BURNING QUESTIONS IN A UNIVERSE OF MYSTERY #27:

After I've won the battle, do I have to survive the celebration?

HECKLER'S DOCTRINE #1:

Go to the stand-up comedy show. It can be an open mic or a touring superstar or a booked showcase or a filming of a special for cable or streaming or a podgrift recording or what have you. At some point during the proceedings, you will stand up, yourself, and begin performing your own stand-up set. If you so desire, you may assume the role of host, and therefore start calling your own line-up to the mic, each one in turn-which may require you to coordinate with others, so keep that in mind. If you are part of the line-up you may also spontaneously choose to be a host and start calling your own line-up one by one or even two by two or three by three. Audience members inspired by this chaos may decide to impulsively go into their tight five and thereby become part of the show. It is even possible to get on site security operators to abandon their posts and pursue their showbiz dreams. I have even seen chairs and tables and toilets and beer cans and beer bottles and marijuana joints and cocaine lines and cocaine baggies and hotel pillow mints and little airline liquor bottles and ticket stubs and condoms and microwave nacho cheese cups and salty tortilla-adjacent chips all come alive and start working out their sets. Even the yellow legal pad filled with names of striving hacks may self-animate to workshop its topical political humor.  The goal, obviously, is to see how many stand-up comedy shows we can create within each stand-up comedy show, all happening at the same time. Ideally, all becomes comedy, and then, um, giant meteor hits the planet . . . with its reactionary but wry observational material about the inauthenticity of state-funded artificially constructed relativistic kill vehicles-hey, giant meteor skews conservative, but it's all in good fun . . .

NOTIONAL HEADLINE #12:

HERSCHEL WALKER CAST AS THE NEW VOICE OF RICK AND MORTY.

MOVIE REVIEW: COMMUNION (1989)

 

Directed by Philippe Mora 

Screenplay adapted by Whitley Strieber from his own book

Cinematography by Louis Irving

Production Design by Linda Pearl

Costume Design by Malissa Daniel

Art Direction by Dena Roth

Photographic Effects Supervision by Dave Gregory

Special Effects by Richard Ratliff

Alien Effects by A.J. Workman

Edited by Lee Smith

Music by Eric Clapton and Allan Zavod

Produced by Philippe Mora, Dan Allingham, and Whitley Strieber

Starring

Christopher Walken as Whitley Strieber (midlist horror novelist, married to Anne)

Lindsay Crouse as Anne Strieber (author, educator, married to Whitley)

Joel Carlson as Andrew Strieber (Whitley and Anne's son)

Andreas Katsulas as Alex (friend of the Strieber family, partner of Sarah, talks about kobolds)

Terry Hanauer as Sarah (friend of the Strieber family, partner of Alex)

Frances Sternhagen as Dr. Janet Duffy (hypnotherapist, has an immaculately art-directed office)

. . .

"Was there an owl in here last night?"

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

Whitley is a Manhattan-based horror novelist struggling to complete his latest manuscript. His big-ass mid 1980s word processor crashes, deleting a day or more of his toils, so he has to start writing longhand. Whitley has quirky habits: he's constantly videotaping himself so as to keep him on task as a writer; he likes to dress up in chic Swing Revival-esque clothing when he writes; he's a bit of a mischievous imp who enjoys startling his wife, Anne, and son, Andrew. Whitley is played by the actor Christopher Walken, and so he is prone to break out into spontaneous tap dance routines, stare with opaque intensity directly into camera, and relate off-kilter jokes and anecdotes in tones which are both fascinatingly precise yet emotionally cryptic. Whitley's affection for his family seems genuine, even though he is also defined all around the edges by that ineffable Walkeny strangeness. 

Whitley, in the depths of writer's block, decides to pack up the fam, and-along with another couple Alex and Sarah-spend a weekend out at a cabin in the woods. The cabin is outfitted with an expensive pain-in-the-ass security system that is prone to false alarms which trigger bright flood lights. One night, Whitley can't fall asleep, and he senses an intrusive presence. He sits up in bed, staring at a door frame until a strange, peachy-colored bug-eyed face peeks at him from just around the frame. Bright white light floods the cabin, which is seemingly that pain-in-the-ass security system, but the memories of that night are weirdly vague and incomplete for Whitley. The next morning, Alex insists that Whitley and Anne drive him and Sarah home because he's freaked out by the white light. Later, Whitley undergoes hypnosis to unearth troubling visions from that abortive weekend at the cabin. 

