Phutatorius Rides Again

100th Post!

2007-06-01T09:54:00.005-04:00

So it occurred to me that this post would be my 100th, and I thought I should serve up something special to mark the centepostal moment.

And that's what I've been doing for the past week — all week — trying to come up with something to write that would be worthy of a hundredth post.

A whole week lost to cogitatin' and ruminatin', and what do I have to show for it? A whole lot of NOTHING. No fanfare, no pageantry, no hoo-ha, no hullaballoo, no pomp and circumstance. No ceremonial recitations, no commemorative poem inscribed in marble, no unveiling of statuary, no 21-gun salutes, no ritual sacrifices to the sun god Ra. I collapsed under the pressure of the moment (that's a small "m" moment, until further notice), and all you get are these lousy T-shirts.

(available in white and ash grey, all proceeds will go to the Phutatorius & Co. World Domination Fund, all rights reserved, all liabilities disclaimed)

Here's hoping Post 101 goes better. In the meantime, I'm going to undertake a searching review of the base-10 numbering system, once we take power. It's so arbitrary that we celebrate the 100th iteration of anything -- if we were on a base-12 or base-16, we'd be honoring the 144th or the 256th, and no one would be complaining. 100 is just an artifact of history. I think it's worth spending some time poring over the numbers and selecting a numbering system that balances the competing goals of (1) supplying a sufficient quantity of milestone parties to satisfy the drooling masses, and (2) keeping those of us who have to stage these celebrations from tearing our hair out.

Anyway, 100th post — yippee. Go buy yourself a frickin' T-shirt.

How Could They?

2007-05-23T13:54:00.000-04:00

Not Adriana! I find myself bereft and bereaved. Not only is this a tragic and unfair result, but I'll surely miss the Hispano-Jersey flounce-and-pout stylings of Celia Juarez, sister of Adobe Fortifications Foreman Edgardo Juarez, and inspired real-time interpreter of Miss Drea de Matteo's lines during this period of illness.

Celia, I can't see you as any other character. It is therefore with a certain bittersweet sentiment that I dismiss you today. Go then, Celia — vamoose, as they say in your country — get thee hence to some other, more rewarding existence. Your stage talents are wasted on entertaining the pale, unshaven, pock-marked likes of me. Maybe we'll meet again, someday after the Ascendancy.

Honestly, it hasn't even been two weeks, and I'm dying here. I don't know how Howard Hughes did it.

Chickenpox!

2007-05-12T22:04:00.001-04:00

I've got them, too. SON OF A BITCH. We'll be rescheduling the hard-sell to the Yali tribesmen. Everything pushed back three weeks. 'Saright — I'll just hole up and watch some video. PePe just gave me the first 5.5 seasons of The Sopranos on DVD — pirated through a cousin of his in Lima. He didn't have to pay them a cent.

Problem is they're dubbed over in Spanish by a handful of this cousin's scofflaw friends. They sound stoned out of their minds and are giggling half the time. They do the men's voices all buffoonish and the girls' in falsettos. It's hard to listen to, and I don't understand what they're saying, anyway. So I've hired away some of the English speakers on the crew to come over and retranslate the dubbed Spanish back into English, in real time. It's not ideal, but it's television. I've got a couple of the domestics doing the women's roles: some of them are pretty talented.

Frickin' 'pox. I can't stand it. Whatever. I'm clocking out. This laptop's got my legs itching again.

Chickenpox!

2007-05-07T15:29:00.000-04:00

Sea Monkey Brother Jarvis has the chickenpox! What a stunning reversal for the Terrarium Terror. No sooner is he given a name than he's covered in a raft of unsightly blotches. What is it with my peeps getting sick like this?

Ho there, Phutatorius! you say. Why all this consultation with doctors? Don't you know chickenpox when you see it?

Well, I do. At least I think I would, but on a dude with such a small amount of surface area, you're talking about only 10-15 button-sized marks, from head to toe. So for all I know it could have been a breakout of acne.

Anyway, all we can do right now is keep The Boy comfortable until the virus clears. I got a good-sized tub of Noxzema, scooped a big wad of it out, and set it down half-full for him to sit in. He spends most of the day up to his neck in moisturizer, and he seems content (or at least the glass is muffling his complaints).

The real bitch of it is I wanted to take his picture for The Yali Presentation. He is, after all, the much-discussed Little Man from their Prophecy. But I want to put my best foot forward here, and I'd rather that he didn't look all unkempt and diseased.

I guess there's always PhotoShop.

The Morning After

2007-05-06T11:44:00.000-04:00

Well, the late morning, anyway . . .

If you hadn't gathered as much from my last post, it turns out I was really lit up last night. In fact, things got so bad that at one point I was out on a corner of the Patio, mashing pretty hard with a chick that I thought was the spitting image of Flora Pachado (the Most Beautiful Girl I've Ever Seen in Peru, if you remember).

Now I'm told that the Object of Last Night's Misdirected Lust ("OLNML") was in fact a giant stuffed panda that we had raffled off to the kids earlier in the day. The girl who had won it had (thankfully) gone home to bed with her grandmother, but her parents were still at the party and were planning to take it home later that night.

PePe's got a bottle of Woolite and is cleaning the OLNML off right now — this wouldn't be that big a project, but apparently I had a mouthful of Oreos when I moved in for the kill. I'm all for just getting little Juanita a new panda bear, but PePe thinks this one is still salvageable.

I've written up a blog post on this because I think there's some wisdom in this story, and I want to draw it out for you. So here goes: if I were some lesser form of being — say, a politician — I'd be trying to cover up this Incident. But as you all should know so well by now, Brothers and Sisters, life is all about having Incidents — and the number and nature of my Incidents are what make my life in particular so rich. Persons (note that I didn't write "men," Sisters) who are truly Great don't need to cover up their foibles, their indiscretions. They lay their lives open for the world to see, because they know that when all the assets and liabilities are tabled and calculated out, they're still Great.

So I got to third base last night with Somebody Else's Stuffed Panda. What of it? Some years down the road we'll not only be laughing about this: I'll have commissioned some world-renowned artist to recreate the scene in oils for the Capitol Rotunda. Count on it, People.

¡Cinco de MAyo!

2007-05-06T03:19:00.000-04:00

Oh oh oh ohhh ohoh ho ho am I hamered. Fuapachewita, Bros and Sissses! That's Spanish, you know —, specail Phutatorius diale3ct for ";celebrate goood times cm'on!""

So I gave the bulding crerws the day off for Cinco de Mayo. Not sure what that's all about, but I've been to enough Mexican restraunts to be aware of the holiday and when its celebrated. Chalk me up as a BIG fan of holidays that have their dates built into their names. When I get my crap in order and overhaul the calendr, we're going to chuck Easter and Thangksiving and Election Day too: all that shit in favor of moreeasily scheduled festival days. You have to have to figure that there was a month/day when Christ came back from the dead, when the pilgrims sat down with the INdians for dinner. Somebody just needs to roll up their sleeves and DO THE FRICKIN' RESERCH. Once we have precise calendar dates, we can settle these wandering hollidays onceandforall. If the Detroit Lions and Macy's don't like it, bring on BLOOMINGDALE'S AND THE B ROWNS. ¿How you likeme now, bitches? Worrrrrrd up.

Anyway, any excuse to trhow a party, right? Awwwwwright. I told the crews to bring over their families. Stocked up on José Cuervo, broke out the quesdillo maker, even brought a projection screen out on the patio to show last week's Sabado Gigante off the TiVO. I know, I know, you here all this talk about "assimilation," but sometimes it's not the worsdt thing in the world to give people a taste of home. Ya know? For the muchachos I picked up a couple piñatas at a party warehous: one shaped like a donkeyyy and the other some dude in a suit — the tag on it said "Tom Tancredo." Never heard of the guy, but he sure fires up a crowd full of MeXcans a party. Even the adults were lining up to take a swing at him.

We had ourselves one raucous little fiesta, let me tell you. I always say you know a good party when the cops arrive, and you know a better party when they stick around, get jacked up on margritas and dry-hump the topiary nudes. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreeeeha!

Now I don't go looking to pooop on a partay, but here are two bummer: (1) I didn't make much progress on the Yali presentation today — or yesterday or the day befor thaat; and (2) Sea--Monkey Jarvis was under the wether and notable to join us for the party. Not sure what's ailing Lil' Bro, but I've got calls in to a doctor and a vetenarian. Should know something by tomorrow.

BedTime now for El Jefe. All that sangria's taking it's toll==

PePe's Back

2007-05-02T13:52:00.000-04:00

I'm writing from a Motel 6 (Official Hotel Chain of the Ascendancy, mind you) in Atlanta. Had to drive down here to pick up PePe, who was released yesterday from the Centers for Disease Control. Well, I didn't have to drive: we could have flown him up to New England, but flying's been a bitch for Phutatorius & Co. lately (see "Stupid &#$@* No-Fly List!," Dec. 2, 2005). And I wanted to show my Piper some love: he did, after all, have to spend forty days getting pin-stuck by government nurses under fluorescent lamps.

PePe doesn't seem much the worse off for the experience. His illness left some pock marks on his face, but I've told him — half-kidding, of course — that we'll just ask the sculptors to chisel some updates into the busts and statues I've commissioned for the world's major cities.

PePe tells me he thinks his diplomatic foray into Yali territory went pretty well. There's a bit of a divide among the tribal elders re how I fit into their Prophecy. I'm putting together a presentation that I think will make an authoritative case; PePe says the elders have a retreat planned for mid-May, and I hope to have my pitch together by them. The problem is I'm accustomed to working in PowerPoint, and it's not clear to me they'll have teleconferencing at this retreat. I mean, if you already live in the wilderness as part of a hunter-gatherer society, where do you go when you want to "get away from distractions?" Seems to me you could go either way: to a prime hotel in The Big City, or to an Even More Remote Location that doesn't even have electricity, much less the sort of communications infrastructure that would enable me to run slides from one hundred and forty time zones away.

Logistics aside, though, the point is that the Yali are willing to listen. If I can get them to buy in, that's one society I can dominate without even striking a blow. And who knows? Maybe they can fight.

As for PePe, he used up all his sick time + ten personal days while he was in quarantine. I could make allowances for him, but what kind of message would that send to the rest of The Staff? If he can show me he was working during some of this down time, I'll set it off against his out-of-office totals. Absent that, my dedicated and diligent Piper will just have to settle for winning April's "Employee of the Month" award — and the much-coveted $50 gift certificate to Chili's that comes with it.

Here's to you, PePe: Piper, Sidekick, Emissary, Trouper. Let's get you back home.

Naming Contest Winner

2007-04-26T20:37:00.000-04:00

I know, I know, people: I've let this go on too long. It's been over two months since I announced two finalists in the Contest To Name My Sea Monkey Brother (see "Contest Finalists 'Named'," Feb. 22, 2007).

Announcing a winner is long overdue, then — both for the contestants and for my Sea Monkey Brother, who I'm sure would welcome a bit of closure on the Nomenclature Front.

At this point I'd like to ask that all of you hold your reactions until the end of the post here. I anticipate just a smidgen of outrage here, and I want the opportunity to explain the situation before the hate mail rolls in.

All right, then. Here's goes.

The winner is . . . ME!!!

I've named my brother myself. It happened a couple of days ago, and quite by accident. I walked by his tank, stopped, took a long look at him, and the name came to me: JARVIS. He just looks like a Jarvis. There's no way around it. He's Jarvis. I looked my brother in the eye on Tuesday, called him Jarvis, and now I can't look at him and see anyone else but Jarvis. It's almost like I had some kind of divine visitation on this score.

Over the past 48 hours I've fought a little bit of a battle with myself on this. I did pledge, after all, to award naming rights to the best contest entry. At the same time, however, in light of this sudden, crystal-clear revelation (which I think could well qualify as an upper-case-M Moment for me, by the way) it would be a crime to call my Sea Monkey Brother anything but Jarvis (or an affectionate nickname to be determined at a later date). So Jarvis it is.

Plus I've been thinking: I never did say I couldn't enter the contest on equal terms with the rest of you. And for that matter, I didn't close off the pipeline of entries when I named my two finalists back in February. On the contrary, I affirmatively solicited more entries. There's no reason why I couldn't submit my idea. And so I did. And I win.

I'm thinking I'll take myself out for a steak dinner.

Consolation prizes are due, of course, to those Fabulous February Finalists, Magdalena in Mauritius and Chumsley in Oxford. To Maggie I intend to forward a digital copy of the bootleg video I made of a performance of The King & I on Broadway. This was a show from the 1996 revival, with Lou Diamond Phillips playing the King. Great stuff: I had terrific orchestra seats and caught all of the first and most of the second act before they confiscated my Camcorder. To Chumsley, a round trip ticket from Oxford to Limerick, redeemable any weekday between May and October.

Content-appropriate prizes, I should think.

All right, then. If any of you still think I've double-crossed you, have at me. I can take it.

Announcing The Loot-the-Church All-Stars Summer European Tour Dates!

2007-04-14T14:04:00.000-04:00

As I think I've mentioned in at least one other post (see "Ketchup (get it?)," Oct. 12, 2006), I've been in talks to take my highly successful "Loot the Church"™ fundraiser/interactive history lesson on tour.

Turns out the USA dates aren't going to work out. About half of them were set up at Episcopalian churches. We were negotiating the appearances in bulk at the diocese level (you can't get anything done going church-to-church), and when some of these congregations found out what was brewing, they got all huffy, broke off the national church and realigned themselves with more traditional Anglican churches in Uganda and Nigeria.

(You know, because no one's ever looted a church in Uganda or Nigeria. Right.)

Anyway, because of Episco-Schism-Gate we lost opportunities in three big revenue sweet spots: northern Virginia; eastern Pennsylvania; and Charlotte, North Carolina. After that a couple of investors pulled their money, and the whole US plan fell through.

But I don't dwell on bad news. I just poison the messengers and move on to the good news (kidding! I'm kidding, Mr. DHL Man! Have a tartlet. They're homemade.). The good news is this: we're on for the Euro tour this summer with Cirque du Soleil! The dates are set in stone, I'm told, and here they are:

June 16-18: Copenhagen
June 21-23: Helsinki
June 27-29: Riga
July 1-12: St. Petersburg
July 13-20: Moscow
July 24-26: Tbilisi
July 28-30: Kiev
August 3-7: Prague
August 11-13: Budapest
August 16-18: Dubrovnik
August 22-24: Thessaloniki
August 26-30: Athens

I don't know all the particulars as to the churches involved, but I hear there are some pretty terrific cathedrals in play in this part of the world, complete with reliquaries and crypts and everything. And the plan is to mix in a couple of monasteries, too.

I know some of you were hoping we could get something done with the Vatican, but it's not so easy to steal a minute to talk to this new Pope. Add to this that he's not the type to delegate the authority to bind the Church in contracts, and you end up having to stand in line along with all the other suitors, petitioners, contractors, and process servers. You thought it was a bitch to get to the Sistine Chapel: it could be another eight months before we get our audience with Papa Benedict. (You hope Peter manages the bureaucracy a little better at the Pearly Gates . . .)

I'll be announcing the All-Stars lineup — a veritable who's who of friends and relations of Phutatorius's friends and relations! — in a couple days. If I served up all the juicy bits at once, you wouldn't have to come back here for more, would you?

April Fools, Mother F**ka!

2007-04-02T09:28:00.000-04:00

Well, la-di-da, Brothers and Sisters. I pick up this morning's Boston Herald, and what do I see?

Seems as though my caseworker at the Department of Labor, Francis X. Gilbert — a/k/a "Mr. Integrity" — got busted yesterday for possession with intent to distribute. A bag of H and a monogrammed syringe — nice touch, guy — surfaced in his cubicle at the DOL offices, after an anonymous caller tipped off building security about a "party pack" in Gilbert's desk drawer.

As they were hauling him away in cuffs, Gilbert apparently declared that the evidence was planted, and he'll be vindicated in a court of law. "I've been framed!" Gilbert insisted on his perp walk. "And I have a pretty good idea who did it." Right, dude. Whatever. Blame everybody but The Monkey. Life's a bitch, innit?

And I suppose the six marijuana plants that police found in earthenware pots on your enclosed back patio — those were, uh, planted, too? Heh heh.

Open letter from Phutatorius, World Leader Ascendant, to F.X. Gilbert: kiss my lily-white butt, G-man! No one's buying your Joe Friday, Elliot (sp.?) Ness schtick anymore, are they? Turns out you're not just a user, you're a trafficker. Ouch. You're out jacked up on horse in your off-hours, peddling gateway drugs to God-knows-whose teenage kids, and here all I was doing was helping to instill some discipline into some poor Mexican families with dreams.

Joke's on you, pig. And to think just three days ago you turned up your nose at the Cabinet-level Minister of Labor Conditions gig I was offering. Hell of a negotiator you are.

Pfft.

Re: Your Policy Questions

2007-03-29T22:58:00.000-04:00

All right, all right, ALL RIGHT, people. All is forgiven, and you can stop sending me the gift baskets. I'm up to my neck in chocolate-covered pretzels and shrink-wrapped peppercorn salamis. I normally wouldn't complain, but I've been overindulging these last couple days, and now I'm hurting. If you're going to send anything, dial up this red-headed Betty and send me some TUMs. In the meantime, I'll shift some of the overflow to the workers, see if I can't buy myself a few "Excellents" on the surveys they're completing for the feds..

Some of you have asked what I intend to do once I've seized Absolute Power over the Geopoliticus. "What will you change, Phutatorius? How will you make life better for us?"

These are fair questions — complicated questions, and I'm not sure it makes a great deal of sense to try to answer them now. I understand that some of you are cautious types, and you don't want to put your eggs in a basket if you don't know what lies in the bottom of it. I also appreciate that you've been watching all these early Presidential debates (at least those of you in the States, anyway); all these candidates are getting hot and bothered about how they're going to fix the health care industry and save endangered whales and protect the American flag from forest fires. I get that a lot of you have come of age under democratic regimes, and you've been lulled into thinking you're entitled to ask these questions of your Would-Be Leaders. And maybe you do have that right (to be honest, I haven't decided that question just yet), but please understand, Brothers and Sisters:

I don't think these questions are very fair to me right now. I have so much going on, so much to do. An Ascendancy is an Ascendancy; I'll give thought to how I'll use my mandate once I have it.

Now I hate to resort to clichés, Brothers and Sisters, but I really do need to take this one step at a time, and I will cross the Bridge of Setting and Implementing Policy when — and only when — I get to it.

When you're playing a high-stakes game like I am, you just can't afford to get too far ahead of yourself.

So I apologize for leaving you in suspense, and I beseech you all to show some patience with me on this point. It's not that I'm trying to be secretive. It's just that I've got a bit of a one-track mind right now. My preoccupation at this moment is to get the Power. Once I've done that, I'll take a three-week vacation, sit on a beach somewhere, and sort through how I intend to use It.

Good enough?

Loose Lips . . .

2007-03-12T22:27:00.000-04:00

. . . I won't finish the sentence, people, because you all know what loose lips do. They suck. They suck just like the person who read my last post and went out and started blabbing all about it up and down the landscape, so that now I've got the federal government up here running an investigation into my labor practices.

These DOL people . . . arrgh! Give them a reason to get all up in your bidness, and they never let up. Sniffing around The Compound with their clipboards and Geiger counters, handing out self-help/report abuse pamphlets to all and sundry, hassling my guard dogs. It's just unbearable.

The simple fact is, Diego and Felix tried to rip me off, and in exchange they got to spend a nice couple of weeks kicked back on a couple of pristine almost-new Army issue cots, with three squares and forty-nine channels of cable television wired directly into their cells. So they couldn't come and go as they pleased. Whoop-dee-doo. Based on the on-demand charges I'm seeing on my cable bill, these hombres weren't exactly lacking for entertainment. Plus I bet if you went to these two guys' apartments, you'd find beds there that aren't as luxurious as the cots, and fewer channels on the TV set. How can it be an illegal labor practice to lock a worker into a room that, by every measurable standard, is nicer than his own house? Not to pile on, or to be snarky, but I'd wager dollars to doughnuts that the living conditions in my Detention Facility rate at least two stars higher than any veterans' hospital in the Lower 48 (I won't speak for Hawai'i: I hear it's lovely there). Get your own house in order first, U.S. Government.

It's just so frickin' absurd. And now I'm either going to have to bribe these inspectors or swallow a citation and consent decree — not a desirable result either way. All this because some Brother or Sister can't read my confidential communications and keep His or Her mouth shut about them.

A blogger's relationship with his readers, like all relationships, is built on trust. Someone's gone and wrecked that trust, and now I'm in a snit. And I won't come out of it unless some critical mass of my Loyal Readership sends me chocolate and Hickory Farms gift boxes in the mail (links provided). And at least one of those three-way cheese/butter/caramel popcorn tins you get at Christmas. In the meantime, consider this blog's Candor Level dialed down to Need To Know Only.

Construction Update

2007-03-03T19:44:00.000-05:00

As I'm still recovering from the surgery and can't do air travel for another month or two — I've been spending most of my time hanging out in the Compound. The weather is ugly up here, and promises to remain so at least through March, so I don't have much occasion for or interest in stepping out (especially now that I'm trying to ramp down my friendship with Aldo: I can't even go to the grocery store without him cropping up). I'm becoming a bit of a homebody lately, and I figure it's high time I treated my readers to an update on the construction effort.

Work continues through the winter. These Mexican laborers moan and groan now and then about the cold weather. I throw them a bone now and then, offer them extended coffee breaks with hot apple cider and flautas. The little things mean a lot to these folks, and if the occasional refreshment will keep them from unionizing on me, it's money well-spent.

Six of the forty-one buildings on the site plan are "substantially complete," per the contract language. That may seem like minimal progress, but at least half of the planned structures are cabins, sheds, outposts — small-time buildings on the periphery of the estate, and they're slated to be the last bits built.

The Big Six currently in progress — (1) the Residence, (2) the Garage, (3) the Rec Center, (4) the Armory, (5) the Café, and (6) the Detention Facility — are really taking shape. We fast-tracked the Rec Center, since I've been stuck around the house. The home theater system is wired and fully-loaded, hot rocks are fired up in the steam room, and I've played a few hard-fought games of ping pong in the billiard room (the ping pong is just temporary: we're still waiting for the snooker table to be delivered).

The café kitchen is fully equipped — restaurant-quality, top-of-the-line appliances. I have an RFP out for restaurant services. Posted the ad in Vermont Restaurateurs Weekly. Six vendors come in next week with tasting menus, and I can't frickin' wait. No more frozen pizza turnovers for Phutatorius. Henceforward, it'll be fresh pizza turnovers.

The tunnel complex interconnecting the principal buildings is coming together, too. We had a cave-in just outside the Armory, but no one was seriously injured. I flew in a friend of mine with an MD to treat the half-dozen casualties (if you can even call them that). He set a few bones, rigged up some slings and splints, divvied up a six-pack of Bactine bottles and sent the workers home to recuperate. I've offered them double pay for the lost hours, and they've signed releases of liability and promised not to go tattling to OSHA. Not bad compensation, and when word got out about the deal a couple of the ne'er-do-wells on the work crew staged a few accidents of their own. They're now in the Detention Facility. Two weeks for each of them, sentence suspended until we finally got light and heat in the cells two days ago. (I didn't want to violate any of the Geneva Conventions.)

Everything seems to be on schedule, and I don't anticipate any serious cost overruns. For materials you always have to pay through the nose, but I'm starting to know people who know people around here. A lot of times they'll cut me a break on pricing, on account of how I'm a World-Renowned Internet Personality. Now and again I'll get frustrated with the pace of things, but all in all, a nice little Compound is taking shape up here.

New MySpace Page!

2007-02-27T20:30:00.000-05:00

So I've been reading all over tarnation about how anyone who's anyone has a "MySpace page." For a while, I personally didn't see what all the hoo-hah was about, but if I had to list my Top 50 Character Traits, an open mind would be #15. I'm a Man Of the People, By the People, For the People. And if the People dig this MySpace site, who am I to gainsay them?

Without further ado, then, I proudly announce the opening of my spanking-new MySpace page. And I have to say, this website is a pretty terrific networking resource. I've already made inquiries with at least one other subscriber about signing a House Band of My Imperial Ascendancy. This was a big-ticket act, and no sooner had I written them than I had a notice promptly returned announcing that I've become one of their "friends." No answer yet on the House Band gig, but I understand people have calendars and commitments to consult before they drop everything and hitch their tour bus to my rising star.

But at worst, by simply introducing myself I've become close friends with a troupe of seasoned indie rockers. Not a bad payoff for ten minutes' work. Clearly there's something to this MySpace business. All you need is a computer and Internet port, and pow! — you're instantly hobnobbing with political and cultural elites. And for that matter, it seems I'm already absorbing some of the clout and cachet from my rocker buddies: hardly a day passes without some winsome, usually nude twenty-year-old girl leaving me a "message," asking me to "be her friend." That's right, Brothers and Sisters, your Internet Personality has become a bit of a hot property since his MySpace page went up.

In fact, the way things are going, I figure I won't have to hang out with Aldo Nova much anymore, which is a relief. Don't get me wrong — I normally despise social climbers — but Aldo's cool has been slipping for some time. He won't stop talking about his Juvenile Gout Foundation work (see "I Found Myself Going Once . . . Going Twice . . . and SOLD!", Phutatorius, Dec. 2, 2005). He's become a real sanctimonious bore, and because of it there isn't a hot club in Montpelier or even Burlington anymore that hasn't blacklisted him. I have to take the guy to Hardee's now, and he never has any cash on him to pick up the tab. Bees and Esses, the Aldo Nova train is at the end of the line: it was high time for me to take my aspirations elsewhere.

And of course the organizing possibilities a site like this offers are significant. I figure all I need to do is drop a note to Puff Diddy and I could well have half of Harlem enlisted and mobilized Downtown in support of The Ascendancy. Shoot! Thanks to my deffest homey P. Daddy, I could have full battalions storming Wall Street by Whitsuntide.

It may still be the dead of winter up here in Vermont, but things are looking up in Phutsietown, people. Come check out the site. You'll want to "befriend" me early, if you want the plum cabinet appointments and proconsulships.

Contest Finalists "Named"

2007-02-22T19:34:00.000-05:00

I've got two finalists in the naming contest. Finding both entries equally brilliant, but in fundamentally different ways, I'm confronted with a difficult apple and orange problem. So at the moment I don't yet favor one over the other. Unless and until I have a breakthrough here — and I won't rule it out — I consider the following entries to be the front-runners:

The first comes from Chumsley in Oxford, a bit of an aesthete, I gather, who framed his entry as a limerick:

A fellow we like to call Linus,
lived for years in his big brother's sinus.
But when he got gangrene,
Bro did not seem so keen:
"When he's out, let no doc recombine us."

I love the poem, but I'm not sure whether the name sticks, outside the context of the limerick. Big points, though, for Chumsley.

Another writer, Magdalena in Mauritius, proposes that I name the Little Fellow "Yul," after Yul Brynner, who of course played the celebrated role of King Mongkut in The King and I. "That commemorates the whole Siamese twin thing," Magdalena writes, "and at the same time it takes note of the fact that he was born during the Christmas season." One thing to keep clear, people: my brother was born — that is, delivered of his mother — right alongside me in September 1973. He was extracted on December 26 of last year. I just want us all to keep our terms clear. Otherwise I'm kind of digging the Yul/Yule pun. Maggie, you're my other finalist.

Now you know what you're up against, people. Hop to!

Aetna Sucks

2007-02-14T10:27:00.000-05:00

Ugh. My Piper's in some kind of Customs quarantine, where he'll sit and rot for the next forty days (did you know, by the way, that the word "quarantine" comes from the Latin for "forty?"). They took him off the plane at LAX, claiming he had some kind of infectious tropical disease.

I had thought, at first, that the feds were just hassling us again (see "Stupid &#$@* No-Fly List", Dec. 2, 2005). But PePe called me from a pay phone — it's like an old dormitory, where they've placed him, with a community coin-op telephone in the hallway — and said he really does have typhoid fever. He says everyone in the facility is friendly. The food is good, they show second-run movies in the auditorium, and the medical care is more than adequate. Not a bit like Guantanamo, which is a relief.

Here's the thing, though: sitting in quarantine with typhoid fever really sucks, and this was an avoidable event. Phutatorius & Co. has contracted with Aetna to provide health care benefits to the staff, and you would think — a stitch in time being worth a pound of cure, as they say — that the coverage would extend to immunizations. But when PePe went down to the travel clinic before the trip to Papua New Guinea, they told him Aetna doesn't pay for the shots.

(You know what I think it is? They're cheap bastards, for sure. They're an insurance company. But it's more than that: they're based in like Texas or Oklahoma or something, and they just don't want anybody to leave the country. You know, because there's nothing worthwhile that's not in the U.S. of A. That's Aetna for you.)

So PePe had to go into the middle of the diseased South Pacific wilderness without any vaccines. Not on vacation, not for his own pleasure or broadening of experience: it was a trip for work. An assignment: he had no choice. And wouldn't you know it? Bam! Typhoid. Flared up on the plane. Something ugly, too, as I hear from Dead Eye, who rode home next to him. She was scared to death, scrubbing herself with Purell the whole time. Flayed off half her skin with that stuff.

