____________________________ MOST FUCKED-UP PERSON ALIVE TELLS ALL ____________________________ The Autobiography of Being Pissed Off ===================================== Copyright (c) 1995 Cognitec/3rd Force ===================================== -------- PROLOGUE -------- 1 I was born to hijack space shuttles and blackmail cities and start world neurologic wars. And be kicked out of rooms and institutions and off planets and out of solar systems. I was born to be the kind of person that intercepts a satellite feed and superimposes flashing titles like "Child Molester," "Mass Murderer," or "Dickhead," over its images of celebrities and world leaders. And I was even born to be elected President of the Cosmos -- on a platform of "Fuck the Economy! Fuck the People! Fuck the Police!" 2 Or else, I wasn't born this way at all, and something must have happened in life itself, to make it this way. --- ONE --- 1 I was born around Big Midnight in a CanaMexican motel, where the owners and maids were all so busy either drying out or scoring, that they couldn't be bothered with checking people in or cleaning the rooms. 2 My parents had met at a school or a spa, where young ladies were taught to be proper alcoholics. They lived on Zero Street: home of coffee, toothpaste and vodka -- all at once. After graduating, they stayed together for a while and, instead of life, decided to have the fucked-up offspring: --> me. 3 My paternal mother belonged to the Benign Fascist Labor Party, and my maternal mother ran a chain of simulation shops that only really existed in the kind of rumor that never got past Mouth One. 4 Though I grew up with no control over my own hopeless life, I could sometimes force events in the real world -- earthquakes and fatal illnesses, corporate bankruptcies and stock market crashes, drug czar resignation scandals and mountain road auto accidents, to name just a few. Most, without even being there. Some, without even trying. --- TWO --- 1 I was born in a Sony 797, one day, and my first birthmemory was the sight of the pilot, co-pilot, and crew, out the window, parachuting by. 2 My parents had wanted me to grow up to be one of those people who, by sheer strength of personality, can convince 12 or 15 members of an audience to jam themselves into a small, tight, transparent glass booth, made to hold about 6 adults max, and then lock the door on them and take two ordinary house cats and hold them out for the rest of the audience to see what sweet gentle little kitties they are, then shoot them both up with a long thick syringe of concentrated PCP and drop them into the glass booth and clamp down the lid so there's no exit. Then join the audience in watching, as the little kitties tense up and gracefully puree the volunteers, with a driving, insect-chainsaw sound. 3 Of course, I didn't grow up to become one of these people and, instead, enrolled full-time at Find-the-Salami University, with a major in cable/phone/software consciousness, and a minor in how even kamikazes get abused. My advisor was Professor Our. 4 Things went OK there, for a while, but eventually, sophomore year, I just lost it one day, in between classes, and headed out for the airport and hijacked a plane that was sitting on the runway, stuffed with passengers, waiting to take off. Soon, the police came and deployed their snipers and sharpshooters, and through the glass of their makeshift command center, I could see the contract psycho-therapists they'd hired, madly scanning disks of clip-text, for the perfect line or word to use to talk me out of it. 5 I got on the radio and tried to be straight with them, at first, making only the simplest emotional demands. The police negotiator, Captain Our, listened politely to my list, and then, when I was done, just said, "I'm sorry, but those all seem to violate some fundamental law of physics or other, and can, therefore, simply not be met in this universe, at this time. Even if we wanted to." I got so pissed at that, I started demanding everything I could think of, whether I cared about it or not -- then, got so guilty, I only asked for softball items, just to let the cops have, at least, *some* success. "How about more drugs," I said, into the headset I'd taken off the dead pilot. "Lots more drugs -- if it's not too much trouble. And while you're at it, let's have more colors and deeper darknesses and richer histories and more intelligent timbres and new hi-res emotions from formerly restricted top-secret government databases, with real-time-interactive cartoon-animal user-interfaces." 