"We don't really care about religion," I said. "We just use religion to piss each other off."

"We don't really care about each other," they said. "We just use each other to piss each other off."

"We don't really care about the family," we said. "We just use the family to piss ourselves off."

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For most of our lives now, films and books and songs and environmental and population studies and astrophysics have been promising us the end of the world.

And, as a result, a great deal of pent up expectation and hope has been expanded in all our human hearts.

In fact, a recent survey shows that most people currently alive on earth today will be thoroughly disappointed if they do not get to witness a full-blown glorious termination of the world, at least once in their lifetime.

This means, for one thing, that, as we sit here twiddling our thumbs, every minute, hundreds of thousands of people all over the world are dying unfulfilled.

So if we have the least bit of decency left in our ignorant brutal souls, it is time to get off our corpulent asses and do something about this injustice whose victims grow by 6 or 7 figures each day.

Of course, when I tried to spread this message out of unconditional unselfish love for all mankind, I was arrested and charged with one-man conspiracy to conditionally selfishly hate all mankind.

I was blindfolded and incarcerated, and when the blindfold was removed I found I was back in the very prison I'd escaped from months ago, but it had changed so much and there'd been so much turnover since my escape that I hardly recognized the place and no one there recognized me.

Fortunately, a few days after my arrival, the prisoners all got together and voted to outsource our incarceration to a phone bank in Bangalore and, the next day, we walked out into the sun.

This was the first time I had not been on the run in years, and I started vomiting out of fear of not knowing how to just sit there and be.

But, within hours, I was able to outsource my nausea to Metro Manilla and continue on.

The first thing I did was go and take a quick refresher course from Deepak Chopra or Tony Robbins, on how to be my own best douchebag. Apparently, forgetting this had led to whatever acts had led to my being incarcerated the first time -- escape from which incarceration had, in part, led to my being incarcerated the 2nd or 3rd time, depending on how you're counting.

Still, I knew that, sooner or later, I would run into something I couldn't outsource or drink or smoke my way through or be a douchebag about.

That something was the people.

Because, despite their Satan, and despite their clothes and haircuts, people had finally been reduced to being mere cellular automata of themselves -- much as Stephen Wolfram had predicted in his ground-shaking book "A New Kind of Scientology".

But, fortunately, in exchange for being reduced to mere cellular or cell phone automata, the people had been promised discounts ranging from 10-30%.

But, unfortunately, since people had been reduced to being a mere parody of reduction itself, it was hard to reach them with any new idea about how owed the end of the world they were.

To get to them, first you had to steal a car and crash it through the side of their house while they were watching TV.

And most likely what they were watching on TV at this time was the end of the world being promised to them yet again.

So, from there it was easy. You didn't even have to hold them at gun point because, like Christ or the Disciples, you have come bringing the good news -- the good news that the end of the world is within.

But, like Ken Lay or Frito-Lay, you have also come bringing the bad news that they will have to WORK to make the end of the world happen.

They will have to drop everything. Then they all have to get in one of their cars and you get in the other, so now you can go crash these 2 cars through the sides of 2 more houses and deliver the same message to its occupants and thus convince them to join too.

Then, from these 2 houses, there are 4 cars1 and enough people to break up into 4 groups to crash each of them through the sides of 4 more houses whose occupants are also thereby convinced to join in, so then there are 8 cars to go crash through the sides of 8 more houses -- and so on -- with the chain reaction proceeding like nuclear fission, according to the powers of 2, but with homes replacing neutrons as the unit of measure in the series 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384, 32,768, 65,536, 131,072, etc.

Which, pretty soon, leaves most every house in the world with a car crashed through its side and the garage empty and the former occupants gone off with both their cars, and with enough cars and people generated when it's done so that a billion cars, stuffed to the gills with newly home-wrecked humanity, are free to go surround all world capitals -- demanding the end of the fucking world NOW! as promised.

Before one more person dies without it.

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But it didn't matter -- because, suddenly, we woke up and it had all just been a dream. But when we sat up in bed and looked past our feet, there were the unexploded dummy RPGs on the floor.

