-----EIGHT----

1

Then suddenly, unexpectedly, one morning, the world
was restructured in a most natural way -- in the image
of cable television.

Old nationalities were gently laid aside, and
individual nations stopped being about language and
culture and historic hatreds and central, holy bodies
of lies -- and started being about one highly
specific, precisely targeted, life/media product
orientation.

In this new world of theme states and tight-focus,
monophonic republics, each piece of geography offered
its own unique vision, so that, once you tired of
roaming the planet forever, and decided to settle down
until-death, you could choose the place to do it in
from an extensive list of archetypal, brand-name
countries that included the Sport Nation and the Court
Nation, the Comedy Nation and the Home Shopping
Nation, the Family Nation and the Disaster Nation, the
All-Talk Nation and the All-Action Nation, the Work
Nation and the Party Nation, the Compulsive Nation and
the Repulsive Nation, the Reckless Nation and the
Recluse Nation, the Lost Nation and the Salvation
Nation and the Man Without A Nation Nation and the
Weather Nation and the News Nation and the Music
Nation and the Amused Nation and the Abused Nation and
the Confused Nation and the Fucked Nation and the
Straight Nation and the Spirit Nation and the Emotion
Nation and the Delusion Nation and the Contusion
Nation and the Collusion Nation and the Cold Fusion
Nation and the Reform Nation and the Balanced Nation
and the One-Dimensional Nation and the Basic Nation
and the Bullshit Nation and the Pure Nation and the
Hand-Jive Nation and the All-Business Nation and the
All-Showbiz Nation and the Song-and-Dance Nation and
the Nickel-and-Dime Nation and the Miracle Nation and
the Extreme Nation and the Supreme Nation and the
Simple Nation and the Sample Nation and the Hard Core
Nation and the Romance Nation and the Horror Nation
and the Self-Righteous Nation and the Self-Deprecation
Nation.

And a few nations remained unchanged: Italica,
Albania, Costa Lavakia.

2

Before you could relocate, however, you had to attend
special classes to learn the new universal language,
Worldspeak -- which used only 28 universal words to
encompass just about anything any new world person
might ever want to do or say to any other.

----NINE----

1

Though it took me 5 tries, eventually I was able to
pass the Worldspeak proficiency exam without cheating
or lying, and was cleared for emigration.

Of course, I'd chosen the Most Fucked-Up Nation to be
my new homeland, because I assumed that not only its
people and government, but also its societal and
institutional structures and waste treatment
facilities, would all be just like me.

2

For the trip, I bought a reconditioned Alzheimer's GT
with the last of my World Ponzi Markers, and swapped a
ream of Mitsurola intelligent paper for a case of
Exxon-Valdez Full-Spectrum Peanut-Fudge bars.

Then I got on the road.

3

Everything went fine for the first 500,000 miles or
so -- a quarter of the way there -- and I had just
turned onto the Null Expressway southbound -- when the
engine began vibrating at the exact resonant frequency
of my skeletal system, and I was forced to pull over
and roll the car off a cliff -- just to get the feel
of it completely out of my bones.

4

I curled up, that first night, in a stand of small
bushes on the divider strip, and slept OK, despite the
traffic.

I dreamt I wasn't an asshole. Then I woke up. Beside
me was a doctorate in Placebo Theory which I must have
earned while unconscious.

5

I decided to settle down wherever I was, and rented a
place at the edge of a compound, where, at the center,
a 50 foot high, 360 degree display screen showed
endless, scratchy video loops of the nation's
President, staggering around naked and drunk, outside
the Presidential Palace, vomiting and pissing on all
the world's sacred symbols, flags, and logos and the
official portraits of all its sacred, holy people and
charismatic leaders, spread out there, on the ground,
in the rose garden.

And gathered around, in a rowdy mob, all the members
of Congress, the cabinet, and the Supreme Court,
relentlessly cheered her on.

6

Since this was the Flaming Compulsive Nation, the only
jobs they had here were in the cleanup trade, and for
my first assignment, I was jammed into the back of a
pickup truck, one night, with 10 others like myself,
and taken to a famous Northwestern lake, now quietly
strewn with the bodyparts from multiple freak
collisions between jet-skiers and water-skiers.