Now there would be some justice here, if Aetna then had to pay for all the expensive treatments you need to get rid of frickin' typhoid. It might be worth PePe getting typhoid, to make the point to these jerks that they should it's better for everyone if they pay for prevention, rather than cure. But nooooooo. This one's on the federal government, because he's in quarantine.

And Aetna skates. The pricks.

Wait. Wait a Minute . . .

2007-02-12T16:55:00.000-05:00

I just had a Moment.

Do you suppose . . .

that the dearly- and overexposedly-departed Anna Nicole Smith (November 28, 1967 - February 8, 2007) might be the Platinum-Haired Goddess from the Yali Prophecy?

And do you suppose some cosmic ordering principle had an agency in the otherwise unexplained circumstance of Ms. Smith's death?

And do you suppose Ms. Smith's death accomplished the "Platinum-Haired Goddess . . . leav[ing] the Earth" precondition for the ascendancy of the Chosen Big Man?

Now before you all start writing me, wet handkerchiefs in hand, to complain that I'm exploiting the passing of an American icon, or that I'm some kind of ghoulish opportunist, let me make clear that I haven't gone around systematically gunning down good-looking blondes in the hope of moving this Prophecy along. Nor have I applied a more literal reading to the Yali chieftain's pronouncement and launched a Supermodels in Space program (not that certain strict constructionist-types in my inner circle haven't advised it). Not my thing, Brothers and Sisters: to be sure, keeping an abundance of buxom blondies alive and on the planet is a big plank in my Geomanagement platform.

But I'd be a damned fool — wouldn't I? — if I didn't take note of the Prophecy when the departure of an obvious candidate for Platinum-Haired Goddess lands in my lap.

Look — draw your own conclusions, people. But I'll be looking into this. Closely.

Betty! See what you can pull together on Anna Nicole Smith.

(Betty's the new Research Specialist.)

I want her Wikipedia entry, printed out. I want biostatistics, accounts from her childhood. Travel logs and itineraries: especially any trips to Oceania. If she had a divine revelation, I want to know about it. I want to know the trade name and chemical composition of every drug she ever took: did she ever do peyote? And photos — for God's sake, get me photos. I'll want to look these over closely: she may have some kind of a birthmark somewhere that sets her off as a Figure of Cosmic Importance.

I Am Getting Soooooo Tired . . .

2007-02-11T15:23:00.000-05:00

of this Anna Nicole Smith thing. I mean, my Gawd. You can't turn on the television without seeing once-serious news commentators going on — as if they're still serious people on a serious subject — about Anna Nicole Smith.

This is the problem of being stuck at home recuperating from illness. Yeah, sure — you might get 500 channels on The Dish, but then some nonevent of a news story happens, and every single stinking one of them abandons its regular programming to cover the nonevent.

So some bleach-blonde beauty queen dies before her time. Whoop-de-doo. It's not like there's some great cosmic consequence to it, right?

My Call, Ma

2007-02-05T22:29:00.000-05:00

Add my mother to the list of complainers. She just wrote me on the Blackberry (man that thing's addictive!), asking to have "a word." Turns out she's miffed about the Naming Contest. Says she's the little Sea Monkey's mother, and it's her prerogative to pick a name for him.

Now the way I see it, a mother acquires naming rights over a child in one of two ways: (1) she carries the child around inside her for nine months, which I hear is uncomfortable, and (2) at a certain point the kid comes out of her, which I hear hurts like hell.

All that's well and good, but this is a special case. By either measure, I have a greater entitlement, viz.:

(1) Ma might have carried my brother around for nine months, but I bore the load for thirty-three years. Shoot — even when the little guy was inside her, he was also inside me. So there was never even a moment when Ma had exclusive sovereignty over my brother.

(2) When my mother went into labor with her twin sons, it was the bigger one — me — who brought the pain. Remember, now: my brother was lodged in my head. So as much as it probably sucked to give birth to me (I was a big 'un, weighing it at 8 lbs., 15 oz.), Ma did not suffer any additional pain on the margin in delivering her second son. We both came out at once. And she got all this done overnight. Whereas the pain I felt over Christmas went on for days. I don't know how it compares to labor — and I won't dare to speculate, Sisters — but the headaches I had sure lasted longer, and I'm looking at four months' rehabbing from the surgery. In short, I believe I can confidently say that I went through more hell getting Lil' Bro extracted from my sinus than Ma did delivering him so many years ago.

I'm naming this kid, Ma, and that's that. Don't try writing me again on this — I've reconfigured my spam filter to bounce any further messages on this subject.

Naming Contest!

2007-02-01T09:19:00.000-05:00

I've got all this downtime — I need to amuse myself. How about a naming contest? I realize I've been calling my brother "The Little Guy." That can't stick, and I'm hurting for ideas. Any help out there, Bros and Sisses?

Tell you what: y'all can write me with proposals. I'll pick the best one, and the winner gets a TBD prize. Only one name per person. By name I mean set of names — first and middle. So an entry of "Thomas Alva" counts as one name. An entry that says, "how about Thomas? or Alva?" gets disqualified.

That settles it. No deadline for entries. I'll know The Name when I see it.

A Diplomatic Mission

2007-01-28T20:52:00.000-05:00

Well, it took a fair amount of elbow-throwing and threats, but my travel agent managed to put together a short-notice itinerary from Boston Logan to Papua New Guinea. It's amazing what those bums at American Express Travel can do when you hold their feet to the fire a little. They've even arranged for an English-speaking escort to conduct my emissary, PePe, to his destination among the Yali.

What — you thought I would be going? In my condition?

We discussed the matter around the Compound and concluded that although it would certainly be best for me to appear among the Yali in person (as, after all, I am the Big Man Who Carried Etc. &c.) but my doctors communicated to me some concern about how my sinuses would handle the pressure of ascent and descent on those plane flights (not to mention the jungle humidity over there — an infection waiting to happen). I don't know if any of you have traveled to the Far East, but — let me tell you — the airline pilots over there aren't particularly attuned to Western sensibilities about airplane landings. They pretty much drop the nose and go into a full dive. I've told Gloria more than once: if you're going to send one of your jets to fetch me, make sure the pilot isn't a goddamned kamikaze. But she never listens.

It was also mentioned — by an unnamed staff member I will hold in disfavor for at least the next couple of days — that I might not be the best candidate to make initial diplomatic overtures. This after I suggested that we propose certain modifications to the Yali Prophecy, to wit: that the words "his personal guard" be stricken from the oracular text, and that the words "Rock 'n' Roll" be inserted between "Wisdom" and "Harmony." These seem to be reasonable requests, as I'd like to preserve maximum flexibility in appointing and dismissing security personnel (and I'd like them to have firearms training, and not just a facility with boomerangs or whatever these Yalis have in their limited arsenals), and one big reason I'm taking on this burden is that I'm really frustrated with the state of popular music these days. The Certain Staff Member remarked that redlining the Yali's sacred prophecy would be insensitive, and proposing it would surely get the conversations off on the wrong foot. Certain Other Staff Members agreed (the way they all fall in line with one another, I swear they're all sleeping together), to which I say,

Whatever.

It's generally the case that a head of state doesn't carry the bulk of the diplomatic load. So there's no reason for affairs to be managed differently in my case. Upon consultation, it was resolved that PePe would embark on this journey to establish diplomatic ties — and if possible, a formal alliance and pledge of mutual cooperation — with the Yali. I've recorded a greeting on a DVD, for PePe to play on his laptop when he meets with the tribal elders. So I will have a presence at the meeting, even though my brain trust apparently doesn't trust me to address these people in real time.

This being a journey of some historical significance, I assigned one of the Stenos (Dead Eye) to travel with PePe and record the proceedings as best she can. I understand that she'll be traveling in rough country, largely unsupported and without any of her fellows to relieve her. So I don't expect a 24-7 rendering: she's just required to jot down the good stuff.

In the meantime, I'm short-staffed at home, and my contracts with the other two limit their shift length to eight hours daily. So with only sixteen hours of coverage, I've resolved not to speak for eight hours each day. So long as I remember when I'm flying sans-Steno, that shouldn't be so hard to do. I've been sleeping ten hours a day anyway. It's just a question of coordinating the naps.

I must say I remain a bit nonplussed about this Platinum-Haired Goddess, whose shuffling-off from somewhere seems to be a precondition for my Ascendancy. My best guess is that the Goddess is Hillary Clinton, and that the Prophecy requires me to wait until the end of her Presidency to make my move. That's a gagger on so many levels. But I just can't think of many other blondes I'm in competition with right now.

I Love a Good Prophecy

2007-01-23T08:15:00.000-05:00

A guy with aspirations like mine loves good pub. I like to think I have a nose for a good story, and a knack for self-promotion. But I certainly can't take credit for the developments of last night. Sometimes the Good Stuff just falls in your lap.

As any of you read the papers knows, the story of The Twin in My Head broke in the large media outlets three days ago. I've been on the phone much of the past couple days giving follow-up interviews, licensing photographs of Little Bro to the Associated Press and Reuters. If I didn't own the news cycle, I had a pretty strong market share in it. There's an Apple Dashboard widget that plots, on a map of the world, where the hot news stories are, and when I consulted it yesterday, there was a big fat red dot over this part of Northern Vermont. I don't see anyone else in this sleepy burg generating any news. So it's gotta be me.

Anyway, it turns out that news of my brother's extraction made its way into a deep, secluded corner of Papua New Guinea. Not sure how, as I can't imagine they have broadband or even dial-up Internet in these remote Oceanian jungles, but a Yali chieftain got wind of my story, and he walked a brisk sixty miles overnight to the nearest telephone exchange, found himself an English-speaking interpreter, and dialed me up. I took the call at around 8 p.m. EST. The chieftain endured all this hardship because he wanted to recount to me a generations-old Yali prophecy. It's a cornerstone of tribal lore, apparently, this prophecy, which was uttered from the dying lips of the Yali tribe's greatest warrior king (I forget his name; it sounded something like "Samsonite," which I know isn't right) and passed down over twenty-one generations to my phone correspondent. The prophecy goes as follows:

One day all the world's forces will converge and concentrate in a single man, the Chosen King — Samsonite renewed. You will know him as The Big Man Who Carried the Little Man in His Nose, and he will be revealed to you in that fashion. The Little Man will be separated from the Big Man, and into the vacant space the Big Man will inhale and absorb great leadership attributes. The Platinum-Haired Goddess will recognize him and leave the Earth, out of deference to him, and the Earth will be his to hold and manage. The Yali will be the Big Man's protectors, his personal guard, and under his tutelage and government the Earth shall enter an Age of Abundance, Wisdom, and Harmony.

The prophecy goes on — which was brutal, because this guy called collect, and the charges from Papua New Guinea aren't negligible — but that's the gist of it. In short, this Yali chieftain's pretty convinced I'm the Chosen Big Man, which works for me, because that's what I'm thinking, too. And now I have the benefit of an age-old prophecy to support my case. The guy's talking about forming an army to support me. I told him to hold off for a bit, while I think how I might best use the talents of him and his band.

(I say "band" because this fellow doesn't have authority over the entire Yali ethnic group — just a subset of the tribe. I believe anthropologists use the word "band" to describe the suborganizations of "tribes." This is confusing, I know because when we hear "band," we think, "oh — Phutatorius plans to hire a house band. Brilliant!" But this is something different, Brothers and Sisters. This is an opening for a possible power play in Papua New Guinea. And anyone who has played Risk knows that New Guinea is one of the four component territories of the Australian continent — the easiest of continents to hold, once you take it over. So wahoo (as they say!).)

You've got to love a good prophecy. Now I wonder who the Platinum-Haired Goddess is . . .

Discharged/Discharging

2007-01-12T15:08:00.000-05:00

I'm back at the Old Homestead now. Wish I could say a lot of construction progress was made in my absence, but alas! Very little in the way of noticeable improvements. I've been told that there was a plumbing overhaul — copper pipes now instead of lead (lead?!? were we really drinking our water from lead pipes all this time?) — internal support structures were steel-reinforced, that kind of thing. Important work, certainly, but not the sort of thing to wow a guy who just had his twin brother carved out of his head.

I mean, for Christ's sake, they still haven't installed the spa. And it could be July by the time the wine cellar is stocked. The temperature and humidity consultant refuses to fly in from France until "appropriate guarantees can be made for [his] safety." I don't know what the hell that means, but he's the World's Finest, so I suppose he's entitled to his idiosyncrasies.

We've set up a nice little room for The Bro. Not so much a room as an alcove off the master bedroom suite where I'm laid up these days. Kid's ten inches tall (not sure whether to say "tall" or "long," to be honest), and he doesn't need a full-sized room so much as a couple dozen square feet of private space. PePe went to the store and picked up a nice terrarium and a multiple-setting heat lamp. We've got a couple of plants in there with him, and we set him down on a shelf opposite the window. He can watch the work crews buy their ham-and-egg bagels from the food truck in the morning. The space gets good light. The Stenos chipped in and painted the walls a pastel green — their welcome-home gift to the Little Guy. It's a "soothing color," according to the psychologists, and it's supposed to help ease him into his new surroundings. I dunno. Sounds like a lot of hocus pocus to me.

We bought him a Bose Wave Radio, and I play him CDs. He seems to like Beethoven, the White Stripes, Carmina Burana. Not so big on Dylan or the Beatles. You get the impression he wants his music primal. I put the remote control in the terrarium, in a Ziploc bag so he can't pee on it and short out the circuit board. Little guy will flop over on the buttons, causing the player to pause, fast-forward, shuffle, repeat. It's not clear that there's any intentionality to it, or that he understands he's controlling the flow of music through the speakers. He may just like the feel of the pips on his backside. We all have our kicks, I guess. Even if we're still covered in embryonic hair.

I've got some reporters coming in tonight to interview me about the experience. There's a guy from the Weekly World News ringing my phone off the hook. Keeps leaving messages emphasizing that his rag is above all others peculiarly suited to cover this story. I don't deny that, but I've got interest from the BBC, the New York Post, and CNN's Offbeat News desk. I can't overstretch myself and appear everywhere I'm wanted, regardless of quality. I can be Matt Damon or Ben Affleck here. That's no choice at all.

Anyway, I've got to get hopping. Drain line to my cheek is clogged, and they've got to clear the blockage before the fluid backs up into my face again. Waking up in the middle of the night to that was no fun at all, let me tell you. Anyway, it's great to get back in front of a keyboard again. All my best to the Blessed Readership — I'll be logging on again soon.

iPhone

2007-01-09T17:56:00.000-05:00

[Start Dictation.]

Wow. I've got to get me one of those, when it comes out.

[End Dictation.]

Holy Frappe!

2007-01-07T21:02:00.000-05:00

[Start Dictation.]

Hot damn! A brain freeze from a chocolate milkshake is one thing. Now try it a few days after you've had your sinus torn open.

Felt like a glacier advancing up over my head from my soft palate.

Jesus God, that was a bad idea.

[End Dictation.]

Still "in Hospital" . . .

2007-01-07T11:31:00.000-05:00

. . . as the English say (they're so cute). Plan was to street me today, but now my hematocrit levels are low, so I'm looking at another couple days On the Ward. I don't feel like my hematocrit levels are low, and I suspect there's some bloodworking ledgerdemain going down, just to keep me around: the national news crews have descended, and the novelty of it hasn't yet worn off on the hospital staff.

(You wouldn't believe how well some of these nurses clean up, suddenly, with Anderson Cooper around. Sure makes my days here a lot nicer. That Barbara who works the early morning shift? Yesterday you could have got a staph infection from her fingernails alone. Now she comes in a dead ringer for Gina Gershon.)

Anyway, I'm on the laptop now. No Internet, because there aren't any Ethernet jacks in the rooms, and they can't do wireless: would interfere with all the machines, they say. I had PePe run a longline from the jacks at the nurse's station — they have a whole cluster of computers there — but of course some lady tripped over it and reopened some wound or other, and he got a talking-to for it. So I'm typing up this post offline, for somebody on the Staff to publish later.

Still no interviews with the press. I'll probably give a statement on the way out the door.

I've got a roommate now. Real talker, this guy. Says he names cars for a living. Says he's the hot car-name guy in the industry, and Toyota just hired him away from Kia. I asked him what cars he named at Kia. He said, "all of them." I got the impression he was full of shit, and I asked him for specific names. He paused for a minute and said, "well, the Kia Boysenberry, for one . . ."

Turns out he is full of shit, and I talked Frankie Big Cheese into doctoring up the guy's medical records to conform to my diagnosis. A minute ago Gina wheeled him off to have somebody "disimpact his bowel." Ha ha ha.

I tell you, B/S, Frankie's not half-bad at forgery — medical forgery, especially. It's like he knows all the notations and abbreviations. A potentially very useful talent, I should think. Already useful, don't get me wrong, but I figure a crack medical forger is good for more than just buying me ten minutes of peace to write a blog post.

Maybe I'll get him to write me a prescription for a chocolate shake. I've got a craving.

Hey, Brother

2007-01-04T21:38:00.001-05:00

[Start Dictation.]

I finally felt good enough to get out of bed today. Still haven't mastered the fine motor movements required for typing, so the Stenos remain on the job. But I put a couple hundred yards on the Old Odometer after lunch, walking laps around my floor here in the hospital.

More importantly, today I got a first look at my little brother (little in size, of course, and not age, as we were born simultaneously, and since I entered the birth canal in the conventional head-first manner, by the Who Was All the Way Out Test, he's my senior). They wheeled me down to the Nursery — that much ground would have been too much for me to traverse on foot — where they have him in an incubator. I had to wait all this time to see him because they wanted me to undergo six hours of counseling first.

It's a traumatic thing to learn, after all this time, that you have a sibling.

"It's a traumatic thing, too, to have someone basically take a jackhammer to your face on Boxing Day. I think I can deal with it."

Phutatorius, you just can't go traipsing in down there. You need to prepare yourself mentally — emotionally. And so on.

So I talked through my feelings with the on-staff clinical psychologist over the past couple days. Then finally they gave me the go-sign, and Stan the Orderly came by with the Wheelchair of Truth. He rolled these old bones down to see my brother, and I've got to tell you, people: there's not a whole lot there to see.

It's all right, Phutatorius, for you to feel ambivalent. He's a human being and your brother, but he's also severely disabled and terribly small. You might find it difficult to forge an emotional bond with him, at first.

He's basically just this raw-skinned Sea Monkey-looking thing, lying under a heat lamp with a bandage over his leg stump. When they uncoil him, he's about eight inches long. Weighs barely two pounds. (I tell you, Brother/Sister, having a two-pound object taken out of your head is pretty trippy. I've got these overdeveloped neck muscles now, and they whip this new head of mine around like an empty piñata. So this is how the other 99.99999999% live. Wild.)

He's all squinty-eyed, too. Not used to the light, I suppose — but neither am I these days. He blinks constantly, needs the help of a respirator to breathe, and they feed him a mixture of saline and fish food with an eyedropper six times a day.

I'm all like whoa there —

It's completely understandable for you to feel abstracted from your brother. You can't go beating yourself up with guilt over it. It will take time, Phutatorius. Understand that it will take time.

They want me to sign papers, become his legal guardian. I'm not sure I can handle this. I watched the nurse with the eyedropper, trying to work that mush into his tiny mouth. I just don't know if I have the patience. I've never even had a cat, and for the most part they go out and feed themselves.

It's an opportunity for you to grow as a person.

Yeah, we'll see. He's literally a scaled-up Sea Monkey. An overgrown brine shrimp.

Still, though, he is kinda cute. And we've come this far together, the two of us . . . Coochy-coochy-coo, there, Little Buddy. Coochy-coo!

[End Dictation.]

I Want Pitt To Play Me in the Made-for-TV Movie (w/ Verne Troyer as My Brother?)

2006-12-31T16:20:00.000-05:00

[Start Dictation.]

I tell you, folks, I've got doctors circling over me like vultures with privacy waivers. All. Day. Long.

It seems federal law says these guys can't write the medical journals or call CNN until I say they can. There are already a few local reporters sniffing around: loose lips in the nurses' station, apparently. A guy leaned in around the door frame this afternoon and took a photo. The flash felt like a worm burrowing into my brain. Not pleasant. PePe called security.

There might be money to be made here. The anesthesiologist who did my surgery stopped by: his brother owns the local M. Benz dealership. Says he can hook me up with a C-class if I sign on the dotted line. Guy's got a direct line to The Today Show, says we can both get a Matt Lauer interview out of this.

Thing is, I want a piece of Katie Couric, and she doesn't do the morning talk anymore. Lauer's a dork.

I don't think I can keep the lid on this much longer. There's a media brouhaha in the wings, people. I'd just like to have another couple days' recuperation, before it breaks. I want to be in a position to put my best foot forward.

Happy New Year, everyone. Can't believe another year has come and gone. Can't believe either that I'll be stuck in front of the TV watching frickin' Carson Daly tonight. And eating green Jell-O. Not exactly the kind of upscale hellraising I'd envisioned a week ago, but sail-a-vee . . .

[End Dictation.]

Like a Hole in the Head . . .

2006-12-30T21:55:00.000-05:00

[Start Dictation.]

Brothers & Sisters:

Life will throw you curve balls. Fer shurr. [Folks, spell that f-e-r s-h-u-r-r. Yep. Thanks.]

I'm sitting here in a hospital bed, grunting out next-to-unintelligible syllables through a wrap of gauze and medicated plaster, hoping for the best. My Three Stenos are listening in to what I try to say. Hopefully together they'll get most of it, notwithstanding all the post-operative garble.

I had that doctor's appointment last Tuesday — hastily arranged, as you know — and by the time I landed this old corporeal trainwreck in the exam rooms, the headaches were so bad I could —

[inaudible]

— so the specialist referred me for a CAT scan, and I ended up blacking out while they had me inside the machine. Apparently that's not an uncommon occurrence — a lot of claustrophobes freak out and abandon consciousness — but I want to make clear to you that it wasn't that pansy-ass medullary override mechanism at work in my case. I can handle that kind of closed-up space just fine.

No, I crashed out because for the past thirty-three years I've been living (in reasonable comfort, actually) with a developmentally-stalled conjoined twin trapped in one of my sinus cavities, and at some point in the last couple weeks — for reasons that still have not been adequately explained to me — the Poor Little Guy contracted a case of gangrene. The swelling on his leg put increasing pressure on my brain, causing the excruciating headaches and, in the end, my crap-out in Radiology.

They wheeled me straightaway into emergency surgery at around 12:30, where a surgeon I still need to thank performed a less-than-routine siblingectomy from behind my face. I hear now that my head's former tenant is recovering in an incubator in the kiddie wing of the hospital: they had to take one of his legs to stop the disease from spreading. To be honest I don't know whether the Little Guy has —

[inaudible]

— enough to be bummed out about the amputation. Of course, that's just one of the things I'm thinking right now.

Some of the others include

*Why me?

*You've got to be freaking kidding.

*What sort of relationship can I expect to have with my stunted Kid Brother? I still haven't seen The Guy, and I hope he's not too freaky-looking. I have a hard time interacting with animals that are freaky-looking.

*What are the coverage limits of the Phutatorius & Co. health plan, and if they're exceeded, would anyone object to me dipping into the World Domination Fund to pay a medical bill or two? It seems to me that expenditures on my personal health are crucial to the Overarching Cause here. I just don't people to conclude that I'm unethical.

*At what point will I be able to eat solid foods again?

et cetera. [Stenos, put that last bit in italics, because it's Latin. Thanks.]

That's all I've got the time and energy to tell, Bees and Esses. I'll try to check in with regular updates.

[End Dictation.]

Surgery Update

2006-12-26T22:12:00.000-05:00

Hermanos/-as:

Is PePe here once again. I write with status report re condition of Señor Phutatorius. Surgery is finished now one half hour ago. A prolonged procedure of seven hours, but the doctors say Our Leader is of stable condition, and that operation went as well one can expect.

Señor Phutatorius will recover 100%. Hopefully the next blogpost will come from himself.

Look here for more news often.

Emergency Surgery

2006-12-26T15:20:00.000-05:00

Es su amigo PePe aquì, Hermanos y Hermanas.

I write now to inform you all that Señor Phutatorius was admitted to hospital today and is having right now this afternoon EMERGENCY SURGERY on his HEAD and FACE. The surgery has begun at 2:30 p.m.

More particulares will follow as I learn them. On the way to the operatory room Señor Phutatorius asked me that I keep you posted.

Please keep our same friend in your prayers in the coming hours.

PePe

Oh, God, My Head Hurts

2006-12-22T22:56:00.000-05:00

I wish I could give you an idea of how bad my head hurts right now. I know some of the folks at home probably think I'm crying wolf again. I will admit I have, in the past, staged dramatic holiday illnesses — complete with chemically-induced projectile vomiting and fake bloodied stool samples — so that I could put off my Christmas shopping until the Day After Christmas sales. In my defense, I never skimped on the spending: the discounts just enabled me to get my beloved friends and family more and better gifts on my preset budget. And of course, my sudden recovery from the brink of death always brought great New Year's cheer to loved ones.

I'm not up to any such high-spirited trickery this year, Brothers and Sisters, I swear. I did all my shopping early (even Bobo the ex-Intern Chimp will be getting a half-dozen Harry & David pears in the mail — restraining order be damned). This is a for-real headache, with flashing lights, aura, and noticeable swelling under my cheekbones. Feels like a migraine, with the light and sound sensitivity, except that it's ten days old now, and getting worse every second. I've had to spend the last three days in complete darkness, inside an interior room with the lights off and a black bath towel shoved under the door, so as not to admit the smallest crack of light from outside. I can't get any time in front of a computer, and right now I'm whisper-blogging this post through the door to Dead Eye, who will log on and transcribe it momentarily.

In short, folks, I'm really hurting here — and a bit scared. Thanks to a fortuitous cancellation (Mrs. Denton Browne of North Troy, Vermont: your husband will be released unharmed behind the Sunoco station at exactly 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday — be sure to bring your car round back to pick him up), I've managed to wangle an appointment with a neurologist on the 26th. Here's hoping it's nothing serious, and I can get some kind of relief.

Hope the rest of you are having a terrific holiday, while your would-be World Leader lies doubled over in pain puking into a bucket.

DICTATED, NOT READ

Headaches

2006-12-19T21:55:00.000-05:00

The last couple of weeks, Brother/Sister, have been nothing but headaches.

You start to understand why certain other predecessors (and present-day competitors) of mine built their strongholds and compounds on desert islands, or under the ocean floor. Just try to get any kind of significant construction work done in any modern-day nation-state, and it's headaches, headaches, headaches.

For starters, there's the local Zoning Board. Apparently the dairy-farm timeshare property is zoned "commercial/recreational." This because in the past it has served simultaneously as a resort property and a working, productive cheese distributor. Last week I got a summons to appear at a hearing down in town. Order To Show Cause Why Power-Mad Local Officials Shouldn't Totally Screw Over Phutatorius, or something like that. They all but guaranteed I'd be denied permits, because I hadn't certified that the property's new use would be commercial/recreational. World domination not fitting that description to the satisfaction of these piddling despots.

Lucky thing for me, as tried and tired as the "send a hot babe to seduce the local official, surveil the liaison with hidden cameras, then extort favorable and appropriate government action" gambit may be — and as much airplay as it gets on television and in the movies — it never fails with municipal zoning board chairmen. It never fails. In my lifetime I'm 14-for-14 with that tactic.

So for now, I'm free of government interference with the building project.

But then there are the unions. As some of you may remember from last November, I did a good turn for some Mexicans who wanted to roll the dice in the Land of Opportunity. They left names and emails with me, and wouldn't you know it? A whole bunch of them were willing to work construction details for me up here in Vermont — at quite reasonable rates. Not all of them were interested — some of them are sore at me over Loot the Church. But that's just the hardcore Catholics, and I can live without them. I'll give a broken soul a job, but if he's gonna find God and then put That Guy ahead of me on his priority list, he can go screw. The fellows I have, though, are fantastic. Not just workers, but artisans. I got one guy, gonna trick out Building 12 (Detention Center) in adobe. All the exterior walls, and if it takes, I just might have him work up the entire complex.

The catch is, I get picket lines. Like frickin' instantaneously. Big, fat, entitled white guys spring up out of the Earth as soon as the first Mexican trabajero sets foot on my property. It's not anything I personally can't deal with. A lot of background-noise chanting along the property line, anonymous threats on my answering machine, the occasional egg or two thrown at my garage door. Whatever. But my work crews are intimidated. They've been jumped outside local taverns. Nativist union goons are hassling their women. I have half a mind to put in a call to Gloria for advice. Figure my little Filipino Filly might be clued in to some unionbreaking strategies I don't know about. Until I can get in touch with her, though, I've got labor strife on my plate. Rightist paramilitaries cost money I don't have.

And on top of everything else, I've literally had a headache for going on eight days now. There are times I can't even sit up, and for the last two days I've been able to eat nothing but soft melon. Feels like someone's filled my sinuses with oatmeal and jalapeño. Condition's got PePe half scared to death. He thinks I've been poisoned, and he follows me around with a Geiger counter. (A clue, my Piper friend: radioactive isotopes may be a possibility these days, but arsenic works, too, and it won't give you a reading.)