6 When that didn't work, I demanded more streets and more cities and more nations and continents and more moons and more space junk. And more words and more subtle explosives and more alphabets and languages and more new categories of self-sacrifice and self-destruction. I was all hyped up. Nothing was enough. Everything bored the piss out of me. Thermonuclear war between Earth and Venus. Mass suicide of entire populations by wall outlet electrocution in bathtub. Golden anal sex with the world. Zarathustra blowjob. "There has to be more action," I screamed at Captain Our over the hotline between us. "*Constant* action. Somebody has to get shot or save somebody's life on every street corner, every minute. And every kickoff has to be run back 110 yards for a touchdown, and every basket has to be made from the stands at the opposite end of the court, and every pitch has to be a hit batter who dies on the spot, so both dugouts pour out, and the two teams kill each other, as well as the umpires and fans -- leaving nobody alive. "Every sound has to be an earthquake or tidal wave that topples governments and changes national boundaries and mutates whole species so they suddenly drift off the planet, across galaxies, only to return, years later, when nobody wants to know them cause their credit rating's bad or because they can't do the Mashed Potatoes. "More violence, more cataclysms, more adventure, more car crashes at stoplights and intersections. More meteors and satellites and re-entry pods and debris dropping out of the sky, carrying cryptic filthy messages on slim-line videodiscs hidden under a false layer of paint. "Hundreds of new world leaders installed every day to replace hundreds of old ones ousted by obscene scandals or by lazy 1-man revolutions. 4 new wars starting every day to replace 3 old ones ending. 7 celebrities born each day, replacing 5 murdered, 4 married, 7 dead by natural causes. 9 new songs on the charts every hour, displacing 8 old ones off. 10 new shows launched each day, replacing 11 old ones cancelled after only a week. "More mid-air collisions and high-altitude rescues and trainwrecks and nuclear disasters and droughts and bridge collapses and biologic blackmail and accidental missiles dumped from trainer aircraft. "When I walk down the street and only 3 or 4 shots are fired at me, I find it hard to stay awake." ----- THREE ----- 1 I was born in a squadron of intelligent, unmanned, stealth glider-bombers that cruised the earth forever. On-board neuro-digital, idiot-precognitive systems, networked throughout the formation, predicted the weather on a moment-by-moment basis, all over the world, and kept the gliders aloft by using today's best air currents to get to tomorrow's. Thousands of these squadrons decorated the skies over thousands of different cities at once, giving populations their final taste of awe -- and the supreme consolation prize for having put up so well with the complex bullshit of being. 2 When I was old enough, and ground-based expert systems indicated that the planet was ready for me, I crawled into the co-pilot's seat and pulled the eject lever, as I'd been trained to do on TV airplane school. Instantly, a precise dance of explosive bolts rocketed the seat and me into space. My chute deployed, and below, all life lay spread open before me -- like a nymphomaniac. 3 When I landed, there was already a job waiting for me at Company Zero -- a really pissed-off, multi-disciplinary, multi-modal, multi-tasking, multi-sexual, underground, pirate, gypsy, hegemonic, corporate behemoth, that spanned the globe but couldn't be found when someone wanted to arrest its president or make it stop. It didn't have a comm number or a street address or an ether name. It didn't have a Tax/Security ID or encrypted password logo. 4 I was hired to be one of the many bogus employees of Company Zero, whose only task was to circulate endlessly through the bars and restaurants of a town or city, to give the false impression that our corporate headquarters was somewhere nearby. In reality, headquarters was randomly relocated many times each month, sometimes to places tucked deep in volcanic mountainsides or to caverns under the sea, where even nuclear explosives couldn't penetrate. For the non-bogus workers, this meant a new office in a different building or a different city or a different hemisphere or a different world or dimension altogether, every few days. Appearances, brand name loyalties, friends and families also had to be changed at approximately the same rate. 5 When I was finally asked to leave the Company Zero apprenticeship program, one day, no specific reason was given, other than a "re-thinking of issues of corporate culture," and a "necessary reallocation of resources, based on unexpected fiscal shortfalls. Or something." 