FUN YOU CAN HAVE #21:

Reading Letters to Penthouse out loud using Jimmy Stewart Voice.

THINGS NEVER SAID #53:

“There are these books that I’m never gonna read. They’re filled with equations. I don’t know how to read those things. All my life I’ve felt this large set of gears out there, just turning and churning and grinding away-it’s a machine of fate. I can’t see it. I can only sometimes hear it. I always feel it. It’s out there. I could switch it off if I could read the equations. I know that’s how it would work. But I just can’t get my head around those equations. I don’t even know where to start. And even if I started right now, kept at it, made steady progress-I’m too old to get it together in a timely fashion. I’ve already gone too far down this road of Sunday Funnies, and Sports Sections, and Box Office Top Tens, and Latest Movie Reviews, and Political Opinion Commentaries, and Society Pages, and Celebutante Gossip, and White House Scandals, and Forever Wars in the Middle East-the equations got me right where they want me. They profiled me as the Ultimate Reader of their Precision Narrative Outputs. I’m in my Proper Position. As per the equations. This is where they need me to be. And I’m grateful to have a place where I belong.”

PLACES YOU CAN GO #6:

The casino of your innermost avarice . . .

NOTIONAL HEADLINE #237:

OVER THE WEEKEND, AND AT THE BEHEST OF THE SAUDI AND ISRAELI GOVERNMENTS, PRESIDENT TRUMP ORDERED AN EXTENSIVE BOMBING CAMPAIGN OF IRAN WITH THE IMMEDIATE GOAL OF REGIME CHANGE, BUT WITH THE ULTIMATE GOAL OF GETTING AMERICANS TO FORGET ABOUT RISING COSTS OF LIVING, CLIMATE CATASTROPHE, PAY-FOR-PLAY CORRUPTION SCHEMES WITHIN THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION, I.C.E. DEATH SQUAD ATROCITIES, AND THE EPSTEIN FILES . . . VICE PRESIDENT VANCE TO OVERSEE THE INSTALLATION INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE OF A HUGE NEW COUCH WHICH IS SAID TO OFFER “JUST THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF GRIP AND PUSHBACK” . . . IN OTHER NEWS, A NEW ARTIFICIALLY INTELLIGENT ROBOT TOY DEVELOPED BY A PENTAGON CONTRACTOR WILL BE EQUIPPED WITH ADORABLE MINI-TASERS TO SHOCK YOUR INSUFFERABLE BRATS INTO COMPLIANCE . . .

LOADING SCREEN WISDOM #47:

EARN BONUSES TO FEEL EXCEPTIONAL.

BURNING QUESTIONS IN A UNIVERSE OF MYSTERY #96:

Did I leave my switchblade comb on the bus?

EMERGENCE #8:

. . . Libby didn’t know if it was right or wrong to enjoy watching Danton’s Tower, a movie based on her life that depicted her killing scores of people-

-but, yeah, this movie rocks! Doesn’t have much to do with what really happened. They show me as this very striking looking blonde lady in a powered armor getup, which I guess they did because they needed their protagonist to have an actual face as opposed to a faceplate, but that still weirds me out. She’s good, though, she kicks ass. They have multiple scenes of her eating all those military rations. I think it’s a thing with this director. He always has people eating. I watched that other one where there was the scene with the dudes eating a huge meal, and then the bad guys showed up, so they started stuffing their faces, and making to-go boxes and doggy bags, and the one guy slams a whole pot of coffee, and then in the big shootout they’re still munching on drumsticks as people are getting blown away, I liked that.

Aside from her brain, Libby hadn’t had any organs in a lifetime and a half. The producers initially thought they could push her as a new kind of cyborg heroine, easily manifested by some computer graphics team. And then they did a focus group which conjured some oracular market research suggesting they go with an actual star. The fictional Libby seemed destined to eclipse the reality based Libby. So she did a string of hostile interviews shitting all over the project.

But this kinda rocks. Even back then I think I just wanted more money because the blonde lady was some sort of big deal back then. So when I heard about her signing on to the picture I just knew I should agitate for a bigger dragon’s hoard. But it was nothing personal. I don’t remember it being personal.

Libby tended to forget about her paranoid outbursts from back in the day. She saw Illuminati and Rosicrucian plots around every corner, and she was perfectly happy to call out the warring conspiracies as the causes of her disenfranchisement. A decade of therapy got it all under control, but it was touch and go for a dire stretch. Libby even showed up at the lead actress’s luxury compound threatening to launch an all-out attack on “all Illuminati bastards,” before a crisis negotiation team arrived to talk her into powering down her weapons.

