The first of the two men was likewise young, aggressive and on his way up, but the other man was in his mid 30's, lazy, irresponsible, and already at the top and looking for an easy way back down.

"It's either music and marijuana," said the second man, "or manhood and manual labor. Nature, in short, has conned a whole fucking species into not hanging it up -- for THIS!"

He held his arm out palm up and motioned it around the restaurant and then around a picture of the cosmos on the cover of a book he'd brought with him to read when dinner with the wealthiest man on earth just got too fucking boring.

"As far as that dickbrain Nature's concerned," he continued, arms now drawn back into his body, "we're just another fucking coin-flip experiment. A whole species created solely for a test run -- like a handful of coins minted just to decide who kicks off and who receives -- and meanwhile we think we're here to be some kinda super-elevated locus of creation and will."

The waiter came over.

"Tonight we have, uh, you know, some kinda meat thing, or whatever, with, like some sauce or gravy or something on it, and, like some kinda potato or pasta or rice thingy. Or you could have some kinda TOTALLY veggie thingy with some kinda, you know, dressing, or whatever. And there's of course, some vinaigrette thing or whatever in there somewhere, no matter what you get."

"That sounds excellent," the first guy said, "I'll have everything."

"Nothing, for me," the second man said, reaching into his backpack and pulling out a can of Franco-American Spaghetti. "But what kind of can openers do you have?"

The waiter ran through the kinds of can openers they had.

"Bring whichever one you'd personally use," the second man said.

"To open a can of Franco-American Spaghetti with?" the waiter asked.

"That too," the man replied. "But I mainly wanna use it as a prop to help me describe my recent surgery to my friend here. All kinds of tubes and scopes and lasers and baskets were shoved up the tiny hole in my dick, so they could fish around and yank out a couplea big bloody kidney stones through my ureter."

People at nearby tables politely choked on their food or spit out their coffee. The sound of stifled, unrequited vomit could be heard.

"And it went on for HOURS," the man called out as the waiter was walking away to get their food and props.

Several tables finished quickly and got up to leave, holding their stomachs and/or mouths.

As soon as a table was completely deserted by its former diners, the second man got up and moved over to it and sat down and started scarfing up big handfuls from the wide assortment and vast amounts of unfinished food left on its plates. The first man followed, sitting down across from him, semi-frantic.

"What are you doing??! Are you crazy?!! This is the most expensive restaurant in LA. The most important and powerful people in modern world civilization eat here all the time!"

"Well, they're sure bein' fed shitty leftovers," the second man said, downing something red from between his forefingers.

"You're just doing this to test us, right?" the first man said.

"Doing what?" the second man said, draining the only previously undrained wine glass. Then, looking quickly around and seeing the current table pretty much scarfed out, he moved to another table where the pickings were far better.

"Whoaa!! Look at all this shit!!" he said genuinely elated to the first guy, who'd followed and sat down across from him again.

"Isn't the money enough for you?" the first guy said. "Do we have to indulge your fucking persona too?"

The second guy did a total 180 demeanor change and grabbed the first guy by the shirt neck. "This isn't my fucking persona," he said.

He grabbed the table full of dishes and leftovers and wine and with great difficulty lifted it all a few feet off the ground and threw it against the wall, but missed and it smashed into another table instead.

"This isn't my fucking persona," he said, louder, more forcefully, turning over more tables as he headed for the door.

But instead of using the door when he got there, he jumped through the plate glass front window beside it, and, while he was still in midair, continued intoning, even louder, "And THIS isn't my fucking persona EITHER!"

And, fully-coated in glass shards by the time he hit the ground, he continued rolling sideways down the middle of road, cars swerving through more plate glass windows and storefronts and each other to avoid hitting him, and in between the screeches of their horns and brakes and the sound of metal wrenched apart, he continued saying forcefully, at the top of his voice, but without much other affect, to the many passersby who lined the streets to gawk as he rolled past, "And This is NOT my fucking persona, either, yah buncha sick fucking bourgeois losers!"

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After that, who'd fucking care what the story and characters were. Because, in a few simple words, I'd have essentially said it ALL. The rest of the book, therefore, would have to be just bland comfort words, to help calm the reader down.

The problem is, of course, that when the book comes out, people are gonna draw conclusions. And some of them will come to see me, all pissed off.

"You hate culture!" they'll scream. And: "So, if you're so damn smart, then why don't you tell us how to make culture stop being the ugly stupid worthless boring piece of shit it currently is. -- Or, at least, tell us beautiful, powerful, intelligent, caring, creative, spiritual, humane, highly-valued, vastly entertaining people out here how to stop lapping it up like we're all starved out inside."

I'll, of course, have my answer ready (in fact, I'm figuring it out, as we speak), but first I'll make them listen to a few hours of My Bloody Valentine and/or Blonde Redhead while I knock off a quick Vanity Fair piece in the corner. Then, maybe at the end of "Messenger" or "Don't Ask Why", I'll tell them how, if they wanna get rid of their ugly stupid worthless boring piece of shit culture, the first thing they oughta do is replace their fucking candy-ass so-called Olympic Games.

They'll no doubt gasp and say, "Yeah -- but with what?"

At which point I'll casually interject, almost as an afterthought, "With itself blindfolded, of course."

