The God Of Many Masks Chapter 2 -- the chapters are short.

"Neat trick out there, setting up those snipers to shoot around you."  Jay and I are in a back room of the church.  I kept the dark motorcycle helmet on until we were alone, my face covered by the opaque plastic to hide the changes in my looks.   I take it off and look at James, the spy who acts like a sceptic who is not....   I never have understood why they gave him these orders, years ago, before we met...  though I have seen enough signs of his belief in me to know he watched the webcam with the others, believing a deity had arrived on the planet.    Jay is six seven, the muscles he pumped up with iron and steroids during his two tours in Iraq have lost their definition.   He still looks monstrous.  Classic rich boy handsome, blue eyed with curly blonde hair, a hard core Irish rebel at heart, proud his family starved during the potato famine rather than bowing before the British monarchy, he comes from one of the powerful families that once ruled the mid-west. 

Two of his uncles started in special op's and ended up doing work known only between them and the president, shadow warriors Jay had been pumping for information on how the world really worked since he was a kid.  He used to get them drunk and hear about the world behind the curtains;  what they didn't tell him he figured out with his 186 IQ and occasionally slipping into an aunt's computer that had a direcct link to CIA eyes only files.  He had been sent to me years ago, my first human contact with someone who outed himself as knowledgable about the shadow war;  before that they had sent me vague messages on the tv, occasionally muttered a message on the streets.   I was under heavy surveillance, knew as much, but not why.


 I was being worshipped by a group I did not know about, the CIA and others who I never heard the names of had told them I was giving them non verbal messages thru the way I arranged my apartment...    His mother had been hell bent on keeping him out of shadow war and he was all for it, a stoner like I was, a hippy kid who slept on the beaches in the summers in Chicago, until his family decided he needed to go into the army, straighten out his life, give him some direction.   He was fit for that life on the outside only.  Used to walk around the neighborhood with a kitten on his shoulder, Max...  they took out his family because of his association with me.  I barely stopped him from going out in a blaze of glory.  Just barely.  Kept him drunk and on mushrooms for a couple weeks with three hookers.  Not the conventional ways of a son of God, not that I fit any of the myths they attributed to me, for the most part.  A few had come all too true.

Vera has a wig made from the actual long hair that I was known for wearing, and hairs from my beard.  She  sits me down and begins  carefully putting the blonde/grey hair back onto my face.  She is going beyond the goutee I had, giving me a full beard to hide my weight gain.

Jay is become worried about me.   Knows that I have held the groups together, by my fame from the webcam, the favors I have done for certain groups, including saving a few of their lives. "Did you have them all killed -- sent for a reset, as you say?"   He thinks I set up the snipers who fired down on us while we motorcycled in.  One of the vet's had taken a bullet in the ankle.

"Jay..."   I have to play along with his cover, he has some reason for it, adds to my credibility I guess with those who are fighting with me despite how I am looked at -- one group had told me, ALL WRITERS THINK THEY ARE GOD, though they knew it benefited them to work with me...   I shrug, laugh as much as I do, short and fake.   "I would not have...   well, maybe they were just bad shots, you know how gang bangers are... they fire for some target and end up magic bulleting three year olds."

Vera is quiet.  She knows Jay knows I AM...  we talk around the topic, Jay's cover story intact as the cynic.  Vera herself grows more terrified of me by the day;  the miracles are convincing some that I am there to end the world, after defeating evil.   I cannot honestly tell them this is not true... or convince myself it is not true, much as I  wish I could. My Father will make that decision.   All I can do is fight the deluded elitists and pray that we win, usher in a new age that pleases my Father enough that he decides a mercy killing is not required.

Jay hands me a white robe  with a hood.   I rear my head back and roll my eyes, 
'Gotta hide that you've become a fat ass."
"Being told to eat a lot cake, man...  you get an order like that, you jump in.   A robe, though.... loose clothes would have worked."
"Not on me."
"Okay."   I take it and begin to slip it on over my clothes.
"Undress, man.  You gotta look all Mick Jagger for this show, like they know you.  I gotta say, man, you do look like a plain old man without all the hair, and fat."   Jay is the most blunt person I have eer met in my life, used to offend everyone in my family back in the day when the shadow war was being played out as a fight between sheperds who were afraid to let the sheep know, fearing the inevitable stampede.   I was sick with learning of what was really happening in the world, but  I look back on the time and know I had it so good that if I could go back... living a block from the beach, with a woman I loved, a husky who raised the cats.... just writing, smoking weed, listening to Christian music written for me.... and loving the feeling, the loyalty, the knowledge that some believed in my  leadership, even as the FBI interrogated me for crimes the CIA was trying to pin onme, and I was learning about the murder of peaceful protesters who came to Chicago, who I had basically ignored, writing in the voice of Jesus and knowing the words were the mission, not the protests...   a decisiion that proved correct, even though thinking of the agents beating young college girls to death on a golf course...   I have so many memories now like that I have to compartmaentalize them away to keep back the tears.  Had to show a front.  A hard warrior.  As I wrote in my Jesus trance, God's do not war.  God's slaughter.   And this has proven all too true..

