===================================== MOST FUCKED-UP PERSON ALIVE TELLS ALL ============(part 5 )=========== ===================================== Copyright (c) 1995 Cognitec/3rd Force ===================================== -------- TWENTY-1 -------- 1 I moved to Aljersia and rented a place where I thought if I could just sit and stew at the right frequency, my seething heart would automatically percolate out to all the world's satellite receivers -- and become the first salvo in a whole new genre of pure, passive, disestablishment terrorism. But I was wrong. 2 Among my new neighbors, I had come to be known affectionately as "the Time Bomb From Outer Space That Cried." To repay their kindness, I decided to build a research institute at the center of town, dedicated to them, named after me, and mono-maniacally committed to advancing the cure for whichever was the disease: -- desire or its absence. Thus was born "Most Fucked Up Person Alive Institute for Research into Whichever is the Disease: -- Desire or Its Absence." 3 In no time, the quality of our work had earned us the grudging respect of our many charlatan colleagues and detractors from all over the world, and all across that conceptual terrain where understanding is supposedly an issue. This, in turn, gave us the security we needed to be able to rapidly advance the nature of our work -- from simply studying disease, to the more fruitful study of studying *itself*, and then, from there, onto the even more fruitful study of the process of studying studying itself, itself, and then on to the study of the process of the study of the processes of this process, itself -- and so on, recursively. 4 Of course the great leaders and celebrities of this and other worlds, both secular and religious, were all flocking to the institute to avail themselves of the great work we were doing, and to laud my saintly intentions and herculean perseverance. It seemed that whoever came in contact with me, at this time, suddenly stopped being the slimy, filthy, creepy scumbag he'd always been and immediately turned into the kind of warm, loving, caring person who, in any life-and-death situation, always selflessly risked his own life to try to save everybody else first. 5 But then I went on a brief sabbatical, and while I was gone, the researchers took over the institute and turned it into a population redistribution center. They'd designed an airlift program that they claimed could achieve a maximum throughput of about 1 million people per hour, and were all ready to test it out -- even though they had no idea where the planes would land, or which (if any) nations would refrain from shooting their passengers on sight, out of the air, as they parachuted down. These details were simply left as an exercise for the crew, to be (hopefully) worked out, once the planes were aloft and as the specifics of each unique situation unfolded. 6 By the time I returned, however, they'd somehow lost all enthusiasm for their project, and the hundreds of huge, new transports they'd bought, now sat scattered around outside, idle and rusting, all over the campus. Rather than just turn them into classrooms and dormitories, I bought a few desks and telephones and intercoms and video monitors and a few fake baggage carrousels (which just kept going round and round with the bogus baggage of people that didn't really exist) and started Alcoholics Anonymous Airways. There'd only be one flight on this airline. Wealthy, powerful people would take it when all their credentials were suddenly erased one day, and they'd lost everything. At the end of the flight, they would be in a new place, where they'd just have to stand in line, and wait their turn and watch, as vapid con men from the local lower classes aced them out every time for even the shittiest shitjobs. 7 My management philosophy at AAA was to keep all employees right on the edge of outright rebellion. Everyone who lived in the company town was always kept right on the edge of moving out. And top management was always kept right on the verge of quitting and finding a whole new line of work. At AAA we were proud of the fact that all our decisions came, not out of logic or foresight or reason or understanding, but out of pure, blind, corporate momentum. 8 Then, suddenly, there was a blip in History, and we had to suspend all service. A (temporary?) dead spot in either the Universe or Time had made flight stop working. Ethnic wars momentarily ceased, and humans trying to get their way over the last little speck of turf, temporarily relaxed and stopped firing. During this lull in the world, people spent their time trying to outdo each other at who could drink the raunchiest blood. Someone who stepped out on his front stoop to announce that "I can drink the blood of a bird!" could be certain that, only moments later, someone else, a building or two away, would lean out her window and yell back, "So what! I can drink the blood of a cockroach that's just eaten a turd!" And so on. 9 Meanwhile, all our pilots and co-pilots had nothing better to do than just sit around the airport lounge calling each other you fascist slimeball, you commie piss-brain. ------ 20-TWO ------ 1 Now that all