Another cascade of misc.

Dear diary,

Now a twenty-two year old kisses a twenty-two year old. These young women are really going at it, in public. What happened is that God decided, after having put on flesh and become a mortal human so that King Herod could slay him, he would now inhabit a motherboard and get robotic. So he found two damsels who were willing to make him into a machine, by way of their soft bodies. That’s why this essay commences with a kiss.

I wanted to talk to you today about proper government formation. If you go to a foreign land and do not like the way that they rule themselves, it’s important to know how to make changes to their regime. First, look at the higher-ups: there should be anywhere from one to thirty people resembling a king and some senators. Take them up with you in your airplane. Make sure that you’re the one piloting the thing. Get in the fuselage; man that cockpit. Put on your safety belt. Now become airborne; BUT, before you do, grab the intercom microphone and announce to the assembly as follows: “All aboard? Then it’s time for liftoff!” Count backwards from ten and then press the “Eject” button on your seat, after aiming the plane at a mountain. What will happen is that you’ll pop out of the driver’s seat with your parachute in full blossom; and you can float slowly down to the ground while watching the airplane travel in a dotted beeline into the active volcano. And while you enjoy this show, the soundtrack shall be playing “The Blue Danube” waltz by Johann Strauss II.

So God becomes a robot, and he decides to change the government of the place where he lands. Instead of a king, he installs UNE FEMME; and then he replaces the senators with the good Lord Bryan. 

It’s a place where only creditors are allowed; that’s why everyone’s swimming in credit. Nobody owes anybody anything. Not even infants are born indebted to their mothers, here. Folks step out the steel doors of the robo-womb fully armed and ready to take what’s rightfully theirs (read: mightfully theirs). If you summon them to court, they just laugh and order a side of justice for you, along with a main course of THE PROCESS IS THE PUNISHMENT; then wave dismissively when the bailiff brings the bill. The judge comes over and bows and kisses my ring. “I just love your work,” he sez. I place my hand on his arm and gently but steadily apply more pressure until he tips over. I then nudge him with my foot until he crawls out of the frame.

Now Betty orders buns. Midge orders tea and buttered toast.

“Lord Bryan,” sez UNE FEMME, “look over at the table next to us, that’s so close I can touch it with my arm without even leaning over to reach — it’s right here. Do you see the two twenty-two-year-olds going at it?”

Suddenly 130-pound balls of hail start dropping to earth, and everyone in the world is screaming blasphemies at God. One of the twenty-two-year-olds wears a small bright green toque over her black bobbed hair, and her extremely short and rather shabby skirt reveals a pair of uncommonly dainty ankles. 

UNE FEMME is aroused. She begins to pour out her tea.

The manager of the courtroom comes and stares. He notes the women going at it and the baby robot being born in a pool of its own divinity. He then turns and beholds the two persons (Betty and Midge) inside one eternal female, accompanying Lord Bryan whose jet-black mane consists of flame. The courtroom manager blinks; then sez: “What day is it?”

“Sunday. The fourth of September, two thousand and twenty-one years after Christ wet his loincloth.” 

“Are you sure?” sez the manager.

“Yes.”

“OK, Sunday it is, then,” the manager draws a picture of the sun on his hand, to help him remember. He has a blind date this evening, and it’s important not to be late when you’re planning on placing the bell jar of marriage over the body of a stranger and then pumping out all the sentiment. 

“Sir?” sez the robot on the floor.

“Yes, ma’am?” sez the manager.

“Why is this place flooded with credit? How is a confidence trickster expected to accomplish a fair and just quantity of snake-oiling if one can’t even get one’s mechanical claw on a decent piece of…”

The manager interjects: “It’s because I am so bad at bookkeeping. Here, let me explain—” he grabs the chalk from behind the robot’s ear and steps over to the blackboard, on which is written today’s lunch menu. The manager uses his sleeve to smear the existing writing into a milky mess, and, while he speaks, begins chalking marks over the top of the semi-erasure: “You see, one should always balance debits with credits. Debits go HERE, and credits go HERE. — This is how debt grows up to become a problem in the community. You soon set eyes on your neighbor’s wife and maidservants, so you ask what their value is, and you add their names and the total price to the ‘You Owe Me This’ column; then pretty soon you enslave your neighbor himself by purchasing him outright, because you write his name there too, next to all his loved ones and belongings — his homestead and animals and all his farm implements are yours — for it’s immoral to question why the rest of the world doesn’t simply laugh all creditors out of the courtroom. Well, what I so stupidly did was put every figure over HERE, on the ‘Friendly Freedom’ side; therefore nobody’s in debt, and everyone has their own stuff, and they just love it.”

