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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