I have a surprise for all of them.   When I went into hiding to change my appearence, a CIA defected scientist gave me two false eyes;  tech they have been working on for fifty some years, perfected and in use by the enemy, no doubt...       hooked up to the muscles surrounding my eyes, I had went thru two painful as all hell months learning to control the features;   I can focus almost like microscope -- close enough for my purposes;  I can now hear thru my skull from two miles away.  The reason the CIA had spent only God knows how many hundred millions plus on the eyes, I would be using on a human for the first time tonight...  I am fairly stoic about death, in the midst of battle, when I am wound up preaching to soldiers.   I am not a cold bloodied killer.   It takes the heat of the fire of God to change me from my usual soft spoken, half professor/half stoner sounding self;  tonight there would be traitors with equipment to track the meeting.   We have a damper going for a two miles around the church, no one was getting anything in or out electronically.   Two miles was enough for a nuke and they would try that on me if they could, though I knew I would be standing amidst the death unharmed, I have people I value too much in the area to sacrifice.

The blue lasers coming from my eyes would surprise the hell out of even James.  Learning how to control the features had been easier for me than any soldier they had tried it on, of course, and they kept trying to test me to figure out why.... there is not telling a scientist and a group of shrinks who I really am;  they figured belief in a reincarnating guide was something for the soldiers to spur them.  I have had a headache since the surgery.  I take handfuls of pills, which I did sometimes anyways due to the back surgeries, which they tell me resulted from the wings growing, and what they had to do to pull them out during the year they hospitilized me when I was five.... maybe I took too many at times, my little cross, though I tried to be careful.   The lasers had caused a lot of damage when I was training with it.... out in a field learning to subtly manipulate the muscles around my eye that controlled the features.  The eyes are connected to a computer placed in my guts, which allows me access to gps, infra red and night vision, the ability to contact phones, computers, ham radios...  They took out everyone associated with the surgeries, then each other.  Hard core groups.  I had no control over any of it though I accepted their deaths over the layers of dry blood on my hands, my arms, chest, face...  soul. 

"So, you know we are going to have hinkey assholes out there?  You're going to trust them?"   Jay sounds cynical, acts like I am an idiot a lot, too much at times, with his IQ it has come a bit too natural to him,  and I act like one enough to welcome someone around me who is not afraid to put me down, for the good of the soul.  Maybe that was part of why his cover included being sceptical of my divinity?   I knew he knew from a couple slip up's he made when he was either wasted, or seeing if I wanted to act like Jesus around him -- something I had never done.  The five years plus I had been worshipped, they kept them from me, or if we met, and they did bring a lot of people to Chicago who just wanted to be in my presence, see me in person.

 I have a hard time relating to people on the other side of the mirror.  I envy them.   When I was 24 and married, I had a prophetic dream while living in Toledo Ohio and having no memories of Chicago other than the art musuems our high school took us to every year, I was downtown on State street -- which I recognized years later when i saw it, and down thru the thin strip of blue sky between the skyscrapers, a cloud was approaching... and I knew Jesus was back.  I was euphoric, running throough the streets screaming out, "JESUS IS BACK.  Look into the sky.... see?"  Then I was in a Catholic church, telling my wife that no matter how many women I had been with since we split up, that she was my only wife...her clothes fell off, she rose up into the air and then backed onto my hard dick...   afterwards I ran back intot he streets, and watched as the thin could begam to descend right in front of me. The happiness was more than I have ever felt awake.   But when the cloud reached the ground there was simply a glam rock band playing, skinny and painted up, jammingon a guitar, drums...  That dream seemed like God giving me a slight idea of how people had once felt about me.

They forgot the part of my return saying the nations would be broken with an Iron Rod, that I would return with a sword.  Peace and love had been expected when they first introduced me... they tried to get me to go on stage with Yoko Ono at Wrigley Field, but a spy planted in my life, who I thought was a friend and was always there to front me weed, steered me away from going.   I was still half thinking maybe I had gone mad, that I was not who this voice seeed to make me out to be.  Jim.  He was among those planted around me to make me not believe in myself, so the CIA could manipulate me.   Another regret, the peace and love that I thought I was bringing to all inthe world, that my even existing was the proof of God I had always sought, and was forever changed by having...   universal truths had long been shattered by my post modern philosophy classes, truth something subjective nd ever changing;  but the first few weeks, anything seemed possible -- if a CHRIST existed.

Now I am hated and hunted, actually turned a lot of people away from religion, drove others to kill innocents, leap from skyscrapers to protest my jailing, form into an army, taking over the white house...   nuke outside of Japan and cause a tsunami that shattered a nuclear power plant, which was slowly killing the pacific ocean -- unintended consequences.  Killing the English Royal family....  various actors who played characters based on me that mocked me.

That all came later, after I knew how they were looking at me, after the years of feeling like I was being taunted by more powerful people on tv...  and was surprised anytime something I did came up on a show, or mentioned on the news, always coded enough that other than my wife, who witnessed it all, I was afraid to bring it up with anyone...  I once wrote that they should do their worst and burn me with jokes, because I would them... having no idea the next week the tv broadcast practically nothing but shit about me.  I was stunned by how people saw me, humiliated...   my first taste of the humility that was to come when I learned there were cameras even in my toilet.  Saturday Night Live did a show bout me that even mentioned the church I went to, not even funny just practically a list of things... talking about how poor I was, pretending my dealers were my friends and mocking then, showing me they even had cameras there.   Afterwards I learned how deadly my supporters were when   I had to step in and stop the entire cast of saturday nght live being put to death.  The CIA was keeping me isolated from all the acttion, so my life seemed normal, even poverty ridden.  The schizophrenia of one world goingon the tv and then going out into the streets and everything seeming normal, other than the occasional strange words uttered to me by people I did not know, I felt entirely alone. I was alone, no one around in my life.    My day to day life usually seemed normal, a guy whith a broken back who wrote a blog and kept himself stoned from morning to night, ate handfuls of pain pills.  IF ONLY I HAD KNOWN...  is a thought I have had millions of times it seems, but God had not wanted me to know.  I opened the bible seeking a random passage, which was a game the Father and I played, where he usually gave me what I needed, not what I wanted.   The passage talked about how God would beffudle people at times to get his way.   I also found the passage talking about how the women following me would become barren the same way, after being told the same thing on the tv. 

