March 13th, 1969 Saab Lofton is born — the first and only child of Amelia Winston and Michael Lofton.

1972 Amelia marries Jerome Brown, a shell-shocked Vietnam veteran who proves to be as brutal a stepfather as the “alternate” version of Biff Tannen from Back to the Future Part II.

Human Rights Day 1978 Superman: The Movie premieres and has a profound effect on Saab.

1979 to 1981 As a military brat, Saab is “stationed” in the Canal Zone of Panama and regularly seeing people of color in positions of power also has a profound effect on him.

October 1981 Saab returns to America and watches his very first episode of what will become his favorite television series, The Greatest American Hero.

1985 When Saab notices that those the least likely to be affected by Tipper Gore’s proposed censorship of music (John Denver and Donny Osmond) stood in solidarity with those who would, it sparks his interest in politics.

October 1986 A handful of teenagers murder Saab’s biological father as part of their gang initiation.

1986 to 1987 By writing/drawing a fanzine, Saab does his part to pressure Marvel Comics into returning the artwork — albeit merely 2,100 pages of the estimated 10,000 to 13,000 pages — that had been wrongfully denied the legendary Jack “The King” Kirby (1917 – 1994). Then he meets “The King” at a costume contest and is invited to visit Kirby’s home after graduating from high school.

June 12th, 1987 Saab narrowly graduates from Fairfield High School in Fairfield, California — it’s such a cliffhanger that this date is declared a holiday: Impossible Day, which he still celebrates every year …

July 24th, 1987 Literally hours before he plans on following in his grandfather’s footsteps (Emmanuel Lofton fought Hitler’s Nazis during World War II) and enlisting in the army, Saab watches Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, becomes an anti-nuclear activist, and weeks later, marches in his first peace rally, which marks the beginning of a political career that lasts for over a quarter of a century. However, the relationship between grandfather and grandson never fully recovers.

1990 Emmanuel Lofton dies of a stroke.

Impossible Day 1991 to July 3rd, 1992: The Year of Hell Saab is homeless while he awaits Emmanuel Lofton’s drawn-out probate proceedings, which are administered by his apathetic uncle, James Lofton (a wide receiver for the Green Bay Packers) and even attends Solano Community College full time while still on the streets. Assisted by physicist Tomas “Tommygun” Berger, Saab is able to survive until a portion of an overdue inheritance finally arrives and permits him to afford entrance into San Francisco State University.

Fall 1992 Saab’s college roommate introduces him to Professor Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.

Summer 1993 Saab discovers Professor Noam Chomsky by accident in a Spin Magazine interview.

May 1994 to November 1994 Upon learning the Nation of Islam is merely an Afrocentric version of the Religious Right, Saab writes his first novel, A.D., which speculates the consequences of a Farrakhanian separate state and it’s endorsed by Professor Zinn (after the professor’s apprentice, Alice Walker, “dissed” Saab for having asked that she give her endorsement at a book signing for Zinn’s autobiography, You Can’t Remain Neutral on a Moving Train).

September 15th, 1995 A.D. (III Publishing) debuts, but it receives little if any coverage from the corporately-owned media (because it’s as much an indicting expose as it is speculative fiction), even though its release is one month before the Million Man March, of all events.

August 1997 The Financial Aid Department of San Francisco State denies Saab the funding necessary to graduate since countering the corporate censorship surrounding A.D. took precedence over class attendance, so he moves in with his mother and writes Battle Neverending.

October 1998 Battle Neverending, an anthology of short stories and poems endorsed by Dick Gregory, is self-published. Saab dresses as its superheroic protagonist in order to advertise it and begins attending the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.

Winter 1998 A commentary by Jerry Large of The Seattle Times about Saab’s literary career attracts the attention of JanSport backpacks, and for a time, Saab assumes he’ll be part of its Fall 1999/back-to-school ad campaign centering on obscure celebrities (Alyson Hannigan from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Wayne Knight from Seinfeld were already requested), but at the last minute, Nicholas Lea (most famous as Krycek from The X-Files) is cast instead, which costs him six thousand dollars and an all-expenses-paid photoshoot in Berlin, Germany.

June 11th, 1999 In a textbook example of karma, Evergreen gives Saab a bachelor’s degree (albeit a generic one in liberal arts) based on the very writing that exiled him from San Francisco State. Soon afterwards, he follows his gambleholic mother to Las Vegas.

2000 to 2001 Fear No Evil, Saab’s award-winning column for The Las Vegas CityLife goes from only appearing occasionally to monthly to weekly.

November 2001 For trying to walk between a pair of police horses blocking his path, Saab is beaten, nearly blinded in one eye and spends a night in jail for an obscure misdemeanor, “interference with a police animal,” but eventually, the ACLU gets this fallacious charge dismissed.

January 2003 Confident that The Las Vegas CityLife would continually support him, Saab’s boycott of day jobs or wage slavery, AKA the Mission, officially begins when he allows his tenure as a substitute teacher to expire by refusing assignments.

