“I am Q”

…said the real Q.

Dumbfounded, the crowd stared back at him. They glanced around at each other, and then turned their eyes back to him.

And there was much blinking.

Finally, a woman with long flowing hair mustered up the courage to speak; “The real Q would never call himself the Q.”

Many nodded and grunted their assent to this.

“Anyway, everyone knows the real Q is shorter than you,” added a tall man. “And Hunter Biden would have shot you by now.”

“Hillary’s emails would get you,” someone growled.

“It’s true,” echoed a short bald man. “If you were Q, exploding popsicles would have found you within mere moments of that confession.”

“No really, I am Q,” said the real Q.

“Oh really,” asked the short bald man, “what’s your favorite kinda pizza?”

“I…” the real Q hesitated “…I don’t really like pizza.”

The crowd gasped.

“What?” asked the real Q.

“You knew it was a trick question,” the tall man piped up. “Any kind of favorite pizza would condemn you once and for all!”

“Damned pervert, for sure,” echoed the woman with the long flowing hair.

“Pepperoni?” asked the real Q.

“Pervert!” answered the tall man.

“Canadian Bacon?”

“Pervert for sure,” echoed the crowd.

“But you knew that, didn’t you?” said the short bald man.

A well-dressed old codger sneered, “I’ll bet he likes pineapple on his pizza.”

“Told you, he was a pervert!” Said the woman with the long flowing hair.

“You didn’t say the wrong thing,” said the tall man. “It’s all very suspicious.”

“Could it…” Once again the real Q hesitated. “Could it be that I just don’t have a favorite pizza? Or maybe I know the deal with pizzas, because I’ve told you about them before, and I avoid them as all good Americans should?”

A chorus of rejection came pouring out of his ears; “No,” “Definitely not,” “Cut the bullshit!” “We know better!”

“Seriously, how do you know I’m shorter than, …well,” the real Q was getting irritated. “How do you know I’m shorter than me?”

“You once mentioned your shoe size,” said the tall man.

“It’s true,” nodded the woman with the long flowing hair,” I saw it on Parler.

“No, not Parler,” the old codger snapped. “He said it on Facebook; that was before we all turned our backs on Facebook?”

“We have?” asked the tall man.

Several people struck him with their hats.

“Anyway, it wasn’t his shoe size on Facebook,” said an old woman leaning upon a cane. “It was his favorite mug.”

“No, that was on Chan,” said a young man wearing spectacles.

“Don’t follow the Parler shoe,” shouted another woman. “Follow the Chan Mug!”

“No, he speaks to us through Rumble,” said another voice from the back of the crowd.

“Not the Rumble; the truth is on Parler,” the woman with the long flowing hair shouted.

“Was,” said the bald man.

“Was on Parler,” the woman with you-know-what-kinda hair corrected herself.

“OKAY FINE!” shouted the real Q. “You read my shoe size on Parler.”

“Facebook!”

“Fine, FACEBOOK,” shouted the real Q. “You read my shoe size on Facebook. How do you know that was me that wrote it?”

“We don’t.” Said a man named Tim. “we don’t know that you’re Q, so we don’t know that you’re the real Q. Even if you were the real Q, you wouldn’t really be Q to anyone who believed in Q, not even if you could prove that you are Q, or even if Q could prove you were Q. The real Q saw to it that no Q could be proven, so if you are here offering up proofs of your Qness, then you must not be the real Q after all.”

The crowd shouted in unison, “So say all the Q!”

“What?” asked the real Q.

“Do we get to stone him?” asked the tall man.

“Wrong parody,” said the woman with some kinda hair.

“OKAY, FINE! FINE!” The real Q shouted over the lot of them. “If I’m not the real Q, and you have no way of knowing just who is and who isn’t the real Q, then how do you decide when to assume someone is the real Q and listen to what he says?

All agreed this was a good question,

“Um,” A dim-looking man spoke slowly at first. “If it’s cool.”

The real Q shot him a dirty look.

A smart looking fellow with a tree on his shirt tipped back his hat and proclaimed loudly; “We decide it is the real Q if it is cool AND if it says bad things about people we want to think badly about.”

All nodded in agreement.

“But it does have to be pretty cool,” the dim-looking man added.

The crowd reluctantly assented to this addition.

“Look,” said the real Q, “This is why I came out to you. the joke has just gone too far. You can’t just treat a message as coming from Q if you hate the people it asks you too. You have to have some independent means of knowing whether or not they are worth hating.”

“That’s what Q is for.” said the bald man, “If it’s Q, then they are just as awful as he says they are .”

“And if you want to think they are as awful as he says they are, that’s how you know who is the real Q?”

“Precisely,” the crowd affirmed.

“Isn’t that what you wanted?” asked the woman who really did have hair.

“Well n…” seeing the crowd around him tense up, the the real Q hesitated one more time. “I mean, yeah; that was my plan all along.”

“Uh huh,” the tall man nodded. “Just when did you decide this was your plan?”

“When I realized that was the plan that you wanted me to have, which is exactly what real Q followers would want the plan to be and exactly how they would want the real Q to figure anything out, just as they do.” The real Q almost looked confident. “Right?”

“Maybe,” said the man named Tim.

“We’re going to have to run it by the executive committee,” said the tall man.

“The executive committee?” asked the real Q.

“Yes, the executive committee,” said the old codger. “The executive committee of the Proud People’s Front.?”

“Not the People’s front of Boogaloo?” asked the real Q.

“Hell no,” spat the tall man.

“Splitters! the crowd shouted in unison.

“I thought you guys were boogaloos.” said the real Q.

“Say that again and I’ll turn you into a liberal,” snarled the man named Tim.

“Not since Tuesday,” said the woman who’s hair really was a wig all along. “We don’t boog our loos, no more!”

The real Q strode to the center of the crowd and gathered up all of his courage. “Look, you can’t just live like this. You can’t be one group of terror, patriots, one day and a different bunch of patrio-terrorists the next, love Mike Pence in December and try to kill him in January. You can’t believe everything you read on Facebook one day and dismiss it all the next, learn everything you know from Fox news for decades and one day decide their a bunch of Goddamned liberals. Sooner or later you have to make an effort; you have to find some way of sorting the truth out from the crap and sticking with it instead of blowing like a leaf on the winds of the latest semi-pornographic narrative to catch your eye while surfing through cat memes. You just just can’t live like that!”

“We can’t.”

“No, you can’t. That’s no way to live!”

“DON’T YOU OPPRESS US!!!”