Some say it's the new wine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Self could even be the new Other.

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

Notes

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

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