When you're alone and you're quitting your meds and your brain is stepping out for a smoke every few minutes, or to go and mentally vomit, it helps to be able to distract yourself. I'm fortunate in that, well or not, adjusted or in the middle of a psychotic episode, I'm still one fantastic creature.

I sometimes wonder what I would have done in life had I been someone else. The odds would probably stuff me into the role of gas pumper (in Oregon, anyway, where you still aren't allowed to pump your own gas) or crack spackler (I don't know what a "crack spackler" is, but I'm sure it was on that Here's-What-Our-Computers-Say-You-Should-Do-With-the-Rest-of-Your-Life test they gave me in the first, and nearly last, week I was in high school).

It isn't a pleasant thought. Gas Pumper or Crack Spackler.

Marmite or Vegemite.

Like Yin and Yang, but only if Yin and Yang were evil, retarded cousins who married, copulated, and gave birth to a litter of 72 rabid blind mole rats.

Nope. The options stink.

I get around the options by resigning myself to whatever I must to in life to survive, but then spending at least fourteen hours of each day in a state of daydreaming so intense you could put your feces in my mouth. I'd notice, but not until it was too late. Also, don't do this, as I haven't had a hepatitis vaccination. Also, don't do this, as it's disgusting. I can't even believe you brought it up.

Today I was daydreaming as usual. To keep my mind off of the pain of med withdrawal (yes: it continues), I sat down to watch a few episodes of season one of Alias. I have season one of Alias because Erik lent it to me sometime in 2006, and then I didn't give it back. He sits right across from me - we share an office - but I think he's too polite to broach the subject of my having stolen his season one Alias boxed set. He's also probably reading this. If only there were a way to make the words I've written disappear.

I've watched all of Alias. Every season. Twice. Even a few seasons they didn't make. That's how dedicated a fan I am.

One thing that's interested me all the way through is the prevalence of torture. It seems like, every chance they got, the writers put poor, little, super-muffiny-hot Jennifer Garner in a chair where some pissant who got one too many wedgies in his schooldays took out his anger on captured spies the same way all interrogators and torturers take out their anger on captured spies: Modern dentistry.

I think it was in the very first episode that Jen had one of her teeth yanked out. She handled it like a pro, but what about the next fifty times she had something yanked out, or off, or twisted, or attached while being questioned by the enemy? Even with the proper insurance, dental work is expensive as all hell. A crown? NINE HUNDRED BUCKS. Yeah. And that's with insurance. Good thing I'm not bitter. I've hardly thought this year about how I either could have had my dental work or bought a Porsche. Who needs a Porsche? What do they do but go really fast and get you laid? How stupid is that? Ha ha.

Anyway, what impresses me is that, in Alias, as well as other spy-cop-thriller-action shows like 24, people seem to hold up pretty well under the pain of interrogation. I just don't think I could do that. What's more important: State secrets or keeping my nine hundred dollar crown in place?

Sorry, yo. Even with a high-paying job as a hot spy (which I totally could have been if I hadn't been tagged as a future crack spackler by that stupid test), I wouldn't give up my teeth - real or otherwise - in order to keep quiet about where we hide the nukes and blah blah blah.

To illustrate how well I expect I'd hold up under that kind of pressure, I drew a lovely little comic for you.

Yes - For you!

As we join our hero ("our hero" being the traitor who's ready to give it all up in exchange for keeping his pretty smile ("the traitor" being me)), he's sitting in one of those chairs they automatically stick you in every time you're being interrogated on television. Recently captured, the darling man is being rudely asked to furnish forth top secret information stuff...

As you can see, though, he managed to hold out through that first question. The bad guy is all trying to get me to talk, and I'm not having any of it.

That's because I'm brave.

But the interrogator takes off the gloves and pushes me to the brink...

I may want to keep my dental work in place, but I'd still try to pull one over on them. See, when I said "OK!" in the panel above, I was simply putting into place a plan to delay my captor until such time as I could make my escape or bite down on the cyanide capsule embedded in one of my molars.

Actually, screw that cyanide capsule stuff.

The negotiations continue...

First rule of resisting interrogation: Don't resist much at all, and then come up with a really clever lie.

In this case, as you've seen, I told the guy that the documents were on Mars even though they weren't! That's the genius of my plan. I said something to him that wasn't true - he would be fooled by my ruse and then spend the next fifty years getting funding for a manned mission to Mars to recover the documents.

What if that doesn't satisfy him, though? What if he's skeptical about your convincing not-true-answer?

That's when you tell him more things that aren't true...

This is a good example of maintaining control over the process by keeping him guessing. Your documents are on Mars. So what?

So what? I'll tell you what - they aren't just on Mars - they're being guarded by an effing witch.

It's this ability to improvise in the heat of the moment that might save your life and your teeth. But don't expect to be able to come up with anything this good while sitting in that chair. I had the entire day to think up these answers. What you come up with on the spot will likely suck, get you killed, and put the recipe for State Secret Pie right in the hands of your enemies. Don't let this discourage you. As history has shown, when it comes to spies talking and ratting out their countries, what we really care about is that they tried to resist. A for effort, everybody.

If you're a pro like me, it's different. You see that your material about the document-guarding witch living in a cave on Mars is totally clicking with the bad guy.

Now's when you turn the dishonesty up to eleven...

See what I did there? I relied on the high likelihood that the person interrogating me was your average uneducated thug, and that he didn't know that a Mars-witch couldn't come in the form of a leopard with a stinger (leopards with stingers being an earth based animal - DUH!!!).

This is what ancient Japanese warriors called "Telling your enemy that you have a Mars-witch leopard with a stinger on your side." They used this in battle all the time. It's how they defeated Godzilla. Granted, Godzilla (the real Godzilla - not the one in the movies) was a six-hundred foot tall fire-breathing lizard from beyond time and space with a brain the size of a fava bean, but the fact that the Japanese are alive today is simply testament to the fact that it always pays to tell the enemy that you have a Mars-witch leopard with a stinger on your side.

If I haven't made my point on this subject, then it's not because I haven't made it, but because you're stupid.

Finally, the Lying Tree bears the fruits of our labor...

If all goes according to plan (it won't), you get to turn the tables on your enemy and assert your dominance over his country.

Once you're through winning the game of interrogation, you can plant a little American flag in the room where you've been harassed by foreigners and claim the land as our own, 'CAUSE THAT'S WHAT WE DO HERE IN 'MERICA!

YEE-HAW!

Finish the day with a mocha-frappa-donut-latte (that's the finest Italian coffee beverage ever invented in New Jersey) and wash it down with a plate of freedom-fries.

You've done your duty for king and country.

Or whatever.