So before we could get down to business about this whole Doped-Up Baseball thing which threatened to end our world, there had to be a few moments of smarmy gossip to loosen everybody up and create unit cohesion.

But these moments wound up lasting hours, as we ran through all known celebrities, their sickening ejaculations and breath-taking impotencies, their wretched failures and even worse failures, and then ran through friends and acquaintances that only one person at a time knew so he or she could be pulling it totally out of his or her respective ass just to keep the increasingly smarmy stories coming and maintain strict avoidance of the reason we were here in the first place.

And after we'd finished with people, we burned through animals and objects, and then we let abstract concepts and ideas have it, till, finally, by late evening, we'd spewed the smarmiest slime way past even the farthest edge of abstraction where the only place left after that was just the popular filth everyone knew about the metaverse -- about how it used to pay failed universes to savagely fist it on their way down while it watched nostalgic depressing videos of way before the beginning of time, and cried.

I figured at least it had to end right there and somebody'd clear his or her throat and say, uhhh, I guess we'd better get down to business.

But somehow, that never happened. Or when it happened everybody just laughed and kept going because now they all wanted to take back the lies they'd just told and replace them with the TRUTH they'd been withholding for so long for national security reasons, or national obscurity reasons -- stories that they KNEW were true but had been previously afraid to tell -- because of the political, economic or social climate -- stories about beloved and esteemed celebrities of the past paying prostitutes or fans to fist the shit out of them while they watched video reruns of their big hit show, or the biggest moment of their career.

Each story went successively farther back in time, through celebrities long since deceased and on through certain early saints who everyone knew had paid prostitute angels to fist the "living" crap out of them while watching, from heaven, acts of purest love and charity done by humans to humans down on earth.

Once they ran out of these stories, everyone started calling everybody else's story a lie claiming they were all just taking a long-established formula and plugging in their most despised or random celebrity, in order to win what had apparently become, instead of a trying to solve the Totally Doped-Up Baseball problem back on earth, a pissing contest to see who could come up with the most bogus celebrity fisting story -- making use of the kind of perfectly formed lies that no one could ever find the truth to.

But what if all the stories WERE true, and there was a pattern in reality such that if you went out now and took a slice of the world, a significant per centage of mankind would be out there paying heavily-tattooed transsexuals and multi-pierced dominatrices to violently fist the crap out of them while they watched videos of their most profound, successful, compassionate, or heroic act or achievement in life.

We continued debating this fine point till finally, as the end of our time on the ISS approached, someone did stand up and clear his or her throat and suggest, without missing a beat, that maybe, as long as somehow we were onto this whole fisting thing anyway, and hadn't yet crossed over to the whole coprophilia thing, how, since everybody was already doing it constantly all over the world, that maybe the solution to the Totally Doped-Up Baseball problem, not to make too facile a segue to it, was, nevertheless, to come up with A WHOLE NEW baseball league that would be fresh and exciting and based on a whole new conception of man, and would reach out to hearts and minds at their deepest most innermost levels where something like SAVAGE FISTING BASEBALL could turn the world around and the population would totally forget about Totally Doped-Up Baseball and all its other totally doped up offshoots that were still springing up at an ever-accelerating rate back down on earth as we whiled away the time up here on the ISS, eating all kinds of rare generic space station food on the international community's dime.

We were still debating whether to go with this or not, when the space shuttle showed up outside, honking its horn and occasionally slamming the solar panels with its nosecone to indicate it was time for us to get the fuck out of the International Space Station.

But even if we decided, the giants on whose shoulders we were standing notwithstanding, to bring Savage Fisting Baseball back to earth, we still had tons of mind-bending detail to work out before we could even say what it actually was.

Eventually we decided that being on the ISS was just too good a deal and, you know, once you stop vomiting, and get used to the incessant hum, it's all the free food you can eat, a great view, and anytime you wanna let off steam, it's just a short space walk and a few strips of Reynolds Wrap to take out all cable television for the world.

So we put up signs in the portholes and locked the door and cut off radio transmission, so we could totally focus for the next weeks and months, on coming up with the field design and bats and balls and rules and salary structures, and positions, and farm systems, and high school and college programs for Savage Fisting Baseball -- as a way to undercut and replace Totally Doped-Up Baseball, and the totally Doped Up juggernaut now brewing and deploying down on earth, reaching its apex in the totally Doped-Up Olympics, set in Santa Cruz this summer, which had already sold more tickets than the last three deathly boring Supposedly Totally Anti-Doped Up Olympics of 2000, 1996, and 1992, combined.

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