Communion is a movie which depicts a mysterious power invading the lives of a happy, prosperous artistic family unit-the Striebers-living in Manhattan in the 1980s. And I do mean mysterious. At first, the invading power seems like it could be ghostly or psychological in nature. The bizarre creatures bedeviling the family unit could-in the early going-equally come from Hell or the Land of Faerie as they behave in ways alternately sinister and mischievous. Or these beings could be the creatures of insanity born from a broken mind.  A savvy audience will pick up on the invaders' modus operandi as coming from the Alien Abduction playbook-anal probes and all-but, strictly speaking, Communion refuses to give definitive answers as to who or what the inexplicable intruders are and why they've targeted the Striebers. 

The mysterious forces seem to be focused on the midlist horror novelist Whitley Strieber, author of books such as The Wolfen-a modern take on werewolves-and The Hunger-a modern take on vampires-both of which were made into Hollywood movies, by the way, despite Strieber not being named Stephen King. In this movie, however, no explicit reference is made to Strieber's previous titles or the fairly well-regarded movies derived from them. Another interesting book Strieber had a hand in was Warday, co-authored with historian James Kunetka, in which the authors not only imagined what it would be like to survive in a post-nuclear USofA, but they also wrote themselves into the book as protagonists. Like I said, none of this is mentioned in any detail in the movie itself, but I think it's worth mentioning that the real life Strieber was known for horror novels, a couple of movie adaptations of two of those horror novels, and the one post-apocalyptic novel into which he wrote himself as a fictional character. And then he wrote the book Communion, in which the author is once again also the protagonist, sort of like in Warday, except that Warday was explicitly fictional  whereas Communion was marketed as nonfiction. The movie derived from the book is therefore one of those "Based on a true story" or "Inspired by true events" type of deals. Could it be that Strieber is a man who had a burning need to burrow ever deeper into his novels until he became one with his fiction?

Whitley's journey to uncover the truth about the mysterious forces interdicting his life spawns memorable visions and hallucinations. While riding a city bus the other passengers spontaneously manifest praying mantis heads. During a community Halloween haunted house party, Whitley and his son walk down a long hallway at the end of which is both a jack o'lantern and a surprise. Under hypnosis, Whitley recalls being abducted by small hooded humanoids which he later refers to as "little blue fuckers" who may be fresh off a bender at the Star Wars cantina. And, of course, there's the scene where Whitley is stripped nude and anally probed by his hooded captors. Right before the probe is inserted, Whitley asks if they're all gonna sing "White Christmas." I've only laughed harder at Redd Foxx's line about what would make a man "change gods" in Harlem Nights, but it's a close call. 

Eventually, Whitley discovers through hypnosis that the strange beings have always been in his life from age ten onwards. Or, if he is re-authoring himself as a fictional entity, maybe this is the writer doing a flashback chapter to fill in some crucial backstory. It also makes me think of the recursive storytelling of DC and Marvel comics wherein characters would be introduced without clear origins so as to keep the action moving, but then their backgrounds would be revisited/revised to suit continuity in later issues. I could see Communion being incorporated into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. James Gunn could definitely write a great scene of Star Lord getting anally probed. I'd be there opening weekend wearing nothing but bells. 

Communion, whether you buy it as a "True Story" or not does indeed attempt to wrestle with intriguing dilemmas appropriate to speculative fiction. If you beheld a being from another reality, how would you know for sure? Would that being allow itself to be seen as itself? Would it be in disguise? If you saw it, would you even be able to make sense of it? If it's a traveler from a distant star, it would have to have overcome massive gulfs of space/time by means beyond all our plausible physics and spaceflight technology-would such a being even have a physical form? Would there be any meats'n'juices to it? Would you only be able to describe it in the melodramatic terms of religion, of myth, of genre fiction, of conspiracy theories-It was the Devil, I say! Or perhaps an Angel of the Lord. In any event, we must sterilize all surfaces contaminated by the alien intruder. No doubt it was trying to infect us with demonic possession to steal our souls and/or Illuminati nanomachines in order to convert us to a cashless society paradigm. Even now, an extraterrestrial/extradimensional fetus could be gestating inside our Collective Abdomen! Cower in terror! Or rejoice in same!

If you were confronted by something genuinely inexplicable, how would you define it? If you were able to explain it beyond that word-inexplicable-wouldn't it become explicable to some degree? 