So maybe it hadn't ALL been just a dream, but, even so, we'd still never know which parts of it WERE just dreams and which WEREN'T, so why have even fucking bothered either having had them, in the first place, or trying to figure them all out, in the second place?

Clearly, despite everything pointing to exactly the opposite, we were at a turning point.

So we could opt for World Revolution.

Or we could opt for one or more of the many perfect masters who were all clamoring to come on our radio show -- and we didn't even HAVE a radio show.

Or we could opt for the endless watching of and the eventual joining in with the cruelty that victims unloaded on each other by the shit- or boatload.

Or we could opt for Xtreme Sainthood, which notes pinned to the dummy RPGs shot through the windows told us we were now eligible for, thanks to both all we'd been through and the gracious manner in which we'd handled it all, especially the parts with blood, torn body parts, or human cultural choices.

We took a vote.

Will there even be a momentary stop off at the 15th century, on our hurried way back to the 10th?" someone asked.

Will this sainthood really just be a new kind of Mcdonalds -- for the soul? someone else asked.

The trick was, if we wanted to be canonized, a chopper would appear overhead and snatch us off our roof on a rope ladder. We had 5 minutes to decide.

What the fuck. We didn't bother deciding, just went up on the roof. The chopper was late and lifted off too soon so the last person, me, had to leap for the last rung of the ladder with everyone else still scrambling up it.

But I only caught it with a finger and dropped off into a lake after just a few minutes of stupid hanging on.

The lake was surrounded by woods on all sides and I spent the night on a small island at the center of it, with small water rodents that no human had ever seen before slapping around all the time like they fucking owned the place.

In the morning I could hear the sound of chain saws as the Army and National Guard were cutting down the trees to get to me. Apparently one of the many video cameras that were always running somewhere and pointing in all directions so in the end most of the planet was covered, had caught my descent from the chopper rope ladder and now it was just a matter of time.

I dove into the lake and fortunately found an underground cave where I could suck enough oxygen out of the fish to stay alive until I got to the other end which was still underground but no longer under water.

I started clawing up and as I poked through the surface into daylight there was a truck sound and my hands caught onto an axle and I was dragged out of the hole and kept my legs bent so they could grab hold on the bottom of the pick up truck and keep me flat against the drive shaft as we headed up what was clearly a long narrow winding mountain road doing abt 65 so I couldn't drop off.

I was facing up so most of the flying dirt and pebbles weren't hitting me directly in the eyes nose mouth etc. but they were still bouncing off the underside of the cab, so I was still getting hit in sensitive destructive places, but in much smaller numbers than maybe I deserved.

"Deserved," I thought. "What does that even mean?"

Eventually we were heading back down and then the inevitable transition to paved road and the first stop light after days at freeway speeds.

I dropped off and scampered away. Things looked familiar and I realized I was back in my home town, even though when I'd started all this a month ago, I was on another continent.

Actually I'd been born here but we moved away when I was 8.

So no one recognized me, and things had changed enough in the intervening years that I barely recognized the town.

But I had to act fast cause the police were already onto me. When they came up and asked what I was doing I said I was here doing a survey.

They agreed to be my first subjects.

My survey question was, like: OK, so like, you know, there've been all these films and books and songs and shit about the end of the world. You know, the end of the world this, and the end of the world that. Blah blah blah. You can't turn around growing up without hearing about the end of the world.

So, I mean, after hearing all this advertising for the end of the world, will you be disappointed if you die without ever seeing the end of the world.

The cops had to think about this. And as I went around town asking everybody the same question -- because what had started out as a cover-up had become a life's mission -- they all had to stop and think too.

And then, at a rate of 95 to 1, they virtually all finished thinking and looked up and said, Yeah, you know, I kinda WOULD be VERY disappointed if I didn't see the actual end of the world in my lifetime. I definitely WOULD feel cheated out of something I'd been promised.

So, it turns out, if you ask the question the right way, everybody, EVERYBODY, wants this fucking old shitbag world to end. And the sooner the better -- cause we damn well wouldn't wanna all die tomorrow and then have the world end the day after tomorrow.