'Yes, well, I think I know how to figure out who is with us, and who is not.  In fact I have a little surprise for you all tonight.   You stoned?"
'You want a bowl?"
"Nah, I just think you'll like this better stoned."

Part of my training with the eye was to focus in on others flesh, looking for signs of distress like sweating, flushing;  hands for the slightest shaking;  eyes for fear or cunning;  basically to note those who were playing a role, or reacting in ways incoherent with the situation.   I would use the eye to identify them first, before I said much of anything, then....  show them the brutal power of the son of God.

The gathering does not know I am going to be here.  Most of the world thinks I am in a bunker underground, on a submarine in the arctic...  all the places they tried to get me to go in the beginning, when they thought they were protecting me.  My resourcefullness in protecting them was nothing they would ever understand.   No life I had ever lived fully convinced anyone 24/7 what I am.  I understood, the doubts...  I had them once, on a cross, when I thought I was going to win a revolution and instead He made me a symbol, the day I took the worlds sins as my own and knew what it truly was to be human.  The day a God's son was humbled, and a Father turned away from the pain and the cries of his son...


"I have a surprise for the enemies in our midst, Jay.  Trust me for a change, alright?"
'Yeah, right.  I'm trusting these."  He waves over at the small arsenal he has been travelling with, ak-47, grenade launcher, a shoulder held anti-aircraft missile...  I know nothing about weapons.  Never owned one.  When you can pull lightening out of the sky the only reason you would need a gun is avoid over-kill.... and over-kill kind of goes along with what I do.   If I did not know all souls go to Heaven, I would not be the most deadly creature in all of creation.  I do.  And I am.

"I will have a hit off that bowl."   Jay hands me the bowl he has been puffing on since I came in, I take a long harsh hit and hold it until my heads go light....  blow out the little bit of smoke that is left, take another, do the same...   "Alright, let's go."
"You want some visine?"   Vera has been quiet the whole time.  She is terrified even with the valium she pops like candy.  
"Uh...  No, they all know I smoke."


Jay picks up an ak-47, slips an uzi over his shoulder...  opens the door and waves and looks down the hall both ways.  There is plenty of security in the church, though he has stayed alive by trusting no humans, a line from the bible we shared a great respect for.

The First Thing That Dies In Battle Is The Plan

"Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness to God."
1 Corinthians, 18, 19

Too much thinking over the past...  too many faces of the dead.  Too much blood encased on me to even move.   Tonight there will be more. More grieving.  More loss.  More souls finding out it is better to be dead than alive, that their fear of death was just more of the foolishness of the survival instinct.


The plan is to use a boat to get me up the lakeshore, along with anyone else I can identify who is going to be a target.   The only one I have heard yet is the national guardsman, and the cop who interviewed me when I came into the camp.   I insisted on this.  The cop I have no idea how to get to...  they are being hunted because of me.  They made mistakes, still...  they were on mission for awhile.   My people are only worried about my safety, which I know is ridiculous, but try telling a human who has seen the death they have that God will not let anything happen to you.   There is always the doubt, the belief they have more wisdom than God.   I learned that I would be a fool and God would do what He planned no matter how much it hurt me, humiliated me, or killed.   Time and time again in this war I have thought I made a mistake, only to discover I had done exactly what needed to be done to subvert the enemy.

They are going to hit the four entrances,, which are loosely guarded.  We are miles behind enemy lines, the southside of Chicago is pure chaos, with the gangs banding together trying to hold turf, which is not going to work in the end, like any seige, because they are going to run out of food.  We have people among them recruiting, getting those who we can use out of the city, into the small units we are using, groups of five who communicate only thru carvings on trees, each spot known only to the units directly around each other, so no captures can bring down them all.

I wish there was a clock, know the time is close.   They have silencers, should be able to pull this off without alerting the authorities held up inside Soldier Field.   Our area is closee to the lake, the wind always heard hitting the building, the waves crashing outside white noise. I feel it start.  The bit of the psychic powers I am afraid to explore, that come unbidden from time to time to save me from trouble, and have my entire life.   I am supposed to get up and walk to the door when I see a siloutte there.   I see the door open, the black outline of a man holding a pistol at his side, then he steps away.   I get up and start walking toward the door.   From the four corners of the room men get up out of their beds.   Silently begin to come in on me.  I whistle and the door opens and the soldier steps back in, another follows behind...  

One of the men closest to me pulls a phone out of his shirt.   I act defeated, looking at the ground, arms by my side.  He is taken by surprise when I throw a round house into his temple, put him down,  stomp the side of my boot into his throat.  Hear a grotesque gurgles as his crushed larynax attempts to gasp precious air.   The other three are taken down by silent shots from the soldiers.   People begin getting up, asking what is going on?  I tell them in a loud whisper, "QUITE.  We have captured three insurgents.  Lay back down and stay calm or you are going to be considered accomplesses.   You,"  I point at the national guardsman, "are coming with us.  We need trained soldiers.  You have nothing to fear from us."