And how-oh-how would you make a movie depicting such mysteries? Do you evoke the laser light abstractions and cryptic visions of death and rebirth from 2001: A Space Odyssey? Do you structure it as a mystery with a dogged protagonist piecing together clues culminating in a tidy resolution? Maybe it's about confronting the mystery in the form of a terrifying monster to be dispatched with violence like in Alien, Aliens, and Predator. Communion offers mystery, and violence is briefly explored as a possible solution, but then the film turns towards acceptance of the unknown as opposed to a War on the Unknown. Whitley, in the depths of his fear, loads up a shotgun, goes after a phantom enemy, and ends up nearly obliterating his wife Anne. Fortunately, Whitley lays down his arms and is forgiven by his long-suffering wife. Anne ends up being the one to push Whitley towards hypnotherapy, which is the beginnings of a constructive solution.

Whitley's climatic meeting with the mysterious beings involves him making a choice to intrude upon their domain, thus reversing the roles of invader and invaded. But the writer does this with a video camera in hand as opposed to a gun. What transpires is a combination dance party/doppelganger magic show in which Whitley begins to see the various weird creatures as aspects of himself. The onslaught of the Unknown, of what lies around each twist and turn of the labyrinth of one's life, becomes something to be met with playfulness, understanding, and openness to new experiences. Forget the Alien Abduction mythologies. Communion is a little New Agey, a little bit too "perception dictates reality" for my taste, yes, but if taken more as metaphor and allegory it's an unexpectedly optimistic tale. 

Compare and contrast the cinematic projection of Whitley Strieber with some other movie novelists: Jack Torrance, in Kubrick's The Shining never escapes the labyrinth of his murderous hatred of Black people, women, and children;Yukio Mishima in Paul Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters ends up channeling his masterful wordcraft into the staging of a right-wing suicide fantasia; and William Lee-fictional avatar of William Burroughs-is forever trapped in cycles of addiction and guilt over an accidental killing in David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch. I make my little jokes about anal probes and the like, but Whitley used his writer's craft to fictionalize his way through a troubled passage of his existence. Good work if you can survive it.

PROTIP: If you are in a committed relationship with another person, try to avoid shooting at them with a shotgun. Even if you miss, this can create stress and conflict between yourself and your partner.

ANCILLARY PRODUCTS #5:

Deep fake holograms of Jack Webb and Harry Morgan win the Internet with their blistering cover version of Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks's "City of Crime."

OPTIONAL RULE #5:

Every meats-being who dies has to come back from the dead at least once as a scary cyborg or as a meats-being-with-extra-robo, if you prefer. 

If you are already a cyborg, you are obliged to come back from the dead as either a scary meats-borg or as a cyborg-with-extra-meats, as you please.

In other words: death adds robo to meats, meats to robo. If you start as full-robo you can understand yourself as moving towards full-meats as you cycle through life-and-death. If you start as full-meats you can understand yourself as moving towards full-robo as you cycle through life-and-death.

SINCE YOU DIDN'T ASK #7:

. . . to be honest, I wasn't that impressed with my time being the famous superhacker outlaw Cyber-Creamer. In the popular imagination, these hacker types are non-conformist heroes, standing tall against oppressive governments and corporations, but, in actuality, a fair few of them work on behalf of oppressive governments and corporations while projecting the image of being cool people or whatever. Like Cyber-Creamer with all the hoopla about "cyber-creaming fools" or what have you. Basically, it's a clubby-gatekeepy subculture of technically proficient people who all resent the fact that the entire world isn't subsumed by their relatively narrow set of concerns. But, by virtue of the lubricated manner in which ideas can slip and slide into each other due to cyberspace's continual extrusions of itself into meatspace it is now possible for Cyber-Creamer and friends to crowbar their way into many more lives that would've been otherwise oblivious and unconcerned with such insular intrigues. 

Still, I have to admit: Cyber-Creamer hipped me to some truly outre food/coffee combinations!

BONUS: For even more Fun Maximization, dip Cyber-Creamer-the outlaw superhacker-into cyber-creamer-the virtualized coffee creamer.

THE NEW DREAM #10:

unpaginated fugue state

Lynd Ward on all sides

be awhile before I'm home here

MENTAL BEAM LASER #2:

I want you to picture deep within your mind the characters of Cloud and Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII Remake. 

Do you have them well in mind?

Very good.

Now, together, we will use the power of imagination to effect a profound transformation. 

This is not the first time we have done this, but I do not want you to treat this lightly. You are still at the very beginning of this journey. All attention must be paid to all particulars. 

Now, do you still have Cloud and Sephiroth well in mind? 

