Chapter 3: The Chicago School of Hard Knocks

There’s a lot of empty water out here on this stationary plane. When you’re bobbing along at four knots in a thirty-foot sloop, with nothing but the gentle hum of a flat ocean and the occasional screech of a seagull, your mind starts to drift. You start asking yourself: How did a kid from the streets of Chicago end up tracing the frozen edge of the world?

Well, it didn’t start with stars or domes. It started with crooked politicians and a typewriter.

If you want to understand why I don’t buy the “official story” on anything—from NASA’s CGI marbles to the nightly news—you have to understand Chicago. Down there, lying isn’t just a habit; it’s a highly organized, tax-funded industry.

Back in the day, I was known as a bit of a local headache. A “freedom fighter,” some called me. A “pain in the backside,” according to the guys in the fedoras down at City Hall. I was hell-bent on proving that we, the people, were being lied to about absolutely everything.

And I would have been just another loudmouth shouting into the wind if it wasn’t for the greatest columnist to ever grace a newsroom: Mike Royko.

Mike was my hero. He was the undisputed king of the Chicago Tribune, a guy who wrote with a pen dipped in pure, unfiltered truth and Chicago sewer water. When Mike heard about my exploits, he didn’t laugh me out of town. He saw a kindred spirit. For years, Mike tracked my battles against the crooked Mayor Richard J. Daley organization, giving his readers a front-row seat to the circus.

Through Mike’s daily columns, the whole city watched me take on the “Machine.” I remember the time I tried to audit the city’s snowplow budget because I suspected they were using the trucks to pave the driveways of ward committeemen (spoiler: they were). Or the time I proved that half the registered voters in the 11th Ward had been resting peacefully in Mount Olivet Cemetery since the Truman administration but still managed to show up at the ballot box every November.

Mike loved every minute of it. He’d sit at his desk, chuckle, and write about how Slats Grobnik was out there throwing wrenches into the gears of the statehouse in Springfield, and eventually, the White House itself. We took on the big boys—the federal bureaucrats, the backroom dealmakers, the guys who thought they owned the air we breathe.

Why? Because if they’ll lie to you about where your tax dollars are going, they’ll lie to you about the very ground you stand on.

Sitting here on the deck of the Passagio, looking up at the perfect, unmoving sky, I raise my tin mug of coffee to Mike. He taught me the golden rule of survival: If the authorities tell you it’s raining, look out the window yourself.

Chapter 4: Radio Waves and Red-Pilled Relays

When Mike Royko passed away in the late 1990s, a piece of Chicago’s soul went with him. For a while, the silence in the papers was deafening. The Machine thought they had won. They thought the last guy with a platform who dared to ask hard questions was gone, and they could go back to sleepwalk-governing us into submission.

But you can’t kill a good fight.

Enter a young, sharp-witted journalist named Greg Anthony.

Greg was a newsman of the old school—he had that same ink in his veins and a stubborn refusal to swallow the corporate garbage being fed to the public. When Mike passed, Greg picked up the torch. He didn’t just write about my antics; he brought me onto his alternative radio show, broadcasting the truth over the airwaves to anyone brave enough to tune in.

While the mainstream media was busy hypnotizing the masses with useless gossip and state-approved narratives, Greg and I were on the airwaves talking about deep-state overreach, historical cover-ups, and the slow, deliberate boxing-in of human freedom.

It was during those late-night broadcasts, looking at the sheer scale of the deception we uncovered week after week, that the final puzzle piece clicked for me.

Think about it. If you want to control a population, you don’t just lock them in a room; you convince them they’re living on a tiny, insignificant speck of dust, hurtling aimlessly through a cold, hostile void. You make them feel small. You make them feel powerless. You tell them that “experts” in lab coats are the only ones qualified to tell them what’s real.

But Greg and I knew better. We knew that the same globalists pulling the strings in Washington and Geneva were the ones running the space agencies.

“Slats,” Greg told me once over a couple of cold ones, “if they can hide a trillion-dollar black budget in the Pentagon, they can easily hide the edge of the world.”

He was right. That conversation was the spark. I realized that fighting the politicians in Springfield was just batting at mosquitoes. If I wanted to expose the mother of all lies, I had to go to the boundary line itself. I had to find the fence of the terrarium.

So, I bought the Passagio. I packed my binoculars, my logs, and my stubborn Chicago grit, and I set sail.

Now, three years later, as I write these logs on the gently swaying desk of my cabin, I know Greg is still out there keeping the microphone hot, waiting for my reports. The elites might have the satellites, the money, and the fake globes—but we’ve got the truth, we’ve got the legacy of Royko, and we’ve got the wind at our backs.

Next stop: the uncharted waters beyond the Wall. Stay tuned.