Our intelligent, sober motto was "Fuck the other side -- even if there's no such thing!!"

It was after 3/3. Everything was different now. GAME1 was failing to give people the permanent erections of the past, though critics were still rating everything "Permanent Erection!!!" in public (the ratings, not the erections) anyway.

But, as yet, only elite athletes of extreme fantasy reenactments seemed to have the stuff to even think about entering a GAME2 mockup. So the masses were painfully stuck between themselves and each other.

After the ceremony, where everybody had accepted their Nobel Land Mines for Peace except me, we were taken in separate limos to exclusive box seats in Stockholm Stadium.

A rigged GAME2 game would be showing up here later to take over, but part of it being rigged was the deal that people in the exclusive box seats would not be killed while everybody else was being killed, so they (the people in the exclusive box seats) could watch unimpeded by death. This was apparently a special treat given to Nobel Land Mine laureates even if they turned the Nobel Land Mine itself down.

But first we had to wade through the old GAME1 game. Some local 12-year-old girls who'd participated in bringing civilization to its knees on 3/3, sang the national anthem:

Hey, Hey, I'm totally doped up
Hey, Hey, I'm totally doped up
C'mon Get aboard the train
The train to uh uh uh
Uhhh, who gives a shit where.

The President of Sweden came and sat in our box as the game got underway. He congratulated me on turning down their stupid Nobel Land Mine for Peace.

"It's my revenge against doped up baseball, for not picking up my waivers," I said, "They're all part of this same shit with the Nobel Land Mine Committee."

Only a few years ago, I had come over from Cuba to play doped up baseball. I could make all kinds of leaping, diving, rolling-over, shoestring, bread basket, over the shoulder catches, with my eyes closed but I had to be on constant IV drip lysergic acid at the time. However, it only took a few tabs of street acid taken orally 30 minutes before coming up to bat, for me to consistently hit any pitch out of the park no matter where it was and regardless of whether the umpires were looking or not.

Obviously, then, I should have just settled for being a designated hitter, where I wouldn't need to push my IV bottle over on its pole from the second base side, every time I had to dive for a hot smash up the middle.

But, instead, I was given my unconditional release and since I didn't have any other skills, the only thing I could do was just win Nobel Land Mines for Peace and the only thing you can do with those that makes any sense or has any meaning is turn them down and call everybody a douchebag.

After the singing of the national anthem, the GAME1 game got underway but the 12-year-olds stayed on the PA system and started haranguing the audience about how cool it was that they (the hundreds of 11-13 years-olds around the world who were involved) had brought down human civilization at a cost of just a few dollars each, and how they'd reversed thousands of years of social organization in an instant using only water balloons and Ready-Whip and, of course, an advanced computer simulation of world traffic flow coupled with complete satellite photos of all world highways that, together, could pinpoint and rank the most strategically crippling overpasses to drop whipped-creme filled water balloons onto windshields from, in the world.

"Even though this operation was 5 generations in the making," one of them said, "the previous 4 generations were just wasting their time, spinning their proverbial wheels, as neither the conditions nor the technology existed during any of..."

She was cut off by another voice... "Water balloons and Ready-Whip and overpasses have been around for 5 decades...

Who was cut off by ... "But the infrastructure was never this complex and interdependent and so easy to..."

And by... "But so many world pre-teens were never so ready to pull a world terror stunt like this..."

The argument rang out back and forth over the PA system as play tried to proceed. The meaning of post-world collapse times and the good or bad of having brought it on and brought it on just for the hell of it (despite its (the collapse's) hundred plus years of being in the making).

There were two on and two out and a two - two count on the batter in the bottom of the second when the GAME2 players, as the first move in trying to so totally get the fuck out of reality, burst through the ceiling of the Stockholm Dome and rappelled down to precisely what their infield and outfield positions respectively should have been, had they been playing the upcoming batter straight-away.

To be continued...

permanent link to this article

Extreme Nothingness aka GAME2, then, was born in a trapped car in a world historic terror moment, designed in a notebook laid flat in the well of the passenger seat, sun slowly moving across the page, reflecting so badly he could barely see the preliminary diagrams he sketched out, which, in the end, turned out to not only NOT be a bug, but to also, instead, be a FEATURE.

The game of Extreme Nothingness aka GAME2 was designed and written on that day with the purpose of taking peoples' minds off all other prior games combined, aka GAME1 -- which was so everywhere and unavoidable that people didn't notice it, despite thinking about nothing else but.

And GAME1, aka "the game", itself, he thought -- as the horns gradually stopped blaring and people got out and climbed up on the roofs of their cars to try to scope out why all traffic everywhere had come to a sudden halt -- GAME1 , aka "the game", after all, had become, as everybody knew (even fucking morons like the president, the pope, and the supreme court), a piece of shit. And not just any old piece of shit, either, but one that threatened to clog the last sewer line of hope for all mankind for all time.

In short, the world needed GAME2 if it was to survive, or at least if it was to LOOK like it was surviving while it was in fact dying fast. But better to die surviving than to die dying, someone must have once said, if not many people and often.

In Extreme Nothingness aka GAME2, the field of play was constantly shifting, like the future of human interaction following 3.3.05 (aka 3/3), the day it was written.

One minute it (the "field" of "play") could be just a few quarks or neutrinos wide, and a couplea bosons high. The next minute it could encompass the earth, the cosmos, the metaverse, multiple metaverses, infinity, ashtrays, swizzle sticks... you name it!