God gave me a voice that can terrify or sooth, and taught me well how to preach what sounds like THE TRUTH, even when I am telling a lie for a greater goal.

We make it to the boat with no problems, it looks too small to deal with the waves, a thirteen footer, open.   Ten heavily armed vet's are inside.   We start off down the coastline and lighs start coming on in the dorms, shouts we cannot make out come from behind us.   Everyone is dressed in black except me and the ex guardsmen.  I duck down out of sight, motion for him to do the same.
"Who are you?"   He asks, his voice terrified...  they have all been terrified for years now, all trying not to show it;  trying to pretend what they saw all around them fit the government narrative, no matter how incongrous.

"I am."   My response widens his eyes.  They have heard of me, saw me thru their internets and tv's when I was being filmed, when the enemy was trying to use the man who grew wings to jump start their world take over.   I kept my hair long back then, wore a beard...  stayed skinny as a rail.  Aged ten years by getting rid of the hair and gaining the fat, look like a balding, handsome middle aged man now.  Non descript.  They loved the rock star image of the boy who grew wings, which was  God's joke on them, my ironic father.... they cut the wings off, radiated them out of existence during a lost year in a hospital when I was five.   A ploy on the part of my father.  I am no angel.   I distrust angels.  Angels fall.  I cannot fall, no matter how close I seem to be hitting the ground, He is always there to pull me back up.

Lights begin sweeping the water.  They expect us to move out into the lake, as we knew they would, and staying on the coast line gives us enough time to reach an empty park down the shore, where motorcycles are waiting to take us to a church where the faithful have gathered, along with some they trust enough to attempt conversion.   I am not trying to get them into a religion, I am here this time to fight.  The religions of man, mostly started by me, all influenced by my presence, earlier religions I started, are meaningless to me...  how people behave is all I care about.   I am not the God that man makes up.  The Son of Man...  The Son of God.   A scizophrenic existence below, on the planet, and above, where I greet the souls, send some to a long moment of hell, welcome them all in the end to the knowledge, however fleeting for them, that the earth is a coccoon and they are all going to heaven.

I wish I could get across to them Heaven, the golden light, the souls basking in a love that they are incapable of even beginning to understand, a euphoria that is not in their chemical make up.   God glories in the souls, the souls glory in God.  In heaven, there is no motion.  Perfect stillness.   My planet is named Heaven, and humans became confused thousands of years ago on this point, so I let them hold onto the name.  We are the closest planet to Him.   My kind feels blessed to be close to Him.   We could go to God, into the golden love where all is explained, spend our lives in euphoric celebration of all God has created, tap into....   I cannot explain anymore than I have been told.  I am mobile, once a watcher of creation like all of my kind, doing the job of mercy killing the coccoons, forever heading from one planet to another.   The rest of my kind go home for long periods, thousand and thousands of your years, telling their tales to the others.  Not me.  God's presence is for those I send off.   They are drawn to His love from all places in the cosmos.   I am drawn to pain, a need to try to stop what I can of it... the gift/curse of the one being who amused his God, who gave the creature his first and only laugh, when He who was never meant to have free-will witnessed it too often not to have it wear off on me, and asked him if I could let a planet live?

I am thankful for my role.   I am humbled by His love and trust in me.  I am amazed that I get to do what seems more important to me than satisfying my own needs.  Angels are those who try to follow what I do, but they all eventually fall...  or head off to Heaven.  Either way I am not disappointed.  There is only one of me, and I would have no other live this life of eternal pain.

Our passage thru the gang terratories has already been negoitiated.  We drive off west to Ashland, go south to the First Trinity Church.  The darkness is in stark contrast to how light they were keeping the predominantly white northside.  Water, power, gas -- all shut off down here.   The leaflets dropped daily telling the people here to come to the camps to be taken care of.  The blacks have been more wary than the whites during the war, which has served them well, and why the revolution I started so many years ago was offered to them first, and the oppressed of all nations, eventually...  the elite who were backing me had no idea my words were not like their Machiavellian Svengali rap, until they had given me too much power to take it all back, no matter how much blood they shed.


I sense the snipers before the first shots begin to hit the pavement around us...  just as quickly I hear the soldiers I had surrounding the blocks around us moving in, battling with whichever group was trying to take us out.   I wave my comrades on toward the church.  Stop my bike and turn it off.  The shots zero in on me, letting the others safely pull around behind the church, where guards are already surrounding the perimeter. "You cannot kill me, "   I scream into the night.  "Surrender now and I will prove this to you."   Bullets rip through the tires, hit gastank a quarter inch from my leg and gasoline begins to pour down my leg.   The fighting goes on.  They will not listen.   My own people are either yelling at me to come to the church or just standing stunned, watching me make a target of myself.  I know as long as they are concentrated on me that my soldiers around them can take them out with fewer causalties.   I can see flashes of white.  Hear the shots, see the gravel spewing up, hear it hitting my helmut, smelling the gasoline.  

Finally there is quiet.  They are all dead.  I hang my head and wish I could cry.   Think to myself, 'We will need to learn to cry again.  This stoicism will be the end of us.'   They saw me crying when they were filming me and made such sport of me that I lost the ability....  inside of course the damn was always close to bursting open, though I had only to hide my face for a moment, continue.   I let the bike fall to the pavement and move toward the church, barely hearing the reports that nine were killed, a gang hired by the ISIS factions to take me out.   They are torturing one of them and I can hear him screaming out that they knew they would be on bikes, and that is all.  Another shot tells me the interrogator believes him.  The brutality we have come to live with...   makes me think for a moment of the stoner comedy writer who they came for.   How little he would have believed anyone who predicted his future, let alone tried to tell him he was the son of God.

