OK. So I had to prove that I was awake now and that everything that came before, all this stuff about stuff not being real, all this idea stuff, all this THINKING stuff, all this understanding stuff, all this, in short, imaginary stuff had, in fact, just been a dream, and that things weren't in fact not real, and that everything was NOT, in fact, just a dream, and so to prove this I ran outside into the street.

When I got there, in the snow, I looked around -- but by the time I realized I wasn't wearing any clothes, it was already too late. People were arriving at the church on the rocks across the street. Or was it a university?

Whatever it was, the cops came down the path from it, heading in my direction, and I darted back into the apartment building. A moment ago, I hadn't done anything wrong, but now I could be arrested just for running from the police. So from here on I could disregard all law because I was already heading for the electric chair or gas chamber if caught.

To get away, I thought I'd go up to the roof and then dash from rooftop to rooftop as I'd seen done in the movies, but there were already helicopters up there waiting, so I ran down a few flights, broke into an apartment, and crawled out onto its clothesline and pulled myself, hand over hand, across the narrow courtyard far below to the next building and into the window of another apartment.

This time someone was waiting and had watched me come across.

"The police," I called out to him. "Isn't it time they stopped picking on us criminals!!"

I don't know if that moved him towards not turning me in, but inside his apartment I could hear rich people in the next room arguing: "yeah, but MYYYY philanthropic acts are so much MORE philanthropic than YOURRRR philanthropic acts."

Fortunately this building was much closer to the next building up the street and his next door neighbor's window faced it and once we broke into his place, all we had to do was lay a board across to the open window on the other side of the narrow space between buildings.

He helped me do this because he believed that the constitution should be declared unconstitutional and I agreed to get on the Supreme Court and actively lobby for his cause as soon as I got away from the police.

Everyone knew the unconstitutionality of the constitution would send civilization into an infinite recursive loop from which there is no return, only nonexistence. But also, no one gave a fuck, and I actually believed I would keep up my end of the deal. After all, my many Nobel Prizes and Academy Awards make me a virtual shoe-in for any executive, legislative, or judicial slot virtually anywhere. The only reason I hadn't been offered the Supreme Court before was because everyone thought I'd turn it down, or else that I'd keep bringing proceedings to a halt by hocking up huge wads of mucus all the time.

I crawled in through the window of the next apartment building and the apartment was empty, so I thought I'd make myself at home and rest here for a while.

The person who lived here was obviously rigging a persona for World Gossip -- in the hopes that he or she would be picked up and carried to vast wealth as the world's focus of alternating pity and hatred for many months and years to come and, if lucky, for eternity, carried aloft by history herself.

At first, when the world realized it had used up all its celebrities and didn't know who to gossip about any more, in desperation, its agents began scanning all local neighborhood/workplace gossip everywhere, giving the most salacious a shot at the vacant world stage.

In turn, people rose to the occasion, turning their tchotchka lives into ebay pages of the eternal hope of becoming the object of worshipful derision.

But gossip left to the mob, gossip by and about the masses, does not perform its true societal role of keeping people in line, establishing societal norms, and creating a perverse kind of social cohesion.

Suddenly, the unknown person whose unknown life had sparked these adrenalin-fuelled sociological musings came home, and rather than see the unfortunate fleshing out of what I already knew to be the case, I shimmied out onto the apartment's clothesline attached to the next building up the street. All the way across, though, I could feel this sinking in my stomach. When I got to the other side, the window -- as I'd noted beforehand but didn't mention till now, not wishing to worry the reader unnecessarily or for any longer than necessary -- the window was closed, and I had to smash it with my bare fist to get in.

Somebody was home but they fainted when they saw my bloody hand so I was able to grab a towel and head out the window on the opposite side of the apartment -- but when I got there, there was no building facing. I'd reached the corner of 2nd Ave. and 10th St. I had to climb out on the ledge and try to move down 10th street jumping from ledge to ledge.

When I looked down -- into an abyss of smoke and emptiness -- I realized the world had been collapsing behind me as I ran.

My life flashed before me.

1957: "Stop complaining. When I was your age we had to walk 5 miles through the snow to school everyday."

2020: "Stop complaining. When I was your age we all thought we'd have to die some day."

