I am a writer. Writers write. Especially about Major Occurences. Like the Unexpected, the Outrageous, the Disastrous... the Enflamed. I was in bed after a long day, calming myself down into slumber. I hadn't brushed my teeth, but the sleep demons had already sunk their teeth into my leg muscles. I was dormant. Then, a noise. A bang. A shout, a stumble down the stairs, more shouts (closer this time). When you see an unexpected flame, you don't necessarily panic. It's one of the oldest, most natural things to behold and to rally around. Only houses are new -- fires, and the safety they've provided, have been around for many mad millenia. It makes sense not to run. But I did. I ran into the street, friend in tow, holding my Macintosh. Fires are ancient, houses are just old, but Macs are wee babies... and important. The noosphere survives in our information: lose the info, lose the third dome around the third rock from the sun. The earth shrinks, the species grows dull. As she put it: "Get the Macs, and get out!" Running from the ancient flame, running from the civilized structures, we ran into the street, where the only people awake at that hour had congregated to witness the awesome power of heat and old timber. You don't realize how fragile the physical realm is until you see it changing state right before your eyes. All it takes is a small candle flame to render a massive engineered structure completely useless for protecting humans from the elements. Small, elemental properties undo huge productions of the noosphere, and all we can do is stand curbside, slackjawed. Nature is not awesome: it's dumb and brutal, but it's not awesome. What's awesome is humanity, and its ability for resilience, compassion, and building things on top of the burned-down heaps of things past. A lost house makes room for a new one, a bigger one, one with sentience and care and complexity built in, and higher and higher we get towards outer space.

Hey ya'll, as if the recent fire and loss of Plunge Artist HQ wasn't enough craziness, this week also marks the debut of my graduate improv comedy show at Bovine Metropolis in Denver. We're running every Wednesday this month at 7:30pm ($8--cheap!), hope to see you there! (Poster design by me, show title by committee)

What would it take to become the World Poet? What would be required to gain fame as the planet's most beloved versifier? This and many other impossible (and hence: probable) goals keep me up at night, wondering what it would be like to tap into the earth's pulse, hear the needs of its people, and communicate it all in written -- or spoken -- form. First there is the question of arty dillentantism: being another g-dang "multilcultural" literature producer, dropping place name after arrogant place name as though the stamps on a passport automatically transformed into lifelong Soul Points. Yeah yeah dude, you know six words in Spanish and seven in Dutch: great. Your poetry still stinks. Related to this issue (of the superificial lingo-tourist) is the more crucial problem: the planet's 6 billion don't all speak the same language. Do you fake it? Impose English or Chinese? Speak gibberish? Resort to iconography? Or maybe you just outsource your source texts to a really good team of translators, who spread the word in every tongue across the seven lands. Beyond these communication concerns (the How of communication) is something more interesting, and profound: What does the World Poet communicate? Is it enough to simply report the sufferings of the Southern hemisphere to the generous pocketbook ears of the Northen hemisphere? (The "speaking truth to power" approach). Perhaps one might instead join the cults of Thomas Friedman or Thomas P.M. Barnett, becoming a rah-rah cheerleader for global capitalism, urging the underdeveloped world to get on the development bandwagon, by hook or by limerick if possible. But both of these approaches seem a bit too agenda-driven, don't they? I'd like to propose a third solution to the problem of What a writer writes about: not the world's sufferings, nor its melting pot economy, but what it could BE, where it could GO, and how it (the world itself, like a giant, space-faring organism) would SPEAK. And to do that, it first becomes necessary to inspect said world, nose to the sand, and then to ASK IT QUESTIONS.

Check out the latest from Plunge Artist, a one-page PDF checklist for anyone looking to break their lease to live on the streets, in their car, or in the skies while still being able to work. Click here to download.

Yes, we're selling the famous Macbook on eBay to benefit the residents of Maxwell House. Place your bid today (5 days only, tick-tock mofos!). Click here to buy the famous Macbook.

