"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.]

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