Excellent.

Now, bring forth your Mental Beam Laser-but do not fire! Bring forth the locus of power to the center of your forehead, and allow it to gather power. You will most likely perceive this locus as a hyperdense ball of light-a wee little sun-just above your nose.

How nice!

We will now elevate your Mental Beam Laser game. You will now picture deep within your mind Harvey Pekar and David Letterman two of the most consequential characters of Late Night Talk TV. 

Do you have Pekar and Letterman well in mind?

Are you also maintaining your brain imaging of Cloud and Sephiroth?

All four-Pekar, Cloud, Letterman, Sephiroth-are of utmost importance to our endeavor. 

Do you have all four vividly pictured inside yourself?

Good job.

Now, I will ask you to will the hyperdense orb to expand into the image of an abandoned low income residence located in Cleveland, Ohio. We zoom into the front porch where we see an old couch-looking incongruous-and we can just make out the phantasmal image of a woman dressed in red and pink standing in shadows just beyond the door frame. We pull back, and now Letterman, Sephiroth, Pekar, and Cloud enter from the edges of the frame. They pause before stepping up onto the porch, chatting among themselves the best way to get a grip on that incongruous couch. Sephiroth and Letterman-who refuse to be memories-have no problem getting up onto the porch, but Cloud and Pekar-who are always tormented by memories-prefer not to get any closer to the inside of that house, so they will help maneuver the couch from off the porch. Soon enough, the party has maneuvered the incongruous couch from off the porch, and they hustle it out of frame. We zoom back in, just as the phantasmal woman in red and pink moves deeper into the abandoned house, beyond our sight-

Do you begin to see?

The power of concentrating your Mental Beam Laser into hyperdense concentration?

Down this path lies both Creation and Destruction!

SOLO GAMING #6: MYSTERIOUS SOUP!

You will now purchase your cans of soup for the week, which you will measure as a span of seven days. If you are inclined to purchase cans of soup of different sizes and/or shapes, I will, at this time, insist that you purchase seven different kinds of soup from a single brand thus ensuring that-despite the different kinds of soup-they are all contained within the same sizes/shapes of can adorned with paper labels of uniform trade dress. If you are not inclined to purchase cans of soup, you will now adjust your inclinations so that they tend towards purchasing and consuming soup from the can. Once you have purchased your cans of soup for the week, I will now require you to take note of the paper labels glued to the cans. Take a good look, because those labels are going away forever. You will now be required to remove the paper labels and dispose of them as you see fit-so long as those labels are, indeed, disposed of with no possibility of being re-glued to the soup cans. Once you have succeeded in this endeavor, I will now require you to mix up the de-labeled cans until it is impossible for you to recall which can contains what kind of soup. Once you have accomplished these tasks you will be permitted some measure of satisfactory feeling. If you so choose, you may-at this time-take a "break" of a duration no longer than five minutes. Break or no, we must, at last, proceed apace into the most consequential phase of our endeavor: the daily consumption of your purchased cans of soup. Which consists of the following: when the time of your day comes that is reserved for preparing and ingesting soup, you will no doubt find yourself with a dilemma: how are you to decide-from among the de-labeled cans of soup-which to open? If you are craving Chicken Noodle, but you happen to open a can of Italian Wedding, well, you cannot very well despise and abandon the Italian Wedding-food waste is, I will assume, repugnant to us both. If you are not bothered by food waste, then I will now require you to adopt my own views on this matter. As you go through your week, you may very well find yourself wondering-meal by meal-what your day would've been like had you happened to blindly choose a soup other than what you ended up with on the day. You may find yourself tantalized by what might have been. I urge you to consider this feeling of tantalization at some depth: does it interfere with your enjoyment of the soup? Is this tantalization, finally, pernicious? Or is this tantalization flavor additive-almost like a condiment or seasoning? In the end, these insights and answers are yours alone, tho' you may attempt to express and/or explain them to other beings if you so choose. 

OPTIONAL RULE: PLAY THE GAME OF MYSTERIOUS SOUP FOR SO LONG AS YOU ARE A CONSUMER OF SOUP.