"Take all the current Olympic sports," I'll explain in language even an infant could understand, "and do them all blindfolded. Blindfolded pole vault. Blindfolded swimming. Blindfolded Boxing. The blindfolded mile.

"Then, when doing the Olympics blindfolded starts getting boring again, start blindfolding the athletes in the dressing room using non-removeable blindfolds and don't help them find their event when it's show time -- so they have to desperately stagger around the whole Olympics stadium for hours not knowing where they're going, occasionally getting into vicious brawls with fans, and ultimately missing their event entirely, disgracing their whole nation and sports in general.

"Then, a few years later, when that gets boring too, blindfold them in their hotel room before they leave, so most of them don't even find the stadium where the Olympics are being held and, instead, wind up in the wrong place without knowing it, so suddenly Olympic-class athletes are doing broad jumps off the tops of buildings and pole vaulting into outdoor billboards on strip mall highways, or running the mile through a series of unexpected plate glass windows."

"OK," they'll say, "but the Olympics are only every 4 years. What's everybody supposed to do for the 3 years in between?"

At which point I'll get all massively self-righteous and unload.

"See!!!" I'll say, showing something between repulsion and contempt, "That's why you're all such a buncha losers. You're just sooo pissed about how I'M ALWAYS RIGHT about EVERYTHING and YOU'RE ALWAYS WRONG about EVERYTHING, that whenever I put forward some simple solution to help you save your pathetic miserable asses, you always have to find some dumb little nit-picky way to try to spoil it."

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Sorry it took me so long to respond to your email, but I am unable to use a keyboard due to the keys always all breaking off whenever I try to type on them. This is related, I am told, to a lack of subtlety or finesse on my part.

Similarly, pencil points and pen tips always seem to snap off and shoot across the room whenever I try to write even a word or two with them, on paper.

Apparently, only by deeply gouging my words into a block of wood with a strong pin or fork prong can my anger at their meaning be sufficiently absorbed to allow for me to write down anything at all.

Therefore, each email takes me many weeks and months to write, as the only way to correct a spelling error is to slam the fucking block of wood against a concrete wall many times till it's just a mass of tiny, bloody splinters, and then start again.

Once complete, my emails are then typed into an email client by an assistant and sent.

I hope this adequately explains my circumstance, so that, when I finally do get around to answering that worthless, ignorant, piece of shit email you sent me many many months ago, you will not be so angry at the lengthy delay in my response that you slam your fist through your monitor screen (dying instantly of massive blood loss and electrocution), when it (my long-belated response) finally arrives.

Must drain lizard now,

-- dsl

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It was all fun and games.

It was the New DMV.

In the New DMV, when the shit hits the fan, it is, more often than not, REAL shit hitting REAL fans.

Today it was most likely the guy at the photo/fingerprint window who'd brought it in and then tossed it up when no one was looking and finally flipped the fan switch to "ON".

For the most part, the Hit(Fan, Shit) proposition behaved according to statistical models worked out at MIT over the course of the last few decades by Professor Dean Moriarity, and the post fan-blade shit splattered harmlessly on walls and windows, rarely hitting faces and therefore even more rarely going directly into mouths and, rarer still, down throats and through digestive systems to be reverse-engineered and ultimately excreted as food.

I walked to the information window as people were rising up from their duck-and-cover crouches and applauding themselves and feeling all elated over having avoided all that air born fecal matter, unaware that the hated "statistics" had really done all the heavy lifting of saving them from being just another shit-faced statistic.

I flashed my MetroPass.

"What's that?" the information window person said, cheerily, like it was a dead canary and we were children.

"It's my MetroPass," I said, just a touch of incredulity in my voice.

According to Schrodinger's equation, Freedom = Entertainment = Emotion and, according to the Constitution, Schrodinger's Equation is everybody's absolute natural born inalienable right, with or completely without regard to circumstance.

"What's a MetroPass?" she said. "There's no such thing. I'm afraid the DMV does not issue or honor MetroPasses."

I started getting impatient. "It's something you flash," I said. "Characters in science fiction stories have them all the time. They walk up to people or windows or whatever and flash their MetroCard or MetroPass or OmniTicket. It goes by a lot of different names depending on the story. But they're all the same."

"This isn't a story, sir. This is the DMV. Are you here for a driving test?"

"The DMV IS a story!" I corrected her. "The DMV is a STORY in MEATSPACE!" I explained. "What's a driving test?"

"So you can get or renew a drivers' license."

"What's a drivers' license? Is that like a MetroPass?" I asked.

"So you can legally drive a car in the state of California," she said, not getting impatient at all -- but that's because everybody was so fucking hang loose at the New DMV.

"Why the FUCK," I said, really beyond all reconciliation with time at this point, "Why the FUCK would I want to drive a fucking car in the state of California!!? -- and even if I DID (want to drive a fucking car in the state of California) -- Why the DOUBLE FUCK would I want to do it LEGALLY??!!"

The New DMV was designed on the theory that there is something higher than thought, and we just need to get our brains to do it.

So the New DMV workers were invited to let it all hang out. Be all pranksterish and fun-loving one minute and then all desperate and despairing the next, and then all calm and mellow, the next.

