They Came Through the Floorboards

by Jim Kopetz

"This is the way the fucking world ends! Look at this fucking shit we're in, man! Not with a bang, but with a whimper. And with a whimper, I'm fucking splitting, Jack." - The Photo Journalist in Apocalypse Now.

It all started with a whimper. I was in my room, polishing off a bottle of Old Crow and reading David Cross's I Drink For A Reason when I heard a subtle tear hit the floor beneath me. At that moment, I knew I was fucked.

They swarmed like locusts, crashing through the windows and gnawing their way through the floorboards. They were heavily armed and screaming at me while speaking in tongues and rolling around on what was left of my floor. It was a matter of minutes before I was hogtied. They were so high on bottles of liquid GHB that they completely forgot about reading me my rights and arresting me in proper fashion, but that was never their intention. And when I say rights I mean it in an Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin definition of rights. They gagged me a bit, poured grain alcohol down my throat. They stomped on my record collection, and burned my books. For some reason they left my DVD/Bluray collection untouched. A bit of taste I assume. Then came the beating.

Each removed his or her shoes in a vague ceremonial act, continued by removing their socks. Eventually they were down to the bare necessities, and that's when the wrestling began. I was thrown into a jerry-rigged ring and sprayed with Pam. Then things went dark. They put a sack over my head and began poking me from all angles. I slipped and fell, screaming into a hallucinatory black hole. Things were getting strange.

After spraying me down and toweling me off, they focused my attention on a computer screen by nuzzling my face with the muzzles of their rifles, giggling as I winced at the pain of a hot barrel. (Did I mention they nearly killed both my cats? Luckily the GHB was of high quality and they had no depth perception.) Skype was loading on the computer screen. Suddenly I found myself face to face with him, the President himself, Mr. Barack Obama. President Obama greeted me with a smile, but quickly got down to the details. These were his conditions:

   1. I am not to criticize the administration in any way. Failure to comply will lead to incarceration.

   2. I am not to publish anything by Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, or Bradley Manning; unless it is about their acts of "treason".

   3. The NSA has absolutely nothing to do with this, and if I to suggest that they were, they would release my browser history to the public.

The President ended his treatise by waving a disappointed finger at me and, if my eyes do not deceive me, snorted a line of some very pure crank before the camera shut off. 

The Men in Black left as quietly as they entered, crunching on various edibles retrieved from my cabinets. The mole men retreated underground; the window crashers jumped out through the very windows they entered and ran off into the sunset. And our President was very, very high on pink.

But have no fear. I shall continue to write the truth, even if the bastards come again; this time for my scalp. This is the prelude to the end of the world.