I am the Filter Man

I am the Filter Man. I come by your house; I stop by your office; I even make roadside calls and can quietly enter a church, synagogue, mosque, or hospital, if need be, to perform my duties. I often visit the halls of Congress. You might say I'm ubiquitous. Which a lot of people get mixed up with iniquitous, which I am pretty much not.

I got the job years ago when the fifteenth Ice Age was announced on Fox News. Immediately CNN had to put their oar in to say there was not going to be a fifteenth Ice Age, but a season of hurricanes that would wreck the planet. And, of course, the New York Times kept repeating that we would all be drowned within a matter of weeks so why worry about an ice age?

Amidst all the confusion, with men and women rushing to and fro, crying "What shall we do?" I remained calm and collected. I had shown an early ability as a boy to filter everything disturbing, exciting, and puzzling, out of my life, so by the time I was fifteen I had no problems with girls, cars, grammar, acne, or my parents. I lived in a world of white sterilized gauze. I was neither oblivious nor paranoid -- I accepted everything that came my way, and then simply filtered it all down to a colorless, odorless, and generally inert mindset. I was acutely disinterested. 

So when the World Health Organization asked me to create filters for others before everyone had kittens, I graciously accepted -- and never looked back.

In Ireland parents get their children to behave and eat their boiled turnips by threatening to have the Filter Man come get them.

In the Ukraine I'm referred to as Uncle Felbish, who brings candy to orphans and makes the lilac bushes weep.

In Brazil they call me "Gnat Strainer" and light candles to me during Mass.

And the Chinese offer an image of me rice vinegar and pencil stubs to alleviate the swine flu. 

I'm really not a bogeyman or a deity. I can't prevent pigs from dying nor do I enjoy snacking on red-haired little leprechauns. I'm just a working stiff. I visit the unfiltered wherever they may be, palace or hovel, and bring to them the peace of a filtered existence. Sometimes I use a physical filter that I install in their ears or over their eyes. Many people need an industrial filter for their mouth. But for the most part I just fill their heads with soothing pap that has been so refined it contains nothing nutritious or savory. Sort of a mental poi, if you will. I place gossamer filters over TV screens, loudspeakers, and most picture windows in the home. I've worked in tandem with the auto industry to have rose-colored glass installed in every vehicle on the road today. 

I've never considered myself indispensable, or immortal. I know that someday I'll die just like everyone else. But I choose not to think about it, to filter it completely out of my mind. And so when I do shuffle off to Buffalo there will be no one to replace me -- but by then I hope to have filtered enough people so that they will carry on my work for me, taking filters to the unfiltered in far off and benighted lands. 

And, yes, Virginia, there is a dangerous amount of fiberglass in every filter.