This is Frank Frazetta's "Against the Gods." If you know me, or have read my book, "Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story," you know why - with his "Combat" - is my favorite painting.

Sometimes, I think I may be psychic. I woke up last night at three. That’s fairly common for me, something I actually learned by self-hypnosis. I go to bed looking for the answer to a problem, do self-hypnosis before sleep and implant the post-hypnotic suggestion to solve the problem as I sleep. I’m not the first to use the method, but it works for me every time.

Last night was different. I didn’t have a question for answer, didn’t self-hypnose. Wondering why I had awakened, I realize with some disappointment at myself that this is an anniversary. It was twenty years ago that I had one of those things people call an “epiphany.” I knew I was going to lose it all, everything I had worked all my life to have. In the movie “Replacements,” in the role of Shane Falco, Keanu Reeves delivers lines explaining the disaster that ended his hopes of a professional football career. When I heard them, I choked.

“You're playing, and you think everything's going fine, but then one thing goes wrong ... and another ... and another ... and you try to fight back, but the harder you fight, the deeper you sink ... until you can't move ... you can't breathe ... because you're in over your head. Like quicksand."

My epiphany was something like being stunned. Totally bewildered, I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t imagine why. Everything was so WRONG. This was the United States of America, Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, Nation of Laws. This was the country dedicated to the rights of the individual. We had a Constitution and Bill of Rights guaranteeing personal rights. We had a Declaration of Independence proclaiming that “to secure these rights governments are instituted among men . . .” I had never done anything wrong!

I mean that last. I was so straight-arrow I sometimes wondered about myself on that count, too. I was so damned law-abiding that I stopped at stop signs out in the country when I could see for miles in all directions and no cars were coming. I not only paid my taxes, I insisted that my book-keepers take no deductions of any kind that would draw IRS ire. I’d never (still haven’t) deducted a business lunch or the like in my life.

Ah, yes – I did fight the IRS one year when they disallowed my deductions for travel expense. And I proved in court that I had, in fact, driven the miles claimed for business. The amount was $117.00, for Christ’s sake.

But the government doesn’t seem to forget things like that. Without warning of any kind, all my funds were seized. Sitting at my desk one day in 1977, I learned that the three twenty dollar bills and change I had in my pocket were all the money I had. With all the monthly bills to pay, I found I couldn’t borrow from any bank or lending agency. Under pressure from the Internal Revenue Service, and with two exceptions, longtime friends found reason to forget they knew me. When I had tried to find a job – even for companies doing the service I had invented – I was turned down (of course, it took a while for someone to admit that they had refused to hire me under threat of audit by the government’s “tax collectors”). Each time an employer filed W-2 forms, they received a threatening call from the IRS.

And so it went. Like Shane Falco’s quicksand. I lost it all. Not once, but twice. Everything I owned, and more. First one wife, then a second, abandoned ship when the federal government broadsides continued to land. A son attempted suicide. Through it all, I was hamstrung by my continuing faith that what was happening had to be an anomaly, a mistake. I had those “rights” I’d been preached to about all my life. Every, single one of them had been violated. I might as well have been a domesticated animal.

Everything I did was wrong, made the straits I was in narrower, my plight worse. Indoctrinated since birth, steeped in it, I kept repairing to the law, playing a game wherein my oppressors made all the rules. I just couldn’t believe what was happening. Even when I had been reduced to life in a tent in the wilderness, literally fighting for my life against starvation, the elements, government goons dispatched to maim or kill me, and police officers being incited to do the same, I kept thinking something I might do legally would succeed. Only finally, when both twenty-three lawyers and my own pro se efforts had failed, did I realize that the king is a son-of-a-bitch who does not obey his own laws.

When I had learned to fight effectively, by "getting something on" my opponents, and they had revealed the real face of government as never before, all I could do was defensive, fight with judo and a handgun against the relentlessly continual attempts at murder by the people sworn to protect me from criminals.

