[ANTON FILIGREE, LEGAL REPRESENTATIVE]

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      [2004.03.01]   [common foreheads]

  I do not look like Conan O'Brien.
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      [2004.02.29]   [corrections dept.; or, "my bad."]

  Salutations, fair readers,

  It seems that the impending doom I alluded to in my last entry failed to consummate. Kindly disregard everything I said.
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      [2004.02.28]   [notes from the fallout shelter]

  Salutations, fair readers,

  As I contemplate my imminent, untimely demise at the hands of disagreeable States, I cannot help but wonder at the results, via pains, tribulations, and fallacies, of a man's life. You see, I never went to Law School. Rather, I misspent my youthful endeavors on frivolities and snapstacks, chasing linens (and Lenins) and reciting junk poetry with the local misfitia in the Strange Quarter. Those were egregious times; the Great Revolution having seemingly milked the sanity from Mother Earth; us citizens attempting to make due, to commune with one another, not as the Leader envisioned you see, but by the whims of the drink. Days were spent returning to the origins of our nights; nights fleeing from the blinding realities of the day.

  Suddenly then, I did wake up, after a night of only slight debauching, and wonder to myself, "When I'm sitting in my death-bunker, pondering this moment, which epiphany shall I recall?"

  The next morning I was at the local Libraratorium, reading up on Calvin and his sectarian cohorts. Law is the perfect arithmetic, I thought to myself, for a Universe to align itself. So I read and studied and dreamt and debated and read, and passed myself a Bar Exam.

  I spent the subsequent months arguing cases in front of bored juries and disinterested defendants. For me, Law was pure, it was truth. It was the measure of society, the life-giving force enabling even the feeble, the elderly, the disformed, to stand in their breadlines without fear. I argued ferociously, found obscure precedents and got more murderers off than any Counsel before me. God and State as my witnesses, I never thought one could reference Dostoyevsky so frequently in such a small portion of time!

  But Decadence, being the paternal twin of Debauchery, takes its heady toll. There was only so much good one man could do, could give, could deny himself. I needed a velocity shift.

  I suppose, though it contributes revolutions per minute to my dear mother's tomb, that my one true saving grace was, and will always be, the Revolutionary Hydra. It was the spring of '29, I was destitute and barren, wasting away in the bowels of Stalingrad when they swept through on their first major tour of the Heartland, throwing their American money and women around like yesterday's discarded soup tins. Magnificent. Startling. I followed them on the road to Moscow, and soon was able to befriend their gentle guide, Rasputin, who quickly stowed me away and set me to various, enriching tasks. I was charged with the clean- and cover-up of their recent history; the beer cans, the paper plates, the used batteries, the dead peasants, the bottles of urine- all fell under my realm, my shovel. I continued on with them even after the tour ended, for they required much clean-up and even more cover-up, and no one could surpass my prowess in this field. Thus, I learned the goings on and the wents by, and became their trusted, loving confidant.

  Months later, on October 28th, the blackest of Mondays, the Revolutionary Hydra sent me to Switzerland, stating that they needed my Law and Finance skills moreso than my deft shoveling. The rest, as they say, is mere happenstance.
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