Times sure have changed. A hotdog used to cost five hundred caesars. Birds did not fear humankind: they would come right up and land on your upheld arm. Your house in those days was camouflage — now it’s transparent. All men were ugly, whereas now they all look like beautiful women. Trucks required water to live and breathe and multiply. College was fun. Debts soared. Fruit was not quite as juicy (I’m talking about ALL fruit, that’s why I didn’t specify gourds); pizza and a hot date would get you a job on the Internet. You could work as much as you liked, and your boss would never say when. Cars were funky. Cats were awesome. Children, especially bullies, were kind to each other and allowed Jesus Christ to approach them for kicks. (He would toss bread crumbs at them, and they would bat them back.) In short, everything was paranoid, in the best sense of the word. Raggedy newspapers would shred themselves in protest of their false views. Hardened schoolteachers would booze right out in public. Church was honest. State was cool. The cops were your friends.
Now all this stuff is more than sixty-nine times better.
How did this happen? And where do we go from here?
There’s a satellite that’s natural and a satellite that’s manmade: both are floating in space, and one of them has all the answers; but first we must discover them. The keys to the door are lost, but we’ll find them, I’m sure of it. My guess is that they’re hiding underneath one of those hollow, plastic rocks. — Problem is, nowadays, there are billions of each type of binary satellite-pair, and literally trillions of keys inside countless fake pebbles, wherever you go. If you visit the beach, the whole place looks like a standard aquarium. I got lost there myself, one time; so perhaps I’m a skeleton key to something bigger than my own personal problems, and this universe will open and I’ll be at last beheld by the lab team that made me. (And what if your lab team overlooks you? And what if you see right thru their great ruse? — What then, tough guy?)
There once was a concept called “the banana republic”. Now we have flying fool’s-gold ingots for sale. Try not to swat them.
Did you like the old king better or the new king? Ah, that’s the right answer: I prefer the new king, too. He’s older and wiser. He’s got a thick accent. He always wears that leather jacket. He walks right up to your scale and weighs apples to oranges. What are you going to do about it? Become an organizer? Start a small-claims court? Get that “Tornado Crane” out of its plastic packaging and lift something heavy? Well then I have more than just one house to tell you about: I recommend lifting multiple complexes of apartments. Take ’em from Kansas and give ’em to Texas.
I wanna sneak in and take that new class you just bought. Let it pass me on a joyride; then trash it. Deprive you of the knowledge that you thought you had. I wanna make you so stupid that you thank me.
YOU: “O god! It’s ecstasy!”
ME: “Hey, no problem.” [Flameblows kisses.]
Yes, we do good stuff together, I can tell. Let’s call it successful. I’ll fill out the paperwork, and you rubber-stamp it.
Let’s listen to heavy-metal music while we’re still in the womb, and then graduate to caribbean jazz while we’re waiting to make our appearance. We can stand behind the red curtains and peek out to see what the concertgoers look like. (Are they the audience or the band? I can’t quite tell.) Then we’ll step out onstage in our tuxedos and tell jokes in song form, only our singing will sound exactly (and I mean exactly) like weeping and gnashing.
Initially I hated World War One, but now I’m almost starting to like it. Here’s what I found worked for me: I swapped out the countries and all the people who fought the war in reality, and I put in their place: me myself on the side of THE GOOD; and then, likewise, I swapped out the side of THE BAD with the octogenarian Bertrand Russel. (Yes, the philosopher.) I just fought the whole world-war against him alone, and the event came to life: I saw it with totally different eyes, and it was on the verge of splendid. All the things that I formerly thought were horrible atrocities were now borderline enjoyments. And it’s not that I have anything against Lord Russel — he just makes a commendable enemy.
So, after the smoke clears, and all the dead bodies are hauled away, and the blood is mopped up from the battlefields, and the buildings un-bombed; I get to participate in a ceremony where the globe awards me all of Russel’s hula girls. (The hula is a dance characterized by six basic gestures imitating true mythological phenomena.) The damsels that Russel relinquishes to me dramatize a symbolic message by undulating their hips: they depict The World as Will and Representation — that book by Arthur Schopenhauer — in visual dance form. And if you are wondering “Why Schopenhauer?” math yields you no reason.
My favorite aspect of these humans that I win as war-spoils from The Bad Lord Russel is that they wear such colorful tops and skirts.
And I teach people to breathe, and to use their spirit to sublimate the fallen forms of matter. When we at last discover God, we tend to his wounds, even if he keeps trying to strike us with his horns and the spikes on his tail. After eons of thrashing, God becomes our friend: he is no longer our intensest adversary. As I said above, just as fear itself is the only aspect of life that we have to be afraid of, our final enemy is not death but Lord Bertrand Russel — and he’s not even a hard, sincere opposition: it’s just like we’re playing a game of chess. And I win, forever.
So now I go around vaccinating all the animals. I tell them “I have created a vaccine, now I must vax you.” And they all get vaxxed.
Even the anti-vaxxers accept my vax. My most hate-filled critics and skeptics desire my potion — in fact, they yearn for the fix, till I come and repair them; because I remain a persuasive physician.
If you look at the doctors and nurses nowadays, they all work for the same six companies, and all their science has been corrupted by corporate hijinks; which explains why they’re always chasing each other around the operating table and trying to lift each other’s smocks to ogle each other’s comely parts. This type of behavior is not becoming for a western faith-healer. Nor is it professional to seduce your clients, if you are a snake handler. You want the public to believe in the high quality of the oil that your serpent yields, lest they begin to doubt you. For a hint of doubt can begin as small as a mustard seed, but just blink your eyes and you’ll see that it has grown into a whole stinking forest: Lo, the birds of heaven now nest within these mustard-tree branches; then anyone who passes beneath them gets shat upon. This is decidedly unhygienic. — But if, instead of chasing each other around their patients’ hospital beds, and committing carnal acts right there on the hospital floor…
I’m just trying to get you clowns to enter your cowboy-chrysalises. There’s no reason you couldn’t be calf-roping gentlemen, by now — turn that noose into a lasso: Master the art of seduction. I’m talking about ye rodeo clowns: all ye folk who wear a wooden barrel for clothes. Think of that barrel like it’s your cocoon. Duck inside and emerge as a matador.
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