I actually don’t remember when it started – combat like this does things to your internal calendars – but I came to know with familiarity strange times like that last night. It’s a sudden return of the bewilderment, a feeling much like that which a woman who has just been raped must feel. I still can’t believe what has happened to me. I woke as I always do, looking around, still expecting that when I wake one morning it will be to find that everything I can remember has been a bad dream.

But it’s always the same. All my surroundings are for a moment – a very long one – strange. I always have to do a kind of inventory. First my senses, my mind – am I all right, still sane? Then my surroundings. Where am I? How did I come to be here? Oh, Jesus – it’s all gone. I don’t have anything left!

Where did it go? When I remember in a minute, my mind rebels – that can’t be. And the litany starts, the litany of all the rights I have as a citizen of the Land of the Free. I do it every time. Every one. By heart.

Usually by now, I sit down – sometimes, right where I happen to be. It’s like I’ve taken an electrical shock that has burned out my nervous system. I always feel breathless. Then, I’m angry. No, not angry; enraged. I need desperately to attack somebody, even something. Experience, and the blood-pressure cuff I’ve kept now for years, tell me that my blood pressure is soaring.

It passes finally. That self-hypnosis I mentioned a minute ago kicks in, to make me suddenly calm, collected. I take three or four deep, satisfying breaths and mentally watch my thoughts segue to those pre-conditioned.

And it’s over.

But I always wonder how long it will go on this way. Last night was very strange, and it makes me wonder. The hunted animal develops from his circumstances a heightened sense of his surroundings. Having fought for his life and escaped repeatedly, he pays far more attention to detail than he would otherwise. He listens more intently, learns to see what others can’t. He knows when he’s in trouble before it happens.

And, of course, it’s no longer me and my safety I can be wondering about. I’m down to where I only care about food and water. Property, pride, all those things I lost to my country, its falseness, and my own naiveté concerning them no longer mean anything to me. Knowing that to have everything back would just make me weak and vulnerable again, I wouldn’t walk across the street to have it all again. More, I’m seventy. I don’t care all that much about my life anymore either.

But the news – those "circumstances" I mentioned – is all bad. I don’t mean entirely by that that the news brought by the media is bad. I mean the news brought to me by those “heightened senses” I mentioned a minute ago, the sixth sense of a hunted animal. When you’ve been hunted the way I was, you learn by watching the body language of a man approaching. Once he’s close enough, you read his eyes, and his expression. People still marvel at the way I anticipate and block an attack, even one from very close. As stupid as it is – I can cripple or kill a man instantly with my empty hands, and they know it – my friends, even my wife, will suddenly try to tussle my hair or the like, only to have their offending hands intercepted and held. It’s kind of a game.

But they’re me friends, and I know their playing. Those same friends also know of the extreme manner with which I remain aware of my circumstances, mentally planning for the worst each and every time I enter those other than those most familiar. Away from home, I have begun perusing the place as soon as I exit the car, planning for the worst that might happen. They’ve seen it time and again, know that I watch people who aren’t my friends in a manner entirely different from anyone normal. I know trouble when I see it coming. It amazes me that you don’t and I know that unprotected by the societal prison where you are, you wouldn’t last an hour in the real world – the one where I've lived.

So I’ll warn you. You can – you will – lose everything the way I did. The law that protects you is the same law that “protected” me. It can be set aside as easily as it was set aside where it concerned me and my rights, as easily as Mr. Bush has set aside the law having to do with his powers as president. It’s all a fraud, the idea that the government is here to protect you and your rights; it is here to USE you as it sees fit. You are to people like George W. Bush and his patrician kind a domesticated animal, a sheep to be sheared whenever they see fit. Your property, even your life, is theirs to spend as they choose (ask a soldier, “serving” in Iraq – ask him in private, away from the government microphones), and when they come for you, you will feel like I did.

You’ll feel the quicksand.