In the Shit

I am lost in the proverbial shit. Job loss bombshells explode right next to me and all around me the fires of unemployment in unprecedented scales are raging. The difficulty of just surviving has made this city mean. Meaner than she has ever been. We fight an invisible enemy on battlefields both outside and inside of ourselves. Our will to survive has made us hard.

But not me. I am as cowardly as ever, completely unwilling to deal with this battle. I never wanted to be a part of this war in the first place. I would rather be comfortable, employed, self-reliant and content. Instead I am forced by circumstance to be a nervous wreck constantly dreading the falling of some ax. It is an ax that has fallen on me thrice before because I never really got back from that other war that we occasionally hear about on the television.

I can hear, in the distance, the beating wings of my rescue chopper coming to save me. Beat, Beat, Beat they say and my heart whispers the words to itself. I picture the faces of its pilots serene and at peace with the task at hand. We will survive the battle, but the war, however, will likely consume us whole.

I have been on a lonely mission here for months. It is an important mission that came from the highest of command. It read: URGENT – WRITE BOOK! And so I have been. The task is almost complete, though the enemy closes in around me.

As of this very moment I am hiding in a laundramat while my uniforms tumble around in a dryer. I am stoned as hell and in a compromised position, outside of my doors in the land where money is spent. Money… When will it finally be destroyed?

They have caught on to me. They fired me from the job that I was holding. I guess they could tell that I was one of them. Maybe they could smell Resistance. Anyways, it woke me up quickly to the knowledge that they were on to me and I could not continue to try to act like one of them anymore. I took the last of that resource which they have an iron grip on and fled back to the safety of Brother Bird’s apartment to create an exit strategy.

As luck would have it, or rather as command saw fit, the Rescue Chopper was on its way, this time disguised as a van full of papermaking equipment and typewriters. I was to rejoin Alpha Squad. Directives are sparse, but it seems that we will be going South. Operation Snow Bird. I am to take the book with me like some magical key that will finally fit into its perfect place. I guess I will only know it when it happens.

I will perform my usual function with Alpha Squad. I am the Communications expert. I have undergone years of specialized training in not only this field, but also the field of Freak Paper Making on the run. I am what we call in the service a lean, mean, communicating and paper making machine.

I learned from the best.

There is no rank structure in Alpha Squad because we are all members of the E4 Mafia which takes no direction from anyone. Ever. In fact this is almost its only rule which in itself is a paradox.

There are only specialties.

D.Bob, for instance, is our resident weapons master. He is a mad scientist of all things paper making and printing. If it is a process he has already mastered it and the ability to teach others to use it. He is an idea man of the highest caliber who, when plied with booze, is capable of crafting an absolutely outlandish idea that just might work.

If we were the X-Men D.Cam would be our Cyclops. He is the essence of a leader. I know that this contradicts my earlier statement that there is no hierarchy in the E4 Mafia, but personality types will arise and the role of the leader is more of a job than a particular power.

Our beloved Medic , Dr. Wright (who, I should not, is not actually a doctor) has fixed us all when we were fucked up from the combination of many spinning sharp things and the drugs which always seem to be around us at all times, whether they be alcohol, marijuana or hallucinogens. We have had many casualties.

JT is our paranormal specialist who battles things in planes that we cannot see but which are no less relevant when it comes to personal safety.

There are many people who have worked with Alpha Squad during hectic missions. They are either lone operatives in the war against Money and War or part of some other elite group which gets missions sent to it from different sectors of Command.

What we do happens so fast that people often have no idea what has happened around them. We leave behind us a trail of paper and other artifacts of our profession. Most importantly our mission is to activate a self destruct sequence inside of the programming that the military industrial complex implanted in us as if we were lab rats.

It all starts with scissors and the simple act of cutting up a uniform that defined an identity. It is the identity that we wish most to destroy. This is the initial labor. It is not only the hardest part physically, but also mentally. There is a lot of anger inside of that fabric.

The fibers are then soaked with water, the most beautiful substance on the planet which lubricates all life and which is so often polluted. Then they are shredded to their most basic element in the Beater. The machine destroys what the Machine has made.

Finally the process is completed when the soldier makes something beautiful out of the waste of this process which has consumed their lives.

If we were successful in our mission the virus has been set in place and activated and it is only a matter of time and luck that it will destroy that program which makes it impossible to live and to love and to create because these are things that a machine cannot do, and the program that we are hoping to destroy, forever if we do our jobs right, has turned us all into machines.

And then we are gone, whisked away in the chopper to fight again another day.