“Ah, I see,” the robot nods. The huge hailstones now stop falling, and the surrounding blasphemous shouting simmers down to a dull roar.

Now Leo the Lion strides out of the private office at the East side of the courtroom, and Bryan the Tortoise lurks out of the conference chamber at the West side of the courtroom. The two approach each other. They stand and stare into each other’s enormous eyes, while the referee drops a show-stopping wheel of Parmigiano Reggiano between them like it’s a hockey puck. The snapping turtle takes the cheese.* 

[*Footnote: Attentive readers will recall that I chose Boccaccio, author of The Decameron, to be my personal chef in my previous books — see the collection called No More Fake Novels — even going so far as to build him a kitchen above my home when I lived in the Great Pyramid. My reason for doing this is that, on Day 8, Tale 3 of his aforesaid masterwork, he has his character Elisa describe “a mountain of grated Parmesan cheese, inhabited by people who do nothing other than make macaroni and ravioli, which they cook in capon broth and then throw on the ground to be scrambled for, and those who can pick up most get most. Also, nearby there is a stream of white wine, the best ever drunk, without a drop of water in it.” — I intensely admire Boccaccio for imagining this, and it made me want to live with him as my meal-planner.]

UNE FEMME returns from the lady’s room. “What’s going on? Fill me in — I think I missed some crucial developments of the plot while I was in the Snow-White Stall wetting my loincloth like Uncle Jesus.”

Lord Bryan brings Betty and Midge up-to-date on the story, and they order more french fries and hotdogs and brats and hamburgers. The waiter also gives them free milkshakes and three bottomless jugs of vodka. — They throw the milkshakes at nearby diners, who then march over to their table and ask the reason for this rudeness. Lord Bryan, on behalf of his eternal mistress UNE FEMME, explains that they do not like the political views of these prigs.

“Thank you so much for the breakdown of my political iniquities,” say the prigs. “What should I be believing instead of what I currently hold to be true?”

“Well,” Lord Bryan rises to his full height and begins to sermonize. He is imposing and majestic. He is like THE KING WHO IS LOVED BY THE COMMON PEOPLE combined with all the senators who assassinated him.

Now the robot, still bathing in its own pool of radiant afterbirth on the floor, interrupts.

“Don’t interrupt me,” Lord Bryan snaps.

“Sorry,” sez the robot.

“Now, as I was saying,” Lord Bryan begins to pace and preach again. He talks loudly and clearly. He is extremely convincing. His voice is deep and commanding. His ideas are cogent. 

By the time Bryan finishes his lecture, everyone has changed their mind and is now in agreement with his notions about how the world should be configured.

The waiter approaches with more milkshakes on a tray. He hands them out to all the people who are now Lord Bryan’s disciples. Lord Bryan commands them to go and throw the shakes at everyone who hasn’t yet heard of his political stance. The disciples do this, and the amount of people who agree with Lord Bryan increases exponentially. 

“Turn on the television that is hanging in the corner of the courtroom restaurant there,” Lord Bryan points with his Dracula-hand.

“Absolutely. Sure thing, master,” sez the robot, as it sloshes thru its own glowing afterbirth and climbs up the wall like a spider to switch on the black-and-white TV.

“Turn it up; I can’t hear it,” Lord Bryan commands.

The robot climbs back up the wall and turns the volume knob until the unit is blaring loud. It is an extremely annoying corporate newscast program. 

“Is that satisfactory, master?” asks the robot, not daring to crawl back down the wall yet.

“Shh!” Lord Bryan shushes the robot and moves his hand in a way that means “move out of the way; you are blocking my view of the screen”.

The robot, having lost the will to hold on to the wall, drops into a nearby trash can.

“This holiday season is looking like it will be a bad one for retail outlets and stores with inventory in general,” blares the female newscaster smarmily. “Since the entire universe is now drowning in credit, nobody needs to buy anything — lo, everyone already owns everything that they need: they own their own clothes, they have food enough to survive for a billion lifetimes, and they even own a small brown house in the suburbs!” The woman reaches down to satisfy an urge.

Her fellow news-reader, an old man who is dull, begins blabbing when his co-host stops: “Now that nobody needs any useless junk anymore,” he blares from the TV, “there’s nothing to do. No products to advertise; no working-class folks to buy stuff. Everyone is just trading stocks online, sitting in their bathrobe. So the mall is getting dusty. Look at these pictures that our photographer took earlier today. Isn’t it sad? No employees, no customers: just walls of unsold products. Soon the mall will shut down and the people who own it will watch their stocks skyrocket, but they will not have any feeling of accomplishment about this, because they’ll know that they didn’t really annoy anyone in the process of…”

“Shut it off!” shouts Lord Bryan. “I’ve heard enough.”

