The Acting-Editor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea

I open this column with a firm and hearty, "Thanks, dicks." This is not directed to you dicks reading at home, but to the dicks who neglected to inform me Red Bagel had returned and the commune staff was operating normally under his rule again. I was barricaded in that office since May, fearing swift and brutal retaliation, while at any time someone could have knocked on the door and said I was merely demoted again. True, I probably would have considered it an attempt to lure me out and not believed them, but it was worth a shot.

It's all meaningless what-iffery by now, since I was forced to come out to use a regular rest room after my coffee can filled up, and noticed the staff laughing rather than lunging at me with swords and daggers. When I asked, someone even told me Bagel had annexed the floor above us for his own new office, and I could have the dank dungeon I had made my own since January, if the smell of human waste didn't nauseate me. It doesn't, so I thank Bagel's kindness and take it as a minor promotion for all my good work in his stead.

As you can tell by all this, I'm no longer a big deal around the commune offices. But from what I understand, if the door to the office had been open when Bagel returned I would have been castrated and choked with a frayed electrical cord, so waiting had its advantages as well. After enough time, and self-prescribed morphine, Bagel was back in a friendly mood and decided to merely demote me to King of Dinks, a title which Raoul Dunkin had to relinquish to me.

Some could see it as failure, but I look at it as an inverted success. Sometimes you have to fall back to the bottom of the ladder and start your career over to move ahead. And that's what I'm doing at the commune. Also, as you can see, I was mightily addicted to sharing my thoughts with the readers after months of filling in on Bagel's "Or So You Thought" column, so I decided to introduce my new rotating column "Poop of the Century." True, I wanted a regular semi-weekly feature like Finger or Bricks, but it was Bagel's suggestion I do a periodic column or sit on it and rotate, hence the idea. He was right, too; now that I'm freed of the duties of Acting-Editor I can return to my first love, masturbation—I mean, reporting. Sitting in my smelly office writing columns all day isn't my style, at least Bagel says so.

Unfortunately, the call to write a column is muddled with the call to prove to the world I'm not dead, so that's mostly what this beginner's column is about. It's important I get my Social Security number reinstated so I can find a new apartment and re-open my bank account. Personally, I'd hoped someone at the commune might have mentioned I was in the office and hadn't been killed on the job as the death certificate said, but in fairness, as Lil Duncan said, everyone was extremely busy trying to bust the piñata when the investigators dropped by.

Don't expect this little corner of the commune to be another self-indulgent crybaby's story of the little things in life that piss him off. Let the other columnists engage in that ego-stroking. Ramrod Hurley is interested in tackling the bigger issues of the day, and blowing your mind in the process. That's a lot to do in one column, one particular edition might have more blowing and less issue-tackling, but in general I'll try to mix the two well enough.

I just hope you readers are into getting tackled and blown.