Do things exist outside of our perception of them? More importantly: do they exist for each other? And if so, how? I am thinking now of all the ruined, melted, and charred objects which came out of our house fire a few weeks ago -- a collapsed typewriter, a torched piano, a gutted futon mattress -- objects which no longer retain their function, but still exist in the world. Like the rotting boats of Suffolk, they are prime for investigation. This group of objects lived in our house together: a piano, a sofa, several books, a typewriter. They didn't percieve each other in totality, but they did "see" certain parts of each other. The wood cells in the piano may have felt the air-impressions of clacking typewriter keys, the sofa cells may have been dimly aware of the subtle pressure of the books resting on them, etc. Not a permanent environment, but it did have a certain constancy. One night, another object -- a candelabra -- betrays them all, failing in its function to keep a candle standing up, instead letting it fall against the wooden wall and soon, light it on fire. Within moments, every object in the apartment is rendered dysfunctional, different, and weird. Piano keys have melted together, the typewriter has collapsed in on itself, the pages of each book have burned away in black and tan layers. Each object is different to all of the others. They weigh less, their blackness absorbs more light, and there's a new chill breeze blowing in through the eastern windows where the firemen broke the glass to let the smoke out, creating new sounds, new smells, and a new average temperature. These objects are now strangers to each other, new things that didn't exist before, irreverisbly changed by the violent physics of the conflagration. They have woken up as different individuals, living in an environment with complete strangers, yet all of them, strangely, are seated in the same positions they were in a day ago. Haunting, no? Yet this more or less describes our world as a whole: the same objects, changed time and time again, are passing each other in the night, finding faint glimmers of recognition ("Hello tree!" "Hello stone!") as they pass through the same queer routes -- roadbeds, commercial shipping lines, UPS flight paths. It's a sea of semi-sentient artifacts feeling each others' warmth and shifting ever so slightly to their microgravities -- and yet being changed by the interactions of other objects with each pass. What we forget is that every object exists beyond just the standard assessments of "useful" or "not useful". For other beings, a burned sofa or a torched coffee can may be the most profound of religious emblems, a vessel within which to travel great distances, or a source of a torturous amount of heat or chill. And the needs of these beings are forever changing as well. Bringing it back to the fire, we find six people changed, percieving a different world filled with objects with new meanings (for me, most of the "stuff" I once collected is now junk to be moved out and shipped), many of these objects themselves changing over and over... yet all of it remaining strange and familiar, like a pitch-shifted remix of a song you heard when you were 3 years old. And through it all, the winds keep blowing their streamers of air molecules, the oldest friends we know.

When it comes to the empire of things, familiarity does not breed contempt, but invisibility. What seems new and interesting slowly fades into the background, and doesn't rear its head again until something goes wrong. In the "object-oriented philosophy" of contemporary metaphysicist (and Heidegger scholar) Graham Harman, we find a world consisting entirely of objects churning away in the background, performing their tasks in the quiet of anonymity... until something goes wrong. A liver malfunctions, a wall collapses, a web server breaks down: suddenly the things we take for granted assert their presence. It is not that they are "broken" or "pathological" in an ontological sense, only that they are broken for us. Harman's philosophy subverts this anthropomorphism, in an attempt to (according to his Wiki profile) "extricate objects from their human captivity and uncover a strange new subterranean network of object relations." Either way, what interests me is that moment when an object -- a car, a balustrade, a kitten, or a collection of furniture -- no longer occupies our conscious interest, and becomes something to be silently relied on, as though they have been "ingested" by our awareness and rendered inert by our presence. Have they? I propose that it is only at their most invisible (and boring) that our everyday objects are most important. They have a certain, reliable identity in our relation to them (the car is always a vehicle, the balustrade is always to hang one's coat on), but for other beings, for other objects, children, mice, and insects, they can be much more, and much different. A children may find a dangerous crushing-thing in the car, an insect may find a host for parasitism in the kitten, and a mouse is obviously hard at work dragging bodies of cheese in and around the furniture. In short: these objects can be many things to many other things, so much so that their value and identity could never be exhausted. We may think our known environments to be networks of stable, consistent, dull things, but that is only from our perspective: in reality, we are dealing with an infinity of universes, populated by the dumb and profound alike.

NOTE: This is a new writing series. The premise is simple: write whatever comes to my mind for one hour every day, and post it. This is the first one. Fiction. "Relax or I'll kill you." This she said to me as she sat on my chest. It was 1985, and we were in love. She lived down the street, on the side of the neighborhood where the grass grew longer because the old lady at 212 hated mowers, and loved calling in noise complaints. The girl had hard-packed hair from the spray she nuked it with. Her jeans were tight, and her grip on my hand tighter. We walked around the main circle which united the neighborhood's side streets. They were all named after birds, and we talked as we felt the setting sun's orange glow glide around our bodies, warming them with its orbit. "We're like pigs on a spit," she said. In lieu of what was to happen, she wasn't far off. