Back Surgery My Ass

I just got back last night from my favorite spot in the Eastern Sierra, where I had spent a little over a week out of the reach of telephones and the internetz and civilization in general, and boy, are my neural synapses tired. About the only communication with the outside world that I had while I was busy fishing, hiking and sitting around campfires were Giants baseball games on the radio at night and early edition newspapers purchased at the camp's general store every morning. It was through those papers that I learned about Jim Carroll, Patrick Swayze, Mary Travers and Henry Gibson all having died in the same week.

Jim Carroll?!? Fuck!! I thought he died years ago.

(Aside -- last time I was there, Tim Russert and a few other notable folks passed on, and if I was a celebrity, I'd start to get worried every time Mrs. G and I plan a camping trip.)

Anyway... it was in one of those early edition newspapers -- the Reno Gazette-Journal, I believe -- that I read last Friday or Saturday about the former Shitbag in Chief Vice-President, Dick Motherfucking Cheney, having recently undergone a surgical procedure that, according to the article, was supposed to alleviate some back problems that he's had for a while. Something about the brief item just didn't seem all that believable to me, though, and I'm not exactly sure why. Torquemada Dick Cheney getting routine back surgery just to take care of a little pain? The man who has made a career of talking tough out of the side of his mouth (albeit while taking five deferments to stay out of the Vietnam War, and never actually having experienced combat or any semblance of it in his fucking life -- unless you count the shooting-his-friend-in-the-face incident as some kind of battlefield dust-up), succumbing to a little oh-my-aching-back?

Naaah. I don't buy it.

What I think really happened is that a crack surgical team of Satan-appointed Josef Mengele clones opened Cheney up just wide enough to spoon in another heapin' helpin' of the Pure Unadulterated Evil that fills the hole in his chest where his heart should be; the glowing, radioactive malevolence that courses through his nearly-collapsed veins and keeps that malicious son of a bitch alive. The brimstone coursed through the intravenous tubes, the aroma of dozens of sacrificed virgin newborns wafted through the operating theater and the demonic host busied themselves recharging the batteries of wickedness inside the American Darth Vader, readying him for battle against the forces of liberalism and steadying him for more disingenuous appearances on Fox News. I think that's what really happened

You are free to disagree with this theory, of course, but lacking any concrete empirical evidence to the contrary, I remain convinced that my scenario is the true one.