The secret service was suspicious. It was, after all, their job to protect the head blogger, the President, with their very lives.

"OK," they said, interrogation-style, "if you're the bloggers from outer space, let's see your blogs!"

"Our blogs are not IN your blogosphere," the lead blogger from outer space told the head secret service guy.

"Well, then take us to YOUR blogosphere!" the secret service guy said to the blogger from outer space.

"Well, uhh," said the lead blogger, "our blogs aren't actually IN our blogosphere, either -- uhh, you see, at the moment, in our world, blogging done in blogs in the blogosphere is totally passé and strictly for losers. In fact, anybody who's currently IN our blogosphere is pretty much considered to be a total douche."

"So then," the secret service head asked, "why are you misrepresenting yourselves as bloggers from outer space?"

"Well," said the lead blogger, "we are still blogging -- except we're just not blogging the lame old-fashioned way anymore. We've moved on."

"OK, so where the fuck ARE you blogging now?" the secret service agent asked, approaching the end of his patience.

"We are blogging in meatspace," the blogger from outer space answered. "Our blogs are blogged in everyday physical reality itself. So everything I'm saying to you now and everything I'm doing now -- is all just part of my blog. And when I do the space alien version of taking a dump, that's blogging too."

"Whoooa, coool," said the secret service guy. "So that means I'm blogging right now too, and all my men are blogging, and childbirth and drug-pushing are just different kinds of blogging, and the universe itself is really just the blog of some supreme deity -- and the reason there are different religions is simply because there are different brands of blogging software."

"Yes, that's it," the alien said. "And when you go to sleep each night and start having what your charlatan scientists erroneously refer to as 'dreams', what you are REALLY experiencing is simply a product of the brain's absolute NEED -- even while the rest of the body is totally immobilized -- to KEEP blogging, no matter what.

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We paused briefly outside the hotel to congratulate ourselves on this great success, but after a few cigarettes and some small talk about who's fucking whom and WHY, we were back inside, starting from scratch again, beginning the long road to saying all the SEMANTICALLY legal things that could be said.

The moderator, after a brief preamble which was completely devoid of meaning so as not to be inadvertently confused with the ultimate work product of our commission, finally began the session proper with the first semantically legal sentence:

"Actors are people," he said, "who have been born with the uncanny ability to be (or have studied and practiced and learned how to not CRINGE at being) utter fucking clichés."

The secretary recorded the utterance and gave it a reference number.

Suddenly my assistant grabbed her head and bolted from the room.

I excused myself to see what was wrong. The meeting ground to a halt and rather than waste semantically legal utterances that could not be recorded till I returned, they chatted in sentences devoid of semantic content or that did not obey the laws of meaning at all.

In the hall my assistant complained that our task was futile and could never be completed and that it made her head sick just to think about it. In short, she wanted out, and wanted the rest of us to quit too.

I explained that quitting wouldn't solve anything and that her best bet was to come back into the room and try to subvert the system from within.

She stopped sobbing and agreed to return only if I'd back her up 100% in proposing that the next semantically legal utterance to be added to the data base should be: "But please, for the sake of the planet, for the sake of the species, for the sake of civilization, for the sake of mankind, for the sake of the future, please, please, please, hurry the fuck up and get your self-righteous, sanctimonious, lame, hypocritical, fascist, murderous, child molesting, baby-murdering, ugly asses the fuck off this planet so the rest of us can breathe again."

When she finished I told her that I understood where she was coming from on this, but that I thought her ends could be more effectively and economically achieved by, instead, simply proposing the utterance, "small turds arranged in the shape of a heart." With emphasis on the heart and the turds.

She nodded assent and we placed our hands on each other's ass to verify the purity and exclusivity of our mutual trust against the tyranny of neuro-social biochemistry.

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You can say what you want about man. You can say what you want about human nature. You can say what you want about civilization.

But no matter what you say, no matter how damning and demeaning, no matter how accurate and true, in the end, you still can't deny that we, as a species and as a civilization, have come a long long way from "Let them eat cake!" to "Windows has encountered a fatal error and must shut down."

The race to innocuousness had begun. Everyone spun around rapidly in place, trying to see who could screw himself the farthest into the earth the fastest.

The rules of this race were a fucking mess. But if they'd been clean and crisp and clear nobody would've believed them because everybody knows that truth doesn't express itself in clear, simple sentences.

And so, though NOT being a fucking mess would have GUARANTEED that the rules of this race couldn't possibly be true, BEING a fucking mess only guarantees that the rules of this race are NOT GUARANTEED to be false, but definitely NOT that they're GUARANTEED to be true.

But then someone pointed out that racing is not ABOUT truth anyway, so who fucking cares.

He held his family at bay with the shotgun. His daughter said it doesn't have to be this way. A plane circled overhead. A voice from it over a bullhorn seconded her point.

The pilot sat in the copilot seat, listening to flight attendant radio. The flight attendants stood in the bathroom, listening to passenger radio. The passengers sat in the cargo bay, listening to those assholes on ground radio.

We are all just casualties I said as the plane descended unexpectedly, without power, without a word from the pilot or crew.

No we aren't he said.

Or at least, we weren't till you said that, he corrected himself.

Despite all this intentionally misleading bullshit about 99% shared DNA, what we all REALLY have in common is that no matter who we are or what or where we are -- we are all, each of us, just a single little tiny blip on the surface of the earth, whether we are standing or sitting or lying down, full of life or near death, alone or with 1 person or 2 people or thousands, inside or outside, in a room, on a mountain top, underwater, in a field, in a barn, in a factory, halfway up a skyscraper, in a car, with control over millions of troops, directing a small department or indie film, or barely in control of self.

And so I sat there now, a blip on the surface of the earth. Ahead of me was Mexico, South America, Antarctica. To my right, the Pacific Ocean, Hawaii, Japan, Asia, Russia, the Middle East. Behind me was California, Oregon, Washington, Canada, Alaska, the North Pole. To my left was America, the Atlantic Ocean, Scandinavia, Europe, the Balkans, Africa.

And there wasn't a single thing happening anywhere out there in the overrated rest of the world that wasn't already happening far better and more honestly in my fucking baby toe.

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Factional disputes are, of course, no stranger to the great religions of the world, but ours had not yet been so blessed, and therefore, when it finally happened, many were taken by surprise, did not fully comprehend, and against their better judgment found themselves at my humble doorstep seeking guidance.

I, of course, what with, you know, like being a prophet an' all, had seen this moment coming decades ago and so, as always, was bored shitless listening to the tribal elders lay it out for me in their broken understanding of the truth.

Our sacred book, the LASTAR, had made existence entirely clear for us, till then, despite its brevity and simplicity.

But though the canonical texts totaled only a few hundred pages in length and dealt only with the early exploits of the prophet-deity-resurrected-daughter-of-herself, Paula Abdul, there were rumored to be many hundreds of thousands of additional pages of sacred text which the prophet-deity-resurrected-daughter-of-herself had chosen to not yet reveal to man.

These pages were rumored to contain the exploits of many other sub-deities, sub-prophets and unresurrected daughters of nobody, but the mind of man had not matured enough in its limited history to be able to encompass all this vast content or keep track of all these many story lines where boy meets girl, boy loses girls, and cop shoots cop, and they would have to gradually be revealed in time as the human mind grew up.

But the people were, as always, restless.

They began to fabricate.

Before, to solve everyday dilemmas, it was enough to look down at your arm or someone else's arm, and turn it to read the WWPD tattoo there. What Would Paula Do covered just about every human issue with style and grace.

But one night, long ago, someone failed to fall asleep -- or woke up early -- and, in this unnatural state of being half-awake at 3 AM, a vision came to him. Of Girls. Gone Wild.

And somehow, in his confused and distorted state of mind, this vision entwined itself with the scripture already in his head. So that, one day not long thereafter, when confronted with a situation involving many unclear paths, he looked to his arm for help and asked instead, "What Would Girls Gone Wild Do?"

A moment later, when the wave function had finished collapsing, the path was clear, and its success led him to apply this simple formula to all the rest of life and to go on to share it with others so they would be saved too.