my careers were ended, and all my entrepreneurialisms lost, all the people whose lives I'd saved, years ago, suddenly started driving up in expensive cars and peeling out of my driveway, kicking up piles of gravel and screaming something about what a fucking shit- or dick-head I was -- and always would be! 2 I used the money from the sale of my airline/institute to take out full page ads in all the slickest media, offering huge bounties for the severed heads of the world's richest and most famous and most powerful people. Then, when somebody brought one in, I'd get all apologetic and say like, "Geez, I'm really sorry, but we're right in the middle of a short-term cash flow crunch at the moment, so we really can't write any checks for a few more days. But don't worry, we'll have one out to you within a week or two. -- And, in the meantime, you can *keep* the head -- as collateral." Deaths brought about in this way, of course, were legitimately counted towards my total score in the international competition to see who could kill the most celebrities -- even though they generated no return on investment. 3 As a condition of my parole-on-earth, I was required to teach a 3-day intensive seminar discrediting and invalidating all culture and all human knowledge and all human ideas. This wasn't hard to do since all the originators of these ideas and the creators of these cultures and the chroniclers of these knowledge dumps, had already stepped forward and repudiated themselves long ago -- and all the records of these confessions had been collected on a single disc and could be played through, at triple speed, in less than a day. 4 For the remaining 2 days of the seminar, we examined the question of whether these people knew they were just bullshitting at the time, and if they did, what had they hoped to gain by it, and if they'd hoped to gain, had they? And, if not, what had they achieved instead and was it better or worse? And, what if these people *hadn't* known they were bullshitting at the time? 5 Since the complete motivations of man were already well understood, this was a course without any value or need, and teaching or taking it was prescribed strictly as a punitive measure. Yet it was so well received and became so popular so fast, that it was soon expanded into a full-blown department, and then into a full-time university, and then into an entire system of education which I was hired by Governor Dishrag to administer entirely as I saw fit. 6 The Governor, like so many other top government officials of the time, had taken on a "goofy surname," in order to throw off the routine assassination attempts that were made, sometimes daily, on people in his position of power. What serious hitperson, after all, would ever want to be known as the killer of Senator Dickbrains or as the assassin of President Dingleball? 7 One day, a hitchhiker showed up at the office. He had just failed to be ordained into the sweet religion where you had to be a pederast first, before you could be a priest. "Thank you for considering my application," he said, once he'd sat down. "As you know," he began, "I've been denied ordination several times because of attitude. But the truth is, that all complaints lodged against me are from people who've been hired and professionally trained to try to make it look like reality actually exists. "Everybody knows that's what these lying scum are all about, but if somebody says this, it is called 'attitude,' and I am constantly being told I am an asshole for talking about it." 8 After the asshole left, the Governor looked to me for counsel. As always, I had absolutely no opinion about anything whatsoever, and in fact, couldn't even remember what the guy'd been talking about. So I gave my stock answer: "Just kill off everybody on both sides of the issue," I advised, "And then the rest of the world will love you and quickly forget about it all -- just as *I've* already forgotten about it. Case closed!" But, of course, Governor Dishrag had been elected on the Progressive Spiritual-Capital ticket, which was steeped in the modern mythology of how it's more righteous to buy off or brainwash a problem group than to kill it. 9 I bought a car without a muffler and drove around town for a while. Eventually, I came to a place where the road continued in one direction, and skid marks showed you could also swerve sharply right and head across a broad field. I followed the tire tracks, with the hope of winding up someplace new, where the constitution had been written by maybe a few hundred psychopaths scattered around the world, connected to each other only by tin-can-to-satellite groupware with a bandwidth of, like 10 bits every day or so. But after only a few miles, I was stopped by a small detachment of Sony Guard, and arrested for some old presidential assassination attempts they'd found on my record when they ran a check on me. 10 I served 3 months in prison, and then was released on the easy kind of parole where, to stay clean, you just had to call up and tell your parole officer, a few hours in advance, if you were gonna go out and kill more than one person at a time, that day. 11 Now that I was out, I sat down and looked inside myself, and searched deep through my soul and my past. I meditated into my genome, and moved through it slowly, a nucleotide at a time, projecting the consequence of each through the whole history of the cosmos, so that when I came out the tail end, it was with a powerful new commitment -- to violating and invalidating all meaning and all past moments. After that, I woke up fresh and alert each morning, and began each day with the absolute certainty and total self-confidence that *tomorrow* would *definitely* be the first day of the rest of my life. But, meanwhile, FUCK TODAY! 12 Then I stole a car and went joy-riding around Turkey-o and stopped off briefly at the party, only because I'd promised everybody, earlier in the day, that I'd come by and show off my new gun. I was there for a while, and I suppose we'd all had a little too much to drink, when somebody got up and went into the kitchen and came back with a knife. I pulled out the gun and started firing. At first, just into the ceiling. 13 I couldn't remember what I had intended, and I couldn't remember what happened. I think everything just stopped, and we waited for the police to come. But nobody had *called* the police. "Maybe we should hire the Independent Protection Agency," someone said. "They're licensed to kill the police, if they have to. That way, it won't matter *what* happened here. It won't matter who did or didn't get killed or injured. They'll just protect us from everything, and we can go on forgetting about it." "Yeah, but I didn't spend 3 years living in outer space colonies, just to wind up like this!" someone chimed in. And I found myself sitting there, regretting that I didn't meet the age requirements for teen suicide. 14 I went to see my new agent. "So what are your talents and skills and strengths?" she asked. "What can you do?" "I'll worry about that later," I said. "First, just get me some fucking work." 15 But she said she couldn't. Because she was committed to a higher truth. A truth that wouldn't exist if she didn't keep conscientiously lying about it. And so, instead, she just handed me the complete works of world pornography (cross-species, cross-sex, cross-nationality, cross-class) as homework, or consolation prize. Whichever came first. 16 About that time, I had the good fortune to join the refugee-funk group "They Are Their Own Executioners." Though we couldn't play or sing, and our songs were inane and sophomoric, and our production outright sloppy -- we were still considered the bible of all music, ancient and modern, and every singer, song, composer, tune, and movement throughout the whole history of all world musics, was considered just a footnote to our least ditty. Ours were the most copied and recorded songs of all time -- ranked with the great classics of thought, as well as the great classics of action. These were the songs that more of the world people knew than any other. And so, when the global population, in perfect unanimity, demanded a new World Peoples' National Anthem, there wasn't even a question about *who* they'd want to write, perform and produce it. 17 Despite all our prior successes, and the degree to which, therefore, we were full of ourselves, we were still extremely moved by this outpouring of respect and trust and admiration, and so immediately and totally immersed ourselves in the project -- producing for them, in the end, a stirring, patriotic hymn about how the World Telephone & Intelligence Agency waits until there are 300 people it wants to get rid of, then sticks them all on the same airplane at the same time, and crashes it. This anthem gave the people an identity, and brought them closer together, and gave them the strength to make the tough decisions -- like the decision between going with an audio/video display of the psycho-pathology of a single, animal neuro-transmission -- on the one hand -- or going with a fast-cut sequence of blurry, high-action shots made jumping off roller-coasters into rapids and swimming upstream against shark attacks to top secret shuttle bases where government-sponsored prostitution is being dished out to wealthy, compulsive liars in exchange for highly-classified, artificial intelligence software secrets -- on the other. 18 Of course, the band split up, one day, leaving us all broken, impoverished people -- sort of like the end of a movie where, after driving tons of shaky nitro-glycerin bottles thousands of miles across badly-frayed, narrow rope-bridges in a rickety old bald-tire truck, the hero dies suddenly from falling off a chair while changing a lightbulb in her bathroom, on a warm, quiet evening in the suburbs. -------- TWENTY-3 -------- 1 I still thought I had maybe one final chance to put my fucked-up life back together, so I enrolled in Nuclear Button Junior College. This was the only school where you could be trained for the minimum wage job of sitting around all day, over some old leftover nuclear button, waiting for the hotline phone to ring. Their school motto was: "Hey, don't stop being a whore on *my* account." 2 The curriculum there was quite rigorous, and before we could even get to *see* a real nuclear button, we had to take a two-year intensive course in The History Of The World -- so we'd understand just what it was we could wipe out in a microsecond with a single accidental sneeze. 