Good morning, Agent Saunders.

How are you today? Did you have a nice breakfast? Was it like out of some fifties television show, with your wife serving you half a grapefruit and a soft boiled egg? Did you read the paper and wish the kids a nice day at school?

Me, I scrounged a few handfuls of dry, "Spoon Size" Post shredded wheat out of the box and ate it while drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette. That's my breakfast. And once my bowels get going, I'll shit in my bucket.

For any late comers to my show, I'll tell you that Agent Saunders runs the Burlington office of the Secret Service. He's on what I half-jokingly refer to as "my Secret Service staff." He and I have a very strange relationship. We got our start on around the time Fag in Chief George Bush and his fagtastic little butt-buddy boyfriend, Fagberto Gonzales, started the electronic surveillance in my house. It was so wondrous trying to get laid in my own house while knowing that creeps are just watching me.

And further, I should tell you that when I worked military intelligence, I had been professionally trained in detecting surveillance operations. That's all. This was back in the Soviet days when my Top Secret Special Compartmentalized Intelligence security clearance necessitated being aware of espionage operations. I do not represent myself as some member of the Junior Spy Brigade, but in general, should I elect to comment on surveillance matters, you might keep in mind that I know orders of magnitude more about the discipline than the average person. When it comes to surveillance, you should defer to my opinion unless you have been similarly trained. Hell, my most interesting training doesn't even appear in my training record.

"Making" a United States agent is supremely easy. Good thing we work different sides of the same street. It's a wonder they don't get whacked more often. Doing my part to raise the standards, I gave their junior guys some tips on surveilling people while I sat in my living room with my feet up on the desk and eating pistachio nuts.

So anyway, to the best of my ability to deduce (and I have it on good authority that I figure things out very well) I had been placed into some perhaps hitherto unknown class of protection which I will call the "hands-off legal protective custody" of the Secret Service. Can I know that for a fact? No I can't. I can only deduce its likelihood. We'll have to wait for my FBI file to be made public some years from now.

See, once you understand that I do what is known in the biz as "significant material" rather than armpit fart noises, heavy hitter material as exemplified by one of my favorite pieces, the Capta Brightstick Document, you can see that all that terra legislation with the surveillance provisions and the due process-free jailings isn't for the terriss, but it's actually so that the criminals in Washington won't get arrested by lawmen like me. All that those criminals then have to do is to wave a magic wand and declare someone a terriss. Ta da! All fixed! Isn't the American legal system great?

You then can see the logic in fighting fire with fire by pre-emptively placing that smelly ol' terriss into the hands-off legal custody of some United States law enforcement agency, presumably the Secret Service, the reasoning being "How could you legally transfer Mister King to a torture chamber? He's already in custody, albeit a hands-off custody. Set and match." It's a Vermont reverse half nelson, a tag team smackdown.

See how it works around here?

Incidentally I have to tell you how uproariously entertaining it is to move through this tony little town like a spectre, walking among the oh-so-refined wealthy transplants from New York and Boston, they in their rarefied realms, looking down their noses at the loser who walks down the country road to his house painting gig, they being completely unaware that the man can speak with the president's Secret Service detail if he wishes merely by text messaging himself. It's magical! He summons people and they dutifully deliver themselves into his theater! The furs-and-diamonds crowd in this town would have to pay ten grand a plate at some black tie fund raiser for that kind of access. See how insignificant they are in the grand scheme of things, their Volvos and Land Rovers notwithstanding?

Also to the best of my ability to deduce, either Fag in Chief George Bush or President Null and Void stamped their feet and sulked and signed a piece of paper that somehow complicated my ability to get paid for my professional work as an entertainer. Again, I cannot know this. I can only guess.

So for any newcomers, that is a brief history of my dealings with Assclown Jurisdiction United States. It goes back seven years. The story is a bit more complicated than what you may have read in the papers, what with my reported "history of mental problems" which I do not have. I am not on medication, I have never been on medication, and prior to my arrest, my entire, lifetime dealings with the mental health industry totaled 2.75 hours --a forty-five minute session with a local therapist for depression, and a two-hour consultation with an autism specialist for an intelligence test. (Which came out embarrassingly high. I won't even tell you what it was, but trust me: it gets me red carpet entry into one of those nerd clubs.) I can only marvel at the shoddy work in the journalism business that somehow converted a complete absence of any private, much less public, record of mental illness into a "history of mental problems." It's why I don't read newspapers. It's a whorish profession.

I'm not paranoid schizophrenic, I'm not schizoid, I'm not schizotypal, I'm not anything. The best my court-mandated psychologist can come up with is that I am, quote, "different, definitely Asperger-y. You are not a threat to yourself or others and you do not require supervision." And when it is convenient for me to do so, I will direct him to terminate the therapy. He has indicated that he will do so, as he can find no compelling reason to continue.

There. Hopefully everyone is up to speed.

Mister Saunders, does our professional relationship obviate your responsibility to buy your ticket to my show? No it does not, because the professional distinction though it may be, being in your hands-off legal protective custody doesn't pay the bills.

You run that office, right? When did you get that promotion? It feels good to get a promotion, doesn't it? We are propelled in this world by the prospect of improving our situations. You want to know the last time I got a promotion? 1988. That was when I got promoted to E-5, Petty Officer Second Class. For reasons I do not understand, promotions in the civilian world never seemed to come. Every time I turned around, someone was stealing from me and passing my own achievements off as their own, getting themselves fat raises and big offices, offering me not so much as a by-your-leave.

I never had any illusions of being on TV or in a movie, not with doing the significant material that I do. And that is why I chose to work within a ticket-based revenue model. It's D-I-Y. See? No one can interfere with my success if I rent the theater myself and sell tickets.

But ah! Now's there's some extra-special reason why I can't get paid!

I demand my due. And you and your buddies are going to give it to me.

I am an entertainer. There is a compact between us, a rights-and-responsibilities relationship. I have the responsibility to entertain and inform you. And I have the right to get paid so that I can keep the lights on.

You, as an audience member, have the right to be entertained and informed. And you have the responsibility to pay me so that I can keep the lights on.

It is an extremely simple relationship, one that has always governed show business.

What part of that do you and your law enforcement confreres not understand?

That so-called jurisdiction elicits nothing but contempt from any reasonable person anyway. I couldn't care less that you may be in possession of a piece of paper that indemnifies you in the taking of my intellectual property. Everyone's got pieces of paper. This world is full of paper. In order for your piece of paper to trump all other pieces of paper --including the one that details our audience/performer rights and responsibilities compact-- it has to have some moral propulsive force behind it.

Can you claim with a straight face that that disease you work for possesses the moral authority even to display its malignant face in polite society, much less make demands of anyone?

Of course not. You need to get with it, Saunders. The jurisdiction has died. You, being the dead-ender that you are, are the last to know this. You're clutching these grand legal pronouncements to your breast as if they're the word of God.

You are in possession of legal papers which carry about as much weight as those of the Confederate States of America.

I remain very fond of you. But I am losing patience with you and the rest of my audience.

Purchase your ticket.