I used to be a normal person. I woke up around 6:45, took a 15 minute shower, ate a perfunctory breakfast of eggs and coffee, and rode the subway to work like everyone else. My routine never varied. My dedication to this schedule never wavered, never faltered. Even when small wrinkles were introduced -abnormal weather patterns, chatty neighbors, invasive girlfriends- I would function like clockwork. My routine was like a warm blanket on the cold day that was every day of my life.

Your first breath of fresh air is the sweetest, but your last breath is the one that you savor. I didn’t realize this until I drew my last breath, but that really isn’t the story. The “how” and “why” are far more interesting.

Let’s skip to the last day of my normal routine. It was November 23rd, a Friday. While riding the subway, I usually listened to music and read the paper to avoid eye contact with lonely strangers and the other riff-raff. Today, it was Bob Dylan coming through the earbuds. As I stepped off of the train, careful to avoid the looks of the panhandling homeless man with the beat up mug, “A Simple Twist of Fate” came on. I always liked Blood on the Tracks. By the time I had finished walking to the offices, Radiohead’s “15 Step” was playing. “And then a sheer drop ooooooooooooh.” I looked up to see my boss staring at me.

“What are you doing?” he demanded.

“Going to my desk.”

What else could I be doing at this time of day?

“Do you know what time it is?”

I looked at the clock. It was 9:00 am. Exactly one hour later than I usually arrived. I took another look to be sure. I was. I looked at my watch. I looked at his watch. I walked up and down the rows of cubicles filled with dumb toys and dumber writers as they worked lackadaisically on stories that they didn’t really care about. No one here took their job seriously. I thought.

“Well, I need you to do some things downstairs for me since you’re late.”

How could I refuse? I took the list from his outstretched hand and headed downstairs. That was precisely the moment that I saw the thing that changed my life forever.

I rounded the corner, and there was Karl Rove, lying in a modified Hyperbaric chamber, his lower half shrouded in what looked like something from a bad sci-fi porno. Rove had always been a dick — following my life like a a cloud and raining of my personal freedoms. Again, coffee, eggs, and then bam: Rove being a dick on the front page of the newspaper.

Well, I’d lost just enough sleep over the past two weeks. The tipping point was upon me. Horrified, I took action, flipping up the lid and punching him in the exposed trouser mouse. He just twitched a little bit and a smile crossed his slumbering face. I doubled over, nearly spilling my eggs. I sprinted down the hall for more coffee. I’m seeing things, I thought. But three more cups of coffee couldn’t chase the image away. That corpulent little body and smug little smile. He even wore those spectacles in his sleep.

It was then that I knew I had to get to the bottom of things. First, why was I constantly assigned the busy work of a moronic troll and secondly — not to be understated — why was Rovie chilling in the basement schlaufen with his fountain out? As the image of his shriveled johnson pierced my minds eye, I landed mental triple sowcows — my heart and brain alive like johnny five. Who could be at the bottom of this? Who was sinister enough to hatch such a scheme? Why were none of the other drones visually paralyzed by this atrocity?

Then, in a flash, I knew. His laugh echoed between my ears: wah eh eh eh eh. Dick, Dick Cheney. Rove had a penchant for Richards. He’d whored himself for Nixon back in the sixties. He’d been absent for a bit in the eighties and perhaps…

Theory: enough Maxwell House will bring telepathy to even the most broken and downtrodden of spirits. As I chugged, I wished for an easy button, some roofies, control-alt-delete — anything to rid myself of the visions. Driven by masochism, I went further down the rabbit hole.

A cluck-muttering Cheney and MC Rove miles beneath Denver, Colorado, in a secret penguins lair — whiffing chemicals and popping pills. Sending propaganda to the surface by SOS to Reagan and Rumsfeld: Say No to Drugs, Abstinence Only, True Love Waits. High and in-love, they spent years testing their nano technology. In the meantime, Rove’s mother committed suicide out of grief. His father ran away, but young MC knew none of these trivial surface dwelling events. He and Dick pushed on in a quest for world domination.

Like Rip Van Winkle, he rose from cryogenic slumber right before my eyes. I too, was back from the future, and he stared luridly at me. Just then, I noticed his jacket. It said Nuclear Biological and Chemical embossed below a red-eyed peacock crest. N-B-C. This was far too much and far too sudden. I fell to the floor like a limestone block.

It seemed like an eternity as the parquet flooring came closer and closer to my soft, soon-to-be-broken nose, but each millisecond brought with it the kind of hard-fought clarity that most people don’t find until their twilight years. With a sharp crack, the cartilage in my nose flattened against the floor and brought me back to my senses. I knew what had to be done.

Sharpening my resolve, I reached into my pocket and produced the only sort of weapon that I had: my iPod. Luckily, Rove was not rested from his slumber, and he faltered — nearing my face to shout some sort of taunt. I hurled forty gigabytes of music at his junk, and when he doubled over in pain, I choked him out with my earbuds. He gurgled high and raspy, but eventually suffocated with a low, scraping cellulite cough.

As I lay on Rove’s fat, naked body, a voice spoke.

“Come to me.”

I looked around. No one was there.

“Come to me.”

I realized it was the machine, Rove’s machine, speaking to me. It seemed logical that with the mastermind dead, I should own his throne, so I climbed in. The machine sealed, and it was then that I took my last breath. As the lid shut, I felt a rush of information and understood the profundity: obesity gave him the ability to survive the massive flow of data; he was like a bulbous Professor Charles Xavier.