Summer 2004 Saab is at an all-time peak: In addition to winning awards for journalism, his radio show, The Saab Lofton Power Hour, is on the air every Thursday night at nine p.m. on KLAV 1230 AM.

December 2004 Saab moves in with Marci White; a woman he’s not attracted to, because his rent is wrongfully raised.

Saint Patrick’s Day 2005 To silence the only far left voice in Nevada media, the Stephens Media Group buys The Las Vegas CityLife primarily to censor Saab’s column.

Summer 2005 Jarvis Marlow, a fan and patron of Saab’s, pays for the reprinting of Battle Neverending, which gives him a much-needed source of income.

Late August/early September 2005 While selling copies of Battle Neverending in Los Angeles, Saab is assumed to be homosexual because of his superhero costume, which is used to advertise the novel, and gay bashed.

October 2005 Marci is finally tired of Saab fantasizing about white women wherever they’re together, so he’s kicked out of her apartment. Fortunately, Charles Imboden of the Nevada Green Party takes him in immediately afterwards.

April 2006 Utterly impoverished, Saab is left with no choice but to move back in with his mother, who has returned to the state of Washington by this point so that Native American casinos can be gambled on.

2006 to 2008 Saab embarks upon his quest for a “cougar” or a “suga momma” — an older-yet-attractive woman willing and financially able to be a breadwinning provider for a younger lover — and comes close, but decides in the end to abandon romance entirely in favor of activism.

May 2008 After years of being on a waiting list, Saab moves into a subsidized apartment for low income people in downtown Seattle. Unfortunately, this gains the attention of a clinically insane libertarian who stalks Saab across cyberspace over the course of the next several months.

2009 College students David Lewis and Noah Zoltan start to co-direct Saab Lofton: The Movie — a documentary based on Saab’s life …

January 27th, 2010 Professor Howard Zinn passes on.

Fall 2010 Saab sends his first submission to a charitable event known as Wonder Woman Day, where drawings of the character are sold at an auction and all the money raised is donated to battered women’s shelters and domestic violence programs, which becomes an annual tradition for him.

March 20th, 2011 Saab has a heart attack because of how loud and obnoxious African Americans can be if they’ve been infected with the “virus of anti-intellectualism,” as associate professor of linguistics John McWhorter put it. This marks the beginning of Saab’s involvement in Chris Rock’s Civil War, an ongoing conflict.

August 2011 Ramona “Sapphire” Lofton (author of Push, which became the Oscar-nominated movie, Precious), Saab’s aunt, disowns him — claiming his mother is supposedly a “lying whore,” but suspiciously refuses to take a genetic test in order to confirm her claim.

2012 Saab Lofton: The Movie is released on DVD and eventually on youtube.com.

April 2012 Saab introduces Cindy Sheehan when she lectures in Seattle and compares the loss of her son, Casey (1979 – 2004), to characters such as Batman, Spider-Man, Daredevil and the Punisher losing their loved ones. Despite the snarky, anti-intellectualism dominating the left, Sheehan understands/appreciates the comparison and even mentions how Casey was a Trekkie.

December 2012 When the Ugandan government threatens to pass genocidal legislation against Uganda’s homosexual population in time for Christmas as a “gift,” Saab does his part for the gay rights movement by bombarding that government’s websites with facts and insults, which helps save the lives of half a million people.

“[Uganda’s fascistic legislation prescribing imprisonment for homosexuals] was first tabled in 2009, with a proposed death penalty for some homosexual acts, drawing a firestorm of criticism [and at the center of every firestorm is a white hot core] from rights groups and Western leaders. The death penalty was later removed amid international pressure, but rights groups want the whole bill scrapped.”
–Al Jazeera, February 20th, 2014

December 2013 After over a year of torture, Saab sued PHG (Plymouth Housing Group AKA Pandering to Hobos and Gangsters) for refusing to silence its noisiest tenants. Unfortunately, without the benefit of an attorney, Saab is forced into the following settlement: Two thousand dollars would be received if he leaves an apartment that’s been a home to him. What’s worse, the only realistic choice he has — insofar as a place to stay — is sleeping on his mother’s living room couch.

August 26th, 2014 In yet another battle of Chris Rock’s Civil War, Saab’s mandible is fractured after “an ig-nant-ass niggah” sucker punches him for stopping a woman from being slapped at a bus stop. For the next several months, a bionic implant holds his jaw in place, and half that time, he’s limited to the softest of foods.

December 2014 Realizing he can no longer rely on relatives for housing, Saab returns to searching for the legendary “suga momma” and actually finds one online in the form of “Carla Marx” — the code name for a divorced substitute teacher who’s fallen in love with him … He moves in with her because she believes in his Mission enough to sponsor his work, so long as he cooks for/cleans up after her.

February 2015 After singlehandedly outdebating an entire fleet of libertarians on the FCC’s Facebook page, Saab did his part to cattle prod it into voting for net neutrality in 2015.

