Last night, formerly deceased President Rudy Ruiz took the stage at the national GOP debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, claiming to be the first person billionaire-backed biotech company RevTech has ever successfully treated with what has been described as a “miraculous” advancement in medicine. According to Ruiz, RevTech, and a cadre of supporters, the company is capable of reversing “mortal events” — in plain speech, bringing people back from the dead.

But one Turner Falls resident takes exception to an important part of that characterization.

“I don’t want to take anything away from Rudy — I mean, the president, Mr. President,” said Mitch Carter, who was injured in the Independence Day storms that saw tornados touch down at the Treetops Trailer Community and in downtown Turner Falls, TX. “But he got a lot of firsts under his belly already. I was first on this thing.”

I knew who it was going to be the second — the second — the words “surprise guest” came out of debate moderator Bret Baier’s mouth.

Sharp-eyed commentators noticed something was up as soon as viewers got the first wide shot of the stage, set with nine lecterns rather than the expected eight. Slate politics writer Hari Blake even fired off this crack on Twitter:

Minutes later, of course, after President Grantham, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and the rest of the crew took the stage, Baier introduced the ninth debater, “special guest” President Rudy Ruiz. The same President Rudy Ruiz who was killed in a plane crash on Independence Day; the same President Rudy Ruiz who was mourned by tens of thousands who descended on his hometown of Turner Falls for his funeral.

This morning, when I took a swivel-seat across the plastic table from Linda Lyle’s easy smile — which is anything but plastic, itself — at the McDonald’s on the outer loop highway outside Tyler, she reached for my hand and gave it a familiar, grandmotherly squeeze. Her warm welcome belied the dark impetus for our meeting: The worried, rambling voicemail she left me about Carron Nielsberg “screwing with” her neighbors at the Treetops Trailer Community. “They’re running some kind of tests on our people out here,” she said in her message. “And it don’t look legitimate to me.”

Fine, I said — happy to have her only daughter back home, especially since it means she’s got someone to share a pot of real coffee with after my stepdad switched to decaf last year.

But first: the small-town pleasantries.

I arrived early enough at the New Life Church of Turner Falls on Sunday to get a priority-section seat for what I was assured would be the beginning of a historic, world-changing, paradigm-shifting revolution in our very understanding of what it means to be human.

I half expected to be recognized, even among the thousands who queue up well in advance for the church’s flagship weekly broadcast, and booted out in retaliation for last week’s newsletter. Instead, I was treated to nearly an hour of pre-show programming, most of it concerned with ensuring parishioners are tithing to the fullest extent of their financial ability. (Semantic quibble: doesn’t “tithing” mean giving 10 percent of whatever you’ve got? Either you’re tithing or you’re not!)

For new subscribers — allow me to extend a grateful welcome to Trash Tabs readers and an ungrateful unwelcome to the PatriotWire trolls who have been flooding my inbox with threats and hate speech — here’s where we’re at: a billionaire lightly kidnapped me last month in an attempt to convince me he had resurrected the President of the United States from the dead, the details of which would be revealed to the world last weekend during the Sunday, July 30th 11 a.m. service at New Life.

And while that’s definitely one of the strangest sentences I’ve ever written, it is not the strangest, because the strangest is the one I’m about to write: