So now we're left hanging in the middle of the sky as chunks of huge body parts break off and disintegrate below. Are they waving good-bye to us, or is that just an illusion formed by their ash and dust wafting around in the breeze from their departure?

Whatever, here we are now, utterly abandoned by someone else's error, in a vast ignorant vacuum of another someone else's making.

Fortunately we have learned to not give a fuck about anything.

Like, for example, today.

See, by putting off the first day of the rest of our life till TOMORROW, forever, we are able to not have to give a fuck about TODAY.

So today, instead of trying to do what's known facetiously as "life", we can spend the time trying to smash life's founding lie.

We do this the old-fashioned way, by theorizing so hard that objective physical reality can't avoid our conclusions, regardless of their tenuous relation to fact or proof or reason, and even though we don't move or say or write a word about them.

If we theorize hard enough and long enough, objective physical reality will, finally, simply crack open from the strain of trying to accommodate our stupid ideas about it, and out will pop the products and situations, which are the children of these ideas -- and the dreams, which are the children of the products and situations, and thus the grandchildren of these ideas, though they are marketed as their foster parents.

Today's idea is for an action-packed religio-philosophical adventure story. This idea is so perfect and complete, that the details of the story itself can be absolutely anything. It doesn't matter what the action is. It doesn't matter what the religion is. It doesn't matter what the philosophy is. It doesn't matter what the adventure is.

So, like, it could be a car chase through underground tunnels by Nietzschean Buddhists trying to recover a valuable family heirloom from unscrupulous international cartels of Hegelian Episcopalians who've joined forces to steal it because of some mystical magical world-controlling power it supposedly possesses or its possessor will supposedly possess.

Or it could be about Zoroastrian Pragmatists chasing each other across the desert in pickup trucks, but then, as they approach the border, they both get into the hot air balloons they have in back and lift off as the trucks go off the cliff in perfect time together so they crash in midair on the way down, and then their broken off chunks careen and re-careen into each other again and again off the narrow canyon walls, while the balloons float across the border, dodging small arms fire from customs and border patrol agents on both sides, below.

Eventually, however, all possible stories created from this one idea, regardless of detail, ends with the protagonist recovering in the hospital following the harrowing events that nearly took his life and DID take the lives of everyone ELSE involved.

Then as he lies there in his hospital bed, heavily bandaged, heavily doped up, everything suddenly gets all touchy-feely, and he begins to unload an uplifting but not entirely uncynical stream of bourgeois sentimentality about pain and grief and redemption and healing.

Then there's a very slow fade-out of artifice in all sense modalities so people in the audience just keep sitting there listening, afraid for a long time to get up and go slam their fist into a wall.

When they do finally realize it's really over, it's already BEEN over for 15 minutes and so it's too late to slam anything into anything.

Instead, they get up and wander back out into the street in a daze, questioning all knowledge and understanding. Questioning human life. Questioning all motivation, rationality, and irrationality across all populations and each individual. They question all of philosophy, all of science, all of literature.1

Life can still go on like this but can it still go on once this questioning of everything finally reaches even Yahoo?!! Even Amazon?!!

Is it only a matter of time before some young hotshot, looking to become the Lettvin, Maturana, McCulloch, and Pitts (1959) of Internet-Brain interface, war drives his way through the Fourier transforms of millions of users' wi-fi wafted EEGs, and reads in them their cognitive systems' unmistakable doubt as to, like, whether Yahoo Weather isn't calling it a lot fucking warmer than it feels like right now in this fucking little beach town or like whether the 20 or 30 Russian revolution titles Amazon recognizes is some kind of front-end pre-filtering to save the back end selection software all the work of dealing with, for example, the several hundred titles Powells shows for the same fucking topic?

And if so, does this mean that the books of the giants we used to stand on the shoulders of until they were proven wrong by lesser minds, will only be available from sites where it takes a $50 order before you get free shipping, while never again if even ever before, being available from a site where it only takes an order of $25??