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This awareness was at its peak in 1985, the year he entered Harvard despite bad grades, low SAT scores, no extracurricular activities, and a recommendation letter that said: "This person inhales and exhales, can stand up and sit down and walk in and out of doors. I have seen him eating on more than one occasion. I can only assume from this that he most likely defecates and urinates. Beyond that I can say nothing more about this student, even whether or not he sleeps.

"He scores at chance levels on all tests, his papers appear to be random assemblages of words taken from the vocabulary of the topic at hand, as do his verbal 'contributions' in class.

"As far as I can tell he appears to lack enthusiasm for any activity, enjoys nothing, shows no ambition, drive, or even desire to do or be or possess anything at all.

"However, and despite not coming anywhere near any standard of popularity, for some unknown reason he's respected on some unfathomable level by his classmates, from the brightest to the dumbest, and is frequently elected to school councils even though he contributes nothing to them and does absolutely no work -- often, apparently, infecting the whole group with this attitude so that nothing ever gets done by any council he's on, or on any project he's involved with.

"I can only predict, therefore, that upon admission to Harvard he would no doubt commence to do the same for you."

He arrived in Cambridge, on full scholarship, in October, long after the start of classes, but his sudden appearance in History 135 -- The Age of Capitalism - for Math Majors -- didn't seem to upset or disorient anyone, as it didn't when he frequently raised his hand and mentioned how mythology is preferable to history because at least mythology admits it's a lie -- and when told that History admits it's a lie too, responded, Yeah, but History's lying when it says that.

He didn't really sign up for anything and it was unclear where he lived or even slept. He just walked into random classes, usually many minutes late when the professor was already well into his spiel, and, as he sat down, raised his hand and asked some seemingly innocuous question which somehow caused the class, from that moment on and for all subsequent sessions for the rest of the semester, to stop moving through the actual course material and become totally enmeshed in the infinite recursive loop of epistemology -- i.e. what right did anybody have to say anything about anything, given the wack-a-mole relations between knower, known, and the objects and operations of knowing? (Or whatever.)

By 1989 Harvard had to be shut down for repairs, and his class graduated only in the virtual-digital world of Sims. He was given a postdoctoral position in the MIT Psychology Department, based on his Harvard transcript where the 100 occurrences of the printed word "INCOMPLETE!" all had a poorly hand-drawn #2 pencil line through their "IN"s.

Meanwhile, the other members of his class, who'd never known him or even knew who he was, yet had been profoundly influenced by his presence at Harvard, and who, during their 4 years, had done virtually no work, read virtually no books, and though they often sat around shuffling and reshuffling decks of cards, rarely got around to ever dealing out a hand, and when they did, it was always a completely different game from the last hand dealt and no one else around the table knew how to play it -- these graduates were immediately scarfed up by capitalism to become the CEOs of all their high-powered massively successful companies -- which, within a year had all failed.

Cut to 1995.

People live in harmony and happiness and bliss. There are no more stories, so no one can win or lose and no one can have power.

By now he runs a small independent TV station in Cambridge, WBRI. It broadcasts Princeton classes like Physics for Lit Majors, Religion for Engineers, and Chemistry for Divinity Students, set to My Bloody Valentine and The Pixies.

Everyone now lives on their own unique line of history and sociology. Occasionally, these lines intersect and the information space is modified. Occasionally multiple lines intersect and a temporary node is formed, set to Sisters of Mercy and Joy Division.

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"Sir, he said, "we are ready to fight and die for the placebo effect."

The refugee commandante nodded. He knew that nationalism and religion couldn't exist without the placebo effect existing first and therefore it was far more noble to fight and die for the placebo effect than to fight and die for your sadistic hypocritical nation or your ignorant self-righteous "beliefs".

He and the rest of the company as well as the refugees and their sponsors the bourgeoisees all wore old disheveled clothes and lived in mud huts because physical existence is meaningless when you're pursuing a massive cosmic goal -- especially when the people who stand in your way and are ruling the world and implementing the exact opposite goal are all wearing slickly-tailored high priced duds and living on huge manicured estates with nannies up the wazoo.

The company of men, many in their late teens and early 80's, took up positions along the perimeter and objectivated their phenomenologies into the arena of intersubjectivity that stretched from the tip of their nose all the way around the surface of the planet to the rear of their anus and back out their mouth again.