It could be happening on a board one minute like Monopoly™, Scrabble™, or Douchebag, Douchebag™, while, in the next minute, it could be playing itself out on a large field like Football, Soccer, or Borrow-the-Beef-Link-Sausage-at-3-and-3/4%-interest. And then a moment later, it could be running only in a single mind or between 2 minds or all minds, or between some Archetypal world-mind and its own pre-archetypal prior states.

It could involve any number of players from zero to all people who'd ever lived or will ever live, and including those waiting incarnates who never make it to life cause their assigned world ends before their assigned number is called. Tough luck. But at least GAME2 does not leave them (potentially) unrecognized, and their getting in the incarnation line will not have gone unrecorded in the Complete History to be published when everything -- you know, EVERYTHING!!! -- is finally fucking OVER. So even if you take everything else away from it, GAME2 has ALREADY saved lives!! Given meaning and closure to lives that won't ever even exist.

Of course, the GAME2 Hall of Fame doesn't really have anybody in it cause it keeps getting blown up as a way of scoring 100 points in some random instances of play of GAME2 itself.

Here is a sample GAME2 game, played just last week:

In the only pre-scripted part of GAME2, all games start play with the self-styled "players" (who may or may not be divided into one or more or no teams who work either with or against each other or themselves) picking a random time and place using a random number generator.

Once the place and time are picked totally at random, and solely by means of GPS coordinates and without regard to what's actually gonna be happening on the ground when they get there, they go to that place and time and immediately commandeer whatever game is already going on there -- at whatever level they have to go to to find a game -- whether they land on a city street where girls are playing hopscotch, or in an office where two employees are playing "let's pull a fast one on Joey" on a third, or at a board in a room where people play Clue™, Craps-2™, or Celebrity Coma Crew™, or on a barren field at night where a blade of grass is playing survival against bugs -- with dirt somehow disintermediating it all.

So in the sample game now being described, the players take over a stadium where some pathetic instance of a GAME1 game is being played to an audience of 10s of thousands of near-comatose people who've been bribed into attending with promises of abstract but perverted sex.

Following (or as part of) the takeover, all the original players of the GAME1 game, as well as coaches, referees, umpires, managers, owners and fans are killed -- to purify the stadium.

This is considered simply "loosening up" before the start of actual play of a random GAME2 game.

To be continued...

permanent link to this article

"Johnny's on the overpass
shakin' up the Ready-Whip.
I'm in a Toyota,
thinkin' 'bout... [word that rhymes w/Ready-Whip] ."

Those are the thoughts I was having and the song I was writing in my head and working on out loud as the Toyota sped to its appointed overpass and we slipped off our backpacks and started getting things ready.

We'd already stopped at the 7-11 for the Ready-Whip -- the idea being to get it at the last possible moment to guarantee optimal freshness and hopefully the fewest possible duds.

Also, if there's ever a trial, then most of the key witnesses against us are all gonna be, you know, 7-11 clerks. Case dismissed.

"This is too easy," I said. "Maybe we should do it blindfolded... so at the trial we can say, 'yeah, but we did it all BLINDFOLDED, you know?' and the jury will go all oooh and ahhh and look at each other. Case dismissed."

But that was only the fuck-off reason I brought up the whole blindfold thing. The real, the deep reason was because, well, remember back when the Jonses were having so much trouble keeping up with each other and decided that the only place left for them to go was a place where, if they went there, they were gonna have to go there totally blindfolded?

And then, when they got there, totally blindfolded, the only thing they could come up with to do with themselves there, now that they were all assembled in this idyllic location, was to reenact the Battle of the Future in 2077.* And, as they say, "the rest is, as they say, history."

Well, so, what we are doing today, on March 3, 2005 -- henceforth to be known (because of its world historical momentousness) as "3/3" -- leads -- according to most modern historians who became sick of the past in grad school and now explore documents of the future on the new Internet which runs at 3 times the speed of light -- leads -- directly to the self same "Battle of the Future" in 2077.

And the only reason this battle has any fucking reenacters whatsoever (because not even the most shit-faced drunks wanted to reenact it for any price) is that frightened blindfolded people got conned into it -- unlike the willful unblindfolded other reenacters of all the willful unblindfolded other stupid wars of the human soap opera run amok and turning on itself instead of just keeping on with the pretense of creating air things like art and literature --

... and oops, there's the story of what is literature -- (flashed by while filling a water-balloon from a can of Ready-Whip™ and heading for an overpass in a Toyota™ just a little before early morning rush hour™) -- the story being that literature is this cultural artifact you create that reflects a culture you desperately hope to escape by means of "the very act of" creating the artifact (but, more likely, by making so fucking much money off judiciously telling the culture what a worthless piece of shit it is by means of the artifact, that you can now afford to "buy your way out of" the stupid ugly worthless piece of shit culture, knowing somewhere inside of course (cause you read it somewhere), that the very act of "buying" only deepens your complicity and entanglement with the stupid ugly worthless culture you so desperately sought to escape when you still had half a brain left -- so that, after that, literature just becomes whining about having created literature to escape stupid ugly worthless culture but finding out that, at its best, it only gets you deeper in to where you forget all about getting out -- so culture, stupid stupid stupid ugly ugly ugly worthless worthless worthless culture, wins again. Let's eat.).

But who cares (and who even cares about eating) cause meanwhile, as stupid ugly culture wins another one, a Toyota makes its way towards its appointed overpass.

The man driving us 5 11-13-year-olds is a close friend of all our parents, and his own 2 11-13-year-olds are also simultaneously being driven, possibly by one of OUR parents, in a matching Toyota but of a distinctly different color, to a similarly appointed overpass carrying equivalent strategic import, in a different city in a different state, and depending on geography, possibly shifted over by an hour or more so they are also just before morning rush hour in whatever time zone they are in.