(Meanwhile, the patrons of the New DMV, unbeknownst to themselves, had been secretly invited to be all melodramatic and self-righteous one minute, then all gracious and obsequious the next.)

Eventually, though, the workers would have to confront the theory that rivaled the theory that the new DMV was based on.

This rival theory, contrary to claiming that there is something higher than thought and we just need to get our brains to DO it -- instead claimed that, really, there is something lower than life and we just need to get our bodies and spirits to ENDURE it.

Fortunately, however, neither theory impinged enough on the final product to obliterate its fundamental feature (not a bug!) -- and so everyone with business at the New DMV had to go through the lines with their clothes 100% off -- in the interest of everybody else's safety.

Unfortunately, since they weren't responding appropriately to my MetroPass, I would have to (go through the lines with my fucking clothes off) too.

"Do you KNOW WHO I AM!!!" I screamed as the armed matron started removing my clothes so I could be processed.

"I'm Professor Buck Hardrod, Ph.D.," I screamed as I took my place at the back of the line for window 17 and started filling out my form, "I'm the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize and Academy Award winning discoverer of the idea that there is something more central than emotion, and we just need to get our insula and/or cingulate cortex to shut the fuck up and start ACTING LIKE it!"

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The coveted Genesis Award is given, each year, to the person who has done the most to return the world to the way it was at the time of, you know, Genesis.1

But the losers of the coveted Genesis Award were crying foul. Turns out the winner of the coveted Genesis award was really the bastard son of the distinguished panel of crack whore jurors -- formerly the US Supreme Court -- who'd chosen him to be this year's recipient of the coveted Genesis Award in the first place.

Still, no one could deny that, by means of excessive repetition and jumping impossible levels of recursion, the winner of this year's coveted Genesis Award had removed the constant static of everyday reality from peoples' lives -- and therefore probably deserved to win this year's coveted Genesis Award, anyway.

Previously, hysteria had distracted the people into being their own best/worst can of worms. But now, now that this year's winner of the coveted Genesis Award had leapt impossible levels of recursion and repetition and smashed everyday societal reality, you could no longer say about any of the people, anymore, that they had it entirely within themselves to be all they needed to go fishing.

After the Genesis Award ceremony, the winner of the coveted Genesis Award tried to cash in on the coveted Genesis Award itself, but apparently it wasn't that kind of award.

He thought back to the time when, in his present state of despair, he could have just sat down and had some searing interior monologue -- but we are way fucking past that crap in literature these days, and he knew it.

And, according to his myYahoo page, we are all cast adrift -- so what's to interior monologue about anyway?

"Hey! What's that over there on the right?!"

"Doesn't matter.... We've already drifted past it."

As a young fetus he had tried to abort his mother but the Supreme Court, his father, turned him down, 5-4. That's why they owed him -- and why giving him the coveted Genesis Award was their makeup call. Now they were even, and could look forward to a future of attempting to kill each other with impunity. Occasionally succeeding.

He grew up in a motive-free zone, where people had no need to manipulate you or be manipulated by you.

So when he entered the non-motive-free world at large, the social order all along his path suddenly got all fucked up for many minutes -- until the last few muon antineutrinos of him had decayed2 into anonymous positrons and he was gone from, first, local reality's PROBability, and, then, its POSSibility.

But when he was finally hired, he was hired to fulfill a need, not for the self he had mapped out in his head.

He was hired to put that self aside.

"If all you had to do was yourself," the application form had stated, "there wouldn't be any fucking reason for us to pay you. Or bother keeping you alive. Now would there be!"

His first assignment had been to watch a child born giving birth to a child born giving birth to a child born giving birth to another child born giving birth to yet another child, and so on to infinity, but it all happened so fast that no one noticed. -- Unless you played back the tape in ultra slo-mo -- which interpolates 10 frames of the quantum truth in between every 2 frames of the unquantum lie.

In this view it was easy to see what was happening. But if you looked....

If you looked... a whole 'nother fucking line of life, maybe it's from earlier years, or it's one that never existed, passes through your head.

And you realize suddenly, and without consulting any data base, that the moral of this story is -- "Fuck all stories and fuck all their fucking morals."

And fuck all the horses they rode in on.

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"And that's why Hollywood sucks," the spokesman for the Dogma '05 group told the assembled meeting of investors, producers, studio heads and their butt boys and sycophants.

But my group, the Dogma '06 group, had a different idea. Our idea was that, since '95, many years had passed with no new dogmas.

Ooops, we noticed too late that our idea was, verbatim, the exact same as everybody else's fucking idea.

Suddenly we realized we'd have to come up with a whole NEW idea, if we wanted a chance to throw our weight around like all those other assholes who got to throw their weight around just because they almost actually had an idea once.

And on such short notice, with no time to think, and for want of something better, we just might have to go with the truth.

"OK," one of our more junior members blurted out. "The theater darkens, and, before the studio logo appears, some soft but slightly ominous music plays and a simple white-on-black disclaimer with maybe Times Roman lettering flashes up on-screen. Its purpose is to put the movie-going audience at ease -- so they can watch the film relaxed, unafraid, without fear of being made complicit in an act of inhumanity. The disclaimer simply tells them that 'No Gyllenhaals were used in the making of this picture'."