"Agriculture, exploration, imperialism, capitalism, immigration, war, are really just different types of searches into the space of all possibilities of this planet at this time," they thought. "So why the fuck are we wasting our time just sitting here phenomenologizing our local neuro-transmitter imbalance into the global market infrastructure of belief?"

They recollected how they'd started out, once, as free young search bots, ranging the space of all ontology, sucking everything up, but only letting on to people about sex and sex-related conflict/murder. They kept everything else hidden because it was all just too fucking filthy for human consumption and would likely have caused everybody to start offing themselves en masse in their city streets or places of worship or crackwhore houses.

"It's not my fucking fault," Sergeant Platoon said to Corporal Regiment, "that sleazy capitalism and slimy religion got together one day and invented sanctimonious story. And that they then sold it to that loser, man. It was inevitable. Capitalism, born in the Cambrian explosion, needs competition and winning and losing. Religion, born in the brain testicle, needs good and evil and guilt. And human consciousness, born in fear, pain, confusion wants a father/hero/organizer. So when you put it all together and puree at low heat or slow speed for a microsecond, and pour it out on the table and the righteous hero wins -- then it's win-win-win for the 3-headed crack-whore capitalism-religion-man, too."

"Then I guess I've wasted my fucking time, i.e. my fucking life," said Admiral Batallion, letting a sheaf of papers waft slowly off the vessel into the wind a few tragic sheets at a time like in the Apu trilogy, "and the Algebra of Ideologies I've so painstakingly developed over the course of 30 years is no longer needed."

But despite his being hanged or hung from the yardarm for lone wolf conspiracy to spread lies to the little fishies, his equations turned out to be TRUE, and, today, today, every school child learns his first law that

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We're semi-icognito, though. Meaning we keep all our video gear hidden and don't announce that we're here on assignment to cover this exciting new breakthrough in mass entertainment.

There's about 10 other lines we can see at entrances spaced maybe 20 feet apart to our right and left. But the place is vast. There could be 20 or 30 more entrances on other sides. Whatever, the lines we CAN see all stretch for miles.

On the other side of the gate, only tall trees are visible, so there's not the least hint of what's inside.

Pretty much everybody's here -- including people from many hundreds and thousands of miles away, from all walks of life, all ages, and all classes.

And though we're here on a highly reliable tip, all 20 or 30,000 of them are here based entirely on a rumor. A rumor that hasn't been confirmed or denied. A rumor about which there is absolute silence from higher authorities and the people who should know.

And since we're the entertainment press (, baby!), we always know this kinda shit FIRST, and yet, when we arrived, several "average joes" were already here, and the rest began arriving in droves soon thereafter.

Whatever -- clearly this is the biggest and most electrified crowd that's ever attended the opening of a new theme park -- and not a single soul here -- including us -- knows a single thing about it -- other than it's name -- and that only began circulating about an hour ago.

But that's the power of Disney, I guess.

Who else could get away with opening a new theme park called Human Natureland, and then cynically employ some of the worst elements of human nature itself, to manipulate humans into showing up en masse against all rationality?

And they did it without uttering a single word of promotion or even acknowledging its existence!!

In fact, officially -- though any minute now people are about to start streaming through the gates -- Disney still does not admit that this park even exists, or that Disney has anything to do with it if in fact it does exist. Which, of course, only heightens the excitement for everyone involved.

And as to what's inside, even the world's leading theme park designers all confess zero outright knowledge and zero ability to predict.

So we'll just have to wait and ...

Wait... The line's starting to move.

We're next.

OK, we're moving past the ticket taker, now through another gate and we're in and ....

Uhhh, we still don't really see anything -- just trees and shrubbery. Apparently we'll have to go deeper into the park, but the people ahead of us look equally disoriented. Well, maybe this is just part of the experience -- making everybody a little uneasy.

[Disorientation and fear in the face of violation of expectation, after all, is a big human nature kinda thing.... Isn't it?]

OK so we're following the crowd... there appears to be motion in this direction so we're going along, it's hard to see if there's anything in the distance, there's a lot of trees ... wait it looks like, uhh, yes, there's a building -- behind this next clump of trees -- it's low so that's why it couldn't be seen till we were right on it, and it looks like it's really huge.