Oh . . . there was some drama back then, wasn’t there?

Libby, encased within her throne, betrayed no discomfort, nor did her faceplate express any hint of inner turmoil. No lights illuminated her house as she mainlined the movie. Her space offered plenty of rooms and furniture, and sometimes she even lived her days as though she needed to turn on lights and make fancy dinners-she even hired houseguests now and again when her therapist pushed her to do it-but, no, she didn’t really need to do any of that meats-people stuff unless the mood struck her. 

Yeah . . . goddamn, I remember how bad it got . . . but those movie people worked all kinds of sleazy hardball stratagems, didn’t they? I remember the producer guy later told me he “respected my balls” for all the wildass shit I pulled to get my backend . . .

In the movie, Chief Executive Officer Danton Pusser waltzed with his secretary, the innocent and tragic Justine. The movie version of Pusser was a gothically depraved corporate oligarch decked out in a Dracula-ized Mao Suit. Sweet, mousy Justine-mostly invented for the screenplay-wore a kind of militarized French maid costume. Boss and secretary waltzed about a vast ballroom that could’ve been an outtake from Citizen Kane’s Xanadu.

But it all worked out in the end. I got my dump trucks of cash. The movie busted blocks. I even started therapy. Who cares if it’s a bunch of goth kid horseshit? The real life Pusser was just a dickhead in an organization man uniform. When I killed him I thought I’d waxed some middle manager. It took a month to identify him from his DNA. We were edgy that he might’ve slipped through our fingers, but so fucking relieved when we confirmed his corpse residue . . .

Movie Pusser led Justine in and out and around a holographic fantasia of some cyclopean glittering future city. 

Yeah, none of this is real. Pusser was trim for his age, he could’ve fucked if he wanted to, but he had been married to the same woman for twenty-five years. And the dude was bald, but he made it work for him, he looked like the man who had hustled his hair away clambering for the big brass ring or whatever. He didn’t have a luxurious mane of night dark anime villain hair. He didn’t try to seduce his secretary, or gift her any vampire’s ball Halloween threads, none of that. There was his personal assistant. She was close to him. But it was all above board.

Movie Pusser looks into Justine’s eyes. Some critics interpreted this as a Dracula hypnosis thing. Justine, every bit the image of a shy librarian, averts her gaze. Movie Pusser uses finger and thumb to lift her face back into position. The frame is filled with the executive’s androgynously handsome face.

Now, as I recall . . . the personal assistant did seemingly join her boss in death. But that was all very murky. I think I was told she’d been injured in the initial assault. I might’ve even been the one who fired the shot . . . I’m trying to remember her name, because it wasn’t Justine . . .

It all happened so long ago.

I mean, who still watches movies?

Sometimes Libby liked to pretend to be the last movie watcher for whom all of cinema had been conjured into existence.

It’s fun to pretend . . .

FUN YOU CAN HAVE #20:

Stockpile Nerf weapons.

Hoard snacks and soft drinks.

Construct a pillow fort.

Raise an army of action figures, vehicles, and playsets.

Issue a series of deranged communiques declaring your breakaway republic.

Have activities to do while you wait for government forces to arrive to lay siege to your pillow fort: Sudoku, crossword puzzles, Nintendo 3DS, coloring books, etc.

When the little plastic Army Men arrive to give you trouble, order your own troops to fight to the last man. Tell ‘em to fire every bullet, and then use their rifles as clubs . . . and if those rifles break, well, just pick up the man next to you, and swing him as a club! And once every last fighting figure has been irreparably shattered, just howl and snarl and hiss and caterwaul and bellow and screech and scream ‘til the enemy completely loses their fucking minds!

 . . . in the end, there you stand. The spent Nerf gun in your hands. Your eyes wild with battle lust. And yet . . . you have come to know the bitterness of victory . . .

“I’ve destroyed all my enemies, but I still want to fight!”

Freeze frame as you start to smash yourself in the head with your spent Nerf gun . . .

F.A.Q. #27:

Q: Did you burn ants with a magnifying glass when you were a kid?

A: I tried to do that on a few occasions . . . actually, I had way more fun feeding ants to ant lions. That was like my personal sarlacc pit!

PLACES YOU CAN GO #5:

The now defunct college radio station within whose disused office you will find a boxful of vinyl 45s featuring B-sides of Hoyt Axton’s theme song for Mitchell . . .

THE NEW OBVIOUS #48:

I bet you that measles-for all that it appreciates the anti-vaccination movement’s efforts to bring it back into the mainstream-really kinda resents the anti-vaxxers.

