Round
Acid     The
Clock
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
The End of the World, Again
source: prisoner interrogation transcripts
posted: june 22, 2004, 9:01 am
by: djs
Strategic catastrophe loomed. Someone had taken a few facts and then bullshitted his ass off over them. Then added references, domain-specific vocabulary, and started hanging out with them vaguely near the edge of logic -- but not TOO close, so don't worry -- things won't start getting, like, all logical an' shit, anytime soon.

It was at this point that our sleeper cell received its wake-up call.

I answered the phone still hung over from drugs that weren't even legal in prison, drugs that even the president of the United States and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and the supreme dictator of Alopecia did not have access to, let alone knowledge of.

Knowing this, the voice on the other end of the line didn't waste time with the usual opening that had been hard-wired into the brain by evolution because for some reason, millions of years before telephones, people who didn't have it didn't survive. And though he had it hard-wired in him too, he DIDN'T start out like everybody else with the line that had proved to be so crucial to the success, maintenance and very survival of the human species: "Uhhh, yessss. I was just wondering..."

Instead, the voice got right to the point: "The growing confusion and inelegance surrounding the current metaphor," it said, "indicates that this metaphor is operating at too low a level to be useful to comprehension and thus, most of the inherent, unsolvable problems of lower level metaphors would simply "fall out" with the arrival of the appropriate higher level metaphor (which by definition covers more with less, reaches broader and is far simpler -- so the need for many of the faulty lower level metaphors simply fades away -- while other, still useful metaphors become re-instantiated with associations that no longer produce paradoxical results when the metaphor moves outside its own domain and begins to interact with other lower level metaphors. The strength and fit of the appropriate higher level metaphor makes the contradictions of lower level metaphors cease to be. Which in itself is a partial proof of its strength and fit.)"

"Uhhh, yes," I said. "But what about, you know, all the douchebags out there?"

The voice thought for a few seconds, then said, "Hmmm. You're right. Forget everything I said. Let's just blow shit up."

"Whoaaaaa, Awwwright!!!" came the cries from behind me of my fellow sleeper cell folk, cause I'd put the voice on the speaker phone.

"By the way," I said, "Who is this."

"This is UPS," he said. "We have your shipment of iguanas on our loading dock but the box burst open and now they're running all over the place and fucking everything up so if you don't get down here and clean this shit up we're gonna sue your damn ass from here to that place where, you know, one day, so that students would hopefully give a shit about them again, all the metaphors used in science and philosophy to clarify difficult concepts, were changed en masse to sexual metaphors. The second law of thermodynamics, for example, was now expressed in terms of genitalia functioning, and oppositely charged particles were said to wanna fuck the living shit out of each other, while similarly charged particles wouldn't fuck each other if you paid them, and so stayed as far away from each other as possible."

"Yeah, well fuck you too, buddy," I said, realizing this was just one of those prank calls that people used to make albums out of, and which only stopped when someone tried to make a movie out of them.

Disappointed, our frolicsome sleeper cell went back to sleep, but not before deciding to focus our dreams on figuring out what the new prank call would be -- in the same sense of "new" as in the statement "pink is the new black" or "brutal murder is the new religion of love".

permanent link to this article

copyright © 2004 by HC