Notes:

1. Questioning music doesn't come up because it isn't possible.

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First they accused me of not having any values.

"But," I told them, "in fact, I happen to have GREAT values!! For example: Tube socks at 94 cents a pair; microwave ovens -- $29.95; Hanes underwear -- $5.95 for a 3-pack."

Since no one can argue with great values, they went to the next item on their hit list and attacked me over the many millions of truckloads of stem cells that were used to make Stem Cell Toothpaste and Stem Cell Chewing Gum. Images of vast waves of dead babies drifting downstream like herds of drowned cattle after the 1927 Mississippi flood were conjured up without any of these words actually being used.

I said, "NO dead babies were created in the making of these beautiful wondrous miraculous stem cells."

I said, "These holy, saintly, life-giving stem cells were created the old fashioned way: By lying out our fucking asses about them from day one!! The stems we use are cleaned out of personal stashes of marijuana by our crack team of reformed crack whores. Like all once-living things, these stems are composed of cells -- and so, to NOT call them 'stem cells' would be doing them a disservice they did not ask for and, therefore, do not deserve.

"In short, gentlemen, we just tell some abstract wholly semantic truth that has no relation to fact or actual lives and just let peoples' minds create whatever lie from it they wanna hear."

The representatives of the Christian Right seemed taken aback at first, but then all 10 of them broke out in broad smiles, like they'd been faking all along too and now that the truth was out, we were brothers.

They embraced me and shook my hand and welcomed me into their fraternity of righteous people who know what ignorant worthless pieces of shit fucking people are and know how to bilk every last dime and every last ounce of energy and every last drop of former soul out of them in exchange for the utter soullessness of knowing who they "are".

To cement our new relationship we got smashed on our asses and went staggering around fucking everything in sight. Eventually, though, I started coming up with my new idea for the day.

The whole stem cell thing had taken on a life of its own and vast global corporate players were now competing and cutting each others' throats to get on board the lucrative stem cell additives bandwagon -- The most popular diets of the day had all been dumped in favor of The Stem Cell Diet, where all you eat are stem cells and you become like some hyper-animation where even your clothes are constantly regenerating and redesigning and refitting themselves on your constantly shape-shifting body as you stride down the street with the sun shining and the wind at your back, the collective classes of the histories and sociologies and demographies of man, all licking clean the toes and heels of your boots.

So I'd pretty much drifted away from the whole stem cell business and was ready to situationalize or productize a new idea of the day.

Once I got the Christians off our crack team of recidivist crack whores and sobered them up and had flushed all their crack down the toilet so they wouldn't keep getting up to take one last toke, I told them about my new idea for the day.

It was called Starship Hospital and it would be the apotheosis of what man at his highest could do for man at his lowest. It would operate at the apex of humanity, and represent the most profound realization of man's will to survive, EVER.

See, people everywhere were suddenly coming down with violent illnesses stemming from, apparently, too many stem cell milkshakes. And, simultaneously, the health care system of the world was in disarray and didn't know how to cope with the sudden epidemic.

Enter Starship Hospital.

Starship Hospital was to space what cryogenic preservation was to time. Where cryogenic preservation (or whatever the fuck those buncha bogus quacks call it) is supposed to allow the body to come back at some future point in time when the incurable disease it has has suddenly become curable, Starship Hospital rockets tons of incurably sick people way way out into the cosmos in the hopes that they will stumble on some more advanced civilization in some distant galaxy where the cure for their disease has already been discovered. The farther they go, the better their chance of a cure.

Of course, what ultimately made Starship Hospital such a sweet deal investment-wise, was that you could have a chain of tens of thousands of them, and you only needed one single piece of real estate here on earth: the Starship Hospital Spaceport where each hospital is launched.

And once you had that and some engines, you didn't have to worry about teaching anybody to fly the thing or control it, cause they didn't know where the fuck they were going anyway -- and of course there was no costly recovery of returning vehicles cause when the topic of vehicle recovery had come up during the design phase, all the engineers had just put their fingers in their ears and gone la la la la la.

