So the roads were near impassable from all the rolled over still-burning hulks, and the only reasonable way for his 12-man focus group to travel was in fleets of '76 Toyota sedans, 4 men to a sedan and he and random hitchhikers in the fourth, lead Toyota.

Originally they'd planned to roam the land by highway, healing the sick and bringing the dead back to life using the widely accepted statistical techniques of modern polling and the theory of how a large enough focus group, given the right questions, could solve any problem, especially those involving the behavior of large numbers of irrational, lawless particles which even mathematics and physics couldn't touch -- such as how many jellybeans are in a jar, or cancer.

When that didn't work, the focus group focus grouped up an algorithm that could distinguish the point where the sounds emanating from some nearby machine ended and the sounds emanating from inside your own damn head began.

At first, they embodied this algorithm in a mechanical device the size of a room. Then they made the device progressively smaller. Eventually they got the size down to where it disappeared, and the price down to where it was free, so everyone could own one or a million.

Then they mysteriously all simultaneously died of a rare blood disease while receiving the World International Prize in Copenhagen for having created a brave new world in which people no longer had to worry about whether that fucking sound was coming from some fucking machine outside themselves, or some fucking machine in their own fucking head.

Despite their death, their success quickly became the model for all business of the future, and every new company began with the goal of seeking to come up with something analogous to what they'd come up with, in a way analogous to the way in which they'd come up with it.

And so their brave new world quickly became like all the scared old worlds before, the sum of all failures at this -- a world based on ONE person having done ONE interesting thing ONCE, followed by hundreds of millions of years of history which exist SOLELY to cash in on everybody's hopes that somebody can do it again. But nobody ever does.

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We needed to start with something easy, something manageable, to get our feet wet at becoming self-modifying code, to ease into being the first species to truly say to evolution, "outta the way, mutha, I'll be takin' her in from here..."

So there were just 2 propositions on the ballot.

Prop 1 called for the elimination of the gene for being an utter fucking asshole when you're drunk.

Polls and anecdotes from all classes, races and nationalities had made it abundantly clear that nearly EVERYBODY really wished that everybody ELSE could just stop being such utter fucking assholes when they got utter fucking shit-faced.

This was also a big favorite because everyone knew that this modification would have absolutely zero impact on themselves, what with they're not being anywhere near the kind of major league hall-of-fame-class assholes all their friends were by drink 3.

Proposition 2 eliminated a similar gene with a similar effect, but this alternate gene for being an asshole didn't really care if you were drunk at the time or not.

OK, but what if the propositions pass unanimously, as everyone knows they will, and then suddenly, a week or a month or a year or two down the road, everybody's sitting around drunk and so bored out of their minds that eventually somebody wistfully looks up at the sky and says, "gee, wouldn't it be nice if there was just some real major asshole here right now so that we could all have something to get all self-righteous about and not have to be so fucking bored?"

And what if this sentiment is being expressed across the entire spectrum of drunken situations, and sober ones too, so that, soon, everyone takes to the streets clamoring "we want our utter fucking drunken assholes back" -- because they find, as Rodney King warned, that they can't really get along without them.

Well, fortunately the foundling fathers of our genome self-modification electoral process took all that into consideration -- and provided us with special recall elections.

But not only that, because that wouldn't be enough. The Genome Self-Modification Voting Act of 2005 provided that "all genes voted out of the genome by the electorate shall be maintained and bundled together and saved on their own private island. And, to keep the genes amused until needed, if needed, they will be allowed to recombine and replicate uninhibited, in artificial environmental conditions of ultimately their own making."

Thus these egregious discarded genes will still always be available to us. So when our population decides they want their poor little drunken asshole gene back or their sex-crazed creep-ass Sarah Jessica Parker gene back, our doctor can just call up the hellhole museum of genomic horrors where our former vile and voted down genes are stored, and tell the curator of the Earth to send us back a copy.

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The screenplay contained in the attachment to this email is about the salvation of the human race and was written with the express purpose of emotionally manipulating the human race into taking the kinds of actions that will save it from destruction.

If you do not like this topic, I have another screenplay that is about the extermination of the human race, and which was written with the diametric opposite express purpose as the screenplay you now have, so please contact me and I will send you this one in place of that one.

If, however, you do not like either topic, I have another screenplay that's about, like, this guy who's you know like really dumb an shit, and he's got this friend who's also like totally dumb an shit but not as totally dumb as the first guy, but the first guy is better at scoring chicks.

However, despite being all dumb an shit, these guys are also, like, lovable madcaps and everybody loves them until one day the first guy, Heinrich von Kleist, eats a burrito that he buys at a street fair, and gets like all woozy from it and passes out.

When he comes to, he suddenly understands quantum physics at a fundamental level and, as a result, he's able to explain it clearly and concisely to even the most simple-minded layman, and the complex, anti-intuitive, uncertain mystery of quantum physics, that was not understood by even the most advanced theoretical physicists of the day, is suddenly solved -- and by a solution so simple that even an actor, politician, or infant could understand it.

Of course Kleist immediately becomes world famous and even way way more beloved than before -- but about a minute later, suddenly, everybody turns on him and hates his guts and wants to see him dead.

Hiding out in the basement of his last remaining friend, he asks the friend's 14-year-old daughter why everybody suddenly hates his guts and wants him dead.

"All these millions of people who hate your guts," she tells him, "used to have jobs -- but now they're unemployed -- and it's all your fault."

When Kleist doesn't understand why his clearing up of quantum physics has caused everybody to lose their jobs, she explains to him how all work is utterly bogus and has no real reason for existing in any rational world, but that the uncertainty and probabilisticality introduced into the understanding of reality by quantum physics had opened up huge conceptual loopholes where useless senseless boring alienating ugly stupid busy-work became eminently justifiable. But now that he, Kleist, has come along and eliminated all the bullshit of quantum physics, there are no more bogus loopholes in reality where people can create the kinds of lies which were the rationales for the existence of most peoples' worthless, meaningless "jobs".

The film ends there, on a freeze-frame of Heinrich von Kleist looking into the camera distraught and opining how maybe he never should have eaten that fucking burrito.