BENIGN AND/OR INANE CONSPIRACIES #4:

The world fills up with loser dipshit conspiracy podgrifters because the Illuminati are trying to send us a message:

Alex Jones is a gutless loser who made foul money off of white supremacist racism, science denialism, denialism of mass shootings, scam products, and getting into bed with rightwing politicians despite putting on a show of anti-government defiance. The hacky jerkoffs that emulate him are just chasing those mountains of cash they see in their slimy crapitalist dreams. These gross man-children do not speak for us; however we allow them to exist as living examples of how not to handle your shit in this world of luxury and sorrow. Will you pay heed to these grotesque allegories of craven idiocy? Or will you join the conformist grifters in exhaling the most rancid conspiritosis into the world?

See? The Illuminati are weirdos in how they communicate, but they're lookin' out for us!

THE NEW DREAM #9:

I'm shouting

I don't need to shout

but I'm shouting

my voice is electronically amplified across a people sea of extras in stylized ancient times garb-a mishmash of European RenFair medievalism and Dungeons and Dragons and the Roman dudes in metal skirts and post-apocalyptic barbarians tricked out in animal hides'n'sports padding

-post-apocalypse can be grouped in with ancient times stuff, right? hey, cliches just feel ancient, don't they? I think so

I'm shouting at clusterfuck chaos

trying to yell my way into order

and, y'know, there's some movement on the margins,

I think that's what that is,

so I scan with binoculars

but the binoculars are some kind of teleportation device

and I'm just right there in the swirling mess

my extras are chanting and clanging their weapons

horses rearing up

I flinch at hooves that narrowly miss coming down on my head

people are playfighting

but there's this tendency of the really ambitious ones

to wound themselves

just a little

to hardsell the action

Mr. Director Man'll take notice, remember our devotion, give us a come up on the next show, an extra gets promoted to a supporting actor, one day summit into a lead,

and I'm like, "Hell, I had a few overly ambitious supporting players straight-up disembowel themselves on my last picture-you earn a hard passage on my ship-!"

-woowoowoowoooooo

-and right as it's all gettin' good to me

the air's thick with decapitated heads; 

folks're only too damn eager to get tangled up in barbed wire and dosed with mustard gas and glazed with napalm

-woowoowoowoooooo

-and right as it's gettin' good to me

this brindle pitbull comes bounding up to me, wooing like crazy,

stepping on my feet

like some toddler dancing with a grandparent

eyes at full puppy

-woowoowoowoooooo

-blood showers us-me and the dog-from several neck stumps

always a favorite bit

tho' admittedly I'm not usually in the thick of it like this

-blood from several neck stumps showers me and the dog

and now the pittie is licking its lips compulsively

flavor is in the air

pittie licks some gore from my hand

and that's when a mighty Valkyrie wanders over, says, "Who's the most perfect puppy? It's you!"

and she's using her sinewy hands to massage and scritch and scratch the pittie's short-haired body

a freshly decapitated post-apocalypse bandit squats down to offer his shredded neck stump as a chewy treat

soon enough

swordsmen and wizards and gladiators and radioactive biker gangs are all crowding towards the pittie,

offering pets and scratchies and belly rubs

and severed digits'n'limbs'n'coils of intestines as treats

and this great assemblage of cosplayers is suffused with a magnificent golden light

and I'm like,

"What, precisely, the fuck is happening?!"

but I'm being crowded away from the True Center

back beyond the periphery

I hold the binoculars up to my eyes

hoping to teleport

but all that happens now

is that the binoculars are now functioning merely as binoculars

allowing me a distant view of what looks like

uhhh

like a giant outdoor concert

like Woodstock or something

they've even converted the materials of several siege engines into a kind of stage

upon which that brindled pittie is wooing its little heart out

while all my extras are dancing with wild abandon

tearing their limbs outta sockets

twisting their heads around backwards

skeletons jumping outta bodies to jitter and gyrate wildly, flinging off muscle and guts;

blades and motorcycles mystically merge essences into new kinds of food processing apparatus consisting of whirling-vrooming sharpnesses that grind everybody up into premium canine chow

which the pittie gobbles with abandon

growing huge with its feasting

gnawing every last bone down to the oh-so-suckable marrow

-did you notice that it's wearing a new sweater that someone knitted for it,so cute-

the pittie just grows and swells

wooing ecstatic joyous gluttony

'til it, too, explodes

loosing a hot meaty wind

that scours the flesh from my bones

my agony is so supreme

that the gods simply discharge all spiritual duties and burdens and fast track me through hell

back into the world of the living

where I spend six months fighting being locked out of the editing suite by the producers

-and then I just let it go

'cause movies are a pain in the ass

and I'm lucky to have any ass left

ANCILLARY PRODUCTS #4:

Looks into crystal ball.