Soon this notion spread and took over peoples' hearts, and the LASTAR had to be reinterpreted to keep up with the times. Paula Abdul was still the prophet, but now she was the Prophet of Girls Gone Wild. And she was still the resurrected daughter, but now, instead of virgin birth from herself, she was the sum of all the vaginal discharge of all the girls gone wild all over the world across all history past present and future. And in that sense she never stopped growing.

People seemed content with this cosmology for a while but then, one day, someone without honor who was just in it for a buck, pretended to have lain awake one night, and the next day claimed as divine revelation an alternative formulation of the kingdom of justice and right.

And even though it's obvious in his tone and demeanor that he's just shuckin' and jivin' and doesn't really feel it in his soul, still, when he reveals his vision of What Would Wild Party Girls Do, 42% of the tribe are immediately willing to sign on.

And so today there is a schism in our midst and life cannot proceed with people at cross purposes over religion.

Because when 2 men arrive at a crossroads at the same time and one asks "What Would Girls Gone Wild Do?", and the other asks "What Would Wild Party Girls Do?", then there can be no peace.

Because the What Would Girls Gone Wild do guy knows that the What Would Wild Party Girls Do guy is the victim of a bogus fraud of a faith, a faith developed cynically for money, a faith that did not truly emanate from an honest soul, a fabricated faith of shallow, unfulfilled promises.

But the What Would Wild Party Girls Do guy becomes even more defensive of his faith, knowing that this is what the What Would Girls Gone Wild Do guy is thinking -- and so he'll use every vile tactic in the book to get the better of the What Would Girls Gone Wild Do guy, who, believing that his belief is true and therefore needs no defense, will be completely passive and thus eventually be destroyed by the What Would Wild Party Girls Do guy, and so suddenly the world would be run by an utterly bogus, mercenary, pretend-religion instead of the one true faith.

This was the dilemma brought to me by the elders which I was able to solve quite easily since I am 20 or 30 years ahead of these fucking morons.

The solution is trivial because the future has revealed a far more profound and potent truth and guide to behavior than What Would Girls Gone Wild Do. Up ahead in our magical future, though already old hat to enlightened prophets like myself, is WWTBTWCD, the one final absolute religion of truth and beauty and justice and the answer to all questions of the spirit and all logistics from morality to stain removal.

For the answer to everything is but to ask, "What Would The Babes of The Weather Channel Do?"

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They were after me again or I was on the run or road again. Whichever.

When I tried to tell them there was no world, no people, no consciousness, no physics, no phenomenology, they just smiled and flashed their handcuffs.

At that point I didn't even bother trying to tell them how, though there actually WAS epistemology, it was ultimately little more than tautology -- i.e. me knowing me, so why bother.

So everything was destroyed except what we needed to go on being public nuisances.

All roads and bridges were impassible except the roads and bridges WE took. And cars and phones didn't work -- except the cars WE drove and the phones WE barked our always disappointed expectation into.

And sex with other people and adventure, now that they are no longer advertised every waking minute everywhere round the fucking clock, have dropped off everyone's play list of desire and onto everyone's trash list of boring musts to avoid.

As people make their way around town, kicking up the rubble, they have come to realize that the world was nothing more than one big dumb self-storage shed for each individual brain, life, and species. So who needs it!

The end of the world is really, come to think of it, they think, just the cleanest most efficient way to unload a lot of worthless shit you've saved up but that you're never gonna wanna see or use again and never would have even thought about looking at ever again anyway, no matter what.

The crapass world that was, the crass world that is no longer, they realize walking the torn up rail line through the blown out suburbs, that crass crapass world's only purpose was to be the staging ground for stories whose only purpose was to weave the fundamental set of lies that keeps a species with lots of cars and lots of cliffs from one day all driving the former, en masse, over the latter.

In interviews, members of this species would say things like, "all we want is for our children not to have to give a flaming crap about THEIR children like the flaming crap their poor pathetic ignorant parents, us, had to give about THEM."

Aside from that, the only problem they had with catastrophe was when someone came along and tried to rhyme it with apostrophe.

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Slumped in a chair in the room with the nuclear button and its 3 anxious wannabe pushers, I'd look up out of my permanent funk every few hours and say casually but with authority to the others, "OK, MY turn!"

But MY turn at the nuclear button never came. It rightfully went to someone else, someone who had it in his blood and had spent his entire childhood doing whatever a child could do to prepare for growing up to be the kind of person who's either pushing or not pushing the nuclear button every second he's on the job.

I, on the other hand, had spent my childhood assuming that, when the time came, I'd just develop a whole new breakthrough product that would either be a drug or a cell phone.

The basic idea was that if the world had "talking in tongues", then why shouldn't it also have "talking in toes", or -- more to the point -- "talking in genitalia"?

And once there was talking in genitalia (say), in the world, then immediately there'd have to be a drug that allowed the average man to do it, and/or a specialized cell phone he could do it over in order to reach the greatest number with his unique incomprehensible message of deep divine mystical revelation and everyday pure common ejaculatory horse sense.

By the time I was a full-blown adult I was part of a large commercial effort (Grupo de whatever) working on this product. And though we still didn't have the least fucking idea what it was, we figured we'd better hold a big meeting of investors to finalize its design anyway.

Everybody who came was genuinely excited about its prospects -- talking ceaselessly about the string of opportunities and doors and spaces that would readily and gladly open themselves up to our crack team of developers.

"I think we've got a winner here," smiling executives said to each other and to underlings with conviction, following or preceding or simultaneous with the obligatory bear hug, or back or shoulder pat.

For the first time, someone at the meeting was taking notes. He had a brand new yellow notepad and had left the first page blank and folded it over so the 2nd clean page was now up and ready to record design specs.

He wrote down the number "1" followed by a period to indicate its status as the first item in a list.

Then somebody said something and he wrote down a word after the 1.

Quickly people gathered around to see what he'd written.

Then they returned slowly painfully to their seats, making sounds most often associated with advancing age and declining health.

In a fast and rare mutual moment, it had become clear to everyone that this fucking product, whatever the fuck it was, would easily rival the most stupid product in all human history.

So, with the first third of my life wasted on a dream that turned out to just be a dream, I vowed to not be fooled again during the next third of my life and so chose to waste it on the absolute most real aspect of reality.

And since there is nothing more real than someone setting off a nuclear bomb in your face, and since I'd rather be the someone setting it off than the someone whose face it's set off in, I applied for and landed this job, whose many subtle and delicate checks and balances should assuage all your possible fears that one day one of my many psychotic episodes will end with me lunging for the nuclear button and depressing it firmly with both hands so the hold cannot be broken, in much the same way that the nuclear family and society in general has seen fit to so firmly and eternally depress the living fuck out of ME.

And that's really all I ask of a career path. Cold, hard, immutable substance -- and protection from the possibility of taking revenge against high-level, abstract social forces selected for long ago in the structure of mind completely without reference to how uncool they'd be when I got here.

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So when the catastrophe hit, first thing everybody's like all "See! I told you so!" at each other.

Then they calmed down a notch and started screaming their fucking heads off.

After a while, rationality wore itself out and people started getting all suddenly righteous (even more than usual) in their phone conversations.

The phone lines and cell towers were all down, as befits global catastrophe, but calls still went through -- by sheer force of callers' will, apparently. "I can't believe this is all really happening," someone said during one of these miracle calls. "It's like we're in a movie."

The easy illogic of special effects ruled the day. Survivors clung to their roofs in the rain, as huge rivers of mud and debris gushed through their streets below.

Cars, from standing stock still, just up and did exceedingly graceful multiple rollovers. Busses bounced up off of buildings like mass (m=FR2/GM; m=E/c2) was no longer an issue for gravity.

The face of the planet was changing and everybody's jaw was all dropped open when they saw the smashed skylines on their home DVRs or CVS-Rs or DVTs or whichever standard of recording protocol ruled that week.

"But why are you all so fucking angry and upset about this," the well-respected news anchor chided them, staring directly into the camera in extreme head-on close-up, as was not normally done during the nightly newscast but after much discussion in the production meeting for that day they had agreed that an extreme camera angle was necessary to get the point across -- why, after all, have stuck to the same old boring set of camera angles for so many years consecutively if not to suddenly, one day, take advantage of the mind-crushing novelty of a totally DIFFERENT camera angle when it's most needed, to drive home a point that's crucial to the survival of the very viewing audience, if not the species.

