In the New Dream
I got so tired of being balloon but not
You grab a limp balloon
You pop yourself a stroke blowing it up
Unless you're one of these mutants that's just good at blowing up balloons
You go to the state fair
There's a machine with a nozzle
Blows up the balloons so good
It must be having significant long-term evolutionary effects upon the species
But in the New Dream
I'm not any of this
I'm balloon but not
At best I'm miming the balloon inflation process
Blowing into a shape
That can only be seen
But gets me no actual balloon
This gets me down
But then there's a floaty zooming sensation
It's like playing Doom for hours and hours without interdictions by enemy
Pure traversal
Keeping some kind of beat with regular intervals of chunky future door noises
Chillax mode enabled-
-mostly excised from the final cut
Reduced down to a Spike Lee style "floating dolly pull" as I make my way to a Lowe's
I float the aisles
Meats ghost routine
A helpful employee draws near in a slightly uncomfortable close-up
I ask if they have the components for a nuclear bomb
I ask this expecting laughter or to get told off for being a weirdo
I fantasize making it on to one of them thar watchlists
But no
The employee walks me through the whole process
There's a series of modular kits
It's expensive
To do the full sequence
But it's all packaged up and ready to go
They got payment plans and everything
"-ever since the Supreme Court expanded the domain of the individual's right to bear arms-"
Employee dude is super into the details
Of the New Dream
I get dunked into dismal depths of Buyer's Remorse
But I put the full sequence onto my credit card
Sans hesitation
Just the guilt that's fully leaded
Good radiation protection
Perhaps
More chillaxed Doom traversal elided
And I'm a suburban nuclear power
Like the for real kind
Boom-boom
Not electricity
I get seated at the adults' table for the first fucking time in my life, dude!
Presidents
Prime Ministers
Dictators
Warlords
Comic Opera Colonels
Petroleum Princes
Five course dinners,
Had to sneak off to the bathroom to puke
How the fuck do you eat five courses of anything short of ambrosia?
And then they brought in the ambrosia!
Dude!
Of course, the US President wasn't actually there, just a derpy envoy
Actually
This is kind of a cute story
But a genocidal rogue state colonel with a wildass Joker cosplay thought I was the US President
Dude kept trying to get me to sell him Agent Orange
"I'm telling you, Mr. President, I'll go win the Vietnam War for you-and that's at a fraction of the Pentagon's budget! Why that's a bargain at twice the price!"
I begged off by selling him a copy of that Valve Orange Box with Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2 and Portal,
Told him that it contained the recipe for Agent Orange,
Whilst the American envoy simultaneously shook her head in disapproval, licked her lips, and winked at me,
Was she the one playing footsie with me under the adults' table?
I could've sworn it was Vladimir Putin.
Sure, it could've been both.
It was all a little too Loaded Weapon 1 for my taste.
I prefer the lightness of Lubitsch.
Truly, the situation was fraught.
Of course
The New Dream ended in nuclear annihilation
But it wasn't any of us at the adults' table
Some random Florida Man sparked it off during a road rage incident down in Tallahassee
Now I'm floaty zooming
Against a screen
Of nuclear whiteness
Truly glitched out of any kind of rules set
Sans perspective
Lost the sensation of movement
Can't see
Nothing to see
Ivory migraine choppers biting down hard on my last blob of consciousness
Finale
Of head rushing
Like back at the hotel
Lying down
After a day of riding roller coasters
No roller coasters
Balloon but not
