I am in no mood to talk, gentle readers. Fortunately I can do my column in a written fashion, although it throws me off my game not to hear my own voice ranting as I freestyle my diatribe. But my voice hurts too much to even think about talking—see? That just now hurt really bad. I am sick with the influenza.

At least that’s what doctors tell me. I have much darker suspicions that I have been infected with the CIA’s latest death virus.

Doctors, friends, and those folks at the radio call-in show are quick to doubt me, I know, but it only makes my suspicions stronger. They ask me, “Why would the CIA waste time trying to kill you?” Of course, that question has a list of answers a mile long. There’s my controversial columns which someone must be reading, influencing a whole generation of hypothetical readers toward an underground revolution. Or there’s what I did last year in the city of Branson, Missouri’s water supply. And these two things are only at the top of the list. Frankly, who knows? They’re the CIA. I don’t pretend to understand their motivations, even as I make them up.

All that matters is this may well be true. As you may know, the CIA are not to be fucked with, sir, when it comes to death viruses. They invented the best of them—AIDS, syphilis, Hong Kong flu, herpes. I hear tell one of them even escaped the lab and got a talk show under the name Jenny Jones. These people are clearly the go-to folks when it comes to inventing death viruses. And if this one is their latest, it stands to reason I’m in big, contagious trouble.

The doctor was right about one thing—nothing you can do but let it run its course. So I’m taking a fatalistic approach to it all, I suppose, saying what happens happens. Of course, this doesn’t stop me from making our Marketing VP Sully work on a cure 24 hours a day, minus lunch. I’ve also cursed the name of God for letting this happen and trashed a church, but I was probably going to do that anyway.

The worst thing about any cold, even a death virus, is being sick all the time. Snotty, sore throat, always rushing to the bathroom at the drop of a hat, or something less hat-like. Everything in my office is germ-ridden and nasty. I’ve gotten the commune cleaning staff (a.k.a. the copywriting desk) to come in and scrub down my office every two hours, just to keep it less contagious—also, I admit, I’m a little curious to see how quick they catch it, to see what this death virus can really do. I’ve also had them empty all my jars of urine, since when they began to get in the way I had to confess I really didn’t have much idea what I was saving them for.

In the even of my death, however, seeing as how this is a death virus, I believe the commune will be in good hands. I’ve assigned editorial duties to Sully, Mazie the Chicken, Lil Duncan, and celebrity heartthrob Leif Garrett, just to shake things up a bit. Each will have the reigning editorial duties on a certain day of the month, from first to fourth. On the event of a rare fifth Monday, responsibility for those duties will be determined by a battle to the death. Perhaps a bit extreme, but I’m damned to determine to see the creative control doesn’t suffer due to my brother’s meddling and the CIA’s attempt to kill me.

Sure, I suppose I could get better, but you have to plan for the worst. After all, this all probably could have been avoided if I had invested in that hermetically-sealed personal bubble I planned on buying after seeing that John Travolta movie all those years ago.