OK, but there's an alternate, optional, "happy" ending which I include in an appendix to the screenplay. Here it is:

Heinrich von Kleist's alarm rings and he wakes up and he's in his bed and... it was all just a dream!!

But then...

He gets out of bed and goes over to his desk and takes out his notebook which is filled with pages and pages of complex quantum physics type equations which, on the final page all sum up to one simple equation "I=E". He closes the notebook and looks at the cover which is titled: A Simple Single-Parameter Explanation of Phenomena Normally Associated With Quantum Physics.

Then he glances at the cover letter he has written to all living Nobel Prize winners in Physics explaining his simple new theory. The camera zooms in and the film, in this alternate ending version, ends on a freeze-frame of the nearly unreadable, incomprehensible letter.

With this alternate ending, the audience will most likely stand up and cheer, whereas, with the original ending, they will most likely sit there stunned through the closing credits (over e.g. "Cry in the Wind" (Xymox)), with their mouths open, in utter incomprehension. Then, no matter where they live, they'll all walk home in utter silence in the rain and go immediately to bed without drying off, and cry themselves to death in their dreams.

Pricing and stipulations:

You can have either the salvation of the human race screenplay or the extermination of the human race screenplay for $3.5 million each, with the only stipulation being that I have to have absolute veto over casting of the 4 lead roles in either picture (e.g. NO Gyllenhaals) and 100% control over opening (e.g. Velocity Girl or Lush) and closing (Xymox or Cure) credits music.

Also, in any scene where a car radio is turned on, what comes out of it has to be "What's Your Take on Cassavetes?" (Le Tigre).

The third screenplay goes for $100, and the only stipulation is that the production has to come up with (and prove) the actual "fundamental understanding" of quantum physics alluded to in the treatment above, and left blank in several stretches of dialogue in the original screenplay itself.

If all 3 screenplays are purchased together, the fee is waived and the whole package is free -- provided all 3 films are produced and released simultaneously*.

*Simultaneous release: The producers must place a $10 million security deposit in escrow, to be returned upon release of the third film, or to be forfeited to me, upon failure to release the third film within 1 month of the release of the second film or upon failure to release the second film within 1 month of the release of the first film or failure to release the first film within one year of the date of this email.

Thanks for your consideration.

-- hc

PS: if you chose to pass on all this, could you please forward this email to the Coen Brothers and ask them to forward it to the Maysles brothers if they (the Coen brothers) choose to pass, and to ask them (the Maysles brothers) to, in turn forward it to the Wachowski Brothers if they (the Maysles brothers) choose to pass -- and so on recursively through the Chambers Brothers, the Righteous Brothers, the Allman Brothers, the Doobie Brothers, the Brooks Brothers, the Lehmann Brothers, the Brothers Grimm and the Beachboys.

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Fortunately his audience was billed as belonging to the human race, so he figured they could write his speech to them for him on the spot, in real time, as he spoke it, and thus save EVERYBODY more than half the bullshit of being -- at least for a few hours.

He thought he'd start off with a joke -- as he'd learned to do in transhuman modem brainstorm implant school.

So he asked the audience, "What's a good joke that ends with the world historical punch line: "Hey, losers! The show's fucking OVER! Get It?"

But either they couldn't come up with anything better than 2 guys walk into the Stanford Linear Accelerator, or they didn't like the punch line enough to even try, and so just either stuck their fingers in their ears and went la la la la la, or clung even tighter to the bottle of personal liquid brain detergent hanging on a chain around their neck.

Then, a funny thing happens. Slowly the species in the audience begins to realize that not only are they the ONLY species capable of even CONTEMPLATING their own extinction, but they are also the only species capable of actually fucking pulling it off.

They also realize that they are, parenthetically, the only species capable of putting their own self-extermination in the punch line of a joke. And the only species who NEEDS TO.

But, unforunately, they must have misunderstood their own understanding because they immediately break out rioting and rush the stage -- but fortunately the speaker, Wyatt Arp, was expecting something like this and has a waiting car that he jumps into just before they get to him and he tear-asses off into the night.

But the rioting audience members all have their own cars waiting in the parking lot warmed up and ready to go, and they all jump into them and tear-ass after him and so he continues his unprepared speech to them through the loudspeaker on top of his car as the chase speeds along at hundreds of miles per hour along deserted freeways heading west.

He's still trying to get them to write his speech for him as he speaks it, but this is tougher to do and stay on the road doing 250 at the same time, so he tries to get them to pull off the highway and head into the dense woods without decreasing speed so that truth may be finally determined by whoever, when it's all over, doesn't have to be scraped off a tree.

But the people in the pursuing vehicles, though they hear every word perfectly and in fact have on-board motion-speech translators so they couldn't miss a word even if they wanted to, still don't even believe the words he's NOT saying -- let alone the words he IS saying -- so they try to drive his car off the road so it'll spin sideways over and over down a cliff and land in the ocean and explode halfway out to Santa Catalina, 26 miles away.

Which it does, except for the explode part, so now he's heading out to Santa Catalina and the pursuing cars have no choice but to smash into each other so they all too roll sideways down the cliff into the ocean in pursuit.

Fortunately they are all driving those new car-boats from Dean Kamen which are designed to be rolled down a hill many times and always land on their tires, even in the ocean.

So they're all doing about 200 knots or whatever, now, and Wyatt Arp's calling out to his pursuers who want to kill him so as not to have to hear any more about how it's fucking game over, lights out, end of story time for their fucking species.

But they're running out of ocean, approaching Catalina, and so maybe all anything is ever really about is who gets to NAME the end vs. who gets to LIVE it.

Buy by then the boats have all slammed into the island and the passengers dash out and fortunately there are hot air balloons already fired up and waiting and everybody jumps in and they lift off and Arp keeps lecturing the pursuers via the hot air balloons' Voice Over IP internet phones high in the air over Catalina, but a strong wind blows up and blows the balloons out to sea far from any land, but still Wyatt Arp, the famous sculptor-sheriff turned public speaker, is pitching ever weirder, ever more off-the-wall ideas at his pursuers in their low-performance chase balloons -- ideas of how the end should be, and the pursuing former audience members still haven't even bought into the idea that the end is now just weeks away.