"Why are you all so fucking upset by this anomalous and unrelenting string of catastrophes," the anchor whined at the home viewers, incredulous and almost condescendingly.

There was a slow dissolve on his face as he spoke, a slow dissolve to an overhead shot of the whole planet (the circumferences of world and anchor head matching, like, EXACTLY, so the dissolve is almost imperceptible) where the catastrophe is seen from outer space, from the moon, from mars -- from where it's all brilliant colored jagged swirls and sparks.

And in case it wasn't obvious to everyone -- maybe some of them had forgotten their art history or were absent the day Impressionism (or whatever) was covered -- the anchor explained it to the people in the voice he'd held in reserve for 20 years, saving it to match the day when the first extreme frontal close up on his face was used for maximum impact during time of crisis:

"I mean -- folks -- stroke for stroke -- the whole damn planet looks exactly like a fucking VAN GOGH!! -- Who could ask for more? -- After thousands of years of just being lame, distanced, unfeeling, dilettante, bourgeois observers of great art and history and science -- now, finally, we are A REAL FUCKING PART OF IT! -- Art and nature finally AGREE! -- A new world is being born!"

At which point, of course, on cue, the studio collapsed around him and the image blipped off on the final shot of the "V (for Victory)" sign, emerging on a pair of middle fingers stuck up through a hole from underneath the rubble where the anchor desk used to be.

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The Ruined World Patrol drove around in ruined cars, wore ruined uniforms, ate Ruined Toasties for breakfast. Their car radio only picked up stations that only played "Disintegration" back-to-back, interruption-free, 24-hours a day

The Industrial Devolution had shown us how to gut the planet and the Technologic Devolution had shown us how to jazz up the tailings and the Communications Devolution had shown us how to mix it all together and come out empty.

This was known as style.

The beauty of style is its ready co-optibility by any random piece of scum.

So style, like patriotism and religion, can easily be the last but is usually the first refuge of the scumbag.

And, in a world where the only virtue is avoiding the drool of material's slaves and the only sin is NOT being a drooling materialist slave yourself, what really fucking ELSE is there?

Well, there is .... uh, there is ... uhh, you know, there is being in the Ruined World Patrol, where, for one thing, you learn prayer and they blindfold you on Easter and give you spaghetti and you think it's worms.

Then you drive around the ruined world in your Dodge Dart and get out in front of large crowds and imitate what the other planets are saying about this one:

"They're like all, 'I told you so!'," you say, "And they're all, like, 'boy am I glad we kept that life crap off OUR planet! -- investing in that firewall that SHUTS LIFE OUT (perceived by the would-be attacker as a grossly inhospitable environment -- most often in the climatologic dimension) has definitely kept us from becoming a shit hole like earth.'"

The leader of the Ruined World Patrol is Jebb Harkness, the inventor of the Dodge Dart, which harnesses the quantum mechanical energy that everybody else wastes because they don't know it's there, and keeps running even after you've removed the last piece of engine.

He is also the mythical/quantum driver of every car that goes out on patrol. He invented the Dart to show the world how fucking WRONG it was about EVERYTHING, but they didn't get it. They thought it was just a car.

And so when he died that day -- as we went running down the alley, looking for food -- and we held an impromptu jazz funeral on the spot, the guy who improvised the eulogy pretty well summed it up for all of us who knew him when he said, "I'm sure if they had a Nobel Prize for what you can do with a white resin deck chair, a bamboo pole, a cinder block, 3 9X12 green tarps, a grocery delivery carton and 50 feet of truck rope, Jebb Harkness would have won it hands down every year."

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So I didn't waste my time trying.

Besides, trying shouldn't even count.

Trying is like steroids. It artificially enhances performance.

Even the ancients knew this and prescribed the penalty for it in the Myth of Sisyphus -- but today this so-called "myth" is the elephant in the living room that no one wants to talk about.

The world you see around you, the ruined world, is the result of trying -- and its vilest 'worsts' are the result of trying too hard.

Anything good in this world, if it ever really existed at all, came from not really giving a flying fuck -- and it stopped being good the day someone TRIED to BE or DO it again -- the day someone came along and fucked it all up with their ceaseless, stupid, brain-damaged MOTIVATION and ultimately fittingly self-destructive EFFORT.

On the other hand, as an individual, you cannot (currently) touch what big powers and their intermediaries can do to control life.

You can only keep moving to the place under least control at the moment.

Where you don't need to outsideshow the self anew each day.

Or have to follow the holy book of obsessive compulsion.

Where you can just become (say) a petty thief.

Until, one day, while just going about your normal business, you accidentally release an evil genie from a red crystal, and have to enlist a priest's help to imprison him again.

And, in the meantime, the genie has gone around granting deadly wishes to unsuspecting victims and making mutual defense pacts with malevolent cyberintelligences, despite a college student, a computer hacker and rebel warriors who've joined forces to battle him.

But, of course, it won't be until a Seattle medical examiner framed for his wife's murder injects himself with a drug allowing him to see her memories of those of her killer's, that a huge tear in the fabric of mass socio-pathology will finally give you the opening you need to begin your long-awaited pseudo-documentary where a woolly mammoth, a saber-toothed tiger and a sloth try to reunite a human baby with his father.

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It involves mostly drugs and cell phones.

The cell phones are for where you spit the rush of ideas out into once the drugs hit.

The actual rituals are pretty unimportant, though. They're simply, after all, just the enzymes that catalyze a random idea through physicality to emotion, and through emotion to memory and belief.

So it was a cold, rainy, shitty day, here in the gutter. And all those courses I took at MIT about how to be a princess suddenly weren't any help to me now.

Really, only a planet-wide tsunami could save me. Wipe the world away and start fresh. Because, now, my fingerprints were on all the world's horrific tragedy -- and everything wrong anywhere had ultimately been signed off on by me. To apologize and make amends would take more lifetimes than I have -- and also I'd probably have to put on clothes, walk out the door, and get in a car -- how fucking bourgeois! -- so let's just wipe the world away and try again.

I held my breath and waited.

C'mon!

C'mon!

World?

World?

Nature?

C'mon, man. Wipe it all away!

Tsunami me to freedom!

I waited some more, but gradually grew despondent again when no tsunami appeared anywhere on the blue horizon.

All the courses I took at Harvard about how to do drugs and just kick back weren't of any help to me now.

I had, in fact, written my dissertation on just doing drugs and kicking back, and a few months after my degree was awarded to someone less psychotic, my dissertation appeared anyway in hardcover as the runaway bestseller, "Just Doing Drugs and Kicking Back: a Ph.D. Dissertation That Was Made Into a Best-selling Book That You Are Now Holding In Your Hands And Are Probably Just Fucking Stupid Enough To Buy!"

But that was then. What has lately done for me recently?

And that's when and why we started looking to higher authority, to timelessness, to a place beyond possibility, to far beyond hope.

When we got there, we were introduced around and quickly discerned that there were just 2 kinds of people in this world.

One kind of person meant well but got it wrong, causing much pain and misery.

The other kind of person just wanted to fuck everybody over and take everything, but also got it wrong which, however, by the perversion of chance, wound up eliminating much pain and suffering, and bringing much joy and hope.

But this meant that if you were honest about NOT being a scumbag, you were doomed to failure.

And if you were dishonest about BEING a scumbag, you were doomed to failure, too.

And, so, only totally honest scumbags and totally duplicitous saints could get anywhere in this fucking world.

Leaving all guidance counselors, from the most well-meaning to the most intentionally slimiest, with no option but to advise their counselees that "if you're any good, this piece of shit world doesn't deserve you -- so just drop out and piss on it.

"And if you're no good at all, this piece of shit world is made up entirely of people like you and already has more than it knows what to do with -- so just drop out and piss on it."

And all the courses I took at the US Navel Academy in Annapolis Maryland about how to get really really deep into navel analysis, weren't any help at all to me now.

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The travel brochure had said that single words here, written on public surfaces in ironic bodily fluids, always trumped complete sentences printed in ink on paper everywhere else.

I was taking a walk around the section of the city known as Nowheresville, but then I bumped into a suburban couple bored with their existence who were taking a walk on the wild side. That disoriented me.

"You mean this is the wild side?" I asked them, stunned. "I thought it was supposed to be Nowheresville."