6 I immediately joined the "Smiling Saint Genocide: Mafia Bitch" Project. Its meetings consisted mostly of its chairman complaining that his monkey had a laptop on its back. When I got home from these meetings, I'd usually learn that a neighbor or roommate had been dismembered and boiled up in a soup and fed to some community group unbeknownst, and they'd all loved it. 7 Then I dialed a wrong number, but the therapist who answered couldn't resist running me through a battery of standardized psychological tests, anyway. A few hours later, she called back. "After checking and re-checking and cross-checking your results with all my colleagues and mentors and even my students," she said, "It's clear to me and to everyone else, that what you have is simply an extreme case of being multi-, poly-, ultra-, para-, super-, extra-, mega-fucked-up. -- And that's the *optimistic* assessment." She told me I'd better do something fast or risk evaporating on contact. "There is only one place," she said, "That even *claims* to be able to deal with people like you." ---- FOUR ---- 1 A week later, I found myself at the entry point to an unmarked treatment city maintained by World Rehab, in western Nervada. A soft orange-yellow glow suffused all space here, where things should have been white or gray -- but it wasn't a new-color sun or just after a brush fire. A light I didn't know I had, started flickering somewhere inside my head. They'd built the world's largest electromagnetic mountain here, and once you were cleared for entrance, they turned it on as you passed through. By the time you reached downtown, it had thoroughly erased all your ugly, stupid memories, and all the pretty ones too, and you were nothing, anymore, but yourself, at the moment. 2 Non-functioning `48 Chevys and `53 Oldsmobiles sat parked along Main Street like bath toys -- their only use, to jump on when you were drunk. There were few moving cars and fewer people. I suppose, once you've had all your memories blown out, you don't really need Main St. anymore, unless you're new in town. As I walked past the simulated, boarded-up storefronts, a `54 Buick convertible came cruising slow from behind me -- doin' 4, maybe 5 mph. "Hey - yo! Mah man! Dude!" a voice called from the driver's seat as the car pulled up alongside me and slowed to my pace, maybe 1 to 1.5 mph. "Whatcha got on it?" I said, because that was the only line I knew for people in cars. It was a call for specs, and I thought if I got him talking numbers, maybe he'd never get around to trying to show me his fucking baby pictures. "Got 500 horses," he said, "437 Cubes, 10 on the floor, and 6 undocumented on the column." He reached over as he drove and popped open the glove compartment. He took out a stack of owner's manuals and, leaning across the front seat, held them out to me. I had to walk into the street to get them and I didn't even want them. "I don't want your fucking service manuals," I said. "I only said what I said cause it's the only line I know. I don't *care* what the answer is." He smiled. "Then you're my kinda organism," he said, pushing open the door for me. 3 We cruised down Main St., and he told me about his days in reform school. I didn't *have* any memories, so he got to do all the talking. So what! He reached into the console and pulled a little vial out and held it up to the light that came dead down Main St. thorough his windshield. "Di-methyl, tri-chloro, Di-hydro-phenylalanine sulfate," he pronounced, phonetically. "Street name: 'Not-to-be-alone.' The number 1 motivation drug. Outlawed 3 years ago." We came to a section of the street where makeshift cardboard stalls and tables offered all possible consumer items, but had no customers, and the vendors didn't care. "The drug," he said, pointing at the bottle and taking his eye off the road long enough to almost hit a line of parked cars, "Works by making you think you're not alone in the world. You are, therefore, willing to take great risks to try to kill your friends and loved ones -- knowing full well, they'll be there to save your ass, when you fail." Storefronts drifted by as he spoke, his feet so light on the pedals, his fingers so light on the wheel. "When it was outlawed," he continued, "I was able to invent a legal placebo that worked exactly *like* it -- if you believed in it enough when you took it -- and I'd found a backer with deep pockets and interplanetary distribution." His tone turned somber. "But then, suddenly, just 2 days before full-scale production was to begin, the backer had a nervous breakdown and was committed to an institution. Without his cash, all activity on the project stopped immediately, and no one else could be found, willing to bankroll it. "So I took my $500 advance, bought this old Buick, and have been cruising up and down Main St. ever since, waiting for something to happen. And, right now -- you're it." ---- FIVE ---- 1 Eventually, I was kicked out of rehab for being either "beyond sickness" or "beyond motivation," and put on the bus for Rabid City, just across the border, in Saudi Israelia. I settled down there because it was the only town in the hemisphere that still accepted World Ponzi Markers as legal tender, and that was the only currency I had. 2 The streets of Rabid City were littered with the bodies of people who'd wanted desperately to be mad dog killers, but had failed miserably at even being mad. These people now found themselves in low-level service jobs, ancillary to the mad dog killer industry, with no hope of advancement. Many had dropped the fantasy altogether and opted for other, less glamorous careers, like Hospital Investigator or "Fuck Money" Facilitator. 