Crowning An Imperial Gallon

When you hang out your shingle as a telegraph operator, expect to read messages you can never repeat because no one would believe you.

Yesterday, as an instance.

I walked out to my '95 325i parked in the driveway and noted a special set of cat paw prints on the bonnet.  According to the cat paw print language, I was supposed to pick up a science-related magazine in the lobby of my dentist's office, wait for the signal I would receive in Morse code from the leg swings of another patient in the lobby and go to the sequence of page and paragraph numbers the Morse code would tell me.

Sure enough, the message in the magazine was there.  It told me that I was supposed to drive to the Dodge petrol station and get a message written in invisible ink on the back of the receipt printed at the pump.

Invisible ink?  Are you kidding?  Is this grade school again?

Wearing my special shades sold to me by a temporary employee of Wal-Mart who is a special agent for the shadow government we all know exists and doesn't exist (now you know why I keep telling you I do and don't exist), I held the receipt up to the sunlight and read the message.

Hot humping dog!  Turns out I had received a receipt with reddish-pink ink stains at Arby's from a teenage agent named Marisa and didn't even know it.  So, I dug through the garbage, found the Arby's receipt and read the message I was supposed to have read but missed.  Will at the Blue Plate had double-verified the message contents for me in his conversation with two lovely ladies at the table near my wife and me.

What did the original message say?

I was supposed to attend a secret rally meeting hidden within the student protests taking place in California that would have revealed who was behind the Taiwanese quake.  I went back through the seismic data from Taiwan, Missouri and Chile, as instructed, and plotted the discussion points for the secret rally meeting.

I hate all this duck-and-clover, cloak-and-dagger stuff.  I'm a simple country boy who was accidentally raised in the suburban labyrinth of commercialised subliminal messaging.  When can I retire from getting exposed to adverts meant for the disposable income kinder?

Anyway, the secret rally notes were published last night and delivered to me on a roll of toilet paper I bought several weeks ago at the dollar discount store that went out of business in January.  Yeah, when time and space no longer have any meaning, you get messages telegraphed to you anytimeanyplace.

Using my old analemmic sundial, I waited until the proper time this morning to see which part of the message I'm supposed to deliver to you right now.

Based on the ambient atmospheric conditions in a tiny Chinese village you've never heard of but will produce a great hero of a renewed warrior class, here is what I have for you:

Several groups are building an alliance, even though every individual group's aims would appear to make the groups archenemies of one another.  They are basing their joint goals on the fact the leader they have pointed their hatred toward is not completely a member of any one of their groups and thus an enemy of all of them.  But they are not after that leader.  Instead, that leader is merely a symbol they can point to that any agents or spies within their ranks will think they're after.  Ultimately, they have another goal - to incite an attack by the state and national militaries against several of their groups at once, thus proving that their anti-government message is real and attracting a flash mob to their cause.  The groups are encouraging "respectable" organisations - liberal, conservative, Greens, Socialist Democrats, Democratic Socialists, Republicans, Democrats, Proletarians, Communists, Labour, Tories, Sinn Féin, Theocratic, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, deist, atheist, naturalist, agnostic, agrarian, metropolitan, technopop, goth, apocalyptic, utopian - to spread fear and uncertainty so that any perceived negative action by the established governments anywhere in the world will solidify the alliance and unite them with others instantly.  The alliance has already sworn to secrecy members within local governments and of both military leadership and soldier classes, who have promised they will, when the time is right, push their military units into the milieu.

Do I believe any of this?  I imagine there are more than a few who do, based on what I've seen of those who are "testing" our government's defenses to figure out which police and military units they can get to react the most.  At the same time, I have a lot of friends who work for or in the military and I don't see them doing anything other than making a living and providing for their families, content to sit at home and watch TV, surf the Internet or play video games when not engaged in community activities associated with their family members.

However, I'm a telegraph operator.  I don't have to believe anything I see.  I just tap out the text no matter what it says and let everyone see what's going down the wire.

Today's a beautiful day.  Think I'll wash the car and erase the paw prints.  I don't want someone to think I do or do not support the messages written in dirt on my windscreen.  I'm just a regular taxpaying guy who's thinking about taking his shingle down before he reads something he's not prepared to know about.  All I ever wanted was to find a way to get our species off this planet and what I've found is that there are those who use my desire to their personal advantage, which distorts and takes away from our ability to establish space colonies.  If someone is taking away my dream, and not pointing to a plausible solution, to whom do I turn to help me fulfill it?  China?  Private space entrepreneurs?  If so, does that mean that those of us in the shadow government will finally decide to sell out the United States and completely break it into parts owned by more responsible governments and corporations, taking away any semblance of "power of the people" the Americans thought they had?

Good thing this is a fictional blog entry and not related to the real world, eh?  Or is it?  Only the shadow knows for sure - isn't that what another fictional tale said?  Would you recognise a software or hardware keyboard logger if you saw one?  Do you know who's going after and collecting valuable data on the customers of lobbyists?  Are you raising your children to be the next ice farmers on Earth's moon or are you preparing for Farmageddon, instead, when the corporations control all farms and all seed production and you have to register the window garden in your flat?

I'm a practical joker, a writer of funny "what if" short stories who takes all the snippets of conversation, all the illogical adverts, all the autobiographical nonsense we put out and weaves an inside-out, realistic model, if you know what you're looking at (behind the "at," as my English teacher would say).  We've moved from the dawning of the Age of Aquarius to the dawning of Viagra Agrarians.  Welcome to the new age that'll be old news before your third facelift has healed.

I'm taking a few days off from writing this blog.  Your life stories are interesting and even though I know I only exist in the context of social situations and my local environment, I'm taking some time away from you folks to let myself breathe fresh air and be me who is not me away from you for a while.