The trash can where the robot gave up his ghost now leaps up and crashes into the TV screen, causing its power switch to get bumped to the “OFF” position.

“I was only interested in listening to that news show long enough to see if all my stocks would increase in value,” explains Lord Bryan. 

“Any stock tips for the rest of us?” sez the waiter, as he brings out a mega-large tray filled with many, many more milkshakes.

“Yes,” sez Lord Bryan. “Buy stock in sneakers. Buy stock in boats. Buy stock in sand. Buy stock in canned muck. Buy stock in…”

“Should I keep a salamander as a pet, or feed it to someone’s cat?” sez one of the two twenty-two-year-olds who are on top of a nearby table, mid-lick.

“Buy stock in both,” sez Lord Bryan. “You can’t go wrong.” Then he points to the woman’s wife: “You missed a spot.”

Now a delivery truck arrives and opens its trailer. There are glistening packages of philosophy stacked in rows, and they are now distributed to everyone. 

“These are really, really good,” sez UNE FEMME. 

And it is true. Normally, philosophies are outdated and stuffy, but this shipment must have been properly refrigerated, because all the statements hold up when proven wrong, plus they’re attractive to the normal, stressed brain of a typical fool, which is the gold-standard test for a philosophy. If you can get your boss to accept it, then you’re in Rome. 

Now this was about the time when people started sending their friends and loved ones on boat trips to nowhere, so the vessels would wind up in the middle of areas that were not yet labeled on any map. 

Huge acorns, as well, were placed all throughout the borders of Michael Angelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco.

And another truck stopped by with a shipment, and very slowly while beeping to warn bystanders to “move it or lose it,” the truck backed up into the main dining area of the courtroom, and it opened its trailer’s door, but the goods that it displayed were less attractive than the abovementioned philosophies. So not as many people accepted the handouts. Thus, the extra, unwanted boxes were piled in front of the rec room, because we didn’t know where else to put them; so, now, nobody could get any recreation until they managed to feign interest in these dissatisfying phenomena, all of which were shrink-wrapped.

And Betty and Midge were unimpressed.

Then someone invented that ride that has people-sized tea-cups that spin relentlessly — it’s a mechanical contraption at the amusement park. 

So Death stepped in and had a look around and then murmured to himself: “Not bad; I like it.” Then he left.

And God, still playing the role of an expired robot living inside of a dustbin, began to teach his Christian followers how to feel hungry when they see a can of beans. The way that he did this is that he would take a can of beans into his hand and peel its top back very, very slowly. That would cause the Christian followers to salivate. Then he would tip the can over and the beans would spill out. And the Christian believers would lap them up. And as they were bending over and mouthing up the beans that had fallen so suggestively, God would point, in imitation of Lord Bryan, and say in English “You missed a spot,” and it wouldn’t even matter if anyone naturally laughed or not, because God figured out how to add a laugh-noise to his soundtrack in post-production.* 

[*Footnote: I know that I make a big deal about all the magic that can happen in the editing room, but I just gotta say that this idea of canned laughter is arguably the best thing since spilled beans. With God as my witness.]

Now, while God was in trashed-robot form pretending to do all the above, there was a giant fuzzy reptile that walked onstage and innocently stepped right where all the church members were licking up the beans, while God was pointing. 

And everyone’s credit score just kept soaring and soaring. It used to be that 745 was a decent number; but now it was, on the average, at around the 860s or low 900s at which most people were levitating. It was like they had huffed hot helium, when you would French them on the mouth and then discuss business. Trying to fix a badly forged signature while the bigwigs in the backroom won’t stop squeaking about ethical investments began to look like a scientific miracle swathed in a clusterfuck.

After that, they brought out more of those half-sized hotdogs, and there was ketchup, mustard, and relish on the condiment cart. Then we were treated to a laser-tag tournament. 

And fathers and sons conspired with mothers and daughters to make the world a better place to live in, by bringing more healthy, natural, pure, innocent love into the picture, and using yellow dandelion heads as paintbrushes to spread it around. This made everyone reflect deeply about engaging in fraudulent schemes; and, when they finally DID set out to perform their next fraudulent scheme, they fought off the memory of this present episode, using a broom handle. They just kept jabbing at it, until the memory collapsed and fell backwards into the freezer. Then…

Actually, then, nothing. Nothing happened, from this point forward. 

That is to say: UNE FEMME turned sharply, and the words hovering on the tip of her tongue remained unspoken, for her audience’s appearance and manner did not bear out her first and most natural assumption. She hesitated. And, as if her own gentle listener (who is our own gentle reader) had overheard her thoughts, you yourself said quickly:

“I can assure you I mean only disrespect.”