But I still didn't know why are we in Viet Nam.

* [The battle of the future in 2077 was between window-dressing and revolution in the hearts of men. But before the actual killing started, a compromise was reached and war was averted.

The compromise was that revolution in the hearts of men could exist and be given free-reign, but that, in the end, it would be nothing more than window dressing on the perpetual lie of humanity. And that, in the larger end, all this will have really been done solely in the name and interest of entertainment, and without the express written consent of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Amen.]

permanent link to this article

"Underachievers Overachieve!" was an early favorite which I sort of liked (based mostly on its simplicity and balance) but it wasn't really accurate.

"Buncha Lazy-Ass Kids Bring Down Civilization," wasn't accurate either -- besides being also just a little too bombastic or backdoor self-aggrandizing for my tastes. And "lazy-ass" was just our teachers' and classmates' assessment of us, and what headline writer is gonna take the word of 12-year-old kids or the people who are paid to but unable to teach them?

And frankly, in the aftermath, I'd like to see, instead of the usual romantic mythologizing, just a little more truth -- like, for example, how we aren't (weren't, if you're reading this) really just a buncha lazy good-for-nothing fuck-up underachievers -- but rather how we really are highly-trained and skilled actors and technicians who were explicitly brought up to APPEAR to be lazy good-for-nothing fuck-up underachievers ON THE OUTSIDE, while actually being brilliant, masterful high-achievers ON THE INSIDE (and mad about how no one has found an appropriate cookie name to call us for being this way).

Then there were all those headlines we came up with that began with "Ingenious Plot...," but these were shouted down before they got off the ground... because the actual plot was so simple and obvious, and most of us felt, for obviously self-centered reasons, that the emphasis should be placed much more on the act of pulling it off, and on the courage and fortitude and just all-around coolness of the people -- the troops on the ground -- who actually did pull it off.

Headlines that began with "Unknown Assailants..." were also put down early and often cause we knew they'd catch us -- provided there was both a they and an us left to apprehend and be apprehended, respectively.

"Our Children Are Killing Us!" Yes. That was everybody's favorite. It was like "Why Do They Hate Us?" after 9/11. That sense of mass paranoia implied by any use of the word "us" as the last word in a sentence followed by any sentence-terminating punctuation other than a period!!

That's what prompted me to lean forward and naively ask our driver, "Is there a way we can, like, put a flow control or something on this... operation?" He was actually a friend of our parents. A member of the 5th generation of our sleeper cell -- the children of the generation that grew disillusioned and rebelled; the children who'd counter-revolted back to ultra-orthodoxy, but were still denied, and who now had to watch in silence as their own children carried out the final purpose of a hundred wasted years of empty generational waiting. And all that was left for them now was to assist these children in only the most ancillary way, like by driving cars full of them to their target sites -- laughing giggling 12-year olds who couldn't care less about cause and purpose, and asked stupid questions like if a damper could be put on this world-shattering operation, now that the go had been given, and people and events were in motion.

So when he simply laughed at my question I tried to explain. "Because," I said, "if this goes all the way, and we wipe everybody out, and there aren't any newspapers or people left, and no one knows what we've done and how cool it was, well, that's no big deal -- but, I mean, wouldn't it be much much cooler just to leave enough people so there ARE still newspapers and people to read them -- so they can wake up in the morning all over the world and have to read about how "Our Children Are Killing Us!!!!"

I mean, just to see the expressions on their faces in a fast-cut video on MTV, would maybe be even cooler than what the world would be like totally without a single last one of them or us left in it whatsoever.

To be continued....

permanent link to this article

1890: "We are just now entering the exciting new explosive world historical period of 1890-1920," they don't think, as they get off the boat, are cleared, cleaned, and taken to the ghetto of their kind, there to select one of only a few patterns to survive off and have it be their fucking life, day after day, year after year, dolefully repeating actions reactions emotions learned, like animals, from the brother and aunt and 2nd cousin ghetto animals that came before and vouched for their entrance into new world history despite never having met.

1915: The children of the people in 1890 are now the same age as their parents were in the above paragraph when they (their parents) got off the proverbial boat. They've watched their parents grow old and die metaphorically at a young age as they waited for instructions that never came. Instructions that would have made clear their purpose in coming here in the first place. The reason they'd been sent, the justification for living a 24/7 round-the-clock lie that, in a foreign land, eventually had to become the truth.

And finally, when the word did come, they were already way too old to carry out the kind of action they'd always thought they were sent here to do -- you know, some kind of wild explosive adventurous thing, requiring peak performance in simultaneously many drastically different human activities mental and physical and all for a greater higher cause -- which was why they even signed up for this intelligence service crap in the first place, and maintained the cover of hapless immigrants so well for so long that they became it.

But then the word that finally came too late only turned out anyway to be just a lame postponement of the revelation of its purpose. Both the act and the cause it was to be performed in the name of were still in flux, still being formulated out of whole cloth. But rest assured, they were told, the Central Committee is working its ass off, and as soon as etc etc...

Nevertheless, they were also told and with much pride, there was a positive side to all this: "...your infiltration will be that much more potent by its final purpose being carried out not by you, but by a second, more assimilated generation, your children -- who will have a far wider and deeper access to the country, its highest and most secret institutions, as well as its cultural norms and its individual people, many possessing unique access to highly specialized data and control."

Therefore it was essential, they were told, that their children both outnumber them and be brought up dedicated to the mission so ably and patiently inaugurated, by their parents.

