Puddle forms on Luddite Bar & Grill floor as visiting lecturer drinks a "Free Speech Lite."

As I was sitting in my chair,
I knew the bottom wasn't there,
Nor legs nor back, but I just sat,
Ignoring little things like that.
— Hughes Mearns

Hi. I’m not really a “College Professor of Political Science” – I just play one at Freedom of Speech, the “Son of SOLNA” blog.

Come to think of it, my name isn’t Erik, either.

You see, Erik’s just an imagined screen name, one that is useful to hide the identities of my semi-literate puppet master and her somewhat more competent ghostwriter.

They’re both female, but you’ll notice that when it came to creating me, the desired aura of macho academic respectability was deemed more believable if I were imagined by readers to be male.

What’s more, they made my field political science … not beer, computers or even sociology, but political science.

I don’t mind either way, man or woman, since I don’t exist in the first place, but sometimes late at night, when they’re hunched over the keyboard, sucking down Bud Lights as they perpetuate their feeble deception whilst foaming at the mouth about some mayor somewhere and his sewer system, my mind starts to wander.

Do I have a last name? Where exactly do I teach? Do I have a family, a house, or a car?

Then I remember: I’m an empty shell.

I’m – Erik’s – just pure fiction, conjured by the same people who do the funky Guantanamo to accepted principles of logic and the syntax over at SOLNA.

And so to me, well, it’s just a job I do. It pays the bills.

Before they moved me to Freedom of Speech and gave me this new fake name, I was the one who posted the SOLNA comments from So-and-So Family and Fed Up This and Outraged That.

Boy, was it boring following Laura’s template!

Now I’m having a much better time posing as a university teacher at my own blog, although I wish they hadn’t taken down the nice borrowed photo that purported to depict me. It was very flattering, you know. Almost like a model. Wonder whose copyright got violated for that one?

My favorite moment so far was getting to interview Steve Price, the 3rd District councilman. It wasn’t easy, you know. It’s hard to toss softballs when you aren’t flesh and blood, but somehow we managed to get past the self-evident nature of my non-existence, and all the questions composed by my creators were answered in suitably clichéd fashion.

Hell, even I don’t know how I did it.

Unless … hmm, do you think the Bud Light drinkers did it themselves, you know, submitted the questions and all?

That really hadn’t occurred to me until just now, but then again, I’m not really here.

Maybe they’re not, either.