We all shot him a dirty look. Disclaimers were anathema to the industry -- but the jig was up and we all knew we'd eventually wind up here anyway. Our dirty looks softened to "someday you'll make a great... uhh, whatever we older folks are, kid" looks.

Meanwhile the other groups were taken aback. Knocked off their own game plans, they couldn't but acquiesce to the voice that, through innocence, had cut straight to the heart of the matter.

"No Gyllenhaals, eh?" said the leader of the Dogma '05 group, finally breaking the silence that was already dripping with what he was now going to put into words for us. "Yes. That might just do it... Let's see...

"We could begin each film with a simple disclaimer - white background with black Helvetica lettering: 'Absolutely No Gyllenhaals whatsoever were used in the making of this film."

No metaphor had been intended in our initial formulation, of course, but somebody found one anyway.

"Yes," said the leader of another dissident group. "It's EXACTLY like the 'no animals harmed in the making of this picture' disclaimer.

"I mean, we ALL feel sorry for those actors up there -- ignorant, talentless people, forced to make total assholes of themselves in front of millions, uttering lame clichés, acting like self-righteous creeps one minute and lowlife scumbag pieces of shit, the next.

"So, naturally, people are willing to come out and support a charity like the movies, that gives meaningful work to these tragic losers. And nobody wants to harm them. -- But -- but that's just it! A movie with a Gyllenhaal in it harms EVERYBODY, especially actors.

"And that's where our new dogma '05 disclaimer comes in. It tells the movie-going public that while they're helping out actors by plunking down their lousy $10.00, we're doing our bit too -- helping actors by not making them be in movies that, every time the script calls for quirky but intelligent, throws a fucking creepy but milquetoast Gyllenhaal at you."

At that point I definitely would have stood up and taken offense at how that wasn't what we were implying AT ALL -- if everyone hadn't been standing up on their seats applauding and stomping their feet and calling for an encore.

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Then there was something.

Now there is everything.

But what we REALLY want is something ELSE.

Unfortunately -- by definition -- once this is everything, there can never really BE anything else.1

Notes:

1. So, you know, like, why fucking BOTHER??

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But somehow you know that this year it'll be different and this year it'll happen just the way you're envisioning it now. But then of course, you realize that EVERY year you think, "yeah but this year is gonna be different, this year it's really gonna fly, really gonna just play out the way I'm seeing it now." But it never does, so why should you expect it to now. Which is ALSO what you think each year at just this exact same point in the train of logic.

But, given that, why not just NOT think it this time, and break the pattern? Why not NOT think that it's not gonna play out as expected this time because it never has before?

Well, for one thing, you can't just NOT think it this time because you already HAVE thought it this time. But for another thing you can't just NOT think it this time because, if you DON'T think that things are not gonna happen and then they DO because you didn't, then next year at this time you won't be able to have the same feeling you've had in all these previous years -- and then you might never have this exalted feeling of something possibly soon actually maybe really happening, EVER AGAIN.

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But, because reality was made out of Creation's very substance, they both moved at the same speed and Creation could not predict reality's future.

And that's why, on the stand that day, Creation was able to honestly, plausibly deny any advance knowledge whatsoever that when reality took its 1034th crap, out would come life.

"Therefore, your honor," Creation's defense team told the judge, "we would ask you to please desist from any further ass-kissing of illogic and irrationality, and find the defendant, Creation, not guilty by reason of, you know, Reason itself.

In their rebuttal, or redirect, or summation, or whatever, the prosecution said, "So! So reality is just a joke, eh? Then how come, how come Life, you know, LIFE, takes itself so motherfucking seriously?"

They paused for effect and slowly looked from face to face in the jury. Then they looked from face to face in the rest of the courtroom once they could no longer bare to look into the blow-job-inflated mouths of the jury anymore.

"And so, ladies and gentlemen of the jury," the prosecution continued once it felt its previous point had sunken all the way in, "Creation has taken a wrong turn, and has had to resort to creating people. But the only purpose of those people is to keep other people in line.

"And then, as you know, Life was bought out by Control, and there was nothing anybody could do about it. Life was promptly re-purposed in order to give more consequence to lies that couldn't exist at all without its aggressive, vocal support.

"Accordingly, the history of ideas has been determined by the wrong ideas of whichever asshole pushed hardest on the buttons on Control's control panel.

"And, since, your honor and ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it's gauche to talk about your success and painful to talk about your failure, there's really nothing much left to be said about anything anymore, except blow me and thank you."

And the prosecution rested.

In the press box many of us were thinking, shit, if I could just rhyme 'catastrophe' with 'apostrophe' I could launch a whole new career and not have to do this "justice" crap anymore.

But we couldn't.

To cheer us up while the jury deliberated, they showed The 3 Stooges, but that just made it worse.

Because, though The 3 Stooges, as everybody now knows, had invented Shakespeare to make themselves look good, they were still, also, among the primary evangelists of the idea that feeling anguish over purely mental constructs (constructs with no correlate in physical reality) was the evolutionary leap that allowed societies to exist at all.

Or, as Curly Joe always used to say, "Even hyenas bear the psychological burden of being judged -- uhhh woob-woob-woob-woob-woob."

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We were having a conversation that consisted mostly of changing the subject before anything clear or concrete was said. So fragments of half-baked "ideas" flowed easily into stories bearing no relation whatsoever.