Our task, once we'd cleaned up the water, was to
continue on to land, to clean up some hunters who'd
been so startled by the screams from the
jet-skier/water-skier collisions, that they'd all
accidentally shot each other, as well as some people
on nearby golf courses, who we cleaned up next.

Then, we had to go cleanup the trails where some
joggers had been killed by direct frontal lobe hits
from balls viciously hooked or sliced by the golfers
shot dead or wounded at the precise moment of
ball-clubhead impact.

And then we had to go cleanup the tennis courts where
some frightened joggers had run to try to escape the
gunfire but, instead, were killed by the players for
disrupting their game, or accidentally hit and killed
by a vicious volley off the racket of someone suddenly
startled by the deathsounds of horses on the way to
the track whose trailers had just been slammed into by
race car drivers who'd just spun out of control
because they'd been hit by linedrives from a baseball
game in a nearby stadium where the players had lost
their concentration because a fan doing a Heimlich
maneuver on his choking wife in the bleachers had
failed and the wife fallen over dead, smothering a
small child asleep beside her whose despondent parents
tried to shoot themselves over this, but kept missing
and wound up killing everybody else in the stands,
instead.

And, of course, we had to clean all that up too.

7

Complex jobs like these required that we bring our
entire inventory of sports cleanup equipment, and if
nothing else, it was always a joy just to be able to
deploy all that technology, whether it actually did
any good for anyone or not.

8

Instead of returning to a home base, our truck stayed
constantly on the move, so we'd be guaranteed a
running start on whatever the next emergency was.

We were also expected to be on the lookout for
situations where trucks carrying used body bags from
12-car smash-ups, had collided with trucks carrying
VCRs designed to show tapes of ancient earthquakes to
halls full of people who didn't already have their
own stories of tragedy and abuse.

We were to report such collision sites to Cleanup
Central, but not stop or attempt unauthorized cleanup
operations ourselves.

9

In the end, though, despite its romantic image and the
glamorous stories told about it, cleanup is really
nothing more than just long periods of intense boredom
and total disgust, punctuated by brief moments of
sheer terror and total disgust.

And so, to try to forget this, and to help pass all
the dead time on the road, we were always trying to
come up with The Next Big Thing. You know, like The
Next Big Hit Song or The Next Big Story or The Next
Big Game or Organism or Level Of Consciousness.

-----TEN-----

1

One night, we drove into a new city, where all the
lights were on and all the tall buildings were lit up
inside, but the streets were empty, with only a soft
desert breeze snaking through.

We'd been put into a laughing sleep, so when the team
leaders woke us up, we were fresh, and ready for any
job.

Since we didn't know what it would be, we quietly
began preparing for all 5 categories of cleanup.

2

We were told to put on our blindfolds, and after a few
more miles, the truck stopped, and we were led into a
building.

Inside, the blindfolds came off, and here was this
once lavish theater, so recently trashed-to-shit, that
the sounds of its debris still settling, nearly
deafened us.

The stage was littered with expensively dressed and
mostly dead bodies (a few still twitching), and faced
an audience of several hundred more bodies in similar
attire and condition.

Two of the onstage dead were connected by a thin
envelope, half in the right hand of one, half in the
left hand of the other, with a little statuette on the
floor beside them and, towards the rear of the stage,
behind the proceedings, 20 more pretty corpses, neatly
collapsed in a fallen-domino pattern.

All my comrades puked uncontrollably and had to be led
out of there and consoled, while I was left to clean
it up alone, because I'd laughed instead of cried.

This was the first celebrity massacre, and nobody knew
how to handle it. Except me.

3

The owner of the auditorium/slaughterhouse was already
on the phone to the managers and agents of the dead
celebs, and they didn't know what to do either --
other than quickly rush out and find new look-alike,
work-alike replacements for their former meal tickets.

Meanwhile, the slimy, barely beating heart of the
future of world celebrity, quivered naked and exposed,
beneath the sharpened, rusty church key of my talents
and skills and capabilities and lamenesses and utter
fucking lack of any fucking attention span whatsoever.