WHAT YOU DO NOT KNOW... CAN GET A LOT OF PEOPLE KILLED.

    The routine at the camp was mind numbingly dull to most.   I had always lived mostly in my own head, or other people's -- at least their books...   After the visit from the 'ghosts,' my life dimmed more than I thought possible.   I thought I knew depression, having written plenty of adolescent-esque poetry about lost loves and death in my high school years, after losing my best friend to suicide.  He was picked on, and me and my brothrs, all five of us, had protected him all our lives, best we could.  My parents divorced, we moved across the country, and six months later he was dead.   I blamed myself at the time.   Now I was responsible for thousands of deaths, and did not blame at all.  I could hardly blame myself for killing the ghosts.  They asked me, explained to me that the world was going to be on my shoulders one day, proved their seriousness with a Christ like martyrdom to hide their secret -- and to instill in me how deeply I had to hide my own.   I went back over it all during those weeks, a conscious life flashing before my eyes before my death, or the distinct possibility of my death.  Setting off the nukes, to take out the concentration of Federales in the city, and elsewhere, was  a job I would not live through.  That was why I was in the FEMA  camp.  I could have been in the mountains somewhere, or on a submarine..  those who thought of me as a Holy man wanted to preserve me...  could not understand why I wanted to make Chicago my stand.   I wasn't sure either, really... just something I declared I would do when they finally came for me.

Per the shadow war nothing is said literally, and nothing is chance.   I was doing okay, forty five years old, had an apartment on Sheridan Road over looking the lake, and was writing a journalistic blog, with a comedic edge that was popular, though not making me a lot of money.  I had been with the same woman for eight years, and she had stood beside me through the thick and thin, did not care that she made more money than me, put up with my cats, helped me host a literary reading once a week...  and smoked as much weed as I did.  Or even more, at times. 

I was friendly with everyone in the neighborhood, which was the most integrated hood in the most segregated city in the country.  Walking my Husky Ruby made saying 'Hello,' and 'She's friendly,' to everyone.  She was a lover who looked vicious with her mouth full of fangs.  They were said to be a terror in a fight, though jovial otherwise.  I could relate, of course.   I talked a lot with a 'musician' who worked at the carry out across the street from me, Tom Jones nephew, looked welsh, with black hair and blue eyes,  six seven at least, chubbed out enough to look threatening to some.  He was soft spoken though something about his eyes...   I was too into my own world to think too much about other people back then, to be honest.  I would later find out he was a spy, as was the woman I was with, and the one before...   Jimmy Peace he claimed was his real name, though I would later find out he lied reflexafly, like most spies, and this was just a stage name.   He worked at a place called Sonny's.   Only much later would I figure out the entire neighborhood had been planned for Operation Bluebeam.  There I was the storm itself, with no knowledge at all of the lightening inside of me.

Jimmy called me up and said, "How would you like to make all of your short stories into movies, and do a comedy radio show?"   The electric euphoria that came over me-- something like being a teenager and finding out the woman you loved from afar loved you back times ten....   every dream suddenly fullfilled in a phone call...  Dan Milano, Greg The Bunny creator, wrote me saying sometimes the clouds did open in the sky and reveal heaven...   I had the usual dreams in my youth of being a famous writer, fed myself on them in the darker times of my life, when I made a drunken fool of myself and lost the respect of a friend...  when people treated me like a loser in the cab I drove during my stints at universities in Toledo, Ohio and Chicago.  The feeling had almost went away by the time I was 45, as did the ghosts coming to me...  for the first ten years I expected something to happen almost every day...  then another decade passed.... and I began to think the plan they talked about had never come to fruitition, per my prayers, and the dread that came over me when I looked around the city and imagined everything I loved burning into an ash, turning the gorgeous lake front city into an unihabitable radioactive waste land.

The first meetings with the radio show executives they talked like me and the two other hosts were going to huge stars, that there would be tours...  I announced on my blog that I had gotten the call of a life time, and my one famous friend, evidently let hollywood know and suddenly my readership in southern California shot thru the roof...  then Gwyneth Paltrow mentioned me on Entertainment Tonight, something about pot smoking, which was a big deal in my writing, fighting for legalization.  The excitement did not die down though... became a manic feeling like I imagine speed out be.  I was not myself.  I thought I was just excited but I could not stop my racing thoughts...  later I found out they had begun drugging me when they offered the radio show.   My first steps toward fame, becoming known to the world, were well on their way.   My blog was read in over eighty countries, and the internet station they were putting the show on was huge, downtown Chicago, with a huge picture window where people could watch us do the shows....

The manic feeling was growing worse, I was walking the dog down at the beach, out onto a small pier, when it struck me without any evidence at all that I was being watched.   I had the idea of leaving the dog behind to see if it was true, and tied her to the pier and walked down onto the beach, ranting that I knew they were watching me, and I had no idea why, but I was sure of it...   A memory of the bloody  holes in the foreheads of the ghosts, the mist of red behind them that they fell through into the dark stream of water...   I cannot remember now everything I said.  A woman walked up with Ruby, asking if she wasn't my dog?   It seemed to confirm I was being watched but I was still lucid enough to know this could be a co-incidence.