Anyway, this is no way to go into the holidays, Brother/Sister. Would rest if I could but the World continues to flounder without a bona fide Dominator to run things. Bring on the Sudafed and Mucinex, rubber bullets and mustard gas. A guy's got to get some work done, against whatever odds. The New Year is coming, and I'm going to have to account for what I accomplished in the year 2006.

Headquarters Under Development

2006-11-01T11:33:00.000-05:00

Well, what can I tell you? We're still holed up here at our farm in Vermont, and we've parried the several legal thrusts of some of these stick-up-their-ass timeshare claimants. It helps that I've rigged up a wicked home theater system in what we're now calling "the Great Room." The county sheriff and his deputies have an open invitation to come watch the college football games in high-def on Saturdays — and if I can keep the chips and guac coming, they're quite a bit less determined to serve me with their writs.

We'll see if the goodwill from local law enforcement holds up after the bowl season in January.

But I'm a reasonable man, and I know what's fair, so I've offered to buy out all the timeshare owners — regardless of what week they have — for fourteen cents on the dollar. The way I see it, possession is nine tenths of the law, right? So in essence I'm offering a 4% premium to anyone who cooperates.

To date I've managed to speak with 29 of the 37 owners (some people bought up more than one week), and I've consolidated ownership of the farm for most of January and February, the third week in April, all of June and September, and from mid-November through the end of the year. Those dates float a bit with the calendar, so they're just approximations. I'm close to deals with most everyone we've tracked down so far. One guy in New Jersey has been a real thorn in my side, but for the most part people have had the business sense to cut and run.

At some point I'll be doing a blog-exclusive walkthrough of this place, and you can expect a more authoritative description of its facilities and features then. To do that now would be premature, because we're making improvements — and building fortifications — left and right, and we haven't yet decided what we want to keep secret and what we can freely discuss.

Right now, and uncontroversially, I can list among this estate's assets forty-five milk cows and three bulls (we might sell off the animals, depending upon how profitable the cheesemaking operation is), a couple good-sized John Deere tractors, a chicken coop, fifteen three-foot wheels of signature artisanal Vermont cheddar, ten pair of snowshoes, a Ford F-150 truck (left behind by a pair of middle-aged vacationers we put to flight), a snowmobile, and an Artesian well out back that will provide a site-specific water-source to the complex, once we get the old set of pumps cleaned up and repaired.

You don't want to rely on City Water if you don't have to.

PePe is hard at work installing the perimeter defenses, starting with two fences: chain-link-and-razor-wire on the outer boundaries of the property, then an electric fence. There was some discussion about what should come first. I favored the high-voltage fence, on the ground that electrical shocks have significant short-term depreciative effects on a person's motor skills, making it difficult for him to perform the delicate movements required to skirt a three-foot loop of razor wire.

PePe championed the razor wire, for liability reasons. With the electric fence on the outside, a guy can just walk into it by accident and sue us for the burns and disfigurement. If he's already cleared a forbidding razor-wire barrier, it's clear he is an intruder and we owe him no legal duty not to shock the daylights out of him.

That's the kind of prudent observation that makes PePe not only my Piper, but also a Trusted Advisor. I'm leaving that project entirely to his discretion while I work with the architect about opening up the farmhouse interior (and wiring it for T1 Internet: this dial-up crap has got to go).

Anyway, busy busy busy. We need to get all the exterior work on the estate buildings done by winter — and up here winter comes early.

Ketchup (get it?)

2006-10-12T16:24:00.000-04:00

Hard to believe it's been three months, Brothers and Sisters, since we've talked. I could offer my usual excuses, but to save time, just assume I made them, and we'll move on.

I figure I can go a long way toward rebuilding trust in my Readership, if I get to work on answering some of my backlog of email. Here we go:

(1) Brother Gustavus writes from Brussels:

Phutatorius, is there any chance you might take "Loot the Church" on the road? Some of us didn't have the dollahs to make the trip to Boston.

We're way ahead of you, Gustavus. I've hired an event planner — Hillary Something-or-Other, she's based in Long Island — and she's lining up a ten-city spring tour down the East Coast. Providence, Hartford, New York, Philly, Wilmington, Harrisburg, Baltimore, Arlington (Virginia), Richmond, Atlanta. We may have a shot at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan, on ST. PATRICK'S DAY. Would that be sweet or WHAT?

From there, all systems are go for a June-July '07 gig opening for Cirque du Soleil on the Continent — probably your best bet to see us, Gus, though most of the dates will be concentrated in Eastern Europe. Call your friends, pack up the RV, and come on down to Prague. I can't guarantee that I'll be there (visa issues, and I'm busy), but at worst you'll be treated to appearances by "Phutsie's All-Stars" (lineup TBD).

(2) Sister Marsha has these words from County Clare (I believe that's Ireland):

How's the dance-fighter training going? Not so well, I think, based on what I saw on YouTube.

We've asked the folks at YouTube to take down that clip, in part because it discloses certain confidential fighting techniques (I have no intention of going through THAT again), and also because it's not a fair or representative depiction of my fighting prowess. That "demonstration" came after a long afternoon of drinking with the Gang — there may have been some mushrooms involved, too — in short, the intern had no business recording that footage in the first place. Posting it on the 'Net was an even graver breach of trust, and notwithstanding her "considerable assets," I've had her replaced. YouTube is complying with the takedown instruction, but digital copies breed digital copies, and I'm sure that video will crop up again somewhere. If you do happen to see it, don't read anything into it about my skill set.

(3) From Moldova, Brother Turk, with a bit of an edge:

Any progress establishing a headquarters? An underground lair? Hollowed-out volcano, perhaps? What criminal mastermind works out of an apartment in Cambridge?

Let's be clear, Monsieur Turk (if that is your real name) — I'm far from a criminal mastermind. I'm mounting a legitimate, extrajurisdictional challenge to the world's sovereign powers. There's nothing criminal about it.

That said, I could use a base of operations with a bit more storage space. And a conference room. But this isn't Austin Powers, or even Superfriends Versus the Legion of Doom. I don't need a volcano or Hall of Justice or big, black underwater thingy to live in. Any old tract of land with building structures and a T1 connection will do.

Where we are at the moment is, we've set up shop at Frankie Big Cheese's timeshare — the dairy farm in Vermont, if you remember. Went up there during his three-week window back in July, and we just haven't left. Vacationing families keep turning up on Fridays (Turnover Day) to claim their time slots, but we've managed to frighten them away, so far. It's not ideal, plotting for World Domination with minivans pulling up in your driveway all the time. But it's all the cheese you can eat, and we're working on buying out these pain-in-the-ass timeshare owners as they arrive.

(4) Burping Squid writes from wherever he might be, wandering the landscape, with no home to claim him or friend to love him:

You suck, Phutatorius.

Yo mama, Squidley.

Rock On and Peace Out.

Not Yet, PePe

2006-07-16T16:55:00.000-04:00

We're back from Jimmy's. It saved us a couple hours that we found the poor kid strung out on his sofa and barely breathing when we arrived. The paramedics picked him up at 3:30, and we were back at the Homestead by four.

PePe is irate. He's very protective of his Peruvian brethren, and he proposes that we go find that Assistant District Attorney, bust his door down, and waterboard him.

I say we wait.

There will indeed come a time when Phutatorius & Co. resort to force. In fact, unless I can put together one hell of a Marketing Department, that's how this has to play out.

I am reluctant, however, to take that big step just now. Mine is a long row to hoe — long and at times lonely. I knew when I embarked that there would be provocations along the way, and they would number in the hundreds.

The important thing is to remember to put one's head down, focus on the goal, press on ahead. It can be too easy to succumb to distractions, to wander down sideroads and get lost or mugged by the footpads of the Establishment. We have power now, to be sure — I'm an intermediate-level Elite Incan Dance Fighter (the Master Trainer reviewed my latest training video and sent me my certificate in the mail) — but we're not so strong yet that I can afford the bad pub that would follow from dunking this punk prosecutor in his stationary tub for an evening.

To me, the better bet right now is to take the high road and float some money from the WDF for Jimmy's rehab. It's not obvious to me that Jimmy wouldn't have OD'd this morning irregardless. In fact, were it not for these oppressive inquiries from that ADA, we certainly would not have trekked down to East Cambridge to give Jimmy our reassurances. Who know who would have found him — and when?

When I'm running the Show, B/S, I'm going to do something about drugs. This I promise you. Jimmy Atahualpa is a friend of mine. This issue is personal for me now.

In the meantime, our afternoon just opened up. Talk about a gift! It's off to The Cheesecake Factory for an afternoon snack: spinach/artichoke dip for me, and I'll be smuggling in my own white-corn Tostitos.

Harassment

2006-07-15T23:22:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I got a letter from this persnickety prosecutor-guy in Boston. Jerkoff wants to know if we obtained Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) on Jimmy Atahualpa before we let the kiddies pile on him and mock-stab him at the fundraiser.

I guess there's some kind of law requiring you to do this if you're an "entity or organization primarily engaged in providing activities or programs to children 18 years of age."

Now I get the point of this: God forbid some day care program hires some recidivist freakazoid to mop the floors while the kids are around. A law that will stop that makes a heck of a lot of sense to me. Fine. I'll keep it on the books after the Ascendancy.

What this DA-guy's doing here is harassment. Everybody knows Jimmy Atahualpa is a stand-up guy. Sure he has his demons, but if a substance abuser can have a kid, then certainly a substance abuser can spend an impromptu couple of hours breaking up fake-blood capsules and pretend-dying with kids, in plain view of the public on a goddam Saturday afternoon. It's not like the blood is real, or Jimmy's a needle-sharer. The guy has his own leather-bound kit: I've seen it.

Talk about stretching the law: suppose we have an office picnic and the Stenos bring their nieces and nephews with them? Do I have to file paperwork before I challenge these kids to a friendly game of lawn darts? Do I?

PePe's in the other room, and I can't hear him. Hold on a minute.

* * *

All right, I'm back. PePe tells me lawn darts are illegal in the United States. I don't know where he gets this information, but it checks out. So fine — bad example. My point is that we don't suddenly become an organization "primarily engaged in providing activities or programs to children under 18." What we are is an organization "primarily engaged" in an ongoing effort to acquire and consolidate ultimate power over the entire human race. I mean, duh.

You know what it is: these DA-types always have political aspirations of their own. That's what this is about. Investigations like these — they're always politically-motivated. It won't be the last one I have to deal with, and I've got thick skin.

My concern right now is for Jimmy. He thinks all this is his fault, and he's been writing me emails apologizing to me all day. I'd love to reach right through the computer right now and give him a big hug. But I can't, so I'll instead have to get in the car and drive all the way across town to his place tomorrow to assure him everything's OK with him and me. Then he'll want to show me hospitality and offer me lunch, but of course, just like a junkie he won't have anything in the refrigerator, so I'll have to drive him to the store. I won't get out of there until at least six o'clock in the goddam evening

It's just a waste of everybody's time.

(!)

2006-07-14T15:51:00.000-04:00

Just a quick note:

Eliezer from Capetown writes that I've been perhaps a bit too liberal lately with my use of exclamation points in post titles. He is considering whether or not to back me as World Hegemon, and he fears that a Phutatorian Regime might go on a punctuational rampage and pollute the landscape with unwarranted marks of emphasis.

I think this is a fair criticism. After all, imagine how gaudy Las Vegas would become, if you added [!] to all the neon signs and billboards!!

Though I expect to delegate the matter to an Official Aesthetician —

Aesthete! PePe just shouted from the other room (but I think he's wrong on this one).

— you can expect I'll be hands-on with regard to any legislation involving punctuation in signage.

To Mr. Eliezer's second point — about how overuse of the exclamation point results in a devaluation of emphasis — I say this: there are plenty of excess exclamation points floating around out there, just waiting to be put to meaningful use.

Why, as it happens, a great deal of the World Population speaks Spanish, and Spanish-speakers double up on this commodity in their writings, putting the inverted ! or ¡ (as it appears) at the beginning of each excited utterance that they commit to the printed page. If necessary, I can simply place an embargo on this practice, requisition the excess ¡s from Latin America, Spain, and the Philippines, and turn them right-side up for deployment as necessary to convey the strength of my conviction in official proclamations.

So even if I need to serve up two, three, or even four exclamation points to express my will to the public, I should have plenty of reserves at my disposal.

Thanks for writing, Eliezer. It was worth taking the time to think this matter through, and I really do appreciate the aesthetic point you made about my punctuation, even if I find your economic worry a bit overblown.

As to Yentl from Glasgow and her complaint about my predilection for dashes — she can go to h—, that g—d— f— ———-kissing horse-faced b—.

(Bet you like my dashes now, lassie, now that I've confronted you with a brutal alternative . . .)

Vittoria!

2006-07-10T15:51:00.000-04:00

I just collected on my World Cup victory. Add another hundred grand into Phutsie & Co.'s July receipts. What a month!

It's been suggested that certain agents of mine injected PCP into Zinedine Zidane's pregame croissant. To these accusers I say only this: (1) PePe was only in Berlin to celebrate his great-aunt's 80th birthday — he can produce the party favors to corroborate this; (2) had I really so conspired to slip Zizzou a mickey, you can bet I'd have dealt him a bigger dose. That guy hung around 110 minutes before he cracked up, and in the interim he very nearly did in my Azzurri.

But whatever — I suppose that's what comes of acquiring overnight celebrity. "Loot the Church" wins primo CNN coverage, a putz like O'Reilly starts ranting on you, and people start to get the idea you'll do anything for money.

Anyway.

WDF account balance: $416,388.12.

Forza Italia!

2006-07-08T16:56:00.000-04:00

I know it's reckless to be gambling with the Fund money, but I've got a good feeling. $100K down on Italy to win the Cup final tomorrow.

And a Good Time Was Had by All

2006-07-07T09:56:00.000-04:00

Well, Brothers & Sisters, that was a party. Such a party, in fact, that I've spent the last few days recovering from it. I know I know — I swore off after-parties after that post-auction bender the Staff and I went on in New York. But when you raise $138K in one afternoon (that's net, people) you want to go celebrate.

I'd like to thank everybody who came out — I don't have the figures in front of me, but the turnout was tremendous, well over 5000 people. With so many people anxious to participate, we ended up extending the fundraiser three additional hours. In fact, we had to plant twice as much money as we had originally earmarked for the looting — but that meant we earned twice as much, too.

Some strokes of genius I'd like to credit to the Staff:

(1) The staged reenactments of Thomas Beckett's assassination-by-stabbing in the chapel were a hit with audiences and critics alike. Big snaps to Dead Eye for working up the concept, and thanks to Jimmy Atahualpa for playing — in grand style — the role of the beleaguered Archbishop. Jimmy, your extended death performances were positively Shakespearean.

Many of you Harvard Square-frequenters probably know about the problems Jimmy's been having with the drugs and alcohol. Still, he really came through for us on Saturday afternoon. The kids just love Jimmy, and when Dead Eye got the idea to let the under-12s join in with the mock-stabbing, he bought right in to the program. Talk about a good sport! That extra bit of on-the-fly entrepreneurism — five bucks for a crack at this anti-royal SOB! — earned us probably five to ten thousand bucks on top of the admissions fees. And I don't doubt our Beckett sustained a few bumps and bruises from the enthusiastic kiddies.

(Jimmy, good buddy: you DO have something to offer the world — and don't you EVER forget it.)

(2) To the Sound Guy We Hired (I forget his name): nice work. The chanting and creaking, the ubiquitous sound of approaching footsteps really thrilled our looters, particularly in the dark corridors.

(3) Opie did the Steno shift for the afternoon. I know it wasn't easy following me through the crowd with the equipment, and I appreciate the yeoman's work.

(4) Frankie Big Cheese: the Gold Membership Plan was a brilliant idea. The airlines and car rental companies know their business — there is money to be made by offering tiers of service. In fact, it's downright amazing what people will pay for a little extra special treatment and a cardboard crown. Gold Members enjoyed off-street parking in the church lot, received discounts on pie, and were allowed one free shakedown of a fellow looter, so long as it took place inside the church.

(5) PePe, once again you went above and beyond the call of duty. Who knew you could gin up a Popemobile in Boston on such short notice? I'm not one for the limelight, but I rather enjoyed the impromptu parade. Thanks for the surprise, Brother. Much love, indeed.

We'll be compiling a mailing list from the entries in the guest book. I saw Burping Squid's name up front — were you there, buddy? Might have been nice to make your acquaintance, finally — you seem like a thinking man, when you're not being a shit.

Finally, I'd like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to everyone who participated in the counterdemonstration across the street. It's not easy to organize something like that on short notice, but we mustered a goodly-sized crowd to shout down all those no-fun sad-sacks who showed up to protest the event. Of course, it helped that half of the Enemy Demonstrators had duct tape over their mouths. (That's something I'll never get, people — this trend with the duct tape. You're doing half the work of the riot police for them.) But hey — whatever. Our crowd was nice and loud; it did its job and was largely well-behaved.

The upshot of it all is this: an afternoon of community outreach, tons of media coverage, and the running total in the World Domination Fund is now $316,495.31.

We're on a roll, baby!

Interview with a Vampire

2006-06-30T10:53:00.000-04:00

As many of you old-schoolers know, I've been wary of giving interviews since that fiasco with Barbara Walters. These bloodsucking journalists just waste your time and make you feel like an asshole.

But that said, I did relent yesterday and sat down for a few minutes with Alex Beam of the Boston Globe; I decided a little advance pub for Loot the Church couldn't hurt. Plus, at some point as World Hegemon I'll be giving press briefings, and I figured it would be a good idea to start exercising the ol' bullshit-and-stonewall muscle.

The full transcript of the interview will run in today's Weekend section, but here are some highlights:

* * *

Q. Phutatorius, you describe yourself as an Internet Personality, but I've never heard of you. What gives?

A. Well, it sounds to me like you need to bite the bullet and finally buy yourself a computer. For beginners, I recommend one of those cheap-ass Dells. And of course you'll need an ISP. America Online is like a set of training wheels for the World Wide Web; I'm sure you get their CDs in the mail. Give AOL a try, and join us in the 21st century.

Q. What do you think qualifies you to take on this challenge?

A. Well, I've taken a few correspondence courses in event planning —

Q. No — not the fundraiser, Phutatorius. The ruling the planet bit.

A. Just the planet, Alex? Why limit myself? But seriously: I had a Moment last September, and a kind of clarity of purpose descended on me. It was like a visitation. Since that time I've turned my body into a kind of temple. I've gone to a remote mountain redoubt and learned the arcane wisdom of the Elite Incan Dance Fighters, and at home in the mornings I do a lot of strength and agility training. I keep in touch with my EIDF mentor over the Internet. You really should get yourself connected, Alex. There's so much potential in it.

Q. Some people say you're too impetuous a character — that you make enemies easily. Is that the sort of personality that the world population really wants as its leader?

A. Well, first off — I don't know how true your assessment is. The Cardinal and I had some knock-down, drag-out negotiations going on over this church rental — he's a screamer, by the way, and at one point he threw a ball-point pen at me — but when it was all over, we went out for a few beers, he and I, and it was all good.

Q. I thought you said your body was a temple.

A. Yeah. And?

Q. But you're out drinking beer —

A. I don't get your point. But while we're on this subject, I'd like to let you know that our temporary liquor license went through, and we'll have Harpoon and Miller Genuine Draft on tap at the fundraiser on Saturday. We're still talking with the people at Heineken.

Q. On the subject of the fundraiser —

A. Just a minute, Alex — I want to finish my answer to your question about my purported personality flaws. Suppose your lying ass is right, and I do make enemies easily. What of it? That might be a problem if I'm leading a country, and I'm dealing constantly with other heads of state. That's the kind of situation that leads to a war. But if I'm running the world, what meaningful person am I going to butt heads with? The President of Mars?

Q. You have interesting logic.

A. You like me now. Wait until I hire my full-time Logic Minister.

Q. Now to the fundraiser. Some say —

A. What's with all this "some say" crap, Alex? Name names or knock it off.

Q. All right, fine. Everybody says —

A. Better.

Q. Everybody says that it's exploitative and obnoxious for you to take a sacred space, a religious space, and use it to appeal to people's basest instincts so you can make money. What do you say to that?

A. You've just described every priest, every minister, pastor, rabbi, imam, swami, prelate, and pope. The only difference is that with me, the people know their money is going to a good cause — the Phutatorius & Co. World Domination Fund.

* * *

Well, what do my Brothers and Sisters think? How did I hold up against Mr. Beam's obviously hostile lines of questioning? I think I did terrific — maybe a little edgy with that last bit, but whatever. That's the kind of snarky attitude that will bring the kids to church on Saturday, and you've got to appeal to every demographic.

Anyway, back to work. We're baking up a storm here at the apartment. PePe's got a bitchin' Tollhouse cookies recipe, and the off-duty Stenos are rolling the dough for pecan and rhubarb pies. We'll sell the cookies for $1.25 apiece tomorrow. Ten bucks for the pies. Hand over fist, I tell you. Hand over fist.

Well, I hope to see you all tomorrow at the church. I am stoked!

En Español

2006-06-20T12:07:00.000-04:00

PePe's working up Spanish-language fliers — rough word-for-word translations of what I posted in English below — to distribute in Latino neighborhoods.

No reason why Anglos should have all the fun, right?

I've also been making calls this morning trying to track down someone who knows Mandarin. Sometime in the next couple days I have to go down to the DMV (license renewal); I figured I could do a quick leafleting circuit round Chinatown while I'm there.

I had this guy Li Duk on the phone a few minutes ago, was testing him: I'd throw out a sentence in English. He'd translate it back to me. It seemed to go well, but for all I know he was just making random sounds.

Maybe I'll just cut Chinatown altogether and stick with PePe as my lone interpretador. Though it's obvious he plans to skim a little off the top with the Latin customers (even I know "cuarenta" doesn't mean "thirty-five"), PePe's the devil I know —

and a hell of a Piper, too.

"Loot the Church" Set for July 1!

2006-06-19T15:34:00.000-04:00

Took some time to hammer out the details, but we finally have a date, and that's July 1. I'm wary of getting too close to the Independence Day holiday, but so it goes. The Archdiocese wouldn't let me have a Sunday, and they played hardball on that point. I told them my rent check would more than cover what they would take from their Sunday collection plates — but churches are churches. They wanted my rent and the Sunday offertories.

Sons of bitches.

I'm still sanguine about the fundraiser's prospects, notwithstanding that there's some kind of event downtown at the Aquarium on the same day, and the Rotary Club Carnival will run through the weekend in Quincy.

PePe and I are printing up circulars as we speak; by tomorrow there won't be a telephone pole in Middlesex or Suffolk County that doesn't announce it:

LOOT

THE

CHURCH!

Turn St. John's UPSIDE-DOWN for BIG PRIZE MONEY!

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Put on your best Visigoth costume and

PLUNDER PLUNDER PLUNDER!

>>> $35 buy-in gets you 20 minutes to rip, hack, tear, pry, and strip your way to newfound wealth and satisfaction. Children under 5 get in free.

>>> Are you mad as hell at the Catholic Church? Can't shake off that nasty Spanish Inquisition? Take 20 minutes to fight back. We're offering a 10% discount for gays, lesbians, Northern Irish!

GUARANTEED: $60,000 in cash* is hidden somewhere in this church! All you have to do is FIND IT!

WHEN: July 1, 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.

WHERE: Church of St. John the Revelator, Boylston Street, Boston.

>>> Balloons for the kiddies! Funnel cakes, lemon shakes, Italian sausages!

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

All proceeds to THE PHUTATORIUS & CO. WORLD DOMINATION FUND, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

*Figure may include cash-equivalent coupons of corporate sponsors.

To/From Burping Squid, re Church & State

2006-06-02T11:06:00.000-04:00

Well well well — would you believe I got an email just this morning from the long-lost, not-missed Burping Squid?

It seems Burping Squid is an ardent believer in the separation of church and state, and he/she is troubled by my choice of fundraising venues. He/she has written, and I quote:

You suck, Phutatorius. I was just coming round to supporting your candidacy for Sovereign Ruler of Earth, but now I find you suddenly in bed with the Catholic Church.

The single most crucial component of a sane and rational government is that it sequester itself from the influence of fanaticism and superstition. That's a first principle, you jackass. And here you are, barely on the way up, selling your soul to the Vatican for a couple of hundred grand. Phutatorius, you suck.

--BS

To which I reply:

Dear "BS":

It's been a while, you punk-ass bitch. I was just coming round to missing your particular brand of verbal abuse when I got your message of June 2. Now I find myself longing for more cross-eyed silence from Squidville. I appreciate that it's become the idiom of our relationship to trade barbs with one another, and while I hope that I give as good as I get, I've never taken any of your flatulent criticism to heart. That is, until now.

I get your point, Brother/Sister, about church and state. And I'm strongly committed to it. Strongly. Committed. In fact, it's part of why I got into this business. I truly believe that I can be that Sane and Rational Governor you were describing, precisely because I am the LEAST SPIRITUAL PERSON EVER TO WALK ON THIS EARTH. That's a big part of my platform.

But here's the thing: you don't make the jump from Internet Personality to Sane, Rational Governor of the Planet without compromising, TEMPORARILY, on certain principles in the process. For example, I don't believe in regicide. I'm dead-set against it. I think it's destabilizing, and it sets a bad precedent, as people may make the logical leap of concluding that what's good for the King goes double for the World Hegemon. But notwithstanding my position on regicide, it's highly probable that I'm going to have to kill off a king or two — possibly even all of them — during my period of ascendancy.

Likewise here. I assure you: the Catholic Church will be powerless and pleading before me, by the time all this is over. We'll be screening The Da Vinci Code in the Sistine Chapel, and the crowd will be allowed to throw food (because I heard the movie sucked). But in the meantime, the Church needs money, and I need a gimmicky fundraising venue. So it's a great fit: peanut butter, meet chocolate.

And furthermore, it is a bit of a stretch to characterize this transaction as the formation of an alliance between myself and the Archdiocese. Quite the contrary, in fact — this is a contract negotiated at arm's length. And let me tell you, the Cardinal isn't exactly pleased with my intentions for using the facility. I have the guy over a barrel, though, and he'll take what I give him.

So how's about it, BS? Why don't you come on down to the fundraiser (date still TBD, people), and I'll give you one free shot at any piece of religious iconography in the church. You can take a hack at the altar, kick out a stained-glass window, whatever you want. I'll make sure Security knows you're coming, so you don't get hassled. Good?

I'm engaging you on this issue because you're a future constituent, and for once you've actually come to me with a decent bit of substantive criticism. You piss-ant.

Sincerely,

Phutatorius

"Loot the Church" Fundraiser!

2006-06-01T13:40:00.000-04:00

I've said it before and I'll say it again, Brothers and Sisters — where you see a far-reaching clergy sex abuse scandal, I see opportunity. It just takes a brilliant, World Domination-worthy mind to tap into it.

So here's what I'm up to, Bees 'n' Esses:

As you may know, the Boston Archdiocese of the Roman Catholic Church is — how to put it? — hard up for money these days, what with the dozens of million-dollar lawsuits naming the Church as a defendant to sex abuse claims, and the offertory plates around town filling up with indignant congregationers' pocket fluff. Cardinal O'Malley, himself a vow-of-poverty kind of guy, needs to gin up some money straightaway, or a number of his Indoctrination Centers (my umbrella term for churches and schools) will be turning into Jiffy Lubes.

Enter the Catholic Church's latest Savior, Francis X. Phutatorius. All right, all right — maybe "Savior" isn't quite the word to use here — but you have to admit, the "Francis X." I just appended to my legal name is a nice touch. It really helped build trust with Father Sean during the negotiations process —

Cut the self-celebratory crap, Phutatorius, and tell us what you're up to.

Fair enough.

Just this morning I wrote the Archdiocese a check for $20,000 — in exchange for a single day's rental of one of its bigger and cathedral-y churches in Boston. This figure bargained down from Father Sean's initial quotation of a full $40K — it's really a testament to my dealmaking acumen, I tell you, B/S —

But for what, Phutatorius? You rented out the church for what?

I'm kind of digging this Socratic Method we're falling into, B/S. Question, then Answer. It's kind of catchy. And rhythmic.

Well, I'll tell you. I've rented out the church for a fundraiser — a fundraiser like you've never before experienced. No fancy-pants $500-a-plate dinner-and-speech planner am I. I've crafted a fundraiser that will appeal to the Everyday Joe.

Here's the concept: you hide big bags of cash all over the building, and you challenge the public to come in and find them. You sell tickets (say, forty, fifty bucks a pop), you admit 200, 300 people at a time, and you give each group of looters ten minutes to turn the place upside-down and find the money. It's an anything-goes, rules-are-there-are-no-rules kind of environment inside the church — there will, of course, be waivers to sign, and I'll hire a security detail to keep people somewhat in line — you're basically buying yourself a chance to loot a sacred place for good-sized chunks of money. And who hasn't always wanted to do that?

This will be the can't-miss event of the season, B/S. Date TBD, as we have certain details to hammer out in the coming days.

Right now I've got PePe working the numbers: i.e., how much to charge, how much money to make available at any given time, that sort of thing. You want to maximize your returns, which means calibrating your ticket-price-to-prize-money ratio just right. And of course you have to factor in incidentals, like the outlays for security and the ads I'm gonna run in the Herald and Globe. But PePe's a whiz with the adding machine — he's already spit out fifty yards' worth of paper tape running his calculations.