So the pilot in Arp's balloon gets on the VOIP box and now he and the rest of the crew start trying to outdo each other and stab each other in the back to get to the top of telling those losers in the chase balloons that it's all fucking over, O-V-E-R.

But without realizing it, while they've been in the air, events on the ground have transpired such that, now, whatever game they're playing up here in the air, has officially been declared the only game in town.

Of course when people hear this they slap their knees and say damn why the fuck didn't I think of that -- it's so fucking obvious -- and to prove it they go out and shoot down the balloon of the people who actually DID think of it, and get into their own hot air balloons and replace it.

So Wyatt Arp's hot air balloon is shot down while the balloons of his pursuers are not and are allowed instead to drift off the planet into outer space because while doing gedanken experiments aboard the hot air balloon to kill time, they accidentally happened to notice that the laws of physics did not hold in their frame of reference or in any frame of refrerance other than the frame of reference of whoever was lying about it when he made up the law in the first place.

Fortunately Arp's balloon crash lands near an empty mine where Arp and crew are chased down endless shafts in cattle cars for the secrets of how they did it.

When they finally find a path out just before suffocating, they're in the middle of the most bitter and brutal fight over who wants the human end to be more dignified, graceful, honorable and celebratory.

But meanwhile the chase balloons have bounced off Venus and are heading back to exactly where they started according to the theorem of the Pythagoras of Australia.

So Wyatt Arp and his hot air balloon crew head back into another fortunately nearby open mine shaft where they round a curve into the dark, littered with the bodies of dead canaries.

Really, they just wanna party down at this point and overturn cars and light buildings on fire and, since they've already more than taken off all their clothes and fucked eveything not only in sight but in imagination and in the past and future that may never have even existed and certainly won't again, they start peeling off their flesh in celebration or whatever, in utter abject humanness at the apex of something it doesn't have a name for and since it can't name it -- whoops! -- it doesn't exist and, suddenly, upon this realization, the party crashes... like an operating system.

Epilogue: Suddenly, in the last femtoseconds, their sudden realization made everybody become so totally hip that they all wound up on the cover of TIME so it wasn't a waste after all, except, now that they were on the cover of TIME, they weren't hip anymore, but it didn't matter cause the species was over, which, clearly, is the only good time to be on the cover of TIME because, of course, you don't have to worry about how unhip it's gonna make you be the very next week after the week you were on the cover of TIME, anymore.

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Top-ranking unpartisans had assured him then that -- thanks to petaflop clock speeds -- a new quality of computation now on the drawing board would finally sever the last few strings of the last few stragglers' juvenile commitment to logic.

But they didn't say anything about the businessman hippocampus.

Their expert systems wore human enhancement like lift tickets at Cabo, mathematics-speak at dinner, jock camaraderie in nerdland.

They had come back from the edge, where the human race had been, and their nano wires were still showing and the antennae among them dragged along the ground, leaving a nano trail in the dust. The dust from whose random particles had emerged a layer.

They had brought back videos from select days of edge history that witnessed the taking down of thousand year old gold-encrusted symbols of power and authority but then what?

Their molecular nanobot interface, it turns out, was spitting out wonks from extreme modem with only one response to adversity: "If you don't watch out, we will reverse-engineer you back to NOT the fucking STONE AGE, but back to the fucking CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION!"

These entrepreneurs of cross-human melodrama had convened researchers of the subhuman soap opera for the purpose of brainstorming what will happen when their report is released.

Their team surmised that criticism of the report would average out to someone saying, about it: "You know, this experiment must have been devised by either just some lush sitting around listening to the Stones, or just some, you know, stoner, sitting around listening to Lush."

But they were wrong.

Instead, a war broke out among the Utopians over it. Pessimistic utopians, who fervently believed in utopia, but also realized it was just too fucking, you know, UTOPIAN to ever actually HAPPEN, had tried to shut down all the wide-eyed optimistic utopians who actually BELIEVED utopia was actually possible, and so were always falling for the lamest con games in town and giving utopianism a bad name.

Meanwhile, pessimistic dystopians had begun a whisper campaign to wipe out all the optimistic dystopians who were suddenly springing up believing that, while everything really WAS utterly stupid and lame to the core, that, still, it wasn't necessarily ALL that bad and, in fact, if you taped it and edited it down to the absolutely most insipid moments and ran it Tuesday night at 10 on MTV, then, hey, what's there to be so all fucking bummed out about?

But the pessimistic dystopians didn't see it that way and knew they had to wipe out those damn optimistic dystopians and they knew the only way to do this was to join forces with the optimistic utopians, who like themselves (the pessimistic dystopians) were at least standing up for their fundamental core beliefs against a buncha loser wishy-washy infidels.

At the press conference announcing their alliance they issued the following statement:

...the cutting edge federal agency will happen when the hippocampus is tweaked and the information decades will happen very fast thanks to nanobots with life and penis extension, whichever comes first.

Their brain modem bacteria applied to the cognitive science of coming spit out interfaces to what will happen and when.

These interfaces, applied to the initial report on expert business showed that federal entrepreneurs begin to talk when policy wonks convene over by the campus hippo man.

Or, as Mark Trifecta's father wrote, "Man is the only animal that can conceive of and execute its own extinction -- or NEEDS TO!"

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A spokesman for The Right to Not Lie (to Yourself) Movement told reporters: We are NOT here today to gloat and say 'we told you so!'

Then the rest of the press conference was canceled due to inclement weather or something.

Don Perignon de la Mancha, the president of the Right to a Rationale for Life Movement, didn't get where he was by being the kinda guy who wouldn't immediately get on the phone when the chips were down, so he immediately got on the phone.

"The chips are down," he told the directors of the movement. "Man is the only species that cons itself into going on, or needs to -- and our last best con has just been evaporated by the fascism of fact."

"Why'd you fucking wake me at 6 AM," Director #1 said when de la Mancha's call came through. "What was the con we used before this one? Just go the fuck back to that one and don't bother me. Our people are heroes and patriots -- you know, they all heroically and patriotically take their ADD meds everyday -- so they're totally fixated on the moment and won't even notice when they suddenly start reliving the stupidity of their ancient ignorant past all over again. For the good of man."

