(I actually wrote this last year, but as this is my third year in a row in this Baltimore neighborhood, and the same thing has happened three years in a row, I thought it was still relevant. I hope you find it interesting.)

Once when I was in college, I watched a black man get arrested on Maryland Avenue, right under my bedroom window. He was drunk and, faithful to some internal logic, had begun yelling nonsense at the top of his lungs. The police arrived within two minutes, their whooping sirens and flashing lights causing more upheaval than a hundred individual disturbers of the peace. What efficiency, I thought, especially considering they had never come for the dozens of shrieking white drunks who passed by that corner every week. Incensed, I was determined to set up a scientific experiment in which I would get drunk myself, stand on the street yelling, and see how long it took for me to get arrested, but in the end, I just ended up getting drunk and passing out on the floor. It must have been Wednesday.

Fifteen years ago, the world was a different place: George Bush was the president, we were at war in Iraq, and Neil Gaiman wrote a comic book called "Sandman," which provided a pleasant and intriguing escape when everything else seemed to be going to hell. Indulge me a moment, please, as I explain a little bit about the background of this series, so you will understand the story I am about to tell.

"Sandman" was about Morpheus, the shaper of dreams, usually portrayed as tall and thin as a rail, with pasty white skin and a thick shock of black hair; his eyes were jet black, a flash of red or blue often sparking from their depths. I say "usually" because he could take on the form of whatever culture and species he interacted with. Appearing to an African queen, he became a black man with dreadlocks. In the dreams of a Siamese cat, the Morpheus is a black tom, as large as a panther.

Some people say we need to amend our constitution to cope with the multitudes of godless liberals who run around burning the American flag. This is one hundred percent true, and how dare any of you hippie hypocrites say otherwise. If global warming exsits, the carbon released from burning flags is its chief cause. Noted communist Al Gore isn't going to show you THAT in any of his little animations, which is why you can't take a word he says seriously.

I also hear he farts a lot.

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I have to be the last person on Real Earth to start playing with Google Earth. Google Earth is a magical land you can look at on your computer screen. If you type in an address or the name of a landmark, you will swoop down on Google Earth from orbit and see a satellite photo of that place. If you then type in another address, Google Earth will gently bounce you back up into the atmosphere for the short journey to the new location. Google Earth makes me feel like an eagle, an eagle of inquisitive love.

Taking a cue from our omnipotent government, I have over the past few days spied on everyone in my address book from space. Sometimes, I am also spying through time. The photo of my parents' house was taken years ago, before they had a pool. The photo of my house shows our beloved backyard tree before it was mutilated by evil. You can see evil from space. There are times you can see it more clearly than others, depending upon the resolution.

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Thou shalt not compare anyone to a Nazi, particularly Hitler. That, it seems, is the cardinal rule of rhetoric, whether your opponent has made a film about global warming or has turned up at the Reichstag fire with a bag of marshmallows.

Indeed, it can be a careless charge to levy. Used casually, stupidly, it sanitizes the Nazis of their earth-shattering horror. Used with any seriousness or accuracy, it is seen as overkill, undercutting the argument and raising ire on all sides of it. Calmer heads will object, almost reflexively, when the Hitler card is played; I have seen endless internal debate on the liberal blogs when the inevitable Nazi/Republican comparisons are made, and this is one of the few things progressives can do that can grab the attention of the establishment media, no matter how misleading the charges can be. You undoubtedly remember the fiasco surrounding the MoveOn video contest, and others.

We're in the news again. Gays, that is. It's amazing the sizzling headlines we can generate just by wanting to get hitched, settle down, and bake cupcakes for our kids' birthday parties when coverage of, say, how hundreds of thousands of people have been brutally killed or dismembered because of our own president's lies has been so sparse.

But who am I to second-guess the judgment of our fine establishment media? To follow in their footsteps, I add more fuel to the fire here, when I might otherwise be paying attention to global warming. It's just that, in the hate fest that accompanied this past week's vote on the Federal Marriage Amendment, something occurred to me.

We are all well versed in the flights of fancy right-wing Christians will embark upon when describing the "homosexual agenda." In that spirit, I engage in some speculation as to the logic of their motivations.

(More on the flip.)

A reporter from the Washington Post wrote a story about my family. My father, who recently sold a business he built from the ground up for a pretty penny, had decided to set up my four brothers and I (and our spouses) in businesses of our own design, and the premise of the article was how these businesses interact on a commercial and family level.

(My own business, by the way, is an eco-friendly home store. I promise I'll tell you all about it when I get the e-commerce feature working!)

I was not interviewed by the reporter while he was writing the story, but he did call me at work to fact-check his article.

(More on the flip...)

A bird had become trapped in the train station. It flew frantically from window to window, seeking freedom. It swooped. It pecked. Feathers flew. Who could say how long it had been in this dilemma, ignored by the station employees and passers-by? It could have been starving or dying of thirst. It could have had a mate that was worried about it or a nestful of tiny beaks to feed. From one window to the next, it circled and flapped. Thirty feet above my head, it didn't approach the floor. There was no way for me to escort it safely out. There were no custodial employees in sight. When it was announced that my train was delayed by thirty minutes, I knew I could not spend that entire time in the presence of that poor creature, silent witness to its agony, so I got up to buy a chocolate-chip cookie.

That's when my multiple personalities declared civil war.

"How dare you eat a chocolate-chip cookie while that bird is suffering!" part of my mind demanded, a particularly shrill part of my mind that has heretofore chiefly concerned itself with slowing the fascist dismantling of our democracy.