For my part, I'm setting myself to the task of mapping all the fun little nooks and crannies in the church where I'll be hiding the money. I'm also getting in touch with some local institutions — Dunkin' Donuts, Gillette, D'Angelos — about sponsorships. I'll scatter voucher and coupons around the joint, too. Every paid entrant will take home at least something with him.

I'm so excited about this project, I can't even think straight. There's no way I don't at least double the money in the World Domination Fund by the time this thing is over. But first, organization and planning. More to come, Bruthas & Sistas, as I deem necessary and appropriate to divulge. Watch for it!

Investigation Update

2006-05-19T14:34:00.000-04:00

All right. What can I report?

No real progress re my investigation into the mysterious and coincidental deaths of Stenographer Kin. My PIs have turned up nothing, but not without incurring significant expenses in the process. Mark my words, B/S, I'm going to give these receipts a good going-over before I pay these characters a cent. I don't see why a private detective needs to stay in the Hilton President in downtown Kansas City while he beats the streets — it seems to me a Red Roof Inn or Motel 6 out by the Interstate would have done just fine. I think a reasonable rule to follow is that if the hotel has flags hanging in front of it, you shouldn't expense a client for it. Nor am I quite clear on how the six hours of Jet Ski rentals fit into my Florida detective's investigative strategy. Or the $200 "raw bar" charges. Whatever happened to the days when investigators ate cheeseburgers out of the bag while on stakeout?

Note to Self: Revise "Independent Contractor" section of Policy Manual; eliminate expense account protocols in favor of per diem allowances.

At any rate, I've got no real leads and no evidence the two "accidental deaths" were linked. By now I'm about six thousand dollars out of pocket, and I've got all these pissed-off Steno Families in lockdown at these hotels. For a while they were happy enough taking room service and watching the in-room movies. But now we're going on six weeks, and I've got something close to a full-on revolt on my hands. One unhinged brother-in-law unscrewed the piping from his bathroom sink and assaulted a check-in clerk. Clubbed her senseless, broke into the supply closet and drank all the single-serving bottles of whiskey from the minibar stocking shelves. So I've got the clerk's medical bill to cover, along with cleanup for the flooded hotel room and this shithead's "bar bill."

Brothers and Sisters, you can only send people so many placatory pizzas. At a certain point, if people want to come out of hiding and face certain death just to "resume their normal lives," you can't stop them. I wouldn't deserve to govern the planet if I were the type to try to lock people away from their own bad judgment.

More than anything, though, I just want to do right by my employees. So this morning I convened a meeting of the Stenos to discuss the matter. I laid out the risks of releasing their families into the general population, told them to go away and think about whether I should settle up with these hotel chains and check these people out. I catered them a Bertucci's lunch — I just love that Silano they do, with the lemon-cream sauce and broccoli — and they came back and told me to free their families, that they could take care of themselves.

I suppose I'll have more to report as my Steno's peeps are systematically killed by my enemies. As they say, you can lead a horse to water . . .

Imperial Logic

2006-05-09T16:58:00.000-04:00

I know, I know. It seems like half my posts are devoted to apologies or justifications (an Internet Personality/World Domination Aspirant does not concern himself with making excuses, B/S) for not writing. And that's kinda crummy, I admit.

Think about it, though: if I didn't spend all this time not blogging, my posts would go down by half. Then where would we be? Huh?

I call that Imperial Logic, Brother/Sister, and I find it to be a very effective way of settling complaints — and I expect to do a lot of complaint-settling once I come to power. After all, when you get right down to it, isn't the job of "maintaining the public order" really just complaint-settling? Tear gas and truncheons have their merits, but I've always favored winning arguments with logic, particularly the sort of logic that briefly disables the mental functioning of the complainant, affording the complainee valuable seconds to escape. Someday I hope to hire a Staff Philosopher to work full-time on the subject of Imperial Logic, but right now I don't have the dollars.

Anyway, I know you're on pins and needles, B/S, so I promise you: I'll write with actual news in the next couple days. I just can't do it in this post, because it would screw with the "half my posts" premise up there in the first paragraph. That would in turn debunk the Imperial Logic in the second paragraph, rendering the third paragraph nonsensical and causing me to have to rewrite this fourth paragraph midstream. And I've already got a lot of momentum going in this fourth paragraph.

So please accept that actual content is forthcoming, but content yourself (ha! pun!) now with my apologies and justifications for the delay. More tomorrow. Or the next day.

Some Quick Enumerated Points

2006-04-11T16:35:00.000-04:00

I have a few points to cover — just to get out of the way, before too much of a backlog accumulates:

(1) I have set up a program that provides temporary tucked-away housing for family members of staff, until we can get a handle on the apparent threat. All they have to do is produce photocopies of documents evidencing kinship with active personnel. (Don't think, Mr. Homicidal Perpetrator, that you can just go to the Motel 6 closest to these people's houses. We'd be damned fools if we relocated at-risk persons to the Official Budget Hotel Chain of the Future Regime. And we're not damned fools, pal.)

(2) Not much progress on suspects, but it's an ongoing investigation, and if there's one thing I've learned from my days in Human Resources, you never comment on an ongoing investigation.

(3) You're taking this the wrong way, Gloria. You should be flattered that I wrote what I did. Remember: I was surprised that you were that old; that's what prompted my reaction. You don't look a day over 45, which to me is the perfect age for a woman. A woman at 45 is experienced and world-wise, but still spry, and with a lingering capacity for wonder.

(4) To the Shadowy Dude on My Doorstep: there are more water balloons where that last one came from. And next time, it won't be water. So think about that when you take up your post tomorrow morning. Ya prick.

(5) I'm in talks with the Boston Archdiocese about renting space for a fundraiser — moving my peeps' extended families into hiding costs money. I'll keep you posted on the details.

(6) I've created a new blog that documents certain highlighted correspondence. I've lodged a permanent link over there on the right. Click it and keep pace with History, B/S.

FIFTY-NINE?

2006-04-07T15:53:00.000-04:00

I just saw this article in the Globe, and yes — I find it troubling indeed.

But Phutatorius, are you sure you're being objective? Why SHOULDN'T the Filipinos rally against a regime that oppresses them? Honestly, just because you're SLEEPING WITH the President —

No, B/S. You misunderstand me. That's not it at all. It's that I had no idea Gloria was fifty-nine years old. Well, of course she wasn't 59 until just recently, but I didn't have a clue she was even close to the Big 6-0. Shoot: I had her pegged at late 40s, max (I mean, look at the photo. She's a babe!).

That's it, then. I have one year to break it off. Here's hoping that I can get control of her army by next March. Because there's no way I'm going to get it on with a woman (no matter how good she is), if I know she's over 60.

My Renowned Statisticsologist Says . . .

2006-04-07T15:32:00.000-04:00

Here's the analysis I just got back from My Renowned Statisticsologist:

(A) Well, first calculate the probably of one acquaintance having an accidental death in the family. This — in the long run — is simply the number of families that have accidental deaths in the average week divided by the number of families (this is in the world, in the US, in your state — whichever you think is most relevant).

Now, two calculate the chances of two in the same week, you need to define your terms a bit more explicitly. (1) Do you mean in one particular week (e.g., what's the probability of two such occurences in the week of March 3-9)? (2) Or do you mean at some point in your life two will happen in a week? (3) Or do you mean that given one happened, what's the probability of another happening within 7 days?

(3) is easiest because we can make a reasonable assumption about independence because we will clearly be talking about two separate events. There might be some correlation, but it's probably small. Then the answer would simply be whatever you got for (A).

(1) is next easiest. If we assume independence (a big assumption) then you just square (A). If we think there is some positive correlation, i.e., acquaintances' family members might often travel together in the same car, then this will be closer to just plain old (A). Or, if accidental death includes things like death by earthquake, then there's certainly some positive correlation. If you really mean, a safe dropping on someone's head or falling down the stairs, then these are probably close to independent and your answer is (A)^2

(2) This is the hardest. Since the chance is so small you can approximate it by 1 - ((1 - "1")^N) where "1" is the answer you get in the above paragraph and N is the # of weeks you live in a year.

Did you get all that, Brother/Sister? Well, just in case you didn't, here's the upshot: the odds are ASTRONOMICAL that my two Stenos' family members would suffer near-simultaneous mortal "accidents." Like a gajillion-and-a-half to one. So I'm going to proceed on a double-homicide theory.

And Brothers and Sisters, please do let this insider's access I've given you into my management of this crisis inform your understanding of how I intend to govern the planet, once I take over. A Benevolent and Wise World Leader does not act willy-nilly — he consults with trusted and knowledgeable advisors and makes rational policy conclusions that incorporate and reflect their analytical expertise.

That, people, is how you govern.

Whether or not I decide to formalize the position of Renowned Statisticsologist — er, Statistician — into my regime structure, you can bet I will be relying heavily on this aforequoted gentleman's number-crunching insights well into the future.

Death by Dune Buggy/File Cabinet

2006-04-04T12:10:00.000-04:00

Somebody — I think it was Rodrigo from Valladolid — wrote in to ask whether I should be concerned that the relatives of two of my Stenos had died so suddenly and coincidentally.

Well, now that's a good point. And I've been making calls, following up.

The way I see it, there are two possibilities: (1) Opie and Big Cheese are playing hooky, and they've gone down south to take in some spring training baseball and get some sun; or (2) somebody hell-bent on derailing my Bid for Power has been targeting family members of my staff.

I can tell you that I've already ruled out (1), because I've had Opie and Big Cheese tailed by private investigators. Big Cheese is where he should be right now, with his bereaved sister in Kansas City. Opie is down in Venice Beach — in the sunshine, admittedly — but only because his parents had retired there, and it was his mother's wish that her body not be returned to North Carolina for burial, but set to sea on an inflatable (and presumably inflated) raft.

On to (2), then. I think a good point to start here is to consider the Circumstances of Death. Opie's mother, age 75, run down by a dune buggy (police are guessing, based on the tire tracks coming and going) while she walked the beach at sunset. The hit-and-run perpetrators have not been caught. No known enemies, no gambling debts or money trouble. She had embroiled herself in a protracted squabble with neighbors about the color of their mailbox, which she thought detracted from the uniformity of her gated community. But those neighbors drive a Cadillac Coup de Ville.

Big Cheese's brother-in-law was hit by a file cabinet that fell from a fourteenth-floor window just as he left his office. This sounds completely suspicious to me, and I told the police that I thought so. They begged to differ, on the ground that a file cabinet takes some time to fall a full fourteen stories, and what is more, it's a difficult object to aim. The odds of successfully hitting a target with a file cabinet from fourteen floors are slim:

"If you wanted to kill a guy, why not hire a sniper?" the lieutenant asked me.

I asked him if the building had a 13th floor. You know, Brother/Sister, how triskaidekaphobe contractors will "elide out" the 13th floor when they build a building. They'll actually call the 13th floor the 14th floor — as if that fools old Beelzebub.

The policeman confirmed that the building did not have a 14th floor.

"Aha!" I said. "So the file cabinet only fell thirteen stories!"

"So?" said the lieutenant.

"So it was 7.14285% easier to aim than you think."

"Wait a minute. who are you again?" the lieutenant asked.

"I'm Phutatorius."

"And what do you have to do with this investigation?"

"I employ the deceased Mr. Woczniak's brother-in-law on my staff up here in Massachusetts. I'm a famous and controversial Internet personality, and I have reason to believe that somebody killed Mr. Woczniak to get at me."

"Are you kidding?"

"I absolutely am not, Lieutenant, and I encourage you to speak with Sergeant Huntington at the Venice Beach Police Department in Florida. They're investigating another homicide down there, and you may find some leads worth exploring by comparing notes. In fact, you might check the surveillance video, see if there was a dune buggy parked near the building when the accident happened. With Florida plates, maybe?"

"Yeah — yeah, I'll totally look into that," the policeman said, in that uninspired way that policemen have.

I don't expect much in the way of results from the KCPD, but I owe it my Stenos to get to the bottom of this. I'll keep these private eyes on the case in Kansas City and Venice Beach. I also intend to contact a renowned statisticsologist (right word?) I know, just to see what the odds are of two acquaintances suffering accidental family deaths in the same week.

Statistician, PePe says. He's right. Sometimes I think he knows the language better than I do.

The Other Thing Is . . .

2006-03-22T09:36:00.000-05:00

I forgot to tell you — the other thing holding me back these days is that two of my three Stenos (Opie and Big Cheese, if you're keeping score, and I'm not sure certain Shadowy people out there aren't) have had sudden bizarre accidental deaths in the family. So I gave them both bereavement leave, plus a few days to sort through estate issues.

No sooner had I dismissed Opie and Big Cheese, when Dead Eye came down with mono. So she'll be out for about a month. To her credit, she tried sticking it out, but on-the-fly stenography is a difficult job even when you're 100%. I'd say right now Dead Eye is functioning at about 15% of her estimable capacity. Her 15% is certainly better than most people's 30%, but I don't want to push her.

The upshot for me — not that I'm thinking about me, mind you — is that I have very limited Steno coverage these days. So I try not to do or say anything monumental. Dead Eye has loaned PePe her Stentura (who knew those machines were so pricey?), and he's slowly getting up to speed on it. You have to have fast fingers to play the pipes like he does, so I figure he'll be a natural once he gets a feel for how the machine works.

Anyway, these days I'm learning that there's more to being an employer than the simple pleasures of hiring, firing, and sexual harassment. You really have to look out for people. They get sick, they suffer losses . . . and now I'm hearing that I have to make all these periodic payments to Social Security and Medicare for them, and I have to fill out all kinds of forms. What a pain in the ass that is.

Expect all that government crap to change, Brother/Sister, once I come to power.

Springtime Is Here!

2006-03-20T16:30:00.000-05:00

I know, Brother/Sister. You're demanding to know what's taken me so long to write another post — as is your right, since transparency and trust go hand-in-hand. And that goes double when you're dealing with a would-be World Hegemon. No doubt some of the more cynical among you will have read nefarious designs into my radio silence:

He's gone underground. He's planning a surprise attack.

I even got an email from someone alleging that I'd been spotted in Belarus, inquiring about an industrial-grade wood-chipper. I'll leave it to the Peanut Gallery to fill in the gaps of that mysterious plan.

The fact is, I've gone the Way of the Groundhog this past month, after it became abundantly clear, from an accumulation of cigarette butts and cough-drop wrappers on my front porch, that I had acquired one or more Shadows. Some of my Brothers and Sisters know what I'm talking about here. They've seen the men standing casually outside their houses and places of business, waiting. Sure, to the innocent observer they might look like they're delivering the mail, or the daily paper. But that's not what they're doing all the time. That's just the role they assume when a passer-by — a witness — happens down the road. They produce a mailbag, a stack of Boston Globes, change quickly into a government-issue uniform, and get suddenly busy.

But the rest of the time they're watching, waiting. Lurking. Like shadows, they do nothing independently. They fade into the background and are invisible at night. And like shadows, they attach themselves to you the moment you step out into the sunshine, and they follow you wherever you go. There's a perfect symmetry to their tracking efforts: when you walk, they walk. When you get into a car, they conjure up a car of their own.

I know they're out there. No, I can't see them — when I pry open an eye-slit in the blinds to look, they duck quickly under the porch overhang. But every Friday morning, when I take out the trash, I find their detritus on the stoop. I like to think there are at least two of them, because if it's one man, he's chain-smoking his way through a six-week respiratory illness. Unfathomable to me, but then I've never been addicted to nicotine. Or Menthol-Lyptus, for that matter.

Who are they? Who could say? I've made my share of enemies. Could be Ortega's people. Could be local muscle hired by Bobo the Intern Chimp. Could be the government — I am, after all, on a watch list (last I heard, anyway). And it could be a process server waiting to slap a complaint on me for any number of negligent acts, intentional torts, breaches of contract, property liens, quantum meruit, what-have-you.

Suffice to say, because of My Shadow(s) — and because it's frickin' cold outside — I'm playing it close to the vest these days. Sitting in the dark a lot, brooding, biding time, fending off PePe when he comes at me with these pills. So I don't have a heck of a lot to report. I've fallen behind with my daily training modules from the Master. I'm eating a lot of corn chips and ramen noodles. PePe keeps dropping hints about depression, paranoia, agoraphobia. But he just says that to undermine me. He doesn't know what's out there, and it makes me sad. I've got plenty of time to retreat inward and turn psychotic after I take over the world . . .

Kidding! B/S, I was kidding with that last bit. No, the bit about the retreating inward as World Hegemon. I was kidding about that. I mean, I can see how it would happen to certain people. The isolation of power, insecure personalities, all that. But that's not me. You know that. I mean, hell, does Kim Jong-Il have a weblog? All right, then.

In any event, tomorrow brings the vernal equinox — the First Day of Spring. Day and night — and with them the forces of darkness and light, good and evil — draw into equilibrium. The groundhogs, the bears, the Boston-based Internet Personalities shake off their Seasonal Affective Disorders and come out of hibernation. Any minute now I expect to spring open my door, take My Lulled-Into-Indolence Shadows by surprise, beat them down to the ground and demand some answers. I'm just not quite there yet.

Email from the Master Trainer

2006-02-15T22:21:00.000-05:00

So the Master Trainer dropped me a line today, from his Gmail account. Just wanted to check in, he said, she how things were working out with PePe, and tell me that he's setting up "Distance Learning Modules" on the Internet, which will enable me to continue my training in the Ancient and Very Very Lethal Art of Incan Dance-Fighting — but by remote.

How friggin' cool is my Master Trainer?

He went on to say he's been in a bit of funk since I left the Secret Mountain Redoubt, that I had livened up the place with my American impetuousness, and he feared he'd missed out on something big when he lost the opportunity to complete my training. What's more, he feels a gnawing responsibility for sending me out into the world, only half-taught, and having incurred the enduring wrath and enmity of Master Ortega's splinter group of dance-fighting ideologues. If I were ambushed and killed by these wicked, wicked men, he would never forgive himself.

So he tells me he's hired a digital videographer to record his morning training sessions, and he's posted them online in Real Player and Quicktime formats. This way I can keep up with my lessons, no matter where my travels and adventures take me. All I need is a laptop, a Net connection, a Piper, and a set of six or more crash-test dummies. He had to file an assload of paperwork with the Council of Elders to get the necessary permissions for the project. As a result, the website is heavily encrypted and password protected (so don't think, Brother/Sister, that you'll be able to find it and hack into any of the centuries-old secrets of the Elite Incan Dance-Fighters).

The Master Trainer flatters me. He really does. He's a standup guy, a pillar of wisdom, and I plan to appoint him to my Board of Trusted Advisors once I take power.

I have to say, I've let myself slip out of fighting shape a bit over the past couple weeks. We've been living a bit high on the hog. Word from the Master Trainer was just the sort of thing I needed to get me to buckle down. After all, no one ever took over the world by sitting around dropping acid with his stenographers. No — it takes discipline, organization, self-denial. You have to conquer yourself before you can get on with conquering others.

So as I continue to devote the next couple months to fundraising, I'll be sure to spend at least two hours every morning in training. I want to make my Master Trainer proud — and to vindicate all the time and effort he has expended (and continues to expend) on my behalf.

Oh, Right: Steno #3

2006-02-12T21:13:00.000-05:00

I can't believe I forgot to introduce my final archivist hire. Big snaps to Josephus from Dunkirk for writing in and reminding me. My third stenographer signed on before the auction and has already become a valuable member of the team. His name is Francis Gardocki, and he does the morning shifts. Not a court reporter, but a transcriber of CNN pundit shows. Francis has a special expertise in recording the statements of two, sometimes three people speaking simultaneously (and at increasing volume).

Francis owns a timeshare in a Vermont dairy farm, and three weeks a year he goes up there and makes his signature Gardocki™ Sharp Cheddar. That dairy farm is in a secluded area way up by the Canadian border. So if the shit ever hits the fan, I've not only got a crack steno by my side, but I've got access to a naturally fortified strategic hideaway.

Everybody give a belated welcome to "Frankie Big Cheese" Gardocki.

Absolutely!

2006-02-04T22:11:00.000-05:00

I know. I've been delinquent in writing. It's been a week and a half now since the auction, which netted $159,000 for the World Domination Fund, with one of Gloria's emerald bracelets held over for me to send to Flora Pachado, the Most Beautiful Girl I Ever Saw in Peru.

What's that — gauche, you say, to give one lover's gift to another? Well, how about when the first lover is wealthy and powerful beyond your wildest dreams, and the other lives humbly in the Andes mountains, and her father has to sell cheap blankets to eke out a living for the family? How gauche is it when the first lover loved you basically for your body, and the second lover for your mind? Does that alter your opinion at all?

Yeah, see, Brother/Sister: it's not healthy to deal in absolutes. Take, for example, that ABSOLUTE killer of a three-day post-party we had in the Marriott Marquis after the Sotheby's gig. I'm still hurting, B/S — today's the first day I've been able to sit up and eat anything other than hot cereal. And I'm strongly considering burning Dead-Eye's transcripts from Friday and Saturday night: some things are best stricken from the record.

After factoring in all the damage and cleanup costs, we're looking at a $10,000 hotel bill from Marriott. I don't know what to say on that score: sometimes you just have to let off some steam, and smashing the hell out of that toilet really did seem like a good idea at the time. Looking back at the transcripts, I see now that I didn't make the strongest case as to how that particular act of vandalism fit into my grander scheme of taking over the world. But that's 20/20 hindisight. The logic of it was perfectly clear to PePe and me at the time.

Like I said, Bro/Sis — you need to be careful with Absolut. But hey — we're in the money right now, and a ten grand party won't exactly put us into bankruptcy.

Naturally, everybody in the crew threw up on the Acela train back to Boston last Sunday. It's a smooth ride, but not that smooth. Did you know you can get a ticket for puking in a railway compartment? They have these railway cops on Barf Patrol — it's friggin' absurd. The stenos are just going to waive process and pay the fine; PePe and I are going to court. We had the car to ourselves, and no one saw any of us do it. They can't prove anything.

Remind me, Brother/Sister, to tell you about all the connections we made with wealthy elites at the auction. Many of the guests at the reception viewed the World Domination Project with skepticism, but lively debate ensued, and I managed to win a number of them over to my side with wild promises of exclusive timber and natural gas extraction contracts. The champagne was flowing, the credentials flashing, and deals were taking shape. Whew! It was exhilarating, I tell you.

Two Down, One to Go

2006-01-24T16:29:00.000-05:00

I filled two of the three stenographer positions yesterday. What can I say? I'm a "strike while the iron is hot" kind of guy. The CW among Human Resources types (so I hear) is that you don't hire until you've interviewed every candidate, but I know talent when I see it, and I couldn't pass these two up.

So now I introduce the two newest members of The Entourage —

(1) Vernon Calaveras, age 41. In addition to his expertise in stenography, Vernon is a certified French and German language interpreter and a committed triathlete. He grew up in North Carolina and has a shock of red hair, so I've nicknamed him Opie. Welcome aboard, Opie Calaveras!

(2) Susan Granderson, age 34. Susan earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering but bagged a career in research for court reporting because she wanted "more human contact." Susan is an accomplished longbow archer. Let's everybody put their hands together for Dead-Eye Granderson!

The third guy was a total loss. He wrecked coming off the zip-line — clunked his steno machine and sprained an ankle. Cried like a baby, and he apparently threatened to sue me as he was getting into his cab. I didn't hear that last part over all his blubbering, but it showed up in Dead-Eye's transcript (she and Opie don't officially start work until tomorrow, but I had her cover that last interview — I just had a bad feeling about the guy).

Whatever. This won't be the first time I've been named a defendant in a preposterous lawsuit. I drew up an IRONCLAD liability waiver before I set up these trials, and the guy signed it before we got started. So I have to think I'm covered.

Anyway, we'll see what comes of today's trials.

I should add that barring any further postponements, the Gloria Collection auction is on again for Friday in NYC. Seeing as how I have to put all these newbies on payroll, I'm anxious to get the cash in hand.

Wanted: Stenographers

2006-01-23T10:33:00.000-05:00

Much time has passed, B/S, since last we spoke. And with every second that lapsed incommunicado, I felt a distinct pang of remorse for the lost opportunity. On so many occasions in these last twelve days, I experienced some small but enriching life detail, or some fleeting but (at the time) momentous single-frame thought flashed across the silver screen of my consciousness.

But these earthshattering ephemera always occurred to me when I was away from a computer — and they naturally would flit away into oblivion (as ephemera tend to do) before I could take a seat in front of my terminal, pour myself a Diet Coke, and get to typing. My PowerBook is handy, I grant you, but it only helps so much. What about when I'm driving? Or scooting? Or negotiating an arms sale in an abandoned warehouse in Southie?

I've decided I need to keep Archives. I need to maintain a more complete record of my utterances during this rise to power than I am making available to you folks now, in this weblog. Don't get me wrong, B/S — the weblog is not going anywhere. You'll still get the highlights here. But the Archives will have it all — every word I utter, at breakfast, lunch, dinner, in the bath, in my sleep. Everything I say between next Monday and the end of my life will be recorded for posterity's historians and journalists to consult and review.

So right now I'm interviewing stenographers — court reporter-types who can take down on their little machine thingies everything I say during an eight-hour period, then go back and massage their shorthand type into a definitive transcript for my signature later in the week. I'm looking to hire three people, each of whom will work one shift a day.

Qualifications? No formal requirements: I'm basically just looking for skills here. Notary certification would be a plus. And obviously an ability to handle changing work conditions. Most of these people set their apparatus up on a tripod and sit down. I'm going to need people who can follow me everywhere I go. They'll have to be able to rig up their machine so they can type while they walk, or while they're in a car or a helicopter — or crouched in hiding nearby while I'm fighting off some of Ortega's Incan Dance-Fighters.

So that's the plan. I'll be interviewing four candidates this afternoon, and six tomorrow. First an informal conversation, then the skills test. PePe and the intern are setting up an obstacle course/steeplechase for me to run with the stenographer beside me. I'll be reciting Latin poetry as I step through the tires, legal disclaimers while I climb the rope to the diving platform, and baseball statistics during the 100-meter swim sprint.

Entourage status will be awarded to the three stenos who can keep up!

Auction Postponed

2006-01-11T17:18:00.000-05:00

So we're going with Sotheby's, but the auction is put off until at least the weekend. Some woman just stepped out of the woodwork with what purports to be JFK's bathrobe, and all our contacts in the auction house are in a tizzy over it. They've got forensic experts testing hairs found in the terrycloth in hope of authenticating the lot for a Friday evening showing.

And they've invoked some sort of Special Exigency Clause in our contract to requisition all the hors d'oeuvres our caterer was making for the Gloria Collection event. (I've been assured we will be compensated for that.)

Suddenly we're small potatoes.

PePe says we might be better positioned if the source of our presidential memorabilia were not alive. I told him this was just the kind of thinking out loud that a Philippine intelligence operative picks up on a sound dish and utterly misinterprets. Let me therefore state clearly for the record — Gloria, my darling, you're worth more to me alive than your entire estate — even with a Kennedy-esque post mortem markup.

And, of course, I hasten to add the further disclaimer, that everything I report on this website is fictitious, anyway. So whatever that Mindanaoan spy technician thinks he heard, he didn't really hear. I haven't even spoken to PePe today. He's been at the dentist getting a crown fixed.

Accounts Receivable

2006-01-10T15:41:00.000-05:00

I know, I know, B/S — I've been way too preoccupied with money in my last handful of posts. I apologize for that, but I'll ask you to bear with me for just a bit longer.

After all, the last few months have been a bitch from the standpoint of fundraising, but one thing I haven't done yet is log on to Blogger and ask you directly for money. And that's a hell of a lot more than you can say for National Public Radio. Those people are relentless — they want you to pay for their news, whereas I serve up mine for free.

Anyway, I wish I had something nonfinancial and interesting to report, but I don't. I'm just grinding the gears these days to keep this Project afloat, and I haven't had time for the usual bout of Incidents and horsing around.

Here's the state of things: right now I have exactly $2218.42 in the World Domination Fund checking account down at Citizens Bank, earning a measly 3% APR, but I'm also in negotiations with Sotheby's and Christie's to auction off what I've dubbed, for marketing purposes, "The Gloria Collection" sometime before the end of the month.

The thing is, these auction houses are real pennypinchers — they want a 20% commission on the first $100 grand I make. I've asked each of them for a five-point reduction, a paltry concession, in my view, in exchange for down-the-road recognition as the Official Auction House of Phutatorius, World Hegemon. But neither house will budge even a single percentage point off their "standard" commission rates.

In fact, when I made my proposal to Christie's the other day, their negotiator went so far as to sneer at me and say, "That'll be the day." Well, I never! Now I know that getting attitude from the personnel is supposedly "part of the package" when you deal with an upper-crust place like this, but I thought that blast of negativity was a bit much.

If I didn't already have an independent, benevolent motive for doing it, I'd take over the world just to spite the guy. And then I'd see to it that he was fired. As it stands, I may or may not let him keep his job once I've acquired absolute power. Let's just say that right now he's on probation and leave it at that.

I should be choosing one or the other house in the next couple days. Unless Christie's comes in under the competition by tomorrow afternoon, Sotheby's wins on the politeness tiebreaker. I hope to cash in on The Gloria Collection by Friday.

