead, we moon over superpowerless women. The superpowerful among us who see that spectacle call us superpowerless men saints. We know they're laughing at us. It doesn't make us feel good at all.

Once, I was looking at my cat. My cat was looking at me. He had the most quizzical expression his face. Maybe I was anthropromorphizing, but I'm almost certain he was trying to understand how I'd just made that can of tuna appear. For an instant, I felt superhuman. Of course, my only reference point was my cat. Then, to my consternation, I learned that my cat is much better at sex and romance than I am. My cat doesn't even have to use the internet. He doesn't need cologne or money or machismo or any of the other things required by superhuman women. I felt like envying my cat. Instead, I killed him.

THE PRESIDENT NEEDS AN ATOMIC WEDGIE!

Baby, so what if I'm on the run? Is that what this is? I'm sending you this letter to a place no one other than you will ever find it: my blog.

What's it like to be an "unofficial fugitive"? You'd probably laugh in my face if you could only be near me. Just get a job, get it back together. If you could look into my eyes, if I could feel you kneading the shoulders of my dusty jacket with your warm palms the way you used to do and stare into me, if dreams such as these, dreams that sustain me as I sleep in parks and filch my meals from dumpsters behind fast food restaurants (at least the ones that haven't been locked to keep "my kind" from consuming what is meant to be discarded, wasted), I'm not certain I could tell you fully how empty this "unofficial punishment" in 21st Century America can become. Is this what it's called? I really don't know what the Hell happened. Still, I've thought of you many times. Sometimes, when I'm curled into the contours of a ditch I've found, a low place in the ground that will shield me from the cold night wind and the curious eyes of the happenstance observer, I'll hug my own shoulders, just the way we've seen in so many silly movies. I'll hug my shoulders, imagining I'm back home again.

Sometimes I get so sad. Wouldn't you? I suppose we'd both agree I'd taken liberties with my life, liberties based upon contempt of what I'd seen. I've probably been foolish. A little like an over-curious cat. But how else could I have done what I did without getting punched out while being told what I'd done wasn't really all that bad? Doubtless, my friends think I was an idiot for doing this stuff. A can of spray paint, a sense that I could make something happen and use truly radical tactics, that I thought I could do so much better for the world than the pointless proliferation of "tagging" here in Dallas, and now I've seen my life literally ruptured open--how long has it been? Two months? Please don't tell me it's been longer than that. I feel like a complete idiot, and I probably am. How embarrassed should I be when I walk into the library, as I did only moments ago, limp to the men's room to wash my face and find that tear streaks like little rivers have carved themselves into the grime on my face? Have you ever cried and not known you were crying? How many streets full of downtown workers have I walked, how many faces have peered into mine, how many people have seen those rivulets and found them indecipherable? Love, I'm not mentioning this to upset you. But my hands are shaking.

Remember how it all started out as an ornery joke? We were laughing at the stupid graffiti "tags" some kid had deposited on the doorway to the studio. You told me you'd seen kids in big baggy pants running down the streets before this happened, many times you said, and that it was funny to see these kids holding their crotches as they tried to run away from another "mission" as if they were big heroes. You sarcastically said "Steve McQueen. 'The Great Escape.'" Yet I was still angry about it. I'd already painted a nice stenciled logo of our studio's address on the old steel door. Now it had been obscured by a wild scribble. What on earth was it supposed to mean?

"I think it's supposed to mean, 'Yo! I was here!'"

And here's the part where my contempt entered the scene. "You'd think that if those kids went out and spent--what is it? Three dollars for a can of spray paint? That they'd make it count. Know what I'm saying? You'd think they'd have a real public message or something. As it stands, only a few kids even know what those scribbles mean."

"Oh, you know how kids are," you told me. "They're trying to figure out how they stand in the world. If they mark turf with spray paint, their friends apparently understand something we just don't get."

"Well, why leave this 'turf deal' completely private? Why not let the entire world know how you feel?"

You said: "Maybe keeping that stuff private is one of those gesture-deals. Maybe it's a way of saying, 'This is private. You just don't get it. Because you're not part of this deal. You know? You're not in on it. Private speech right there in public."

"Fo' shizzle," I said. "Yo, gotta take a pizzle, word up, dude." We were both laughing as I closed the restroom door. I guess we could say I marked my territory in the toilet bowl. Nothing surprising about that.