Three hours later I had a seizure out of nowhere, from the drugs, which they later told me were in the water bottles we kept refilled in the refrigerator...  M would fill me in on what happened next later.  She called an ambulance and when they arrived I refused to go with them, telling M. they were going to kill me.  The paramedics called the cops, who I guess I tried to fight, though M. was there screaming at them that I had just had a seizure and was not myself... I woke up without any obvious bruises, three days later, with notes scrawled all over my body, telling M. that the tv had been talking to me.   I was nowhere near normal.   I felt as if some transition had happened though I could not begin to tell what.

They transfered me to St. Anthony's Psych ward for further brainwashing.  I had been in a psych ward twice before, during the depression and drinking that followed killing the ghosts...  this was nothing like that. One woman kept holding up her hands and saying, "Cameras!"   Other than that she was perfectly sane, gorgeous, slim with milk chocolate skin.   M and I had been having problems for awhile, and I grew a tremendous crush on Gem, the cover name she was using.   In twenty twenty I know she was trying to tell me I was being filmed all the time, but that would take forever to sink in... and when I found out the extent, the humiliation was...  I am getting too far ahead of myself.

I spent a week in the psych ward.  The classc sign of being brainwashed is not thinking you are someone else, it is knowing you are not the person you thought you were.   I knew something spirtual was happening, began to think the supernatural was the only explanation...  I asked for a bible, and this being a Catholic bible, that is what they brought me.  For reasons I still do not understand, I recoiled at the thought of reading the green covered tomb they offered -- and even though I was raised Baptst, I asked for a Mormon Bible..  I was beginning to suspect I was the Christ, and they had predicted my return in the states... this thought meshed with a South Park episode, a comedic cartoon that was huge back then, where everyone went to heaven and the Mormon's were told they had the right religion... and other, more mystical reasons that I leave up to God to understand.  Later they would tell me that this one decision had caused thousands of Catholics to convert to Mormonism.  The belief they already had in me out in the world, a belief nurtured by the miracle of my growing wings, and living thru situations that would have killed a normal person many times over....  and the brain washing, or whatever they did.  I was a moral person, used to look at life as a way of service, and aa had me volunteering wherever I went, trying to do good deeds.  Just the way I was raised in a small town, without prejudices that I knew of, and those that were around were burned out of me by t the thousands of enlightened minds I had read over the years. 

I had no idea that from then on my every action would be seen as the work of a deity.  Again, if I only knew then what I know now.



  When I left a nurse came up to me and told me she was very honored to have met me, which was not exactly the kind of send off one expects after a week in a psych ward.   A doctor had come in and wanted to put me thru treatment, which I refused, because I had quit drinking years before, and did not consider the poet a problem, and in addition, I was in chronic pain by then... and they wanted to take me off the pain pills...  the thought that people thought I was faking pain after six surgeries was a touchy one to me.   A friend, also named Jim, though the radio host went by Jimmy, came with M. to pick me up on the last day...  His words as he slipped my coat over my back would come back to me when I learned everyone around me of any significance, and quite a few strangers and neighbors I had never spoke to, had been planted in my life.  World wide domination, planned out for over half a century, at least, had given them plenty of time to recruit and plot and plan.   I should have been on the watch for such things, you think I would have been... but cognitive dissonance, not wanting to believe there is a world behind the world;  not wanting to believe what you thought was true is all a lie;  the God-awful realization that are at a fly trapped in a web of lies that flows from horizon to horizin, had kept me from doing anything about the predicted future.   I had put it so far out of my mind that even when the evidence became overwhelming, the anxiety and horror that filled me would make my mind recoil from the truth...  anyways, the words he said as he slipped my heavy, lamb skin aviator jacket over my shoulders -- a jacket of course the Russian Spy I loved had steered me toward, were... "'MY LEIGE."

Now I had been thru being looked at as a king, a fraud, a racist, a betrayer of his race, a pervert, a celibate, a mass murderer, a God, a Demi-God...   I went home from the Hospital and began writing in the voice of Jesus... poetry like nothing that had ever flowed from my fingers.  Enough that I filled a book, and would later publish under Waking Up Jesus.   A chronicle of an angry God trying to reshape religion, working on very little knowledge of what was really going on in the world.  I was a hostage, did not know it...  I was from a family or associated witha  group that was racist, did not know it...   I was considered a king, did not know it.   I felt powerless the years after 07, when we moved into a tiny, roach filled apartment.   I smoked weed all day, painted on my little porch, wrote prose in the endless voice of Jesus flowing thru my mind.   I would see signs something was going on, occasionally the television made half secret references to me.  I remember ordering a play station, and John Stewart showed a clip of a long haired guy eating nutello, my then recent love, playing playstation.  They thought I was ignoring the world going to hell....  I just had no idea.

The fighting, a description of the life, prophesies, all the  questions you want to ask of God...  these are the sum of the recipe for this word stew.  Or is it merely Hobo Stew, water filled with a few rocks that are all I have to offer?   I was like that once.  Now I know too much.

