Historically-speaking, this has been a big week.  After all, it isn’t every day that we find out who was responsible for Richard Nixon’s fall (it was of course, Dick Cheney).  On the subject of important stuff we did years ago and then decided to keep secret until after we died, but then we got a little older and decided to cash in on it instead then, I’ve decided, for the first time ever (except for all the people I already told about it) to tell about how I was once a hunted man by the JMU police (Motto:  If you’re having fun, we’re not doing out job right).

 

            It all started one night, my Junior year.  Kevin had already been driven from my presence, and I had the room to myself.  As a result, I did what any healthy young man would do, and fixed my self a cup of noodles.  Just as I was getting ready to eat said noodles though, the phone rang.  On the other end was a girl from my church group, calling to ask where on earth I was, as the Vestry dinner was tonight.  The Vestry you see, is like the council of Poobahs for a given Episcopal Church, and I happened to be on ours.  As most things do, this had completely slipped my mind, and a buttered ham slips from the grasp of a hungry orangutan.  I asked if I ought to come over to the church then, but she said that she’d just pick me up if I waited in the parking lot next to Frederickson Hall.  And so, taking my hat and flannel shirt (which were, in those days, the source of all my dark powers), I headed out the door.

 

            As I stood there in the parking lot, it eventually dawned upon me that there are many more interesting things in this world that standing in a parking lot.  It also dawned upon me that right beside me stood a very nice tree.  It was a rather smallish tree, but of sturdy shape, with broad and low lying branches spreading over the lot.  Whether it was the chill of the night air or the ululating spirits of my arboreal marmoset ancestors, I never knew, but I climbed the tree.  Now, as I have said, it was a rather diminutive tree, and as a result, when I got as high off the ground as I trusted it to bear me, I wasn’t really so very far above the earth as I originally expected.  But there I sat, for a couple of minutes, all of three and a half feet off the ground, feeling quite pleased with myself for making such a harrowing ascent and feeling vaguely annoyed that I was still waiting.  Then my arms got tired and I climbed down, waited a few more minutes, and when my ride at last arrived, I hopped in and we were off to Luigi’s Pizzatorium.

 

            I remember but one thing about dinner that night, at it is this: for the entire three hours or so that we were there, they were playing nothing but Rod Stewart songs.  It was as if Luigi had mistakenly spent a large sum of money on the complete Rod Stewart collection, and was trying to get the most mileage he could out of it.  Indeed, to this very day, I can’t listen to Rod Stewart without thinking about pizza, nor can I listen to a pizza without thinking of Rod Stewart.  I think our conversation was really mostly about monkeys and Methodists, but I can’t be sure.  Anyways, when all was over, I went home, fell asleep, and thought no more of the night until two days later.

 

            Two day later, I was sitting in our suite and one of the other guys who lived there was reading the school paper (I believe I was building a giant pair of robotical monkey claws that I had dreamed about the night before).  It was the case that at that time, JMU was in the clutches of a terrible wave of peepings.  All across campus, women were reporting guys looking in their windows, walking in on the girls’ bathrooms, all sorts of things.  The crime log reflected this plague of peepage, and suddenly Joe (for such was his name among our people) laughed aloud.  “Hey Ben,” quoth he, “this guy in the Crime Log sounds just like you!”  I laughed as well, how silly it was, to imagine me in the crime log, oh the very ridiculosity of it all. “Really,” he said, “here it is:  A man was sighted in a tree at 8:00 Tuesday night, in the parking lot outside of White Hall, sitting in a tree.  It is believed that he was trying to gain a view of the second story windows of the neighboring dorm.  The police were called, but the suspect escaped in a dark sedan which picked him up and drove off before they could apprehend him.  He was described by witnesses and being a tall, shaggy man, with a brown cowboy hat and a red flannel shirt over a tie-dye shirt.”  I thought it was all terribly funny at first, but then a chill of terror ran down my back.  “Which parking lot was it again?” I asked. “White Hall, oh wait, it was Frederickson,” Joe saith.  Dun Dun DUN! 

 

            In a moment, I had been transformed from a happy go lucky college student into a happy go lucky fugitive.  I knew at once that I could never go to the police and tell them the truth.  The outrage of the recent epidemic of peeping had reached fever pitch, and with nobody else arrested thus far, I knew that no justice awaited me with the authorities.  I did what any sane man would do, I freaked out.  I got a haircut, decided to stop wearing my hat for a couple of weeks until this all blew over.  I put away my usual wardrobe of red flannel shirts and tie-dye, and started wearing a wife-beater and overalls to disguise my identity.  Two days later my secret became too funny to keep to myself, so I told all my friends about it and made a big copy of the Crime Log and taped it to my door.  Shortly thereafter the peeping stopped, and most of us suspected that it had been built more upon rumors and ugly girls who thought that guys would want to catch them in the shower.  But now, I feel that the truth can at last be told, and lucrative book deals and a spot on Letterman can at last be mine.

