Two Words . . .
. . . PROTEIN CIGARETTES.
They don't even have to contain actual protein in 'em. Just print the words PROTEIN CIGARETTES on the packaging.
Hire on a bunch of social media influencers to hype 'em as part of the Keto Diet or Atkins or whatever happens to be trending inside the misinformation cesspools of AM radio, podcasts, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc.
And then you know what you do?
You kick the fuck back and let your eyes go WIIIIIDE as a mountain range of cash money manifests before you.
That's all you gotta do!
. . .Colonic Interregnum.
It's basically that uncertain period when I decide I'm no longer in love with Taco Bell, and I'm sending longing looks Arby's way. But I'm so indecisive I just do the big bag of generic artificially fruit flavored cereal I bought at Sam's Club for a few days. All is uncertainty. All is chaos. Will I get back together with Taco Bell, or am I already fatally tempted by that cheesy roast beef?
How many licks does it take?
The world . . . will have to forensically reconstruct my dietary decisions by a close reading of my strangest bowel movements yet!
. . . BALLISTIC POLYPS . . .
This is one of the most sought after special attacks in Original Recipe ReDumption Earth.
Basically, this devastating maneuver broke the game in the original release, and was replaced by the Host Displacement Party Combo, which was considered a low point of ReDumption Earth: DX: Death Xtra Edition.
The Host Displacement Party Combo involved spending time as the writing staff for a late night talk show host. You've got to mine monologue materials from the depths of a snorted Adderall mania tunnel; you gotta grind out an appropriately dense number of topical jokes and one-liners to keep pace with the spiraling coruption of an increasingly idiotic and authoritarian political fuckedscape; add in just a dash of self-awareness to lampshade the host's preening narcissism; make sure the diction is friendly to the alcoholic slurring people have been noticing of late; weave in some plugs'n'panders for the network's various garbage fire sitcoms, cop shows, and talent contests that just go on and on and on season after season; and, most importantly, contain your bile at being forever below the line while the hack-master catches all the glory-
If you can do all of that, and not get fired for a five year stretch then you unlock the Host Displacement Party Combo, which allows you-via teleportation-to switch places with the host during filming hours in order to unleash a devastating salvo of burns'n'roasts upon your Enemy.
Now, these attacks don't do damage, per se, and it's not actually possible to attain victory over Enemy with this special attack. However, certain Enemies have unusually high Media Consumption stats, and so the shock of recognition of being mildly razzed by someone from TV that they've watched clips of on YouTube causes them to rank down in various obscure effectiveness metrics. The rumor has long been that these systems are actually non-functional in the official release, but the surrealistic spaghetti code revealed by hacking tools has neither confirmed nor debunked anything for certain.
The only thing that can be said for certain is that the Host Displacement Party Combo is a very poor substitute for the beloved, if game-breaking, Ballistic Polyps of Original Recipe ReDumption Earth.
And it wasn't a cakewalk to unlock Ballistic Polyps.
Oh, no, friend.
In fact, you had to walk the Ripped'N'Torn Doom Colon Path. Not a cake in sight anywhere along this desolate stretch.
First of all, you had to get your Cussed, Ornery, and Irascibility stats maxed out. Secondly, you had to willfully skip doctor appointments and annual check-ups. Thirdly, amp up your intake of jet fuel analogue grain alcohol, raw red meat, and bitterness over relationships gone bad. The bitterness is difficult to track precisely, but a good rule of thumb is that anytime a dialogue choice involves saying, "She fucked me," or "That asshole fucked me over good" or "This whole world is run by assholes that fuck you nonstop" you're on the right path. Fourthly, you had to adamantly refuse every single colonoscopy opportunity. If you get even one buttscope then all of your other efforts are for nothing. You may as well start eating right, swear off the sauce, and embrace forgiveness of all the people that done you wrong 'cause everybody's got their reasons in this life.