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When we landed, we'd forgotten why were being chased, and maybe the people chasing us had too, but it didn't stop them.

Fortunately up ahead was a hot air balloon warming up and we killed the two people in the truck and the two in the gondola who were making final preparations.

We turned the burners on full, unhooked the rig from the truck bed and immediately soared up and the wind took us out over the racetrack.

But we were sick from the sudden jolts and started vomiting over the side. They were running the 6th race directly below us at the time and several horses slipped on and several jockeys and fans were sprayed by, our puke.

In response, people in the stands started firing their pistols up at us, trying to bring us down (as it were) because they didn't like having their horse-race, their horses, jockeys and themselves covered with our partly digested last few meals and snacks.

The balloon was hit, but the wind had picked up again and carried us farther inland as we slowly descended into the trees. We were too far from the track now for the people there to get to us quickly, but they'd no doubt called their fucking relatives who lived in the hills and we could already hear the engines of their pickup trucks revving as we de-ballooned.

The local animals were waiting expectantly too, all looking through the trees to see what we were about, but only an old bear bothered to roll a washing machine down a hill at us, and even that was pretty halfhearted -- like it was more about the machine than us.

We made it to an abandoned farm house. But inside, it wasn't abandoned. A TV personality was there. Seated in a hard-backed uncomfortable chair, he mumbled some words off a home TelePrompter and then drank urine from a jar. Anything for a laugh.

Enormous will was required to keep his head from turning to syrup and spilling down over his collar. Or so it appeared.

He delivered strident homilies about the church army for a while, then took out a small hand gun and shot himself in the head -- apparently unwilling or unable to continue to exert the force of will necessary to keep it from getting to the point of viscosity where shooting into it would become finally useless.

We reluctantly moved into the farm house and drew straws for who'd clean out the body. We all lost.

After that we got stoned and ate food we found in the cupboards. For dessert we tried to make a SAM-II out of Drano, lemonade and tin cans. When the choppers came and started firing down into the house we shot these up at them and they actually worked, but couldn't be aimed well and ultimately missed. Fortunately the choppers all collided anyway, but, unfortunately, they fell into the house and smashed up everything and blew up.

Fortunately we got out of there in time, but now we had to walk through the woods for days. At this point, we had not heard Velocity Girl or Lush for over a month.

Of course we were running from incarceration for crimes we didn't commit or even know existed till we were accused of them, convicted, sentenced, and jailed.

There's not much to say beyond that about the past because of, you know, national security reasons.

Anyway, we were all hopped up about the partial success of our homemade SAM-IIs and were hot to try again and improve them for better accuracy and control. We vowed to rob some 7-11s and work on this once we got out of the woods.

So after a few days of eating grubs off tree bark and not sleeping much, we finally reached a small town and immediately robbed the 7-11 of all its Drano, lemonade and lighter fluid.

We took over the first house we came to after we left the 7-11 so we'd be near enough to go back and get whatever else we needed once they restocked it.

The people in the house decided to join us because they were renters and had nothing to lose and also hated everything -- except love and beauty and honesty and freedom and truth. And kindness and justice and warmth and healing the sick and predicting the ugly stupid future.

But things didn't go well with the SAM-IIs and we couldn't really improve them and there were several explosions and small fires in trying, and without the pressure of being under attack to spur us on and drive us, we finally just said ehhh fuck it and gave up.

It was only minutes later, while we were relaxing from having taken the weight of building homemade missiles off our shoulders, that we heard chopper sounds and then the release of incendiary bombs.

We dove for the basement and then out a ground level window as the place burst into flames. There were some trees so we had a few moments before we'd be visible from above or from the street.

We made it into a house 2 doors down where they were also renters and decided to join us too, so now we were 8 people, one from each race, religion, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, and favorite song.

Rather than venture back into the streets where the police would be patrolling, we took advantage of the closeness of the houses and dove through the window of one into the window of the place next door. Since it was winter and the windows were mostly closed, we were accompanied by a lot of noise especially the sound of breaking glass, and by many diverse shards of the broken glass itself.

