What's 'really going on'

         I don't know which I love more- conspiracy theories, or the people who believe in them. There's nothing to brighten up a dull life like thinking that perhaps there is an Ed Harris- esque secret agent/ general tracking your every move through a hidden and deeply complex survellience system.  And there's nothing quite like speculating with an avid consiracy theorist, confirming old suspicions and being introduced to new delightfully horrifying possibilities.
         I've traced my interest in these theories to my oldest sister Gen, whose pot induced paranoia finds a perfect outlet in the alleged presence of an all seeing, top secret government agency.  In fact, my first experience with this new and exciting level of reality took place years ago during one of Gen's brief and usually disturbing pitstops home from the Dead tour.  Feeling complacently cool walking down the street with my fashionably bedraggled sister, I had not yet learned to be continuously wary of Gen's ability to pull the proverbial rug out from under my feet, and was as usual completely unprepared for the world that I was about to enter via her hallucinigenic enhanced mind.  After a vigorous toke, Gen nudged me and pointed to a telephone pole.
        'You see those boxes up there?'  She asked in a strained voice, a musky little curl of smoke escaping from her peirced nose.   Exhaling the rest if the smoke in a long stream , she looked at me with all earnestness through red, glassy eyes.
        'Those are cameras that the President put up there.  He watches everything that you do.'
        Being who I was, and still am to a certain extent, I took this startling news at face value.  It was both shocking and deflating, as I was an accomplice right then to an illegal activity.  I pictured a grainy black and white movie of us breaking the law being transmitted at that very moment to the Oval office, where George Bush sat in front of rows and rows of small monitors evocative of the television section of Walmart.  Leaning forward, he zoomed into our faces using a small controller and nodded slowly and disapprovingly.  I was now blacklisted.
         As usual, Gen's mind had immediately moved onto other things, leaving me alone with the implications of a nosy, all seeing government- casual 'facts' or statements on the part of Gen, which to me were earth shattering news, was an alarming pattern in our relationship.  (She had no idea that I, an already unstable eleven year old, was considering the easiest and most painless way to commit suicide after her informing me that everything about me (my astrological sign, a strand of my hair, my initials, my birthday) pointed to my unique role in history as being the future 'bride of the Antichrist' (an entirely different story in itself)).  Likewise, she had no idea that her information regarding the President's cameras not only engrained itself into my mind.  It would later on both form and pricelessly enhance my adulthood, as the initial discomfort I felt at my walks  down the long, monotonous road of my youth being observed from telephone poles developed into a ghoulish fascination with what is 'really going on'. 
          As a conspiracy theorist in today's world, it is not only my pleasure but my duty to reiterate to any willing audience what I have learned from 'Jesse Ventura's Conspiracy Theory' TV show, taking the liberty to fill in obvious discrepancies with my own ideas.  I fritter nights away watching Youtube videos about 9/11, relishing the outrage that I feel for the United States government.  And kudos to Gen, who was in fact far ahead of her time for 1995, as the internet, cell phones and the especially diabolical GPS, the conspiracy theorists' sure fire evidence that something is terribly, thrillingly amiss, were twinkles in the eye of the CIA.