So now, to discuss it in a place where they wouldn't have to keep standing up and screaming at people across the room wearing only shirts and no pants, "Hey, could you turn that fucking thing down! we can't even hear ourselves think," they'd retreated to the International Space Station -- the only place left where you could still have, you know, a little fucking privacy around here -- there being, as everyone knew, no place left on earth where that could happen. (Extremists of all persuasions, left, right, center, up, and down, believed the ISS Consortium had invested heavily to make it this way -- so people would HAVE TO rent out their piece of shit abandoned anachronistic "space station", just to get a little of it back.)

They had the space station for the weekend, sharing it with the convention for a consortium of the self-proclaimed 5 kinds of guys -- the drugged guy, the factual guy, the self-obsessed guy, the delusional guy, and the sci-tech guy -- who spent most of their time arguing (in spirals of virulent one-upsmanship) about why they SHOULDN'T admit one or another of the never-ending stream of wannabe kinds of guys: you know, the guy who's come through tons of adversity, or the guy who's come through the adversity of having had absolutely no adversity whatsoever, for example.

OK. So the de rigueur diverse group has arrived here to come up with a solution for doped-up baseball and by extension to all the ills currently plaguing those jerk-offs back down on mutha earth.

This group is so diverse that ALL social classes are equally represented here in proportion to the perspicacity of their wine cellars: the rich, the super-rich, and the poor slobs.

And the agenda had been drawn up months ago by International Agenda and Televiewing, the company that had risen from obscurity, starting with just a loose collection of services that assisted the average joe in watching television better. Now they drew up agendas for over 150 National and International groups, with several thousand conferences annually, none of whom or which had the slightest clue what the fuck they were about and so could not ultimately have survived without the services of IA&T.

But the Consortium On What To Do About Doped-Up Baseball wasn't one of these. The Consortium On What To Do About Doped-Up Baseball had, as its mandate, exactly what its name implied. And it knew it.

At breakfast, in the control room, the deafening hum of the ISS having finally burned out the neural components that processed them at key levels of cognition, we got down to business.

We were ready to go and we all had our agenda cards courtesy of IA&T next to our bowls of Cheerios, each O made in a different country, or under differing circumstances of depravity and despair, so every spoonful contained at least half the history of the world, with a sprinkling of the history of the universe, and enough original light quanta to boot up more universes than anyone'd wanna shake a stick at.

Doped-Up Baseball had started innocently enough. "Why shouldn't players be allowed to operate at some super-normal peak by means of drugs or prosthetics or extreme information or technology? Don't the burnt-out bored-shitless fans deserve all we can give them to make their affliction even worse?"

And to that question the immediate answer was always: "Yes!!!"

Followed by a long moment as euphoria settled in, as everyone imaged with undisguised glee the screaming, hearts-pounding once-bored-shitless fans wired to the ceiling now on Doritos, vomiting feces, pissing vomit, shitting Read/Write DVDs from watching players leap 50 rows back in the stands to snag wannebe grand-slams, killing 10, injuring 25... stolen bases that go from first to home without the least pause to reconsider at second or third... nanojets hidden in saliva making spitters that release tiny sonic booms from time when they reach the plate doing 650 mph.

Followed of course after many many minutes of this by the first, final, and crushing reservation: "but, uhhh, yess, uhhh, but that's uhhh, you know, NOT FAIR to all those players who AREN'T utterly doped to the gills as well."

And so there it sat for years, no one able to crack the nut. The solution awaited either a George Washington or a Mussolini, but then, one day, someone who was stoned was thinking "what if ALL people were stoned ALL the time" and then he realized, "Nahh, that's just some druggie pipe dream and could never really happen in reality cause reality is really somebody ELSE's pipe dream, and that somebody else has been working a long time on this pipe dream, in making it all-encompassing and long-lasting and monopolistic and an utter fucking piece of shit in order to stick it to you after first making you need to have something and then making you accept what it gives instead of that and then making you make all kinds of stories in your head about how great this all is this only choice from somebody else's pipe dream -- until the day it breaks through the cracks and you start to say but hey this is really all just a buncha shit, isn't it? Isn't it! Which is what its intention was in the first place for you to realize this in the end, because ultimately it wants to stick it to you, which is an integral part of this somebody else's stupid fucking pipe dream you are living instead of your own stupid fucking pipe dream."

But, later that day, the stoned person who had thought that to himself thought, "well, OK, so it's impossible to get all 6 billion people on earth to be stoned all the time cause they've already been ultra-brainwashed to be off doing things that are even more stupid, but what about an island in that 6 billion people, a test group, a colony, a subset, a closed domain, a sub-group, a team, a league, with rules, rules like everybody has to be doped-up all the time. The undoped-up players already HAVE a league, so how about a league for the ones who just don't give a shit and are willing to destroy themselves in all possible ways at all possible limits of humanity in the interest of pure performance, of ultimately pure abstract numbers on an abstract ultimately meaningless scale without analogue at even the quantum level so why have even fucking bothered?"

To be continued...

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