"They'll call it deja vu," de la Mancha laughed.

"Are we done!" said director #1.

"No," de la Mancha answered politely. "According to rule 30 I have to inform you that it's now your official duty to call director #2 and director #3 and tell director #2 to call director #4 and director #5 and tell director #3 to call directors #6 and #7, and tell them (the directors YOU call) to tell them (the directors THEY call) what you just told them (the directors YOU called) except the numbers of the 2 directors they tell each to call should be 2 times their own (the director you called's) number, and 2 times their (the director you called's) own number plus 1."

By the time word reached Director #1024, he was already too far down the path of inventing a whole new kind of terrorism to turn back and join the search for a whole new kind of con, just to save man.

Anyway, he thought, his new kind of terror might save man a lot faster than a new kind of con would save man.

The old kind of terror, he told reporters, was generally aimed at simple symbolic targets: usually buildings or people.

"It is time for a more inventive, a more complex and a more nuanced terrorism," he went on. "One whose demands and ethos can't be symbolized by simple objects but can only be embodied in complex propositions.

"Thus," he explained, "a concrete act of terror is constructed from the ground up -- in terms of subjects and predicates, not ideologies and objectives.

"The subject, the perpetrators, could, for example, be children. The predicate, the act, is, say, non-suicidal, doesn't kill or harm directly, but still is able to shut down major cities for days, causing profound economic dislocation.

"So in this act of terror, designed from the bottom up in terms of subjects and predicates, no crime is committed, yet tens of millions of people are adversely affected, and the perpetrator is a child no one can find. And the 6.4 billion people not directly affected soon learn about the whole affair -- and, without a moment of thought, know they're next."

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Earlier, that same person, who didn't have to be anything except what it was at that moment, had tried talking itself into willingly participating in the person it would have to be later (the person you had to be to walk out the door) when it walked out the door.

"What/how/why should/could that person be?" it had thought, albeit not explicitly. And what, if any, of the bits of what it actually was, should/could go along for the ride with it/you when it/you walked out the door?

Because, see, there aren't any sequences that haven't already been played out multiple times and found wanting in every fucking one of them. So why bother being one more fucking person running one more fucking instance of the same fucking sequence ONE MORE TIME?

Of course, according to urban myth (remember THEM?), the ONLY real alternative to that is just to be nothing but utter fucking noise. And why waste your time doing what the wind and ocean have already done to death.

Fortunately, The Institute for Suburban Fact, has been submitting urban myth to rigorous testing, in laboratories set up far from the distortion, duplicity, and decay of the city.

So, to find out how we'd better live before it's just too fucking late, we sent a camera crew to the institute to film this report, but unfortunately the researchers there smashed all our equipment in the process of looking for the bomb they thought we'd come to blow up their leader with under the guise of "journalism".

This report is therefore taken from handwritten notes, as the video footage that would normally accompany it does not exist. We spoke with Dr. "Hands-On" Christian Anderrs.

ARTC: So, like, how come everything sucks, and always has and always will?

[ Unfortunately, Dr. Anderrs had just resigned from the institute and wanted to tell everybody why.]

ANDERRS: I am resigning from the institute today in order to spend LESS time with my fucking family. Without this fucking job I can afford to travel and get the fuck far far away from THEM, the buncha losers.

ARTC: Uhh, so does your decision you think have anything to do with WHY everything must suck -- I mean on a profound philosophical level, not on some petty soap opera level about you and what you do with your, you know, dick.

ANDERRS: Look, I'm on the verge of becoming one of those guys who calls up 2AM-radio-call-in shows and says "hey, I'm on the verge of doing something that, if it works, all mankind will be sitting pretty -- but, at the same time, many people will want to kill me for it. Therefore, I must maintain my anonymity and I can't really tell you what I'm about to do or who I am or what I'm talking about, otherwise I'd be putting you in danger of being tortured to death by those who'll stop at nothing to track me down. Therefore, in what follows, I will be necessarily vague, albeit highly (as compensation) emotional."

ARTC: OK. We can relate to that. Here at ARTC we try to respect anyone who's on the verge of anything, regardless of what it is. So let me put the question this way:

Mathematically and ideally speaking, there is a space of all possible slogans for all possible products or ideas.

So why not set the population of the world, in its role as massively parallel computer, to discover as many legal slogans in this space as it can, and then turn these slogans back on the 6.5 billion person world population, in its role as focus group, and have it decide which slogan is the most likely to con the consumer into buying, and then turn this slogan back again on the population of the world, in its role as consumer, so it can freely buy up all the product, which it has not only just created and selected the optimal slogan for, but also, thanks to globalization, has had a hand in producing some tiny fraction of, and without this contribution there would have been no product or slogan or desire in the first place?

And, if this happened, wouldn't it just be capitalist-communism perfected -- i.e. the people using themselves as a blunt software instrument to figure out how best to sell themselves (in their role as a seething bolus of desire) on the product the production of which gives them all their livelihood (in their role as respectable standup human being supporting a family, etc.)?

ANDERRS: Yes. It would.

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So the great man is thrown into the heart of the playing out of his thought in time, and no one can see him and he sits in a corner of the room or he paces around in the narrow space at the back between the last row of cheap folding chairs and the back wall, behind which you can already hear the sounds of hard core ex-con bikers tear-assing by on their choppers and the screams of whores being tortured to death by off duty patrolmen who haven't been paid in years because their captain is so fucking corrupt yet he has them all too scared shitless to even ask for their damn pay cause apparently his reputation is that he kills, with the legal impunity of the law, anyone who dares cross him or complain.

Anyway, this great man from history, be it Marx or Christ or Freud or Newton or Olivia Newton-John, has to sit there now and actually watch his words -- which had initially been designed to live forever and guide all mankind for all time because they were so profound and perfect and right and true -- he has to sit there and watch these once great words -- earned and teased out through long years of suffering and tortuous thought -- he has to watch them thoroughly transformed, as though through several rounds of a game of "Telephone," except it's the modern version of the game and now it's called Cell Phone, and instead of just ideas getting garbled and being misunderstood, now whole chunks have been completely dropped out and either replaced by their polar opposite, or by nothing at all, leaving an immense gap in logic that no one seems to acknowledge or mind.