Then another story. Engendering another fragment of an idea, but nothing like the one we started with.

When the conversation died abruptly, we looked to a screen on the wall. It was running a cheap-shit dumb-ass cliché action flick, but suddenly, right in the heart of the action, everything stopped and there was a close-up on the villain of the story against a background of a fire or fires burning in the distance. Slowly he began to unwind a 5-minute uninterrupted Shakesperean-style monologue about the nature of crime or death or love or something.

Of course we all knew this scene was not in the script at all. Because we all knew it was well-known that this scene came straight from the actor's contract.

In fact, this highly popular actor who, for unexplained reasons, was always a boon to the bottom line of ANY production, was well-known throughout the industry as someone who would only agree to do a film (especially dumb-shit, cheap-ass, cliché action flicks) if he was given complete authorial control over a 5-minute section of the film, right dead center in the heart of the action, to just stop everything and, against the dramatic background of his choosing, self-indulgently indulge himself in the full range of his acting skills in some Shakespearean-style monologue of his own creation, possibly improvised on the spot out of whole cloth.

So we sat transfixed, watching him stare off, in jagged profile, into nothingness and simultaneously into some modern day stand-in for Yorick's skull, knowing that this meta-story was really what life was really all about. Really.

'Cause life was not really about life, or about living, or about all the surface achievement of all those social milestones that force people to pretend not to despise you for achieving them.

No. Life is not about what's in the script for life. Life is written far away from and well behind the sequential list of fade-ins and actions and fade-outs of each fucking day.

It's written in the contracts that are signed by the actors, directors and lighting technicians who participate in the realization of the scripts of life which, in the end, are really just fronts for the these contracts, which are the real story being told.

That is why there appears to be no logic or reason to life -- because events are caused and determined by hidden clauses in proprietary contracts tucked away in unblowable safes.

For every stupid thing that happens, there is a clause somewhere in someone's contract that says it has to be this way.

Logic and reason are walking down the street and the sun's shining and everything's fine when suddenly a fight breaks out and logic and reason, completely innocent and minding their own vast business, are arrested for incitement to riot -- but it's all been a put up job and the real reason they are taken off the street is because too many contracts cannot be honorably carried out with them around.

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The title of this piece is "Why Google Maps Sucks" because when you go to Google Maps and click on "Satellite", you get a satellite photo from 4 MONTHS AGO!

But I wanna go outside and wave my arms around and then immediately run back in and click on Google Maps and type in my address and click "satellite" and zoom in and see the top of my tiny head and my two tiny upturned palms.1

And I wanna do this at the same moment everyone else on earth is doing it too -- zooming in from the sky's eye-view of 7 continents till they see themselves (and the rest of man) standing on their own personal specks of earth all over the world, yearning to be free.

There's never been a world moment like this one will be. Never been anything so way far beyond the regular meaning of culture. Never been a time before in history when everyone on earth could so easily share the same stark highly personal, heavily communal realization SIMULTANEOUSLY.

Because, in the history of technology-sociology, it's one thing to see a live picture of Walter Cronkite saying "Hello dere from Rome!" live, from Rome.

But it's totally something else altogether to see yourself and every other living human on earth, standing on the surface of the planet, all together, ironically giving the moon or each other the finger, near-live from the Google Maps page.

So, Google Maps, get your damn act together and give us instantaneously updated satellite views of the planet, NOW.1

And could you get in just a few feet closer too, please?1

'Cause, at the very least, we should all be able to read what others have written in blood on scraps of paper they/we hold up to the sky.

Notes:

1. And, if that's what Google Earth does, then... you know... nevermind.

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Both groups knew they'd failed miserably at their respective projects.

And now they'd come together finally, at the behest of their mutual need, to commiserate over how far up their own respective asses they all were.

They had invited the artists and philosophers to come too, but the artists and philosophers were still desperately clinging to the notion that they were NOT as way far up their own asses as the astrophysicists and Catholic priests were.

But unfortunately for the artists and philosophers, as luck would have it, right after the Catholic priests and astrophysicists had confessed to each other how badly they'd failed to understand a single fucking thing in this world, and after they'd eaten some doughnuts and played out their limited repertoires of human social moves at each other, they started getting restless and reverting back to younger and younger stages of not giving a shit.

Eventually they got to the stage where you just want to fuck things up and then quickly moved to the sub-stage where you call people on the phone at random and try to fuck with their heads. (This was also briefly considered popular music at some point in the history of man.)

So the Catholic priests and astrophysicists, pretending to be from, like, UPS or some adoption agency, started calling the artists and philosophers and saying, like, "when can we deliver your truckload of starving rabid pythons?", or "when can we bring over the illegal Cambodian babies you just ordered over the internet?".

And then, while the artists and philosophers were getting really really pissed 'cause they "didn't order no stinking pythons" or babies, the astrophysicists and Catholic priests neatly segued into how isn't it fucking about time you artists and philosophers got honest with the world and admitted what a load of shit you're all spewing?

But, unfortunately for the astrophysicists and Catholic priests, the artists and philosophers, with little hesitation, just said yeah, you know, you're right! and immediately got in their cars and drove out en masse to join the astrophysicists and Catholic priests in admitting how far up their own asses they were.