3 The first day of this class, our professor, Professor Our, asked us, before we got started, if anyone already *knew* the history of the world. When I raised my hand to indicate that I thought I did, he motioned for me to go ahead and lay it out as best I could. I was, of course, a little rusty, because I'd first learned it all in a dream, many years before (when I was still just a failed infanticide), and hadn't thought much about it since. "Let's see," I said, hesitant, "OK. When Satan lost the War, her punishment was to live forever in a place created specifically for her. This place was called 'the World,' and everybody else had to live there too. It existed just to torture Satan, and the life of every other individual there was inconsequential. People of the world only suffered, in order to show Satan all the possibilities of suffering. "And when people were happy, they only did it to make Satan feel even worse, and to help introduce her to whole new dimensions of pain. "Worst of all for Satan, every time she fucked-up really bad, she found herself praying for salvation." I stopped there, skipping a few of the finer points, and Professor Our thanked me. "That's it," he said. "Exactly! -- Class dismissed." 4 Because we'd gotten through the material so quickly, we were given the rest of the semester off, and that allowed me to accept a part-time job with Nuclear Proliferators Anonymous. Their motto and national anthem was: "Hey baby, how about some (more) Plutonium?" 5 They also had the reputation for being a no-bullshit crew, and my first day on the team, the captain had said to me, "OK, private, now let's just get past content, and get right down to syntactics. Right down to nitty-gritty meta-linguistics." Even though we were clearly just a bunch of lame assholes just jerkin' around, he was singularly dedicated to transforming us, almost overnight, into a *highly-trained* bunch of lame assholes -- just jerkin' around *in a highly professional manner*. 6 At the end of a trial period, I was administered the oath: I hereby solemnly swear to abide by all the unwritten and esoteric laws and unspoken moralities of the Nuclear Proliferators Anonymous team, and to, therefore, never peel the topmost layer off a video display, revealing organic tubing, hair, viscera, and rancid human fluids stewing in a dish, underneath. And I will always do my best to try to be a little unambiguous, every so often, and to not always be trying to sneak in plugs for our top-grossing film: "Stupidity Lays Out A Powerful Truth." Amen. 7 Since I was the most empty and unbiased person on the squad or on the planet, as well as the most politically, sexually, and economically neutral -- with no axe to grind except the one about the axe itself -- my first assignment was to implement the Las Vegas Accords. This planet-wide treaty provided for the immediate rocketing of all nuclear-tipped missiles into the sun, where nobody'd even notice or care. 8 Before I was to begin, a public ceremony was held in my honor, where top government officials from many great nations sidled up to where I stood on the stage and, tearfully, dejectedly, tried to slip me the keys to their nuclear complexes and missile silos, without anyone noticing. I tried to console them. "Don't worry," I said to each one, all sympathetic and warm, "I'm sure the bulk of your life has certainly not been as pitiful and stupid as it is now, at this difficult moment." Then I lightened up and got all back-slapping jovial, telling them not to worry, because I was so drunk on my ass that I wouldn't remember any of this *anyway*. And I let out a big belly-laugh to try to help them not be so bummed about the loss of their little nuclear thing. 9 Then, the next morning, I got up early, had a few drinks to clear my hangover, and went out to start making the rounds. At each complex, there was always somebody who'd be very nice and give me a quick rundown on how to aim and where the reserve starter button was, in case the primary starter button failed. There was always a little window you could look out of and a little hand crank for each missile to wheel it into place and aim it. From the very first one, I found the whole system extremely easy to learn and use. By turning the crank, I was able to sight the tip of the missile through the window till it seemed pointed at the sun, or pretty much in that general direction. Then I'd kinda fake some bogus launch protocol chatter for a while, then suddenly scream out a quick "Three-Two-One-Zero!" and slam the side of my fist down hard on the starter button, and listen as the thing rumbled, and then blasted out of its silo. For a few moments after that, I could usually watch the flame ball in the sky through the window, heading off, more or less, in the direction of the sun. I have to confess here that I am quite appreciative of the fine work done by the nuclear weapons services department in providing a user-interface so friendly, that almost any asshole could walk in off the street and cleanly launch any number of nuclear warheads, just by using a little common sense and a few objects normally found around the house. (Of course, it always helps, too, if somebody just gives you the key and goes away.) 10 I finished off the missiles in that first complex, in no time, and was soon on to the next complex, and then on to the next, and the next. This was the easiest job I'd ever had, but also, disappointingly, the first one where I couldn't eat the leftovers. 