As if to prove it, a corrupt detective friend of the bored suburban couple appeared suddenly out of the shadows.

"He wants revenge on a gangster who he caught fucking his girlfriend," the female half of the bored suburban couple said.

The corrupt detective nodded assent.

"I never really liked her," he said, "but who can resist a woman who's resorted to sexual antics to save an airline?"

And we all agreed, even Farmer Vincent and his portly sister, Ida, who put lost motorists in their popular smoked meats. They were friends of the male half of the bored suburban couple and had just, by pure chance, pulled up in a car to ask directions to the tame side.

"Go back to New Jersey!" I yelled at them reflexively.

Everybody looked at me strangely.

"I expected this to be Nowheresville," I said defensively, "but it turned out to be the wild side -- and I didn't bring the right handheld device for the wild side, so now, I'm just trying to make do."

They thought for a moment and then made the universal sign for giving me a pass on my behavior.

"Now get the fuck back to New Jersey, fucking anyway!" I screamed at the fucking assholes in the car.

I started kicking over gabarge cans to show I meant business.

I was sick of their world, but kept not finding anything else no matter where I went.

"But maybe," I said to them assuming they assumed about me what I've just said to you about myself above, whether I was thinking it then or showing it, or not, "Maybe if whoever in Le Tigre screams "GET OFF THE INTERNET!" on "Get Off the Internet" and whoever in the Cure goes "Auowwwww" at the beginning of "Disintegration" became president and vice president respectively of the most powerful nation in history, maybe THEN we could start to shed these layers of pretense."

A woman who'd unknowingly accepted a ride from a psychopath after a fight with her boyfriend, and was also the half-sister of the detective's ex-girlfriend who'd fucked the gangster he was now trying to get revenge on said, "But the genetic ego knows what it wants out of mammals, and only the most brutal or most loving interdiction will ever put even a dent in its opportunistic gameplan."

She'd been dropped off by the people who were now headed back to New Jersey even though they didn't really originate there, but didn't want to disappoint me.

By then we'd walked several miles and were at the filling station that disco girls had taken over for their ailing uncle during an oil crisis.

We didn't need any gas or shit but stopped there anyway to encourage them in their noble undertaking and let them know that if we had, in fact, needed gas, we definitely would have been getting it there, but since we were on foot blah blah blah, so all we could do was encourage them to keep up the good work because we all knew it was for a noble cause, even if they were all just a bunch of sluts and whores.

Unfortunately, as we were going through these pleasantries, suddenly, over in the corner of the station, bat's blood hit Dracula's ashes and he rose again to fight the bored suburban couple who he assumed were looking for trouble, which wasn't really a precise description of exactly what they were looking for, but, apparently, Dracula's ashes weren't counting.

I tried to zone out. What the fuck was I doing here, I thought, when all my goal had ever been was just to be a young vagabond listening to stories about such varied subjects as existentialism, evolution, alienation, dreaming and the media?

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But, as always, someone in the crowd just couldn't take words at face value. Especially words that still reeked of the heuristics that generated them and the knowledge representations that filled their formal parameters with ham-fisted instances.

"'JUST TOYS' as in MERELY toys," he asked, possibly rhetorically, "OR 'JUST TOYS' as in MORALLY RIGHTEOUS toys?"

His tone didn't make clear which one he was gunning for, but most likely either would do.

All eyes were now fixed on this man who'd just ('JUST' as in 'A MOMENT AGO') dared to question heartfelt machine code transduced into near-perfect mammalianisms.

Everybody knew him -- and knew his "story".

As a con man, he'd used his adorable adopted daughter to steal the heart of a corporate lawyer he'd targeted for one of his cons.

The lawyer, at the time, had just tried and failed to prove her husband's innocence after the military accused him of murder.

One day, they (the con man and the lawyer) were sitting together quietly alone in the park.

"Can you hear that?" he said suddenly, then went totally silent, his head cocked.

She heightened her own silence -- the park air was motionless -- devoid of sound.

When she heard it, she looked at him with sudden fear and they both jumped up and started running as fast as they could, holding hands, each pulling the other to go faster.

At about 200 feet away from it they felt the shock wave and heard the huge blast at the spot they'd just been sitting peacefully, and were lifted or jumped into the air and thrown or jumped a short distance and finally slammed face down or landed on the damp grass unharmed, their arms over their heads and clutching each other, which was anatomically impossible, but after that immense ball of light and heat, who expects classical mechanics to still be guiding the course of matter.

Cut to the future: a cutting-edge android in the form of a boy embarks on a journey to discover his/its true nature. He/it is their son. More or less.

The first thing he learns is that the zeitgeist is everywhere. And that when it comes to the zeitgeist, EVERYONE IS TO BLAME.

And simultaneously EVERYONE is its victim, and no individual really even understands the very fucking zeitgeist he's responsible for.

"When we're not in a packed stadium with hundreds of thousands of others, we are all lost," the android moans to his hydrotherapist, who, after fifteen weeks, has been unable to lift him out of his funk over life itself.

But suddenly there is a knock on the hydrotherapist's office door.

Animated by a vicious killer's spirit, a battered doll and its mate are here seeking help from neighbors to regain human form.

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I was on the run again.

Trying to get off this fucking world with only the poor man's escape velocity available to me.

This usually involved the convergence of real objects with certain mystical numbers. A car with a double digit model year and a road with the same digits for a name would do. A '55 T-bird on Highway 55, for example -- or a '66 Corvette on Route 66 -- which was rumored to work best.

Then you got in and just fucking DROVE! -- and, eventually, if you drove far enough long enough, and got lucky enough, suddenly, up ahead, you'd see the off ramp where, when you get off and circle around to its sister on ramp, Rod Serling is standing there hitchhiking, waiting to whisk you into outer space for free, no questions asked. His hitchhiking sign saying: "California (wink wink)".

The car, of course, has to be retrofitted to meet modern specs, so the seats and doors and dash are all touch screens and, when you touch them the right way, all kinds of touchy-feely ex cathedra catch phrases from touchy-feely icons of the past stream across them horizontally -- like tears in the wind -- slow enough to read, if you don't mind your car accidentally glancing off a guardrail every so often, sparks flying.

When I was young, I tried to blow up my high school and was probably only saved from a life of crime and horror by a teacher who believed in me and suggested I try out for the lead in a play.

Unfortunately, on opening night, a horde of giant spiders produced by toxic waste came out to terrorize our small Arizona town and, the next day, Jack Ryan and the CIA director showed up claiming they were trying to stop terrorists who were planning a nuclear attack.

Of course we knew immediately they were lying and just looking for headlines, so we told them we didn't have time for them to look around -- we couldn't interrupt our production to accommodate their whims -- because we were creating something that would make people sad and then give them hard ons -- and without this, the fabric of our society would tear (as in rip, not as in cry).

They could tell that wasn't the real reason, though. They had my dossier. They knew that before I was a teenager I'd endured a string of foster homes after my mother, a talented artist, was convicted of murder.

They knew that, despite being a logical adolescent, I was being framed for strange community pranks, by a bogeyman -- and it took the help of my brother's imaginary friend to defeat him.

"And that is not enough motivation to be planning a nuclear attack," I told them, after I finished retelling them what they already knew. But they said it was enough motivation to be aiding and abetting someone who was fucking someone who was less than 6 degrees removed from someone who WAS planning a nuclear attack. A nuclear attack.

So when I couldn't handle any more of what was passing for logic at the time (like mindless repetition, for example) I got the fuck out of there and headed for New York where I immediately became a restaurateur and fell for a free-spirited woman half my age.

For a change of pace and together with a third friend we went on a dude ranch cattle drive to play cowboy and find out what we were made of.

But just before the drive started I got an urgent text message from a nurse who'd just learned that evil people were trying to harness the special powers possessed by her 6-year old niece, and I had to leave to go try to help them, even though we all knew there was nothing I could do.

I'm sorry, I have to go, I told the 2 other losers who were now stuck doing this lame ass dude ranch cattle drive thing without the person who'd conned them into doing it in the first place.

And then, in a flash, I finally understood what kept the fucking world going at all and why I was on the run to get as far away from it as possible.