-- to be continued

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Normally, when I have an idea like this, I just blurt it out and assume my work is done. That the world is now saved again for another day, thanks to my idea, and I can go home now and eat or sleep.

And so far, not to brag, but... the world is still here. And so I should probably feel some pride in this. Some satisfaction. Just like I should look forward to going home and eating and sleeping once my work of saving the world from itself with an idea, is done.

But today, at home, high in the cliffs overlooking the beach and the ocean, the small fire burning at the mouth of the cave I live in, I'm scanning my email and I suddenly read one that negates everything I just said, and everything I've ever done and everything I think.

It comes in the form of advice. It tells me my fucking ideas are NOT saving the world as I think they are. And that what I need to do is "situationalize" them, in order for them to even have half a chance at saving the fucking disgraceful world I didn't create and yet find myself cognitively always picking up after.

Situationalize or productize or die, the email tells me. And definitely do not mathematize or even fucking monetize anything ever again.

I write back using my only weapon: the truth. You can tell it's the truth because it starts by saying that everything I've ever said, up until now, was a total and absolute lie.

At this point you don't need a video link to know he's rubbing his hands over his keyboard, mentally pulling up a comfortable chair, as he reads my email, sitting back, bowls full of Doritos close by, settling in, and thinking, Whooa, this is gonna be good!

So I cut to the chase. OK, I tell him, I don't eat or sleep. I spend all night in a cave keeping the fire going and thinking up tomorrow's idea.

In the morning I walk up the coast along the beach telling people my idea for that day. I don't tell them to spread it or that it will save the world. I am not giving them a fish but I am also NOT teaching them HOW to be fishermen, either. And I am NOT giving birth to them on 3rd base and telling them they just hit a triple. I am just saying, here we are on 3rd base, and then I tell them what the sign for the suicide squeeze is. And how it has to be put on twice, before you break for the plate with the pitch, having total perfect disregard for absolutely EVERYTHING else at that moment.

People who feel bad about not giving a flaming crap about my fucking "idea" for the day usually offer me food to console themselves, and I can't decline or they will KNOW they were right about my being wrong -- so I accept it graciously and then usually stuff it ravenously in my face immediately, so there won't even be a question about which species I'm from. Then, when they're far enough away, I go spit it all back into the ocean to feed the gulls and porpoises who sometimes are only a few hundred feet offshore riding the wave peaks, and could use a quick slab of baloney for the energy to get past the next one.

That's why I walk along the ocean. Not so I can know where the fuck I'm going, not for the air, not for the scenery, but so I can always have a place to spit out food with impunity.

Then I conclude my email to the person whose email told me I had to either situationalize or productize:

Thank you again for your heartfelt advice and I hope it is clear why I have said everything to you I've just said to you, but in case it isn't, the reason is so that you will understand WHY it is IMPOSSIBLE for me at this time to either situationalize or productize fucking ANYTHING!!

Then I send the email, but unfortunately even I am unconvinced by my own bullshit truth, so I take the idea I am currently having and try to embody it in a product or, to be obnoxious, a product line.

The twin anchors of this product line are Stem Cell Toothpaste and Stem Cell Chewing Gum -- and both products, as the names indicate, are literally teaming with millions of hot young stem cells -- just sitting around aching to regenerate tissue.

The idea I am productizing in Stem Cell Chewing Gum and Stem Cell Toothpaste is a simple one: People will believe all kinds of utter fucking bullshit -- to the point where fully grown, fully cognizant, all their faculties intact adults will stick all kinds of unknown crap in their mouth just because some charlatan says it contains something they don't but should understand.

The actual productizing itself is done on the internet using some of the many sites selling vanity chewing gum -- sticks of generic chewing gum inside wrappers with your name or company name and/or logo and/or message printed on the outside for a small fee.