So the great man is hunched over in the back of the room, in the corner, his furrowed forehead face down swiveling back and forth in the palm of his sweaty hands, muttering, "No! No! No!"

Finally he gets up and presses his materializer button that was provided to him just before he'd left the space dome on his way to earth to salvage his meaning.

"Fuck all old school revolution!" he says first, once he can be seen and heard by the room full of people. "In old school revolution -- the physical kind -- scumbags just replace scumbags after a few days of some high-octane partying down."

"Yeah, party down, dude!" some of his tenth generation followers scream out.

"No, no, no," he says, responding not to that comment, but to one that no one has heard but himself, "True revolution takes place deep in the world and without violence or force -- by undermining cognition itself out from under the scumbags who made the world the way it is.

"By undermining all these world scumbags' words and symbols and objects and products and emotions and personalities and places and spaces and activities and motivations and rewards and punishments and causal relations and sciences and arts and musics and dramas and sports and human relations and desires and goals and measurements.

"And then just letting new dimensions of being grow from the ashes..."

There's a pause as he looks around at the faces, everyone eager to get going on whatever -- eager to start with a cell and a rule and see where it goes, and repeat this till someone finds a rule that solves the world.

"But what if," he continues as blank petitions begin circulating like blank checks, "the new dimensions of being that grow out of the ashes of the old dimensions of being are just the same old piece of shit dimensions of being that we have today -- all over again?

"And then what if this whole effort that we begin here today -- what if it becomes just one more line in the proof that there is a predisposition in the ultimate laws of self-organization, evolution, and Cambrian explosions, and that this predisposition is that, regardless of your frame of reference and regardless of its state of motion, everything MUST suck?"

"Then why have even fucking bothered?" someone at the far other side of the room thinks.

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That they compute as system errors is simply reality's way of trying to cover up their true nature -- but the only one fooled by this is reality herself.

So if reality isn't in charge, then who is?

To find out, we sent a team to attend Proletarian Story Day.

Proletarian Story Day is the day the proletarians get to tell their story to the assembled aristocrats, priests, warriors, capitalists, bourgeoisie, untouchables, barbarians and aliens.

Unlike the other days of the week, like Warrior Story Day or Capitalist Story Day, for example, Proletarian Story Day is the day reality likes best.

On all the other days, the classes whose day it ISN'T get apprised of all the sorrows and struggles and pride and horror and achievements and failures and goods and evils and hypocrisies and honesties and lamenesses and slimeballeries and blah blah blah of the class whose day it IS. In this way individuals could come to understand how we are all just stuck with a common humanity and that all we each wanna do is just be left alone to eat, sleep, rape each other, and tongue our own genitalia, so why can't we all just get along?

But on Proletarian Story Day, unlike the other days, sometimes the question is broached: will we have to keep seeking new places to pillage and plunder and sleep in, with new people to rape and be raped by and new things to eat, and to get there will we have to keep devising ever newer transportation modes to travel through ever more esoteric transportation modalities to arrive at ever more nonexistent destinations with not only NOT the same old objects of desire, but also WITH whole new categories of desire to replace the lame boring passé desires of ancient man we are currently stuck with and which drove us here to this unfortunate place in the first place?

Reality likes this day because it knows that after a hundred years of them (if Marvin Minsky and Billy Bob Thornton are to be believed), entirely new symbols will have been overlaid on and set to activate the same old chemistries.

At first, just the activating symbols will be replaced -- most likely by means of simple transparent overlays -- any piece of household plastic wrap will do.

But even this will get old fast, so eventually we will need to be able to replace the base chemistry itself so desire no longer even "feels" the same. This will most likely need to be done over several generations, one functional unit of desire at a time.

The story ends, of course, when the stability of eternal chaos has been reached and nobody has any time for self-consciousness anymore and life is happening so fast that everything has to be purely reflexive and processed almost exclusively at the level of the autonomic nervous system, and people are so tightly interconnected that any perturbation anywhere in the network perturbs them too and, because this is a constant, they always have to be ready -- to the point where there's no time left to do or be anything BUT ready.

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Just when structure has everything down all neat and cool, substance comes along, instantiates, and proceeds to fuck everything all up.

We thought we could use science, or whoever, to undo, if not reverse, this state of affairs.

The initial approach was to reconstruct the decomposed body by moving backwards in time.

First we found all the maggots that ate its flesh and reverse-engineered their cells to get back to the chemicals that came from the decomposing body. Then we brought all those chemicals together and reverse-engineered the DNA that produced them in those proportions. And once we had the DNA, it was just a matter of running it forward to produce its organism's original cells and organs. And then.... Well, you know the rest.

So when that didn't work we thought maybe ideology could help because ideology is based on the twin lies of what people aren't and what they can never hope to be.

Apparently, under ideology, representatives go out and convince people they are so far far much less than they actually are -- BUT, whaddya know, once they start living out our cool new ideology, they will suddenly acquire the potential to be so far far much better than they realistically could have ever dreamed of being -- in their dreams!

But where ideology is all symmetry, like physics, real life is all edges, like chemistry -- and whether or not this state of affairs has been unnaturally deselected for, is none of our fucking business.

Our final option, therefore, was the much maligned approach known as cognition management -- and so we headed for the home of the world renown Centers for Cognition Management Control, where, apparently, they don't believe one fucking scientific experiment from Galileo on down.

"Everyone knows experimental results are ALWAYS fudged," our guide told us. "And there's always at least a femtosecond in every mathematical proof where the mind has to go all wacky and kinda look the other way and then forget about it the next morning and just continue on as though the theorem had actually been proved last night when everybody was shit faced, and can now be believed and blindly built upon without further ado, no questions asked."

"Despite that," he went on, "here at the Center, we live and breathe absolute and complete honesty. Not for its own sake. Not for the morality of it. Not because it's right. Not because it's the best or ONLY policy. But, because honesty is just the most obscene joke you can make -- in a crapass world where absolutely everything else is an utter fucking lie."