Because I KNEW people could not really like or care about the things they claimed and the media claimed and their neighbors claimed and their friends and parents and children and biographers claimed they liked and cared about. So how did this crap ass world keep going on in the absence of anyone who really even gave a flaming flying fuck about any of its manifestations?

The answer, of course, was that people like ME were responsible. People with some chemical imbalance or other, who got all excited about something and, without even trying, wind up conning a few hundred others into jumping in feet first, no looking back, no reservations, no net, no fallback position, no exit strategy.

Meanwhile, people like me, instead of jumping in too, were always somehow suddenly, a split second before everybody else jumped in, being called away to salvage or assuage desperate situations at the far extreme of human suffering, that no feeling thinking human being could refuse to drop absolutely everything for and rush off to help, even though everybody knew he'd most likely just make things worse.

So multiply me by 30 or 60 million and multiply that by the 100 or 200 each of us con into jumping into the pit of pretending to care, and now you see what keeps the entire population of the world thinking they fucking give a rat's ass about anything. Or at least being out there convincing everybody else they really give a rat's ass about something.

But so who wants to live in a world of people pretending to be driven by motivations conned into them by people like ME.

A world where, for people like ME, when we arrive, all out of breath, at the home of the nurse whose 6-year-old niece is having her special powers harnessed by evil people, the first thing she says to us is "Ehhh screw the niece. I just found out my son produced by artificial insemination has the DNA of my fertility doctor."

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I was re-watching it 'cause the first time I saw it I was also scanning headlines on Wired News and listening to Cat Power and so somehow must have missed the transition from where they're all happy and in love to him driving around crying.

I'm also following the game online using Yahoo's pitch-by-pitch summary page2 which updates whenever you reload it (or automatically every 30 or 60 seconds, if you don't mind being manipulated by someone else's idea of time).

Following a game online, it turns out (if you do the math), is much better than going to or watching the game itself, because you get the pure numbers that the mind craves without all the senseless filler of men hitting, throwing, and chasing balls around.

So I can take a tiny fraction of the time and energy this saves3 and use it to continually track, in another window from the one I'm tracking the game in, the many hundreds of UPS shipments I've got coming from Amazon, HomeExplosives.com and DrugParaphernalia.org.

Also, while I'm re-watching the first 15 minutes of eternal sunshine of the spotless mind and downloading Lush and Blonde Redhead mp3s and following the game on Yahoo and tracking all my packages, I am writing this piece about it that you are reading now -- or have maybe already stopped reading, now that you realize it's not gonna be about heavy philosophical issues which affect all people though they don't know it, and instead is gonna be just some long what-I-had-for-breakfast ramble masquerading as a searing critique of multitasking and its profound psychological effects on the young -- as well as a startling behind-the-scenes exposé of all the things humans most fear being and, despite this, ALWAYS already ARE -- for eternity.

Anyway, it turns out, after watching more or less the first 15 minutes of eternal sunshine etc., that there IS NO transition from when they're all happy and they come back from the beach to when he's driving around crying -- except that's where the credits start -- all of which I'd noticed the first time so I didn't really even need to waste my fucking time re-watching it now, now did I.

NO! And therefore it's a damn good thing I was also downloading some Lush and Blonde Redhead mp3s (on a 2-week/50 mp3 free trial basis) and writing this piece, (and also reading mail list postings re: an "intellectual" pop star's recent ostensibly insufficiently-noted death), otherwise my existence for those 15 minutes would have been

more than enough unjustified

to more than have warranted considering suicide.

Notes

1. Plus or Minus CSPAN1 and CSPAN2

2. ESPN.com does it too, but Yahoo is faster and cleaner so fuck ESPN and -- while you're at it -- fuck FSN2 too.

3. Time and energy that would have gone to processing the individual movement of players, muscle by muscle, in the complex chain of instantaneous reflex by each in response to the most pedantic Newtonian behaviors of a small object. For 2 or 3 or 4 fucking hours!

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So the wind was getting really pissed at me.

"Hey, I'm tryin' to blow here -- could you keep it the fuck down!" it said.

But I was crying all my bullshit and infantile human angst into the wind and, in terms of both timbral complexity and sheer amplitude, I was clearly kicking the wind's ethereal ass.

And this wasn't just another instance of self-involved adolescent self-indulgence, either. And -- even if it WAS -- it was ALSO done totally in support of and solidarity with the global insurgency against all of Nature and her profoundly stupid excesses and numerous tone-deaf inconsistencies.

The goal of this insurgency is to continually show up Nature at every turn, so, sooner or later, all of Nature, in unison, gets really pissed off and, out of blind rage, starts making gross intercontinental mistakes.

Then, when Nature has made one too many of these unforgivable public relations errors, finally the fucking masses will catch on and get really pissed at Nature too and join our cause, and eventually, when all the people of the world stand united against her, Nature will be defeated in one horrific final battle in the mud of Antarctica and will have to agree to our terms: to just go the fuck away and leave us the fuck alone and go find some other bad luck solar system to crap all over.

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Eventually, though, culture came to realize that survival was a BIG mistake.

And since, by then, survival had evolved its own simple onboard monoculture, culture found itself doubly pressed to start being about something that was NOT survival at all.

Which it gamely tried to do -- by greenlighting whole new categories like art, music, literature, mathematics, religion, and reality TV.

Yet, out of what culture became, there were always "no hard feelings" expressed towards survival itself and its many sycophants, pimps, whores, losers, and lowlife slimeball hangers-on.

Until today!

Today, Grupo Norepinephrine is proud to announce the release of a brand new wonder drug that finally stands up and says "FUCK NO!!" to the brutish and Satanic forces of survival.

Arsenicia is the first over-the-counter drug to combine one of the world's leading and most effective, out-and-out no-holds-barred toxins with one of the world's most proven, powerful and trusted hallucinogenic agents.

So that by taking Arsenicia ONLY ONCE, you will not only push the unwanted houseguest, survival, finally out your door for good, but you'll feel as cosmic and blissful and right about it as it truly IS -- in the overall cosmic scheme of things.

And, taken as directed, Arsenicia is absolutely safe and has NO known side-effects whatsoever -- except, of course, in the rare event that, due to some unique individual biochemical anomaly or other, Arsenicia fails to work at all. When this happens, unfortunately, there is the biggest, most virulent, most destructive side-effect of all. Another fucking day.

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Therefore, it would be of no small interest to compare, for example, the possibilities of a world where people speak and write and think only the words of the Merriam-Webster Pocket Dictionary (2005 edition), with the world of people whose possible utterances come only from the most recent edition of the OED.

Unfortunately the Research Committee at Corporate State University didn't see it that way and our proposal was denied.

But, rather than give up on work with such profound implication, we renounced our steenking tenure at CSU and took it down the street to GU, Garage University, where simply walking in the door entitles you to all the research fellowships and assistantships your resumé, backpack or iPod can hold.

Originally founded by the distant sons of distant fathers, Garage University was anti-everything and gladly sponsored all research that could be done for under $10 and a bag of Cheetos.

Designed as an open-source think tank, it created new unheard of departments on a daily basis, and its Self & Other-Criticism Department, whose ultimate goal was to tear everything down so everything could be rebuilt from scratch (based on whatever the consensus of Garage University was as to how things should be that day), was already running a fully accredited self-parody university, Garbage University, whose catalogue described its purpose as "to parody the living crap out of Garage University in order to keep it from becoming just another douchebag".

Immediately upon our arrival there, we started the Comparative Lexicographically-Generated Worlds Studies Department and e-mailed the 2-page outline of our goals to the University's Pure and Utter Computation Department for them to code up and run the 2 dictionary world simulations described above.

Since this would take several years, at the end of which time a few graduate students could quickly scan the data and write up accurate summaries, our lifetime of intellectual work was thus pretty much done, and we headed off to the beach for a much deserved lifetime sabbatical.

And the story of this moral is that once upon a time there had been a vast and rapid growth in knowledge and understanding. Eventually, however, this growth slowed and stopped -- yet the vast infrastructure which had grown up to nurture and support it not only didn't stop, but continued getting fatter.

So that now the only body of knowledge that needs to be mastered is the one with the methodology for generating the kinds of cons that allow dead disciplines and their irrelevant objects to maintain funding and prestige at a level commensurate with the analogous ever-inflating worthlessness of money, human life, and civilization.