1940: The children of the couple in 1915 are now the same age their parents were in 1915 and their grandparents were in 1890. Like their parents before them, they have watched their parents grow old and die metaphorically waiting for a communication from the now grown children of the members of the old Central Committee who are now the members of the new Central Committee back home, a home they've never seen and have no connection with other than through their upbringing/indoctrination into an as yet unrevealed cause with as yet unrevealed tactics in which they are to play a crucial role.

This continued lack of knowledge is made easier by the knowledge that their fellows and comrades in the cause don't quite know exactly what it is about either so they are all in this together.

1965: The great-grand-children of the people who came over all fired up in 1890 to strike a blow for some great cause are now the same age their great-grandparents were at that time and have continued the family tradition of watching their parents grow old and die metaphorically at a young age. Determined not to do this themselves, they make a concerted effort to break from the will of the Central Committee back home, which they have been trained from birth to obey and worship.

For one thing, they've had many illegitimate children in their teens, years before now, who they abandoned then but have now all rounded up and brought back together into a new breed of happy post-nuclear family.

Needless to say, the Central Committee, still tries to regain control of these children by continually guilt-tripping their parents about "what they're doing to" their (the children's') grandparents.

1980: The many illegitimate children have now reached the age their great-great grandparents were when they first embarked on their noble calling. This new generation, however, rejects the rejectionism of their parents, and reestablishes ties with the Central Committee which is now seen as finally getting its fucking act together and about to launch its great program and purpose and proposal to guide all its loyal followers and agents into the bright new future. This is exactly what the new generation wants to hear, and they're, like, totally all enthusiastic and shit about the future.

But somehow -- well, you know how it is -- the Central Committee has some untimely deaths, some illnesses -- deadlines slip -- meetings are canceled -- some key documents are lost and have to be rewritten from scratch -- the offices burn down under questionable circumstances.

1992: Disillusionment is palpable. Having delayed childbearing to compensate temporally for their own teenage parents, the once fired-up generation of bastards starts pumping out eminently legitimate offspring, with only lackluster lip-service paid in their upbringing to the great cause brought here by their great-great-great grandparents.

2005: We are the 12 and 13 and 11 year old great-great-great grandchildren of people who came to this country so dedicated to a cause that they were willing to die for it without even knowing what it was. Instead they lived a death to pass on that cause to ultimately us and we would be disgracing 100 years of throbbing deathful human life, to not act when given the opportunity they and their children and grandchildren, and we and our parents and grand parents have till now been denied.

The Central Committee has informed us that now is the time for us to carry out our noble purpose by means of a highly-specific, highly-organized, low-cost, operation with universal impact on all nations and all peoples' lives.

And, like, what's so really fucking cool is, we're all just a buncha 11-13 year olds who're gonna just do things that any 11-13 year olds might do and with -- not guns or bombs or advanced weapons systems or biological or chemical or nuclear devices -- but with things, you know, that anybody can buy at any 7-11.

And so, apparently our purpose, and our great-great-great- grandparents belated purpose, is to bring down civilization. For the Hell of it. The great purpose that drove great-great-great grandma and great-great-great grandpa to come to this country all fired up and full of hope only to see that hope dashed again and again, generation after generation.

So, OK, get ready everybody. We skirt the border between pre-pubescence and full-blown pubescence, and we're gettin' ready to bring down the world with Redi-Whip.

To be continued....

permanent link to this article

As a result, or ironically (depending on what point in history you are speaking from, and currently, you are speaking from none) lanes 1-4 are virtually empty. Also, it is the desert. So you floor it, hoping to just get across and worry about repairs on the other side.

You drive through a barren stretch where they don't even bother to cover over the abandoned nuclear triggers along the roadside with sanitary napkins as is the custom here since the end of last year's Civil Revolutionary War.

And though they (the triggers) are free for the taking, people still buy and sell them for exorbitant prices by bullshitting along the edge of logic and talking along the edge of each others' vocabularies, till a sale is made and everybody breaks out in a broad smile over the continued bright future of detonation.

There has not been enough dope grown in all human history put together that compressed and smoked in one hit could get you through this stretch now. At the very least, you have to pull over and empty your gut in the scrub several times.

But back in the car with your mouth wiped off, you approach the speed of dark, which is double the speed of light so, of course nobody can EVER see you. It's at these speeds that no number of strategic catastrophes can affect the golden rule of selfishness: do unto yourself as you would have others do unto themselves, and let's keep it that way.

In fact the war that created the very desert you are now driving through was fought over this proposition vs. its opposite rival claimant for being the actual golden rule of selfishness: do unto yourself as you would have yourself do unto yourself.

There is no place for others in the golden rule of selfishness, the supporters of this alternate proposition maintained.

Eventually you get to the other side of the desert which you're now so fucking fed up with that when you get home, you immediately sit down and write a complex highly metaphorical novel about the ocean and the train, about a train that runs along the edge of the ocean.

This was clearly the heaviest metaphor possible (including within its domain, for example, stuff like head-on collisions of millions of tons of steel doing 2 X 60 mph being simultaneously washed over by vast intercontinental tidal waves) so when other metaphor writers see it they just throw up their hands and say, well, why bother writing any more metaphors since that's easily the heaviest fucking metaphor anyone could ever possibly write and thereby reduces anyone else who even TRIES to write another metaphor to being just another loser puttering around totally in the shadow of the great metaphor, trying to sprout and grow some nano seed metaphor without water or sun.

