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 drives 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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