4

So, first, I went through all the victims' pockets and
purses, till I had enough drugs to do the job right.

Then, ... [But the methods and techniques I used are
all valuable, proprietary, trade secrets and cannot be
discussed any further, without seriously jeopardizing
whatever future livelihood I've not yet blown.]

When I was done, all bodies had been disposed of
without leaving a trace, and the theater was
completely cleansed of all hint of human tragedy or
pain.

5

Overnight, I'd become the planet's leading authority
on the cleanup of celebrity massacres, and my services
were in demand everywhere. I was paid vast amounts to
simply hang around major events, doing absolutely
nothing -- just so I'd be on hand to save everybody's
ass if something did happen.

Of course, all the other workers thoroughly resented
me for this, especially the celebs, who found my
presence there, nothing less than a constant reminder
of all the psychotic, pissed-off assholes who might
try to kill them that night.

Yet they always treated me with the utmost respect and
unconditional love -- because they understood the
deathblow it could deal to universal culturtainfo, if
their sudden, en masse demise weren't rapidly,
efficiently, cleaned and covered up.

6

Though I have mostly bitter memories of this period,
these are somewhat mitigated by the close personal
friendships I had formed with many world-famous and
world-revered celebrities, who remained close to me
throughout my fucked-up life and who, time and again,
helped pull me through some of the most pathetic of
human moments, even though they knew I'd rather see
them dead.

--ELEVEN--

1

But I was growing sick of all this crap and began
thinking about going back on the road.

And of course, the perfect person to go back on the
road with was Brother Teresa.

2

I'd first met Brother Teresa at a class reunion of the
people who'd been truly holocausted by life itself.
At the time, she was on trial for the only first
degree murder ever done entirely in software.

After she was convicted, she wrote me often from death
row -- imploring me to teach her "...all the sweet,
beautiful things about celebrity cleanup...," just as
soon as she escaped.

Then, one day, out of the blue, she showed up at my
door with Mario Vargas Llosa.

3

She was dressed in generic promotional gear: a cap
that said "your logo here," a tee-shirt that said
"your company name here," and a pair of jeans that
said "your ad here," across the crotch.

We all sat around for a while, watching "Hey, Ninja,"
and talked through the night, doing vodka implants,
and skin-popping angel dust. We had much in common
because we already shared the fundamental belief that
class is what you do when you're drunk.

4

The next morning, we went over to Brother Teresa's
place on the outskirts of Hypercity-6, where she'd
shot her girlfriend through the stomach one day, but
that had only brought them closer together.

She'd spent the first week out of prison, getting all
her vid/comm devices to function under a single,
standard control protocol, but now was totally pissed,
at the end of it all, to learn that she still needed a
human to bring her the master remote.

"So that's what family is for," she muttered to
herself, slamming the unit against the wall till it
was powder.

5

Just before leaving for death row, she'd married her
brother, Sister Teresa. But now that she was back,
she wanted to forget all that and only tell prison
stories that ended with her vicious, brutal cellmate
either blushing crimson, or breaking down crying.

Then, when she got bored with that, she'd read aloud
from her living will -- the part about how any film
she starred in had to end with her either severing the
bad guy's corpus callosum with a meat cleaver, or
shooting an arrow in one of his ears and out the
other.

Then she showed us her latest resume. Instead of
writing down the names of old jobs, she'd written down
how sick she was of being stuck in a world where power
relationships only existed because sex had somehow
gotten confused with real life, one day.

6

We went someplace and got a little drunk and, then,
went downtown, where famous actors always seemed to
leave their simulated Ford Broncos double-parked
outside unfashionable restaurants, while they ran in
and pretended to look for a recent friend, beneath
them socially, who they were trying to help.

When the night was over, rather than go back to our
respective lives of stupidity and despair, we stole a
car and decided to get directly on the road, before it
was too late.

If we did nothing else, out there, we knew we'd at
least be able to help other, less fortunate people who
were on the road for the first time and, thus, in
serious danger of falling off it and being hurt.

With our experience and knowledge, we could probably
catch them before they hit the ground or injured
themselves. Which, I guess, would just sort of make
us the catchers on the road, or something.