If any of you are interested in buying, write me directly and I'll clue you in on the time, place, and date of the auction, once they're settled. Right now I don't have any of the details, except that it will be a "black-tie optional" affair (which I've read somewhere is etiquette-speak for "black-tie mandatory" — who knew?).

Heard from Gloria

2006-01-05T20:45:00.000-05:00

Finally took the hold off my mail — I'd been back in town a week, just hadn't got around to it. And wouldn't you know it? I had letters from my Philippine paramour, Gloria (named by Forbes, by the way, as the Fourth Most Powerful Woman in the World)!

Now I won't tell you exactly what my little Presidential vixen wrote to me — sorry, Us Magazine, but I've told you before: I don't kiss and tell — but I will say that each successive letter was written with greater urgency (and sprayed with a bit more perfume) than the last. It seems Ms. Arroyo was reading too much into my nonresponsiveness: she didn't know I was out of town, and she thought I was giving her the brush-off.

I could have sworn I wrote and told her I was going to Peru. The letter may have been pulled by the people screening her email. I did get a return message from one of her staffers, a form letter type of thing — "Thank you for taking the time to communicate your concerns to President Arroyo. We take all of the President's correspondence very seriously, but due to the volume of email we receive, unfortunately the President is not able to respond personally to each and every message she receives . . ." But still, if she really is so interested in me, she could have kept up with me by reading the blog.

Anyway, the long and short of it was that Gloria got herself all worked up to the point where she started sending me gifts. Lots of expensive gifts. Diamond rings, a sack of priceless pieces-of-eight from the Spanish Colonial era, an ankle bracelet of platinum and emeralds — we're talking big-time loot here.

PePe says I should get her on the phone and clear up the misunderstanding, then send back all the bullion and jewelry, which Gloria no doubt sent to me while in a very emotional state. Although I regard my Piper as a trusted advisor, I think he's way off on this one. It's not enough, in this world, just to be a Man of Destiny. You have to recognize that you're a Man of Destiny. And that's where PePe and I differ. You see, I get that things like this are supposed to happen to me. Wealth is supposed to fall out of the sky into my lap, quite by accident. Something has to kick-start the World Domination Fund. How else will I rise from my humble station to become the Omnibus Uber-Sovereign?

This sort of thing was foreordained when I had my Moment back in September. I won't turn away good fortune simply because I don't appear to have "earned it." (And between you and me, Gloria's not exactly hurting for jewelry. I bet the gifting of these fifty-some odd pieces barely made a dent in her collection.) Sometime soon I'll hop a flight to Manila and steal an evening, maybe a long weekend of passion with my lover and benefactress. Believe me, I know better than to do wrong to the President of the Philippines.

In the meantime, though, it's off downtown tomorrow morning, to visit the appraiser!

Of Ice Sculptures and Office Staff

2006-01-03T21:05:00.000-05:00

Back in Cambridge now, and I'm still steaming about New Year's Eve — the judges at First Night Boston disqualified my ice sculpture entry, when they got word that I had not hand-chiseled it, but had rather poured water into a prefabricated mold and frozen it overnight.

The requirement of hand-chiseling is nowhere mentioned in the contest rules, and I would never have guessed that my methodology was "unethical" or "problematic." Sure, it takes painstaking effort and precision to whittle away a block of ice into the shape of a dolphin. But my approach was no picnic, either — stripped naked and covered in a skintight heat-resistant body suit, I had to stand stock-still and breathe through a bent cocktail straw for forty-five minutes, until the molten plastic congealed around me to form the mold. And then another twenty minutes passed while PePe and the intern — I'll tell you about her later, Brother/Sister — cut the mold in two so I could be lifted out of it.

So it was that First Night officials took a blowtorch to my life-sized Ice Phutatorius, perfectly posed to display every bulging muscle, every taut sinew and engorged organ — and I was given the explanation that my use of a mold violated the spirit of the rules. Like that would ever stand up in court.

Here's the thing, B/S: this wasn't about Your Beloved Internet Personality cheating in an ice-sculpture contest. This was about censorship. The city wants to sell First Night as a "family" event, which in today's Puritan consciousness means that displays of virility — however tasteful, and whatever their artistic merit — are simply non grata in Copley Square. And PePe tells me he overheard one of the judges decrying what she thought was a "joint" sticking out of my mouth. So I had the anti-cannabis lobby working against me, too, based on their complete mistaking of a cocktail straw for a marijuana cigarette. Honestly.

When I'm the World Hegemon, Brother/Sister, gigantic, anatomically-exaggerated statues of me, cut from marble, will adorn all of America's major cities — not as monuments to my vanity (I know how you think, B/S) but as reminders that my benevolent and progressive-minded regime simply will not tolerate this kind of prudishness.

In the meantime, though, I'm out the $2500 first-prize award I was counting on winning. Which means the intern remains unpaid, despite her considerable skills and qualities, of which I intend to make extensive use in the coming weeks.

Home for the Holidays

2006-01-02T11:46:00.000-05:00

I was able to stop home for the holidays, which was nice, Brother/Sister. Don't ask me where home is — my enemies would love to get wind of that information, just to get to people who are close to me. I'll only say that we weren't required to break too far off our Texas-to-Boston itinerary to spend Christmas with my family.

I don't think I have to tell you, B/S, how a stop home for a few days can recharge the batteries of an Internet Personality. Hugs and home cooking from Mom, shots of festive liqueurs with Dad, a game of Scrabble with Sissy and Skip (not their real names, fellas) — it was all good.

As always, we went to Aunt Marjorie and Uncle Earvin's place for Christmas Eve. Uncle Earvin and I never really clicked, but family is family, and we all put on our holiday sweaters and arrived at my mother's sister's doorstep at around 7 p.m., holding pies. My aunt greeted us warmly at the door, took our coats and ushered us inside.

My uncle stood up abruptly, spilling his mulled wine, as I entered his living room with PePe in tow. "I KNEW IT!" he cried. "I knew it the first time I tried to throw a football with that sissy-boy!"

"Knew what?" my father asked, darkly.

"I knew he was going to come home one Christmas and try to bring a man into MY HOUSE!"

"Oh, come off it," I told my uncle. "PePe's just my Piper —"

"The two of you perverts can do whatever you want together back in the Big City, but I won't have you talking about it in my house, in front of my children!" This was a bit dramatic, I thought, given that my cousins are thirty-six and twenty-nine years old, and the younger one had been known to "experiment" sexually in college before her father cut off her tuition during her junior year.

But rather than dig up that old skeleton and provoke a full-on family brawl (I wouldn't do that to my Aunt Marjorie), I thought it better to explain my relationship with PePe to my uncle. So I told him about my training in Peru, and the tradition that calls for each Elite Incan Dance-Fighter to have in his retinue a Piper, who provides the musical accompaniment that an EIDF requires when he goes into battle. I then described to him the mutual, ceremonial oath of loyalty and friendship that PePe and I took together back in Peru.

"Well, that sounds a lot like one of those gay weddings to me," my uncle rumbled. He glared at my father while he said this, as though it were Dad's fault that I had grown up to be the kind of person a man like my Uncle Earvin would mistake for a homosexual.

"So what if it was?" my father nobly shot back. "At least we'd have a marriage to celebrate." He gestured at my two single cousins, whose prospects did not seem to have improved since I last saw them, as brother and sister had put on some eighty pounds between them. This set my Aunt Marjorie to bawling, and I realized I was going to have to act quickly before all of Christmas 2005 went straight to hell.

"EVERYBODY OUTSIDE," I said. My uncle gave me a challenging look. "FOR A DEMONSTRATION," I explained. "OUT. NOW."

My aunt and uncle's expansive front lawn — I should have described it to you earlier, Brother/Sister, on the way in — was a veritable Disneyland of Christmas animatronics. My uncle has his faults, but he is a craftsman, and over the years he had built, from scratch, a life-sized Nativity scene, with moving parts. The display was set under a oak tree just off the driveway, and the figures ran off a car battery — the Baby Jesus writhed uncomfortably in his swaddling cloths, the Virgin Mother made gestures of administration to her child, threatening shepherds brandished crooks at three foreign men proffering their gifts to Christ the Lord. An angel hung from wires extended from the roof of the house to the oak tree. Its wings flapped up and down hypnotically. Backing all this was a full-size Santa, in his sleigh, with reindeer, and flanking him were the characters from the Frosty the Snowman and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer TV specials (one notable omission being the Elf Who Wanted To Be a Dentist, whom my uncle was known to repudiate as a promoter of alternative lifestyles).

"PePe," I said. "Do you know 'Walking in a Winter Wonderland'?"

PePe nodded.

"Play it," I instructed, pulling one foot, then the other up behind my back to stretch my quads. PePe pulled out his pipes and began performing the song. I turned fierce eyes on my Uncle Earvin. "Watch this," I said,

and I attacked his Christmas display. Took out the shepherds in three kick-steps, then sauntered over to Frosty and decapitated him. With Frosty's hat and one of the shepherds' crooks I improvised a vaudeville hat-and-cane routine that culminated in me thrashing the Christmas angel overhead, bringing him down like a piñata. I then turned my attentions to the reindeer, the Rudolph characters, and finally the wise men, obliterating all of them in turn with spectacular kicks, thrusts, and rhythmic punches. Out of deference to my aunt's renowned religious piety (she hasn't missed a Sunday church service in forty-three years, which partly explains why my uncle, who can't leave town for more than six days, is so provincial-minded a personality), I left Mary, Joseph, and the Christ Child intact.

PePe wound out "Winter Wonderland", and I dropped into a crouch and twirled around to survey the carnage. The front yard was littered with plastic limbs, splintered wood, and shredded electrical wires shorting out in the snow. The family gaped at me, dumbfounded. Uncle Earvin was the first to find words:

"God damn, boy. You smashed my whole Christmas display to hell."

It occurred to me, at this point, that I had made a bit of a miscalculation. Determined as I had been to provide some clarity to my uncle on the subject of my relationship with PePe, I hadn't thought that, in the process, I was laying waste to some three decades of his work.

Surprisingly, my uncle was willing, at the moment, to overlook this fact:

"The dancing looked a little queer. But you say you have to do that when you fight?"

"I do. It's the music that gives us an edge over the conventional martial arts, the kung fu fighters and ninjas —"

"And you can do this to the Enemy?" Uncle Earvin asked.

"The Enemy?"

"You know — the Arabs."

I pointed to one of the wise men on the ground. "This one came from the East," I said.

"I owe you an apology, boy. And you, too," my uncle said, gesturing at PePe. "Let's get in out of the cold and get us some Christmas dinner."

"Amen!" cried my Aunt Marjorie.

And with that deep impression made on my hard-nosed Uncle Earvin, a good time was had by all.

Back from Hiatus

2005-12-31T12:49:00.000-05:00

Been a while, B/S. Sorry for the holdup. Writing hasn't been convenient, what with the strep infection, the long cross-country road trip — no more plane flights for me, until I get my no-fly status sorted out — then the holidays.

I'll catch you up soon. I'm having the year-end meeting with my accountant today. And I always go to the barber and get a deluxe straight-razor shave on the 31st of December.

Resolutions by tomorrow? We'll see. I only have the one aspiration, of which you're well aware. (But I wouldn't mind dropping a few pounds, too.)

Thousand of Dollars, Hundreds of Friends

2005-12-14T21:50:00.000-05:00

If you're wondering, Brother/Sister, why your favorite Internet Personality has served up nothing but radio silence in almost a week — well, that's because he's been hard at work earning THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS and HUNDREDS OF FRIENDS.

A man of true ambition finds his way in the world, B/S. I might have been down-spirited when I last wrote, but life is about picking yourself off the mat, shaking off the hangover, stopping down by the hotel lobby for the continental breakfast, and going once more into the breach.

I could give you a blow-by-blow of the last few days, but there was a lot of driving, waiting, loading, driving, unloading, and driving again — and that part was boring as hell. So I'll keep it brief and snappy for you, B/S:

We've been smuggling illegals.

Now don't get all moralistic and start quoting to me from the U.S. immigration laws. If you were jobless and stranded in a Texas border town with a compadre eating his way through your savings, and said compadre — as many of them are — were a native Spanish speaker . . . well, it might occur to you that there are certain obvious ways to turn your frown upside-down. And if, in the process of inverting that frown, you just so happened to incur the enduring gratitude of some forty score hopeful and able-bodied Mexican workers . . . well, now you're thinking you might have the rudiments of an army, if at some later date you might need one.

What bright-eyed Internet Personality with World Domination aims wouldn't act as I did? The legal stuff we can clear up later — if we even have to. That's what lawyers are for.

PePe and I have made fourteen runs (that's over the border and back) in four nights. The work is so easy it's like money falling out the sky. The hardest part was getting the Ryder truck — they pretty much staff the rental joints with federal agents down here. You can't rent a simple cargo truck without fielding twenty or more probing questions from the guy at the counter. And when you're finished navigating those treacherous waters, you're asked to pay cash up front. So we had to go around the corner to the pawn shop and hock all our belongings — rings, watches, black wheelie bag, iPod, EVERYTHING. PePe had a hard time parting with his pipes, even temporarily. But we swallowed hard, pooled the money together and got us a truck.

From there it was smooth sailing. We made all the money back in our first two runs and bought back all our worldly goods just as the pawn shop opened the next morning (though I had to wrest my iPod from the grasp of some early-bird grandmother who thought she'd just landed Junior's dream Christmas gift on the cheap). PePe had all the contacts, made the calls, talked in Spanish, arranged the pickups. I was the licensed driver. We had a secret route over the River. There's an old abandoned bridge —

I'm saying too much.

Suffice to say, we netted $500 per haul — not counting the homemade Mexican delicacies our generous passengers gave us over and above the charged fare for the transfer. We had only one incident — last night — when we happened upon some Minutemen. You may have heard of them, B/S: they're these nutbag border-watch volunteers who call in suspicious activity along the Rio Grande. It took five minutes' cajoling before PePe would put down his empanada and pipe me up some redneck-thrashing music, but once he did, I was able to get to the bastards and lay them out before they could dime us to the Border Patrol. There were three of them parked in a jeep. They had night-vision goggles and satellite phones. Real Delta Force wanna-bes, these jerks — I gave them a big, thick dose of AVVLAIDF, had them all knocked out and piled into the truck in thirty seconds flat.

Just for kicks we took them over into Mexico on our next run, left them for the Policia. See how they like it.

Anyway, we're sitting on seven grand right now, and rather than push our luck, we're going to pocket the money, settle up at the Motel 6, and ditch Del Rio, Texas ASAP. Some 800+ newly arrived Mexican-Americans have my business card, and I have their contact information entered on this computer (these people may own next to nothing, but you wouldn't believe how many of them cross the border with mobile phone accounts). Some people might worry that I'm leaving a trail of evidence behind, but not me. You get ahead in life by making connections. I got these people safely and comfortably placed in the Land of Opportunity at a reasonable price. I want them to know they can call on me for help — for work, for mentorship, for a favor. I don't demand reciprocity down the road, but I won't refuse it either.

Not everyone can make more than seven Gs and 800 close friends in four nights. It's a sweet deal, if you can swing it.

Money Problems

2005-12-08T10:40:00.000-05:00

I apologize, Brother/Sister, for the tone I took in that last post. As anyone who has had to resort to smuggling himself over a border inside a refrigerator could tell you, I've been under a fair amount of stress lately.

These cash flow issues don't help. You may remember from way back that when I first left for Peru, I prudentially tucked away $500 for a return flight. What I didn't know — and could never have guessed — at the time were (1) that I would have a Piper to fly home alongside me, and (2) that he and I would together get booted off our plane two thirds of the way through our itinerary, and (3) that friggin' American Airlines would refuse to refund me for what their Customer Service Personnel have described as an "interruption in service."

I call it a screw-over, Brother/Sister. If the airline overbooks a flight and bumps you, it puts you on the next flight. If you get hammered at the hotel bar and arrive to the gate too late, they find a way to book you through to your destination.

I don't see how my situation is any different. In fact, I think I make a stronger case for assistance than most people who miss a flight. In my case —

("Our case," PePe says. That's fair.)

in our case, we missed our flight because the government was persecuting me because of my political ambitions and assassin's training.

But those punks at American Airlines are unyielding on this point, it being their strict policy not to make travel allowances for people who suffer an interruption in service due to their no-fly status.

What a bunch of patriots they are.

Anyway, Brother/Sister, I'm coming to learn how crippling illiquidity can be to an enterprise — even a non-profit sociopolitical movement like mine.

We've blown through my $500 travel set-aside and are now dipping into the balance of $343.78 in the World Domination Fund. Come tax-time, I don't think I'll have any problem justifying the cost of this extended involuntary layover as a "business expense."

Still, I don't like borrowing against the Fund so early on in the project. I was saving up to buy a share of Google stock, but if PePe keeps eating the way he does — my God, you'd think they were starving the guy at the Secret Mountain Redoubt — we'll have run the Fund down to zero on his potato-chip consumption alone. (And between you and me, my loyal and voracious Piper is not exactly bringing home big bills from his busking gig downtown.)

So that's why I'm a bit testy these days. I'm keeping my eyes peeled for a get-rich-quick scheme, but I'm fighting a real sense of discouragement, bordering on depression. It's a struggle even to get out of bed these days, much less beat the streets for business opportunities.

Stop Asking Me This

2005-12-05T15:59:00.000-05:00

Some my Brothers and Sisters have written in to ask me whether I abruptly terminated my visit in Peru in response to readers' "lack of interest" in "that particular subplot."

I wish I could find an adequate way to express my utter disgust with that kind of cynicism. But right now I'm coming off a long weekend spent stranded in a Motel 6 in Del Rio, Texas — and I've pretty much exhausted my capacity to express disgust.

But know this, Brother/Sister, because I will not be repeating it:

‹rant›

I am on a mission. This weblog exists to chart my progress and to report to my several loyalists on the progress of that mission. The weblog does not come before the mission.

Do you really think I would cut short my valuable training in the Ancient and Very, Very Lethal Art of Incan Dance-Fighting just to win myself a temporary ratings bump? Would I flee Peru just when I was getting somewhere with Flora Posada, the Most Beautiful Girl in the Country?

("Pachado," PePe tells me. "Flora Pachado." He's been downtown Piping, Jimmy Atahualpa-style, for travel money to get us back to Cambridge, and he just walked in the door.)

Would I bug out on Flora Pachado, without finishing her screened-in porch (if you know what I mean), just because Burping Squid isn't interested in Andean cultures?

I got the heck out of Peru because people in Peru wanted me dead. It's possible I'll be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life — or at least until the Master Trainer gives me the all-clear sign. These people want to kill me.

And by the way, if at some point before I ascend to power I'm driving my car, and I look in my rear-view mirror, and there appears to be somebody tailing me, I'm going to try to lose them. You're free to suppose, Brother/Sister, that I'm just serving up a car chase to my readers — you know, because everybody loves a good car chase. But if that's what you're thinking, I don't want to hear it.

This is insulting. This is my life. And so what if the Peruvian Tourism Board, or whatever it's called —

("Comisiòn de Promociòn de Peru," PePe says.) —

so what if they wrote me a check a couple of months ago? I don't like the way you people are picking around in my private affairs. It was 300 bucks, and I put it directly into the World Domination Fund. If the Peruvian government were making me personally rich, I'd be on a first-class plane to Boston right now.

Instead, PePe and I are scraping pennies together right now just to get home in coach before Christmas. I'm sorry if that "subplot" doesn't have enough zip for you, Brother/Sister, but life is what it is.

If you want fantastic tales of great adventure, go somewhere else.

‹/rant›

Stupid &#$@* No-Fly List!

2005-12-02T15:06:00.000-05:00

There’s always a wrinkle, Brother/Sister. I breathed a sigh of relief when I arrived in Bolivia (in part because that refrigerator was a tight fit and my oxygen tank was running on empty). I thanked my lucky stars when PePe and I got to the airport in La Paz, cleared security, and boarded the plane. Everything seemed to be going without a hitch; the Master’s plan to get me out of harm’s way was airtight.

Then our inbound flight to Houston was diverted to Laughlin Air Force Base (I wonder what third-grader designs these military websites). FBI agents boarded the plane while we were on the tarmac; they reviewed the passenger manifest and took PePe and me into custody. It appears that Your Favorite Internet Personality was on the Department of Homeland Security’s “No-Fly List.”

What a crock.

They separated us, and two agents sat me down in a room and did the Good Cop/Bad Cop bit, e.g., one of them brings me coffee, and the other one says I have to take it black. Recognizing this dynamic for what it was, I demanded an attorney. The Good Cop told me a guy was coming from the Public Defender’s Office. The Bad Cop told me the guy was a drunk and an evangelical Christian, and he wouldn’t arrive for another six hours.

“Screw it,” I said. “I’ll waive my right to an attorney. This is just a big misunderstanding, anyway. Let's clear it up and get on with our lives.”

They told me I was on the No-Fly List because they had intelligence that I was training at a leftist terror camp in the Andes mountains.

“Oh, no,” I said. “You’ve got it all wrong. That’s not it at all. I was learning the Ancient and Very Very Lethal Art of Incan Dance-Fighting at my Master Trainer’s Secret Mountain Redoubt. It’s like a martial arts thing.”

“But we’d never heard of it.”

“That’s because the techniques are for secret assassins.”

Bad Cop stepped in, at this point, to zip-cuff my hands behind my back. It occurred to me that I was not making a very strong case for my release.

“All right, all right," I said. "That doesn’t sound good, I agree. But I assure you, the Elite Incan Dance-Fighters are not terrorists. They don’t really do much of anything, in fact, except fight each other about their club by-laws. And sometimes when the ninjas get uppity, they fight them.”

"But we're not worried about the Dance-Fighters. We're worried about you."

"Me?" I said. "You've got to be kidding. I'm not a terrorist. I just went down there to get that training because I'm on a mission to take over the world."

Bad Cop stepped in again, this time to put me in leg irons. Should have waited for the lawyer, I was thinking.

"No no no," I said. "I was just kidding about that 'taking over the world' stuff. I didn't really mean it."

"But it's consistent with our intelligence."

"Your intelligence?" I asked (not that I would ever call these bozos' intelligence into question).

"We've read your weblog."

Shit. Think fast think fast think fast think fast —

"Oh, that," I said. "That's just fiction. That's just something I made up for fun. Silly old me, always telling stories, you know —"

At this point the Good Cop (inexplicably) gave me a Koran, and the Bad Cop gave me a form to sign, certifying that the Koran I had just received was in pristine condition and had not been defiled in any way by the United States government. As I had no pen or pencil to apply to this document — and my hands were cuffed behind me, in any event — I stared blankly at the form for a short period of time.

During this period, the agents just stood there quietly, with hands folded. The silence was long and awkward, so I started talking again.

"I mean, really, if I did have designs on taking over the world, and I went to Peru to get assassination training that I truly planned to use to gain political power by force — if all that were true, would I write a weblog about it? I mean, that sort of thing could get me in all sorts of trouble. It's fiction, Mr. and Mrs. Cop. Fiction, and nothing more."

Good and Bad Cop walked over to the corner of the room and whispered to one another. They left me alone in the room for 5.5 hours. Then the Bad Cop came in and freed me from my restraints.

"You make a good case," he said. "You'd have to be an absolute idiot — I mean, really . . ." and he trailed off, mumbling to himself.

I assumed I was free to go.

Fifteen minutes later I was reunited with PePe. By this time, though, our plane was long gone on its happy way to Houston with the other passengers, and we were stranded at this Air Force Base, six miles from Del Rio (the nearest town), without transportation in the sweltering ninety-degree South Texas heat.

The two of us were worn-out, sleep-deprived, and emotionally spent. I don't know where we would be if that lawyer hadn't pulled up and offered us a ride. The situation was not ideal — the guy lectured us about Jesus Christ and kept veering off the road toward gigantic saguaro cacti — but PePe and I are now comfortably ensconced at a Motel 6, and when I finish writing this "fictional" (heh-heh) post, I'm going to crash for the next sixteen hours — at least.

Dear Flora

2005-11-30T19:08:00.000-05:00

Dear Flora Pachado —

I don't know what this letter should say. I write this for two reasons:

First, circumstances wrenched us apart in mid-dialogue, leaving me a bit confused about where I stand with you (more on this below).

Second, I've had to post this letter to you on my weblog, because I forgot your home address and phone number. I had it written down on a slip of paper in my wallet, but the Master Trainer confiscated the paper from me, out of concern that I might be ambushed in transit, and Delgado's Holdouts would find it, read it, and take your family hostage. That's the point we're at right now with these people. I thank my lucky stars, though, that I had the foresight to install those Ethernet jacks in your father's den two weeks ago, when I was rewiring your house. I am therefore confident that I will be able to reach you through the Internet, but in a forum like this — which anyone and everyone can read — I am reluctant to reveal my innermost thoughts. My enemies read this blog for areas of weakness. People like Burping Squid are always trying to come up with some way to take a shot at me. I don't want to give too much away to these people —

maybe it's best to stick to the facts.

By the time you read this I will have been smuggled out of Peru, with my luggage, inside a discarded refrigerator that, as far as the rest of the world knows, my Master Trainer sold on eBay. The refrigerator will have been delivered by wagon cart to my Master's contact over the border in Bolivia. PePe will have accompanied me on this journey, in the garb of a Maytag repairman. The contact should have purchased airline tickets for the both of us, to take us back to the States.

I wish I could say definitively when I'll be back in Peru to finish your screened porch. But I just don't know. You're young and beautiful and brilliant and caring — the Most Beautiful Woman I[] Ever S[aw] in Peru — and it would be unfair of me to ask you to wait for me, when there are, I expect, many competent and reasonably-priced contractors in your area who could complete the job. Here in the States we have Angie's List, which serves as a kind of reference/information sharing center for people who need work on their houses. I don't know if Peru has the same kind of online consultative resource, but you might look into it.

I think that in my dealings with you, I might have learned Something Important about humility. It's sort of amorphous right now, a cloudy kind of Something I'm still trying to get my mind around, and I won't try to write it down here. It seemed like there was something going on with us, and we were on the verge of having a conversation of some significance. With all the blackouts and these Delgados chasing me around, that hash-out of the relationship obviously couldn't happen. I wish we had talked, just to clarify things. Shit. Maybe I'm saying too much.

Off I go, Flora. Write me (I mean, if you feel like it).

Sincerely,

/s/

Your Devoted Handyman (and Friend?),

Phutatorius.

Well, That Sucks

2005-11-28T20:45:00.000-05:00

So the Master Trainer finally dropped by to speak to me today — this after my third escape attempt from the infirmary. I'm not someone who just sits around and ignores the Elephant in the Room, so I asked him about the patch over his eye.

"This is what I came to talk to you about," he said. "It took me a while to track him down, but I found Ortega. We — er — negotiated."

Ortega! That dirty bastard! "It looks to me like he wasn't in a dealmaking mood," I said.

"Well, he's dead now," my Master said, with a shrug and a smirk. "So that's sort of a moot point now, isn't it?"

"But your eye —"

"A scratch on the cornea, and certainly not my first. He telegraphed his move for my eye — I dare say even you would have seen it coming, Student-of-Mine. The only contact he made, and he paid dearly for it. The upshot of it all, Phutatorius, is that we're going to have to smuggle you out of here."

"What? Where?"

"I offered a general amnesty to Ortega's gang. They would pledge not to do you harm, and I wouldn't shatter their ribcages, as I did their Master Trainer's."

"And?"

"And about half of them accepted. The others scattered into the mountains. About a dozen or more Intermediate to Advanced Intermediate Fighters, most of them with Pipers. As long as they remain unaccounted-for, it's not safe for you here."

"Master, I — I don't understand. Why wouldn't they take the amnesty? Why are they so preoccupied with me?"

"It's not entirely about you. There are strong undercurrents here. Prejudices, old vendettas. A tangled, wicked web. Your crime, Phutatorius, is that you flushed out all the poison in these mountains. With your Internet posts, that Yanqui strut of yours. Fighting alone to your iPod, without a Piper. You're a lightning rod, a magnet for controversy. You've drawn all the disease here to the surface — for the best, I think. In the long run, it will help us clean house."

I tried to process all of those mixed and conflicting metaphors.

"In the meantime, we're going to have to get you out of Peru."

"WHAT? OUT OF PERU? NOW?" Flora Pachado. WHAT ABOUT FLORA PACHADO?

"Shortly after midnight, is the plan. I took the liberty of packing your black wheelie-bag for you. PePe has agreed to suspend his Piper training to help effect your escape. He will, of course, be traveling with you."

I — we — we never even got to first base, much less totally do it in her father's house.

"It's for your own safety, Phutatorius. You were lucky to survive that ambush. Any one of them could have landed a blow to your iPod. You would have been sin musica, and done for. Once we've exterminated —" my Master Trainer paused, thought hard about whether this was an appropriate word to use, then figured the hell with it and continued — "the Ortegans, I'll be in a position to consider bringing you back, to continue your training."

My Master Trainer stood up. I am certain that he had very little trouble reading the dissatisfaction on my face. "I will have further instructions for you shortly." And he walked out.

The Hardest Part

2005-11-22T17:37:00.000-05:00

I believe it was Mahatma Gandhi who said, "The waitin' is the hardest part."

