12:22 pm | 14 October 2004 | a funny thing happened on the way to my journal

I was making a sarcastic fake Bush monologue and then it got sad, suddenly. [shrugs]

Many of you are saying that the square thing under my coat means I'm wired. My fellow liberty-enjoyers, this is not the case. When I unleash the armies of compassion, I enjoy some tunes. It is my iPod.

You are asking what I listen to on my iPod? I cannot tell you. I don't really know. They load the MP2s on there and I listen to them. One has a girl with a pretty voice. One is I Believe I Can Fly. That song makes me happy, because I think about flying up in Heaven, when God will say: "You did a good job," and I will get the gold star sticker on my Freedom report card. And then I pray. I will tell you this, though: my iPod is not the Mini. It is the big one, and it is--green.

Or perhaps the plumb nuttiest of you lefty left-wingers are making jokes about me being a robot controlled by Carl Rove. I saw something like that once, on a cartoon about ninja turtles. But that's just plain goofy, saying there is a brain inside my body. Wait. That wasn't what I meant to say.

It's not body armor, either. That, too, is plain goofy. Why would I want to look bulkier under my nice blue suit? Liberty and freedom are not fat ideas, people. If I do not appear slender, then democracy will not spread like Dutch elm disease across...the Dutch elm orchards. In Iraq.

Why won't you believe me? Can't a man keep a box of animal crackers in his own suit coat for national security? I give those animal cookies out to the poor children of Wisconsin I meet. I shake some out of the circus-car box and put them in their little grabby American hands, passing them out, one by one, naming them as I go: Bear. Lio--tiger. Liger. A very large penguin.

All right, you got me. I did no such thing. My animal crackers are mine and are provided to me free of charge since I have some extra funny-money in my former pretzel fund. But Rumsfeld holds on to them for me and I only get to have them if I do a good job. I don't like this suit anymore. It's itching the small hairs on the back of my neck, and it pulls too tight across the shoulder blades. They stuck something under there. They said at first it was for identifying purposes, but I said "Uh-uh, you kidders. I already have my bracelet. It has a tag that says my name, and then where to take me if I get lost. Sometimes I get lost. But I never forget my homeland."

When I said that, they looked at each other. They were two men I never seen before. They looked like everyone else I know. Now sometimes when it's time for speeches, I feel real sleepy, and then something wonderful happens. It's like I can just relax, and somebody else is controlling my legs, walking me past the crowd and behind my little tall table, making my fist pound sometimes when the words I am somehow saying get important. I like this. The words I say are good words that I like, and they are about Freedom and Liberty. I always learned these are good words and now I can say them even in my sleep. I'm so tired.