Except, by the time they got there, the astrophysicists and Catholic priests were way past the point of endlessly obsessing about what a load of shit they all were and were no longer interested in hearing how far up their asses the philosophers and artists were now willing to admit they were too. Anyway, everybody already knew how far up their asses the artists and philosophers were.

So eventually the astrophysicists and Catholic priests got the artists and philosophers to stop whining and got them, instead, to channel their vanishing energy into making prank calls to those worthless soulless ignorant piece of shit slimeball politicians and businessmen out there, just like they (the astrophysicists and Catholic priests) had made prank calls to them (the artists and philosophers).

Except the astrophysicists and Catholic priests were really pulling a fast one on the artists and philosophers because it's absolutely IMPOSSIBLE to get those worthless soulless ignorant piece of shit slimeball politicians and businessmen to admit how way way way far up their own asses they are because, frankly, politicians and businessmen don't give a flaming flying fuck how far up their own asses they are, as long as they are winning. Or even losing. In fact, as long as they think they're 'playing' the fucking game. ANY fucking game.

Across town, I was still putting on my boots.

But back at the meeting, everybody was getting bored again and the artists and philosophers, thinking it was their turn, said, OK, let's get those fucking musicians to admit how far up their asses THEY are. And they all looked pretty proud at having come up with this.

Unfortunately for the artists and philosophers, there was dead silence in response to their idea -- as the astrophysicists and Catholic priests just sat there steaming and thinking about punching the artists and philosophers fucking lights out.

Later, in the infirmary, Moses Buddha, the astrophysicist who'd spent 10 years undercover as a Catholic priest and was also the organizer of this meeting, tried to explain to the artists and philosophers how they'd unfortunately stumbled on the ONLY human endeavor that might possibly be exempt from being way up its own ass.

"Though SOME music is certainly way up its own ass along with its rationale being often way up the ass of its creators," he explained, "still, SOME music APPEARS to be NOT way way up its own ass.

"This is explained by a prominent theory which posits that music already existed on the day BEFORE everything was suddenly doomed to be way up its own ass forever.

"The next day, according to the theory, we walked away from perfection bringing only music with us, and came here, where all categories and assumptions were clearly bogus but everything proceeded as though they weren't.

"It follows from this theory, then, that, really, all our time here has just been a vacation. A very bogus, very sanctimonious, very anxious vacation, salvaged only for brief moments by McCoy Tyner or Velocity Girl.

"And, today, the young Turks of this theory believe that this sad vacation way up our own asses is now finally approaching the implosion that will mark its end -- and our triumphant return to perfection -- where we will sit peaceably in plasma jars on neutrino shelves, that much the wiser for having seen firsthand how deep stupidity can go -- or how stupid depth can be. Whichever."

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But Creation's math could not predict any faster than its algorithms could actually play out in time. So it could not have known in advance that when the cosmos took its 111th crap, out would come Life.

Therefore, your honor, I would ask you to please desist from any further ass-kissing of rationality, and find the defendant, Creation, GUILTY anyway -- despite its obvious innocence -- of the crime of playing just a little too fucking fast and loose with itself.1

With that, the prosecution rested and the defense stood up to present its case.

Once upon a time, the cosmos saw Life as just an utter fucking joke -- maybe the biggest fucking joke in the cosmos. Even Tau particles and muon-antineutrinos were laughing.

And so Life today should still just be the biggest fucking joke in town, but, unfortunately, at some point, Life found a way to force everybody to take it dead seriously.

And so, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Life has clearly taken a wrong turn, and people have had to be hired to keep other people in line.

Then, as you know, Life was bought out and there was nothing anybody could do about it. Under new management, Life's new, paid purpose was to give more consequence to the utter lies that couldn't exist at all without it.

Accordingly, the history of ideas has been determined by the flawed ideas of people who realized they were forceful and wanted everybody else to realize it too.

And, since, your honor and ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it's gauche to talk about one's success and painful to talk about one's failure, there's really nothing much left to be said about anything at all anymore.

And the defense rested.

In the press box many of us were thinking, shit, if I could just rhyme 'catastrophe' with 'apostrophe' I could launch a whole new career and get the fuck out of this incomprehensible justice business.

But I/we couldn't.

To cheer us up while the jury deliberated, they showed The 3 Stooges, but that just made us all more depressed -- even though we knew the 3 stooges invented Shakespeare and were the primary evangelists for the idea that feeling anguish over mental constructs without physical reality was the evolutionary leap that allowed for or mandated society.

"Despite their apparent lack of language, societal animals like hyenas and wolves still 'understand' interpersonal angst at deep chemo-cognitive levels2 -- uhhh woob- woob-woob-woob-woob," Curly Joe always used to say.

Notes

1. to the detriment of its many subclasses and the subclasses' subclasses and the subclasses' subclasses' subclasses, and so on.

2. For example, the neural embodiment of:

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They'd gotten to the point of complete understanding of this complex phenomenon and, to wrap everything up, just needed to do one more last experiment.

And we were it.