7

Once we actually got on the road, everything was just
the way they'd described it in road books and road
movies and road songs and road videos and road CD-ROMs
-- except for all the fucking pop stars.

These obnoxious assholes were everywhere, and once
they sensed you were on the road, they wouldn't leave
you alone.

They'd come up to you, stopped at a light or at a gas
station, screaming, "Why aren't you staring at me?"
and force you to take their autographed photos and
candid snapshots of their families at play. Then
they'd start rambling on and on about their 6 picture,
4 magazine, 8 greeting card, 3 theme park, 5 album
deals, and promotional tour tie-ins up the wazoo, and
how Ennio Morricone or Sly and Robbie were gonna do
their personalized doorbell ring, just as soon as they
got back from vacationing in Acapuclo or the south of
Franz.

8

When we reached the desert, Brother Teresa took the
wheel and drove all night, while I slept, and then I
drove all morning and afternoon and night, while she
slept.

I had the radio on, as I drove, even though the only
station that came in was just a 24-hour loop of the
local #1 song, ".357 From the Heart," over and over
again.

I passed the time by playing the game where you see
how fast and how far you can drive on a single blood
rush, with your eyes closed and both hands off the
wheel.

9

After a while, the radio started picking up a popular
show on the Get-Out-of-the-World Satellite Network,
and its professional MC voice seemed to mesh, in
unexpected ways, with the Alzheimer's gentle roll
across the desert night.

"Alright, contestant number 2," the MC voice
introduced, "It says here that you're a broken, bitter
person, and your hobbies are serial murder and turning
lights on and off till the bulb blows or a switch
breaks."

"That's right, Vinnie," the contestant voice said. He
sounded like something out of some sit-rag where the
only emotions are rage, lust and irony.

"And I understand," Vinnie continued, "That all the
pejorative adjectives have your name on them."

"So what!" the contestant snapped, getting a little
pissed. "Let's get on with the show."

Suddenly the reception dropped off, and I felt a shot
of desert fever. There was no longer any highway.
Just an endless, wide stretch of dense hardpack, where
direction itself was the only road, and information
the only energy that mattered.

10

Eventually, the pure desert turned back into scrub
country, and the radio came back on in random bursts
of language fragments and audience applause. Everyone
on the show had lost, and the consolation prizes were
being awarded.

11

Around Fort Tamboo, we pulled off the dirt path and
headed up a little bank of dust, where a hitchhiker
who'd lost everything else, was thumbing a ride. He
just wanted somebody to pull him and his hangglider
till it was airborne, and then let go.

12

Instead, we stuffed the hangglider in the trunk, and
the hitchhiker got into the back, and as we drove off,
Brother Teresa and I introduced ourselves.

"I was abandoned in the jungle at birth and raised by
fruit flies," I said.

"I hold the world record for serial murders done using
micro cold-fusion explosives, unwittingly swallowed by
the victims," Brother Teresa said.

The hitchhiker told us about the Lima Express, just up
ahead. The tracks were on some low sandstone cliffs
that ran along about 100 feet above the beach. A
little ramp on the surface street, parallel to the
cliffs, let you pull up alongside the train, match its
speed, and then, sail off the top and land on the
flatcar or in the open boxcar of your choice.

13

Our first night on the train, we were joined in the
dining car by a group of triathletes. They gracefully
punctuated our stories of lameness and despair with
their own dark tales of genetically-engineered bicycle
shoes and satellite neural-net running-gloves.

Huge racks of cows and pigs were wheeled in for them
and the train had to keep stopping to take on more
food and milk. 6 foot long loaves of French bread
were scarfed down in a single gulp, like a peanut.

Each triathlete wore an LED headband that publicly
displayed his current physiologic parameters, updated
each second, and including net worth and humanity, all
measured in BTUs.

Whenever their conversation started to lag, it could
always get livened up, in an instant, by somebody
pointing at somebody else's numbers and calling him a
metabolic asshole or just a plain, old, metabolic
loser. Then laughing uncontrollably till the guy
stormed off and did 50,000 laps of the entire freight
train -- out of pure, metabolic, athlete angst.