My Man from Mumbai couldn't have been more right. I'm anxious to get discharged from the infirmary, to get back into the swing of things. I've got trainings to attend, drills to run, the Most Beautiful Girl I've Ever Seen in Peru to romance. But I'm stuck in this bed until I hear otherwise from the Master Trainer, and he's pretty much AWOL these days. I haven't seen him since he and PePe dumped me in this CraftMatic, and he doesn't respond to my emails.

Other students come and go with bumps and bruises, sprains and strains acquired in the ordinary course. Most of them stop by the bed to wish me well — now I know what it takes to overcome people's prejudices. On the other hand, they might still be giving me the cold shoulder, so the fact that I'm getting some respect 'round here must say something good (if only minimally good) about the Human Condition.

There's an orderly here who is obsessed with Yahtzee. The dice jangle in his pocket while he mops. Sometime last Wednesday I bottomed out morale-wise. A game or two sounded like fun, and I agreed to play him. Dispatched him pretty handily, too, winning fifteen of twenty (not that I'm keeping score). Now the guy's pestering me every minute for a rematch, says he won't empty my bedpan unless I give in. It's been five days. There's quite a heapin' helpin' of my leavings tucked away and fermenting under the bed right now — when you draw Phutatorius into a battle of wills, nobody wins. It's mutually assured destruction, Brother/Sister. Remember that.

Sooner or later the stink will reach the Master Trainer's office, and he'll have to come see me. That's my ace in the hole: YAHTZEE, mother f**ker.

UPDATE (11/22; 1:30 a.m.): several of my Brothers and Sisters write to inform me that Gandhi was not from Mumbai. I am, however, willing to rewrite history for alliterative purposes. Expect more of that when I'm administrating the world.

UPDATE (11/22; 10:30 a.m.): now people are telling me that it wasn't Mahatma Gandhi who said that bit about the waitin'. Let me ask you this, Brother/Sister — are you sure of that? Did you spend every minute of every day with Mahatma Gandhi? How can you profess to know, then — with certainty — what he didn't say? I rest my case.

Ambuscado, Part 3

2005-11-18T20:46:00.000-05:00

When I next awakened, my Master Trainer was prying open my left eyelid and shining a penlight into it. This I found to be rather annoying, and so I threw up all over him. He stepped away from me quickly, nimbly, receiving only a small fraction of the sputum I had served up for him. He is, after all, a Master-qualified Elite Incan Dance-Fighter.

Flora appeared at my side. "He's awake," she said, unnecessarily. She took hold of my right hand. I swallowed what was left in my mouth.

"Awake for the moment," my Master Trainer said. "We'll need to take full advantage of it." He produced a hand towel and wiped the lapels of his jacket. "Tell me what happened, Phutatorius. From the beginning."

I called for water. Flora moved to get it, but my Master preempted her and fetched it himself. I gulped it down and told him everything I could remember about the ambush.

"Can you tell me anything about their fighting style?"

"Well, I thought they would be better than they were."

"I need details, Phutatorius. This is important."

"There was a lot of marching and stomping. High steps. They would bring their knees to their chests, then kick out. They seemed stiff in the hips."

"Ortega's people!" my Master hissed. "I knew it!" Ortega was the last juror to cave in my criminal case before the EIDF Council. He was also the most brutal of my interrogators in the hours preceding my trial. He had really seemed to have it in for me. "He's acting outside the Council's authority, and he'll answer for it. In the meantime, we'll need to move you back to the Redoubt, Phutatorius. We've imposed enough on Ms. Pachado."

Flora tightened her grip on my hand. "It's no imposition, Master Trainer. Wouldn't it be better not to move him?"

The Master turned impatient eyes on her. "He's fine to move. He's stabilized. But he needs real medical care. We have IV units, heart rate monitors up the mountain. And the Redoubt is fortified and secure. PePe!"

The door to Flora's room opened, and my devoted Piper appeared in its frame. "He's awake!" PePe said, unnecessarily.

"We're moving him. Get the stretcher."

Flora looked at me. There was nothing I could say.

"Will I see you again?" she asked me.

"I'll be back to finish the screened porch."

"That's something we'll have to discuss," my Master Trainer chipped in.

Five minutes later my Master Trainer and PePe were hiking me up the mountain.

"Keep your eyes open, PePe, and your pipes handy," my Master Trainer said.

Lying on the stretcher, I only thought of Flora. I had received a hundred or more vicious blows to my body overnight, but it was the soft imprint of her lips on my cheek — a stolen goodbye kiss — that stuck with me. All I wanted was to see her again. All I wanted was to know what she said to me, starting with "I —", before I passed out. I had a good idea what it was, but I needed to hear it.

It has been a week now since I saw her. I'm still stuck in this bed. PePe brought me his GameBoy, and I've entered a couple online poker tournaments. The days are interminable, and the nights! Don't even talk to me about the nights, Brother/Sister. I'm restless, I'm anxious, I'm irritable, and I'm getting pretty goddam tired of eating green Jell-O.

Enough is enough. I need to see Flora.

Ambuscado, Part 2

2005-11-17T21:48:00.000-05:00

Where ya been, Phutsie? You can't cut out in the middle of a story like that.

Cut me some friggin' slack, Brother/Sister. My health comes first. Would you trouble Hemingway for an ending if he were triply concussed? Would you be on Spielberg's case to wrap up a final edit while he was recovering from hernia surgery?

All right, then. Ambuscado, part 2 — delivered as quickly as I could get it down:

I woke up on my back. I was lying on a cot, naked, under a sheet and blanket. The room was small and its lighting was dim. There was someone standing over me, a face framed by black hair. Flora.

I reached up to my head. This was instinctive, because it was my head, and not any other part of my body, that was pulsing with an intense, blinding pain. I pressed my hand against my forehead and found it wrapped in gauze. The hand itself was bruised, knuckles bloodied.

"That bandage is not hand-made," Flora said, "but I hope you'll accept it."

I looked over at her, caught the tail end of a fleeting and delicate smile. It flashed across her face, lit up her green eyes, and was gone again as quickly as it came. That might have been the first time I saw her smile, and my knocked-silly eyes, lolling around in their sockets without discipline, nearly missed it.

Her face fell into its characteristic frown. "There were three of them fighting you."

I looked up at the ceiling. By this time my brain was starting to register sensation from my arms, legs, thorax, and abdomen. That sensation was a uniform, penetrating ache that I expected would, in short order, resolve into several dozen specific foci of pain, where my attackers had landed their blows and kicks.

Now I know, Brother/Sister, how these stories usually go. When the Picaro resumes consciousness, he says something like Where am I? What happened? This indicates to the reader that he has no memory of the events that immediately preceded his blackout — requiring his interlocutor (in this case, Flora) to tell him that he had been attacked by three Elite Incan Dance-Fighters and kicked repeatedly in the head. But standard Hollywood plot formulas notwithstanding, I happened to remember exactly what went down up the road — I in fact knew more about it than Flora. And so when she said, "There were three of them fighting you," I replied not with Three of who? or even Three of whom?

Instead I said, "Five. There were five, to begin with." I wanted Flora to know that I was not entirely brain-addled. And I also wanted credit for the two Dance-Fighters I had managed to dispatch.

"Whatever the number was — it wasn't a fair fight," Flora said. She was frowning again.

"They didn't want a fair fight. They wanted to kill me," I said. "And I shouldn't be here. Your brothers and sisters — the children — I'm endangering all of you. They could come back —"

I sat up, brought my feet to the floor. The room whirled violently around me, I lurched left, then right on the cot, but I endeavored to stand, anyway, taking care to drape the bedsheet over my waist. I was wobbly on my feet, dizzy and a bit disoriented, but my legs supported my weight. That would be enough to get me out of the Pachado house before the assassins killed her family.

"The doors are barricaded," Flora assured me. She pulled a shotgun from a dark corner. I had not seen it before. "We're as safe as we can be. I sent for your Master Trainer. He should be here within the hour."

"You could all be killed in that amount of time." I inched across the room toward the door. "Where are my clothes?"

"I hid them."

"You what?"

"Because I knew you would do this. I knew you would try to leave." Flora approached me and took hold of my arm. She led me, flinching, stutter-stepping, back toward the cot. "I've watched you over the past three days. You're not the yanqui culo I thought you were. You work hard. You have a good heart. You're respectful." Tears welled up in her eyes.

"I just want you to be safe —"

"I know this," she said, pushing me gently down on the bed. "And you've done so much for my family these three days. You've almost finished the screened porch. Let me take care of you now."

What limited energy I had on awakening I had exhausted on my round trip across Flora's bedroom. My head came to rest on the pillow, and the pain up and down my body receded, signing to me that I would be losing consciousness again momentarily. My eyelids came down. With superhuman effort I lifted them. Flora was in the room, with me. The Most Beautiful Girl I've Ever Seen in Peru. Why would I allow some fascist autonomic nerve override to close my eyes? She was speaking to me —

"Phutatorius —"

I centered my eyes on hers. I was determined not to black out. With the entire force of my will I clung to consciousness — just to keep looking at her, just to keep listening to her — but I had no hope. Darkness converged on me, my vision blurred, until all I could see were the two green lights of her eyes, filling with tears, reflecting light at me. And these, too, were dimming —

"Phutatorius, — I —"

Spit it out, woman. I could go any second now.

"I —"

Blackness. Silence. Shit.

Part 3 when I'm feeling up to it.

Just a Quick Note

2005-11-12T00:16:00.000-05:00

Boy — time flies when you're multiply concussed! I was down for about fourteen hours and just woke up now to check email and read the news.

Many thanks to Burping Squid for the Get Well e-Card. I didn't know you were still out there. I can't say for sure that you didn't mean it ironically, but I'll take the best wishes at face value.

As for the rest of you, in lieu of flowers, please donate money to UNICEF.

Oof. Here comes the nurse with my supper. I see soft foods in my future, for the next three days at least — looks like green Jell-O, oatmeal, and pumpkin pie on the tray-table. Gotta go — I'll finish my story tomorrow.

Ambuscado: Part 1

2005-11-11T10:03:00.000-05:00

—

It's Friday morning, Phutatorius. Shouldn't you be down the mountain at the Pachados' house?

Well, if you'd give me a minute, Brother/Sister, I would explain. I was ambushed on Wednesday night.

I had finished a long eleven-hour day of home improvement efforts, under Flora's close and (dare I say it?) approving supervision, and I was about ten minutes into my running climb back to the Secret Mountain Redoubt for the night. The sun had set behind the mountains in the west, and the light was dimming. I had the Beatles on my iPod and was gearing up to tackle the steep six-mile incline.

Suddenly, from nowhere, three men were on top of me, blocking my path up the hill. I spun around, and there were two more of them, behind me. I snapped off my headphones, and I heard the haunting sounds of pipes, played from a rocky promontory, ten or fifteen feet above me. The three men in front of me ran at me — they were Elite Incan Dance-Fighters, that was obvious. More pipes tuned in from other points overhead. In an instant I had sized up the situation and concluded that I was looking at a five-on-one gang fight, and my opponents looked to be at least Intermediate-Level EIDF.

This much I knew because of the multiple Pipers, each of whom was piping sound independently of the others. The five (presumably five, as the Pipers weren't visible to count) different strains, taken together, were nothing but noise. The resulting cacophony was not danceable, but the men surrounding me were moving with a kind of rhythmic menace I had not seen, except in my Master Trainer's demonstrations. Each of these men was dancing to the music of his own Piper, showing a sound-filtration skill that can only result from extensive Intermediate-Level training in the Ancient and Very, Very Lethal Art of Incan Dance-Fighting. The Master Trainer does not even attempt to teach multiple-Piper dance-fighting techniques until the second year.

The five men closed in around me. There was a possible lane of escape to my left, but it would have brought me onto the backside of the Pachado property. I didn't want these men turning their hostile attentions to my adopted family. I decided to stand and fight. I pulled the headphones back on, cranked up the volume on my iPod, to drown out the enemy Pipers as best I could. John, Paul, George, and Ringo started right up with "Birthday," and I came out fighting.

The next thirty-five minutes, forty-two minutes were a blur. I can say with confidence that I handily dispatched two of my attackers during this time, knocking them unconscious during "Helter Skelter." But the other three were relentless. They just kept coming and coming. The four of us were a flurry of arms and legs, of kick-steps and do-si-dos. I pulled out every stop, drew on everything I had ever known about dancing. At one point I ran entirely out of ideas and resorted to the Mashed Potato. They clearly had never seen that posture before, and I managed to biff one of them hard under the chin, before I shifted gears into the more defense-oriented Twist. Although I made no headway against these last three, I kept up the fight all the way through the first eleven tracks of the White Album, Disc Two.

And then, in its turn, right after "Cry Baby Cry" wound out, came "Revolution 9." At this point, I about shat myself.

Now I know that there's a pretty sharp divide among Beatles fans on the question of "Revolution 9." I recognize that this is a sensitive wedge issue, one that has been known to cause the breakup of marriages, business partnerships, and small nation-states. As someone who regards himself as diplomatic (often to a fault), I've therefore made it a point in my life not to take a position either way on "Revolution 9," and I think that philosophy has inured to my benefit over these thirty-two years. Therefore, let not the following suggest that I am either for or against "Revolution 9,"

but I about shat myself when it came on my iPod, as the three remaining Intermediate-Level Elite Incan Dance Fighters bore down on me, bloodied and angry, in menacing shuffle steps.

I about shat myself because — think what you want about "Revolution 9" — you can't dance to it. And where I had thought I would be able to gut out this dance-fight up to the limits of my iPod's battery life, I was facing a premature ending here. That is, if the three advancing men were able to get hold of me before I could dig out my iPod and queue up some honest-to-eephus danceable music to play through my headphones, I would be entirely at their mercy. They would be free to tear me limb from limb while I struggled, against all hope, to dance-fight to one of the impossibly tangled strands of music emanating from the Pipers above me.

I reached in my pocket and pulled out my iPod. I slipped it free of its case, pressed the "Menu" button, whirled the wheel back to the beginning of the double-album. But before I could press "Play," the nearest of the three attackers kicked the iPod free of my hand.

Then I was on the ground, and the three men were brutally kicking me, each to a different beat. I tried parsing out the music of the Pipers on the cliffside above me, but it was all hopelessly swirled together, and the each successive blow to my head made it harder to concentrate. At some point, I blacked out. The last notion to pass through my mind, before it closed up shop, was that this predicament — this scenario wherein I am knocked to the ground and kicked, relentlessly, by several other men — rather neatly reprised the Wedding-Party Incident at the end of September. That beating started me on my Quest for world domination, and I wondered if that Quest would come to a close, prematurely, poetically, with just another bookend eating.

I think I should stop here. I don't need to tell you, Brother/Sister, that during this ordeal I suffered multiple concussions. The nature of my injuries requires that I only sit up for a short time. When I grow tired, or agitated (and right now I think it's fair to say I'm both), the room begins to turn, a repressive ache descends on my head, and I succumb to the most violent and dehydrating sort of nausea. The Master Trainer has been kind enough to run an Ethernet line from his office down to the Redoubt Infirmary, where I am resting now. He said I could avail myself of Internet access, but not at the expense of my convalescence.

I hope you will excuse me, Brother/Sister for putting aside the keyboard so that I can throw up, have a glass of water, and take a nap. More shortly.

Workin' for the MBGIESP

2005-11-08T20:42:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm back in the Redoubt for the night, after my second day of indenture to the Most Beautiful Girl I've Ever Seen in Peru. Not much to report here, except that I'm about a sore as I might be after a full day of workouts with the Master Trainer.

Ah, Phutatorius! So you managed to *****lly ** ** **** **** ****'s daughter!

No no no, Brother/Sister — that's not why I'm sore. The real story is, the MBGIESP has been working me like a dog. I've done more grouting, spackling, scouring, painting, edging, finishing, sanding, grinding, waxing, roasting, toasting, sifting, mixing, nailing, wrenching, stripping, coating, melting, welding, searing, shoring, boring, blending, wiring, sculpting, firing, scraping, peeling, shaving, sawing, summerizing, winterizing, vulcanizing —

this woman is a bit of a taskmaster.

But that's fine. I can hack it. After my meeting with the Master Trainer Sunday night, I spent some time in bed ruminating on the question. I concluded that maybe I really am a yanqui culo, and that maybe I'd be better served humbly subjecting myself to a few day's hard labor than I would plotting and machinating about how to wangle an amorous episode with the MBGIESP out behind her papa's tool shed.

It's about growing as a person, Brother/Sister. If you're on the prowl for ripped bodices and throbbing thrusts of manhood, look elsewhere.

My congress with the MBGIESP has been, to this point, brief and unexceptional. She gives me instructions, and I follow them. Sometimes she serves up unwarranted, unsolicited value observations, such as "We live simply here, but well." I don't respond to these, because I know they're traps. She'll find a way to slot my answers into her preexisting notions about my character. I simply nod/grunt/shrug and get on with my work. If anything will change her mind about me, it will be my humility, my diligence, the pride and care I take in my work for her.

I've made limited observations. I've learned that her name is Flora, and that she is the eldest of Señor Pachado's five or six children — the others move quickly and chaotically enough around the neighborhood that I can't keep track of them, much less suggest an accurate count. I've seen no sign of a mother these two days, and I gather that she passed away recently, and Flora has stepped into the role of mother figure and homemaker — possibly at the expense of her own dreams and aspirations in life (which might explain a certain resentfulness in the tone she takes toward me).

But I'm speculating here. For the most part I'm keeping my head down and my mouth shut. I might laugh and joke a little with the kids: raw eggs — the missile of choice in the Pachado family — have a tendency to heave themselves at me from nearby shrubberies.

¿Que pasa? I'll turn and say out loud, in mock-confusion.

¡Yanqui culo! the shrubberies shout back.

And I get back to my pruning, staking, stumping, loading, shifting, tucking — whatever — but with a smile on my face. Whether or not I totally get to **** *** ********* *** ** Flora, it's been a good week to this point. The fact that people are now throwing eggs at me and missing is, I think, a sign that I'm doing something right.

Busted!

2005-11-06T16:04:00.000-05:00

Busted is right, Brother/Sister. I was summoned to the Master Trainer's office today, after the morning's mambo primer. When I arrived, I found him seated at his desk, with his head propped up on his elbow. A pose clearly intended to convey exasperation, with his balding crown cupped in his palm.

"Sit down, Phutatorius," he said, without raising his head to look at me.

I did.

"We've had a complaint from one of the villagers."

I put on my best innocent face.

"It seems a blanket merchant's table was damaged. Do you have something to tell me?"

"Me?" I said. "I don't know what you're talking —"

"It was an American."

"It could have been any —"

"I read your last post on the Internet."

Shit. I hung my head. "Yeah, it was me."

The Master Trainer sat up straight, took a deep breath, held it for a moment, then exhaled. "It's important, Phutatorius, that we do our best to remain on good terms with the locals."

I looked at him.

"They are naturally suspicious of us. We are trained — or in your case, training — killers, and we have lived undetected in their midst for more than five hundred years. Now, suddenly, we step out of the shadows. The people don't know who we are or what we're about. It is right and just for them to be afraid of us."

"Master, the guy ripped me off —"

"NO!" My Master flew suddenly into a temper, and he slammed his fist on his desk. "WHEN YOU GO OUT INTO THE COMMUNITY, YOU REPRESENT ME, AND YOU REPRESENT THIS INSTITUTION. The villagers can cheat you. They can rob you of all your money and your clothes, then tar and feather you. AND YOU WILL NOT REACT. Unless you are IN FEAR FOR YOUR LIFE, YOU WILL NOT REACT. Do you understand me?"

"But Master, all I did was punch a table —" like you did just now, I managed to refrain from adding.

"You have talent, Phutatorius. You hear music deep in your soul, and you respond to it in really, er — creative and interesting ways. You have the ability to break entirely new ground in the field of dance-fighting. But you lack discipline and self-control. It is my burden and my role, as your Master Trainer, to teach you these things. And after six weeks of trying, I have to admit I've made very little progress. You have an incurable —" he paused, as though he were searching for the right word, "American-ness in you. An independent streak. I've seen nothing like it. It is perhaps your greatest asset. It is the source of your ambition, your creativity, your determination — but it is also the root cause of these Incidents of yours —"

"Master Trainer, respectfully, I stopped short of an Incid —"

"You need to learn humility, and you need to learn that your actions have consequences. Accordingly, you are suspended from classes for a week."

"But Master, I'll fall so far behind in my studies! It was just a dent in a table —"

"You'll spend the week in the blanket merchant's hut. You'll be helping him and his family. For starters, you can repair the table-dent. Once you've finished that, your marching orders will come from his daughter."

"This seems unnecessarily draconian, Master Trainer. A week's slave labor? Respectfully, sir, I think I'd be better served doing the usual thousand or more push-ups, or KP. Scouring pots and pans would at least work my upper body — wait. Wait a minute. His daughter?"

My Master Trainer smiled at me. "She was the one who came to complain. And according to her accounting, you did more than a few sols worth of damage to her father's marketing table. She says you broke one of her chicken's eggs."

"I sure did. With the back of my head."

"Be that as it may," my Master said, wryly, "my decision is final. Starting tomorrow, you will spend six days working for Señor Pachado. You will leave the Redoubt at sunrise and report back before dusk."

"But Master," I said. "That's ninety minutes' walk there and back every day. Wouldn't it be easier if I just overnighted there?"

My Master raised his eyebrow. "The Pachado home is cramped enough as it is. I don't suppose it would improve our standing in the community if it appeared I was requiring this family to quarter my soldiers."

"No — no, Master. You mistake me," I said, hastily. "I had thought I might be able to put up at the home of PePe's aunt."

"You'll be coming back here, Phutatorius. And I'll be watching for you. As for the length of your commute, you might consider running both ways, so that you don't forfeit your conditioning during your suspension."

I believe I grunted, at this point.

"The Ancient and Very Very Lethal Art of Incan Dance-Fighting is no joke, Phutatorius. Those who learn this tradition must commit themselves to living serious lives. If you prove somehow — less than worthy of the Art, I will have to answer to the Council for choosing you for my student. You have a penchant for impetuousness that I find both admirable and, well, at times disturbing. You should know that other revered practitioners of the Art are less kindly-disposed toward you, and I cannot be forever bailing you out of one fracas after another. You need to right the ship — or at least appear to right it. So off you go."

"Master — the daughter: she called me a yanqui culo. Do you think I'm really —"

"You are dismissed, Phutatorius."

Did I detect the slightest of winks from my Master Trainer, as I rose from my chair? The most fleeting and evanescent twitch of his left eyelid?

More tomorrow, Brother/Sister — but right now I'm thinking I totally worked The System here. I just fell ass-backward into a week's vacation from training, and I'll be spending it with my fiery-eyed MBGIESP!

Near-Incident in the Village

2005-11-03T09:40:00.000-05:00

"Hand-made," the guy told me. That was his promise, so I bought the friggin' blanket. He pockets my money, and I walk away, admiring my purchase — one of those bright, multi-colored woolen blankets they (supposedly) hand-make up here in the Andes. And then I see the tag:

MADE IN THE PHILIPPINES. COLD WATER WASH ONLY.

Son of a BITCH!

— but I should start at the beginning. The Master Trainer gave us yesterday afternoon off. Pipers and Fighters both let out early. Most everyone hit the rack for a power-nap before supper — this week's sessions have been excruciating — but PePe has some family in the nearby village, and he proposed that we go down there. He'd show me some of the local culture, and we'd have a home-cooked meal at his aunt's house. We're all getting kind of tired of the food at the Redoubt Cafeteria.

Sounded good to me, so we hiked a good 90 minutes down from the Secret Mountain Redoubt into town. It was Market Day, and merchants from this village and others nearby had assembled on the main street, set up counters, were peddling their wares. One of the guys was selling those brightly-colored alpaca wool blankets.

It occurred to me that I might buy one of these and mail it to President Arroyo. I should pause for a moment and say, up front, that I'm not normally one to kiss and tell — that's not who I am — but in this case, it's important to the story, so I'll make an exception. As you know, Gloria flew me out to her presidential palace last year for a night of unfettered passion. What you don't know is we did it all over her house.

At one point we wound up on the couch in her study. She had a nice imported alpaca blanket from Peru in there, kind of thrown over the back of it. The colors were a great match on the ultrasuede. In the heat of the moment, it didn't occur to either of us to put that blanket away, and it somehow got caught under us. By the time we came up for air, that blanket was shredded. I mean, it was messed up. Gloria later mailed it to me as a souvenir.

Anyway, I thought it might be nice to send her a replacement blanket, just to let her know that I still think of her now and then. I had a good one picked out. To my eye it looked like a good match for her couch. I haggled a bit with the merchant, just to let him know that even though I'm American, I can still drive a hard bargain.

"Hand-made," he kept saying, over and over. Yes, yes. Hand-made. We settled on a price and closed the deal.

Then I saw that tag: MADE IN THE PHILIPPINES, and I went storming back to the counter to demand a refund.

"You said these were hand-made," I complained.

"Yes, yes. Hand-made in the Philippines."

"Yes, well, here's the thing — I plan to send this blanket to the Philippines. It's sort of silly, isn't it, for me to buy a Peruvian blanket that was made in the Philippines and then send it back to the Philippines?"

The merchant nodded at me, understanding. He reached out and took the blanket from under my arm. Good, I thought. He's going to be reasonable. He dug around in his pockets for what I thought was my money. Instead, he pulled out a pair of folding scissors. With these he cut the tag off the blanket, which he then handed right back to me.

"Hand-made in Peru," he said, triumphantly.

"No —" I shook my head. "No. That's not going to work."

"Well, no refunds. Sorry."

At this point I felt the blood rush to my head. The world seemed to move in slow motion, and voices from nowhere began to shout provocative words at me. In short, I began to experience all the familiar signs that I was going to have an Incident. I slammed a fist down on the merchant's counter, splintering the wood.

"PEPE!" I shouted.

My Piper appeared beside me. He had been charming some of the local milkmaids with an improvisation of "Guantanamera." "What is it?" he asked.

"Pipe me some fightin' music, PePe. This gentleman here is asking for an ass-kicking."

PePe brought his hand to my shoulder. "I don't think that's a good idea, Phutatorius."

"WHAT?" I cried, taking another angry hack at the charlatan blanket-merchant's wooden table. This one left a deep dent. "Have you forgot your blood-oath already?"

PePe stiffened. "We are not in danger, Phutatorius. The blood-oath does not trigger under these conditions. Stop for a moment and think. This is an unwise course of action."

The concentration of blood flushed out of my head, swirling away the angry voices with it. The world resumed turning at its normal rate. I took a deep breath. "PePe, you're right. There are other people here. Good people I might offend, if I give this snake-oil salesman the drubbing he deserves. It's not worth it."

I looked up at the astonished merchant, who began stammering. "You're — you're one of the Elite Incan D-dance-Fighters we've been he-hearing about?"

I nodded.

He reached into his pocket. "Here. Take your money. T-t-t-take it. Take all of it!"

"No," I said, backtracking. "I'm fine. I was upset. I let my emotions get the better of me, and I apologize. A deal is a deal. I'll keep the blanket."

The merchant accepted my extended hand, and we shook on it. Then I took my leave of him, with PePe beside me. We weren't thirty yards clear of the market when something cracked the back of my head, just on the occipital bone. I reached a hand back, instinctively, to the point of impact. Something gooey. I looked at my fingers. Yolk — and small bits of shell.

I turned around to see who threw the egg. And there she was: the Most Beautiful Girl I'd Ever Seen in Peru ("MBGIESP"). She had long, thick black hair, almond-shaped eyes of the deepest, penetrating green. She had on a woolen poncho and a long, woven skirt, and she was holding the pose on her follow-through and cursing me out:

"¡YANQUI CULO!"

I froze in my tracks. Wait — wait a minute, I wanted to plead my case. There wasn't even an Incident. PePe stopped me, and I did the right thing. I'M NOT A YANQUI CULO. I'm a good person. But no words came out. And the MBGIESP continued to glare at me.

"Come on," PePe said, taking my arm, turning me back round. "My aunt has dinner ready."

The Blood-Oath

2005-10-30T20:07:00.000-05:00

While I'm still at the controls here, I'm thinking I should treat you to an English translation of the traditional Blood-Oath that PePe and I were required to swear to one another on Friday. It's quite touching, and it gives the reader a window into the Piper/Fighter relationship. That the Rule of Secrecy should have kept the EIDF from sharing a tradition as beautiful as the Blood-Oath with the at-large culture (for eight centuries!) — well, it really gets my goat, and it's something I want to fix.

I'll skip through all the invocations of gods, goddesses, and ancestors — the droning doctrinal niceties, the three or more pages given over to buttering up Viracocha, the storm and sun god — and set you down right in the heart of the text:

*Piper and Fighter walk together when Viracocha brings the sun.

*Piper and Fighter walk together in the rain.

*Piper and Fighter take shelter together when Viracocha brings black clouds, and the thunder and lightning.

*Piper and Fighter are inseparable.

*Piper and Fighter keep no secrets from one another.

*Piper and Fighter use their unique abilities to protect one another. Their lives are forever intertwined, in this world and the next.

*Piper and Fighter are of One Blood and One Being.