So maybe everything is in here. People are already inside. And somebody inside just started screaming something out -- it's a hollow scream with a heavy echo -- he's saying :"IT'S EMPTY!!"

But people are only rushing in faster as a result -- the crowd's carrying us now into the building too -- there's the usual pushing and shoving -- inside, at the center, you can see people visibly arguing -- but they keep getting pushed into each other by the addition of more people streaming in, like bath toys in a toilet that keeps being flushed.

"Anybody says Human Nature sucks ass, I'll crack his head open!" someone shouts.

Somebody breaks out laughing. Don't you get it, he screams. It's a big joke. THIS is human nature! -- US being left to our own devices. No props, no games, no booths, nobody selling us anything, no entertainment, just OURSELVES! After all, WE are human nature!!

And the only way to beat it, someone else says, is if we don't all act like a buncha spoiled pissed off assholes. So instead, let's show everybody that we are mature adults, from an advanced technologic civilization, who understand our own nature and the nature of the world around us and are capable of stepping back from the heat of the moment and acting rationally in our own self-interest, and in a way that dignifies not only our people, but civilization in general and our species in particular, and all species that have learned to rise above simple reflex.

Ehhh, that's too gay for me, someone screams out, and pops the first guy, and now everybody's just trying to beat the shit out of each other -- over, apparently, either the nature of human nature, or Disney's failure, one more time, to keep us entertained enough.

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True, all the very little we wanted was provided to us absolutely free -- BUT all the millions and billions and trillions of things we DIDN'T want were provided free too.

And so we had to PAY people to keep all that shit away.

Like, health care was absolutely free, but we had to pay certain people to not come by and make us sick every day.

Housing was free too, but we had to pay people to not move into the house we were already living in, as was their right under the free housing act which made housing free in the first place.

All food was free, both in stores and restaurants, but we had to pay people to NOT piss on it just before we ate it.

And so, though we wanted very little and everything was free, we still had to work.

This was the logical outcome capitalism shared with socialism and anarchy.

Goods and needs aren't what really matter. What really matters is somehow paying someone something every time you breath.

This, however, as everybody knows, overlooks the entertainment of various biologic irrationalisms that keep a species honest.

And, as a result of the repressiveness of work, entertainment had to be made out of everything else: from surgery (surgertainment) to meditation (meditainment).

Otherwise, we'd fall asleep out of boredom over (yawn) just another one of those pathetic little matters of life and death.

But this only serves to underscore that:

Which still, surprisingly, is not enough to depress the living crap out of us.

This is explained by a vague memory everybody has about how, when we were very young, we made some less than heartfelt compromise with nebulous forces in our dreams. We agreed to pretend that there ISN'T nothing. And so, so-called success in so-called life was really based on how hard you pretended, and so-called happiness is defined as getting to the point where it doesn't feel like pretense anymore.

And once you stopped living this or forgot it, it WOULD depress the living crap out of you.

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In the early years of his life he stayed in the tank and when asked by his guidance counselor what he was passionate about would say I'm passionate about my saliva.

As an adult he computer-generated laws from word-frequency distribution tables drawing from all levels of sanity, all realms of experience, all bodies of knowledge and all libraries of disinformation and wrong conjecture.

And though everything from all elementary particles to all people obeyed these laws, still, he wasn't satisfied.

He bought a big house way out with lots of acreage.

Immediately there was a cruise missile attack and he was nearly killed. When the satellite came by, he pretended to be dead so they wouldn't attack again. Apparently he'd looked at someone the wrong way, once.

Later he thought the answer must lie way back with the first photon. He went back and followed the photon from its origin through the human suffering of people who died mining the substance that would one day redistribute that original photon, and many other fucking subsequent photons, throughout the social construction of reality as well as the cosmos itself.

What did he learn from that experience?

He learned that it was important to stay very very loaded, all the time.

As a result, he went on a binge, applying this same approach to other travels where a single tiny taken-for-granted phenomenon of everyday life is traced from its origins in physics and history, on through its effects on biology, cognition, and sociology.

But then he got to a point where I guess he was just too fucking lazy to even begin to bother anymore, and so everything he started was stopped near its beginning and the rest was left as an exercise for the reader to perform at home in his or her spare time.