Like measles just thinks to itself, “These anti-vaxx people make it too damn easy! They’re hypnotized by the steady flow of disinformation pouring out of their screens. They keep voting all these greedy crooks into office who burn down their government from the inside. They aren’t willing to even skim the Wikipedia article on how vaccines work. I know I should be grateful . . . but I just don’t respect them. They make it too easy for me. I spend hours listening to grindset podcasts to get myself psyched up to work, work, work . . . and for what? I’m pretty much on autopilot seven days outta the week. They’ve robbed me of any sense of earned achievement!”

It’s tougher than it looks to be measles these days . . .

NOTIONAL HEADLINE #236:

PRESIDENT TRUMP UNLIKELY TO REFUND TARIFFS-DESPITE THE SUPREME COURT’S RECENT RULING-LARGELY DUE TO THE COLLECTED TAXES ALREADY BEING SPENT ON A COMBINATION OF GHISLAINE MAXWELL’S LUXURY ACCOMMODATIONS, CRYPTO RUG PULLS, AND A NATIONWIDE NETWORK OF EXTRALEGAL I.C.E. DETENTION FACILITIES.

PHOTO #5:

I took all these really great photos.

But there was this one that was simply perfect.

Captured the instant of someone walking off the job that they hated for so long.

It was, of course, a selfie, and, no, they didn’t actually let me quit.

It was a whole thing. 

They’d invested so much in me, and they wanted me to feel valued-they gave me awards, I built out that fuckin’ network-and, honestly, I didn’t feel so bad as I initially thought . . .

But I was also on five different non-prescription amphetamines. Didn’t do the sleeping thing, not much of it, didn’t miss it, either, not for a long while. The sources of my award winning productivity, my value. My emotions were separated out into two kinds, broadly speaking, and most of my “up” vibes were constantly surfacing, and pretty much all of my “downs” were in some kind of intrapersonal blacksite. And I thought that made all the sense. I mean, it did . . . but then things started getting loose from that blacksite. Which was interesting. My downs and my ups were working together at last. That was even more interesting. Because then I started doing what I actually wanted to do. I took all of the pictures all of the time. I even forgot that I had “quit,” which was funny. The bosses did a real good job of getting some of me to buy into this sort of temporary amnesia thing, but most of me hadn’t actually forgotten anything, which is why I persisted with my photography project past all sense and warnings and fears.

And then I got fired not too long after that for taking so many damn photos in the office, which was strictly forbidden, but I didn’t give a shit, because I just wanted to capture people inside that space that wasn’t supposed to be documented like that. And then I told the world about all those cameras and microphones in the restrooms, got a big thing in some magazine I’d never read before in my life, spent years in court, dictated a tell-all thing to some mercenary ghostwriter, sold it to some independent producer who sold it to some studio who sold it to some streamer-

Most shocking of all? It kinda broke through the noise for a solid seventy-six hours or so. 

Not much, in the scheme of things, but how much speed could I ever ingest to compete with the Trumps and the Swifts and the Climate Catastrophes of this vacuous world, y’know?

I did okay.

But honestly, I never set out to be a whistleblower.

I just followed the leader to some weird places is all.

The company had-has-all kinds of surveillance: keystrokes, metal detectors, explosive sniffers, drug testing, background checks, cameras all over the place, microphones all over the place, open plan offices, offsite mandatory social gatherings, apps on everyone’s mobile-really, my whole photography adventure was just like me-working it out with some next level hilarious Speedy Logic-trying to be like the company, to beat the company at its own shit. As it turns out, my firing offense wasn’t breaking the rules so much as it was a kind of blasphemy.

The selfie holds up, even if it turned out to be a picture of a “fake quitter.” 

People just screen out the convolutions of my story no matter how many times I tell it, and the movie based on my life did the same thing. 

I think I’ll quit again, just go along with the Hollywood version. 

Actually, the selfie that got memed the most is the one they staged with the lead actor . . .

NOTIONAL HEADLINE #235:

AT THE INAUGURAL MEETING OF THE BOARD OF PEACE PRESIDENT TRUMP TOOK THE OPPORTUNITY DURING A RAMBLING, NONSENSICAL SPEECH TO DECLARE WORLD WAR III.

FANTASY MASHUP FORCE #31:

The ending of Neon Genesis Evangelion Episode 26 (1996)

+

The ending of The Game (1997)

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An overload of people from your life surrounding you to congratulate you for making some huge existential leap into some great unknown whatchamafuck something or other . . .