11 In a short space of time, I'd eliminated all the world's multiple, independently-targetable, re-entry vehicle warheads, and all their single ones too, and since I couldn't shake the momentum, I just kept going and, soon, had cleaned up all their nuclear and toxic and neurobiologic waste, as well. But when I ran into my parole officer, at the commissary, during my lunch break, he still wouldn't get off my ass about "giving something back." 12 He told me I could make my first downpayment on this by taking the job as assistant editor of his corporation's annual report, "Fear Is Just A Theory." Of course, once I started working there, it became clear that what we were really producing was a glossy, counter-erotic, mass-market magazine that routinely featured pictures of things like pubic hair in substances like peanut butter, along with endless stories where Boy Meets Girl, Cop Meets Boy, Girl Shoots Cop, Boy Loses Girl. Or where Girl Meets Girl, Cop meets Girl, Boy Shoots Cop, Cop Loses Boy. 13 Though the permutations of just these narrative ideas, alone, could have generated enough stories to fill all magazines till the end of time, the staff was, nonetheless, counting heavily on me to come up with some whole new directions, in some whole new dimensions, that were well beyond even story or murder or sexmutilation. This, of course, was no big deal for me, because I was already working on an idea for an anti-story where Boy Meets Cop, Girl Meets Cop, Cop Meets Cop, Everybody Kills Everybody, and Boy Loses Drug. As soon as I told this to my editor-in-chief, he got all excited and immediately set aside a special issue to be devoted solely to this story, whatever it turned out to be, and to parasitic articles about its ramifications in society and the psyche and whatever else. 14 When I was done writing it up, I sent it off to the magazine's editorial department for feedback -- and never heard from them again. But, a week later, every book, movie, song, nation, user-interface, compression algorithm, and disarmament agreement was based on this idea, and I was forced to sue the universe for breach of cognition and violation of =ab genome= copyright. 15 The suit dragged on for a few trillion decades, then was finally decided in my favor. As a result, the defendants (including most of the industries of the world) were all forced to change the format and content and name and nature of everything they did. From then on, whatever new product they came out with, it had to be called "Lust for Stasis." -- in honor, of course, of me, and the title of one of my many failed, and never completed, and never published autobiographies of hatred and despair. 16 It was now more clear to me than ever, that all the petty, slimy stuff of the world existed only as a metaphor for all the stuff that was supposed to *not* be petty and slimy, but couldn't exist in its own right. Just like birds and airplanes and MIRVs only existed, in the first place, to serve as metaphors for what the mind could do if it weren't strapped to the world by emotion, and pain, and the bogus institutionalisms that serviced them. ------- 20-FOUR ------- 1 I was selected to be part of a panel whose task was to prove the old philosophical dictum that "memorabilia precedes essence." We were generally free to take any approach we wanted, as long as it ruined the earth and used up immense amounts of manpower and money and skills and state-of-the-art equipment, and required tens of thousands of round-the-clock gofers running to get coffee and cigarettes, in all kinds of neighborhoods and all kinds of weather, seven days a week, for hundreds of years and spanning hundreds of continents. 2 When I finally quit the Institute, I found that my experience there had left me with only one skill: I could take almost any person who thought globally and, quite effortlessly, convert him from being the kind of person who acted locally, into the kind of person who acted meta-cosmically -- which was much more fun, rewarding, and appreciated by matter everywhere. On a good day at this, I could usually con about a hundred people into about 9 or 10 pickup trucks and then rapidly deploy them to major financial institutions all over the world, where we'd pile out at each one, encircle the building, arms linked, then inch slowly, counter-clockwise around it, chanting mournfully, "Fuck Money! .... Fuck Money!" -- over and over again, till it collapsed. And then on to the next one and the next one, and then on to the next category of institutions, and the next one and the next one. All those religious and familial and sexual and national ones, and all those institutions of the so-called heart and the so-called mind and the so-called spirit and the so-called soul. 3 But, eventually, this became an unacceptable behavior in society, and my entire institute experience no longer had market value. I started having one of those cliche dreams I'd had so often in my youth. In it, I was stumbling around a cemetery late at night, with a half-dead flashlight and a half moon that occasionally came out from behind some half-clouds. The tombstones were all flush with the ground. I focused the light on one of them and read it: Just Another Loser June 5, 345 - April 2, 415, it said. I looked at the one beside it which had: Just Another Loser 300 - 333 chiseled into its surface in a weirdly modified Times Roman face. Then I walked to a different part of the grounds and the first stone I looked at there said: Another Loser, but not JUST Another Loser 233 - 383. 