I'm traveling by air today -- I know, I'm an idiot -- and when I got to the Miami International Airport and Permanent Construction Zone I found that we have new security procedures, requiring that all passengers remove all of their dignity and place it in little gray bins. As I approached the screening point, a TSA person told me to go into the line for the scanning machine, which takes an image of your body and sends it to a TSA person in another room. Or possibly it goes to teenaged hackers in Bangladesh; there is no way to tell.

The people ahead of me were allowed to go after being scanned, but I was not. I was pulled aside and told to stand in a small roped-off area. After I had stood there for several minutes, I asked a passing TSA person what was happening. He said, quote, "You have a blurred groin."

"I have a what?" I said.

"A blurred groin," he said. And then he walked away.

I tried to sneak a peek at my groin, but this is not easy to do inconspicuously when you are confined to a small roped-off area with many people around. Several minutes more passed, and then a man came and took my boarding pass, and another man told me he was going to take me to a private room for a special procedure.

"Your groin was blurred," he explained.

We went into a little room, where he put on blue gloves and explained that he was going to touch me in various private places. He was very specific not only about the places, but also about when he would be using the front of his hand, and when he would be using the back of his hand. (I honestly don't think it's any less creepy either way, but I did not say this, for fear of being viewed as an international terrorist.)

While he was explaining this, the other man came back with my boarding pass, and informed me that I was Dave Barry. His exact words were: "You're Dave Barry!" I agreed that I was. At that point the first man began groping me with the fronts and backs of his hands, and while this was happening the second man was telling me that he was a big fan of my writing. "Maybe he'll write about you!" he said to the groping man, who did not find this as hilarious as he did.

Anyway, they finally let me go, after establishing that there was nothing fishy (so to speak) going on with my groin. So we can all feel a little safer today.