14

After a few more days of this, we got back in the
Alzheimer's and drove off the flatcar onto an exit
ramp and headed for the nearest town. We only had
another million and a half miles to go, but the car
kept driving into the roadway, instead of on it and,
as always, had to be abandoned.

---TWELVE---

1

We walked a ways, through a field of hung over
sunflowers and dried corn stalks, and eventually wound
up in downtown Infanta City, where they'd just
finished fighting the 3-Letter-Word War.

The minute it was over, millions of people took to the
streets and started celebrating all kinds of random,
illogical, inappropriate holidays.

Holidays like "Dissolution of the World Celebration
Commission Day," or "Ethnic Hatreds Re-affirmation
Day," or "Just Plain Dirt Day."

But this only stressed them out even more, till they
all got so pissed, they almost started the
2-Letter-Word War -- which, of course, would've just
been endless streams of 2-letter invectives like GO!
BE! DO! HA! NO! US! and SO?! flung with the most
virulent sounds, gestures, and facial expressions by
members of each side at members of the other.

2

A few days after we arrived, Brother Teresa was shot
on sight for some old, leftover, unpunished crime
without a name.

The Shoot-On-Sight Authorization had classified it as
"Contempt of X; where X is any institution, species
or time of day."

3

Of course, the only real vengeance for this was the
kind where you just wiped out the entire population of
the world -- because, under World Peoples'
Government, everybody was responsible for each and
every stupid law, as well as for each and every stupid
instance of the enforcement of that law.

But, like, say you actually set out to do this, and
just walked around killing everyone you saw for maybe
3 or 4 days or a week, or so.

Sooner or later, you'd just have to hit that wall or
ceiling where it all starts to suck so bad, that all
you wanna do anymore is just break down crying
everyday and spend the rest of your life running
around apologizing to everybody. On sight.
Regardless of who they are, or how big a scumbag.

And at that point, 99.9999% of the population would
still be left untouched.

So why have bothered at all?

4

I rented an apartment nearby, and shortly after I'd
moved in, found the following message scratched into
the underside of one of the kitchen chairs with
probably a strong pin or fork prong:

Dear King Pope-President Saint-Satan
Nature-Nurture DNA-Zeitgeist or
whomever it may concern:

Please undo whatever you've done.

And (thereby) deliver me from this
(constant) pain.

-- Yours, etc.

5

When my landlord tried to collect the rent, I pointed
at the message on the chair and said, "You can't make
somebody pay to live in a place that has that written
in it! You should be paying me!"

But, in truth, if the message hadn't already been
there, I'm sure I would have wound up scratching it in
myself, verbatim, in just a week or two.

6

My day job was with the Center for Navel Analysis, and
in the evenings and nights and on weekends and during
vacations and lunch and coffee breaks, I worked on
writing the runaway, international best-seller, More
Drugs, Please.

As soon as it was released, it attracted many avid
readers and fans who flocked to my seminars and
book-signings. These people felt great sympathy for
me and were always trying to fulfill my impossible
drug needs via air-mail or by driving up and dropping
stuff off, right at my doorstep, in the middle of the
night.

But despite all this, I still couldn't get enough
drugs or the right drugs or strong enough drugs or the
right combinations of drugs -- in order to have a
single waking moment when my only request ceased to
be: "More Drugs, Please."

7

It got so bad, I started trying to fulfill desires I
didn't even have. I went and hung around at the
finish lines of Class AAA 1000-meter dashes, where you
could always grab one of the runners coming off the
line at the end of the race, so exhausted and out of
it, she falls into the first available arms without
checking to see whose they are, until someone else
from her team, or one of the coaches, comes and grabs
her and chases you away.

8

Then, one day, I was arrested for this and knew,
suddenly, that I'd better get serious about my life.
Things were slipping by, and if I didn't grab onto
something fast, I'd risk becoming, well, you know --
somebody who hadn't grabbed onto something fast.

9

After serving half my sentence, I was released on
Mussolini's recognizance or Reagan's (I forget which)
and moved into an Oldsmobile with Pope Our the XXIII.

