I was on the run again.

Trying to get off this fucking world with only the poor man's escape velocity available to me.

This usually involved the convergence of real objects with certain mystical numbers. A car with a double digit model year and a road with the same digits for a name would do. A '55 T-bird on Highway 55, for example -- or a '66 Corvette on Route 66 -- which was rumored to work best.

Then you got in and just fucking DROVE! -- and, eventually, if you drove far enough long enough, and got lucky enough, suddenly, up ahead, you'd see the off ramp where, when you get off and circle around to its sister on ramp, Rod Serling is standing there hitchhiking, waiting to whisk you into outer space for free, no questions asked. His hitchhiking sign saying: "California (wink wink)".

The car, of course, has to be retrofitted to meet modern specs, so the seats and doors and dash are all touch screens and, when you touch them the right way, all kinds of touchy-feely ex cathedra catch phrases from touchy-feely icons of the past stream across them horizontally -- like tears in the wind -- slow enough to read, if you don't mind your car accidentally glancing off a guardrail every so often, sparks flying.

When I was young, I tried to blow up my high school and was probably only saved from a life of crime and horror by a teacher who believed in me and suggested I try out for the lead in a play.

Unfortunately, on opening night, a horde of giant spiders produced by toxic waste came out to terrorize our small Arizona town and, the next day, Jack Ryan and the CIA director showed up claiming they were trying to stop terrorists who were planning a nuclear attack.

Of course we knew immediately they were lying and just looking for headlines, so we told them we didn't have time for them to look around -- we couldn't interrupt our production to accommodate their whims -- because we were creating something that would make people sad and then give them hard ons -- and without this, the fabric of our society would tear (as in rip, not as in cry).

They could tell that wasn't the real reason, though. They had my dossier. They knew that before I was a teenager I'd endured a string of foster homes after my mother, a talented artist, was convicted of murder.

They knew that, despite being a logical adolescent, I was being framed for strange community pranks, by a bogeyman -- and it took the help of my brother's imaginary friend to defeat him.

"And that is not enough motivation to be planning a nuclear attack," I told them, after I finished retelling them what they already knew. But they said it was enough motivation to be aiding and abetting someone who was fucking someone who was less than 6 degrees removed from someone who WAS planning a nuclear attack. A nuclear attack.

So when I couldn't handle any more of what was passing for logic at the time (like mindless repetition, for example) I got the fuck out of there and headed for New York where I immediately became a restaurateur and fell for a free-spirited woman half my age.

For a change of pace and together with a third friend we went on a dude ranch cattle drive to play cowboy and find out what we were made of.

But just before the drive started I got an urgent text message from a nurse who'd just learned that evil people were trying to harness the special powers possessed by her 6-year old niece, and I had to leave to go try to help them, even though we all knew there was nothing I could do.

I'm sorry, I have to go, I told the 2 other losers who were now stuck doing this lame ass dude ranch cattle drive thing without the person who'd conned them into doing it in the first place.

And then, in a flash, I finally understood what kept the fucking world going at all and why I was on the run to get as far away from it as possible.

Because I KNEW people could not really like or care about the things they claimed and the media claimed and their neighbors claimed and their friends and parents and children and biographers claimed they liked and cared about. So how did this crap ass world keep going on in the absence of anyone who really even gave a flaming flying fuck about any of its manifestations?

The answer, of course, was that people like ME were responsible. People with some chemical imbalance or other, who got all excited about something and, without even trying, wind up conning a few hundred others into jumping in feet first, no looking back, no reservations, no net, no fallback position, no exit strategy.

Meanwhile, people like me, instead of jumping in too, were always somehow suddenly, a split second before everybody else jumped in, being called away to salvage or assuage desperate situations at the far extreme of human suffering, that no feeling thinking human being could refuse to drop absolutely everything for and rush off to help, even though everybody knew he'd most likely just make things worse.

So multiply me by 30 or 60 million and multiply that by the 100 or 200 each of us con into jumping into the pit of pretending to care, and now you see what keeps the entire population of the world thinking they fucking give a rat's ass about anything. Or at least being out there convincing everybody else they really give a rat's ass about something.

But so who wants to live in a world of people pretending to be driven by motivations conned into them by people like ME.

A world where, for people like ME, when we arrive, all out of breath, at the home of the nurse whose 6-year-old niece is having her special powers harnessed by evil people, the first thing she says to us is "Ehhh screw the niece. I just found out my son produced by artificial insemination has the DNA of my fertility doctor."

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