And that includes even you, and all your future attempts to use any other possible metaphor in public. But you take it in stride and without missing a beat you start a foundation, a think tank, and a popular journal all dedicated exclusively to metaphors of what it's like to have all your cool new metaphors ignored cause everyone thinks that this one fucking metaphor says it all to the point of blowing away all others, and so if you're not gonna be 110% literal, then just shut the fuck up and take it.

permanent link to this article

And the blame for all this, the man lays, with the wild approval of the audience, at the feet of the robotic phoniness of the world of commerce and its inhabitants and the robotic phoniness of the world of politics and its inhabitants and the robotic phoniness of the world of academia and its inhabitants and the robotic phoniness of the world of work and its inhabitants and the robotic phoniness of the world of childhood and its inhabitants and the robotic phoniness of the world of personhood and its inhabitants and even, even, even the robotic phoniness of the fucking world of play and ITS inhabitants.

And the man, who couldn't be much older than Krishnamurti was at approximately the same age and has hair that looks sandy in full sunlight, goes on, in a mocking tone, about those pathetic losers who think they can respond to this robotic phoniness in all aspects of being by getting on board the wildly popular Backdoor Express to Scumbag Sainthood -- by being a bigger scumbag than everybody else.

"Well, it won't work!" he tells them. But fortunately he's come to show them another way, even though the utterly stupid brutal way he's just described has actually been working at least 60% of the time, but of course the only reason it's working is because of the universal law of everything always working out fucking backwards no matter what the fuck you fucking do!

There's an extended moment of silence in the audience as everyone thinks to his or her or itself about how it's more like 99.9% of the time that everything always works out fucking backwards, and then goes on to run through the 10 or 12 most recent instances of this everything always working out fucking backwards -- with most from probably just moments ago.

When the silence finally hits its inherent (genetically determined?) limit, the naked sandy-haired man who not only looks like the middle-aged Krisnamurti, but also like the young Meir Baba and like the way Richard Lenz looks in heaven, continues on.

"OK, so the REAL reason for all this", he says, "is that the NEW world is behind you now. And it's honking its horn and making all kinds of gestures at you with the usual suspect finger. So you will just have to get out of the way. And I am here to tell you how to get the fuck out of the way with style and grace."

But just as he's about to do this, there's a knock on the stadium door and a film crew shows up and starts shooting a scene all around him. It's the scene where all the protagonists drive up in their pickup trucks, get out and methodically shoot each other dead, one at a time, till 10-20 are lying on the ground with many broken blood capsules all around and only one woman left to lift the head and shoulders of a body off the dirt, cradle it in her bloody arms, and cry.

Now, in order to continue on and still be heard above the din of production, the speaker has to start telling inane anecdotes like the one about [inane anecdote deleted] and when that doesn't work, he shifts to the oldest crowd pleaser in the book.

"First there is history," he says, and the crowd perks up its ears, "which is bullshitting with 'facts.' And then there is opinion, which is bullshitting with bullshit itself. And since the human mind is made of the same fucking genes as peas and cabbage, pure, perfect bullshit (or horseshit) is the medium it grows best in -- so let's all just get out there and bullshit our asses off...!!!"

At which point, of course, the audience rises to its feet and cheers wildly en masse like somebody just told them their town is the hardest rockin town in the USA -- and probably the world. And the film crew has to suspend shooting the final shoot out death scene today cause there's so much fucking noise, they can't even hear themselves, you know, think.

permanent link to this article

They have momentarily separated themselves from the others on the retreat. The retreat is for people who are trying to enter the backdoor to sainthood by being the biggest scumbags they can be.

This approach to sainthood is based on the theory that if you incessantly push the boundaries of brutality, stupidity, and just being an all around scumbag, eventually there comes a point where people will say "NOBODY could be that brutal and stupid and that much of a scumbag -- this guy (or gal) must really be some really weird new kind of saint -- testing us -- or showing us how really awful being a scumbag can be and so therefore we shouldn't all go out and be any kind of scumbag whatsoever."

However, as everyone knows, this is the most dangerous road to sainthood because so few are chosen. And so 99.999% of those who apply to become saints and check the box that says they're gonna get there by being their own inner biggest scumbag will not succeed at becoming saints no matter how hard they try or even how deserving they are, and so, then, will be left with nothing, NOTHING, other than just to continue on being just the same utter fucking scumbags they have worked so hard at being in the now dashed hopes of becoming its utter fucking-most opposite, because now they don't know anything else.

Julie, one of the two people on the beach says to Faye, the other, "I think we're the two biggest scumbags here. None of those other losers are ever gonna become saints, because half of them don't know the first thing about being REAL scumbags."

Faye says, "which means that if they actually did get to become saints, they wouldn't know the first thing about doing THAT either, whereas you and I know that as soon as WE become Saints the first thing we're gonna do is just get sooooo Laaaaaaaaayed...."

"By like everything that moves," says Julie.

"And I like so fucking wanna get out of this world too," says Faye. "Especially because" -- and she motions to the other members of the retreat out on Boat 5 in the Ocean -- "when those losers find out they aren't gonna be saints, the world is gonna have these people roaming around in it who are not only failed saints but they're also failed scumbags."

"Whoa!" says Julie, "Watch out for that shit!"

