Even as a young piglet, El PUERCO (the PIG), knew something wasn't right. El Puerco knew injustice. Prejudice. Discrimination. Knew it first-hand. Lived it. Breathed it. Occasionally rented it from Blockbuster where it's guaranteed to be on the shelf. But he knew it didn't have to be that way--knew, indeed, it ought not to be that way. The PEOPLE, he knew, needed to be made aware of this. But how, El Puerco lamented even at this tender age, to get his message to the PEOPLE? And just what, indeed, was his message?

Nobody quite knows when El Puerco first met up with "Pig Out on Books". Few remember a time when they were NOT together--some say they had always been together, that they had met in another, purer realm, another lifetime. (This explanation is called "The Shirley MacLaine Theory".) Others say they met in a sleazy bar. (This explanation is called "The Truth".) But all El Puerco knew was that he liked "Pig Out on Books"'s message: for what did he desire, if not to gorge himself on books, on the truth, on what is real, on what is important, on the eternal (not to mention on the occasional leftover potato skin)?

(Pig Out on Books, on the other hand, was merely enamored of El Puerco's curlicue tail, which, truth be told, is rather comely.)

El P and POoB were never formally "married"--marriage being, in El P's view, a form of institutionalized slavery (another factor: marriage between a pig and a slogan is outlawed in 48 of the 50 states, excepting Hawaii & Alaska...the freak states). But they became inseparable: they would be, they knew, a team forever. "Unto thee," El Puerco told POoB, "I pledge my trough." "Yeah, whatever," pledged POoB.

All of this occurred long before anyone had even dreamed of the democratizing power of the Internet--of the World Wide Web, an alternate communication system that was to make the Tristero system, Thurn und Taxis, look like two Dixie cups strung together with, uh, ...string...or something string-like or stringy. Maybe wire.

In the early- to mid-90s, the WWW had this potential. (But, alas!, not for long.) And it was there, in that forum, the PEOPLE's forum, that the Pig decided he must put forth his liberating message to the masses, the unwashed multitudes, the geeky, the friendless, the (slightly) creepy. (Who might then pass it on to a more desirable demographic. Let's hope so.)

But, as always happens when a window opens through which the many may express themselves directly and unfiltered, the MAN stepped in and decided that the message had to be made more palatable. It was not a bad message per se, the MAN said--just too radical. "How about," the MAN, suggested in his plastic-fantastic, watered-down, vanilla-is-inoffensive-so-let's-make-it-all-vanilla way, "'Hungry for Books'?"

But the Pig would have none of it. For him, nay, for the PEOPLE, it was "Pig Out on Books" or nothing. He would not abandon his long-time comrade at the 11th hour for the self-serving glamour of exposure on the World Wide Web. For what good was that exposure if the message it brought was a middle-brow corporate lie? Verily, what doth it profit a Pig that he should gain the whole sty yet lose his eternal soul? (Answer: Not much.) The Pig would NOT be a tool of THE MAN. No shill, he!

It should be noted that El Puerco--though always vaguely aware of his destiny, of the fact that he was different--did not always see himself as a Revolutionary. He was brought up differently: he saw himself, as did many young pigs, more as tonight's dinner and, possibly, if he provided enough leftovers, tomorrow's lunch. That was the extent of his conscious ambition.

The Certain Library conducted a nation-wide search for an appropriate barnyard animal to bring the message about books to the young of Certain County via the World Wide Web. El Puerco and POoB were chosen overwhelmingly for that role over twos--perhaps as many as threes--of other candidates. Then the MAN stepped in and overruled the democratically chosen winner, giving the title to an animal--an alligator--that is not even, technically speaking, a barnyard animal! (The MAN was more concerned with the alligator's pliant willingness to convey to the unsuspecting kids of Certain County whatever watered-down message the MAN thought "appropriate".)

It was this experience that radicalized El Puerco. The MAN wanted to deny him, and POoB, their mutual destiny! So it was only after the mainstream outlets closed themselves off to him that El P decided he must move to the periphery where, though the audience might be smaller, his message could be transmitted intact--where truth was not feared.

El Puerco recognized what he had to do. In order not to be silenced, he went underground. Refusing to lend his visage to the MAN's treacly mendacity, he resisted the easy sell out--leave that to some common sewer-alligator! If this meant a life on the run, always one mere step ahead of THE MAN and THE MAN's creatures, if this meant a stealth campaign to bring his message-Pig Out on Books!-to the PEOPLE and thus combat the MAN's co-opted vanilla "equivalent" "Hungry for Books", then so be it! El Puerco welcomed the life of exile...and TRUTH.

And yes, the Pig (or El Puerco, his revolutionary name, by which appellation he now prefers to be addressed) is still with his partner, his comrade, "Pig Out on Books".