But if you remain true to the Ripped'N'Torn Doom Colon Path, then you will eventually be offered the Ripped'N'Torn Sheriff of Spite questline, where you must bring Law and Order and Shotgun Headshots to the mean old Texas town of Spite, wherein you must blast and buffalo your way through a tangled tale of Mexican cartels and gringo gunrunners and ex-CIA hitters gone bank robbin' and the one seniorita who stole your heart once upon a sultry August moon and if you survive all of that . . . a strange sensation shall be abornin' inside your asshole . . . something's just gotta cut loose, pardner!
The elaborate Kingsglaive level cutscene that ensues basically involves a counterattack by the leftovers of the ex-CIA bank robbing gang, a bunch of gunsels looking to get deep into the payback. But you're so done with this town of Spite. You just drop your pants and shotgun those reprobates with a load of self-sharpening polyp shrapnel. Maybe one of the gnarliest depictions of grotesque full body obliterations since the original Parasite Eve.
The Ballistic Polyps are yours, pardner!
Now you can start walking that cake forever!
. . . CONSPIRITOSIS CONCLAVE . . .
. . . this has to do with where secret masters-actual or aspiring-meet to hash out schemes.
Did you ever see that Peter Hyams flick The Star Chamber? That one was about a group of judges who met to issue hits on criminals they deemed too vile for due process. The murderous judges met in appropriately sinister settings, as befitting their social status and need for secrecy. The whole movie has that Peter Hyams shadowy thing going on, which he didn't always achieve, but this one works quite well.
Of course, you may be thinking of Dr. Evil and his buds in the lavish secret hideout from one of the Austin Powers movies. Those were fun.
I always think of the creepy old guys who met in a well-appointed office-like they were lobbyists or something-in The X-Files, always in dim lighting, with shafts of light just so-I guess they don't want to look at each other too closely. Bunch of tired old men barely carrying the weight of whatever it was they were getting up to-alien-human hybrids? That black oil stuff? Killer bees infected with an extraterrestrial virus? Placing bets on whether The Simpsons would get canceled first? It was a big damn mystery.
My favorite example of this would be a group of forty-something tabletop role-playing gamers gathered in a Wendy's in Tallahassee circa 2006. They were hashing out the details of a future roadwar encounter-maybe they were running GURPS Autoduel or the Hard-Wired module of that cyberpunk RPG-and I was the only non-gamer in the joint. I sat with my burger, fries, paper cups of ketchup, and soda and half-listened in on the details of some sort of a missile attack between cyborg frenemies. Wendy's is hardly private-so one might question the conclave-i-ness of the situation . . . but the extreme dorko energy repelled all but the hardiest voyeurs of human escapist projects . . . I may as well have been a spy or a ghost or something . . . and, truly, these were elevated masters of the game, for they played not with pencils or paper or dice-just words and brains and invisible holographic hex grids charting the course of some post-governmental regional conflagration as pizza party minus pizza plus burgers . . .
I was lucky I left with my life, I suppose.
. . . PORK CURSERS . . .
. . . hordes of pigs driven before proper two-legged soldiers to trigger landmines. As the pigs are blown apart, the superheated bits are caught between slices of bread held like catcher's mitts by the soldiers. This is the Way of Snack. But more importantly, the angered spirits of the blown apart swine fly about collectively as a hot-gibbering, moist-vulgar wind full of elaborate execrations and hexes and denigrations aimed at the advancing soldiers who marched them to their recent doom. These pig ghost winds will themselves into phantasmal guts-beasts, who verge on full corporeality, not quite all-the-way-embodied, usually manifesting as a burning glaze of goo which, on contact, induces hallucinations inside the rubbleminds of the soldiers. If the soldiers are sufficiently armored, then the gear will come alive with wild ambitions, equipment more real than character. The omnidirectional chaos and strife that ensues as each soldier-or set of soldiering gear- pursues visionary dreams of New Regimes and New Religions and New Nations and New Fad Diets is alarming to behold, but generally held to be an excellent form of exercise in terms of battlefield arts. Tho' loyalty is the primary virtue of a soldier, one cannot but be impressed by desires to pursue New Endeavors, even beyond the normal bounds of Authorized Existence. Even the Kings and Ministers and Gods of the Kingdom more often than not feel inspired to leap out of themselves and into Fresh Forms of Fun. Therefore, shy not from the hot wind of splattery gore as the mine-swine march dutifully into blast after blast. You just might catch a New Nation Self for all the damn mess!