Next he took us to World Command Central, where obscene jokes and utter fucking lies were fed into vast arrays of parallel multi-processor networked super computers churning their asses off trying to come up with the New World Motto which, if it won't save everybody as was envisioned by our founders in their glory days, then it will at least shut everybody the fuck up for a while.

In order to "work", however, the New World Motto will need to be tattooed on everybody's ass, graffitied on all walls and subway cars, emblazoned across everybody's tee and sweat shirts, and sunburned into everybody's bald scalps, and people speaking to each other will have to use it as their opening and closing greeting, and instead of love or yours, they will need to end all their letters, post cards, telegrams and emails with it.

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But it was only a short fall and he landed feet first and when he looked around he spotted the million dollar stash of loot recently left there by probably whoever was too lame to put the manhole cover back on.

He reached over to snag it and start divvying it up amongst his current and former selves but it was coated with battery acid to burn off the hands of anyone who tried to rip it off, but fortunately he was wearing big thick gloves, but unfortunately there was a hole in one of the fingers, but fortunately he did not use that finger to lift the battery-acid-coated briefcase with the million dollars inside and so he climbed out of the sewer with it.

But when he got back to street level the police were standing there waiting and immediately moved to cuff him, but a sniper from a nearby building nailed the cop in the shoulder, and the man with the stash of loot in the acid covered briefcase took off down an alley that lead to the beach, but when he got there he was attacked by a pack of ravenous dogs running free. But the dogs' owner came along before they had bitten too deeply into his leg and clapped a few times and they ran off down the beach, playing some social dog game with the attack and recession of the water's edge.

But the dogs' owner, once the dogs were far away, pulled a gun and told the man with the briefcase to hand it over. The man handed it over but the man with the gun shot him anyway and he fell over. But underneath his shirt he was wearing a bulletproof vest so when the guy who'd shot him turned to walk away, he jumped him from behind and grabbed his gun and shot him and took the briefcase back. The dogs, hearing the gunshot, came running back at the man with the briefcase, their tongues hanging out, hyper-energized by the ocean air, hot for a quick legal kill.

The man ran up the nearby cliff but the dogs were only inches away so he dove through the picture window of a small cottage right near the edge of the top of the cliff and the dogs were unwilling to leap through the broken glass. There appeared to be no one home, but a sick child came down in a bathrobe from upstairs and started screaming and crying at the presence of the now bloody stranger who also stank of sewage and had a pack of wild dogs howling at him from outside the broken window and had left a dead man on the beach.

The man went to the refrigerator to get some raw meat to throw out to the dogs through the shards of glass but when he got back the kid had called 911 and the police were on the way so he threw the meat to the dogs and headed out the back and ran up to the street and hailed a cab and got in and started heading back downtown, but an oncoming car jumped the divider strip and smashed head-on into his cab instantly killing the driver, but he was able to get away with the briefcase and run up the street a bit and get on a bus. A few stops down, the suicide bomber on the bus blew himself up and the guy with the briefcase was blown out the back and one of his arms had come off but it wasn't the one holding onto the briefcase.

He hobbled down the street and went into a cafe as the screaming and the police sirens started up outside and the patrons of the cafe ran to the doors and windows and out into the streets, so he didn't really have to order anything, he just ate whatever was lying around on tables, and put some quarters into the juke box and listened to a few Sunny Day Real Estate tunes before the patrons started filtering back in to find their Danish's eaten their coffee drunk and the man with the briefcase on his way out.

He walked a couple of blocks over to an apartment where an old girlfriend lived. He walked in and she was fucking someone who tried to kill him but eventually they talked it out and the guy left but the girl treated him like shit and wouldn't let him hide out there especially since he was covered in blood and sewage and pock marked by shrapnel and had just a bloody stump where the right arm should have been and even though he had a briefcase filled with a million dollars, don't put that fuckin thing on my sofa she said, and I'd like to help you but could you please get the fuck out of here instead as I don't like blood but then she had a change of heart and started kissing him on the forehead and cleaning and bandaging his wounds and washing off the sewage and then they fucked but he couldn't get it up and she said get the fuck out of here but then her sister came in who the man had always really loved and the sister said yes that she had always really loved him too but had always been too shy to show it and he said that he had always been too shy to show it too and then they kissed each other for hours and then went down to her new Mercedes to drive off into the sunset together and start a new life of perfect love and bliss but as she got onto the on ramp of the freeway heading for California, an SUV carrying fertilizer and hi-octane jet fuel on the way to a suicide bombing smashed into the Mercedes and blew everything up but the man and woman were miraculously blown free of the car, but were decapitated and their heads rolled down a hill and landed next to each other at the edge of stream. A fish jumped out of the stream and licked the part of the neck that had broken off from the body and come along with the head. This sealed it and allowed the heads to go on living and they were able to locomote by thinking very emotional thoughts which caused their heads to bounce around. In this way they navigated close enough to kiss each other forever, and when they got tired they could get emotional and bounce away far enough to have a conversation about literature, but then they got into a big argument over Pynchon and told each other to fuck off and how they had nothing but the most profound contempt for each other and what a douchebag each of them was.

