The Ruined World Patrol drove around in ruined cars, wore ruined uniforms, ate Ruined Toasties for breakfast. Their car radio only picked up stations that only played "Disintegration" back-to-back, interruption-free, 24-hours a day

The Industrial Devolution had shown us how to gut the planet and the Technologic Devolution had shown us how to jazz up the tailings and the Communications Devolution had shown us how to mix it all together and come out empty.

This was known as style.

The beauty of style is its ready co-optibility by any random piece of scum.

So style, like patriotism and religion, can easily be the last but is usually the first refuge of the scumbag.

And, in a world where the only virtue is avoiding the drool of material's slaves and the only sin is NOT being a drooling materialist slave yourself, what really fucking ELSE is there?

Well, there is .... uh, there is ... uhh, you know, there is being in the Ruined World Patrol, where, for one thing, you learn prayer and they blindfold you on Easter and give you spaghetti and you think it's worms.

Then you drive around the ruined world in your Dodge Dart and get out in front of large crowds and imitate what the other planets are saying about this one:

"They're like all, 'I told you so!'," you say, "And they're all, like, 'boy am I glad we kept that life crap off OUR planet! -- investing in that firewall that SHUTS LIFE OUT (perceived by the would-be attacker as a grossly inhospitable environment -- most often in the climatologic dimension) has definitely kept us from becoming a shit hole like earth.'"

The leader of the Ruined World Patrol is Jebb Harkness, the inventor of the Dodge Dart, which harnesses the quantum mechanical energy that everybody else wastes because they don't know it's there, and keeps running even after you've removed the last piece of engine.

He is also the mythical/quantum driver of every car that goes out on patrol. He invented the Dart to show the world how fucking WRONG it was about EVERYTHING, but they didn't get it. They thought it was just a car.

And so when he died that day -- as we went running down the alley, looking for food -- and we held an impromptu jazz funeral on the spot, the guy who improvised the eulogy pretty well summed it up for all of us who knew him when he said, "I'm sure if they had a Nobel Prize for what you can do with a white resin deck chair, a bamboo pole, a cinder block, 3 9X12 green tarps, a grocery delivery carton and 50 feet of truck rope, Jebb Harkness would have won it hands down every year."

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