Special Report -- I awake in the 4:00 AM gloom, unable to breathe. A bearded, brown-eyed Cyclops wearing a feathery plumed hat lies on my chest staring at me. My Indiglo watch's pale luminescence reveals the intruder's identity: cat #27 nuzzling my pajama pants drawstring again.
I am by necessity a cat rancher. Felines are useful for their varmint-hunting prowess, pelts, and milk. A dozen or so can keep you warm when no other heat source is available. Milking them is not an enterprise to be underestimated, but I have small hands so no problem there.
I'm enjoying my time above ground. Most of it, anyway. It's hard to sleep at night -- I have trouble resting because every day ends with a sense of unfinished business. I can't relax. And then those effing cats come around again.
Fully roused now, I shuffle outside to see what is passing in the wide world. I stroll along the well-worn backyard path that leads to my main bunker. Stars are scattered across the sky like cigarette butts on a street median's landscaping mulch.
Despite my extensive research and powerful intellect, I've jumped the apocalyptic gun a few or many times. I don't know everything! I'm not twenty-five years old! It isn't a lack of information that hampers me, it's too much.
The signs that foretell the End of Days are like the special effects at the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games opening ceremonies -- too much to bear at times, but impossible to ignore. I am resolved, though, to never resume wearing my tinfoil headgear. Better to fret away the remainder of my life in a continuous state of data overload than to die in the muffled sleep of ignorance and let those damned cats feast on my eyes.
I lean against the bunker's reinforced door. Its cool, mossy permanence comforts me. If only I could just relax and let things go. When news is too general, it's annoying. When it's too specific, it's a federal indictment.
There have been a lot of dickish mass media reports about stalkers.
I don't "stalk" because I'm lovesick or sexually obsessed. Far from it. I'm satisfying a need to know every minute aspect of every targeted individual on my list -- what they eat, to whom they speak, what they write in their secret journal, what they throw in the garbage. That's not obsession, kids, that's attention to detail!
Why are reporters talking smack about this? Give me a few days and I will find out. These punk-ass journalists do forget that information flows both ways through "unnamed sources." I got yer reliable informant right here, Mr. Hearst.
Maybe the press should just play it safe and concentrate on covering unfathomably popular television shows like American Idolatry and Legislating with the Stars. Compile a sort of bikini montage featuring Caroline Kennedy, Simon Cowell, and Roland Burris. Must we endlessly discuss Barack Obama's inaugural balls? I'm interested in a lot of things, but not that. Give the man some privacy.
The barbarians who had gathered at our gate are now living in the attic.