Laying on the bunk listening to the people around me....   "They will have ISIS under control, no matter what they have'ta do.  I know it.  I was in the National...  well, my brother was in the National Guard."    Someone has made a mistake.  I intentionally do not look, but I know everyone else is.  Everyone who had served in the armed forces were supposed to report for duty.  None of them were heard of again and as much as cognitive dissonance stopped them from actually dealing with the thought, the suspicion that they were shot down, like the thousands, maybe millions of others considered Homeland Potential Security Risks was strong, if unspoken.   I wait a full minute before pretending to turn over.  I hear the same voice and look at the man.  He is in his thirties,  looks worried.   There is a food bounty for turning people in and most people had half starved families.   People had long before quit thinking of anyone except the few they already loved.  No one wanted to feel anymore death,   You kept everyone at a distance.   This is impossible for me.   Something has opened up that makes me love even my enemies, though I have had no problem having them murdered time and time again.   I am not human.  They told me I was all kinds of things, all the reasons they thought a child might have grown wings as a child... the wings they cut off, then used a year of chemotherapy to get rid of.

Thinking of the wings reminds me of seeing a doctor, when I was running out of pain med's all the time and ending up at emergency wards...  I told him about the treatment for my spondalolathesis, and he started saying, 'They do not treat...."  Caught himself, remembered who he was talking to....  the chosen one, back then.  Before they learned what they had really done when they took a man who grew wings and tried to brainwash morality into him.

I was already moral.  Too moral for them to understand, beyond the ideologes too far for them to see me.   Like a Bushka doll, they kept taking them apart until they got to the smallest, and inside found a cross of fire.   God had set them up.  They wanted to use a man to take over the world, operation bluebeam, start a one world religion around a being they documented growning wings, then march them into a one world religion.  Instead of a false God, they got me... the Real Thing.  Nothing like the actor they wanted.  A moral person unbuyable.  They were unbelievers, most of them...  I took a lot of them to an understanding of who I am until they filmed me masterbating, and sent this image out to the world saying it was my plan.   I was too humiliated to respond...  six months later I figured out they had been filming me and my fight was back.   Never has left again.

I am the most wanted man in the world, but they have other concerns, pockets of militias and homegrown lone wolves and groups of neighbors and families who listened to the underground ham radio broadcasts, before they were shut down, and know what was really happening.  That a fascist coup was fighting their way across the country under the guise of being an enemy of the state who was winning.  A brilliant and stupid idea, like all of theirs.  They took out the human element of their planners, of themselves, my enemies, and this made them underestimate how hard the animal fights when all they love is threatened.  They had cornered humans.   Now they were finding what on paper looked like a route, an easy march across the country killing everyone they did not need as slaves, had become a guerilla war they were fearing they would lose.

I provided the inspiration.   Still wrote my sermons in my head, the poetry that started the world looking to me for leadership....   every four months I surface and get messages out.  They tried to make me a general when this began, a non de plume among many I made for myself was gangsta general X.   I did not know enough about what was happening back then to be a general, and was not trained to be one.   I always thought my role would be like Thomas Paine, a writer who spurred on the revolutionares, the soldiers, who would take it from there.  The lesson that he died drunk and hated because his beloved revolution allowed slavery was lost on me, until now.  They had tried to use me in a race war, one of the many distractions that kept the real enemies, the zionists and a psychotic group of noble supramists, and billionaires...  mostly inbred over the years from a few bloodlines.   I am in the Scottish one.

I am watching to see which one looks like they are going to report the young man who blurted out he had been in the national guard.   I look for the skinniest, the most desperate, the men and women with the largest families.   I see two who look like parents talking quietly among themselves, the woman waves at the children and the husband, a ferret faced man with red rimmed brown eyes, his face creased and weathered from the ever more dangerous sun -- they had stopped the chemtrails that were keeping the greenhouse at bay to use the planes in the war, and the conspiracy theorists who had been talking about them for years were vindicated, sort of... the spray was not supposed to kill them, it was preserving what was left of the atmosphere from going full blown greenhouse, the self-perpetuating process that was going to turn the atmosphere to acid one day....   the man gets up and theatrically  almost looks around, then settles his eyes on the blonde haired guy who said too much.  Their eyes lock for a minute.  I think there is going to be a fight for a second, instead the young guy starts for the door first.   He probably believed them when they were told at the entry to the camp that they could leave at anytime.

FEMA CAMP V... the beginning.

     The FEMA camp is located near the lake, a series of Quonset huts set up to process the cities remaining residents.  The southside is now ISIS territory.   The internet blasted out their channel for a few days, before the government cut off all electronics with an EMP.   I guess they didn't want the panic fueled, though the effort probably did more to cause the feeling of apocalypse to rise in most.  The Christians were sure the end of the world had arrived, and I was the bringer of the lightening and fire that would do away with life on the planet, leave nothing for the souls to return to, remove the gravity of animal and plants that swept us back into the endless cycle.   I cared less for what was to come than they did, had no idea what it would be like to think there was a savior out there.  I was just trying to survive for now. 

After the induction process, the fed's assigned bedding and passed out meal tickets, two a day.  I lay on my bunk silently staring up at the cross hatch of metal separating the upper mattress from mine.  I could hear the wealthy already trying to buy meal tickets, but no one was sure enough of the worth of paper or coins, even gold and silver, to part with their food.  That did not stop them from trying.  My urge was to beat them to a pulp, but the last thing I needed was for the fed's to see I could fight.  Being able to fight made you suspicious in this day.  Too many soldiers were in civilian clothes trying to survive, cops as well.   I knew back in 2015 when the federal soldiers outnumbered the marines that they were ready to make their move...   I think about when this started for me.   I was ignorant as hell of the secret world behind the world, let alone that they had plans for me.  Going to college, wanting to be a journalist, back when I still believed the tv lie that exposing corruption and the ills of society would bring in the Calvary -- forgot the lesson of the Native Americans about what happens when the Calvary comes.