3 Despite these losers, this town was still well on its way to being recognized as the Number 1 mad dog killer town in the world. Not only did many mad dog killers grow up and operate out of here, but many up-and-coming mad dog killers from small towns everywhere, came here to study and make important career contacts. And many famous mad dog killers of the past, when you looked into their records years later, turned out to be originally from here, as well, though you'd never have guessed it. 4 This was the kind of town where maybe 1 out of every 20 cars that went by had a muffler. Every bar in this town had a core group of regulars who sat around all day long, bitching about how the only real alternative to being an asshole and a loser in this life, was to be *just* an asshole or *just* a loser. This was the ugliest town in the world -- but all the others were worse. And this was still the best town in the world to be pissed off in. Hundreds of valiant wars had been fought here, over alleged encroachments on the other guy's sacred piece of dirt. All the trucks and buses in this town had "Ain't My Planet, I Just Eat Here!" bumper stickers, and all their drivers wore "I Don't Know, And I Don't *Wanna'* Know!" tee-shirts. In this town, every company was a world company -- but then, in this world, every town was a company town, and in any company, every world was a small-town world. The only crime here was screaming "Fire!" in a theater when there really *was* a fire. If you screamed it and there was *no* fire, or if you killed the Pope, that *wasn't* a crime. --- SIX --- 1 Under these circumstances, I quickly fell into a bad shit of the head. I was the Chuck Yeager of being fucked-up -- pushing the envelope of despair. When a cigarette is just an excuse to exist. My days were adventures in slo-mo: waiting for the next angry creditor, the tax service, the courts, the World Peoples' Bureau of Investigation, or World Repo to come get me for either being, or not being, enough of a dickhead. 2 But, then, suddenly, before I knew it, this nothing -- this absolute, fucking nothing -- this lameass, worthless, piece-of-shit, scumbag nothing -- this eternal, endless, stupid, useless, piss-dumb nothing -- this flaming, flying, creeping, slimeball, dishrag, slutbucket nothing -- before I knew it -- it was something. Then, it was everything. 3 I was given a job where I just had to sit around all day, scanning the skies for a slow-spiralling football that would appear to come out of nowhere. In reality, this would most likely be a long lost pass, vanished mysteriously, centuries ago, from some busted Hail Mary Play, in the climactic moment of some inter-continental meta-superbowl. 4 I did so well at this, I was promoted to a position where I just had to walk from my apartment to a grocery store, and come back with a box of Twinkies, a bottle of Altdorfers, and a soft-pack of Mitsubishi Lites. But, to do this, I had to push my way through huge crowds of hunger strikers demonstrating round-the-clock, demanding more prissiness in murder and war. These demonstrations had been going on for years and occasionally turned violent, with hundreds of lives lost in a single day and thousands of people injured. And many of the participants openly advocating world cognitive collapse. During this period, I began having a recurrent nightmare. Then I'd wake up and it was just my life, so why worry? 5 All new residents of Rabid City were required to submit a cell or two for DNA analysis, and the genologist who did mine got all excited as soon as she finished. She came rushing over, beaming with pride and shook my hand vigorously, congratulating me again and again for having both the "savage kamikaze" gene *and* the "bitter recluse" gene. "You're a sure bet to win either the Recluse-of-the-Year Award from the International Brotherhood of Kamikazes," she said, "Or the Kamikaze-of-the-Year Award from the Union of Concerned Recluses. And possibly both, and possibly many times over." But she couldn't tell me how long I'd have to wait, or specifically, who I'd have to blow, before I'd be permitted to receive even prize one. 6 So I quit my job and moved into a Universal Generic Habitat in an Automatic Survival Zone on the outskirts of town and set in to wait it out, getting by mostly on General Motors Nutrient Bars and Kool Filters. That was fine for a while, I guess, but then, one day, in the midst of all this, something seemed to snap inside me. I assumed it was "the Call" -- which I'd seen advertised so much on the covers of matchbooks and, mysteriously, in the flaming heat-shields of returned re-entry pods, given up for lost, decades ago -- and, without thinking further, or trying, I suddenly understood what had to be done: Someone had to bring the Near-Death Experience to the masses, in a lo-cost, recreational, "home" version that anyone could afford. Simply in the interest of redistributing power and understanding and fun. And, thereby, levelling the so-called playing field. 