The ad campaign begins with a high Google score for searches on terms like "stem cells" and all other medical terms. Directing searchers to Ads like:

"Over 10,000 stem cells released with every bite!! Chew Stem Cell Chewing Gum all day long and feel the instant exhilaration of all your cells and organs regenerating fresh and new, on the spot, as you speak!"

Or,

"Stem Cell Toothpaste rebuilds your teeth perfectly from scratch, every time you brush!! -- Over 10 million stem cells in every brushful of Stem Cell Toothpaste immediately recognize your teeth, and turn from pure undifferentiated stem cells, into pure teeth cells!! -- and if you accidentally swallow stem cell toothpaste, all that happens is your esophagus and stomach lining will be regenerated with newly differentiated esophagus and stomach lining stem cells."

The rest of the ad campaign circulates on the rumor net: A secret added benefit of Stem Cell Toothpaste and Chewing Gum is if you excrete or otherwise crap or spit out any stem cells that don't get used to regenerate your immediate body parts, they float out into your sewage system and fix your rotting pipes.

To be continued...

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You'd had to invent this world because it didn't already exist and now you had to live not only with your own fuckups, but with the fuckups your fucking world created on its own, independent of its start condition, you.

In your defense, you could say, hey, but how about fucking mathematics, fucking physics, fucking understanding, fucking pleasure, fucking cognition, fucking computation, fucking meta-anything, and you could go on...

But why bother, cause you know they're coming down the hall now, in columns of three, and when they get to you what they're gonna say no matter what you say, they're gonna say, Yeah, but what about your fucking Cambrian Explosion?! What a piece of shit that was! and what about fucking pain?! -- why not just ring a bell and flash some red light in your head?!

Of course your critics come from the world you created so they owe you. OK, they say when you reluctantly call in your markers, and they change the word 'shit' to the word 'crap' when describing the fucking Cambrian Explosion your pathetic world just couldn't seem to avoid having in order to get from there to here.

But they keep pressuring till, finally, you offer to try again. To re-start the cosmos from nothing again and hope that, by the law of averages, pain and the Cambrian Explosion won't happen this run, and that, by the law of stupidity, everything else will.

Of course you're partly lying since, actually, you know all you really have to do is evolve from nothing the way it went the last time, but this time, when you get to the Cambrian Explosion you just have to go into pause mode (which is what the pre-Cambrian Explosion period fucking WAS in the first place -- a pause while the cosmos felt its way forward -- it happened to make the wrong choice, last time, is all), and just find a workaround that doesn't necessitate predation and pain. Unfortunately, whether this can be done can't be known till you get there, as also can't be known exactly WHAT can be done. So you have to get the money and equipment and crew fully paid up front. And they need to possess all possible skill and the full range of flexibility.

Also, you can't predict what will happen AFTER your jury-rigged Cambrian Explosion workaround kicks in, so you have to go along for the ride. And by the time you're about a mile out, if you notice the standard relation between cause and effect changing till finally it's becoming irony, that means you're in trouble and better turn the fuck around fast, or just slam hard into a wall and end it.

And then, where will the possible apex of the cosmos have taken the whole fucking show on a whim?

So maybe let's all just stick to eating flesh and the reproductive intention of other species, till we at least have down the set theoretic proof of how nothingness ineluctably breeds time, and how, as a result, the algorithmic primitives and the library of their useful agglomerations, self-organize -- so the rest is just history and physics as we know it.

Notes

1. ...wouldn't be any more races because there were so many races that everybody came in first and when everybody comes in first they aren't really races anymore.

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During this universal 2-minute moment, we were supposed to think about what we could do to stop elevating the background of life to the status of being life itself. And how, until we'd achieved that, we should at least work to stop saying, "Oh well -- That's life," each time we achieve the diametric fucking opposite.

After the moment of silence, during the first moment of post-silence, we are supposed to be thinking more worldly things like: "No more blocking users from accessing your user list, and logging off users who are accessing your system," in order to ease the transition back.