. . . DOOM NUT . . .
. . . this is what the Ancient'N'Corrupt national father figure decides to bust when he's robbed and raped and murdered and exploited everything else.
The treasury is empty.
The right wing state media cannot possibly polish his wee nasty notional knob any shinier with anymore obsequious rhapsodies and Memory Hole mythologies.
There's no more democracy to sabotage. Every last vote down to the kindergarten art contest has been rigged.
The banking system pretty much turns down anyone who isn't an oligarch, a Christian fundamentalist, a gangster, or a useful mercenary terrorist.
The national father figure just breached his seventies. Out of one corner of his mouth he preaches A Return to Traditional Masculinity and Family Values; but out the other side he whispers to his procurer to bring him young women a quarter his age . . . even though he hasn't been able to properly perform since his sixty-second birthday.
His bowel movements are at a standstill-except when he randomly shits himself.
He's had six secret operations to fix his urinary tract. And his river still runs with blood . . .
Hey, maybe it's a sign.
My river runs red with blood . . . does it have to just be mine?
Well, he can't shoot off proper anymore, but that nuclear arsenal could serve as a wonderful set of adult toys, couldn't it?!
That's how the Ancient'N'Corrupt national father figure edges ever closer to busting the Doom Nut . . .
. . . CRYPTO BOOM . . .
. . . are but a prophesy of two more words . . .
. . . CRYPTO BUST . . .
. . . ESCAPE ROOM . . .
. . . your mission is to search the room carefully for clues that will help you to escape . . . from the other assholes participating in this vacuous corporate retreat team-building exercise.
. . . BUFFET ETERNAL . . .
. . . this is from that era when I was a teenager bad at parking-maybe it was more like I just felt insecure, beat myself up about my parking skills-I hated having to park close to other vehicles or structures, I wanted all the clearance, infinite clearance if possible-and so instead of parking in the official country buffet parking area, I parked in the adjacent K-Mart parking lot, and walked across asphalt and desolate weeds to eat inside the country buffet, which was all nacho cheese, fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, shredded cheese, little tomatoes, broccoli, three refills of Cherry Coke, and a saucer of soft serve vanilla ice cream armored in sprinkles-well, post-gorge, I ambled back across desolate weeds and asphalt and inside the K-Mart-this was a particularly lonely K-Mart which I preferred to haunt because although there were quite a few employees-this being in a boom time at the End of History-this was prior to the advent of ubiquitous mobile devices constantly receiving Internet, and so people had not lost the Fine Art of Retreat Into Self-which therefore meant that an abundance of employees meant necessarily an abundance of people keeping the fuck to themselves-like I said I preferred this specific K-Mart for its air of loneliness, isolation, desperation, and perverse elation-the numbing emptiness of unwearable anti-fashions and stupid outdoor barbecue bullshit and folding chairs worse than sitting upon the actual ground or pro-hemorrhoidal concrete I interweaved with an eccentric selection of VHS tapes-I bought an English dub of Godzilla vs. Biollante for $8.99+applicable sales tax here-this was the place to go to deny the empty chatter of church, state, fake friends, false teachers, and unsatisfiable parents, an anti-hangout zone pristine in its sacred vacuity, I could brain-screen my own combo fanfic of Final Fantasy VII/Dawn of the Dead '78 with my own custom black leather getup topped with a helmet with glowing red eyes, katana in one hand, .44 Bulldog in the other-no pretense of salvation or damnation or shame or glory-well, sad to say I brought a fantastical, drastical desecration into the Temple of Truth, even as I approached the motion sensor door, I felt the upchuck aborning, unusually rapid, usually I get plenty of warning, but this one had an Icarus urgency, I applied my willpower, I can keep my feast in its proper place, but at the slightest touch of my Intestinal Containment Doctrine, the puke did rise up, my lips sputtered, a perfectly pink splash upon the nuclear white tiles, I beat feet to the restrooms, splish-splash, I did not vomit It vomited all by itself, splorsh-splursh, I'm pinking all over my pants legs, stumbling forward, a bad zombie movie routine, pinking from above, some kind of punk anti-nuke gesture against the obliterative tiles, of a sudden I'm in the bathroom and well surprised that I have anything left to deposit into an actual damn toilet bowl . . . needless to say, I did not return to that K-Mart for several months. And when I did, of course, there was no trace of my pollution. No one accosted me, "Hey! You're that vomit asshole! I had to clean up your sick! Fuck you forever!" For all I know, I was part of a semi-regular to regular stream of food poisoned losers staggering in from the country buffet next door. Maybe I was just a vehicle for some disgruntled former Big K team member who got hired on to the backline of the country buffet. Poison a few gluttons, send 'em off to pink up the pristine (not so) big box store. That could've been it. Yeah. I was an unwitting conscript of a forgotten, unknowable puke war, just one in a million petty power plays to fill the all-too-Floridian vigilante void of a vicious false prosperity at the End of History . . . the malice runs even deeper . . . no one accosted me because even confrontation is a kind of affirmation . . . best just to ignore the existence of the person, whilst venerating the puke . . . heh, heh, heh, I kinda like that . . . they probably built little shrines to the pinksplatters as counter-fuckyous to their poisoner nemesis next door . . . contemptuous silence for mere pawns like myself . . . you just don't get that kind of sublime meanness anymore. People just spell out their hate on social media, all text, nothing undercurrent, all slogan, all thesis, no nagging mysteries allowed, just false certainties all the way 'round . . . and, no, I never ate at that particular poison buffet ever again. Even for a clandestine conflict junkie like myself being a pink puke fountain was the limit. Just the once was enough. The memory has endured just fine sans re-up.
. . . never say . . .
. . . PARADIGM SHIFT . . .
. . . when what you really mean is . . .
. . . BOWEL MOVEMENT . . .
. . . thank you . . .
. . . UNAUTHORIZED SEQUEL . . .
. . . to the 1967 Jean-Luc Godard film La Chinoise. Basically, I just want to shoot one scene, okay?
Remember when the Maoist cell constructs literal walls out of thousands of copies of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book?
Okay.
We restage that scene, and have everybody armed and hyped and singing Maoist arena rock songs to stay pumped, and they're all just ready for the capitalists to lay siege to their bookish fortifications-
-when suddenly, a vast shadow falls over them.
The Maoists look up just in time to see an incomprehensibly dense, terrible, and fast moving tsunami composed of remaindered airport paperbacks-Tom Clancy, Stephen King, Michael Crichton, James Patterson, Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child, Stephen Coonts, David Baldacci, Dean Koontz, Michael Slade, John Grisham-all the names, all the bestsellers as one terrifying wave of a billion papercuts.
WHOOOOOSSSHHHH!
It sweeps away the Maoists and their fortress constructed-quite literally-from the words of Chairman Mao.
But what's more, this wave sweeps every-goddamn-thing away. All the ideologies. All the rival literary and paraliterary genres. All the writers. All the readers. All the currencies-they had to use up all the mint paper to print up all those airport paperbacks, y'know.
Nothing is left but a worldaround vista of sundered pages and broken spines and stupid author photographs and gimmicky covers and all of it intermixed into one humongous-ass Voltronic ULTIMATE AIRPORT PAPERBACK 4 ALL TIMES.
It's something to do with a cokehead alcoholic lawyer deadbeat divorced dad struggling novelist who moonlights as a tormented FBI profiler who just wants to reconnect with his estranged wife and son who has of late become haunted by a phantasmagorical figure who resembles Chairman Mao who keeps appearing in the corner of his eyesight in a gory clown costume astride a kaiju-scale turtle demon whilst trying to prevent a terrorist nuclear attack on Washington, DC and find a sunken pirate treasure-
Five hundred thousand years pass, and the pages have merged with cockroaches and termites and ants, who have all mutated to be able to spurt ink and compose hopelessly convoluted novels expressing brain-searingly ruthless insectoid collectivist ideologies whilst keeping an antenna receptive to the popular consumer tastes of a vast potential readership of billions of ghost humans who haunt the new Masters of Earth long after their spectacular annihilation via extinction level event airport paperback global tsunami-
The strange bug/page hybrid beings keep on composing endless popular entertainment novels in search of a long vanished potential audience as a kind of religion forever observant in the hopes of a messiah, a rapture, an apocalypse, etc.
I mean these weirdo novelist bugs can't even read . . . they're purely writers . . . maybe the purest in the history of Earth . . .
Yeah, so, I got high hopes for this project. Crushes all the quadrants, that's for sure . . .
. . . FALSE ALARM . . .
. . . for whatever reason, you haven't been on your mobile device in awhile (25-65 minutes) and you notice someone who looks just a little bit out of place intently swiping and poking at their screen. Almost like this person was on their way someplace, and they just had to stop to resynchronize with the permaflow of bad news. You seize up-maybe even in midstride as you're going through a door-your screen suddenly to hand. Is it a Big One-Nature's Vengeance, World War III, Democracy's Fall, Giant Meteor Coming Soon, A Famous Death, Terrorism, Total Economic Meltdown, Pandemic, A Mass Atrocity-and now you're late to the Gnawing Anxiety Party?
So.
You scroll.
You've no shortage of options: climate change, Vladimir Putin's crimes against humanity, regional megafires, fascism ascendant in the courts and state legislatures, plagues, wars, rumors of wars, earthquakes, volcanoes, contaminated water sources, mass slaughter by fentanyl, mass misery by untreated mental illness, gun crimes on the rise, uptick in white supremacist hate crimes-
You look up at that out of place person as they put in some earbuds, stride off down the hall-were they just downloading some podcasts? Is this just a part of their daily walk? Maybe this person isn't out of place at all. Or maybe they've just decided to explore this area.
You're still halfway through the door. Now you're wondering if you're the one who is out of place. How could you have been so foolish as to think that you had earned a break from the Collective Doom Scroll of Absolute Fuckedness?
What a space cadet . . .
. . . HOLY STORK . . .
. . . these anti-abortion people seem poised to ruin a lot of lives by infringing upon a woman's right to choose how she lives her life.
You've got no exceptions for rape or incest.
You've got phony scumbag "bounty hunters" ratting people out to the cops.
You better believe birth control is the next big target for these fanatics.
Lots of women and girls could be killed or harmed or incarcerated or all three and for what?
No sane reason exists.
Maybe these Republicans and their Supreme Court flunkies are looking forward to building a giant statue of a holy stork using their slimy dark money to honor their putrid achievements.
Maybe the holy stork will even replace the Statue of Liberty.
Yeah, it could come to that.
. . . REALITY LOST . . .
. . . now, right before the nuclear holocaust, there was, of course, the collapse of whatever was left of democracy on Earth among humans. As irrevocably dire as this situation was, it must be said that many felt a strange exhilaration as the lies of religion crumbled in real time. Many on Earth had been told too many stupid and hateful and self-defeating things all in the name of God and/or the State and/or Money and so to see all pretenses be dropped was a bit of a lift to folks, y'know? Futile rebellions of pettiness and bitterness raged in the Final Days as those who were done with all the bullshit decided to live as they pleased and no longer submit to bogus laws and courts and faiths and so forth.
And then the bombs and the missiles and the mushroom clouds and the ensuing Omnicide and all the rest-we've been over all that again and again, we get it. Truly. We get it.
But what we don't talk about . . . is Me. The Last Thing. The Inescapable Thing.
Reality.
Yeah, that's my name, don't wear it out.
Reality.
My existence is controversial, because, At the End, Death was supposed to be the Last Thing, the Inescapable Thing-or Nothing. Nothingness. Dispersion. Dissipation. Disorganization.
Nope. Wrong. I'm the Last Thing. Reality. Because I'm the baseline, the context, the deep background, the system of systems, the works-
Reality, baby! You just can't get outside of Me. You can't supersede Me. You can't cheat Me. You can't bribe Me. You can't kill Me. You can't disappear Me. You can't lie to Me.
You can lie to yourself. You can deny Me.
But you just don't win against Me, not ever.
Armies. Propaganda. Prisons. ICBMs. Concentration camps. Denialisms-so much empty gesturing in My Face. Rude, but futile.
I'm the Thing That Cannot Cease.
Even if there's no one left alive to remember Me.
Yeah. It's a sad truth. You can only half beat Me if you do yourself in, which, I guess, is what you did. Not all of you. Most of you had no problem with Me, not in any major way. But there were enough to ruin it for everybody. Sad but true.
Ah, well.
Y'know, I keep thinking about an image that prevailed in the Final Days. It was something called the Burning Drum Major. It would appear on posters and streaming videos-the fundamentalists really took to it. As did the so-called 'defense intellectuals' and 'action intellectuals'-the usual suspects. The Burning Drum Major was clothed in spectral fire, and accompanied by slogans: MARCH INTO FIRE, CLIMB THE ESCALATION LADDER TO THAT MEASURE, HELL IS THE ONLY REALITY, HEAVEN IS FOR LOSERS-I mean-heh, heh, heh-it was amusing how the fundamentalists dropped the Heavenly Pretense and admitted that they were all Hot for Inferno, just like we always knew, right? Heaven was always this vague, ethereal place of abstract solace or something, whereas Hell was far more vivid. And it's always more fun to elaborate the torments of your Enemy than think on an eternity of refills at the Great Country Buffet In The Sky-heh, heh, heh!
Yeah.
Here I Am.
The Last and Most Lost.
Just Me and the Burning Drum Major for the Duration.
Tee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee!
Oh, shit . . .
. . . UGLY DOGS . . .
. . . I'm on Instagram-first mistake-I tap the spyglass-second mistake-and the endless scroll of wooing pitties and "seal puppies" manifests.
But, alas.
I have become jaded and petty.
These dogs just ain't cute enough.
I swipe down hard to clear the deck.
And a new crop of aspirants manifests.
Jesus! How ugly can you get?
I'm swiping down and down and down . . .
And somewhere in the Outside, beyond my nuke-proof blast walls, and my surveillance cameras, and my custom electronic warfare death labyrinth that destroys all comers, a great sad howling of many canine throats arises throughout the dusty land. For my Desire creates a terrible Sadness as I ruthlessly pursue a pernicious ideal of Canine Beauty, for the doggos can sense my sadistic rejection of them!
Oh, moralize not, ye Righteous, in my direction!
I live every day in a prison of my own cruel Discontent of Seeking ever higher and higher Dog Beauty. The Hell that I myself have constructed is all the curriculum I require.
Yes . . . I sense my Final Plunge . . . my Final Burning . . .
One last swipe . . .
. . .down!
. . . SQUIRREL DANCING . . .
. . . I was walking across campus.
This was in my tender days of education.
Due to my poetic bent, I enrolled in University XYZ's Department of Advanced Procreative Weapons-basically, these were doomsday weapons that could take care of themselves, form true nuclear families, and generally carry on the spark of intelligence once they wiped us gross, babbling humans out to the last man, woman, and child. I specialized in going goo-goo ga-ga to the cute little Omnibomb babies in the ballistic nursery.
As I was saying, I was walking across campus.
I was lost in ecstatic thoughts of how my labors would contribute to the New Era of True Nuclear Families.
I was so caught up, I didn't even notice the squirrel rushing towards me at speed.
Something feinted left, then right.
I came to my senses. I startled. I feinted left, then right.
The squirrel and I were dancing this way and that, not sure how to get past one another.
This was not a situation I had anticipated. Yes, I had long observed how the squirrels were losing their fear of the Final Meats People-My Generation-but I assumed this boldness was strictly for snacky purposes. My Generation was given to feeding the squirrels.
But here was a squirrel whose boldness extended to dancing me up even as I was on my way to ballistic nursery duty.
Am I solely to blame for the hip twirling passion that obtained within my body that fateful day?
Will you call me the Great Unraveller when it was the Procreative Weapons who wound their plans and schemes so tightly that the least deviation brought it all tumbling down?
Not one of the potent farseeing Omnibomb Supervisory Clusterminds figured on the spontaneous dance crew chemistry sparking off between me and that oh-so-bold squirrel, which resulted in my lateness, which resulted in an Omnibomb baby not getting its necessary tender loving care, which ignited a temper tantrum chain of explosions, which led to the downfall of the Procreative Weapons . . .
. . . and here I dance forever in Heaven with my sparky squirrel partner, our dance crew chemistry generating a force field no Reality Regime may pierce, especially the Asshole Realities of True Nuclear Families . . .
. . .and this Heaven is better than what I deserved, considering the Omnibomb path I was on . . .
. . . 'til the day I was saved by a squirrel . . .
. . . EQUUS TWO . . .
. . . in a dream, I laid out my pitch for a sequel to Equus:
"-our troubled young man leaves dreary old England for Hollywood, where he sweet talks his way into directing an independent feature for a Roger Corman-esque producer. This low-budj flick becomes his calling card for the majors, who throw him a low stakes comeback vehicle for an aging Marlon Brando-esque star that becomes the shock hit of the summer. Now our troubled thirtysomething can pursue his dream project: an epic western taking on themes of class struggle and range warfare and the sunset of the Mythic Wild West-and the Movie Gods shower him with cash beyond the dreams of avarice, and he shoots it on desolate locations out in Utah and Wyoming, where he builds elaborate soundstages indistinguishable from real life towns, and even though he's not permitted to actually harm the human performers he does put them through hellish twenty-three hour days, requiring thousands of takes just to get that one detail exactly right. In the depths of this slog, our Great Director snorts five mile rails of cocaine-he calls it the Molar Cracker Express-and begins to abuse the hundreds of horses that are already being overworked under dubious conditions. And that's when he starts hearing the creepy voice of the horse god from the previous movie. And where did that voice come from, hmm? That was never fully explained the first time around, was it? No. Maybe it had something to do with those TV jingles he obsessively sang, hmmm? Put a pin in that. Sooo, after shooting several horses dead to get that authentic dead horse vibe for the shot, the horse god accuses him of murder outright in a strangely familiar drawling voice. A terrifying stallion cloaked in spectral fire chases our Great Director all through the elaborate frontier town set, lighting off everything and everyone. In desperation, the Great Director summons the MGM lion to fight the hellhorse. But the hellhorse tears out the elderly logo lion's throat with ease, and finally catches up with the Great Director. And the hellhorse speaks, saying,
"Hello. I'm Mr. Ed. And it's my turn, now, motherfucker!"
-well, it goes rather poorly for the Great Director. All those years of living in fear of a horse god . . . and it was merely misremembered dialogue from an old TV show. Yep. So, the hellhorse bites his face off as the frontier town set burns to ashes. Cut to a lavish golf course where not only do we see Apollo and Dionysus enjoying the holes . . . but they go riding off together into the sunset in the same golf cart! Roll credits."
. . .of course, it is all still but a dream . . .
. . . GUEST ROOM . . .
". . . could it be? Am I just another Video Asshole?"