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"I can't talk to those fuckers anymore," it told the humans. "YOU tell them."

Like the humans of the past, but unlike the humans starting about a week ago, the animals still thought survival was something.

They didn't understand that the end of the world had come to set them free.

But instead of passing the good news on to the animals, humans passed the Human Non-Eating Human Act of 2005.

"We've come a long way since the end of the world," Senator Parkinglot told a joint session of Congress.

Congressman Forever stirred uneasily in his seat. He'd been there, at the end of the world, and he knew Senator Parkinglot hadn't, and therefore didn't know what the fuck he was talking about, as always.

It had been assumed that with the coming of the end of the world and thereby the end of man's, animal's, and plant's obnoxious need to survive, everyone and everything would suddenly be set free to be their own pure true selves. The purest and truest and most absolute and most utter selves EVER.

"Let's see what the fuck humans really ARE, when you take off ALL constraints," Senator Backhoe had proposed back then to a Senate that was bored even with war and destruction. They were actually sick of blowing shit up from the outside, and at a complete loss as to what to do next, when Backhoe offered them the innovative and attractive idea of blowing shit up from the INSIDE. What a concept! They couldn't refuse.

The people went along with this too because they hated the right wing and the left wing and the center wing so much, they'd do anything to get rid of these flaming douchebags, and the end of the world seemed like as good a way as any.

But, needless to say, in the end, the end of the world wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

For one thing, though the world ended with the end of the world, the end of the world didn't.

The end of the world just kept on being the end of the world, and with the world out of the way, that's all there was. Everyday you'd wake up and it would be the end of the world. And whether it was the same end of the world that you went to sleep during, you had no way of knowing.

And, worse, after a week of fully living out all their hopes and dreams and being their purest and truest selves EVER, people were even more restless and anxious than before -- when all their hopes and dreams were still ahead and every hopped-up day was just the endless uphill losing battle to, at best, get back to some increasingly receding zero.

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A free baseball cap and glove went to everyone on life support.

No one was allowed in who wasn't either ON life support himself or a member of the mobile support team for someone who WAS on life support.

The only other people allowed to be NOT on life support in this part of the stadium were the people responsible for the game down on the field: players, umpires, coaches, grounds crew, play-by-play announcers, concessionaires.

That's where I come in. I carry a box of chilly dogs up and down the aisles. My name's Today.

It all started years ago when someone noticed that the only freedom was the freedom to assist in the design of the punishment of others.

A few years later someone figured out that if you wanted any other freedom at all, you'd have to construct a bogus world in which a whole set of bogus freedoms could be defined from scratch.

Then to cement the existence of these freedoms, you'd have to bribe people with the offer of lots of food to come and watch and make a lot of noise over these freedoms being played out in a context.

And that's where I come in. I carry a huge box of Cheetos around the spiral that snakes through the anxious crowd. My name's still Today.

The score at the end of 3 innings of play was Motherfucking Cocksucking Nazi Fascist Pieces of Scumsucking Shit 500,000, Nice Gentle Sweet Intelligent Decent Good Kind People Nothing.

This was as it should be.

If you are not a scumbag, you don't deserve to live.

That is the definition of deserve.

But inside the scumbag is a child.

And inside the non-scumbag is a child.

That's where I come in. I carry a snapshot from inside the soul looking out, seeing nothing.

Multiply by 2.

Now there are 6 Stooges.

Call them Moe, Larry, Curly Joe, Moe-2, Larry-2, and Curly Joe-2.

Arrange them in a circle in this order so it ends up with Curly Joe-2 next to Moe, and each Stooge equidistant from the Stooge on either side of him.

Face each Stooge away from the center of the circle with the plane of his body tangent to the circle at that point -- his point.

Now, after invoking the laws of quantum entanglement for Stooges and while maintaining the integrity of the circle throughout, move each Stooge farther and farther out into the world in the direction he's facing along the infinite extension of the radius emanating from the center of the circle and passing through him.

Stop when each Stooge is on a different continent.

Now rotate the circle a few degrees around any diameter so Moe, Larry, Curly Joe, Moe-2, Larry-2, and Curly Joe-2 are no longer poor slob white males from the lumpen loser class, but are now each from totally different classes, nationalities, races, genders, etc. (name your poison/parameter).

Now, poke Moe in the eyes, drift back to a safe place on Moonbase Alpha, whip out your pocket Hubble, and watch quantum entanglement at the level of human society as it plays out in the globalization of the circle of bitching at each other over SOMEBODY ELSE'S damn fucking bullshit.

This is your brain NOT on drugs.

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Some say it's the new wine.

And if (as some say) wine is the new literature, then mucus must be too.1 If not more so.

But for us -- wine, mucus, literature -- who gives a flaming flying fuck? For us it was just another day on the fucking flying flaming space station.

We were here on behalf of the Placebo Studies Department at Trophy University (a Division of Coffee Table Hospital and Superstores).

The Department had sent us here to monitor, round-the- clock, all the world's inadvertent RFID output which emanates nonstop from a precise class of RNA which Nature had placed, for purely other reasons, in every human brain.

From these signals, precise distributions of basic human physiologic parameters and qualities can be measured and overlaid on a world map which is zoomable down to the level of an individual room in an individual house, or an individual person inside an individual car traveling along an individual roadway, and can be restricted to one or any combination of parameters at a time -- parameters that can include all major character traits and even social attributes like class, wealth and how much of a fucking douchebag you are underneath it all.

The view can also be zoomed out to capture single or multi-parameter changes in the nature and location of large groups defined across any set of properties.

So, for example, if large numbers of highly stressed-out people all appear to be moving to particular geographical locations, the map starts flashing and the software immediately sounds an alarm, opens a trouble ticket, and puts the specified locations on alert. Meanwhile, we technicians go into emergency mode, get all frenetic, throw papers around, bark self-righteous sanctimonies at each other, and make impassioned phone calls to foreign embassies.

Unfortunately, from our constant observations over many months, many individuals, many groups, many locations, and many human traits and states, we have accidentally stumbled on the cause of the central malaise of man.

You see, once they'd moved to wireless phones, people no longer had the anger release of slamming their telephone handset back down into its cradle when they were pissed off. So they had to find other outlets -- and, needless to say, the outlet they found was each other.

We could see this plainly on our maps but there was nothing we could do about it -- no one knew how to describe it in language that would fit on a trouble ticket.

Meanwhile, back on earth, recent advances in Placebo Theory -- based in part on our raw data -- were beginning to cast serious doubt on almost all other academic disciplines and on the quality, validity, and value of their respective subject areas.

Of course that greatly pissed every other department at Trophy U. off and the Placebo Studies Department saw its budget drastically cut -- leading, among other things, to the abandonment of our project, with no money or resources left to provide return flights for the researchers -- US. (So as I write this, we are stranded here for life.)

The NEW Placebo Theory states that disciplines based on subjective judgments of bodies of work along a single dimension (e.g. art, literature, drama, film, philosophy, astrophysics, economics) were all literally pulling it out of their asses and then conspiring to lavishly elevate to the top of culture whoever within their discipline appeared to pull it out of his or her ass the best.

Inherent qualities, the theory went on, perceived in an individual object or set of objects in the context of other isomorphic but subjectively lower-rated objects, was simply a matter of necessity and belief, and thus employed exactly the same neural mechanisms as the placebo effect.

So, according to Placebo Theory, anything could be the new anything else -- it didn't make a fuck of difference.

So mucus could be the new wine all it wanted, and ditto to wine being the new literature and therefore mucus too.

And Self could even be the new Other.

In fact, Self, itself, could be the NEW Self, and, therefore, the soul of an infinitely recursive renewal whose unavoidable iteration pulls each next load of human culture directly out of its own individual ass. For ever and ever. Amen.

Notes

1. "it must be too", that is, for the members of the intersection of the set of those for whom mucus is the new wine, with the set of those for whom wine is the new literature.

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The physiologic parameters of the hostage were nominal, flat, boring.

Survival was on the table, but not HER survival.

Achievement was on the table, but not HER achievement.

Risk was on the table, but not HER risk.

If this were extreme (or absurd in the extreme) and witnessed from a safe comfortable distance, it would have been entertainment.