There is a postscript, a tacked-on bit, the importance of which has become another wedge issue between the Dance-Fighters of the First and Second Secret Mountain Redoubts. My Master Trainer, who provides Piper representation on his Council and Advisory Committee, regards this text as merely optional. Sort of like ". . . for thine is the kingdom and the power, and the glory forever and ever," at the end of the Lord's Prayer:

*The Piper cannot live without the Fighter. When the Fighter dies, the Piper dies, too — even if he must take his own life.

PePe and I talked this over when we wrote up the contract. He lobbied to include this language in our blood-oath, but I would have none of it. He insisted; I demurred. It was the one sticking point in our negotiations, and very nearly a deal-breaker. In the end, I proposed that the clause be bilateral, so that I would be required to take my own life, too, if my Piper should die. Tears welled up in PePe's eyes. He stood up from the table, and with voice cracking, he declaimed:

"Only now do I understand how foolish, how unfair I am to press my willing sacrifice upon you! It took this — this unprecedented offer of mutuality from a Fighter! Now I am required to consider how it would feel to enter the next world — whatever it is, wherever it may be — bearing the weight of a blood-brother's untimely suicide on my shoulders. No, Phutatorius. I will not accept your offer; nor should you mine. Let us dispense with this clause in its entirety. May we never speak of it again."

Helluva guy, PePe.

Meet PePe

2005-10-30T16:14:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the delay, B/S — 'twas a busy week, by any measure.

I promised you a Sidekick, and damned if I won't deliver today. Do you recall, Brother/Sister, when I talked about my Master Trainer's bold — some would say suicidal — approach to the First Mountain Redoubt, on the day of my trial? I observed that my Master left his Piper at home, as a sign that he came as an emissary of peace.

I'd like to talk a little more about Pipers. This requires a return to the First Principle of the Ancient and Very Very Lethal Art of Incan Dance-Fighting, which is this: that dancing is as important an element of the practice as the fighting. The two are, in fact, inextricable components — and for this reason the Elite Incan Dance-Fighter cannot fight (that is, dance-fight) without music. It is the music that brings the Dance-Fighter's blood to boil, the music that brings him into the Zone, the music that takes control of his limbs and propels them, with uncharacteristically brutal force, into the chops and groins of enemy combatants.

My Master Trainer teaches that the Dance-Fighter is a vessel for the power of music. Without music, his blows have no timing, coordination, or force. This is not a negotiable institutional rule, like the Rule of Secrecy. This is just how dance-fighting works. Without music, there is no dancing. Without dancing, there is no dance-fighting. Without dance-fighting, the Dance-Fighter is just some schmoe looking for an ass-kicking — and more than halfway down the road to getting one.

So it was that in the days before Sony Walkmen and iPods, Dance-Fighters hired and supported their own personal musicians, much as medieval knights had their squires. A particularly wealthy Dance-Fighter might keep as many as three musicians in his retinue — adding a Drummer, and maybe a Tambourine Man to make an ensemble — but at a bare minimum, he had to have a Piper. The same is true today.

There are no fixed rules governing a Fighter's relationship with his Piper. Each Piper enters into his own personally-negotiated contract with his Fighter. Some might take on the duties of a personal valet; others might enter into terms by which the Fighter fends largely for himself and even carries his own pack (or black wheelie-bag, as the "case" may be — ha! pun intended!) on the duo's travels together. There is, however, one sticking point: the Piper must be prepared to throw down and pipe like hell when his Fighter is in danger.

These days the Pipers are trained in parallel with Fighters — at least, that's how my Master Trainer does it in the Second Secret Mountain Redoubt. I don't know what those crazy bastards do at the other place. We're trained in different wings of the Secret Mountain Redoubt, and the two classes don't interact until after the first three or four weeks of training, when the Master Trainer holds a mixer in the Redoubt gymnasium, so that the Fighter students can meet the Piper students, and the two classes can feel each other out in advance of pairing up. If it sounds like a junior high school dance, B/S, that's because it is like a junior high school dance. Pipers on one side, Fighters on the other — and a punch bowl in the middle.

We had our fall mixer Tuesday night, and I met PePe there.

PePe — I should caution you that his name is pronounced PEH-pay — is twenty-five years old, about five-foot-nine, and built like a fireplug. He grew up in nearby Cuzco, but he left the country to study music at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. He speaks fluent English (unlike some of the more provincial mountain-dwellers here), and he's a bit more open-minded than many of his colleagues, most of whom snubbed me at the mixer because I'm American. As open-minded as my Master Trainer is, and as much as he preaches tolerance and diversity to his students, there are still some lingering prejudices toward white men in this territory. I haven't made many friends here in the Redoubt, and at times it feels like I've got an impenetrable twenty-foot force field around me. Don't get me wrong: I get to shower by myself, and that's a treat, but the silent treatment I've been getting after the trial — in two days I went from The Guy Who Nearly Got Us All Killed to the Master Trainer's Pet — has been wearing on my nerves.

But at the mixer, PePe looked right past all that shit. He walked right up to me and said, "You're from Cambridge, right? I hear it's an amazing place. I'd love to see it." For that, I love the man like a brother.

I went and brought PePe some punch and we got to talking, really hit it off. I told him that I had it in mind to take over the world, and that whoever becomes my Piper can expect to do a lot of traveling abroad, and that I would expect to consult with my Piper now and then about matters of strategy and, after I come to power, world administration. The job description really sparked PePe's interest. He said he thought my aspirations to a Benevolent World Dictatorship were noble, and he had always hoped his vocation would enable him to travel and see the world. We talked for most of the night — until well after 4 a.m.! — and came to terms. We drafted a personal services contract and obtained the Master Trainer's approval of the match the next morning. On Friday we swore a mutual blood-oath of loyalty to one another, and the rest is history:

PePe is now my Piper, and I am his Fighter. More on this as it develops.

The Bobo Skinny

2005-10-25T11:15:00.000-04:00

Some of the Brothers and Sisters who were faithful visitors to the old site have written me to ask what became of Bobo the Chimp.

To this point I've been silent on the subject, on the advice of my attorneys, who think it best that I keep a low profile while the litigation is pending. But when a Brother/Sister takes the time to sit down at his/her computer and type up an email to me — well, I'm gonna answer it.

Here's how I look at it: if I lose my court case, I'll probably have to cover a few medical bills, issue some back pay on the wrongful termination claim, maybe write a check out of the World Domination Fund to cover Bobo's "emotional distress," whatever that is (and however you might presume to assign a dollar value to it). That's the extent of my exposure there. But there is also another, greater court, a more important venue, where the stakes are much much higher —

The Massachusetts Court of Animal Appeals?

No, Brother/Sister —

The Supreme Court of the United States?

No, not that one, either, B/S, but you're on the right track. I'm talking about the Super-Supreme Court of Public Opinion.

Ooh.

Ooh is right, Brother/Sister. I had thought I could leave this issue behind, put it in the past, and move forward. But as I'm still getting questions on the subject, then it seems the Court of Public Opinion has jurisdiction over the matter of Phutatorius v. Bobo, and the jury is still out.

What can I say on this subject that I haven't said already, and to that damned monkey's lawyers? I can tell you this much: Bobo and I were just a poor match. It was a bad fit. He was always a limelight-seeker, about as histrionic and self-absorbed a personality as I've encountered. That might have been fine if his role was to play first-fiddle, but I made it very clear in the classified ad. The opening was for a "Sidekick to Internet Personality," and no social-climbers needed apply.

That monkey walked around the office like he was Keith Moon. He'd put on that cute face, make his little squeak noises to charm all the support staff. Then when I asked him to carry my briefcase to a meeting, he'd freak out and wreck all the cubicles. Overturn desks. And if I tried the smallest gesture toward discipline, I'd get all this How dare you? and You put those electrodes away — you should be ashamed of yourself! nonsense from the secretaries. Show me an Internet personality who can run a business under those conditions.

I may have lost my temper once or twice — I'm a man, I'll admit that — but let's be honest. Bobo was a shit. That's the beginning and the end of it. And when this lawsuit wraps up, we'll go our separate ways. I'll live a rich, fulfilling life without him, and he'll find some other person to torment and extort. But I'm closing the book on Bobo. Turning the page.

To you Brothers and Sisters who fell sway to the Bobo's animal charms, I say this: I've got a new Sidekick now, he's got a lot going for him, and you'll soon forget all about that mangy self-promoter and his crack legal team.

But that's the subject of ~~tomorrow's~~ ~~Thursday's~~ ~~Friday's~~ Sunday's post.

A Brief Aside on the Prospect of Dying

2005-10-24T19:05:00.000-04:00

The time I spent in the dock, facing the very real possibility of execution (and all the distinct and signature appurtenances that the EIDF hardliners have by custom affixed thereto), gave me some time to pause and reflect on things a little. Specifically, it got me thinking about dying.

Since I had my Moment back at that wedding reception, I've been full-speed ahead. Pell-mell, gangway, geronimo, damn-the-torpedoes, we-don't-need-no-steenkin'-badges full-speed ahead. Sure, I understood that the world domination business was risky — I did, after all, install the word's ". . . or Dies Trying" into this website's frontispiece. But I always pressed ahead without any real thought for the consequences. And when I talked of Death, I did so playfully. Carelessly. He couldn't come for me. I was in my prime of life.

But now that I've spent three days staring eye-to-eyehole with that Son of a Bitch — only to have him finally stalk off defeated, for the time being — well, I'd be a damned fool if I didn't pause for a moment and take advantage of the opportunity for introspection.

What? Another Moment, Phutatorius?

Ah, far from it, B/S. As you know, every time I click Blogger's "Publish Post" button, I put my credibility as a writer and auto-historian on the line. I've built up that credibility over time — post by painstaking post — and I won't risk it by daring to suggest I am so privileged as to have been visited by two Moments within a single month's time. At most, I think it appropriate to call this exactly what I have called it above (though I take the liberty of capitalizing it): it was an Opportunity for Introspection. Or, if you like, an Occasion for Self-Reflection. Or a Time to Slow Down for a Damn Minute and Think About Stuff Like a Rational Person. The choice is yours.

I wish I could say that, as a result of that introspection, I came to some brilliant philosophical conclusion about dying, but I didn't. I certainly didn't come to terms with the prospect of departing this mortal coil. If anything, I learned that the "brilliant philosophical conclusion," the "coming to terms" — these are just other ways to describe dying. This in turn defines by exclusion living, which is all the process that brings you finally to that point of making conclusions. That process is the part that, to me, seems the most important and most enjoyable, which explains in part why I'm still alive.

I could sit here and tell you everything that ran through my mind when the Councilor-Prosecutors went through their ritual Detailing of the Punishment Sought, while they described the Ceremonial Eye Removal Spoons with their serrated tips (a feature that, so I'm told, predated by three hundred years the appearance of grapefruit spoons in Western cultures), the protocol for preparing the Hallucinogenic Elixir that sets off the Ceremonial Falcons in a frenzy of maneating. I could tell you that I wondered what, if anything, would come afterward. I could tell all my regrets — that I would be so soon forgotten, that all memory of me would be so quickly reabsorbed into this great soup of Information. I could tell you that, of the catalog of Things I Wished I Had Done While Alive, the one that cut me the most deeply, and I don't know why, was that I had never written or recorded a song. A song: just a two- or three-minute burst of melody and wit and earnest, the briefest of intrusions into the life of the listener, but with the ability to penetrate into his/her head and nest there indefinitely — for years, even — until that moment in which the listener finally pauses, truly listens, and gives the long-gone composer his due:

Yes, yes. I like that. It speaks to me. How did he know I would understand?

I could tell you about these and other notions that the passing of days (and the lapse of the exigency that brought them on) now imprint with a certain amount of Silliness that I did not feel at the time. But I wonder what would be the use. Let it suffice to say that I believe every second of this Process — this life — changes you irrevocably. And when you live for any amount of time in close quarters with the Grim Reaper, that Process is intense, and the changes much more pronounced.

Brother/Sister, see if you notice a marked difference in me henceforward.

Show's Over, Now Get Back to Work

2005-10-21T09:46:00.000-04:00

So now I'm back in training. These two-a-days are brutal. You'd think the Master Trainer would have cut me some slack, after all I went through over the weekend — the brutal interrogation, the trial, the wicked after-party back at the Second Secret Mountain Redoubt (three days later, and I'm still hung over from that homemade Andean hooch!).

But nooooooooo!

I'm right back in the thick of things with the others. All day long I'm dance-fighting, repeating drills over and again through the pain and fatigue and blackouts. The adrenaline shots and blood transfusions help. Now and then the Master Trainer throws me a bone, queues up some old-fashioned Yanqui rock 'n' roll on the sound system — some White Stripes, maybe the Ziggy Stardust album (I know, British) — to give me a lift. Half of this is emotional, I'm convinced.

It's hard work, this dance-fighter training, and sometimes I don't think I'll make it through another day. But I put my trust in the Master Trainer. He wouldn't have labored so hard to save me from execution, just to work me to death the next week.

Right?

The Eloquence of My Master Trainer

2005-10-20T14:41:00.000-04:00

As promised, I deliver today a reviewed and approved excerpt of my Master Trainer's elocution in the case In re disclosures by one Phutatorius, American, heard by a per curiam session of the Council of Elders, on the 16th of October, in this the 474th year of the reign of Inca Atahualpa. (As the EIDF refuse to accept the legitimacy of Pizarro's conquest, it is their practice to count the years in this fashion, for archiving purposes.)

The segment I have selected for you is from the Master Trainer's closing argument, when, to my mind, he really hit his stride. Put on three pairs of socks, Brother/Sister, so that my Master can knock them off, seriatim, with his passion and genius. Are you ready? Here goes:

"Councilor A******** appeals to tradition as his reason for convicting the American, Phutatorius, and sentencing him to three days in the Scalding Room before his execution. 'X is what we've always done,' he says, 'and so X is what we must do today.' But there is — or there ought to be — more to tradition than the thoughtless repetition of prior practices. For what are we, if we are not capable ourselves of evaluating what is right, and good, and appropriate at this moment? If we lack this ability, we are empty shells of men. If we lack the will, we do not deserve to occupy this great Mountain Redoubt of our ancestors. Sure, some deference is due to the practices that have survived the generations. But a tradition should only endure so long as it deserves to — and not a minute longer."

"Councillor B******** says that 'rules are rules,' and the rule is clear: the American, and all who read his publication, must be repeatedly scalded, then bound and left in the Falcon Room with the hungry birds. Ah, well: that is the beginning and the end of it. Never mind that we were born with the capacity to exercise judgment. There are rules to channel us through life, so that we might be spared any use of that judgment muscle. Councilors, I am of the opinion that this strict adherence to rules has caused our judgment to atrophy over time — to the point where, when all good sense would call for us to pull together as a community, we instead find ourselves wracked by political divisions. It is because our judgment fails us, that we are separated and sorted into our two fortified Redoubts, and on the brink of war."

"RULES!"

[The Master Trainer's voice rang through the courtroom with such intensity that it set the birds a-squawking in the Falcon Room overhead.]

"RULES! TRADITION! RULES! TRADITION! GOD DAMN THESE RULES, THESE TRADITIONS! Do we really believe that the drafters of these treasured rules, the sources of these traditions, have more to say about our lives, today, than we do? Who were these 'ancestors,' these fountains of reason, to whom we must pay deference at every turn, even if it means leaving poor Phutatorius to be picked to death by our trained birds of prey?"

"I'll tell you who these ancestors were. It is an unpopular fact, and one rarely acknowledged before this august body, but the Empire of the Incas was lost because our ancestors — the fighters best positioned and equipped to defend it against the Spanish — held ourselves above the fray. We certainly could not come to the aid of our countrymen when Pizarro ambushed and slaughtered them on that awful afternoon in November. Why? Because the battle was in a public square, and to embroil ourselves in it, in broad daylight, would have controverted the Rule of Secrecy."

"And though the Archives tell us that our predecessors on the Council fiercely debated the question of whether to conduct a covert campaign of assassinations, we let that opportunity slip as well — for fear that a series of mysterious Spanish deaths in the dead of night might garner unwarranted attention. For fear that some enterprising person might endeavor to find out who was behind this concerted effort to protect our culture from the treachery and corruption of the White Man."

[At this point a number of the jurors shifted their eyes away from my Master Trainer and in my direction, causing me to issue a nervous cough.]

"I know that many of my adversaries on this Council have said, over and again, 'Our ancestors would rather allow the entire Incan Empire to fall than risk disclosing the secrets of the EIDF, of the AVVLAIDF. Who are we, then, to decide these secrets are too 'inconvenient' to keep?' That turns the argument on its head, for this is, I think, the greatest indictment of our secret society: that its Rule of Secrecy restrained us from protecting the larger society to which we belong."

"We've seen the price the Quechuan peoples have paid, and continued to pay, for our inaction so many years ago. But what about us? Should we not ourselves have been punished for failing to come to the Emperor's aid? Well, I say we have been punished. Every day we've spent living in the shadows has been a punishment for us. We are unable to maintain normalized relations with the outside community. At best, many of us are required to lead double lives, with homes in the nearby villages where we keep our wives and children. And those of us who live in this way pass every moment in abject terror, lest our wives, our children might somehow learn something about us that they're not supposed to know."

"What if my children follow me to the Redoubt? What if I talk in my sleep, and I reveal secrets to my wife?"

"Councilor C********, you sit in your chair today, stone-faced, determined that my pupil must die. You were required to surrender your eldest daughter to this august Council, after she followed you up here to the Redoubt. Councilor D********, you lost a brother to this damned Rule of Secrecy. And you others, who choose to reside here, secluded from the rest of the world. Why do you forego the simple, perfect pleasures of family? Because of the RULE. Because you don't trust yourself to leave this building, as we do, and not let something slip."

"And it's for this — to defend and preserve this deplorable state of things — that you are determined to scald Phutatorius, and to strip off his clothes and subject him to our falcons, and to remove his eyes with the Ceremonial Spoons? Today, councilors, you have the opportunity to exercise real independent judgment. You have the opportunity to put an end to a curse that has lasted nearly half a millennium, because to this point no one has had the courage to call for change. You can fix this, and you can spare this young man's skin from the pot's boil, his viscera from our birds. You can save his eyes, his tongue, his toes. The power is in you."

To this, I have absolutely nothing to add.

What About Jimmy?

2005-10-19T10:17:00.000-04:00

I've received a number of emails asking how Jimmy Atahualpa could have put me in contact with the EIDF, if their existence was such a well-kept secret before Friday. Shouldn't Jimmy have been interrogated and killed, if he knew about the EIDF? one reader asks. Another suggests that Jimmy himself is undercover EIDF, based out of Harvard Square.

The fact is, when Jimmy made his phone call on my behalf, he did not know he was connecting me with the EIDF. He thought his friend's brother was a senderista in the Shining Path.

All Clear

2005-10-18T21:18:00.000-04:00

Well, that was one intense and hellish weekend, Brother/Sister. But we're through it, you and I, thanks to the timely, forceful, and committed intervention of my Master Trainer.

Here's the short version (well, as short as I can make it) of what happened:

These past two weeks I have been learning the ancient — and very, very lethal — art of Incan dance-fighting. I made oblique mention of this in an earlier post, but I was not, at that time, disposed to elaborate, because it would have skipped me too far ahead in my story. Narrative flow is important.

I was, however, always resolved to publish a more detailed report of what I am up to here at the Secret Mountain Redoubt. I undertook to accomplish that last Friday. Certain people saw that post online and took exception to it, on the ground that I was revealing treasured secrets of the elite Incan dance-fighters — secrets that their and my predecessors in this art had gone to great extremes to keep contained. When I say "great" extremes, I'm talking about homicide — and when I say homicide, I talk about systematic dead-of-night assassinations of persons who had, for some reason or other, acquired information to which they were not to have access.

Brother/Sister, there is a reason why, to this point, you know nothing about the ancient and very very lethal art of Incan dance-fighting. The reason, snarks Burping Squid, is that you're just making this shit up.

I am not making this "shit" up. The reason you know nothing about the ancient and very very lethal art of Incan dance-fighting (which I will hereinafter identify by the acronym "AVVLAIDF") is that if you did, you would have been killed. And if, in the small gap of time between your learning something about AVVLAIDF and your near-immediate disappearance and death, you should have passed any of your information on to a third party, the elite Incan dance-fighters ("EIDF"), the EIDF would have gone out and killed that third party, too. This is because those select few persons that the EIDF elders deem worthy of rigorous and extensive training in AVVLAIDF are simultaneously schooled in certain ancient Incan arts of interrogation. (The EIDF's interrogation methods are without peer, and I defy any of your newfangled "intelligence agencies," with their electric shocks and truth elixirs, to compete with them.) Before the EIDF silenced you for eternity, they would have endeavored to find out from you just who else they needed to kill to keep their existence secret.

The reason I am alive today? Simple. There is a growing movement within the EIDF to "go public," that is, to pierce the veil of secrecy that surrounds the practice of AVVLAIDF and its adherents. As of, well, yesterday, that movement attained a majority on the EIDF Council of Elders, thanks largely to the impassioned argument of my Master Trainer.

As best I can gather, this issue has been percolating since the early 1980s, when some of the EIDF's young pups (my Master included) took note of the publicity that the Japanese ninjas, themselves a secretive group of trained assassins, were enjoying in America — particularly among suburban ninth-grade boys. The ninjas had relaxed their own secrecy controls, so that they might propagate the fallacious notion that they were the bad-assest assassins on the planet. This really rankled my Master and his friends, who well knew that the ninjas were at best runners-up in this department. Several practicing ninjas learned this lesson the hard way, but, as the EIDF's more strictly-observed Rule of Secrecy required, they did not live to admit that they were second-best.

The EIDF, like any organization of men, is susceptible to politics, and with it, faction. As years passed and my Master and his peers worked their way up the EIDF hierarchy, they felt freer to challenge the Rule of Secrecy. And so they did. This led to all manner of infighting and ugliness. Friendships were demolished over this question, and meetings of the Council of Elders deteriorated into weekly brawls. Some time ago — back in '98, I think it was — some of the exasperated hardline conservatives in the Council suggested that it might be appropriate to enforce the Rule of Secrecy preemptively. The Master received this suggestion the only way he could: as a threat to his life. And he responded the only way he could: he walked out. He took his supporters and split in the dead of night, went off to build and occupy a second Secret Mountain Redoubt some thirty miles north of the Council's. (This second SMR to the north is the one I have been describing to you; I didn't even know about the original Redoubt until I was taken there in chains.)

Most EIDF regard the Schism, or Spinoff, or Pant-Pissing (I've heard all these terms used) as the best thing that could have happened to the EIDF at that time. An awkward peace ensued — imagine if the seceded Southerners had not fired on Fort Sumter — whereby the Master reluctantly maintained the Rule of Secrecy but otherwise operated his own separate Secret Mountain Redoubt unmolested by the hardliners. They left him alone, and he pursued other liberalizations that the Council had rejected, such as admitting women into this facility — and recruiting certain foreigners from places as far away as Cambridge, Massachusetts, whom he might teach to practice AVVLAIDF.

The Secrecy issue was still there, bubbling under the surface, seven years later, when the Master encouraged me to write what I pleased about my training in this blog. My guess is that he decided now was as good a time as any for the endgame. Several of the most unyielding Council Elders had passed away recently; he had a notion that their younger replacements — although not themselves the type to defect to the Second Redoubt, as he had — would be hospitable to some limited efforts to promote AVVLAIDF among the uninitiated.

When I published on Friday, the Council hardliners reacted. I was myself unaware of the danger I was in; a group of unfamiliar EIDF captured me on an afternoon hike outside of the Redoubt. Certain Elders talked of declaring war. I was interrogated, forced to redact Friday's blog entry, and scheduled to stand trial on Saturday morning for treason against the AVVLAIDF.

Brother/Sister, I do not lie when I tell you I was this close [indicating with thumb and forefinger poised a millimeter apart] to execution. And certain of my captors were on Orbitz, making plane reservations to the States no doubt to enforce the Rule of Secrecy against my readership. I overheard them comparing air fares to Cleveland and Akron/Canton.

At dawn on Saturday, as the sun was first peaking over the mountain horizon, my Master appeared at the gates of the Council Redoubt. He was alone, unheralded, without his Piper (this is significant, for an EIDF cannot fight without musical accompaniment, leaving my Master as good as unarmed). He asked the Council for the privilege of pleading my case. They granted him that concession, on the condition that my Master agreed to submit to whatever sentence the jury selected for me. The trial lasted over three days. When it was over, my Master, more than securing a verdict of innocence, had prevailed upon the Council to alter the governing law to permit the limited disclosure of EIDF secrets! It was something to see.

Tomorrow I hope to publish certain of the arguments the Master Trainer made on my behalf, so that you, Brother/Sister, might be treated to the intensity of that court proceeding, and to the great heights of rhetoric and emotional appeal my Master reached late Sunday night. The post is written, but the new regulations require that I first submit it to a Council Committee to review. When they are satisfied that my content falls entirely within the scope of one of the newly-devised exceptions to the Rule of Secrecy, I'll have that post up straightaway!

[TITLE REDACTED]/Run for Your Life, Brother/Sister!

2005-10-13T20:32:00.000-04:00

It makes sense, I think, to step back for a minute. There are some things you need to know — about Quechua, for starters. Quechua is the language group of the native South Americans that settled in the Andes. The official language of the Inca Empire was Cuzco Quechua, and that language, along with a dozen or more other related dialects (including Ayacucho and the Ecuadoran and Bolivian argots) survive to this day, notwithstanding the depredations of the Spanish colonials. In fact, some 8 million people in the South American Northwest speak Quechua, making it the most widely spoken Amerindian language.

This isn't the Discovery Channel, Phutatorius.

I realize that. But I was hoping to make a prefatory point, which is this: much of the custom and culture of the Inca Empire lives on in today's Quechuan populations. So much is apparent from the fact that Jimmy's stage-namesake, the Emperor Atahualpa, who was betrayed and — in the estimation of most right-minded people, anyway — murdered by Francisco Pizarro and his entourage of conquistadores in 1533, lamented the perfidy of his Spaniard guests in substantially the same tongue that Jimmy's parents spoke around the house, back when he was taking pipe lessons on Tuesday nights in the Cuzco 'burbs.

And it's not just a common vocabulary that has descended from the Incas of that Golden Age to today's Andean residents. Certain other rich traditions have hung in there through the years. In fact, it's fair to say that certain ancient Incan arts have even flourished over the last half-millennium, as their practitioners' access and exposure to the broader world did not eradicate them, so much as furnish the means and occasion for further refining those arts. To be sure, a lot of the good stuff is lost. But not all of it.

Which brings me, finally, to the subject of *********** ********* — — —

[THE REMAINDER OF THIS POST HAS BEEN TEMPORARILY WITHDRAWN, AT THE REQUEST OF CERTAIN PERSONS I MAY NOT EVEN OBLIQUELY DESCRIBE, MUCH LESS CALL OUT BY NAME. NEGOTIATIONS WITH THESE PERSONS ARE ONGOING, AND I EXPECT A RESOLUTION OF THIS MATTER IN THE COMING DAYS.

If you did happen to visit this site before I pulled the "objectionable" text, you, uh, should consider lying low in an out-of-the-way Best Western over the weekend while I sort all this out. These persons can (so they tell me anyway) trace IP addresses.

Now, if I might be allowed just a brief moment to editoralize:

Really, W.t.F? It's not like I haven't mentioned the Secret Mountain Redoubt about a billion times already — and the training, too. And I could have sworn I held forth on the ***** *** ********* *** in some earlier post. Nobody said a word, then. And now I'm caught up in this big shitstorm. Well, all will be explained by Monday, at the latest — and I'll be sure to tell you straightaway, Brother/Sister, when it's safe for you to go back home. In the meantime, my focus will be on securing the structural integrity of my own thoracic vertebrae . . . if you get my drift.]

How Can I Tell You How Sucky That Climb Was?

2005-10-12T21:02:00.000-04:00

Boy am I sore, Brother/Sister. And tired, too — I can barely lift my arms over the keyboard keys today. The Master Trainer really had a hair up his ass today. Dropped a paperweight on his foot this morning — the clogs he wears are open-toed — and he spent the rest of the day taking it out on us in merengue drills.

Still, I owe you some catch-up work today, so I'll fight through it. Where did I last leave off?

Respectfully, Phutatorius, I believe you were in the rental car without the tape-deck, traversing the foothills of the Andes.

Ah, yes. What a harrowing drive that was. Mud-slick roads, hairpin switchbacks on loose gravel, sheer hundred-foot drops. No guardrails. I did about fourteen hours straight — half of them in the pitch-black, with the dome light on while I tried to follow the circuitous route my Sponsor had drawn for me in the road atlas. Sometime after sunrise I came to an unpassable stretch, the road clogged in rubble from what figured to have been a recent avalanche (I don't need to remind you, Brother/Sister, that winter just ended down here in the Southern Hemisphere).

I ditched the car at that point, thanked it kindly for its yeoman work, did the last forty miles on foot, following the map past the end of the road, and from there along winding trails — not all of them terribly well-marked — to where X marked the spot. This was not easily accomplished in the thin air, with my wheelie-bag not particularly suited to the mud and muck in these mountains. In retrospect, I think it might have been wise for me to trade it in for a backpack, but after what I had gone through to retrieve it from the airport authorities, I had grown rather attached to that clumsy little black box, with its misaligned wheels.