Then, after the first moment of post-silence, we are supposed to push all our own best self-known buttons in order to con ourselves into boldly accepting the necessity of the preceding 2 moments, and into reminding ourselves that this is the best that can happen even when you adequately incentivize a standards body to develop a common platform.

At least, you knew, as a result of the unflinching universal adherence to these standards, that way out on some periphery of some surface somewhere, a blow was being struck against whomever or whatever deserved to have a blow struck against them or it.

And, besides, we still have many intervening moments of freedom left over to go berserk in, which I was doing at the time, while being mindful, however, that it could only, under present circumstances, be done at the rate of a micron per day.

These microns would then be laid end to end in the heart of all heartlessness. And made anxious by objects, concepts and situations entirely unknown to them and humans.

They would then be passed through filters which, under normal circumstances, should NOT be seen or heard, but which were, under THESE circumstances, becoming louder and more visible each day -- calling into question whether or not we were now still under normal circumstances, or if we ever had been.

Being sensitive, it was tough to go forward, for fear that a single spell check error could have the same cascading effect on the future as the fuckup of a single allele in the DNA strip of a single human who would now not go on to save the universe, or a single letter differentiating 2 sound-alike pop star names leading to erroneous, misplaced rumors which nonetheless terminate 2 careers and whole cultural strains along with them.

So, look out! You gotta go on TV and be ultra-simplistic about it, or even be ultra-simplistic about it OFF TV, and blame the simultaneous all-encompassing global fuckup on the day the helium sanity seeped out of your mass-murder 3-year-old's balloon and he never wanted to see reality unsmashed up, again.

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So you replace it with ramming Sports Utility Vehicles through Sports Bar picture windows and crying out, "can't we all just be sports about this?" when the owner tries to break your ass with a crowbar.

But that fades too and, one day, in casual conversation with the rest of the world population, you compare notes and realize there's nothing worth the expenditure of one more fucking joule of anti-entropy matter.

I.e., the tyranny of possibly missing something is finally over.

And that's when, despite our internal lifelong reservations, everybody suddenly unanimously agrees that the only thing the world could possibly have left to offer us now, at this late stage, is its own fucking END -- the end that's received so much affectionate buzz in story and song for so many generations that isn't it about time we got to meet her?

So, OK, let's have the end of the world. Clearly, by definition, it'll be the Greatest Show on Earth -- and just in time, too, cause we really cannot take one more day of the Lesser Shows on Earth, let alone the Least Show on Earth, which is pretty much all we get in our Show places these days.

But so how is the world gonna end now in such a way as to provide the best show for the largest number of people (preferably everybody), and at the lowest possible price?

Our supercomputers tackled this problem while we went off to argue over the glowing platitudes we'd utter to describe whatever they (the supercomputers) came up with.

But when we got back, our supercomputers had decided that the end of the world could not be designed by man or even by his fucking machines (how's that for nonpartisan selfless egolessness) and that the details of the end of the world should be left entirely in the hands of the world itself, especially given how long (all its fucking life -- billions of years supposedly) and assiduously the world had been preparing for just this moment.

Man's role in this, according to the supercomputing machinery, is simply to tell the world, "OK, we're ready for you to end now," and, if need be, to cajole it or goad it into ending, if it initially balks at the idea of doing so at our behest.

And, as a last resort, there's apparently a switch in physical reality that tells the world to simply power everything down for good and call it a history -- no questions asked.

And this switch, we've learned, is embodied in the signal to noise ratio of the planet.

Currently this ratio is greater than one, as it has always been since the world began. But when noise increases and/or signal decreases to the point where the ratio becomes LESS THAN one and stays there uninterrupted for a day -- then the switch is flipped...

...and the world, in its infinite wisdom, starts the countdown to the beginning of the series of simultaneous global events which -- regardless of who looks up to see, when they look, where they look, or how -- will be far beyond the ability of any early 3rd millennium human or machine cognition to predict, describe or comprehend.

