They tell us no, you cannot walk through the front door. Go around back to the rear service entry or to the loading dock. They make us sign in their logbooks and registers. They hire private security to watch over us and videotape our images as we sign in with fake names and flash our official identification cards. Sometimes access to a laminating machine is all it takes to be George Washington or Marcus Garvey or Lars Ulrich for a day. They create the hoops and we jump through them and sometimes, yes, it gets a little tiring. Because we are artists they consider our lives expendable. They drive their buses full of tourists in from distant states and run us down on our own streets so completely that our bodies are left lying broken on the pavement and our bicycles are converted into crumpled up pieces of tin foil. They force us through magnetometers and x-ray machines and metal detectors and when our cleated shoes or the chains we have secured around our wrists set off alarms, then they make us raise our hands like criminals so that they can wave their magic wands across the private areas of our bodies. They have paved over all the secrets and hidden the majesty and I believe they have done it for a simple dollar. All the polished brass and shining marble we walk between and even the foolish circus hats that hotel doormen wear are all part of their apparatus of power. Like tinted windshields on limousines. Like moustaches on fat cops. Like French cuffs and Sicilian neckties. And no the city is not mobile as we may have promised. But we are mobile as we move through the corridors of these cities. And now we have an organization for ourselves-The District of Columbia Bicycle Courier Association under the guidance of President Andy Zalan and Vice-President James Kerns. This recently incorporated organization is working hard to put on the 1998 Cycle Messenger World Championships which will be held here in Washington over the Labor Day weekend of September 1998. Already there have been a number of fundraising events (Brown Street Halloween party and a Swobo-sponsored raffle at the Crow Bar) to benefit the DCBCA and raise the much needed cash to put on this race. If you can, please help to support the race because whatever you give, you give to yourself as the DCBCA attempts to make DC fun for a week next September. And after the race has been enjoyed and folded up and handed off to another city, the DCBCA plans to address the issues that affect us as couriers on a day to day basis. Meanwhile welcome to Mobile City Issue Three: out little island of Utopia, our modest dictatorship of the Proletariat, our Northwest Passage of the Mind. When the world is leaning over you and trying to run you around or drive you into the asphalt and what they are saying is that you are shit, simply produce a copy of Mobile City and open it wide and tell them no, we are not.