Hey, I meant figuratively, damn it. That smarts! I’ve only got two legs, you know. And two arms, so go easy. Ouch! Watch it, friend…. I’ve only got one of those. Accursed gendarmes!
Oh, crikey. You heard all that then, didn’t you? Geez. Welcome back to the house of pain, a.k.a. the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, now in the process of being more abandoned than ever. That is to say, our little squatting party is being forcibly broken up by thugs from the local constabulary, hired on their off hours by building contractors who have been lusting after this piece of land for some months now. Like Colombian death squads in the night, they shed their uniforms and do their dirty work. Bastards! How the hell did Marvin (my personal robot assistant) work with these fiends?
Yeah, so anyway — the lawyer thing didn’t pan out. Nobody wanted to take the case, even with our financial advisor Geet O’Reilly’s persistent urging, egged on by a blue-spotted Mitch Macaphee. No money in it, you see? Not a good prospect. Oh… and our little impromptu protest, reported on in these pages last week, had little or no effect, other than to light a fire under the constables, who were pounding on our door just a few mornings later with the writ of eviction tucked into their baby-blue helmets. Take it from me, this is not the sort of thing you want to wake up to. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think real fast in the morning…. so my first inclination was to try to 
give them the slip. That was plan C from outer space, quite frankly. (My idea, I’m afraid…)
Plan C went like this: Matt, John and I snuck out the back door of the Cheney Hammer Mill, along with the Big Zamboola, who is the only other member of our entourage that gets out of bed early. None of us has any kind of motor vehicle at this point, so we had to walk past the v-formation of heavily armed police attempting to dislodge us from our lodgings (or de-mill us from our millings, to be more precise). Perhaps it was that sixth sense all constables have that tipped them off to our presence, working our way up a side street (or perhaps it was the admittedly incongruous sight of Big Zamboola — a man-sized planetoid — bouncing up the street like one of those oversized “earth” balls). We thought we had shaken them when I felt that big, cold hand on my shoulder. Man… I should have listened to Zamboola’s rantings for once. Usually he’s talking 
about sandwiches, you know
Hokey smokes – so we’ve been served. And I don’t mean somebody has shown us their killer dance moves. I mean the constables handed us the eviction notice. So it’s on. I’d have to say Marvin’s reaction has been the most dramatic so far. Panhandling. Panhandling… on the first day of our grace period. We haven’t even been tossed out yet, and he’s working the streets. Sheesh. (Hope he picks up enough for a pizza — I’m freaking
starving.)
more and more inevitable with each passing week. Some say the hostilities have already begun, and there can be little doubt that the more clandestine limbs of our $400+ billion-a-year military octopus are now coiling their way through the Persian hinterlands, just as they did for many years in Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion. You would think that someone in the administration would understand what a huge mistake such an adventure would be… but it pays to remember that these folks truly believe Operation Iraqi Freedom has been a screaming success. And if today’s Iraq is what “success” looks like, then a bloody, protracted regional war sparked by an attack on Iran will likely be viewed as a great triumph by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld (the never-say-die kid) and Rice. And Hannity and Limbaugh. Did I forget anyone? Good — then we just need six helmets, six rifles, and a flight to Teheran. Let’s get this party started! 
liable to be sent over there to kill or be killed, so you would tend either to be on the “victory” bandwagon or on the barricades of the anti-war movement. It took a long time even under those circumstances for opposition to build, but eventually it reached a magnitude that deeply troubled policymakers and forced action. Today, the draft would never be tolerated. And the main engine for opposing the Iraq war is resistance by military families, who have been given the full burden to bear on their own.