The other part of my mind--the complacent part, the lazy part, the look-away part, the coward part, the dead part--was almost insanely reluctant to approach anyone about the issue. "You don't need to worry about it. Someone else will do something, sometime. Buy a cookie! Eat, eat, eat!" I wanted to comply, to recline back into my American haze, but after staring for some time at the cookie, insulated from the world in its case of spotless glass, I peeled myself away and forced myself to speak to the Amtrak officer in charge of Information.

"Um, I don't know if you're the right person to ask about this," I began miserably.

"Uhhhhhh hummmm," she said. There was a matte finish to her expression that indicated I had picked the wrong person to ask about anything, but I soldiered on.

"Well, there's a bird in here. Flying around over there. It looks like it's really upset."

"A bird?"

"Yes. Over there. Inside."

She didn't turn to look. "It ain't a pigeon, is it?"

"No, it's some other kind of bird." I wondered if it mattered terribly what kind. Having lived in New York, I know my pigeons. Some people don't like them, and some people do. Clearly, the Information officer was one of the former. Perhaps I should have claimed it was a parrot, or a turkey. Something Technicolor or tasty would capture the imagination.

She looked at me as if she was George Bush and I was an AWOL document. "All right," she said after several moments, seeming incredibly put upon for someone who otherwise had nothing to do.

"All right? You can call someone to help?"

She made a vague noise; against all evidence, I chose to interpret this as affirmation that she would not rest until she found someone to take care of that tragic bird. Relieved, I went for that chocolate-chip cookie, my heavenly reward for selfless behavior.

Back at the gate, I couldn't help but notice that the bird was still there and that nobody else was. I crumbled part of my cookie onto the polished floor, but it sulked on a high windowsill and wouldn't come down to eat. Until my train came at long last, we faced each other, the bird and I, over that inadequate pile of crumbs. Neither of us moved until I escaped through the heavy door, down the crowded stairs that led to the underground platform, and the bird turned back to the window and looked out at the sky.

According to sources that years ago lost their tenuous link to real life--textbooks, for example, and Fox News--we North Americans live in a democracy. So I am confused about the escalating insurgencies of totalitarianism. George W. Bush, our National Embarrassment, famously (and publicly) revealed his yearning for the position of dictator, a post to which, like the Presidency, he could never ascend on his own dubious merits. Closer to home, merchants in my city have claimed titles such as Sturgeon King and Smoothie King. There is a Burger King on every corner. Elsewhere in the line of succession, we have dairy queens, dancing queens, drag queens, drama queens, the prince of tides, and the emperor of ice cream.

I confess to being closet monarchist, myself. Give the hoi polloi the right to vote, and some of them will invariably do so, and these will invariably be the ones who should not be allowed a say in how we live our lives. This is how we get Republicans in office. This is how Richard Hatch won the first "Survivor."

But with all of these emerging kingdoms (and queendoms), highly specialized or no, I am worried about war. What if the Burger King were to encroach on the territory of the Sturgeon King with a new kind of maritime Whopper? Can you imagine the outcome of that battle? And if these realms were to adopt Baby Doc Bush's "Doctrine of Preemption," then that would be all she wrote. The Burger King would only need the flimsiest fabricated evidence that the Smoothie King was hoarding Strawberries of Mass Destruction.

We would all get caught in the fallout.

An old post, just for fun, from my blog.

I am at war with Earthlink and United Parcel Service, a fiendish alliance that one would think has far greater resources at their disposal than I. The examples of their insane stupidity I have witnessed in the past week, however, prove I have nothing to worry about (although I will be wary of lurking brown vans). Rob's dear friend Richard, who was recently in an Earthlink commercial, is not stupid, but he is coming to town next month, ostensibly to be in Rob's show, but how do I know he is not an enemy spy?

In pure Presidential form, Goblin insists that they are all in league with the squirrels, against whom we should unite in an all-out attack if they do not disarm. Squads of Boston terriers are patrolling the park even as I type this, and troops are amassing at the Museum of Natural History, which has graciously allowed the Forces of Justice to use their dog run as a staging area. In the face of such martial glee, it is difficult to ascertain exactly what the squirrels are supposed to be armed with, a question that will be further muddied when the canine equivalent of Ari Fleischer appears on the scene (and muddier still when it becomes obvious that the canine equivalent of Ari Fleischer is Ari Fleischer).

All I know is something is brewing. Goblin's walk was hurried this evening, as I was in a rush to meet my friend Joe for dinner, so I decided not to put her coat on. And who should we encounter during our brief time outside but the very same woman who, on the first cold day of the winter, chided me for putting her coat on so early in the season, as if its protective powers would wear out by being invoked before the snow flew. She also let Goblin lick her teeth, a sight that did not do wonders for my digestive health.

Tonight, she assaulted us again, directing questions at my dog that she intended me to answer. "Who are you? " she asked, and when Goblin was not forthcoming with the introductions, she followed up with, "I said, what is your name? "

"Goblin," I said, looking down from the sky.

"Oh, Goblin! I've met you before! How old are you?"

"Goblin is two-and-a-half years old," I said, pointedly pulling her away.

"Oh, you're just a baby! What is your daddy thinking letting you out without a coat, huh? Where's your coat, baby?"

Neither Goblin nor I answered that one.

"I said , 'Where is your coat?' It's too cold for little girls to be running around outside without a coat!" This was directed at our backs as we beat a hasty retreat.

There is a true-life television program on Animal Planet about a precinct of police officers who deal solely with cases of animal cruelty. I forget what it is called, but I suspect there will be a spinoff featuring people who run around the streets of New York monitoring when other people's dogs are wearing their coats.

Goblin is of the opinion that this woman is a squirrel spy, a distinct possibility.

All I know for sure is that Ari Fleischer is a bitch.