ope John Paul II staunchly refused to die this weekend, in spite of numerous reports to the contrary from an impatient media. Despite showing a complete lack of vital signs and near-total rigor mortis, “the tough old bastard is still hanging on for some reason,” according to Vatican doctors.

Thousands of people gathered in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican Friday night to pray for the pope, though it was unclear whether the assembled were praying for the pope to live forever or praying that the tired old man would finally kick it. Attempts to investigate this question further led to this reporter being rudely hushed several times and hit once with a bagel.

Anxious news organizations from around the world literally hung on the pope’s every breath last week, itching to be the first to report that the revered religious figure and patron saint of child molesters had gone on to meet his employer. Several trigger-happy reporters claimed that the pope had finally died on Saturday, exhaling a visible plume of stale pope smoke before vanishing like a Jedi Knight cut in two by an evil stunt man. The Vatican even went along with the announcement, apparently tired of providing hors d’oeuvres for the thousands of assembled reporters and candle-waving, tie-died burnouts camped out in the Vatican lobby.

But the jig was finally upped when the pope requested that the “loud music be turned down” during his own funeral mass on Sunday, and the international death-watch continued for the very small band of reporters remaining from hardscrabble news outlets such as the commune, Carob Baking Monthly and the Montana Cuntsman who either had nothing better to do or had vowed to see this story through to its true, bitter end, be that now or at some time between now and when our return trip flight vouchers expire.

Some blame the media’s impatience on the unexpectedly long death wait for American hospital patient Terri Schiavo over the previous two weeks, combined with the first signs of nice spring weather, which has reporters itching to get out of the dusty old Vatican and into some loudly-colored shorts. Others point to a growing suspicion among reporters, called paranoid by some, that the pope can’t die.

While scientists not from Italy doubt the feasibility of such claims, Pope John Paul II has already achieved a sort of longevity not seen since the currently late Strom Thurmond (R-South Carolina) refused to stay dead through the second half of the 20th century. This evidence, combined with the pope’s reportedly strong knowledge of hoodoo, has some concerned that this story could drag on for years.

“Mark my words, this is going to go on like those Friday the 13th movies, man,” prophesied pope-watcher Dennis Marbury. “You can’t kill the pope with a knife, gun, or by locking him in a tool shed and dropping it out of an airplane into the Pacific Ocean. That dude’s not going anywhere until he gets his birthday cake.”

Others wonder just why the pope is hanging on so long, considering that he’s supposed to be in so good with God and everything and probably should be happy about kicking off and clicking his heels on up to the big buffet in the sky.

Meanwhile, nervous Catholics the world over await the pope’s final words with constantly renewed baited breath, fingers crossed that the religious leader’s last utterances won’t be anything along the lines of “Psych!” or “Gotcha, suckers!”

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Good people, if there are any of you left, I am outraged. Old school outraged, the way I used to get before Rokwell T. Finger jumped the shark and started involving myself with pro-wrestling and the Russian mob. For some reason, domestic annoyances bother me more than all the lost-at-sea pirate trials and tribulations I've ever experienced. I'm telling everyone, no matter what the realtor says, I have a two-car garage.

I hardly think it's the right of some tubby woman named Sandy to decide how many cars I can fit in my garage. Yet when she sold me this house, Sandy got all high-and-mighty telling me what I could do with it. Three bedrooms, one and a half bath, a basement, and a one-car garage. Well, needless to say, I was offended. It's a big garage. What official garage-judging organization ruled mine could only hold one car? I threw her out of the house immediately, and regretted having already signed the papers to buy it. I can't help that. I don't feel right stepping into an unowned house.

Ever since then I've been fighting the one-car garage demon. There's got to be a way around this tyranny. You can store five motorcycles, side by side, pretty comfortable, and up to 29 non-motorized bikes if you lay them on their side and stack them. Not very convenient, but I still take pride in knowing the ultimate capabilities of my garage. Not that it helps in the matter of cars.

Now, my car is a Lincoln with some homemade fins on each side, so it hardly makes for a good test subject for maximizing garage efficiency. I had to find a way to get my hands on at least two cars, preferably compacts. But who knows, I could have fit three in with enough resources at hand.

I first approached my friends at the commune and asked to borrow their cars for my experiment. They weren't very willing to oblige me. Omar Bricks threatened to throttle me and implied I was making fun of him. But I had no luck borrowing any cars, so I had to rent some from one of these new-fangled car-renting places. I would rather have had the Knight Rider and the Dukes of Hazzard car, but all they had left were boring ones. Still, I got enough for the experiment.

I will grant Sandy, filthy, conspiring Sandy, that it is quite difficult to fit two cars into my garage, but it's far from impossible. Inconvenient, I'll grant. Perhaps even dangerous and a foolhardy gesture. But I did it, damn you, Sandy. I could not park two cars parallel, either facing the back wall or the sides, and there was no success in parking them perpendicular. Sure, technically you're in the garage, but since the door wouldn't close I doubt it counts. I was ready to give up, to park Camembert's wheelchair next to the single car and call it a one-and-a-half car garage. Then inspiration struck, when I recalled my failure to get the Duke boys' car at the rental place. Surely some clever stunt driving could put one extra car in a garage with so much headroom.

Trying to simply jump the car into the garage failed. I flattened the bottom car on the one occasion I didn't hit the garage itself. Perhaps if I had landed the top on the bottom perfectly, I could have gotten the door closed, but I found it impossible to do. My success came, instead, when I set up some half-ramps and got the second car on two wheels—I practically glided right into that garage. It scuffed, scratched, maybe even crushed the bottom car's side, some could say, but I think I've proven my point, Sandy. Your one-car garage is a limited concept whose time has come. My garage is a two car garage, for the seasoned driver. Not that those two cars can ever be returned to the rental agency, and I may need expensive repairs to the garage. But as I've stated time and again, nothing is more important than being right.

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Well well, welcome back to the chaotic worm fart that is my life. I don't know what it is that's out there, call it God, Buddha or the force, whichever stirs your Kool-Aid, but I have discovered that it has a sense of humor.

Over the past couple of months I had worked my life into a pretty boring rut. Don't get me wrong, I still think my life is the shit stuffed between two slices of bitchin', but every once in a while I need some adventure. Now I'm not talking about a road-trip-go-see-stuff kind of adventure, but your bona fide "Indiana Jones-Grand Theft Auto-pull a badass heist like in that movie Heat" kind of adventure. You know the essentials: drugs, hookers, and all kinds of "ill shit."

It took about two seconds to decide that the best setting onto which to unleash my bad self was America's Playground. No, not the multi-colored play area I've been living in at the McDonalds down the street, because last week those bitches took my land and slapped me with a restraining order, just to put the In'jun in injury. Those imperialist dogs got their anus in an Andy just because I went in there pretending to be blind, then demanded loudly that my seeing-eye midget be given twenty Happy Meals for free to make up for my disability.

Leave it to Nevil to fuck up my wet dream.

Everything was going smoothly at first; they even put a toy in every Happy Meal. Booya. But what I hadn't noticed was that Nevil was walking in circles around me the whole time, following a bug or something, and before long his leash was coiled around my body like a goddamned python. Playing it smart, or at least blind, I kept my eyes closed through the con. If there were any witnesses, there'd be no way those rat fucks could scream out "Hey I thought that guy was supposed to be blind! He was all lookin' around and shit!" just to ruin my good time.

Then I heard something that sounded like the dude behind the counter dropping one of the Happy Meal toys on the ground. Either that, or it was an entire Mariachi band stomping on cockroaches, but I considered that possibility less likely given the situation. Either way, Nevil's instincts from his time in the wild took over and he pounced on that toy like Ted Kennedy on spilt booze. Thanks to the leash, that little shit spun me so hard I turned into a blind tornado, devastating everything in my path. My seeing-eye cane smashed against the wall and I accidentally stabbed the day-shift manager in the pills with the sharp end. And the dude did not take it well. I said that I was sorry and shit, what the hell else did he want? The worst part is, I didn't even get my Happy Meals before they chased me out of there with buckets of hot French fry oil.