Summer 2015 Communist radio show host and Facebook friend, David Arthur Smithers, hires Saab to write a short story about a “dark skinned Kryptonian in KKKansas” (Smithers’ exact words/phrasing). That story, entitled “What a Difference a Shade Makes,” which describes a parallel universe in which Superman looked like Taye Diggs instead of Christopher Reeve, is soon weaponized into a website (readWDSM.com) that Saab uses to literally cyberstalk every white supremacist on the planet with …

“Ku Klux Klan groups, meanwhile, FELL from 130 groups to 72 [AS A DIRECT RESULT OF readWDSM.com]. The DECLINE is a clear indication that the new generation of white suprem­acists is REJECTING the Klan’s hoods and robes.”
–The Southern Poverty Law Center, February 21st, 2018

“Everyone who stands up to them has had a role in driving their numbers down and you should include yourself in that.”
–David Neiwert, from the SPLC’s newsletter, Hatewatch

Summer 2016 A white woman named Laurie Auld invites Saab to her home in Cleveland, Ohio so he can personally mass distribute readWDSM.com to all the heavily armed (due to Ohio’s “open carry” law) white supremacists* attending the 2016 Republican Convention. However, 48 hours beforehand, an inebriated Saab is understandably in a “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow, we may all die” mode* and accidentally overfeeds Laurie’s poodle/pomeranian a pork chop bone. Laurie overreacts, makes it painfully clear that black lives matter far less to her than lower lifeforms and throws Saab out before the convention even begins …

SCOTTY: How do you think I wound up here? Had a little debate with my instructor on relativistic physics and how it pertains to subspace travel … I told him that I could not only beam a grapefruit from one planet to the adjacent planet in the same system — which is easy, by the way — I could do it with a life form. So, I tested it out on Admiral Archer’s prized beagle.
KIRK: Wait, I know that dog. What happened to it?
SCOTTY: I’ll tell you when it reappears.
–from the 2009 movie, Star Trek

GRISH: Where is the vault? Do you understand me?
(Porthos wages his tail and woofs.)
GRISH: I can’t lock on to its language.
MUK: It’s a lower lifeform, you fool. Probably the captain’s next meal.
–from the Star Trek: Enterprise episode, “Acquisition”

T’POL: The Kreetassans manufacture plasma injectors. We need one.
ARCHER: I’m told I’ve offended these people … if their carelessness has hurt Porthos or, God forbid, ends up killing him, they’re going to find out what being offended is all about.
T’POL: You shouldn’t have brought your dog on a diplomatic mission.
ARCHER: Porthos has the right to a little fresh air.
T’POL: You obviously place more importance on the quality of the air your pet breathes than on the quality of the plasma that drives your ship … I’m questioning your priorities.
ARCHER: I really thought you were beginning to understand something about Human feelings.
T’POL: Not when it pertains to primitive quadrupeds who haven’t developed the ability to speak or to use a toilet [OOOH, BURN!]
ARCHER: I grew up with dogs. Can’t remember not having one. You have any pets when you were a kid?
PHLOX: My people don’t keep pets.
ARCHER: I thought you said something about the Denobulan Lemur being highly sought after.
PHLOX: Oh, very much so. Their kidneys are considered a great delicacy … Perhaps you’re right, captain. Perhaps I am insensitive to the bond between you and your subservient quadruped
–from the Star Trek: Enterprise episode, “A Night in Sickbay”

“That’s the thing you gotta remember about WASPs — they love animals, they can’t stand people …”
–from the 1987 movie, Wall Street

April Fool’s Day 2017 Carla betrays the Mission by cheating on Saab and throwing him out into the streets — all within a 24 hour period (see TLC’s song, “No Scrubs,” for details) … Even after repeatedly stating that she never would’ve went from substitute teaching to having her own class if it wasn’t for his Alfred the butler-esque housekeeping.

Summer 2017 Saab’s latest novel, Defend the Archive, is completed, from the streets, despite Carla’s treachery. Unfortunately, even though it’s been compared to James Joyce’s Ulysses, he’s still wrongfully denied news coverage.

November 2018 For the second winter in a row, Saab Lofton is sleeping in the garage of a house with NO plumbing/electricity, but he’s still living off of nothing but the sales of his radical literature (snarks be damned) — the Mission continues … THE LEGEND CONTINUES

“Lisa [Simpson] focuses attention on inescapable moral principles and makes people uneasy with conventional compromises. Hence she is typically isolated and suffers intensely from her isolation. She yearns for respect and friendship. She too wants to be popular and to be liked. Because she is a Simpson, she is not a goody-goody. She is not someone who finds happiness simply in doing what it acknowledged by all to be good. Like her brother, Lisa is adventuresome, BUT HER ADVENTURES ARE ON THE MORAL RATHER THAN THE PHYSICAL PLANE.”
–James Lawler, associate professor at the State University of New York in Buffalo, from the 2001 book, The Simpsons and Philosophy

“You have watched the titans walk the Earth and you have kept stride. Perhaps you are more like them than you realize. You exist — to give hope …”
–from the 1996 DC Comics mini-series, Kingdom Come by Mark Waid and Alex Ross