I have a small confession to make. About a year ago, I bought an Asian tree frog with a girlfriend of mine. Our relationship had fallen upon hard times, so we thought, "Let's have a child! That always seems to work in the movies!" But then we thought about how a crying baby might interrupt the all-night arguments we'd grown so fond of, so instead we got a frog. Initially, we wanted a puppy, but our apartment did not allow non-human mammals, so then we sort of wanted a Gila Monster, but then it turns out Gila Monsters are endangered, so we went ahead and bought an Asian tree frog named Sparky.

But even a Gila Monster probably couldn't have saved our relationship, and the girl, who asked me not to say her real name (Helen) on the radio, broke up with me shortly after Sparky became a member of our dysfunctional family. In the weeks after she left, I sat in my apartment feeling sorry for myself and holding Sparky. I would cry, and then Sparky would pee all over my hand, and then something about Sparky's uncontrollable urinary reflex would make me disproportionately sad, and then I would cry some more. It was a nice little excretion circle Sparky and I had going, but then I ran out of sick days and realized I needed to go back to work and get my life together.

So I did something pretty horrible. See, Sparky had become a metaphor for my failure and inadequacy. His ugliness was my ugliness. His inability to control his bladder was my inability to love with my whole heart. I couldn't bear to look at him every day, so I drove out to Margate Park one afternoon last fall and ditched Sparky next to a tree.

I didn't feel terribly bad about this until recently, when I realized that Sparky is our last, best hope to save Chicago from the foreign threats that imperil our very way of life. I don't mean terrorists. I mean flying Asian carp and the West Nile Virus. In case you haven't heard, mosquito bites can now officially be fatal, thanks to a pesky virus that somehow made its way from the Nile river valley to Chicagoland - possibly because, like everyone else, the virus wanted to see a game at Wrigley before the Tribune Co. turns the Friendly Confines into a hideous monstrosity.

And then there are the carp. These crazy 110-pound fish have come within 25 miles of infesting Lake Michigan. If they get into the lake, it's widely believed that the carp will immediately eat all of the fish currently swimming in Lake Michigan, many of which we ourselves were hoping to eat at some point in the future. The fear is that, in ten years, sushi menus will include only A. Asian carp, B. Asian carp eggs, and C. sea urchin, which not even an insatiable omnivore like the Asian carp will eat.

Not only are the Asian carp fat, they're also disconcertingly agile, sort of like Refrigerator Perry in his heyday. They can jump eight feet out of the water and have already injured several fishermen.

So what are we doing? Well, various groups are spraying for mosquitoes in and around Chicago, but to kill all the mosquitoes in Chicago, we would frankly have to nuke ourselves. To combat the carp, we have built an invisible wall across the Chicago canal. This thing emits an electric charge that repels the carp, but here's the kicker. Should the power go out, which even with the reCommittEd ComEd is a virtual summertime certainty, the invisible wall will stop working.

Clearly these measures are ineffective. We need to immediately eliminate Asian carp and mosquitoes from Chicago, and that's why we need to find Sparky and a few thousand of his Asian tree frog brothers and sisters. There are only two things Asian tree frogs are good at: catching bugs and peeing. And it just so happens these are precisely the two talents we need to stop West Nile Virus and Asian carp. All we need to do is stand as a city on the banks of the Chicago canal, each of us holding an Asian tree frog over the canal. In no time flat, the voluminous urinary output of the tree frogs will poison the water and kill the Asian carp. Then we simply release Sparky and his cohorts into the city to serve as an amphibious anti-mosquito commando force. It might not work, but frankly I trust Sparky a lot more than I trust Com-Ed.