7 Until then, only the wealthiest and most famous people could pay the price of or even *knew about* the Near-Death Experience as a vacation option or weekend hobby. If my work was successful, the common man would suddenly have access to this technology, and at a most reasonable price point. And the only real difference would be that my "home" version would have a, roughly, 40% accidental death rate, while the "unaffordable" version (performed by top medical practitioners in clandestine, ultra-hi-tech facilities), had only about 10% of its superstar clients *accidentally* receiving the Full-Death Experience. 8 Then, suddenly, there was a day with no pain. I was so troubled by this, I called my doctor. "Don't worry," he said, "It'll pass." But could I believe him? He lived in San Luis Louie and "It'll pass" was their state motto. Old men sat around old barrels there, in old grocery stores all day, saying it to each other. So I called my lawyer. "My doctor's fucking up," I said. "He's starting to quote from state placebos. I want to sue for malpractice." "Don't worry," my lawyer said. "I'll get right on it." But I didn't like the way she said it. So I called my CPA. "My lawyer's talking like she just got off a spacecraft," I said. "I'm not sure what to do. I need somebody to help me sue my Doctor." "Don't worry," she said, "I have this friend -- well, he's not really a friend, but I like his car. He's not really a lawyer, but he seemed very smart and I'm sure he knows enough to sue your doctor. I'll call him for you right now." As soon as I hung up, the phone rang. It was a wrong number, but he knew my CPA anyway. "She doesn't know what she's doing," the guy said, and he recommended a roofing contractor who could efficiently kill both her *and* my lawyer. ----- SEVEN ----- 1 It was clear to me that my only real hope in life was just to be the most innocent person alive, and then go out and prove it, day after day, all over the world, country by country, city by city, room by room, one soul at a time. 2 So I started out in Satan's Triangle and, from the first minute I arrived, I was definitely the most innocent person there. Then I went to Slovo-Czechovskia, where it was between me and one other person. But, at the end of a week, he came up and admitted that I was much more innocent than he could ever dream of being. From then on, I could walk into almost any garage or any arena, anywhere in the universe, and when I told its patrons I was the most innocent person they'd ever seen or would ever see, no one dared to disagree. "And, as an added bonus," I told them, "I'm also the biggest asshole you've ever seen -- and without even trying." 3 As my reputation for innocence spread globally, I was flooded with offers from civic groups who wanted me to come help them set up new TV networks where all the newscasters would have angry, bitter expressions on their faces but, then, always smile inappropriately at the end of each newsstory about death and destruction. "I'm sorry" I said to all of them, declining their gracious and stinking offers, "But I'm already too busy doing and being virtually everything there is to do and be --- from Pyro-Humanist to Ego-Socialist to Labor Pan-sexual. From Klepto-Maoist to Nympho-Keynesian to Market Para-maniac." 4 Of course, when I'd finished doing and being all these things, and suddenly needed work, all the old offers were gone, and the only job I could get was designing product warning stickers like: "Do Not Plant Car Bomb In This Car," or "Do Not Disconnect This Refrigerator With Child Still Inside," or "Do Not Release Swarms Of Pissed-off Wasps In This Packed Auditorium During World All-Star Championship Series -- Quarterfinals and above." 5 Then I got a job in a store that, instead of selling things people wanted to buy, only sold books and tapes and songs and stories and posters and clothing *about* things people wanted to buy. And the bulk of my work there was simply cleaning up the puddles of tears and white goop that casually fell to the floor in long viscous strings from the corners of the patrons' mouths as they stood there, for hours on end, gawking at cardboard mock-ups of artists' renditions of actual product packaging. 6 Then I got a job at a bookstore that catered only to slimeballs and dickbrains, and the only books we carried were their all-time favorite literary masterworks like "Slimeball on a Hot Tin Roof", and "The Slimeball Who Came in From the Cold," and "Look Homeward, Slimeball," and "The Magnificent Slimeballs," and "Sons and Dickbrains," and "To Kill a Dickbrain," and "Bonfire of the Dickbrains," and "The One Minute Dickbrain," and so on. 7 One day, at work, I overheard Satan crying to herself in the washroom. "Why is every door always locked to me," she sobbed, "And surrounded by vast mine fields and electrified barbed wire fence?" 