Blockbuster burnout births a robust fan culture structured around incorporating the troubled protagonists of writer/director Paul Schrader into fan films based on the Silent Hill and Avatar franchises, with hard-boiled guest stars laterally drifting into the mix from various genre works.

Now we have the fanmade opus Silent Hill: Double Taxi Hell Scroll in which Travis Bickle must navigate a fog shrouded purgatorial city while being confronted by other disturbed folks: a porno theater in which a raging George C. Scott holds court; a seductive phantom lady played by a Cybil Shepherd cosplayer; a muttering mutilation killer in the image of Joe Spinell; Peter Boyle's Joe stalks Bickle with a shotgun; a holographic Tatsuya Nakadai reprises his slasher villain from The Sword of Doom; Sweet Sweetback challenges Bickle to a bare knuckle brawl; a John Travolta cosplayer challenges Bickle to a disco duel in the middle of a gory, glittering abattoir while freshly skinned day players hustle in tight formation all around the arena; and, for the penultimate boss, Bickle must battle the raging Advent Children level CGI specter of a youthful Jodie Foster who then metamorphoses into the True Final Boss: Mothra.

Blue Collar merges with Avatar: The Way of Water: the goodie two shoes family values vibe of James Cameron's overblown sequel evolves into a sophisticated Post-Hope bummer in which Jake Sully tries to live up to the fatherly and heroic expectations placed upon him, but the guy just feels trapped by all that fuckin' structure. Any chance he gets, Sully contrives various excuses-"Honey, I gotta go away for a few weeks to forge an alliance with the Water Tribe"-so that he can give brats'n'wife the slip so he can snort drugs and have group sex with relative strangers. This bold new fan film bears the title Blue Illusions. 

Post-Hope is rough. Yes. But the unauthorized culture is killer. 

I'll take it.

OPTIONAL RULE #4:

Okay, um . . . this one might come across as a little radical. So prepare yourself. And remember: it's strictly optional.

Okay.

So.

This one basically mandates that any kind of event or action or product must be-quintessentially-the thing in and of itself.

It's not the hype. It's not the hangout. It's not the after party. It isn't about the promise or the peril-it must be the thing in and of itself.

It's not the podgrift interview or the behind the scenes or the making of-it must be the thing in and of itself.

Except on Tuesdays and Thursdays-those are the Days of Florid Inauthenticity. 

My prediction is that Tuesdays and Thursdays will become screamingly dense with ALL of the activities and such . . . but I guess we'll see going forward. 

Remember: this is all optional.

If that helps.

AS A SOLIPSIST #2:

Satan paid me a visit in the night, gibbering and gesturing obscenely. I didn't look at him right away as I was absorbed into a playthrough of the Terranigma ROM on my modified SNES Classic. After, I dunno, a half hour? Sure, a half hour, the Prince of Darkness wandered away, came back with an RC Cola in his claw. I saw this out of the corner of my eye, and I said, "You gotta raid my fridge like that?"

Satan slurped noisily to rub it in, and so I was determined to give him a truly fantastical beating once I'd saved my state after getting through the latest tower, but then I heard the Tempter howl of a sudden. Something impacted my carpet. I turned my head to look, and saw Satan, standing in a posture of shock, all covered in bleeding scratches and gashes. And there at Old Scratch's feet, staining my goddamn carpet, was the dropped RC Cola can, just spilling itself out like a freshly slain soldier.

And so I glared hard at Satan.

Satan said, "I thought to scratch you, and slash you, but when I raked you with my claws-"

I sneered, and turned back to my game.

"You crimson fuckin' clown," I said, "you ought to know that when you strike at the source of all things you merely damage yourself."

And then a notion struck me. 

And upon the notion, Satan's head spun round and round, spewing pea soup all over the place, just missing my screen.

Oh, I guffawed into the night . . .

EDITORIAL NOTE: William is a solipsist.

SNACK BOSS BONUS DOUBLE FEATURE: OCCULTATION/REVELATION

 

DELETED SNACK AREA

 

SNACK SENSOR ARRAY

 

REFURBISHED SNACKCILITIES

 

LOADING SCREEN WISDOM #9:

SUPREME GUTS MAY BE UNLOCKED AT ANY TIME, HOWEVER THE EARLIER YOU UNLOCK THEM THE QUICKER THEY GO OUT OF FASHION. IF YOU FIND YOURSELF WITH OUT-OF-FASHION SUPREME GUTS TRY SELLING THEM TO SCIENTISTS FOR A MODEST PROFIT.