We did this for 10 houses till we were 2 streets down, where the police weren't patrolling.

At first we thought we'd make a run for it to the freeway and move surreptitiously through the foliage along the divider strip to another town. But a few feet from the house we saw we were leaving too thick a blood trail to cover up and decided to just all go back inside and quietly bleed to death.

Fortunately the bookcases were filled with books and there were huge full screen TVs on every wall and all manner of porno tape and the great classics of film, video game, and search result.

We decided to start a school and maybe blow things up and shoot things down, on the side.

We stopped all our bleeding and after many days had finally dug the last shard of glass out of flesh that was gonna be dug out, and the rest would have to just be left inside to form a visible but translucent barrier underneath our respective dermis.

The police had blown up half the street but not made it to our new home, so we decided to celebrate by starting over fresh, and we decided to start over fresh by opting out of everything, and then opting back in only to those things we really wanted to opt back into, if any.

We figured at the very least we could get a best-selling book out of it called OPT OUT!! -- which would teach people how to opt out of the stupid worthless lives they've had forced on them and how to opt out of the stupid worthless society they've had forced on them too.

In a later book we would discuss how to opt out of eating, sleeping, brushing your teeth, and sex.

And then, in the 3rd volume of the trilogy, we'd discuss how to opt out of both evolution and carbon-based life itself.

But before we got started with even the first book, several RPGs came smashing through each of our first story windows simultaneously.

To Be Continued....

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That's why our Populist Elitist Party has seen its membership skyrocket in recent years, while other parties wither away.

The Human Nature's A Piecea Crap Party, for example, now commands less that 11% of the electorate -- maybe because, whenever they put forward their platform of "Just tell me one good thing about human nature!" -- nobody can.1

OUR platform, "You are all better than everyone else", on the other hand, meshes perfectly with everybody's thinking.

In fact, our only possible competition in the upcoming election is the Really, It's No Great Loss of Freedom To Not Be Able To Call Your Government a Lying Buncha Scumbags Party.

People are mostly attracted to this party because of its impeccable logic which shows conclusively how it's really no great loss of freedom to not be able to call your government a lying buncha scumbags because everybody already KNOWS what a lying buncha scumbags their government really is, so why bother telling them one more time.

But then, with only a week to go before the voters go to the polls, the whole campaign has been turned upside down. The Human Nature's a Piecea Crap Party has dropped the word "Human" from its name and added a "Just" and so become the Nature's Just a Piecea Crap Party.

Suddenly, people are taking notice. No one had ever considered that, hey, maybe Nature really IS just a piecea crap, before. So maybe it IS all Nature's fault, and being human has nothing to do with it. And even animals, plants, and microorganisms are just as not guilty.

But, meanwhile, no one is confronting the REAL issue of this election: the fact that the ONLY power we have left is the power to restrict and destroy each other's imagination -- and that even this power is disappearing -- a trite ironic consequence of its own success.

This fact is so much in everybody's face, that nobody seems to notice it. And so nobody's willing to go out and fight and die for its opposite anymore -- though pretty much everybody is still willing to go out and fight and die for pornography.3,4

Our platform, on the other hand, proposes, euphemistically of course, that the only way to deal with this issue, aside from silence, is through the power of passive destruction. Nothing, after all, can withstand the force of passivity -- not even the exterminating power of love.

All the heroes of man, for example, the current ones and the historical ones, have all been taken down, one by one, and destroyed by this force -- not maliciously, gratuitously, or with ad hominems -- but with affection, logic and honest ridicule.

And as they were reduced to their fundamentals, each hero made the same fucking confession right before the end, when they had nothing but their core semantic primitives left to use for constructing sentences.5

They admitted that what they'd been passing off for wisdom was most often just ugly bitter hateful cynicism -- which just happened to turn out to be right most of the time.

For this, they were sentenced to manic-depression -- but not just manic-depression in the dimension of mood, but manic-depression across all dimensions of being.

Like manic-depression of understanding -- where, for an hour, everything bristles with meaning, everything is profound. And any random passage from any random book seems to open up vast fields of insight.