8 Then I got a job writing the form letter apologizing for nuclear missiles which sometimes went a little awry during disposal attempts and accidentally hit and demolished innocent civilian non-targets. Dear Accidental Victim, [I wrote] Please excuse this inadvertent nuclear explosion on your premises. You have, of course, our most heartfelt apologies for this mishap which, let me straight out assure you, had absolutely nothing to do with you or with anything you've ever said or done. As you know, [I continued] accidents like these are unavoidable in our modern world, and the blame does not go to people like you or to people like me, but no doubt, belongs to software -- of which, mankind has neither understanding nor control. In closing, then, I trust you can feel our sincerity -- if you know what's good for you -- and will please, therefore, get the fuck off our backs and go harass somebody else. "Sincerely," etc. 9 Once I'd finished this letter, my employers immediately ran off all the copies they needed, sent them all out, and no longer required my services for anything else. The next few jobs after that are a blank in my memory, but may well be the subject matter of the rush of images that come to me sometimes, uncontrollably, and seem totally familiar yet cannot be pinned to any concrete piece of my fucking life as I remember it. If these image streams do not come from forgotten pieces of my life, then they must either be old dreams suddenly remembered for the first time, or else extra-sensory experience of someone else's awful past or future. 10 Then, possibly as a reward or consolation for being so fucked-up, I was hired to run the grinder at the meat market of either ideas or desire -- I forget which. First day on the job, I learned that the gut-wrenching sounds of bone going through the machine, were all digitally synthesized -- straight from numbers and waveforms -- and that the small, coarse chunks that spewed out the nozzle, were all made of mock-substance. Second day at work, I learned that the meat market itself was just a front for a multi-function warehouse: all its interior walls were flat panel plasma, which could display absolutely anything, anytime, under control of software alone. So that any religion could saunter in, at a moment's notice, insert its own disk, reboot the house system, and -- Bang! -- instant holy place of whatever flavor and design. Then, a few hours later, a para-military group could march in and turn the place into a custom supply dump, housing, for example, tactical biologic placebos, or handheld pseudo-thermonuclear devices that ran on Utah room-temperature pseudo-fusion. 11 When I'd had this job for a while, my supervisor called me on the phone, one day, and asked why I hadn't been to work in 3 months. I told her I'd gone straight and was no longer fucked-up enough to carry out my assigned duties. She knew I was lying, but didn't know which part, and didn't really care. She didn't need that in her skill set, and had risen quickly to the top without it -- simply by virtue of belonging to that class of people who could walk briskly into any problem situation, without ever looking down or breaking stride, and yet never step in a fresh puddle of dog piss, no matter how unavoidably waiting, dead-ahead, in their path. She offered me a different job where all I'd have to do was think back to the beginning of recorded time -- to just before the North American Repartition. But I couldn't accept. "I just got through linking many geographically disparate pockets of population and infrastructure with high-speed, command/control, expert-system, interactive hypertext front-end, neural-net, fuzzy-logic stackware," I told her, by way of apology, "And, boy, are my arms tired!" 12 One night, I was unable to sleep from all the noise of ancient, illegal, disappeared airliners suddenly reappearing at just that moment in the airspace above me and slamming down into civilian neighborhoods nearby. I got up, finally, and went out and got so drunk and stoned, that I must have accidentally interviewed for (and landed) a high-powered, high-paying, high-prestige position, crying openly in public places, 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. This was considered an important function for society, because without it, experts feared, the people might get all slimy and stop asking fundamental questions like "What is this tragic, stupid existence no more than mere vestige of?" [ End: Part 1 of 17 ] ===================================== Most Fucked-Up Person Alive Tells All Copyright (c) 1995 Cognitec/3rd Force =====================================