And, apparently, relative to this Johnny-come-lately eschatological scenario, we are now no more than just a few radio talk show hosts, political commentators, superstring theorists, and partygoers away.

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According to them, you should have died last week. According to them you're just a bundle of maxed-out risk factors with a street address and a drivers' license. According to them, the only possible hope for you is a long road trip in a short autoclave.

At first you didn't consciously seek out the risk factors most conducive to early sudden stupid death -- they came pre-installed in your DNA, like Windows XP in your PC.

But, hey, ever see a longevity guru on TV? Ever hear a prescription for living a long healthy life (not to mention the fucking music they play behind it)? And, if yes to both, was there then any possible course open to you other than to dedicate your life to doing the diametric opposite of what these people said was good -- and living forever in spite or because of it?

OK, so here you are now, in the early stages of living forever and since you're doing the opposite of what everybody says you need to do to live, you don't have a job or wear clothes or know what time or day it is and you don't eat or sleep or exercise or avoid carbohydrates.

And then you start to notice that because the rest of the world is so busy trying and failing to stay alive and you are so unbusy NOT trying to do anything, you notice that out there, in the so-called objective reality known as the world, all the songs you hear are written and sung by you, and you're playing all the instruments and dubbing in all the background vocals.

And all books, films, and software are similarly conceived, designed, produced and distributed by YOU. And all laws are unanimously passed and promptly and effectively implemented by YOU.

And all games are won by YOUR teams, and YOU are all their players. And YOU are the only one having sex. And when people are crushed, they are crushed to a powder reusable only as filler in pills and capsules whose active ingredient is always all YOU.

And every drive of your ego is gloriously fulfilled and, in accord with only the least of them, all other egos on earth are reduced to doing nothing but running all the sort algorithms of history on all the history of hand-waving and misunderstanding.

The suffering masses are therefore, now, all your children and your parents and your siblings, and you don't give a fuck about them because the fundamental unit of cognition is more important and they are all its victims -- so if you devote all your effort to finding it and you don't find it, then they are all dead before they are born, anyway, and YOU killed them.

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But the film was all optical illusion. And then, when no one was looking, it shifted into syntactico-semantic illusion.

When characters appeared on screen, the network graphs of their complete internal representations of knowledge were overlaid along with them, and with the current state of the ego momentarily foregrounded, enlarged and rotated in 3-D space, so it could be examined separate from the rest of the knowledge structure.1

At first, the theatergoers gasped or gaped in awe at the virtuoso revelation of the human soul in a computational framework that could be read unparsed as pure pattern, and they nearly choked on their popcorn.

But then the spell woven by constantly refreshed on-screen text boxes and network diagrams was broken by someone screaming out, "Yeah, but what if it's got a recursive cosmic spell check error beginning at the lowest level of meaning?!"

And so the people unable to answer this question to their own satisfaction came streaming out of the theater disappointed and angered, kicking over wire mesh garbage cans and slamming down lit cigarettes.

On top of that, they'd missed the exciting climax of the film where the group's accepted scheme of life is overlaid on their legitimating symbolic universes as the only way of navigating the endlessly auto-catalyzing accretion of primitive cosmic wave functions of indeterminate or zero substance since before time.

But by walking out on the film early, they accidentally caught a glimpse of the mirrors that reflected the bogus universe shifting suddenly surprised back into their factory-default positions.

The construction of reality had been caught off guard. It thought it had more time before the people came out and so it was merely taking this opportunity to perform some routine maintenance and install a few simple upgrades.

Fortunately, though, no one connected this glitch in reality to the obvious and only conclusion that the universe does not exist, or, at least not as we think it does and that, at a certain distance off the planet, it's all just fuckin' mirrors.

But then, what about what is ON the fucking surface?

Oh wait. They'd just been shown what THAT was too. They'd just been shown diagrammatically how words are spoken and how the ego responds, constantly shifting weights constantly updating evaluations, occasionally updating or adding a goal, or reinforcing the link between a specific neurotransmitter and a specific face.