But then, for the next hour, every word, every utterance, ever image reeks of infinite banality if not utter fucking bogus bullshit. Books are dumpsters of yapping egos, shopworn polemics, transparent over-generalizations, and only exist because some slimeball thought he could make a buck off it.

Or the manic-depression of achievement -- where each day rivals the preceding one in, first, what an utter stupid waste it is, and then, moments later, in how there just aren't enough fucking hours in it!

But in the manic-depression of narrative, there is no mania.

Heroes exist only to bring bogus comfort to losers, and to provide just one more number in the ".....Are For Losers" series of books, tapes, films, dramas, dreams, food and clothing.

Notes

1. Other than the one about how, every so often, out of guilt, human nature makes a lame pretense of trying to clean up a tiny fraction of its massive fucking up of everything -- called charity2 -- and then celebrates its righteousness in a ceremony of fucking itself -- called love."

2. Which, however, rather than cleaning up anything, ALWAYS makes everything worse -- but who's counting?

3. Esp. on cel phones, in packed elevators.

4. And also the right to the diametric opposite of pornography -- though no one wants to talk about this anywhere above the level of a footnote.

5. And, therefore, only loss, itself, left to lose.6

6. Along, of course, with possession, life, death, pain, pleasure and all the other semantic primitives, like reward and punishment.

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Simon Says: Put the little object to your ear!

What's he saying?

Pause. Silence. Smiles all around.

The downtrodden man with the cell phone to his ear, having just passed the modern day equivalent of random drug testing, spent the pause somewhere between amused and pissed at how the interface to his "occupation" was really, like human interaction itself, just some lame ancient infants' game. Then he repeated what he'd heard through the earpiece when Simon said repeat what you've just heard through the earpiece.

"Suspected carrier now crossing 4th and heading down F."

No one could say for sure if the physical and medical tracking of everyone on earth had prevented the next major world virus outbreak because no known carriers had ever been stopped by this method, but, likewise, no one could say that it hadn't -- because no outbreak had occurred since the law mandating all this useless crap was passed, a year ago.

So people at the front lines of tracking all possible carriers (everyone was a possible carrier) were like the nuclear button pushers of old (and currently): they never really DID anything, but they made a lot of noise (in world fear-space) NOT doing it.

The only real advantage of the job was the impoverished person you got free to handle all your cell phone calls for you so you didn't have to drop dead of brain cancer after the 1000th call like all the other poor slobs of the world who couldn't afford to or weren't smart enough to hire someone desperate enough to potentially die in their place with the cell phone of death to their ear.

Even news writers were smart enough these days to hire somebody in India to write their cliché-ridden stories for them, because excessive attention to news and culture "ideas" had been shown to cause advanced forms of the disease known as being a fucking moron -- where people would frequently flush themselves down the toilet because there wasn't a car chase, nuclear explosion, boxer from the sticks with a dream, or band of bomb-toting anarcho-terrorists to stop them.

So going from failed news writer to apprentice carrier detector, as I'd done 6 months ago, cost very little basic change, as both were just a matter of outsourcing all the deathly parts of the job to someone who couldn't afford NOT to do them despite the risk, while you yourself just kick back and don't do a fucking thing except write this story about kicking back and not doing a fucking thing except write this story.

In this climate, the difference between the vast success of the very few and the abject failure of the vast majority was always either nepotism or a single occasion where the right person gives or says the right something to the right someone at just the right time, and the rest is history.

So why bother?

Well, for everyone else, their lives are controlled by forces above man -- so they have an excuse for exercising bogus tyrannical illogical power at whatever local level they can become benign dictator of, then quickly or eventually drop the benign.

But I hadn't gotten there yet. So like all those who hadn't, I relied on a belief in the existence of an abstract force made flesh who uses superior strength or cunning or special gifts and modern hi-tech to laugh at all forces that would control him or her. Emotion, religion, stupidity, and the halting problem are, of course, never mentioned.

But now we are engaged in a great civil war. We don't have time for fucking stories anymore. We just need the information, the concepts, we just need the graphic semantic representation, just the Char names connected by directed arrows to actions and objects and causes.