Meanwhile, he was secretly writing the book: "Spam Yourself to Fame and Fortune", which proposed a way to become rich and famous by sending massive amounts of spam TO YOURSELF. And "anybody could do it!!"

He ultimately made so much money from book sales and speaking and lecturing on this technique that he was able to do anything he wanted.

So he decided to travel around dressed as different classes, occupations, and personality types, trying to breach security wherever he went.

This was because he felt that if you didn't have to breach major security to do it, and if you weren't being hunted down for it even now, then doing SOMETHING felt almost exactly like doing NOTHING! And he didn't want to feel that way.

So usually he'd just try to social engineer his way in -- like when he'd come scrambling up the hill from the valley and be met by a uniformed armed guard standing along the roadside eyeing him suspiciously. "Yeah, OK, so I was busy the day everybody scrambled up the hill," he'd say. "But I really don't belong down in that valley anymore, now do I? (wink wink)"

He kept score of how many times the guard would let him in vs. how many times he was arrested in the hopes that there'd be other people doing the same so the score would have some meaning.

But there weren't so it didn't but he didn't give a flying fuck because he was way way beyond fucking desire.

And because he knew that no matter how stupid external circumstance, or how vapid life itself, a neurochemical equilibrium prevailed across all historical time -- in other words, the way people feel has the same distribution across the population regardless of where or when it's measured. In that sense, nothing has changed in the fucking world except the trappings with which neurochemistry associates its selves.

Then the phone rang. It was his ex-wife, drunk on her ass again. But she still maintained total telepathic connection with him for reasons doctors, lawyers and information specialists couldn't fathom.

"What you're thinking," she told him, "is really just somebody else's dream interfering with remnants of your own past dreams."

OK. So those were the upsides. And all he had to do with the downsides (which nobody had realized before) was conceptualize them away through ignorance or irony.

Or sleep through them again.

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"The people" -- the most trusted name in lying -- responded with the silence of deathliness.

They'd had their hopes and dreams endlessly stoked and been promised a world conducive to the free-form multi-path realization of those hopes and dreams -- but only last week they'd been informed that hopes and dreams are a zero-sum game, like everything else, and so that for every person realizing his or her hopes and dreams, there would have to be many many more people not getting anywhere near realizing their least hope or faintest dream.

Still, "anything could still happen"! But, if it was any good, it could usually only happen once. And so, if it already happened to somebody else (those singular events being the source of hopes and dreams to begin with), the odds were enormous that it wasn't gonna be happening to you or anybody else anytime soon.

This caused a great letdown among the people of the world, and they started resorting to robo-sexuality. And when you asked them what was good about their species, the only thing they could say was, "well, we're over 94% biodegradable."

But the corporate CEO's and their puppet master, the market, started to worry when they saw this mood sweep across the land. People, they realized, could soon start offing themselves en masse as an act of ecology, or just to get their 5 cent deposit back.

In corporate board rooms the cry went out: the population must not be allowed to exterminate itself!

At least not until every last fucking penny has been wrung from every last fucking pocket, wallet, and bank account on earth.

So corporations started running "we love you, please don't off yourselves!" campaigns that weren't tied to selling products. In fact, they started giving all their products and services away for free. They even sent out teams of roving male and female free prostitutes to make sure everybody's sex drive was fulfilled.

Of course, to design the "we love you, etc..." campaign, they called on me, who had loved everything for all time no matter what.

"How can we show the people how much we love them so they won't exterminate themselves, now that hopes and dreams have been removed from the equation of possibility?" they asked me before I'd even had a chance to sit down and get loaded.

Fortunately I'd come prepared.

"We can invent," I said, "an infinite number of products, each of which is the diametric opposite of a popular product that currently exists and everyone owns.

"By buying these new anti-products, consumers can negate each of their hated old products, and once they've bought the diametric opposite of everything they own, they'll be officially free of being sickening vapid consumers. At that point they may no longer want to exterminate themselves out of joy over being free, or maybe they still will, but the passage of time may have dulled their ardor, one way or the other. Or maybe they'll just have totally forgotten the whole offing themselves thing in the first place," I concluded.