Later that day, a fish marriage-councilor jumped out of the stream and without the ability to speak and only the ability to flop around on land before returning to the water, made them see how ridiculous they'd been and they apologized to each other and started kissing again but then the guy had a phantom erection in his phantom penis and before long had had a phantom premature ejaculation, but he was able -- by means of brain waves accessing the wireless internet -- to order some premature ejaculation prevention cream from an online website but while he was online, a virus got into his machine and crashed his hard drive which had the novel he'd been working on for years which was just a few more sentences away from complete and would certainly guarantee him many Nobel and Pulitzer prizes in the years to come to tide him through his old age, but fortunately a guy came walking along, taking his family for a Sunday stroll along the stream which had the only clear water for hundreds of miles around, and he turned out to be a computer repairman who was able to retrieve all the data from the hard drive, and so the guy with the briefcase who was just a head now though he was together with the head of the only perfect love anyone had ever found in the history of the world, finished his novel and transferred it over the internet to his enthusiastic publisher and the book came out the following week to much great critical acclaim but it sold no copies and the publisher sent him a note saying, we never believed in you anyway, and we always thought your book was shit, but we published it because we thought the audience out there was just stupid enough to go for it, but obviously even THEY aren't THAT stupid, and frankly we're glad so go fuck yourself, but then he got a letter from the greatest living writer of his day which said your book so completely blew me away that I have given up writing because it would be impossible to surpass it on any level, but then the sister of the guy who wrote the letter called and apologized for her crazy brother who was suffering from some extreme mental disorder which made him pretend to be the world's greatest living writer and then write people who've just recently published a book and tell them he's giving up writing because they were so much better than he was, but the sister turned out to be a nurse and when she found out the guy was just a detached head by a clear stream she said hey this doctor friend of mine has recently come up with a technique for reattaching severed heads to the original or a random body and she immediately came over to the stream in her SUV which was set up like an operating room and the surgeon was there and he'd brought 2 fresh cadavers from the morgue and the man's head and the head of the love of his life were attached to their new bodies and functioned almost perfectly normally except the two people didn't think their new bodies were hot enough to be able to go out now and pick up all the ass they wanted, now that their appetites had been so hopped up by being severed from their bodies for so long and from having been together in perfect love for so long that they were sick of it and starting to make each other puke, and so, if their new bodies weren't hot enough to allow them to go out and score all the fucking hot ass they wanted, then, you know, why even bother living?

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At the sound of approaching engines they began to titter. By the time the lead car came into view they were shouting and cheering in a disorganized fashion. Then, as the cars with dark tinted windows carrying their candidates passed directly in front of them, emotions peaked and in unison everyone began pumping her right arm rhythmically in the air, screaming in one powerful throbbing unified voice, "Whoever! Whoever! Whoever!"

This was the "we don't give a flaming flying fuck" generation, and they didn't give a flaming flying fuck who their next leader was gonna be, as long as they didn't have to be forced to look at him or listen to him. As long as he didn't show himself or speak.

Meanwhile, inside the candidate's car, our GPS scanners were working overtime locking on hot babes in the crowd and sending their precise coordinates up to the satellites and helicopters overhead where the spirit of Frederick Lenz (aka Zen Master Rama) was being channeled to zap them (the babes) with his extreme meditative powers learned in a rock-hewn cave from a Hindu yogi in Rahnjipur or wherever, but practiced in a strip mall in the suburbs of South Wallingford or someplace like that.

As soon as these babes were zapped, they felt a sudden incomprehensible urge to get in a car and drive down the freeway pounding their open palms on the steering wheel in time to the song they're singing out loud through their open fucking car windows, glorifying our name and sacred purpose.

And so hundreds of extra cars are provided at the end of the motorcade, and one by one, as they pass, each zapped babe gets into one and takes over for the driver who gets out and joins the cheering crowd in her place.

At the first side street, the cars divert from the motorcade and head for the nearest freeway entrance. Their zapped babe drivers have it in their minds now that the only crime is complicity with the culture, so once they hit their respective freeways and they're singing their asses off about our glory and purpose and pounding their steering wheels into the floor, they start looking for criminals.

And right away, before they even start trying, they spot the guy who's been widely labeled as thought's bad boy. Or pissing's bad boy. Whichever.

What this means is that everybody else is thinking and pissing in a certain way that is considered GOOD, but, somehow, this guy is thinking and pissing in a manner that others consider to be BAD. And not only that, but he's also just a fucking BOY.

Now, at first glance, he'd appear to be doing the OPPOSITE of being complicit with the culture. It would appear that his thinking and pissing all over culture's norms and being therefore outlawed and profiled by culture, would make him totally NON complicit with our bogus piece of shit culture.

But the way our bogus piece of shit culture works is that not being complicit with it only serves to spotlight what it means to BE complicit with it, and so by being routinely NOT complicit, he only helps foster a drive to be MORE complicit among all those passive normals who were already complicit or leaning in that direction, but really weren't aware of it and wouldn't have given a flaming flying fuck about it even if they knew, but now, because of this bad boy of pissing and thought, they are being forced to be aware of it and, at the sight of his incarceration, they feel great pride at being his opposite, and so now go rededicate themselves to the task of being just SOOOO complicit with our worthless fucking piece of shit culture, which wouldn't be happening if our zapped babe singer/drivers had gotten to him just a few days sooner, but at least they're there now and can prevent him from doing further damage. So they run his car off a 40 foot high overpass where it first bounces off two successively lower overpasses below, before finally coming to rest lodged upside down between two 2003 Toyota Camrys and a 2001 Honda Civic.

And in this way is working smarter at deluding yourself imbued with the symbolism that even shamans find it hard to not give a stinking crap about.

[Note: With fewer and fewer articles being written about the death of something, this could be the year when we see the death of the death of something article, and so, at best, all this article might ever hope to be is to wind up having been the last of the death of the death of something article articles.

-- ed.]

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Ditto religion.

But the different-sex marriage lobby, the most powerful lobby in the world (and could blow your head clean off) will blow the heads clean off anybody who tries to oppose this virulent satanic abomination, and so History is a prison with maybe 70% of all its inmates railroaded into different-sex marriage yet who, when you see their pictures, are obviously forcing the smiles they show the camera, because inside they are having that feeling you get in the stomach and ribs when this is wrong but somehow you have to go ahead and do it anyway because, though it's wrong, doing it is the right thing to do.

So how can this be happening in a free land?

Maybe what we call cognition is just a parody of cognition, and therefore, even if perception "accurately" transduces oscillations in a couplea different modalities pseudo-simultaneously (like walking and chewing gum), what it all sums to at the back of the brain is still a parody of understanding.

The response to which is a parody of emotion which induces a parody of behavior that goes out and elicits a parody of reaction which is perceived and parodied by cognition and the cycle starts all over again, but down 1 level this time because what parody is operating on is already a (first-order) parody.

At this new level, however, which society was constructed to not let you go to no matter what and that's why scumbags were invented, at this new level, a parody cognition of a parody cognition results in a neo-reality far "crisper" and far more "robust" (heuuuuung) than the original because all the imperfections have been pushed up in the first round of parody, and then lopped off in the second round where reality is also restored -- something like the Dolby process of sound manipulation or shaving commercials.