And how what goes on in the final reality of representation has ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING TO DO WITH whatever words the characters speak and whatever these characters think these words mean at the time and place they're spoken, and EVERYTHING TO DO WITH what the pulsating little representation of ego NEEDS in order to strengthen its pulsating little arrow of GOAL to some utterly abstract absurd distant and not even pulsating OBJECT.

And how what unknown unrepresentable is ultimately being kept that way by all these layers of transducing bullshit.

Notes

1. ...which could also, for foregrounding purposes, sort by hardwired categories like life history, goals, and collection of faces -- though of course there were multiple links from them to the current ego -- the variance of whose strengths were represented in the graph by the continuous variance of the human visible light spectrum from just above infrared to just below ultraviolet or by the continuous unidirectional variation of the gray scale from just above black to just below white.

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Everywhere he went these days, everybody was all hopped up about how, soon, they wouldn't have to be assholes anymore.

6 months earlier they'd passed a referendum to eliminate the gene for being an utter fucking asshole from the entire population -- and now, in a few more days, the transformation would be complete.

In the meantime, they celebrated the only way they knew how: by being the biggest assholes they could still be -- and trying to ignore the nagging realization that: what if, one day, AFTER we can no longer be assholes, we suddenly have something to celebrate? What the fuck will we do THEN?!!

So when Johnny Organism arrived, the celebration was approaching that decision point in the life of any celebration when all the busses had been turned over and all the cars and trash cans burned and all the shop windows smashed and looted, and there was a momentary lull waiting up ahead, as people internally tried to dissuade themselves from simply killing and cannibalizing each other -- out of pure joy and thankfulness.

A drunk with mirror-colored skin came up and went into his maudlin sentimental stage right there, sweeping his arm to encompass all the frolicsome merrymakers in the large space around them.

"I'd give my right arm for ANY of these people," the drunk slurred to Johnny Organism, just above the din, "these people have suffered -- and then, when they were asked to sell themselves out for the good of the community, they all courageously stepped up to the plate and did it."

A tear welled up in each eye.

"And then, the next morning," he continued, "they all woke up and realized they were living in a community of NOTHING BUT sellouts."

Johnny Organism had recently invented the Quantum Fuck You Device. It used 256 parallel quantum computers to give all possible fingers to all possible people who had ever lived or will ever live or are currently alive, everywhere in all universes, at once.

And this drunken asshole, on the spot and unbeknownst to himself, had just invented its diametric opposite!

Moments later, as the celebration's introspective pre-cannibal lull arrived, Johnny Organism finally jumped up on a table to carry out his assigned duty.

"Ladies and gentlemen," Johnny Organism announced out loud to the carefree revelers.

They all turned instantly in his direction, having all simultaneously run out of stories of what they'd thought about doing the LAST time they were THIS fucking bored.

"As you all know," Organism began, "a complex process involving the quantum entanglement of multiple parallel L. Ron Hubbard E-meters will soon have completed systematically removing the gene for being an utter fucking asshole from every human genome in every human cell on earth."

The partygoers shuffled their feet in anticipation of more not hearing anything they didn't already know and no longer care about.

"I am here tonight," Johnny continued, registering their readiness to return to being utter fucking assholes at the first subordinate clause, "on behalf of the computational quantum geneticists who have designed and are now overseeing the removal of your asshole gene. -- Ladies and gentlemen, it appears there's been a glitch."

"Ooops," the possibly soon to be former assholes said in their unified universal stomach in unison.

"But it's not all that bad," Johnny continued, "what with the dialectic between you and your socio-historical situation being what it is, an' all."

They all breathed a sigh of release.

"And hey," Johnny added, getting suddenly all upbeat, "it's gonna create a shitload of new JOBS!!!"

They all cheered -- overlooking the nagging in the pit of their stomach again about yeah but when are they gonna create even ONE new Wozniak.

