At a party recently a woman asked me what I did for a living. I told her that I was a bicycle messenger, and that I aspired to be a writer. She looked at me thoughtfully for a long moment and she said:

"Don't you think that there are enough books out there already that aren't being read?"

"Yes," I told her. "That's precisely why I'm still working at it."

I could see that we weren't going to make a deep connection so I didn't waste anymore conversation with this woman, but her words, or my interpretation of them anyway, stuck with me. I was troubled by the idea that I was not particularly gifted, just proud of myself. After all, every writer must be something of an egoist to believe that anyone else cares about what they have to say. I thought about my own efforts, the single love poem with its 1,000 sappy incarnations, the litany of liberal angst hurled like a spitball into the maw of the machine, the unfinished letter to my father.

What the hell are we trying to prove anyway? Aren't the folk confused enough between scrambling for coupons and the evening news without asking them to blink their way through a particular set of issues? How could I and my friends really hope to improve the quality of life in Iowa City or Mozambique?
I have to say that I was moved by the realization of my own insignificance, and I very nearly succumbed to the enormity of all that I did not know.

Eventually, I pulled myself together, and in the wake of my revelation I endeavored to reconstruct a literary platform that would echo through every Legion Hall and 4H chapter across this great country to issue forth like a thunderclap across the taut eardrums of a waiting planet. I remodeled my own puny literary efforts to embrace the proven intellectual traditions of the ancients. I broke a hundred clay tablets and peeled the bark from innocent trees; I even tried writing backwards. I exhorted my colleagues to plumb their subconscious primers for the double helix of the literary fountainhead, to reach past the logos and the lyrics and the jingles to find the meat around the literary stone.

And they rallied around me. We took up burnt sticks and sketched our stories on every flat surface we could find. We stood before the scrolls of the early bards like bare-headed penitents waiting for the divine light of Homer and Aristophanes to call us back to the primordial phrase. And it was good.

When the dust of the centuries settled, we had put together Mobile City Issue #4, a text for the ages.

In its humble pages we offer a salute to the men and women from around the globe who have come to our fair city to compete in the 1998 Cycle Messenger World Championships. With it we strike a blow for bored readers everywhere, and we offer hope to every aspiring bicycle messenger with a pen, brush or camera in hand by declaring: No! It has not all been written yet.