Since corporations have to learn to not know what the fuck they're talking about, it is only natural for them to extrapolate this skill and know how to not know what the fuck anybody else is talking about either. So they gave me the money to go ahead with my plan, whatever the fuck it was.

I quickly assembled a crack team of unrepentant hacker crack whores and, after several months, we were ready with our first product.

It was the diametric opposite of "books on tape", which had sounded like a good idea in the beginning, when we were all stoned on our asses, but when we finally released our product, "voice on paper", no one seemed to want to buy it to negate all the books on tape they'd bought, and so our project was a total failure, thereby short-circuiting all our other dependent hopes and dreams, and the course of human despair was not reversed and eventually they all did exterminate themselves.

A few, however, failed. They survived, and gradually redid some new kinda civilization-thing all over again, from scratch, just so there'd be somebody to read this fucking story of how great they once were(n't).

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Ideas are just excuses for people to exercise power, or for behavior in general.

Ideas are not about the content of ideas. Ideas are about simply existing and being labeled ideas and are really about what people do with them.

People come up with ideas because there is a market for them, not because there is a need.

The only idea that exists on its own and stands as pure unchallenged idea to all people, is the idea that people can't tell other people the truth -- not even THEMSELVES.

Which is why there had to be legend, history, literature and cinema -- to give people a way to tell the truth in the face of all other avenues being closed.

But this doesn't mean that legend history literature and cinema are vehicles of the truth, but only that they occasionally reveal the METHOD that allows for truth, and occasionally include a short sample of what someone telling the truth might actually look like.

According to these countless books films and historic and prehistoric confabulations, truth is allowed to emerge from a human mouth or run through a human brain only when the eyes on the face of that mouth or brain stare deeply into themselves.

Which is why there are so many fucking "mirror scenes" in the world of cultural make-believe -- they indicate that the believe-maker, in a moment of weakness or equivocation, wanted to at least TRY to include a glimpse of something honest.

Nobody knows where this idea about mirrors originally came from, or why everyone believes it -- while believing absolutely NOTHING ELSE -- especially since scientific research has shown that believing and/or doing it (speaking truth to mirrors), in NO WAY correlates with doing anybody else or yourself ANY fucking good whatsoever.

Which has led some to conclude that maybe literature, cinema, legend, and history have been bought off or are otherwise in the tank to the powers that be, and have thus knowingly consciously and intentionally with malice aforethought conned mankind into spilling their unadulterated guts to any mirror that'll sit there and take it.

But so what? People deserve an outlet for their "honest" bullshit too.

But so this:

See, there's this obscure quantum mechanical law that nobody wants to talk about and is not taught in school or written up in papers because it would ostensibly compromise the national security of the universe.

This law states that mirrors and all other pure reflecting surfaces not only reflect all incident waveforms (electromagnetic, air pressure modulations, whatever) back in the direction of the waves' source, but also send some raw compressed waveform information to superstring theory's 14th dimension hidden far away in the stratosphere.1

This means that people who want to hear the only honesty in the world, just have to park their personal handheld geo-stationary satellites in the right spot, with the right kinds of antennas and transducers, to hear and record the naked truth of human life on earth that no one ever gets to see, especially most of human life itself.

And while they're out there in space, they will no doubt also want to take advantage of their location and spare processor cycles to assist with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).

Not because they want to find extraterrestrial life -- but because the more cosmos they search without finding signs of our kind of so-called intelligence, the more likely it becomes that there ARE NO OTHER intelligences like ours out there capable of even communicating off their own crappy little planet.

And therefore, if ultimately no other intelligence equivalent to or better than ours exists anywhere in space and time, then those squawks of endless ego and despair, pride and shame, ignorance and self-conscious virtue your satellites are picking up by the truckload from the mirrors of earth, are each coming directly from the absolute highest point, the farthest out apex, the most extreme pinnacle of utterly everything this fuckin' cosmos has ever been able to achieve in its entire ostensible 15 billion years or so of so-called existence.

And so does the cosmos, unbeknownst to man, wear man's complete story on the front of its tee shirt, and on the back does it say, "15 billion years of miraculous evolution out of absolute nothing, and I all I got was this fucking soap opera!"?

Notes:

1. just enough information to recreate the full semantic content of the original human output of crying swearing screaming accusing praising loving hating or just slow simple easy rational discourse.

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