All my life, I'd been interested in graffiti. It had begun, really, I think, long before my junior high buddies wrote GORDON SUCKS in blue paint on the curb facing my house. Yeah, I was in on that one. It was hilarious. Hilarious to stand there and watch my mother discombobulate, burst into spontaneous combustion. GORDON! WHO DID THAT! THAT'S DISGUSTING! TELL ME! WHO DID IT?

What I'm saying is that I understood what you'd said about kids trying to find their place in the world. My friends and I were too. We felt pretty powerless. We didn't have any money, and what we did have we spent on Slurpees and Justice League of America comic books. We always had to ask for permission to do anything. If we wanted to go to Pizza Hut, our seemingly insatable desires were usually subject to the whims of our parents' appetites. We couldn't figure out how to make girls like us. We couldn't even figure out if they liked us. When my buddy, Bobby, wrote that on the curb, he didn't really mean it in a literal way, he was only doing something he knew would anger my parents, and that was part of the joke.

Years later, I remember reading a magazine article about Barbara Krueger, a New York artist who expressed her fascination with public expression with fanciful and often politically-charged messages on billboards and on the posters she posted all over the city. Other graffiti expressions met my attention by serendipity: The time I saw the huge, Spanish language graffiti that spanned nearly a block of cinder block wall in a Chilean city during the Pinochet takeover. In block letters, stark against the white cement, a huge sign proclaimed Salvadore Allende the true leader of the Chilean people. The message, being officially illicit, but also perfectly readable, commanded both attention and a nearly visceral reaction within me. In fact, I remember it: I felt awe. Awe. As in fear of the awesome and mysterious.

Of course, some of the taggings I'd seen bordered on beauty. Most of them didn't. Some were merely silly scribbles, obviously rendered on the run, sprayed onto walls and windows in a hurry, something done in light of the always surprising appearance of the police. What if, I thought, what if I disdained that example--sophisticated in its own political way--and opted for something more public, more welcoming, and more alarming. Yes, secretly, I began to muse over what it would mean to area businesses if someone in Dallas, Texas, a conservative city that is expressly concerned with how its public image plays in the minds of outsiders in particular, if someone here followed the example of Chilean graffiti artists: Broad, block letters proclaiming bold messages that dared unwitting citizens to think for a change.

Speak truth to power, I thought. What an arcane concept in today's mass media. What the saying should say is that we must speak truth to power as long as we don't move that power to anger. Newspapers like to purport a sheen of this democracy-old dictum, but they only speak truth to the powers that aren't advertising within their pages. Some newspapers are so cowardly that their publishers are afraid to speak the truth because Big Business will be offended. Since the federal government doesn't underwrite a newspaper's advertising, the government is a convenient target, especially when the so-called corporate media is looking for scapegoats. Since the implicit upshot of today's neoconservative movement is to reduce the government's power while increasing our dependence upon the business sector, it only stands to reason that a newspaper controlled by and allied with corporate interests is going to attack the only institution that tries to slow the otherwise unimpeded growth of savage capitalism. What if those taggers used their tool to explicit political effect? SCREW ABSTINENCE ADVOCATES...IN THE ASS!!! is one of the examples I facetiously conjured as I sat one morning and drank my coffee. QUIT TEACHING WHITE MAN'S WAYS IF THE WHITE MAN WON'T LET US IN!!! is another. MURDER THE MEN WHO PAY US TO WORK IN GREASE PITS FOR MINIMUM WAGE!!! I thought of dozens of intimidating slogans a 14-year-old tagger could use to push his world into a little controversy.

I thought it was so silly and so self indulgent that kids, under relatively little danger, refused to take real risks when Latin American kids their age more than likely risked their lives scrawling huge messages along walls and on the sides of buildings. That self-indulgence, I think, is one measure of how complacent Americans have become. The old Chinese saying that provided leaders sage advice regarding population control was apt: Empty their minds and fill their bellies. Exactly. Think of some of the garbage the local news feeds us.

As I write this, I'm beginning to notice that the graffiti is indeed becoming a little clearer. Someone in Dallas is scrawling the word "revolt" on newsstands and on bus shelters across the city. Most people are probably too oblivious to even notice. Others are too arrogant to take the sentiment as a serious one. But what if the sentiment was more clear than a hastily written imperative? What if someone asked serious questions?

I remember my first Chilean graffiti: Late at night, I quietly spirited myself on to Highland Park's Drexel Drive, found a shadowy area at street-side and wrote these conspicuous words right on the pavement: DOES DICK CHENEY REALLY NEED TO LIVE IN A HOUSE THIS BIG? The words, huge and ghostly in the darkness, shouted a question a lot of people ask themselves all the time. The newspapers wouldn't touch that question with a frog gig. Reporters are far more afraid of reprisals, imagined or otherwise, than they're even aware of. They always try to report with a manner patently non-offensive. Still, they seem to venerate Thomas Paine, a renegade journalist who wrote seriously offensive things about the imperial regime of his day.