"And the real reason I wouldn't wanna stay in the world with those failed scumbags," says Faye, "is because once WE become saints and blow the whistle on this whole scumbag-to-saint scam, then everybody who's left stuck in the world, when they see an utter fucking scumbag they won't be able to just say anymore 'oh he or she is JUST an utter fucking scumbag,' but they'll have to stop and think, 'now, this utter fucking scumbag may be an utter fucking scumbag not because he or she actually IS an utter fucking scumbag, but because he or she had wanted so desperately to become a great loving saint that they have made the greatest possible sacrifice to try to get there but have maybe made a wrong choice, or not tried HARD enough, or maybe they just came along at the wrong time and there just weren't enough slots for saints open at that time even though he or she had done everything he or she possibly could and in other times would have unquestionably become a saint, or maybe he or she SHOULD have been a saint this time but some behind-the-scenes shenanigans had caused him or her to be unjustly aced out of an otherwise totally deserved sainthood...' -- and so, if you're in a world where every time you see an utter fucking scumbag you have to think all this, then you'll probably never be able to decide or think or act and, as a result of mass inertia, the world will evaporate back to pure information, without pattern or memory."

permanent link to this article

The issue became so divisive among cabinet members (as it were) that it had to be referred to the Senate where every member (as it were) wanted to name the cruise missile after his own dick, if he had one, till the debate became so rancorous and destructive that the Supreme Court had to step in.

But the stalemate had already lasted years and during that time we were attacked by nuclear bombs several thousand times and now all our key cities were wiped out, our electrical production was shut down, and clean water was so hard to find that people were forming into small mobs and killing each other to drink the saliva and blood of the dead, and meanwhile we were unable to strike back because we hadn't yet decided whose dick our main weapon was to be named after.

Finally the president, from the temporary White House in Vancouver because the one in Washington had been burned down by the British, came up with a compromise to name the cruise missile after Klaus Kinski's dick, Klaus Kinski, which also helped assuage the Secretary of Defense since even though the new cruise missile wasn't gonna be named after his dick, Nastassia Kinski, it was gonna be named after the dick of the father of his dick's namesake, and 2 outta 3 ain't bad. And also the nation was saved.

But then, why is it called the cruise missile and not the klaus kinski missile? Well, it's because just before the Klaus Kinski missile went into production, Klaus Kinski called the White House to say that he'd changed the name of his dick from Klaus Kinski to Tom Cruise because he thought being so self-centered as to name your dick after yourself in a post-war era wasn't gonna cut it (as it were).

PS: when the president heard this, he was so moved that he stopped naming his dick after his vice president and named it after his own first name but with a "y" added at the end, followed by "boy" -- a formulation that had proven successful for him in the past when passing out names for other dicks.

PPS: Meanwhile, the guy who invented the cruise missile felt so bad about the way things had turned out, that, to get the vile taste out of his mouth, he invented the schmooze missile. The schmooze missile was like a cruise missile except instead of going out and just cruising and cruising and cruising, up and down the streets of your town, relentlessly searching for its target, never stopping never "delivering its ordnance" till there is a 99.9% match on the little match-o-meter that comprises most of its neo-cortex, instead of doing that, the schmooze missile went up and down the streets of your town schmoozing everyone in sight, regardless of who they were or their station in life, sometimes even knocking on doors of total strangers and inviting itself in for dinner and all the while schmoozing the living fuck out of its hosts so they don't even realize when their refrigerator is empty and all their pots are dirty in the sink and they are still burping and narcolepting out while the schmooze missile is back out on the street, schmooozing schmoozing schmoozing until its touched 99.9 per cent of all people in creation with its loving kindness salvation object.

permanent link to this article

The status quo called today and said it doesn't wanna be maintained anymore. Suddenly, it wants all its complacent blind-faith sycophants to rise up and trash the living shit out of it instead. So, like, what's come over the status quo and what can we do about?

Whatever the case, please rest assured that we continue to take full responsibility for setting up the system and setting its initial conditions, and pushing the start button, but, as you are aware, there is no way in these types of systems to be able to know or predict at initialization-time whether the component parts of that system, so initialized, will quickly devolve down to all bein', yah know, just a buncha douchebags, or not.

Therefore, though we deeply regret this having occurred in your instance, the only reparation we are authorized to offer you at this time, is free admission to the brand new modern sports arena full of well-dressed angry people seated in folding chairs in the bleachers in front of an empty stage, stamping their feet almost rhythmically and chanting, in near-unison, RE - FUND! RE - FUND! RE - FUND!

Sincerely,

Your Agent, Jesus (it couldn't've been known from start conditions and laws -- only playing it out reveals that a buncha douchebags are always instantiated early and forever) Christ

PS: I have chosen to hide and live in inconspicuous places on this return to earth in order not to spook anybody, by my presence, into cessations of brutality that might disrupt the promise of love.

PPS: If you need to be healed or brought back from the dead, you can catch me later at the boycott of the show about the day when your best drugs don't seem that strong but suddenly your weaker drugs are working better than ever. Mostly everybody there will be lying in wait for expectation to be wrong and passing the time playing recreational social structure until it transforms into recreational soap opera with the addition of a little optional factory-emotion.

permanent link to this article

Concurrent with this ad campaign, recruitment centers will be opened everywhere in towns and cities all over the world, in schools, churches, shopping malls, factories, whore houses, casinos, bathrooms, Starbucks, Wal-Marts, gun shows, McDonalds, county fairs, cranberry bogs, sporting events, and doctors' offices.

These centers will be recruiting for a new army, and will accept into it, no questions asked, all the hundreds of millions of people who come away drooling from our ad campaign.

These people will then all be trained together in the most advanced techniques of warfare, and all given the same advanced weapons, guns, RPGs, and then all sent back to their individual home nations wearing a uniform specific to that nation.

Then, each of these new national pickup armies will be sent, all expenses paid, each from his home nation as a unit representing that nation, to Antarctica where each army will be given its own hill of ice to defend and then all armies will proceed to fight each other to the death, with daily satellite images broadcast world-wide to show the folks at home the big picture of the shifting landscape of slaughter.

