Little Deuce Coup

To those of you out there who think you can bust down my heavily barricaded office door with your flimsy limbs and pathetic, jerryrigged battering devices, I say bring it on. Unless you happen to be a huge and well-built muscleman, in which case I say don't come in here, I'm naked. And if you'd like to pick up some spare change for your supplements and muscle fuel, kindly pound the rest of my staff into quivering, mutinous jelly while you're out there.

Welcome to day two of the commune staff's soon-to-be-unsuccessful coup against yours truly, Acting-Editor Ramrod Hurley. They may think they can outlast me out there, what with their access to the outside world and all, but I have a secret weapon those dolts don't even know about: a case of army rations from WWII that Red Bagel had stashed away under the suspicion that they contained alien fetuses. Whatever kind of fetuses they have in them, they're delicious.

So don't expect me to crawl out of this office on my hands and knees waving a white flag any time soon, communers. Sure, I could use some medical attention for a gangrenous paper cut on my ankle, and using the windowsill for a toilet got old about 30 hours ago, but they can have this office when they pry my stiff, emaciated corpse out from behind the file cabinet, where I've built a makeshift fort in case the outer wall is breached.

It all started last week, when I found the office staff gathered around a television set playing grainy home-video footage of a mysterious figure striding across a street in some unnamed US city. Nobody wanted to say anything while I was in the room, but it was obvious everyone knew what this was.

Red Bagel. Alive.

It was then that I began to feel my igloo of lies collapsing in around me. Sure, I'll admit it, I'd been telling the staff Bagel died within a month of his disappearance, in a gas station bathroom during a botched abortion attempt. It was the only way I could demand the respect and obedience of the staff, get them to stop calling me "dickface" and end the childish outbursts of "You're not my real editor! I'll stay up as late as I want!" all the time. And now my roosters had come home to roost. Proof of Bagel's survival, writ large on the small screen.

Leave it to the commune staff to get all up in my head with mind games, like pretending there hasn't been a coup at all. That the coffee has always been this bad and that the staff was just watching Signs last week, the creature seen waltzing across the street on TV just some bugged-out space alien from the film. Nice try, commune staff. But anyone who's sat a mile in Red Bagel's office chair knows that he would never risk techno-viral infection by setting foot on a Hollywood movie set. Hurley: 1, Coupers: 0.

Besides, I've seen the effigy of my likeness they had strung up in the office last week, and I don't buy the claims that it was just a piñata. I know a piñata when I see one, and that thing was clearly a jackass, an obvious reference to the staff's term of endearment for me, Acting-Editor Ramrod Hurley.

So let's drop the charade and bring the noise, commune staff. I'm stocked to weather this storm. And I'll be here waiting to accept your unconditional surrender once you realize the hopelessness of your situation, on one condition: That you bring pizza, beer and toilet paper with you. And don't forget the TP.

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