           Interdimensional warlords.  All of us know at least a few, whether from professional life, seeing them on the Home Shopping Network, or even just working with them in the glee club.  But most of us, alas, don’t really have them as a part of our daily lives in a personal sense.  This is totally wack, needless to say (though I just did anyway) and I have decided to introduce to y’all, my faithful audience, one of the Richmond area’s most up and coming warlords.  But really, how can any of us truly know a man unless we know from whence he came.  With this in mind, I give you this quick biblography of Twitch, and may it serve you as well as you shall serve him when he at last gains dominion o’er the tri-cities area.

 

            Twitch was born to King Arglebargle of the Realm of Pnut, and seemed at first to have been smiled upon by fate as few other men are, for Pnut is by far the most beauteous and carmel-coated of the Seven Kingdoms of Lorgon.  Alas, while yet a child, he was spirited away one night by the soulless ham ninjas of the Veil of Grok.  Yet even then the power of his destiny was strong upon him, for he beat them into Honey Dijon mustard (for that is what soulless ham ninjas are made from) like so many baby seals with the copy of “Pat the Bunny” which he had wisely kept with him.  Now however, young Twitch found himself alone in the wastelands of Bumwalla with nothing save for his pajamas, a book about a fluffy bunny, and his insatiable drive for conquest.

 

            It was in this environment that he flourished however, and before long all the clans of deciduous Zabaak mollusks fled when he hove into view on the horizon.  Always did he wander the wastes, accompanied by his giant blue ox, Jaqwanda, as he wore a hat made out of a living pig and planted apple trees everywhere (to this very day, the peasants of Bumwalla wear pigs for hats and live only on apples in honor of he who so long protected them).  At last he knew that he was ready to claim his place among the storied heroes of his people, but when he at last returned after years and innumerable adventures to the Kingdom of Pnut, he found that it had been torn down some years earlier to make way for a Bed, Bath and Beyond, and all the people of the kingdom had moved to South Dakota, which was totally far away.

 

            With no home to return to, Twitch traveled across the sea to the fabled academy of Meadowbrook High School.  The legends are not clear on how he traversed the ocean.  Some say that he carved a manatee into a catamaran, others that he glued a thousand hummingbirds to his hat and waited until they all decided to fly in the same direction, yet others say that he made a fiery chariot out of the box his refrigerator came in and harnessed a bunch of flying squirrels to it.  None can say for certain.  While at Meadowbrook, he developed his innate totally phat kung fu skillz under the tutelage of Dick Cheney.  He also joined the show choir, making many friends and allies, and helping out the Incredible Hulk when he was fighting his eating disorder (You no like Hulk! You think Hulk too fat!).  It was at this time that he was first contacted from beyond the grave by the totally sweet-looking blue glowing spirit of John Quincy Adams, who told him to work at the sketchiest movie rental place in all of Richmond, and then to quit after a week and get a job as a DJ (but not DJ from Full House, ‘cause Twitch is a dude).

 

            And so it came to pass, as the spirit had predicted, and for a time, DJing seemed to fill the world-domination shaped hole in his heart quite well.  But then one day, his old mentor, Dick Cheney brought him a melon bouquet in a basket made from a hollowed out armadillo, and told him that being a DJ and ruling the world are, in fact, not automatically the same thing.  Rather they are like simultaneously being Howard Dean, and a yam wrangler; they don’t really coincide unless you work at it.  This at last was the proverbial water buffalo in the sock drawer that Twitch had been awaiting, and now he knew his destiny at last.

 

            This destiny of course, is to take over the world (really, it’s not as if the people running it now are doing such a bang-up job anyway, there’s never any soap in the public restrooms, and deviled ham is damnably expensive these days), starting with Richmond, partly because he’s already here anyway, but mostly because Richmond is, as we all know, the center of the universe.  To this end, he built a super-secret transdimensional starbase, tucked away in a nearby subspace domain.  From here, Twitch continues his DJing, all the while working in subtle subliminal messages to get us to assist him in his mad quest and also to send him those little plastic tubes full of rubber dinosaurs that they sell at the science museum (don’t ask why, its that diabolically brilliant).  In preparation of the glorious day when at last his plans come to terrible and vivid fruition, he follows a daily regimen of yak-baiting, suburban kung fu tournaments against the unspeakable lizard men of Woodlake, and now and then mauling his weight in hobbits (they’re old, mean hobbits who live in underground trailer parks though, so don’t worry about Smeagol).  In closing, I exhort you all to do your part, if not now, then by taking up arms when the revolution of Twitch at last arrives.  Or barring that, to at least give the next unspeakable lizard man of Woodlake you see a good shoe wedgie (they really hate that).