We need just pure graphic elements and word fragments -- predicate calculus clauses, cutups of algorithms left to genetically re-evolve to prove they were right the first time.

But, whatever happens, use of the word "freedom" should be curtailed in everyday discussion until someone can show us -- in real life -- someone or something who actually IS free.

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Up until today, understanding has just been a popularity contest. Religion has only been kicking art's ass because St. Francis of Assisi is a better dresser and a better dancer than Kurt Scwitters.

But, after today, understanding will be rooted in the new logic, gynecologic.

Anyone incapable of this logic will be exiled to America -- by Maxwell's Demon acting at the level of brain function rather than at the level of atoms.

Thus the planet will become balanced cognitively in much the same way that it's balanced magnetically -- with a north and south pole.

One pole, Eurasia, will be all hard cold syntactically-correct algorithm, and the other pole, the Americas, will be all riotous absurdly fucked-up randomness.

And commercial testing centers, like the one you see us pressed against the outer wall of now, have been designed specifically to process large numbers of people like us to determine just which path our lives should take: absurd or cold.

Of course, instead of being entered in the old-fashioned, serial way, where people line up and wait their so-called turn, these buildings, based on the new logic, are entered in the modern, parallel way, where people just press their naked flesh against it and, once their numbers reach critical mass, are oozed in, simultaneously, through its pores.1

But the reason we are all here now, first and foremost, is to prove how normal we are.

And, these days, part of being normal is also being able to suddenly go all wacky, and then to, just as suddenly, snap out of it and apologize profusely, saying, "oh... sorry... I was just, you know, having an acid flashback... or whatever..." in such a way that they can't really tell whether you're joking or not.

And in such a way that the ones who want you to be joking are given just enough to think you are, while the ones who don't really care if you aren't are given just enough so, in fact, they might even come up afterwards to see if you still have your old drug connections.

Once we get inside, it's all Simon Says, and decisions and acts here are weighed by its rule.

Eventually we are wired up and sentences read as we're shot through a tube so we can be finally misunderstood all the way down to the level of neuronal activation patterns.

"It'll never happen again -- because I believe so fervently in the power and validity of what is really the sum total of political expediency, medieval ritual and ancient timeworn clichés," is pretty much the gist of the oath we are all asked to attest to before going on to the final swearing in ceremony. The "it" that will never happen again being all the wrong shit we've done before -- i.e. our lives.

At this point we enter into one end of the delusional spectrum. This is the end where you aren't saying a word because you're afraid you won't be able to handle all the fame that'll be so generously heaped on you for revealing whatever profound knowledge, locked away for millennia, you've just revealed by saying whatever it is you've just said -- though you've just said it only in a possible world that your fear and righteousness won't let exist in even your own mind or pants.

Then, we come out the other end, where you don't hesitate to say whatever you fucking feel like saying -- like: "Maybe you see me in your world, but you KNOW I'm not really here in your lame world. I am really in another far far better world, and have just stopped by to bask in the abundant Schadenfreude which your tragic world has for both its only tourist attraction, and only raison d'être."

Like flour, we've had all the soul and spirit removed and then been "enriched" by having the artificial versions of these put back in -- as stories. You know, closed circuit, multi-player neural activity with only the least tangent on real entropy.

Then we are certified, and put on trains to either the hard cold or the random absurd. But when we get there, we're told it doesn't matter where we are, and there's really no difference and no way to distinguish.

The stories we are given now freely everywhere, are really just their IOUs for the life they've borrowed from us and which is no longer available to us, during the term of the loan.2

But the core elements of these stories have been around since long before capitalism and are based on the animal part of the brain that deep in a destroyed heart is still desperately loved.

Stories made from these elements are able to generate, in a modern vernacular, felt emotion and a sense of life enabling animals and humans to return peacefully to their pens.

But these are stories about desires that could not really exist in the same world as the vernacular in which they are being told.

Like the world where animals and humans excuse being enslaved to alien desires by invoking the one about how even if everybody stopped cold and moved far beyond ALL desire, they'd still have to live in the fucking world designed, sealed and delivered by desire's founding fundamentalisms.