"OK, so the deal is this," Johnny Organism finally got down to it.

"The computational quantum geneticists have accidentally done the so-called math and it now looks like that when the gene for being an asshole is removed, the will to live somehow goes along for the ride. Apparently, according to the computational quantum geneticists, the will to live is somehow intimately commingled with the gene for being an utter fucking asshole."

The former revelers didn't seem surprised.

"Since the gene removal process has already been set inexorably in motion and can't be turned back or modified," Organism continued, "the only way to deal with this situation is to make appropriate changes to the societal infrastructure -- you know, the arbitrary set of lies we all live by and without which the world would stop cold."

Everybody in the audience calmed down and began nodding to themselves over the sensibleness of this course.

"Therefore," Organism picked up, "every street corner will need to have a center where every morning everyone will go from the moment they first open their eyes -- and where, for 2 hours every single day, they'll have to stand there screaming in unison at the top of their lungs, "I want to live!" and "life is beautiful!" and "life is wonderful!", and shit like that which, according to the calculations of our computational quantum geneticists, should be just enough to keep everybody going for one full day in the absence of the former will to live."

Everyone seemed satisfied that their interests had been taken care of by the supervising authority.

"And since," Organism continued, interrupting everybody's beginning to tepidly high-five each other, "there will have to be people to man these centers, we have decided to staff them by dredging up all the do-nothing losers off the streets, and all the do-nothing winners off their yachts and South Pacific Islands."

At which point armed men wearing flack jackets moved in and handcuffed everybody and carted them off to be trained for their new jobs pumping up a world population with enough will to live to make it through another worthless fucking day.

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1. Keeping the doctor away keeps the doctor away.

2. The only real power power has is to make you think about IT when you could be thinking about something that matters.

3. If even physics doesn't know what the fuck it's talking about, imagine what art criticism knows!

But now this self was going on the auction block. Your self. A self you used to wile away many carefree hours and days playing Russian Roulette with (ordering Molotov Cocktails to comfort you when you lost -- or whatever you call it when the gun fails to go off in your head).

A self you could take to another planet and look down at normalcy through a telescope with -- seeing the complex and profound essence of what, in the frame of everyday reality, is just the same old boring, simplistic load of shit.

But times are hard. So what am I bid for this self? Let's start the bidding at 10. 10 things -- and each one is from a different place in the world, but all from the same category of thing. Like, say, semi-automatic weaponry.

A man stood up from the department that helped people recover from the pain of having once been in a focus group and now not mattering anymore. He bid 9. 9 surefire marketing plans -- each designed to rocket you to the top of one galaxy or another in the cosmos of existing AT ALL.

Hey, man, many years ago, this self appeared on America's Most Wasted. It ran for weeks -- so it doesn't need no steenking marketing plans. It needs, at the very least, steenking RPGs.

A long distance bidder on the phone wants you to explain your self before he bids. You tell him you have lived a cartoon life and therefore you are hoping for a cartoon death.

When he finally bids, you tell him he will have to sweeten the deal if he wants to be taken seriously, at which point he hangs up because he knows THAT will be taken seriously too, and it will cost a lot less.

Someone bids his own nepotism. He claims it has cost him much brainwashed and artificially-inseminated emotion. "The preconditions in the social order," he tells you, "have formed my relatives into Protestant hatred groups bent on marriage and immigration. Alarmist rhetoric decries society on their behalf, while the hard center of bogus pathos hates them both, for themselves."

Someone bids his collection of the most hated of the beloved celebrities of man, filtered out of video feeds by hi-tech devices designed for the general-purpose removal of celebrity voices and images from any medium.

Also, he'll throw in a set of CD-ROMs containing the software and data that drive these devices -- software that can be tuned to the emissions (sonic, visual, cognitive) of any possible human, born or unborn, from any possible social class, across all personality types, relative group status levels, and occupations, across all geography and all time, and across all possible conceptions of the self.

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