I think back to the first day I knew my life was no longer mine....

They approached me, five men, buff, military haircuts, with a story that I did not want to believe.  Telling me my grandfather was a spy and that I had started to grow wings as a child, and one day the USA was going to try to use me to start a world wide religion, then a one world government.  They were serious, secretive.   Told me I was monitored though not watched every second of the day, that they had a man inside the 'family' as they called them, who told them when it was safe to meet me.

We would be sitting in a lounge area at NEIU talking about topics that were almost too much for me to believe.  They explained that they did not know much, other than if I went along with them when the time came, there would be a general genocide, and that only a few hundred thousand would live, a chosen few underground.  I would be the one who marched the religious to their death, earned their trust enough to get them to all come together in communal living spaces, where they would be easy targets for poisoning.

At the time I believed them that they knew only this much.  Later I realized that if they had told me what I would really go thru that I would have headed for the jungles of Borneo, or anyplace other than Chicago, where I just happened to end up, after a woman who convinced me to leave Toledo, who they told me was a double agent between Mossad and the Jesuits.  The upshot was they wanted me in charge of a series of nuclear bombs they were setting up in strategic cities, set to go off if I hit the button in Chicago.  They told me to just go on with my life....   I met with them three times, then they took me down into the mass of tunnels under the city,  Dark, rat infested, sewage stinking tunnels that seemed to run on forever, and practically did.

     "You have to prove to us that you know how serious this is."   There were no names involved.  He was about my height, the same short, military cut as the others.  Maybe mid thirties.  The others were slightly older.  All of them had the same serious expression, all the time. There was no play acting that they were normal.   I assumed they had all experienced death too much, and now that I have, I know I was right.   He handed me a pistol.  The first one I had ever held.  Black, heavier than it looked.  Showed me how to hold it with two hands and fire.
    He took out another gun, later I would recognize them as .45's...   he aimed into the side of a blonde guy's head, who did not even flinch as the blast filled the tunnels... echoing down thru the darkness over and over...    I suppressed an urge to scream, then fell to my knees and vomited. 
     "We are too identifiable, traceable.  They will figure out sooner or later, or might, who took the nuclear devices.   And we need to know you have it in you.  We have your psych profile.  You don't give a shit about your own life, but you care about other people.  They selected you carefully, or they would have taken you out."
     They had explained to me earlier that I would be presented with a book about my family at some point, showing I was the end of a line of Scottish Kings, same as my grandfather, and my father before him.   My father was a drunken disappointment.  My grandfather the architect of operation bluebeam. 
     He pointed at the side of his head, then waved at the others.  We were on a concrete platform running alongside the small river of sewege taking Chicago's filth out into the lake.   One of them knelt down and tied two concrete blocks to the dead soldier, then they began tying them to themselves, around their chests...  explaining if they tied it to their arms or legs sooner or later they were erode off and their bodies would come up.   They were not sure how many years I had before they would come for me.  I was 24.  I would have almost twenty years to wait, long enough that the day became a bad dream...   A time I did not want to believe had even happened.  Even a mistake they had made.

By then I was committed...   and I they had explained to me I was going to see a lot death one day.  More than I wanted to imagine.  I saw that as a future eventuality.   More of the dream.   I was a story teller, or planned to be, take my step into journalism and maybe take a stab at fiction.   A romantic still.   That ended as they explained I would be killing all four of them.

I knew I could do it.  I grew up fighting and wanting to kill people over shit they did.  Fantasizing about it, not obsessively, just blowing off steam.   The first stepped over to the edge of the water, his face still showing no fear.  None of them seemed to care almost.  Like they were already dead inside.  I would learn that feeling, too...  though the deaths on my hand would surmount anything they had seen in intelligence, which is now where I knew they would have had to have been to learn anything about me.

I wanted this over with and to back in the sunlight.  There was no question of our being friends.  They had not been friendly to me.  Just effecent.  The only thing I learned about them was that the were Christians, and could no longer go along with what they saw as a great sin, a judgement on humanity only a God was fit to make.   Later I would figure that they thought I was a God, or the Angel of the Armeggedon... back then I did not believe in such things.

They tossed the first body into the water.  I watched him sink into the blackness.  The current was such that he barely made a ripple, just went down.   I took aim on the first one and he stared me in the eyes. "Try your best to forget this...  as long as you can, as much as you can."   Then he smiled for the first time, and added, "God blessed you."  I took aim and fired, took a step to my left, aimed and fired, another step, aimed and fired.   The gunshots sounded like lightening and thunder eminating from me.   They feel backwards and disappeared like the first.   A part of me hardened, already compartmentalizing the event away.  I was now in charge of turning cities to dust.  The weight of that seemed too surreal to carry.   Now, laying in my bunk, I wondered again what it would take for me to do away with everything I had come to love.  Looked around at the people laying on cots, most half asleep after the days of processing, being rounded up, laying awake hearing the gunfire, watching their tv's and computers as a threat they had no idea existed took over most of the USA.   I knew there was no ISIS, that the elite had mercenaries and federal soldiers wearing hunjabs and decimating the population.  All pockets of resistance were known, and taken down first.  My people had been careful with me.   I was well known by then, though cutting off long hair and a beard had seemed like massive plastic surgery, took me from a young looking hipster God to a middle aged man with a paunch.  I was usually skinny as a rail, so they fed me around the clock as part of my disguise, got me up to the weight of the clerk they had found who looked enough like me that altering his ID would draw no suspicion.