As days went on (and I never told you this until the police came calling, something for which I'm terribly sorry, love), I emboldened. From the wall of a heavily-trafficked street corner's retail shop, politically incendiary graffiti shouted one morning as well-off commuters travelled to work: REFUSE TO WORK UNTIL YOUR BOSS GIVES HALF HIS SALARY TO THE POOR!!!

Another sign--WHY DO THE DALLAS POLICE CARE MORE ABOUT MONEY THAN JUSTICE???--lined the parking garage outside the city's Lew Sterrit Justice Center.

OBEDIENCE IS POTTY-TRAINING FOR SLEEPWALKERS!!! BREAK THE BIGGEST RULES YOU CAN FIND!!!

DON'T BOTHER SMASHING THE STATE!!! IGNORE IT INSTEAD!!!

GET YOUR TAX MONEY BACK!!! VANDALIZE AMERICAN AIRLINES ARENA!!!

In restrooms, along retaining walls, on curb sides, on traffic signs, I began a quiet but effective graffiti campaign. DOES ALL THAT MONEY MAKE YOUR SHIT SMELL ANY BETTER???
appeared in the restrooms of a major Dallas law firm. And this one: WHY'S THE EXECUTIVE BATHROOM GOT A KEY??? AFRAID THE MAIL CLERK WILL SEE HOW LITTLE YOUR DICK IS??? And finally this: THE PROLETARIAT'S GONNA REACH OUT OF THIS TOILET AND PULL YOUR ASS IN!!!

Sure. These were ridiculous little slogans. Part of my intention was to be funny and shocking at the same time. Apparently, it began to work.

First, I noticed that some penny-anny little news columnist expressed public indignation over "some of the offensive messages appearing across the city." Almost all the letters that appeared in the newspaper backed her up. So I called the newspaper. "Did anyone write to support whoever is writing this stuff?"

"Oh, sure. We get crackpots all the time. Some of the letters are really angry," the person in the paper's letters department said. "A couple were quite trenchant, but we couldn't use them."

Translation? Defense of public statement that doesn't support officially sanctioned opinion is to be quashed. Newspaper publishers, I supposed, a little wistfully too, just didn't want anyone getting the idea that anyone--anyone at all--actually agreed with the person the newspaper had described as "a vandal." Agreement with controversial issues tends to spread when people learn they're not the only ones who are thinking the shocking messages are closer to the truth than some of the pablum that passes for opinion in America. Publishers, of course, wouldn't want to have it documented that they supported "illegal expression" by even printing so much as a letter to the editor in favor of it. They don't want it on record that a lot of people, as I learned for myself, agreed with my big words.

Retail owners angrily painted over and had the messages professionally erased. EAT MORE PORK!!! BE SURE TO TAKE THE APPLE OUT OF THE PRESIDENT'S MOUTH BEFORE YOU DIG IN!!! was a sign near my grocery store. I asked a customer what he thought of it. "You know that's right!" he said.

So what I was learning was that there was indeed spirited public sentiment in Dallas that was silent. Why is it silent? Why does the official sentiment deny the people its voice? I could have asked so many questions of so many people. Then the police showed up, broke down the studio door, tore the place up. Totally ridiculous. We weren't home, but the instant I saw the police car lights flashing outside the door whenever it was we got home, I drove by and told you everything.