To prove I was serious about getting it together this
time, I called a press conference, and right in the
middle of answering the first question, I just stopped
cold and burst out singing the local national
anthem, "Viva Central Control," to the tune of last
year's global national anthem, "Viva the Junta," but
at the tempo of the Italo-CanaMexican pop hit, "Viva
.357."

This should have meant a lot to them (I had, after
all, just come out with my own hit single and could
have sung that instead), but the people were blind to
my affectations of caring for them -- which just goes
to validate the old cliche about how people (like
History) only exist to make you sick with the idea
that maybe there was once possibility.

10

After several more such fiascoes and debacles and
juggernaut boondoggles and trans-global fuckups, I
stopped doing press conferences altogether, and just
crawled into a little sack of wheat and hid there and
stopped doing drugs.

The press kept clamoring for more information and
interviews and photo-ops and televised debates, and
some top martial arts instructors kept calling me up,
trying to get more self-improvement tips out of me, as
well as the ancient secrets of one-finger murder.

But I was really too fucked-up, this time, to do
anything for any of them.

11

Instead, I turned on my camcorder and hit the "world
broadcast" button and started bitching to the whole
human population -- live and in real-time. Then I
pointed the camera lens down at my toenail, pretending
that that's who was doing the talking -- but I was
really just flattering myself to even think that.

All over the airwaves, people were hearing my plea and
saying, "Shit, even a toenail isn't that bad off" --
so nobody believed me.

12

I had the library of my complete works with me, on a
Smart-Card, and I sat there and re-watched all the
movies I'd scripted and all the ones I'd starred in
and all the ones I'd only directed or line-produced.
Then I read all the books I'd written, and while I was
reading, I had all the songs I'd composed and arranged
and sung, playing in the background, over the speaker
system.

Of course, all my patent applications were there too,
and I skimmed through those as well, occasionally
stopping to re-work a wiring diagram or re-write a
line of code.

I looked at the pictures of all my Institute Awards
and all my Olympic gold medals for fucking up -- but
couldn't ignore that all I'd ever done to win them was
just jive harder than anyone else in the show.

I'd never really felt the way the judges thought I
felt, or did the things they claimed I did.

But, I guess if your stories are horrid enough, even
sadists and slimeballs will be too embarrassed to
check them out, and would much rather just give you an
automatic "10" for that event, and move on.

13

Then I swallowed a transmitting endo-camcorder that
beamed its signal directly up to the satellite, so the
whole world could see as deeply into me as it was
possible to see -- without censorship or
post-processing or time-delay.

But even as they watched, in awe of my boldness and
honesty, everybody in the world still knew what a load
of shit it all was.

Cause, no matter how deep you went, or how technologic
you got, you just never seemed to escape the lock that
neural structure (and a few neural molecules) had on
the possibilities of understanding and on the
possibilities for being.

And stories and myth, of course, were just the face of
this chemical lock, projected into symbol space.

14

Eventually, I saw how badly I was drifting and how
much I needed to simply get back to my gameplan.

"OK," I said, "So where's my fucking gameplan?" And I
started throwing papers around and ransacking drawers,
looking for it.

A few hours later, when I still hadn't found it, I was
forced to admit that, well, maybe there was no
fucking gameplan -- and maybe I'd already dreamed up
and perfectly executed all possible gameplans -- years
ago -- and each had only left me more nowhere than the
one before.

15

I called my in vitro family for moral support, but
they couldn't talk now. Their in vivo dog had just
died.

16

So what, I thought, and out of spite or love (I can't
remember which) I sat down and invented human
consciousness -- just to show everybody how fucking
pissed off it was possible to be, even in today's
gentle world.

17

Then, when it was done, I launched the ad campaign,
which went, simply:

___________________________

 CONSCIOUSNESS:  IT WORKS! 
___________________________

And the rest is history.

18

But who cares?

I was still fucked for life -- and for several
afterlives and incarnations far into the future and
past, and across all galaxies and dimensions.

And though I'd come here thinking maybe it'd be a
whole new ballgame -- I was leaving, knowing it'd been
just a few scattered innings of foul balls and infield
fly rules -- ending in mutual forfeit.

[ End: Part 2 ]