Of course some of the original highs have been lopped off (collateral damage) too.

So where does that leave reality, i.e. different-sex marriage. Could this abomination be just a parody of the real marriage, the original marriage, the no-sex marriage, where instead of joining a parody of a male called a man, and a parody of a female called a woman, instead of joining them together in holy matrimony, a red-faced Disney is forced to discontinue its suicide bomber ride altogether because of repeated complaints by patrons that it just isn't realistic (i.e. bloody) enough?

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Well, no big deal, they thought, once they had figured this out.

Because, as with all other wrong, it could be neatly outsourced for pennies on the dollar, to some asphalt industrial park in some anomalous city in some far off 6th world country where buildings were made of simply boiler rooms stuck together, all packed with wistful dreamy people spending 18-hour workdays being grossly overweight, profusely ignorant, or resoundingly unsuccessful -- FOR YOU! -- child of trim, brilliant, resoundingly successful nations paying rest of world to SUCK so their people (you!) can, in their (your!) pants, still dream that THEY (YOU!) don't SUCK too.

But now, suddenly, the existence of all morality is threatened by the final outsourcing of the last few remaining immoralities -- Senate Bill, SB-21198BC proposes sending all the dreary soap opera aspects of life, from birth to first prepubescent grope to 3rd bitter divorce to 20th nervous breakdown to death and dying themselves, way out to be performed "offshore" by other, more fitting, species of people.

But if this bill passes, the moral high-grounders argue, what will be left for human beings to be? Without the soap opera of sex, family, social relations, people fucking each other over, people getting fucked over, dead children, infidelity, abuse, ostracism, bullying, possessiveness, manipulation, guilt, jealousy, betrayal, etc etc yadda yadda, what will be left for humans to even wanna DO?

Because, it turns out, that once you outsource guilt and jealousy and ugliness and stupidity and drama queens, then, the only thing that's left to feel compassionate about, oh Buddha, is that we no longer have those fucking different-sex-marriage weirdoes and their smarmy "legitimate" children to kick around anymore.

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Host: Because human nature is an unmitigated piece of shit.

Contestant #2 hit his buzzer (or whatever the fuck they do on Jeopardy) and confidently blurted out his question:

Contestant #2: Why, despite rapid technologic progress and a vast increase in understanding of both the nature of reality and the nature of man, why does human life itself appear to be growing ever more stupid, ever more vapid, ever more insipid, ever more fuckin' creepy?

Host: WRONG! Can you take it contestant #1?

Contestant #1: What is the state motto of Texas?

Host: WRONG! Contestant #3?

Contestant #3: What is the state motto of Florida?

Host: NO! Contestant #4, on the phone:

Contestant #4 (on the phone): What does "jejune" mean?

Host: NO!

Contestant #5 (in the space shuttle): Who said: "Ask not, yadda yadda yadda?"

The cosmic version of Jeopardy was based on the original TV Show Jeopardy, but its rules and the dialog and the flow of play had all been designed by someone who'd never actually SEEN the show and only knew about it from pop culture references and people using its structures in moronic stories meant to appeal to pop culture aficionados without whom there would be no such thing as stupid worthless pop culture since -- surprise! -- people, the people pop culture was intended for, you know, the robots and losers and lowlife scum out there, even they, the people, the robots and losers and lowlife scum out there for whom pop culture is designed, don't really give a flaming flying fuck about pop culture in ANY of its slimy deathly manifestations -- really, they only give a flaming flying about one single teeny tiny itsy bitsy little piece of pop culture, a single bleached out pixel in the pop culture bitmap -- and it's only the sum total of all these fucking LOSERS obsessed with some tiny creepy personal fetish, that combined and seen from preferably far far away in another galaxy, makes up the pop culture tchotchkasphere, of which Jeopardy, according to pop culture, is a shining point of light, despite my or the designer of Cosmic Jeopardy's knowing virtually nothing about it and having not the least iota of a velleity to know the least fucking additional bit more about it.

The only other thing about TV Jeopardy that I and the guy who designed Cosmic Jeopardy knew was, of course, the big plot twist about how the host is really supposedly giving the answer and the contestant is really supposedly asking the question, wink, wink -- like:

The answer is: Idaho.

and

The question is: what is the state whose capital is Boise?

or

The answer is: his face is on a 20 dollar bill.

and

The question is: who isn't Benjamin Franklin because his face is on a $5 bill?

Or

The answer is: the guy who fucked that Mafia whore.

And

The question is: Who was John F. Kennedy?

Cosmic Jeopardy had, of course, been created to end all War -- by channeling man's post-Cambrian aggressions through his Precambrian blindness -- so that, for example, man's instinct to be wrong about everything could be confined to games about words -- rather than spending itself building massive futile 500 mile high-energy particle accelerators to smash Higgs Bosons together in order to become even more wrong about the fundamental nature of being.

Host: It begins soft and sweet, one fucking accident at a time.

Contestant #6: What is everything?

Host: Correct! Here's your bonus answer: It takes no time for it to come into being, because it comes into being before it exists.

Contestant #6: Can I call my lawyer? She'd know.

Host: You have 15 seconds.

Contestant #6: What is Time?

The so called popularity of Jeopardy must have occurred because, as cosmic pieces of shit, we are constantly at risk, constantly in jeopardy, constantly having our team in first place with 4 games left and the last 3 against the team that's 3 games back, but despite coming back from 4 or 5 down in the 8th or 9th in 6 out of the last 11, the fact remains that we fucking HAD to because none of our fucking starters can go even 3 innings anymore without giving up at least 5 or 6 runs and, when one does (e.g. pitch 8 solid innings giving up only 1 or 2 runs), our team suddenly becomes totally incapable of coming back from being down by even 1.

Unfortunately, when we finally DO ultimately win, and then go on to win everything, and are finally OUT OF JEOPARDY -- and though the emotion we have is more than real and true, the only way we have to show it is through some deathly tired ritual, no longer fun or even amusing, like pouring hundreds of bottles of cold expensive champagne or huge buckets of ice over each other instead of exterminating emptiness. Whoeeee.

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