4 I got a job at a shop that sold souvenirs of activities recently lost from the history of world creativity. Writing and painting, for example. And thought. In my first few weeks there, I worked hard to become a more perfect misfit and eventually learned to do things with pain that, normally, only ground glass could do with light. But as soon as the going got a little tough, I just kicked over a few barstools and threw a few half-full bottles of vodka through a few plate-glass windows and full-length mirrors (as I'd been trained to do) -- and got going. I'd had it with these fucking assholes anyway, I realized, and I swore I'd just go back to reality where I'd sit myself down and write the giant, runaway, roller-coaster, best-selling book I knew I still had inside me, called either "A Child's Garden of Despair," or "Sex Is Nothing." 5 But, instead, I went to hide out among the most wretched people of the earth. These people slept behind telephone and VCR stores, and were so bad off, they didn't even have an ancestral homeland to bitch about getting back from some ancient, eternal enemy. And they didn't have a vicious oppressor they could revolt against and kill, and cut off his head, and stick it on top of a post in the center of town and have their sky-divers swoop by and film it from all possible angles, for a tapeloop to be shown to their grandchildren each day, at school, in lieu of being taught about understanding consciousness and motivation. 6 When I couldn't take it there, anymore, I got a disease-infested, cardboard hut, soaked in mud and garbage, at the edge of a tent-city slum on the outskirts of town. All the weirdoes from the populations of surrounding nations were housed here, so things back home, everywhere, could now run clean and smooth. 7 To pass the boredom of Impoverished Peoples' Savings Time, I sat around old, abandoned, cardboard cafes, sketching out possible humans on pieces of used, leftover, paper napkins. If I came up with one I liked, and had specified the DNA precisely enough, I could take it right down to the neighborhood fabrication center, and a few hours later, get back a full-blown, living, breathing, thinking, hoping, seething, suppurating human. But then what? 8 When I tried to look into my future, the only road I could see ahead was the one that started and ended with one of those institutions where they help get you back on your feet, so that, one day, you're strong enough to return and tell them to take their moralistic bullshit and go fuck themselves. I went to see my cross-therapist, Dr. Our, about this. "Sorry," he said. "But we are no longer providing treatment or services for that issue. "You see," he continued, getting up, now, and pacing slowly around his office as he spoke, "We are sick of people like you, who just waltz in here whenever you feel like it, to ride the undocumented code at the edge of human behavior, and then waltz right back out again, loaded down with priveleged insight, taken from the pain of others -- which you then recast into random theories of consciousness and nature, that try to validate themselves by pretending to predict all of human history and civilization and superstition, while, in reality, predicting nothing but the evolution of prediction itself." "Ummm," I said, once he'd finished and sat back down, with that righteous smirk on his face, "You may have me, uhhh, confused with somebody else. You see, my only desire in life -- my *only* desire -- is simply to have never lived. -- Period." But he wouldn't buy this and just shook his head. "Do you know who I am!" I screamed at him. But he wouldn't buy that either. 9 "Don't feel bad," the receptionist said to me on my way out. She led me through a glassed-in corridor to the south wing of the complex. From there, we looked down into a small courtyard with otherwise normal-seeming people scattered around it, some sitting peacefully under artificial trees or reading quietly beside an artificial brook. "These people are here because they've had their lives fucked-up by living in somebody else's world of fabricated, amped up volume, till it buzzed," she said. And if you listened hard, you could even hear some of this, playing so loud in their minds, it bled over a little into the ambient sound just outside their heads. [ End: Part 5 ] ===================================== Most Fucked-Up Person Alive Tells All Copyright (c) 1995 Cognitec/3rd Force =====================================