Then, after however many years, when the armies have all finally exterminated each other and themselves and only one man is left standing, that man will be flown back to his nation, which is declared the winner, and all the youth of that nation, along with all the youths of all other participating nations, will be flown free of charge to a magnificent multi-billion dollar city, recently constructed specifically for this event in a relatively isolated location within the borders of the winning nation, to celebrate the great victory of the host country -- this celebration to consist mostly of trashing the living shit out of the glamorous glorious city just constructed, until it's razed to the ground and everybody's drunk out of their minds and has fucked virtually everyone else alive -- since all the fuckable people on earth have been flown, all expenses paid, to the glorious city, in advance of the celebration, for the express purpose of being fucked to death by the legitimate celebrants of the great military victory or whatever happened in Antarctica a couplea years ago that we only saw these schematic satellite photos of.

Unfortunately, of course, after this -- since all the willing warriors of the world are now dead, and all the fuckable people too -- all war will have been eliminated and all sex, and then, once (using analogous techniques) all religions, the family, the bourgeoisie, the working class, the aristocracy, and all corporate capitalist robot shitbags have been gotten rid of too, maybe then we can all just kick back and have a fucking decent world around here, for a change.

permanent link to this article

A few people were still sitting in the audience claiming they had invested some emotion before the tragedy ended the performance, and now it was still owed them back.

The manager (of what, it wasn't clear) had to be called to try to deal with them.

"People are each others' tools each others' robots," the disgruntled audience members' self-appointed spokesman told him. "Each person is the only real human and all the others are machines put here either as helpmates or as cruel jokes or both."

The manager thought about saying "Nooses are never useless" in this situation, but he knew it would be misunderstood and counter-productive, though he knew that being misunderstood doesn't always have to be counterproductive and, in fact,... but that was for another time.

So instead he said, "Uhhh, yes, but I'm sure you'll also agree that the market is here precisely for this purpose: to create the appearance of emotion among these non-humans, as an interface to the one, the only true human, YOU (or ME)."

"So the market is about the movement of emotion, not about the movement or exchange of goods?" the audience member asked, ingenuously.

"Yes," the manager answered, knowingly, "Goods are just the cover story because people would rather be called materialist fuck bags than emotional dish rags -- and, anyway, they don't really exist as external matter, but only as neural patterns -- patterns of electrical activity -- but the same is true for emotions, so there really IS no difference between pure heartfelt emotion and the slimiest capitalist widget."

The spokesman nodded his head, the others however were still disgruntled but too emotionally drained to do anything about it. That's why they wanted their emotion back. So they'd be able to do something stupid about having lost it in the first place. And that something, once they finally did get it back after generations, became well-known and widely-practiced, decades hence, under the brand name: Emotional Suicide.

permanent link to this article

And then, fortunately, a voice in Joan's head rambled off a list of either charitable or not uncharitable acts she could do and promised her, if you can do all these, then you will not have to kill your baby. One iota.

She'd found early on that suicide pills alternated with viagra every half hour, cancelled each other out because death and erections cancelled each other out, with the resultant state being somewhere between a very middling high and a very limp depression, which most normals referred to, unironically, as normalcy.

Anyway, it was normal enough so she could listen to programs that began: "the following hour of programming may not be suitable for all listeners -- if you are one of these listeners please fuck off rather than calling the FCC and complaining about how, ooooo, these buncha assholes on the radio just fucking said fuck off", and not give a shit either way.

She also didn't give a shit either way because she knew that the main work of man is to cover up his enduring tribality, even if it's through abject banality, and through pretense that there actually exists a self not being totally controlled by signals sent from central casting.

But this was all just either a footnote to or the very essence of her job description as a highly paid Washington lobbyist for the leading maker of doctor prescription pads. It was her job to make sure that doctor prescription writing was NEVER computerized, thereby NOT disturbing the delicate balance between her company's need to survive and the 100,000 people who needed to die each year from taking the wrong drug or dosage due to the illegible or confusing or simply misread handwriting of the prescribing physician.

"Recreational pecking orders," she told the audience, "can no longer be left to the recreators." And after the wild deafening applause and yelps finally died down, she continued, explaining how, "We need them now in the real world. Unwanted genes are piling up in each of us as we speak -- unnecessary genes, counterproductive genes, we are moving too fast for biology and its bastard handmaiden chemistry."

But before continuing on she looked down at her watch and noticed it was "the cocktail hour" -- time to get smashed on your ass in preparation for passing out drunk, sleeping, waking up, and starting all over again, fresh, the next day.

permanent link to this article

So, if the answer to the question is it doesn't matter what the answer to the question is because it'll always BE a turd in the end whether it started that way or not or whether it was or wasn't that way when, from the distance, you were certain it was a bright shiny object that made trying to get to it worthwhile, then, if in the end there is always just a turd and you, then life must not be about the end but it must be about the journey. And the journey starts from absolutely nothing -- only empty desire.

So really, you're gonna need to join a fundamentalist group fast to tell you what to do with that desire.

And here's the group I recommend. (Cue intro music)

First, they are dedicated to making a frontal assault on history, and doing it the old-fashioned way: beginning from the present. So as long as you are a citizen of the now, you won't need any other pre-requisites to qualify.

Second, part of the first goal is to make nature look like an asshole. Because everybody thinks nature doesn't make mistakes. But they are here to say, uhhh, uhhhh,... well whatever.