But it wasn't, so she tried to talk the hostage-taker down. Not that she minded being a hostage, but she'd just rather be doing something else -- like maybe being Assistant Secretary of State for Quantum Electro-Dynamical Affairs, or seeing all the way through this bogus SOMETHING to the truth of absolute NOTHING.

"I want to read to you from my book, 'The Pot-Driven Life'," she said. "Unfortunately we, uhh, you know, got a little hung up doin' the research for it and never quite got around to actually writing, you know, like,... the book."

So, instead, she read to him from "Consciousness Explained", starting at page 1.

"C'mon, c'mon," the hostage taker-said impatiently, "read faster, I wanna see how it ends. I wanna know what consciousness is. Once you know that, who'd even give a fuck anymore. Turning yourself in and never committing another crime the rest of your life would be as easy as drinking cool water from a clear mountain stream on a warm summer's day in the Appalachian foothills."

She didn't tell him that consciousness never really gets explained because nobody knows what the fuck it is and titles of books are really just marketing ploys and books are really just products like toasters, and it doesn't really matter what's inside cause in the end everybody knows fucking nothing and what they say in all those hundreds of pages is here are all the ways we can approach emitting lots and lots of language in the absence of knowing absolutely fucking anything at all -- and so, in lieu of something, here's some fucking "story", and in lieu of something else here's another fucking "story" or logical proof that's impeccable in the beginning and then there's that moment of hand-waving, or that moment when it's suddenly look over here, but the action's going on over there and you miss it.

Around page 325 the hostage-taker started getting all antsy. "Hey, this guy doesn't know what the fuck consciousness is either. Does he? He's just like all those bourgeois losers with their goatees and pianos in their living rooms at the University of California, San Diego, isn't he. But shit, man, the guy hangs with Minsky... least you would expect is...."

Then he turned cold and sullen. He started looking at his gun.

"I need a bigger gun," he told the hostage. "Something automatic that fires lotsa rounds. Maybe some huge water cannon that shoots sulfuric acid instead of water or some flame thrower thing that covers a wide swath."

The hostage said, "Look, I think I can write down a first draft of 'The Pot-Driven Life' in a few hours. Then I can read it to you."

So instead of going to the gun-store, the hostage-taker sat down to work out his ideas on the origin of the cosmos from nothing, way way before the so-called big bang, and the hostage sat down to write 'The Pot-Driven Life'.

And this is what she wrote:

When the hostage finished reading it to him, the hostage-taker burst into tears.

"And we don't even have to leave here to go to the gun shop to stock up," she said. "The latest in all your suicide bomber apparel needs is just a mouse-click away. And Al-Caida ships FedEx Overnight and UPS 2nd-day air. And orders over $1000 ship UPS Ground for free."

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From now on, it's all YES!

YES! to bringing everything down.

YES! to smashing the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy, the working class, the peasantry, the intelligentsia and the professionals, artisans, bureaucrats, and politicians.

YES! to smashing the military and religion and the police and the FBI and the arts and sciences and authority and power.

YES! to strategically-placed nuclear explosions in outer space to reverse the direction of cosmic expansion and send the universe back to where it fucking belongs: absolute fucking zero.

YES! to no more being an ignorant fucking digit in the vast computation known as why there is something instead of nothing.

YES! to towns named Nowhere and Wrongsidedown.

YES! to not knowing where you stand or who you are and not knowing what the fuck you're doing, or why.

YES! to forgetting everything that ever happened.

YES! to no days, no streets, no time, no money.

YES! to irresponsibility.

YES! to spectacles of competition between rotting corpses only.

YES! to entertainment admitting it's just necessity made safe, absurd, and dumb.

And YES! to whatever. And YES! to whatever fucking else. Because there is just so much to say YES! to in this glorious fucking world. And so there's just NO EXCUSE for EVER being all down and bummed and pissed and negative and bitter and thinking, like, how everything's just an immense load of shit that can NEVER be shoveled away.

Because, YES! the load of shit CAN all be shoveled away. YES! one person CAN make a difference. YES! you CAN achieve ANYTHING. YES! you CAN single-handedly bring about the end of civilization, the end of man, the end of the earth, and the end of the cosmos and time.

Because, YES! love DOES exist. And, YES! you CAN wipe out this worthless shit, EVERYTHING, with its power.

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Now maybe you don't care if you hurt Being's feelings, but just remember: the universe has a long memory1 and doesn't like being told to go fuck itself, which is what you are doing whenever you try to lead a purpose-driven life.

How do I know?

Well, I was once a purpose-driven lifer.

When I was leading a purpose-driven life, my purpose was for each day to make things become exponentially more wrong. And thanks to the world, I was routinely successful at this without even trying.

But, fortunately, forever was only temporary.

So after my breakdown, I talked to Warren Buffet. He told me that my role as a role model was to set an example for the young. So the example I tried to set was one where you're always pushing your life to the edge of despair, and then, when you get there, all you can do is just sit back and hope for the 11th hour reprieve of massive success.

If it doesn't come, you can just kill yourself and be out of the way of everyone else who wants to follow the same path, and if it does come, you can strut around being an asshole for a few days, and THEN kill yourself.

Either way, everybody wins, so why not try it!

Especially because the team consisting of me and Warren Buffet wins too.

Because, with everybody else dead, we get all the toys. And all the change in everybody's pocket.

And, fortunately, all the satellites are on autopilot, so there'll still be plenty on cable and pay-per-view.

And with no demand, we'll rarely hit an empty gas station, as long as we don't go in circles.

For entertainment, because the worldwide wireless phone system will still work, except there's no payment, we can call random numbers in search of entertaining voice mail messages.

Then we'll gradually collect the best ones and edit them into a book. Then break into the deserted offices of Random House and publish it ourselves.

Then we'll drive to the nearest airport and fill up one of the planes they've got sitting around and fly it to Stockholm and break into the Nobel Prize depository, and then parachute out of drones into the Nobel Prize Auditorium wearing tuxes acquired earlier by prying open the door to George's Stockholm Tux Shoppe, and each receive the Nobel Prize in Literature for our recently published book of entertaining voice mail messages, as well as the Nobel Prizes for (while we're at it) Physics, Medicine, Peace and whatever else they have lying around (but not economics cause as everybody knows that's not a real Nobel Prize cause the economist dudes had to beg, bribe, bug and threaten the old Nobel Prize Committee dudes to give them a charity Nobel Prize so people would stop noticing how economics is an even more bogus load of utter fucking bullshit than even literature and peace).

Then we'll deliver our gracious Nobel Prize acceptance speech and in the last line we'll tie everything together and sum everything up as to the nature of Reality and we'll still be writing it as we're speaking it, and we unfortunately will have to go on writing it as we also unfortunately have to go on speaking it because, in the end, the line itself is realizing as it is being written that it can only sum everything up if it does it the old-fashioned way: by BEING everything -- one fucking femtosecond at a time, forever.

1. I mean, isn't the universe nothing more than the collection of everything that's ever happened2,3 -- which is also, by chance, the definition of perfect memory.

2. If anything ever really HAPPENS at all.

3. The universe also includes the collection of everything that WILL happen and IS happening, and as such is beyond the scope of this footnote4.

4. Footnote 1, that is.

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Carter said his bot could do it too, but faster and cleaner. And with much more élan.

"Once my tiny bug-sized micro-bot has snuck onto a plane, it won't just hide there in a corner, powered down till landing," he said.

"It'll sneak around the cabin emitting strange noises at random moments, so passengers start to look around and feel uneasy. Then, it'll fly or crawl back to the food service area and chemically alter the drinks, snacks and meals in ways that make the passengers feel all relaxed and happy when they eat or drink them -- especially coming off their recent anxiety over weird cabin sounds.

"In the cockpit, my bot will likewise jerk the pilot's and copilot's emotions and beliefs around without restraint, so, in the end, they start fighting over who really DESERVES to be in charge of this trip and while they're struggling and smashing into flight controls, the plane's weaving all over the sky, going into dives and last minute pullouts and spins and rolls so all the passengers, if they haven't yet had their chemically modified coffee and food, are puking their guts out like in the Vomit Comet, but if, out of the kindness of my bot's soul, they've JUST had their chemically-altered uplifting meal, they'll all be sitting there peaceful and calm, happily grooving on zero-gravity when it's around, but not missing it and not going to exorbitantly stupid lengths to try to get it back, when it's gone."

