How To Disappear Completely

Because it's my blog, and I'll cry if I want to. As should be made clear below the cut, I won't be attending Scope or Armory this weekend and possibly may delay my next trip to New York until April at the earliest. Frankly, I'm wondering how I'm going to "attend" such must-not-miss venues as the grocery store for the foreseeable future.

As my debit card and my checkbook were both stolen, and because the powers that be froze my account last week in response to charges made in London and Istanbul (even though I totally called before my trip and had my account annotated to reflect the fact), Bank of Fascism has not merely suspended but revoked that checking account. That's the top-level frustration in the nightmarish matrioshka of nested bureaucratic dead-ends that promises to define my life for the next month. By the time I've found my way through this labyrinth of crises that beget crises, that chick from There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly will be buying my rounds at the bar.

Indulge me, if you have a sympathetic ear: In order to start the new B of F account—and, for that matter, access the money in the old account, which is all my money, at least until my replacement credit cards arrive (in 10–14 soul-crushing business days—if only debt in America could be accessesed as quickly as it grows! )—I need identifying documentation. In order to get said identifying documentation, I need identifying documentation. A District driver's license is out of the question, since I was never licensed in the District. There's simply no getting my Social Security card, passport, or health insurance card without a photo ID or my birth certificate. Even that taped-up student ID that shows me bone skinny and believe-it-or-not blonde would help, but it's all in the hands of the person who fulfilled some rather extravagent consumer impulses at the gas station at 14th and Euclid at 4:45 a.m. this morning.

Now, I gather from the fact that my mom answered my increasingly frantic inquiries as to the whereabouts of my birth certificate with "still looking, dear," shortly before she stopped answering at all, that that search through the Capps annals and vaults is just as likely to turn up the Ark of the Covenant as anything useful. (Seriously, Mom, what t f.) So it all hinges on a non–driver's license identification form to be issued by the state of Texas, a slip of paper, the sort they give you while you're waiting for your real replacement license to arrive. Apparently that, in concert with a few tax forms, will suffice to earn my District license, assuming I can scrounge up the scrylla to pay the fees.

But it should be said that Texas, for all its charms, so many of which I've gone to great lengths to ennumerate on this here Web page, is not the most efficient provider of social services among these fifty, nifty United States. Sue and I joke about a woman that she encountered when she was working in a more tedious capacity than she does these days, at a former job that required her to interact occasionally with the county court. Once, after combat with a court employee via telephone (the prize being contested: a document that the court was obligated to provide to her), Sue took the fight to the courthouse. There she asked her opponent face to face for that which was rightfully hers, and she was met with the best bureaucratic verse since they-pretend-to-pay-us-and-we-pretend-to-work: "I am not getting up."

Let that serve as context for the fact that the Lone Star State, one of the most populous states in the Union and a hell of a friendly place to boot, has just one telephone line for driver's license replacements. I hadn't heard a busy signal in years before I listened to that jingle all day long today. For a really fucking frustrating time, call 512-424-2600. Assuming I finally get through? I'm looking at three to four weeks to process.

But it wasn't my laptop that got snatched, so I know I'm obliged to quit bitching and look on the bright side. Probably there's some angle that I haven't considered, and it won't take a full month to get my life in order. But I think we can go brighter than that. So here goes: I can no longer prove that I exist to the State. I can't go to bars any more. Surely this is the time in a young man's life when he assumes an identity as a conservative vigilante anti-hero. Anyone have a copy of Darkman I can borrow?