Sitting here in a café in a small Turkmenistan town, watching caravan after caravan go by (what you Americans might call tractor-trailer rigs), smelling jet fuel and gunpowder, I figure this is part of the forward base action I was expected to report to my superiours in a conference call later this afternoon.

At first, I complained about this satellite phone, looking like a geek at a debutante party, or rather the rich geek father depositing his little princess at her coming-out party (and yes, you can take that for all it’s worth, these days).

But looking at those guys across the street cradling their smartphones covered with acronyms trying to get a good signal, I say being the sore thumb at an M.C. Hammer hardware store is a good thing, for once.

Besides, I’ve got a friend who carries her lucky knickers just for me.

And I’ve got another friend, El Presidente, who thinks about nothing but al Qaeda and schooling in Sunday afternoon football smackdowns to keep my thoughts warm at night, too.

I wasn’t always like this, sipping stale coffee, spreading badly-worded rumours from underpaid government copywriters, but then maybe I was…we just called it primary school back then.

That’s okay.  It beats sitting at home, not making any money there, either, watching the television news or surfing the Internet for useless tidbits like every other secret organisation in the “business.”

Where was I?  Oh yeah, spiking my coffee with homemade hooch.

You see, in the hinterlands of the former Soviet Union, radioactive material is as easy to get as rabies from the raccoons I used to…well, let’s not go into boring details at this juncture in the punctuated story.

But hey, when a guy gets lonely…never mind.

Anyway, I was sitting on a crate of rotten eggs, unable to distinguish the smell of my ripe, unwashed body from that of chickens that’ll never live to see the light of day reflecting off a machete swinging toward their heads, when it hit me.

The kid down the street, always pestering me to call a tobacco shoppe down the street from his cousin in London and asking if they have Princess Edward in a can, looked at this blog I was texting with my calloused thumbs (calloused, mind you, from texting — what else did you think caused the callousness?  I mean, calloused hands.).

He asked if I had a more interesting writing style, after he’d thrown the uranium/plutonium ball at my noggin.

Hey, that reminds me.  Maybe I’ve got a gold mine at my feet.  Either that, or the pyrite the panhandler pretended to think was gold and sold it only to me, his best friend in the whole wide world, if not the block in which we both live, at a bargain basement we were using to brew the hooch I give out to unsuspecting tourists before I remove their overweight wallets.

Seriously, what have I got that you don’t?

All this nuclear fissable material.  No, that’s the Coke gurgling in my stomach that’s fissable.

It’s the fissionable stuff I’m dreaming about right now.

You see where I’m going with this, don’t you?

Yeah, you know it.  Re-activating Project Orion.

We’ll just declare Turkmenistan off-limits and use it to launch the Mars mission my fellow members of the Committee are dreaming with me.

We’ll rename the country ChernobylTwo or something like that.

We can put this whole “war” to contain nuclear proliferation to a rest and just keep starving the Iranian people to death while their leaders bask in the personal glory of the sacrifice of their people to show them old episodes of “Who’s The Boss?”

Can you think of worse torture than that?

Rumour has it the last thing that Andrew World’s-worst-job-as-overpaid-angry-man Breitbart saw before his heart acted up was Alyssa Milano pretending to act.

Let that be a lesson to you, kids.  Don’t get your hopes up.  And further more, don’t listen to a word your clueless parents have to say.  They were terrible students in school and the only reason they’re doing well is that their bosses were even worse so the whole adult scheme is to pretend that everyone is smarter than they really are.

Of course, you kids have no clue what I’m talking about because, as we’re supposed to know, genetic research proves that our species has actually gotten worse, our purity as animals watered down with talks about backyard BBQ parties, easy-to-hack security alarm systems and other ways we deny we’re overdressed members of the fight-or-flight club.

Almost time for the conference call.

Go back to looking at your cute kitten videos and sports scores.

I’ve got a nuclear bomb powered rocketship to promote!