Notes:

1. This simultaneity of entrance also allows people to be judged relative to each other, rather than relative to some abstract static absolute whose only solution to every question is the quantum electro-dynamical "huh?".

2. Our borrowed lives have been invested in the continued (re-)production of these very stories themselves, and so, apparently, the only place there actually IS life, is in making them.

But whether this social order is a ponzi scheme or not is left as an exercise for the reader.

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It could be done behind everybody's back, while they're watching the film where a failed gunfighter follows a retired outlaw from Santa Fe to New Orleans for one last shoot-out.

Studies have shown that, without reality, everyone's just a small injured bird, hopping around, looking for a dark place to crawl into and die.

And as soon as someone questions their authority, they immediately fall asleep and later don't remember a thing.

But aren't all objects and appearances and desires just fetishes and aren't all stories just soap opera peopled by these fetishes? And so, isn't reality already less than nothing?

Their answer is, of course, NO! Because, if it were true, then why study anthropology at all (other than the universal reason for studying anything at all: i.e. "know thy enemy"1)?

And furthermore, they would argue, reality is the place where Satan, working overtime, created what we now know as religion. This was clearly her greatest, most infinitely recursive subterfuge, and has kept people oscillating among inconsistencies for millennia.

In Christianity and Capitalism, for example, Satan's ironically anti-Satan religions, people are asked to leave their souls hanging out to dry while their bodies go inside to worship. Of course, once all their heads are bowed, Satan can just come along and easily snatch the souls off the church/market clothesline and resell them2 at exorbitant markups to wealthy CEOs and clerics.3

And when the people come out from worshipping, it's a brand new day and they really don't have the time anymore to bother hunting down their crappy old souls. They have to learn to give a whole new brand of lip service to a whole new set of story lines.

Then, when that doesn't work, they have to learn to merge into just one big signal, where each of them is just a pixel in that signal, or just a single sine wave in its Fourier transform.

In this new new day, the workers are gone and the Capitalists have to clean up their own shit.

Suddenly it's easier to throw out the whole bathtub rather than just the bath water or just the baby or just both.

And since everybody feels the same about everybody else, affectional relationships, both on and off camera, are grudgingly played out against a temporary suspension of a permanent and profound disliking.

Everyone is free to chose between 2 shades of gray, and the plural of failure is 404: file not found.

Meanwhile, their culture is churning through the space of all possible culture faster than that space's specs allow.

On one level, they don't live on a planet or through days and years of history -- they live in a search, and if something isn't a search term or an object that can be searched for, by definition it does not exist.

All activity, therefore, is fundamentally searching, and life is simply the sum of all the results never looked at.

So talking about overcoming is really just a way of doing wallowing rather than just blindly relentlessly traversing nodes.

As for food, burnt hair on toast where the toaster blows a fuse early on, is everybody's favorite appetizer. While ice cream modeled with incredible accuracy on human body parts, is only the SECOND most popular food, contrary to popular belief and common sense expectation.

Politics has pretty much been reduced to a desiccated spit particle on the outer rim of the radar screen, and presidential statements of compassion are greeted with questions like "is this your true heartlessness showing through, or is it just you resisting your cheap attempts at emotional manipulation?"

And though reality has truly been eliminated as we set out to do, Reality TV stays on as historical artifact, rotting in museums and trotted out on appropriate holidays, and now consisting of just a stationary camera pointing at people chatting about how life isn't really life, but just the collection of insults TO life -- like unfreedom, selection, and stupidity.4

2. Before sale, of course, the souls are factory-refurbished so they know that life isn't really life, but just the collection of insults TO life -- like unfreedom, selection, and stupidity.4

3. You may have thought these men paid themselves huge salaries because they were just greedy scumbags, but, really, they need every penny of it just to pay the exorbitantly high price Satan charges (i.e. fair market value) for a soul.

4. As determined by reverse engineering the continuous flow of what everybody pours down their drain, tosses in their garbage, and flushes down their toilet.

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