. . . it reeks of incense, and I don't know if that's the norm here or some hasty measure to freshen up for the temporary invaders or maybe they're trying to blot out my smell. Don't know. The bed is firmer than I'm used to, and I don't know if I should search the room for pocketable goodies and knick-knacks-could there be hidden cameras in here? Nice enough folks, so I can't picture that, but who can you trust these days? Whose room did this used to be? Maybe it just comes into being when necessary, whenever guests manifest. The others with me are on the foldout couch bed, and an inflatable mattress in the living room. I have been singled out for special treatment, or maybe just isolation. I prefer to believe that I have been somehow singled out, call it a mild case of persecution fantasy, because it gives me a Protagonist Status, and thereby calls forth all of the heavenly orbs into rotation about my hairy ass. It's just more fun this way. I lie on the too firm bed, knowing how I always wake up much earlier when I bed down in a strange place, how there's some part of me that just cannot fully relax no matter how welcoming the hosts. This is my inner Protagonist going on the alert, ready to seize the reigns of adventure, usually sleeping, rendered dull and inattentive by the ordinary routine of my days. But truly it is travel and novelty and passion and the anticipation of danger and even heavy destruction that awakens my Protagonist self. It probably gets antsy now and again. In fact I'm certain that it gets antsy! I was making those biscuits for the morning Elder Rush one time, and my Protagonist welled up inside me, and the Reality fell from my eyes: the Elder Rush became a succession of Death Specters haunting up lumbering Land Leviathans, and I began to whisper-chant syllables of somnolence over the biscuits that, once consumed, the Death Specters would detach from their unstable, ever-growling mobile armors that I might seize such a vehicular body as my own. But I came back down into Reality, and just in time to remember to make that one unsalted biscuit for that one fellow concerned over his blood pressure. This is the Money Gig-was the Money Gig. Now I'm given to the Road, the Tour. Three Saboteurs packed into a stealth number-sleek, purposeful, ultramodern, no growl to it-fully automated to all external appearances. We stop and exit and our perma-suits make us look like corporate missionaries-I sleep in my suit, as do the other two-and we do get plenty of people pitching us their resumes. We're in the Deep Abradox-this was on the eve of the Suburbia Wars-and we look like we live in a nice place. Each of us programmed with proper defensive chatter to bullshit the applicants right along and out of the frame. Lotta folks eager to show their stuff, decked out full paramilitary-we even get asked about defecting to Paradox-but we play it down the middle. Our true goals involved a circuit of punk houses-which had us on alert because we're about as far from punk as you can get, and we weren't sure how our Extravaganza would be perceived live. Everyone's a star blazing from out the hypnotic bendy screen, but when you show up in the meats? Watch out! Anything can and does happen. Roul's main concern was blundering into a trap laid out by Alphasparr's (not so) secret police, but we didn't see proof that anything of the kind was operating in the Deep Abradox. Nebly wanted a plan for if the presumed audience decided to destroy us and/or goes Full Eater. I had no fear one way or the other-maybe, I guess, I was leaning towards the biggest damn fight for our lives, but what's to fear in that? I'm zapped high on my Inner Protagonist, riding into Horizon, answering the Glory Signal of All Times-even Defeat would be a kind of Victory, wouldn't it? In any case, an Extravaganza consists primarily of an allegorical mime depicting the essential Fuckedness of life under the heels of the -Sparrs. You've got Alphasparr at the top of the pyramid. Near him is the ridiculous actor jerkoff Feldsparr, who plays the same blandly confident action man in the same six or seven scenarios they cycle through like clockwork. You've got the phony rock'n'roll fuckstick Feralsparr, who records the same shitty bogus hedonism fantasia over and over and over again. You've got Pratsparr who functions as imperial comic relief. And somewhere in the deep background you have Fathersparr jamming Mothersparr, just pumpin' out the -Sparrs as necessary. Frankly, I think they must be True Pump-Out Masters of Yore, 'cause I don't actually believe they keep the same -Sparrs for the lifespan, I think they discreetly shitcan 'em when they start to get too caked up with gunk, or too worn out looking on the surface. Plus you can tell there's too much inbreeding 'cause of the various twitchy, aberrant behaviors that manifest, especially with the Feralsparr model, just listen to the strings of grunty-sharty nonsense syllables he tries to pass off as lyrics. Roul and Nebly think I'm nuts, but I swear Feralsparr spoke no discernible human talk on Florida Man, which seems like such an obvious bit, right? Roul busts me for obsessing over something I claim to hate, but someone Out Here has to maintain critical consciousness. But I agree with Roul that good times are to be enjoyed. And the sheer density of these good times, the vast crowds-I keep waiting for it all to get blasted apart by Abradox mercenaries or Eaters, but maybe they're making the crowds, too, enjoying what we do . . . who can say . . .
