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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