So they gave us a late model Dodge Dart, 50 feet of American Rope Company No. 3 general purpose 1/4 inch rope, and a box of International Blindfold Corp.'s No. 7 Black Acrylic Blindfolds, and we got in the Dart and drove off into the New Jersey sunrise. It was 6 AM. A Smith and Wesson No. 4 .357 Automatic Weapon and a bottle of General Drug Company's No. 11 800 mg. Meth-Amphetamine tablets were locked in the glove compartment and unavailable to us for another 5 hours.

Beyond that, there were no constraints or prescriptions on us, so we drove due west till about 11:15 and then, when the traffic started getting dense, we tied the gas pedal down with the rope, pushed the steering wheel out of the way, and blindfolded ourselves. Then we opened all the windows to the max, kicked back in the comfortable upholstery, opened the glove compartment, and let Newton and/or Heisenberg take care of the rest.1

By being so firmly in lockstep with the fundamental laws of physics, we knew we could go on like this forever without lifting a finger, and our driving down some endless road unseeing and out of control wouldn't end until the universe itself did too.

Fortunately, though Rhapsody had been devastated by recent food riots brought on by the war on war, the one song they still had available for download was "Disintegration", and so it played now on permanent loop in the background as we drove on through stark southwest coastal saved daylight.

Meanwhile, fragments of lives and conversations drifted in through the windows from passing cars and, being blindfolded and with no responsibility for control, we had nothing better to do than listen.

But pretty soon, regardless of the make or model of the car as determined by the sound of its engine, all stories started sounding the same. People were going to or coming from the same kinds of places having done or about to do the same kinds of things with the same kinds of anticipations before, and the same kinds of dashed hopes or self-deceptions, after. Their interrelations came from the same small set of possibilities multiplied by the same small set of character types, and ultimately channeled into the same microscopic set of (tragic) outcomes.

So we stopped listening and each of us started searching out loud for whether there was or wasn't, in our early lives, some teeny tiny little insignificant thing which, if done differently way back then at the cost of nearly zero effort, would have made it all suck significantly much less today?

But when we were only halfway through recounting every last fucking detail of every last thing anyone had ever fucking done, someone finally broke the spell and said, "Let's get fucking realistic and start thinking about doing something about something we can actually DO something about."

But everybody just groaned, because utterly stupid recommendations like that one completely overlooked the hunger we still had deep down for doing something about something we COULDN'T do ANYTHING AT ALL about! A hunger that vanished in inverse proportion to the reason we couldn't do anything at all about it being because IT DIDN'T FUCKING EXIST.3

Notes

1. Though Russian Roulette Driving, as it was sometimes called, had enjoyed brief popularity as a world religion back in the 80's, most of its orthodox adherents were killed off in car crashes and the practice of its sacraments2 were tacitly outlawed.

But once the religion itself died, Russian Roulette Driving was able to reemerge (under the name "Quantum Mechanical Driving") as a sport individuals could practice at will without fear of recrimination.

2. The foremost sacrament being the one where all passengers in a given car finally agree to turn off Collision Avoidance -- for good.

3. That is to say a hunger that existed only in direct proportion to the reason we couldn't do anything at all about it being because IT DIDN'T FUCKING EXIST. Which is to say, the more it didn't exist, the hungrier we were to do something about it that we couldn't possibly do.

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In fact, when the world began, everything was totally cool.1

But the brain had to tell itself lies2 for the sake of continuity.3 So it invented the cosmos to surround the world and make it feel like there is this huge cushion out there to absorb all our mistakes.

Then it proceeded to make all those mistakes, one by one.

And blame it on distant cosmic artifacts. "Alpha Centauri made me do it!" For example.

So the big dumb fat ass cosmos that's (supposedly) out there is just a fucking EXCUSE! An excuse to fuck up at home, at will. And the fact that it doesn't actually exist at all is almost irrelevant -- because "exist" itself barely even exists at all.

But, frankly, when it comes to the world's complicity or not in its now being more of a piece of shit than ever, I don't really have a dog in that pissing match.

I really don't have a dog in the pissing match over empty arbitrary standards and manifestations of societal life, and I really don't WANT to have a dog in that pissing match -- or worm in that can of pissing worms.

But, then, what pissing match DO I want the dog(s) I DO have to be in?

I want the dog(s) I DO have to be in pissing matches at the level where understanding isn't just a decorative side-effect (artifact) of survival.

I want the dog(s) I DO have to be in pissing matches at the level where you don't have to worry about continually filing notifications of failure of suspension of disbelief just to keep reality balanced against the billions endlessly filing notifications of excessive expression of robotic mindless faith.4

----------------

Notes

1. Contrary to the pathetic little fundraising fantasy of astrophysics known as, uhhh, .... you know.... something about something "Banging". Or something.

2. Or what the brain had to tell itself for the sake of continuity was almost, by definition, gonna have to be lies.

3. AKA Reality: the continuous, connected, narrative, goal-structured life of the individual as seen against and in the context of the social construction of consensual reality -- i.e. the big lie.

4. Everyone was always alluding to these other "deeper" levels beyond mundane reality, but nobody ever seemed to come back from them with instances. Or make it down to them in the first place.

So by casting away (or never having possessed or desired in the first place so as not to even have to cast away) all the garbage that interfaces the individual to the world by way of his species, geography, and society, I was able to have nothing left BUT these deeper levels, if in fact they exist.