Crazy isn't it baby? Running from the threat of being silenced, but not directly so, don't you think? With all the hassles the Fed put you through, I don't blame you for wanting me out of your life and out of the house. I've been hiding--if that's what you can call this--for a long time. We know the drill: The police questioned my employer about my political affiliations, asked my boss if I'd ever given anyone an indication that I sympathized with terrorists. What else could my boss do? I was summarily fired. Why should any employer put up with F.B.I. visits when a thousand capable people stand waiting to fill the job left by the termination of a "troublemaker"? Then, when strange things began happening on-line, I learned with the help of a friend of some expertise that my computer postings had been hacked. And read. But why? There wasn't a goddamn thing I'd ever said to anybody that was even halfway incriminating. And you? You were taken to your office's human resources department for questioning that had nothing to do with your job. The F.B.I. agent who visited you right there in front of your supervisors cited Homeland Security as one of the reasons for "the trouble." I don't blame you for being pissed off that your boss wrote you up for the hassles. This isn't supposed to be any big deal. I've only got a felony warrant for my arrest--I know that--but things got way too frightening for me. I start having "credit problems" due to "computer errors" and it's hard as Hell to clear them up. You know the details. I don't have to go into literally everything here. Sure. I know I broke anti-vandalism laws with my graffiti campaign. But not everyone gets a visit from the F.B.I. for allegedly painting graffiti on retail building walls. Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt anybody but the Dallas, Texas branch of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And how on earth did those folks find me in the first place? The only thing I can think of is that the new traffic monitoring cameras might have caught me or that some forensics expert peeled my fingerprints off a wall. Maybe some "alert citizen" watched me hit a wall and then get back in the car. The whole thing sounds like overly exaggerated precautions to me. People write on walls all the time. Most of the time the subject matter is pornographic or scatalogical. It wasn't the act of vandalism that has caused all this trouble, that pushed me out of my relationship, my home, my job and all my chances to just get it back together. No, it was the political content, the inflammatory message, the public disturbance, the waste of time collecting forensic evidence by a law enforcement agency reflecting "a certain touchiness" in regard to public speech deemed either unreasonable or inappropriate. But who was drawing the line? I simply don't know. When we started getting threatening telephone calls, we had to change telephone numbers. But the calls kept coming. It seems so stupid. I was afraid, and I still am afraid, we'd get hurt. You'd think we were living in Bulgaria, and that the winter clouds were as gray as how people in the Soviet republic probably felt, but this was in the broad light of the Texas summer. The attempts to silence us were not nearly as self-indulgent as my attempts at being some kind of tabloid-level hero. That's why I'm sorry. That's why I'm writing you. Please respond.

And maybe I am crazy. All this "coincidental activity" can be so nebulous you don't know if you're paranoid or if something's really going on behind the scenes. It's a little like my anti-war friend who had the City of Dallas anti-gang unit create an uproar at his Mesquite home--Mesquite? That's not part of the City of Dallas--because they suspected, they said, his son in the "deffamation" (their words) of a dumpster with a paint pen. He says he knows it had something to do with his anti-war, anti-Bush Administration activities. All I ever did was test the limits of free speech. All kinds of goons were all over us both. All I ever did was follow the lead of some anonymous Latin American graffiti artist who was angry that the Fascist coup of Augusto Pinochet, with the help of the C.I.A. and Henry Kissinger, had overthrown the threatening Socialist government of Salvadore Allende.

HEY! MISTER ILLUMINATI DUDE! YOU'RE FREAKIN' TOAST!

Look. Mister Illuminati dude, I know you're reading this. You read everything. I'm not sure how you read everything, but you're so powerful that you're capable of doing stuff I can't even imagine. That's why you control the entire world. You've got so much money, Mister Illuminati dude, that you've got a huge basement beneath your cliffside mansion, and its walls are made of rocks like Batman's bat-cave, and inside that huge basement, you've got a computer system that makes the U.S. government's Carnivore spy system look like some kind of tinker-toy replica. Every time your name comes up, Mister Illuminati dude, you log onto some kind of uber-site and read what people are saying about you. That sucks, dude. You're gonna stop reading my e-mails or I'm going to hunt you down and pop you in the face. O.K.? Got me?

Right now, you and your friends are huddled around some kind of huge computer screen. All of you are wearing those dumb-ass Druid robes, and like those rich idiots in Stanley Kubrick's movie "Eyes Wide Shut," you've got these dimestore masks on so nobody else in the room really knows who any of you freakazoids are. What's the matter? You insecure or something? And, just because you're really powerful, you need little reminders of your powerfulness standing around. Those reminders, I don't need to say, take the form of these really tall, naked fashion models who, for some reason or another, became prostitutes when you pulled some lever somewhere in your Illuminati bat cave and magically made their international super model careers take a mysterious dive. Is that the only way you can get laid, Mister Illuminati dude? What's the matter with you? You think all your toys make you better than me?

So what if you're reading my blog? Who really cares? You're supposed to be reading it, dumb ass, because I've addressed it to you! What are you? Some kind of mental midget? This is freakin' public information. Even the peons of the world can read this crap! So don't go thinking your so special just because you've got to go way deep down inside the earth into your Illuminati bat cave just to use an overpriced uber computer just to read this. Sure. You might have a lot of money, you might even control the U.S. Federal Reserve system, but that doesn't mean I couldn't kick your little bird-butt if I found you.

