Mark Fritz is Parthuman

This is just one of the crazy-ass transit flubs inflicted on yours truly, who nevertheless is the greatest drag racer to ever split traffic on Manhattan's West Side Highway. I was crowned king of the road by somebody (OK, it was me) who spent hours, days, past lifetimes, filtering and threading through Earth's angriest motorists against an equally asinine opponent until one of us beat a light and left the other stopped dead at a red. Legend has it that I lost only once, when I was pancaked by a crack-addled cabbie and a white Chevy van both vying to cut me off. My jaw was wired and I discovered a whole new world of chilled avocado soup with swirls of butternut squash.

In retrospect, riding off a Blue Ridge Mountain was pretty cool, just another reminder that you can leave this mortal coil without letting the attrition of age take its long, miserable toll. I've embraced year-round sport touring for lack of anything better to do. My career as a newspaperman pretty much ended with the mass suicide of newspapers, which, frankly, was a good thing. Journalism needed a reboot.

Mainly to get out of the office, I've been a roving national or international correspondent for The Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and Boston Globe. I covered the unification of Germany, collapse of the Soviet Union, and wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Lower Manhattan, Somalia, Chechnya, Bosnia, Liberia, and places I forget.

For my Rwanda coverage, I won a Pulitzer. I wrote a book about the 1990s from the entertaining viewpoint of real people trying to avoid getting killed in horrible ways all over the world. It won a very cool award from Salon, thanks to the one critic who actually read it and called it "strangely delightful."

I love the news, the process of finding pure truth and delivering it cleanly and clearly. My stuff is cited in a broad range of books, including several on journalism. Amazingly and alarmingly, a pretty routine war story I wrote was among "101 Masterpieces" in "The Mammoth Book of Journalism." The hack in me got a kick out of joining Orwell, Dickens, and Twain, among other other temporary immortals, though I don't know why we should let that prick dwarf Hemingway into the club.

I quit newspaper jobs on eerily consistent bad terms to perform humanitarian work for the International Rescue Committee in the Sudan, mainly in Darfur; and as war crimes investigator for Human Rights Watch in Uganda. Charitable groups are their own worst enemies because of endless in-fighting and cheap gin.

My last old-fashioned news job was at that right-wing rag, The Wall Street Journal, which at the time had an arcane and bizarre formula for writing a hard feature, which wound up obliterating the actual point of the story for an artificial angle. People clung to this formula like zombies eat brains.

Aside from war, I have written way too much about the medical establishment's fleecing the elderly whilst keeping them alive by any means necessary, creating a country full of lucrative vegetable gardens of imminent obits. I also write about the role of propaganda in wartime strategy, the uselessness of laws based on emotions, the generational conflicts triggered by the aging population, the epic routes taken by massive amounts of immigrants, the impact of changing demographics on the environment, and the genetic engineering of the food we eat.

I also wrote about rainstorms that devastated southwest Michigan's pumpkin crop, leaving growers with a hollow feeling inside. (Heh)