But, needless to say, they don't. And now I am stuck here where everything is profound, and nothing better to do than write you this note to please send money.

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At first, everybody thought it was just some mistake or prank, so they just wrote it off and abandoned their attempted transaction and left the store (or wherever) empty-handed.

But when they got home, all the items purchased by whoever'd stolen their IDs, were waiting there all piled up on their doorsteps.

So, at this point, commerce was effectively ended1 and people had to make do with whatever the identity thieves had chosen to buy for them, plus what they already had on hand, and whatever cash was in their shoes.

Quickly, people were all evicted from their homes because they couldn't pay their rent or mortgage, and they couldn't even prove they belonged there.

And, since paychecks couldn't be cashed, employment ended too.

People migrated to warmer southern climates where they could sleep outside. They survived by endlessly trading and re-trading the same goods and services over and over again among themselves. At the bottom of the chain were thieves who stole food, clothing, and handheld devices from the few remaining haves in whatever place they were currently passing through on their way farther south.

But despite the stolen food moving through their black markets, they still subsisted mostly on nuts, fruit, and berries, and as a result their health improved overall and they lived longer than their former selves and everybody else.

Their children started being born with GPS-video camera phones already integrated into one ear.

Suddenly a new world was appearing made of people with advanced technological concepts living like savages without identity or possession, rarely sick or dying.

And neither religious capitalism nor capital religiosity could compass this change.

Reflexively they responded by just pumping out more "product". Then they upgraded packaging and logos and launched new ad campaigns -- to try to save themselves.

But all that happened was the savages didn't see the packaging or ads or even the products or their purpose or design. They only saw the abstract functional sub-units they could pull out of them and recombine into new products bearing no relation whatsoever to what The Man had always thought desire was.

Notes

1. Because they could now no longer verify IDs, merchants would only take cash -- but banks and ATM machines wouldn't give people cash because they could no longer verify IDs either.

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Billions of people before during and after us had tried and failed to figure it all out, and standing on their shoulders didn't make us fail any less.

So, at least in this respect, we should have all been equal.

But some people were much more forceful at not having figured it all out, and some people failed at figuring it all out with more style, and some people invested years of study to be able to not figure it all out better than those who hadn't invested a minute.

So among people who hadn't figured it all -- let alone ANYTHING -- out, there was a natural hierarchy according to who could be wrong and ignorant in the most believable, flamboyant, and informed way.

Unfortunately for the world, its people weren't the only ones who couldn't figure it all out, because the world itself couldn't figure it all out. "It all" in this case, by definition, being itself, the world.

So the world was just hanging out there, revolving and rotating and trying to act like it knew what it was doing, but the only thing it knew was that it didn't.

To try to get some sense of control, it put together a night club act where it told self-deprecating jokes about itself. One night we went and sat in the front row and watched.

"The world walks into a bar..." it began, a little nervously.

We waited to hear what the world would order -- but it never did. Just sat at the bar.

Power was sitting there too, at the far end of the bar, calmly having truth spoken to it by whomever. Not batting an eyelash.

But what did that leave to be spoken to impotence by whomever2? Only lies, of course.

So people take erectile dysfunction pills not to turn their pathetic flaccid cocks into pathetic erect ones, but simply to, at least once, hear the utter fucking TRUTH that only power gets to hear -- from the impotent protests of the last few impotent people not yet strung out on erectile dysfunction (i.e. salt) pills.

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Welcome to the dream of hope known as this book. The purpose of this introduction is to reinforce this promise of the dream of hope and to outline its parameters.

In this book everything will be revealed fully yet concisely. A clear superstructure will be set forth and all elements of knowledge will be firmly positioned within that superstructure so as to maximally reveal the nature of the interrelations between ALL elements and between all possible sets of elements and the whole.

When this structure is complete, all nagging questions of ontology and phenomenology will have been answered and epistemology will no longer be an issue, the word and concept fading from individual memory and group culture in lockstep with the thing-itself fading from reality at-large.

However, if you go ahead and read this book and are halfway through and suddenly start to get all pissed cause you think nothing's been said, nothing revealed and nothing's clear -- and that most likely nothing ever WILL be said, revealed or made clear -- about anything! -- well, YOU SHOULDN'T JUST GIVE UP ON THE DREAM LIKE THAT SO SOON, YOU FUCKING LOSER!!

If, however, you reach the end of this book and STILL feel that way, well, then, "Sorry!" But look -- see, NOBODY can deliver on what we promise. Right? That's just the way it is. So if everybody was just gonna be honest about it, then no book would EVER offer what we're offering and the possibility of this perfection would drop from sight, the idea would drop from sight, and everybody would just forget about it.

So what we're really doing by lying out our ass about what this book has to offer, is -- we're keeping the dream alive!

Because, if we don't keep it alive this time, or if we DO but some other overly honest asshole DOESN'T the next time, or if she DOES but the asshole after her DOESN'T, or the asshole after him or the asshole after her, and so on and so on -- then we will permanently lose the dream of hope -- and without the dream of hope... without the dream of hope... without the dream of hope... then... you know... like... what else will there be for us to kill off in some distant future, as a stalling tactic to get one more week or year of hopeless days before we finally have to kill off ourselves?

Happy reading!!

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