I worry that unless I describe this journey in a long and drawn-out fashion, then you won't come away from this read with a true and accurate understanding of the hardship I suffered climbing those mountains. On the flipside, if I did recount every uphill stumble, every misread of the map, every muttered expletive and shouted prayer — well, I worry that you'd soon weary of me, Brother/Sister, and leave off reading here in favor of some other weblog that offers its content in more manageable, bite-sized blurbs.

In fact, I'm put in mind of Tolkien, and how miserable a slog some of those Lord of the Rings passages are, when his point was to show the reader just how miserable a slog it was for those poor Hobbits traversing Middle Earth. All this because Tolkien did not have the much-maligned — but oh! so useful! — montage technique in his arsenal. The film adaptations could, you see, convey a sense of distance, endurance, and achievement by showing Frodo first in a desert, then in grasslands, then in mountains. All in a matter of seconds. Likewise, we could get a sense of Rocky Balboa's training regimen in but a few turns of the film reel — without suffering through long afternoons watching him jump rope.

Hm. A montage would certainly be useful right now. I wonder if I might be able to swing it in the narrative prose format. Worth a try, I suppose. All right, then, Brother/Sister — here goes:

lactic acid — sharp gravel — steep grades — battery dies on iPod — steeper grades — asthma attack — that whirlwind I was talking about — bobcats — diarrhea — chafing — hallucinations involving giant throbbing purple skulls chanting KILL! KILL! KILL! —

You're thinking what I'm thinking, B/S. Montage doesn't work so well in written text (and don't think for one minute that this fact didn't cost Tolkien the worldwide readership he might have had otherwise). So lacking any reliable narrative cheat for impressing upon the reader a true understanding of what I went through on Thursday and Friday — but also recognizing that it would be cruel and unusual punishment to subject my reader through the whole experience, step by excruciating step — I'll say only this:

That climb really fucking sucked. And until I get back to the States and get that attestation sworn before a certified Notary Public, you'll just have to take my word on that.

But what next, Phutatorius? What did you find at the end of the climb, where X marked the spot?

The Secret Mountain Redoubt, of course. But I'll get to that in tomorrow's post. I have another seven hundred penalty push-ups to do tonight before lights-out. At Sunday dinner I made the mistake of asking the Master Trainer if we'd be taking Columbus Day off. These Quechuan Indians are really sensitive about that Colonial stuff. Who knew?

Reader Mail/Catch Up Later

2005-10-11T18:35:00.000-04:00

No time at the moment to resume my narrative. We're doing two-a-days up here this week, and I've got to get showered and presentable in time for dinner with the Master Trainer.

But I did take a moment or two to respond to some messages from the Fan Club (see below — by the way, it seems like Burping Squid has fallen off the radar: maybe he/she went out and got a job). Keep the faith, Brother/Sister, and keep those comments and criticisms flowing in.

After all, everything I do — I do for you.

I may steal some time tonight to write. If not, take pity on me. The Master was talking about surprising us with evening strength training sometime this week.

To the Mountains

2005-10-10T21:01:00.000-04:00

As the aforementioned Aeropuerto Hiltòn did not, in fact, exist, I had to take a cab into the city early Thursday morning to find accommodations. It was 1:30 a.m. by the time I arrived at the Best Western Embajadores, which — if I know my Spanish — means "Impregnators." An odd name for a hotel, but I've always been a big fan of the Best Western hotel chain, which is at this point a clear front-runner for Official Hotel Chain of the Phutatorian World-Empire (though I won't yet rule out Motel 6 until I've reviewed their bid).

Reception was closing at the Best Western Impregnators, but the good people at the counter not only gave me a room — they offered me a discounted "Tarifa Super-Embajador." It may be that something is lost in the translation, and it's really "Super Manly-Man Rate," or something like that. Or word is out about my affair with President Arroyo (in that last AP photo, she did look a bit rotund in the belly).

Anyway, it took most of Thursday morning — and about thirty phone calls to the airport — to get my wheelie-bag released from Security. After the Other Phutatorius knocked me out, a security guard had approached my bag and called out to nearby patrons to claim it. As I was lying on the floor unconscious — and in plain view — some thirty feet away, I was not in a position to respond to these solicitations, and so the guard confiscated it. They weren't exactly in a hurry to resolve the misunderstanding — I had to go up the chain to a supervisor, then patch in the U.S. Ambassador's assistant before they would release the bag. And then they wanted to stick me with the cost of delivering the bag downtown! That didn't fly, Brother/Sister. There are some things on which a traveler has to take a stand.

The bag arrived in my room at around four o'clock in the afternoon. I dropped a three-peso tip on the bellman who brought it, then dumped its contents out on the floor to take an inventory. This for two reasons: (1) to make sure none of these confiscation-happy Seguridaddies had made off with my electric shaver, and (2) to verify that they hadn't planted illegal drugs in any of the side pockets. It would be just like these bastards to pick a fight with me on the phone, then kick down the door and arrest me on a trumped-up possession charge. And once you get a record down here, that shit gets in the Interpol database, and your hopes and dreams of world domination are pretty much dashed.

I went through the pile of belongings on the floor — everything seemed to be there, which was a plus. As for what Airport Security might have planted — none of the usual bags of incriminating white powder. But in the top front pocket of the bag I did find a manila envelope — ah, Manila! What a night we had together, Gloria! — sealed and addressed to me.

I opened it.

Inside was a rental-car voucher and a marked-up road map of southern Peru. A Stickie on the map read, ¡FOLLOW THIS ROUTE! Within the hour I was standing in front of the Hertz counter at Jorge Chavez (would you believe they have a special Impregnator Line there, too?), wondering aloud why you can't get a rental car with a cassette deck anywhere on Earth. I have this iPod tape-adaptor, you see, and I never get to use it on a road trip. Anyway, by sunset I was on the road into the mountains, rocking out to Jimmy Atahualpa's Quechuan interpretation of "Stairway to Heaven" on rural Peruvian AM radio —

Oh! The master's coming down the hall. I can tell his footsteps by the clogs he wears — from a kick-line he can whip one though the air, knock an enemy senseless with it from fifty yards. Saw him do it to a crash-test dummy in a class demo. Pretty freakin' sweet. I'll learn that in the eighth week. In the meantime, the students go barefoot.

Anyway, gotta go!

Un Otro Phutatorius

2005-10-09T20:23:00.000-04:00

The last few days have been a whirlwind, Brother/Sister — what with the flight down, the car rental, the trip up here to the secret mountain redoubt, all these orientation meetings . . . and then there was the actual whirlwind. What a son-of-a-bitch weather condition that was!

I should say, starting off, that I don't think I'll be able to get caught up with just this one post, and so I will have to borrow against your patience over the next few days. But as you have always been a willing lender, Brother/Sister — and over the years I have given you no reason to begrudge me credit — I don't foresee a problem in making steady, periodic payment in installments, until such time as I get you entirely up to speed.

Bear in mind, while you wait, that (1) Internet access is spotty at best up here in the Andes; (2) most of my waking hours will be devoted to (a) learning the secret, ancient art of ceremonial Peruvian dance-fighting and (b) exploring the prospects for romance in the local villages; and (3) I can only use my master-trainer's super-secret satellite Internet connection when he's not in his office.

It sounds to me, Phutatorius, that you're playing fast and loose with all these "secrets" — SECRET mountain redoubt, SECRET art of dance-fighting —

Please, Brother/Sister. Did I not just spell out the terms of our agreement? Show some patience, and I promise you, I will explain to your satisfaction why I think it appropriate to reveal, here in the Great Wide Open of the blogosphere, some of the centuries-old secrets contained on pain of death within the elite membership of this heretofore underground group of Andean warrior-assassins —

but I realize I'm raising more questions than I'm answering. So let's just get on with this chronologically, starting with a rewind to Wednesday night, at around midnight, when I landed at Jorge Chavez. To this point the trip had been, for the most part, uneventful. The in-flight movie on the Houston-Lima leg was Monster-in-Law, a romantic comedy placing Jane Fonda opposite the still-ubiquitous, but somewhat less densely-positioned (these days) Jennifer Lopez. When the fasten-seatbelt sign went off, I traveled up the aisle and informally surveyed the Latin passengers on the plane. By a three-to-one margin, they hate J-Lo, too.

I promise to address this J-Lo Situation, Hermano/Hermana, after I consolidate my power.

We landed on schedule at 11:40 p.m. Lima-time. I collected my black wheelie-bag at the Reclamo de Equipaje, then proceeded through Customs (nada a declarar, Hermano) to the terminal. At this point I had no real plan as to where I would go. I figured that my resourceful sponsors would find a way to contact me — and if they didn't, I would shack up at the Aeropuerto Hiltón, or its equivalent, until they did.

But as I passed out of the terminal's secured area, I was pleased (but not surprised) to find a smartly-dressed limo driver standing at attention, with a sign in his hand bearing my name. I approached the man. He wore a pin that designated him as the property of "Lima Limo."

"That's me," I told him.

"¿Que?" The driver seemed confused.

"PHUTATORIUS. That's me." I pointed at the sign.

The driver shook his head at me.

Oh, Christ, I thought. Am I going to have to rummage in my bag for my Spanish dictionary? Now bear in mind, Brother/Sister, that when I am on the road, I am not normally averse to addressing my service-industry contacts in their native languages. I am not that Americano feo who insists that everyone in the world — including the poor limo driver who makes his living chauffeuring visiting dignitaries — speak English.

The problem was that I was tired, I'd been traveling all day, I was dehydrated from the half-bucket of fried chicken I'd eaten during the Houston layover — and I didn't think the point I had tried to make to this gentleman was quite so complicated as to get lost in translation.

I threw up my hands.

"You," the limo driver said, incredulous. "You come from Sao Paolo?"

"From Boston," I corrected. Duh. As I said, I was in a bit of a mood, so cut me some slack, Brother/Sister.

"Is possible you may be different Phutatorius? I get here Phutatorius from Sao Paolo."

"Trust me, signore. There is only one Phutatorius. So this must be some kind of mistake. Why don't you call back your Central Command Center and check on that?"

The limo driver snapped open his mobile phone. He continued to hold up his sign, while he dialed. He was on the line with his dispatcher when a third gentleman emerged from Customs to join our party.

"¿Auto para Phutatorius?," this Third Gentleman said.

"WHO ARE YOU?" I demanded. I kicked my wheelie-bag, sent it rolling off down the terminal. Again, I was tired, dehydrated, etc., etc.

I could belabor what happened next, which is best described, in terms Phutatorian, as an Incident, but I'd rather not. In brief, it turns out (1) there is more than one Phutatorius; (2) this fellow is, too, a purported Internet personality; (3) this Other Phutatorius was traveling to Peru on the same day I was, and weeks ago he had reserved a car with Lima Limo; and (4) when he can finally land it, he has a wicked left hook.

Needless to say, I was required to eat some crow from that limo driver, once I came to. When I get back to the States, I'll be contacting my trademark lawyer. And my personal injury specialist, too.

More tomorrow.

Now Boarding . . .

2005-10-05T10:04:00.000-04:00

Well, here I am at Logan Airport's Terminal C (which Google mislabeled as "D" — stay your hand, Brother/Sister, I've written them about it), waiting for the boarding call and availing myself of the Logan Wi-Fi service to write up this morning's thoughts —

What's that you say, B/S? You think I'm foolish? Impetuous? Just because I accepted a one-way plane ticket to Lima from a set of mysterious limousine kidnappers?

One way, Phutatorius? ONE WAY?

Oh. Yes, right. I did forget to mention that the ticket was paid for the flight down only. That doesn't mean I'll be murdered or held for ransom once I'm down there. It only means I have an open-ended return date — and that my shady sponsors may not spot me for the flight back to Boston.

But no matter. I've sequestered $500 into savings for just that eventuality, and I can pay my own way home.

Look, Brother/Sister — you can say what you want, but the last time an anonymous benefactor booked me on a one-way international flight, I totally ended up hooking up with Philippine President Gloria Arroyo, and she was fantastic. So I know what I'm doing here, and I can take care of myself.

Oops! They're calling all rows, so I'd better wrap this up. Now where did I put my boarding pass?

(More from Houston, if I get a minute. The layover looks to be kinda tight.)

Mysterious Ways

2005-10-04T21:14:00.000-04:00

Well, blow me up and down, Brother/Sister. Life sure can turn on a dime. One minute, you're grimly resigned to your mild-mannered pre-Moment existence. Then — WHAM-O! (click that link, Brother/Sister, and another dime drops into Phutsie's World Domination Fund) — Life pulls up on the curb in a black rented limo and calls your name.

Some setting of the scene would be desirable, Phutatorius.

Right you are, Brother/Sister. Right you are. And so, it was around 11 p.m. last night, the U2 concert (set list here) had just let out, and I had just tumbled down several hundred escalators from my Section 303 balcony seat to the sidewalk outside the BankNorth Garden. I rounded the corner onto Merrimac Street, and a black limousine with livery plates pulled up along the sidewalk. A rear window powered down, and a man called my name.

"Yoo-hoo! Phutatorius!" (For the sake of accuracy, I should say that the person in the limo did not, in fact, cry "Yoo-hoo! Phutatorius!" Nor did I, as you will read below, get into this car voluntarily. As it happened, I was grabbed from behind by a big bruiser of a man who cuffed my hands behind my back, pulled a hood over my head, and tossed me headfirst through the open car door into the back seat. But the facts don't cross-promote quite as well as the Yoo-hoo story does — and helicopter gunships don't come cheap, Brother/Sister.)

I approached the car with the intention of looking through the window crack at who was inside. The window powered up to about 95% closed, leaving only a slit that admitted very little light.

"Who's in there?" I demanded to know.

"Why don't you get in and find out?" asked my Yoo-hooer.

Well, this was a no-brainer. The circumstances here — long black car pulling up after a concert, back-seat passenger playing coy — were identical to those presented to me back in July 2005 when I took the Limo Plunge outside the Middle East with the result that I totally hooked up with the lead singer for Bow Wow Wow. (She had liked what I wrote about her band in my last novel.) Based on that experience, I calculated even odds that Bono or the Edge was in the back seat of the stretch in front of me. Not that I had it in mind to hook up with either of them. But I figured U2 and I could talk over coffee about the geopoliticus, and maybe they could put me in touch with some African freedom fighters I might be able to hire away and mold into some kind of Republican Guard. You know, since this Peru thing had fallen through . . .

Long story short, I got in the car, and it sped off downtown, I think toward Congress Street. With the sack on my head, I couldn't see where we were going. Nor could I see who was in the car with me. We sat in silence together for a long, tedious minute, until I decided to try to break the ice.

"Great show back there," I said. If it were Bono next to me, he'd eat that up. If it weren't, it was harmless conversation. "Finishing with '40' like that. Old school, you know?"

"I didn't have a ticket," said the man next to me, soberly. AHA! I thought. He DIDN'T say he didn't go to the concert. He just said he didn't have a ticket. Oh, Bono — you sure know how to play it cool!

We sat in silence for another minute.

"I should introduce myself," Bono said, in what was obviously not an Irish accent. "My name is —" and the person I was increasingly thinking was not Bono embarked on a string of fourteen or more alien syllables.

"Can you repeat that?" I asked, when he finished.

"That was my Quechuan name," [Unpronounceable] said. "Why don't you just call me Frankie?"

"I used to date a girl named Frankie," I said. "It ended badly, with guilt and recriminations. She bit the hood ornament off my car."

[Pending Frankie] may have cocked an eyebrow. With the sack on my head, I couldn't tell.

"So how about I call you Ed?"

"Ed works."

"You're my connection through Jimmy Atahualpa?"

"I am," Ed confirmed.

"You never called me," I said. "How did you manage to find me?"

"We never intended to contact you over the phone. We were using your cell phone to track your movements."

"You can do that?"

"Haven't you seen 24?"

"Wait — you work for the Counter Terrorist Unit?"

"No," Ed said, in a voice indicating strained patience. "But it's a common tracking method. We had a bead on you for several days. We just didn't have an opportunity to get hold of you. Then Sunday night you fell off our radar."

"My charger plug's broke," I offered, by way of explanation. "I had to turn the phone off to conserve the battery."

"Then you cropped up inside the Fleet Center tonight," Ed said. "But just for a few minutes."

"BankNorth Garden," was my correction. "They just changed the name." Per the instructions of the guy two seats down from me — "What you do is, you turn it on and wave the lit display up in the air, like you used to do with cigarette lighters in the 70s" — I had expended my phone's last five minutes of battery life during U2's encores. "So what do you want with me?" I asked.

"Nothing," Ed said. "We just wanted to give you a ride home." The car pulled to a stop. The passenger's side door opened, and strong arms lifted me out of the back seat and held me steady while somebody's keys unlocked my cuffs. By the time I pulled the hood off my head, the limo was down the road. I was standing outside my apartment.

Well, I said to myself. Now that didn't make any goddam sense at all. All that drama just to get me in a car to drive me home? I hadn't learned anything, no arrangement had been made for a second meeting. I didn't get it. Ah well, I shrugged. At least I saved train fare home.

Then I reached into my jacket pocket to pull out my keys, and I found a plane ticket. Made out in my name, for a Wednesday morning departure. Continental Airlines to Lima, Peru.

Hm.

No News

2005-10-02T00:14:00.000-04:00

Still no voice messages from Peru, no life-changing phone calls — though I did see Jimmy again today. He kept looking over his shoulder while we talked. Jimmy says that I should keep my phone on and handy — "in your pocket, if you can" — but I'm skeptical.

Ho hum. But there's more than one way to skin a cat. And to be honest, I didn't know what I was getting into anyway, with this blanket guy's brother. What was he going to do for me, really? I never had a good feeling about it.

It's Saturday night, and my rise to power seems so far away. I'm having a hard time kick-starting the program here, and it's sort of discouraging.

Maybe next week will go better.

Retraction

2005-09-29T19:01:00.000-04:00

I've had a further communication from Burping Squid. He/she asks that I correct my earlier post, in which I (understandably, to my mind) called him/her a "Squid." Burping Squid takes the position that his/her username is a two-word participial phrase, with "Squid" serving as the object of the verbal "Burping." That is, the name describes a person who has eaten a plate of calamari, with the consequence that his/her gas emissions are redolent of squid.

When I referred to my correspondent as "Squid" for short, I mistakenly assumed that "Burping" was a participial adjective modifying "Squid," so that the Squid does the Burping.

So it goes. I apologize for the error, but you can see why I might have come down on the wrong side of the grammatical ambiguity here.

I should note, as a further matter, that I make this retraction not because I have any interest in giving any more airtime than necessary to this molluscaphage heckler, but rather out of a desire that my record of the events in this weblog be mistake-free — and therefore unimpeachable.

A Sort of Update . . .

2005-09-29T17:22:00.000-04:00

Well, I've checked my voice mail messages a number of times today. Nothing yet from Peru Guy. Just a couple angry messages from lawyers (sigh!) and a crank-call from this Burping Squid character, who seems emboldened by the fact that I called him out by name in my last post.

Squid, yours is quite possibly the worst fake Andean-Spanish accent I've ever heard, and I've heard at least three.

As ever, though, I promise to keep you all posted.

Jimmy Atahualpa

2005-09-28T19:28:00.000-04:00

I've received a fair amount of email on this subject over the past couple days, quite a bit of it supportive. But as usual, there is an undercurrent of taunting from the skeptics out there. These are, no doubt, the same people who told me I'd never get that mail-order propane grill assembled without a contractor's help, the same faithless detractors who bet against me in the 100-meter crab-walk sprint at the '98 Goodwill Games. The overall tone and content of these messages is, I think, best captured in the following one-liner from "burpingsquid@gmail.com":

Well, Phutatorius — it's [time of email] on [day of email], and your army hasn't yet stormed Washington. What gives?

To this message and to all others like it, I answer: Patience, Brother/Sister. This sort of thing takes time, and what's more, it is accomplished in incremental steps. A march on the White House is not the only marker of progress worthy of an update.

And I do, as a matter of fact, have something to report.

Earlier today I was walking back to the office from a favored lunch spot when Jimmy Atahualpa (stage name), a friendly acquaintance, flagged me down on the sidewalk. Jimmy is a Quechua Indian from the Peruvian Andes and formerly a Harvard Square street musician. Jimmy used to play the pan flute in a drum-and-pipe ensemble with his brother, Chico. Andean folk interpretations of rock 'n' roll classics — Sympathy for the Devil, Waiting for the Man by the Velvets. Stuff like that. Jimmy was a seasonal performer, playing to the usual audiences of tourists and teenage runaways in the spring and summer months, then taking up a day job at a dry-cleaning company from November to April. He did this for six, seven years before the perchloroeethylene and other cleaning chemicals gave him lung cancer.

Jimmy's all right now. Doctors took out most of his left lung, along with the lower lobe of his right. In another couple months he'll have his five-year clean bill of health (knock on wood), but it taxes his lungs too much to play the pipes anymore. So now he just parks himself down in his customary spot on the brick sidewalk outside the Harvard Square train entrance (in fact, you can see him on the Google satellite map, if you really lean in and squint), where he sells alpaca blankets and CD-Rs of the Atahualpa Brothers' greatest hits. It helps his sales efforts that he keeps the excised portions of his lungs in a specimen jar on the sidewalk beside him. It's a good ice-breaker with potential buyers.

Anyway, I had just finished lunch this afternoon, and I was hustling back to the office for a meeting, when Jimmy called out to me from his seat on the sidewalk:

"Phutatorius!"

I waved hello.

"What happened to you?"

That stopped me in my tracks. Jimmy's a pretty discerning fellow, I thought, if he can look at me and see that, since the last time I saw him, I have had a Moment.

"Why do you ask?" was my question back to him.

"Well, you're limping, kind of dragging that left ankle," Jimmy said. "There's a butterfly bandage on your neck. It looks like somebody pulled a patch of hair off your scalp —"

"Oh," I said. "That. All of that. You're talking about the Incident." Not the Moment.

"— your right eye is blackened, you have gauze stuffed in your left nostril —" Jimmy paused to catch his breath, then continued — "you seem to be missing one of your incisors —"

"Yes, yes, yes," I interrupted, not anxious to hear Jimmy out as he catalogued every bump and bruise on my facies. "I had an Incident."

"What happened?"

I told him.

"Man, that sucks," Jimmy said. "Groomsmen."

Jimmy's a good person. Kind, thoughtful, generous, concerned. It shamed me that a man with 75% of his lung capacity sitting in a jar on the ground beside him would be offering me his sympathy, when my wounds were largely superficial. So I thought it best to try to put a good face on things, to say something upbeat. After all, I hadn't come complaining to him. He had simply asked me what happened.

"The upside to all of it, though, Jimmy, is that while I was on the ground and they were working me over, I had a Moment."

"A Moment, huh?" Jimmy picked up his jar and climbed up on his feet. He always wanted at least one hand on his jar. "Did you achieve Clarity?"

"I did."

"Insight?"

"Insight, too," I said, proudly. "Destiny-shaping Insight."

"Tell me more," Jimmy Atahualpa said to me, bringing his hand to my shoulder.

I looked at my watch. Screw my one o'clock, I decided. Some things are more important. And over the next ten minutes I told Jimmy Atahualpa all about my Moment, what I had learned about myself, the plans I had for my future. All of it. Jimmy listened, rapt, as I told him these things. When I had finished, Jimmy looked me square in the eye, and he said:

"I beat cancer."

"I know," I said.

"Let me talk," Jimmy said, lifting a finger off his jam jar lid and pointing it at my sternum. "The power is in you, Phutatorius, to do all these things you're talking about. Just like the power was in me to beat cancer. You see? You just have to believe in yourself, brother. You got me?"

Touched, at a loss for words, I nodded.

"I know you got me, brother," Jimmy said, smiling, "'cause I can see it in your eyes. And because your eyes tell me you're serious, and you're a committed person, I think I can help you."

I raised an eyebrow.

"A guy I know back in Peru sends me these blankets, right? My supplier. His brother is a —" Jimmy looked over his shoulder, shifted his eyes left, then right, took a breath. "Well, my guy in Peru can put you in touch with his brother. Are you willing to do that?"

I didn't have the first clue who Jimmy's friend's brother was, or what he did. "What, is the guy a diplomat or something?"

"Let me have your mobile phone number," Jimmy said.

I rattled it off. Jimmy pulled a Rollerball pen from his pocket and took it down on the back of his hand.

"I can't make any promises, Phutatorius, but if this works out, and you get my guy's brother to call you, remember that I helped get you started. Okay?"

"Okay," I said. We shook on it.

"The power is in you, Phutatorius."

And that's how we left it. My telephone is charged and in my pocket. More importantly, I have this to say to all of you burping squids out there who can do nothing but criticize: Jimmy Atahualpa knows I'm serious.

And he beat fucking cancer. What have you ever done?

This First Day of the Rest of My Life

2005-09-26T20:41:00.000-04:00

Why now? is your quite reasonable question.

Well, I'm glad I made sure you asked.

This is happening now because I had a life-changing Moment on Saturday. Although I've had such Moments before — and I reserve the right to have a subsequent Moment that sends my life careening toward some other, lesser destiny — this is the one I'm running with today. Because right now, brothers and sisters, I feel something. The Winds of Change are blowing between my ears, and I feel I have no choice but to listen to their music.

And not just to listen, but to dance.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, and ahead of my Moment. I attended a wedding this weekend, you see —

What ho, Phutatorius! You ARE a Romantic, aren't you?

Sir, I'm not terribly glad I allowed you to interrupt just now. But I'll answer your question: yes, I suppose I am a Romantic, in that broader sense of the term. Not the wine and cheese, hire-the-violinist Romantic, but an old-timey, Robert Louis Stevenson Romantic. In that sense, then, no — it wasn't the union of souls that moved me, not the day's celebration of matrimony that set my heart afire. No — the details, as they say, are in the particulars.

It was about 9:36 EDT. The vows had been exchanged, toasts delivered, casks of wine uncorked and spilled into lustful gullets. The deejay had supplied a suitably rakish voice-over to the bouquet-and-garter proceedings, and the Village People's YMCA had put more than one embarrassing uncle's sweat-soaked dress shirt on awkward display.

And so it was time, many guests supposed, to call for the Electric Slide. And call they did, in menacing, persistent, unison. The deejay knew what to do when confronted by the chanted commands of a drunken mob: you cue up the damned Electric Slide already. So he did.

On the periphery of the proceedings (where many of my brothers and sisters have known me to live), I took dainty sips at my fifteenth Diet Pepsi of the evening, and I watched wide-eyed as the Electric Slide came on, and the initial beats of this well-worn wedding-party classic snapped the scattered and ragtag assembly of guests suddenly to attention, pulled them smartly together into a square formation, and stirred them to move together in precision-timed, uniform, prefabricated steps.

Fascism! I cried. Fascism on the dance floor! This regimented block formation dancing, this soulless display of the most politically and aesthetically disturbing sort of social conformity, this Electric Slide! I could not allow it to continue. Before my judgment could get the better of me, I tossed Diet Pepsi #15 to the ground and heaved my body into the center of this military exercise they call a "dance." Screeching and cursing and flailing my arms, I shoved grandmothers to the ground. I hurled obscenities at the bride. I kicked the five-year old ringbearer and called his mother a Nazi.

And this — THIS was your Moment, Phutatorius? Another one of these Incidents of yours?

Ah, but you're jumping the gun, Brother/Sister. And you're confusing Incidents of high drama and a reasonable amount of bloodshed (of which I admit I have had many in my life) with Moments of clarity and insight (of which I am ashamed to say I have had comparably few). My initial frontal assault on the Electric Sliders was, as you say, another Incident — but only a precursor of and necessary precondition to my Moment. It was, you see, five minutes later, as I lay on the floor under a pile of groomsmen who were beating the living shit out of me, spitting teeth, that I had my Moment.

What of that Moment, Phutatorius? What clarity, what insight was given you during your Moment?

Two things, Brother/Sister. I learned two things at that Moment:

I realized, first, that to that point I was a failure as a leader of men.

And second, I understood that this world of "individuals," however many billion of them there may be, is just screaming for one man to impose a singular and dominating Order upon it. This world's civilians, wayward and dispersed, wait with bated breath for someone to play the song that will bring their lives into a strict focus. And its soldiers — God bless them! — they're just looking for someone, some Supreme Commander, who might give them an excuse to pile on an enemy and make off with his cuff-links.

And so, on Saturday night, as I pressed a Ziploc bag full of ice to my jaw and awaited treatment in the Mount Auburn Hospital Emergency Room, I took stock of my life. I understood that my ambitions were understated, and my regular suggestions of satisfaction (I'm just fine. How are you?) were outright lies. Lies I told to friends and acquaintances, and — far worse — lies I told to myself.

So now I find myself poised on the verge of a new Life's Adventure. I know not where this new path will lead, in the short-term. I can't possibly predict every twist or turn, every uphill climb, every misstep, tumble, or fruitless double-back. I only know that I will move down my new path with a steely determination, and that at the end of this path lies World Domination . . . or not. That's the game I'm playing now: all or nothing.

Keep your eyes open, Brother/Sister. Don't dare to blink. You won't want to miss a trick.