===================================== MOST FUCKED-UP PERSON ALIVE TELLS ALL ============(part 2 of 17)=========== ===================================== Copyright (c) 1995 Cognitec/3rd Force ===================================== ----- 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 of 17 ] ===================================== Most Fucked-Up Person Alive Tells All Copyright (c) 1995 Cognitec/3rd Force =====================================