"You're right," said Tyler. "Your bot will definitely be way cooler than my bot in sneaking around the world for free, so I guess, since we already know who wins, it'd be a total waste of time for us to even bother going through the motions of actually designing and building and programming and testing and debugging bots the size of tiny bugs that draw power from available light and are controlled by cell phone from anywhere else in the world, etc. etc. -- So let's just go back to re-disproving Fermat's lost theorem, and maybe let's organize a conference where people get together to find common ground towards looking for a way to talk about hopefully one day having a con-ver-sa-tion about... uh, you know, whatever."

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"No. That'll be all," Bullshit said to Money.

And when Bullshit talked, Money walked.

Bullshit got on the phone to get MORE money walking.

"Hello. This is Bullshit."

The man who answered cupped the receiver and whispered excitedly to his associates that it was Bullshit calling. He put it on the speakerphone.

"You're not putting this on the fucking speaker phone, are you?" Bullshit snapped.

"NO!" the man snapped back nervously, like Don Notts in the 1955-7 Steve Allen show man in the street interviews.

Now, one by one, the workers at the Manilla call center stepped up to the phone and spoke their piece (truth) to Bullshit on the other end.

They were pitching the screenplays they'd written about normal everyday life in America -- about average Americans going through an average American day performing the average American tasks they performed every day without thinking --

But then, suddenly, there'd be a plot twist.

Like a murder or disappearance or kidnapping, or earthquake or tidal wave, or a member of each of 2 couples fucking each other on the side unbeknownst (give or take) to their partners.

And then, just as suddenly, everything would go all wacky. Characters would start violating average American cultural norms up the wazoo.

People would start dressing funny and talking funning and having funny haircuts. They'd start cutting up their sofas and other furniture and placing the broken pieces meticulously around the room. And acting in ways that could not be traced back to the way anyone acted in any actual American past, and could not be extrapolated forward from even the most extreme behavior of the farthest out edge of the social order today into any possible American future.

But then, when all seemed lost in hopelessness and incomprehensibility, a distinctly American hero comes along and saves everybody -- everybody he doesn't have to kill in wanton acts of extreme violence for the good of the people and their revolution, that is.

Unfortunately, the average everyday American culture in these films is based on slight misinterpretations of slight mistranslations of American pop culture of 30 and 40 years ago, as taught in overseas call center training schools.

In these slightly whacked out cultures, teenagers with names like Marvin and Herb, for example, refer to their friends by means of colloquial expressions such as "kiddo" and "daddyo", for example.

But Bullshit doesn't give a shit, and greenlights every one of them, except for the one where the free market is shown violating itself by having no competition and so, in the final act, has to die right along with the other 2 main characters, Romeo and Juliet.

The greenlighted films will all now be generated by purely digital techniques which pay absolutely no regard to content and give no shit about what comes out. As in the universe itself, algorithms take care of everything1.

And if they don't, and the audience walks out scratching its head saying "what the fuck was THAT?!", there is still, waiting in the wings to save the day, the ultimate marketing truth -- that if you ram enough bugs down enough throats enough times, pretty soon, when it's added all together, the audience realizes what a thankless shit it's been2, and will now sit passively by while the bugs become a feature.3

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

Notes:

1. And natural selection takes care of the rest

2. Moving from denial to acceptance of failure to a life-affirming struggle to make themselves into parodies of a 35-year-ago nonexistent self, produced in error overseas by minimum wage people in the few precious free moments of pee and coffee breaks when they're not otherwise occupied telling hapless "users" to reformat their hard drives even though the problem is really just an unconnected modem or sticky SHIFT key.

3. This process is sometimes referred to as "culture".

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But noooooooooooooo!

Because, even if you just wanna be on the bottom rung -- and even if you wanna be on the lowest part of the bottom rung -- and even if all you wanna do is just simply not give a shit -- even then there's still a royal court of lazy bums, and an entrenched hierarchy of lazy worthlessness, and you have to get in line, and act according to ancient protocol, and look just right and talk just right and say just the right thing at just the right time, and not slip up, and not fuck up, and not look the wrong way at the wrong person. And you have to do this for years and years.

I mean, YOU STILL HAVE TO PAY YOUR FUCKING SO-CALLED DUES just to be even the lowliest piece of shit in this world.

So that when someone asks you what you do and you say I'm just a no good good-for-nothing worthless lazy bum, they can't say, well so's my brother but he's so much lazier than you are and good for much less than nothing -- so you're obviously not much of a lazy good-for-nothing bum, are you? -- and, in fact, you're probably just faking it. Just a poseur. Just a wannabe. Trying to be a no good good-for-nothing worthless lazy bum, when really, down deep inside, you're really some piece of shit high-achieving workaholic aristocrat with 30-page resumes of degrees and awards and ass-licking letters of recommendation from world leaders and leading authorities. So why don't you just go back where you belong, and stop trying to be something you're not, yuh fuckin' loser.

So if it's that much work and that much pain and punishment and mental torture just to be the vapid lazy good-for-nothing lowest piece of shit in this world, then you might as well just go ahead and be the most exalted, the most acclaimed, and the absolute highest piece of shit in this world: The President of the United States in a 10-foot square gold bathtub of shimmering liquid crystal meth, tossing nerf nuclear footballs around with ex-high school quarterback secret service men, and nonstop skin-popping all the angel dust the FDA and DEA can provide and the Social Security "trust" fund can buy.

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Our leading cause of death was ignorance and our leading cause of emotion was music, but everybody blamed both of these on something else -- death on people and disease; emotion on people and religion.

Finally, one day, a charismatic leader arose and exhorted the people to fight the war against stupidity, because "stupidity is too much fun -- we won't willingly give it up without a fight".

First, he asked the museums to come forward and confess their profound hatred of art -- not that it wasn't already obvious to everyone. And not that their campaign against it under the guise of presenting it, hadn't already had a long-lasting effect on human culture and, by implication, the human psyche.

Then he instructed the army to wage relentless war against all militarism. "Kill All Militarist Scumballs," was the slogan written boldly across the armbands that members of all armed services wore. Ditto the craft services -- and it was legal to poison the fast food of anyone suspected of being a militarist scumball.

Finally a plan for orderly evacuation was discussed.

It was to be an orderly evacuation by the mind from its former "human" machinery.

Yet the machinery claimed credit for the mind existing at all, and wasn't willing to give it up without a fight -- the same fight that we are unwilling to give up stupidity without.

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Infinity, after all, is the ultimate refuge of all hand-waving math and science, and without it we'd have to confront the certitude that everything we know is wrong. And everything would have to confront the certitude that, when it comes to knowing us, it is even farther up its own ass than we are.

Our offices are located in the Dream Factory, though all the workers here call it the Cliché factory -- which is no big deal, since dreams are all clichés anyway, and probably vice versa.

The people who work here are unique. They don't seem to be the least bit creeped out by themselves, or about the social construction of reality, or reality's construction of society.

Possibly as a result of this freewheeling attitude, they are able to cause neuro-chemical events in others through simple alterations of frequencies and amplitudes over time in the pre-human modalities.

Our personnel department takes great pride in finding these people, and credits this to its review process which unconditionally rejects all candidates who look even the least bit interested when asked, "How about something, SOMETHING, anything, anything at all, that ISN'T fight, flight, or fucking -- for a fucking change?"

Our CEO, though not the inventor of the wet tee-shirt contest, is considered one of its leading innovators -- having gotten rid of, first, the tee-shirt, then the wet, and, finally, the contest.

Of course, front organizations have been set up to try to thwart our progress by generating catalogues of control which, they claim, once complete, will allow them to twist our pathetic little souls around images, utterances, and raw sequence itself, like mucus round popsicle sticks.

But they're still nowhere in these attempts, and have only recently learned enough to destroy entirely their own prior belief system.

And all they've replaced it with, so far, is the modern realization that people invoking hearts and souls are lying out their fucking ass, while people blaming bodily functions are laying out the gospel truth.

In other words, after spending tens of years and trillions of dollars to stop us, destroy us, wipe us off the face of the earth, all they've gotten for their time and money is the knowledge that everybody else already knows: that "Gotta pee!" is the new "Sincerely,".

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