The travel brochure had said that single words here, written on public surfaces in ironic bodily fluids, always trumped complete sentences printed in ink on paper everywhere else.

I was taking a walk around the section of the city known as Nowheresville, but then I bumped into a suburban couple bored with their existence who were taking a walk on the wild side. That disoriented me.

"You mean this is the wild side?" I asked them, stunned. "I thought it was supposed to be Nowheresville."

As if to prove it, a corrupt detective friend of the bored suburban couple appeared suddenly out of the shadows.

"He wants revenge on a gangster who he caught fucking his girlfriend," the female half of the bored suburban couple said.

The corrupt detective nodded assent.

"I never really liked her," he said, "but who can resist a woman who's resorted to sexual antics to save an airline?"

And we all agreed, even Farmer Vincent and his portly sister, Ida, who put lost motorists in their popular smoked meats. They were friends of the male half of the bored suburban couple and had just, by pure chance, pulled up in a car to ask directions to the tame side.

"Go back to New Jersey!" I yelled at them reflexively.

Everybody looked at me strangely.

"I expected this to be Nowheresville," I said defensively, "but it turned out to be the wild side -- and I didn't bring the right handheld device for the wild side, so now, I'm just trying to make do."

They thought for a moment and then made the universal sign for giving me a pass on my behavior.

"Now get the fuck back to New Jersey, fucking anyway!" I screamed at the fucking assholes in the car.

I started kicking over gabarge cans to show I meant business.

I was sick of their world, but kept not finding anything else no matter where I went.

"But maybe," I said to them assuming they assumed about me what I've just said to you about myself above, whether I was thinking it then or showing it, or not, "Maybe if whoever in Le Tigre screams "GET OFF THE INTERNET!" on "Get Off the Internet" and whoever in the Cure goes "Auowwwww" at the beginning of "Disintegration" became president and vice president respectively of the most powerful nation in history, maybe THEN we could start to shed these layers of pretense."

A woman who'd unknowingly accepted a ride from a psychopath after a fight with her boyfriend, and was also the half-sister of the detective's ex-girlfriend who'd fucked the gangster he was now trying to get revenge on said, "But the genetic ego knows what it wants out of mammals, and only the most brutal or most loving interdiction will ever put even a dent in its opportunistic gameplan."

She'd been dropped off by the people who were now headed back to New Jersey even though they didn't really originate there, but didn't want to disappoint me.

By then we'd walked several miles and were at the filling station that disco girls had taken over for their ailing uncle during an oil crisis.

We didn't need any gas or shit but stopped there anyway to encourage them in their noble undertaking and let them know that if we had, in fact, needed gas, we definitely would have been getting it there, but since we were on foot blah blah blah, so all we could do was encourage them to keep up the good work because we all knew it was for a noble cause, even if they were all just a bunch of sluts and whores.

Unfortunately, as we were going through these pleasantries, suddenly, over in the corner of the station, bat's blood hit Dracula's ashes and he rose again to fight the bored suburban couple who he assumed were looking for trouble, which wasn't really a precise description of exactly what they were looking for, but, apparently, Dracula's ashes weren't counting.

I tried to zone out. What the fuck was I doing here, I thought, when all my goal had ever been was just to be a young vagabond listening to stories about such varied subjects as existentialism, evolution, alienation, dreaming and the media?

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