The wound didn't kill that prick, but apparently it went deep enough that my face and novelty tee-shirt stuck in his memory, and now I'm permanently banned from every McDonalds by old Ronald himself. I can't go within a mile of any of their establishments without risking extradition to the Royal Court of McDonald in Paraguay for a life sentence of breaking rocks and making apple pie pockets. Those fuckers even put up police sketches of me in every restaurant they own. Lousy sketches, too. Who am I, Jesse James? Now what in the hell am I supposed to do for food?

Thanks to the McDonalds incident my whole caper had to be moved to Las Vegas, which is still cool, but can't hold a flame to that play-pen. But since I was planning on letting it all hang out in Vegas, I needed to find someone to watch Nevil for me while I was gone. It's never fun to lose a midget in the city that never sleeps, plus he's far too sensitive to be exposed to 99% of the shit that goes down in that mafia wonderland. Finding a midget sitter was harder than I'd expected, because I really didn't want to pay anyone and I had no idea when I would be coming back. One by one, my neighbors slammed their doors in my face like I was a naked Jehovah's Witness selling used condoms. Man did that bring back memories.

Down but damn sure not out, I dreamt up the perfect solution to my problem: I took Nevil out behind my apartment complex and chained him to a fire hydrant. And I didn't pay the hydrant shit. Who knows, maybe some sympathetic pedestrian stopped and fed him salad croutons or something while I was gone, stranger things have happened. "Good work Mickey, way to kill two birds with one stone," I said out loud. Then I hopped into the back of a pickup truck driven by some Mexican who looked like he was headed to Vegas, and prepared to blow the world's mind.

When I reached the city of sin, I was in high spirits from all the fresh air and a can of boot black I'd found in the pickup's bed. "I'm young, relatively healthy, and ready for what the night will bring," I thought to myself. Thirteen minutes later I was in a strip club, and I didn't come out for two days. Mainly because I spent all my money in that first half hour, after which the mentally unstable-looking bouncers stapled me to the wall in the men's room. They used me as a human spring-loaded billy club dummy for about nine hours, then it was decided that I had repaid my debt.

I could have left sooner than I did, but it took some time for my fractured shins to heal up enough for me to drag myself out through the bathroom window. It was a tight squeeze, but enough of my ribs were broken that I was able to squirm right on through. Just let it be known for the record that I think something is wrong with my spine, because every time I step on my left foot I piss my pants, then barf up dry-roasted peanuts.

I couldn't think too clearly at that time because from all evidence my skull was cracked, and a piece of my brain was dangling carelessly out of one of my ears. While I was trying to remember who I was, what language I spoke and why my feet were covered in dead purple cow-flesh, some homeless crackhead wandered upon my mutilated body and started poking me with what was left of an umbrella. He was eyeing me like I was going to be in his next homemade snuff film, which is why it surprised me when he leaned down and put a crack pipe to my lips, while motioning for me to inhale.

With all the breath I could muster, I forced my torn diaphragm and punctured lung to fill with the thick white smoke. This guy must have been the Yoda of homeless crack addicts, because in minutes I was on my feet, and feeling better than ever. And I do mean ever. After a few more tokes I felt like a million bucks, and all my limbs were working again. But when I looked up to thank my crank-fueled angel of mercy, that little ninja fuck had vanished like a welfare check. Oh well, off to face the city once again.

Feeling rejuvenated, I wandered into the cheapest motel that I could find, which was an empty dumpster behind the Golden Nugget. My trip hadn't started off exactly as I'd expected, but I still had big plans for this monument to man's greed. Mickey Hanes was born to take advantage of a town where the only moral is that if you have enough money, you can do whatever the fuck you want. For the first time in three days, I closed my eyes and rested.

In the morning I awoke to the all-too-familiar sound of a dump truck lifting my dumpster into the crisp morning air. With a quickness I dismounted the dumpster using skills I didn't know I had. I floated through the air almost in slow motion, graceful as a ballet dancer dodging blowdarts. If an angel had seen the grace and elegance of my execution, he would have pissed himself.

The landing, however, was a completely different can of beans. Cirque du Soleil doesn't have shit on me. Caught up completely in my kick-ass performance, I forgot a small but important detail... the landing. I remembered the landing only in retrospect, after the sidewalk tried to shove itself dow

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