I heard all about your little parties in Davos, Switzerland. Who'd wanna go to one of those stuff shirt wing-dings anyway? The Black Sea might be losing its entire population of Sturgeon due to illegal fishing, but lookie there! You've got a mound of black belugia caviar as heaping tall as the Big Rock Candy Mountain sitting right in front of your little fat face. Eating fancy crackers you can't get at the 7/11? Big freakin' deal! What's that make you? A man?

Sorry, Mister Illuminati dude. Not a chance. You'd need a lot more than freaking fish eggs to make you a man. You need mansions all over the globe to make you a man. You need stretch limosines with blacked-out windows to make you a man. You need big yachts, you need specially-tailored clothing, you need stemware, you need rare orchids in your underground greenhouse. Even with all that, Mister Illuminati dude, from what I've heard your penis is still only three inches long. And that's when it's erect! Erect? Forget what that means? It's been a long time since your entire body told you that you were a man, hasn't it?

You're not a man, Mister Illuminati dude, you're a Giant Baby. You're a Giant Baby just like the one that scientists have hidden in the basement of Parkland Hospital in Dallas, Texas, right beneath the emergency room where John F. Kennedy was declared dead. Strange coincidence that you're one of those? Strange that you'd have ordered this cloning experiment--a Giant Baby, Mister Illuminati dude, floating in a giant transparent tub of chemicals--for your self gratification beneath the emergency room cum monument to one of your greatest achievements: the assassination of John F. Kennedy?

Whoo boy! So you got some dude killed! Lucky Luciano did that a thousand times. He didn't have to get the C.I.A. involved, and he didn't have to pay Castro, he didn't have to go through all sorts of red tape, and he didn't have to pay off the Dallas Police Department just to kill some dude, Mister Illuminati dude. All he did was rip out a revolver and pull the trigger. Is that so hard? How much money did you spend on the assassination anyway? Fifty bizzilion dollars? Hell, Mister Illuminati dude, I could have bought a pellet gun at Wall Mart and gotten it done a lot simpler than you did, well couldn't I? I could have used a $1.39 vegetable knife I bought at Kroger. And you're a bigger man than I am?

Who in the creeps do you think you are, Mister Illuminati dude? So freaking what if you can manipulate all the world's money markets with the flip of a finger. With the flip of a finger, I can tell you exactly what I think of you, Mister Illuminati dude.

Apparently you're not doing such a bang-up job of controlling the world either, Mister Illuminati dude. People are multiplying like rabbits. Hell, even some dumb cattle rancher out there in Frogcrotch, Texas can keep his herd under control better than you've done. And he could feed his cattle better than you feed yours, Mister Illuminati dude. At this point, two-thirds of the entire world's population is living off a dollar a day. And you know what? They might not have a custom Bang and Olfson satellite stereo system the size of a thimble sitting on their bedroom table, and they might not even have a bedroom table or even a bedroom, but I'll bet they're just as happy as you are, you miserable little loser. Besides, since you consider all that money you've got piled up in the closet a sure sign of your power, and that it's also a form of insurance that you'll keep your power that you've somehow instituted a top secret strategy of making about four freaking billion people live off a buck a day (talk about insulating yourself from criticism or anyone hedging your turf, dude!), why haven't you defeated Death yet? That's right, you puny, pathetic little loser! You're gonna die! Sooner or later, you're gonna wake up one morning and your face is going to be covered with welts. You might think that you've gotten them because you were allergic to the make-up you put on for the little dramatic presentation over at Bohemian Grove last week, but your doctor's gonna tell you it's cancer!

What you think of that, Mister Illuminati dude? Who'd want you to live forever anyway? You're nothing but a drag on the entire human race! Your mother'd probably want to shit on your head for all the ugly things you've done in the name of power, so why don't you go ahead and soak it, because as it is, Mister Illuminati dude, nobody really wants to look at either your head or your face. That's why you're wearing that mask, isn't it?

Mister Illuminati dude, you're ashamed of yourself. You think the mask is symbollic of working behind the scenes. But the only reason you work behind the scenes in the first place is because you're uglier than a mole on the ass of a rat, that's why. The girls you pay to sleep with you all know it, and they have to take heroin because they can't take it. They have to get up close to what really amounts to a huge turd hanging off the top of what resembles a human neck!

Way to go, Mister Illuminati dude! Ever since that time one of the Big Kids on the playground pulled your pants down and slimed you with pond scum, you've wanted revenge. Well it hasn't worked out so well has it? Look at all the resources you need simply to keep yourself from having to face the truth. You'd probably have done better signing up for a visit with Doctor Phil on TV.