Third, as a member of this group you will mostly 24 hours a day hang out in small stuffy stores that sell thousands of varieties of cold remedies that don't do any good, where you will pretty much be exposed to all the sicknesses and diseases of the city, and hopefully become the breeding ground or viral gene swap meet parking lot, for one of the great new plagues of 21st century man. Nothing helps disease more than people out for cures -- and capitalism, religion, fascism, art, and all other -isms and categories of culture.

Fourth, their tone (and yours should you join) is one of excessive politeness and utter precision of detail and emotion, and of oh yeah, if, in the end, you still don't like us, we can kill you all in under 11 seconds, so don't think we are disingenuous or hypocrites cause we are not -- we just look and talk and act that way for operational reasons.

Uhhh, one drawback to this movement is they are still focus-grouping what they are REALLY all about -- you know, once you scrape away the hollow rhetoric of exterminating the present in order to get a clear shot at exterminating the past.

But whatever they are for or against or why, whatever complex or simple system they offer for the way things are to be understood and the way things need to be, in the end it all has to lead to a huge battle where they have already begun to deploy their systems while the enemy is caught in the act of still hardwiring its response units.

So, in desperation, the enemy reflexively sends its children, more logos for the product known as family than actual beings, out as their first line of defense.

But all the children learned at school was mutual humiliation and suicide. So when your forces (let's assume you've joined the group -- and so this is what YOU've now got in store) come streaming down the public runways which modern man has constructed to each distinguishable aspect of his personality so as to try to preserve them despite being no longer needed, the children lay down a stream of vicious taunts about haircuts and shoes and being so yesterday or so 90's or so '03ish -- but they weren't in high school anymore, or even in any of the many replicants of high school situations known euphemistically as "adult situations".

They were just out there. Where nothing matters any more. Where the temperature was warm enough to go naked and not be concerned over not having clothes less than an hour away.

Your forces, instead of exterminating them in a puff of angel dust, lay out charts and flexible HDTV displays of charts of whole new societies so complexly fucked up that no one has any idea what's going on and no one wants to know -- but in the end, despite all this unnecessary bullshit, it all works -- and so ultimately all the bullshit must have NOT been so unnecessary, or, worse, must have not even BEEN bullshit.

But the children can't be convinced and so they do what they were trained to do, even though they'd, in the spirit of youth, resisted that training at the time: they turn their humiliation and homicide on themselves.

In the distance the adults watching this realize they have to act fast, even before they can finish their analyses and debug all the freshly soldered wiring. Fortunately, they have their core principles. Which state that consistency among and logic within ideas is an insult to the masses and will be dealt with via -- in the words of the sign in the tall grass outside the apartment of the girl next door -- armed response.

permanent link to this article

See, according to statistics, there's a middle. And in this middle there are, like, these 5.42 billion people, and then outside these 5.42 billion people there are .5 billion people on each side, distributed in ever-decreasing numbers as you move farther from the center, each side running down a steep slope of population distribution till, at the very bottom, there's only a handful (percentage-wise) of people left. These are the people who are both totally fucking insane enough to do absolutely fucking anything, and utterly fucking capable enough and smart enough to actually stand a chance of pulling off something that's absolutely fucking insane.

(In fact, it could be argued that REALLY, the only reason all you damn 6.41999 billion people out there are all here in the first place is just to provide a large enough statistical base to guarantee that there's always gonna be an adequate enough supply of flaming psycho lunatics capable of pulling off whatever insane stupidities it takes to keep civilization boring relentlessly forward and relentlessly backward, regardless of the tendencies of time. And the proof of this is just to look at where we are today and to realize that without these flaming hard-working dedicated psycho lunatics we wouldn't be where we are today.)

(So, hey all you 6 billion plus losers out there, stop feeling like you have no purpose in life because, if the last 5,400,000,000 of you didn't exist, the world would (statistically) only have about 60 high-performance psycho-lunatics to make things happen, barely enough to even kick-start a lo-level world civilization, instead of the well over 600 off-the-wall psycho-lunatics of love and peace and truth and beauty and righteousness and generosity and caring and giving and healing and fun and games that we have now. However, that means the first 600,000,000 of you are really contributing nothing compared to the last 5,400,000,000 of you so the first 600 million of you better watch out.)

So, OK, so any loser can get into outer space with enough money. But it's another story altogether to get into outer space using only objects normally found around the house. You know, like pots and pans, TV sets, can openers, DVD units, remote garage door openers, microwave ovens, etc. etc.

Fortunately, though, Burt Rutan and Martha Stewart had the guys at ImClone grab a set of chromosomes from each and stew them together in the big ImClone Clonerator thereby producing a 50% Burt Rutan 50% Martha Stewart clone (often known by straight people as a child), and this clone (child), named Stewart Rutan-Stewart, turned out to be of course the Mozart of building rocket ships that could get you into outer space made out of objects normally found around the house So of course by the time he was 8 he'd already won the much coveted Salinger Prize of 1 Million dollars for the first person who could build a rocket that would go into outer space made out of objects normally found around the house, which I was offering at the time because I wanted to go into outer space but didn't want to pay more than a million for the dubious privilege. I also didn't wanna go into outer space the same tired old way that everybody else always went into outer space and going in on a rocket that was made totally out of objects found lying around the house definitely wasn't gonna be the same way all those other loser astronauts went into outer space.

But, OK, the reason I am writing this is I am actually writing this FROM outer space, right now, where it turns out, getting back from outer space is much much harder than getting there, especially if you have gotten there in the first place using a launch vehicle and space craft made out of articles normally found around the house, because once you're in outer space and you wanna repair your rockets or space capsule or whatever or build a completely new one, you can't really expect to find articles normally found lying around the house there, because, you know, in outer space, apparently, there's no longer any HOUSE.

permanent link to this article