In Your Name

Program Note: I'd just finished a long, sweaty, gut-roiling slog through an SFGate article on the freshly yclept "Terrorist Surveillance Program" and was prepping myself to hide in a soundproof closet with a blanket and teddy bear and embark on my daily Primal Scream workout. Before I could advance two steps, however, Dan Dority, the Gem Saloon's greasy fixer, stepped from the shadowy murk and buttonholed me.

"Al wants to see you."

Hours later, Swearengen's ball of dope now turned to useless ash, and the two grubby Gem trollops he'd assigned to beguile my time stretched out asleep, exhausted, I stumbled, blinking, into the gray dawn and found the following under my byline:

Cocksucker!

What's that, you ask? To whom do I refer? You sit there blinking like a squarehead dirt-farmer on his virgin taste of gin, coughing into your fucking fist and discreetly pulling your bunched knickers out of your tightly clenched ass, and ask me with injured indignation who the fuck I'm calling a cocksucker?

The cocksucker I'm calling a cocksucker is you, you cocksucker. I am addressing every goddamned hooplehead who reads this while quietly ruminating over the knowledge that the Executive Branch of the United States Government, in the form of a miserable, smirking, dry-drunk Oedipal case, has arrogated unto itself the right to hide under any fucking nuptial bed it chooses -- without so much as a rubber-stamp warrant to solemnize the intrusion -- and note every slap, tickle, moan, giggle, protest or accession that may ensue therefrom, and read into the record at a secret fucking treason trial any information so acquired.

This in your name. In your cocksucking name, he does this. To protect you. To protect you, you pusillanimous bedwetting cocksucker. Because you need protecting.

It's an axiom in a line of work in which I occasionally dabble, that there's a stark black line that divides the Grifter from the Mark. That line is never crossed: Once you're a Mark, you're always a fucking Mark, and you will succumb to the Grift. There is no alternative.

Looked at the right way, that stark black line extends out from my business to the entire cocksucking world and divides every last jibbering one of us on this ball of rock into Grifters and Marks. And you, you fucking hooplehead, you who run squealing to this God-sotted pisspot Napoleon, proffering up Inalienable Rights like an Abilene whore on Christmas: You're the Mark. The Grift is on, and you're the cocksucking Mark.

Answer me this: Do you think it's your fucking virtue that makes you the Mark? Do you think that in the Sweet Bye and Bye you'll be rewarded many times over for climbing back to all fours for another ass-fucking every time another Grifter gets a cockstand and takes a fancy to your fundamental aperture? Blesséd are the Marks, for theirs is the stretched and pox-laden bunghole.... I'll give you a hint, hooplehead, a little insight that might arm you with the mother-wit to avoid the burning agony of yet another dry-buggering: Who benefits from that arrangement?

Cui cocksucking bono?

I never cease to marvel at the depth and persistence of your ovine stupidity. With the doggedness of the truly dedicated cretin, you elect guardians of the common weal who are so blatantly crooked they have to be shoehorned into their trousers, and then pretend shock and indignation when evidence arises as inexorably as the cocksucking dawn that they have -- once again, cretin! -- pulled off the Grift.

Can you possibly stop chewing your fucking cud long enough to understand how goddamned tempting the Grift is, when the Marks of the world loudly beg, with wide-eyed, innocent earnestness, with the glowing zeal of the incandescent dullard, for their daily ass-fucking?

Despite centuries of careful indoctrination to the contrary, your position is not intractable. It's not a difficult proposition, not a huge fucking leap to take. You raise your right hand, you close your eyes -- tightly, now, no peeking! Say it with me: I Do Hereby Swear and Affirm: From this day forth, in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, forsaking all other cocksuckers:

I Will No Longer Be a Cocksucking Mark.

There. That wasn't hard, was it, brother?

Oh, by the way, you might want to check: Where's your wallet?

That reminds me.... I want to fuck something. TRIXIE....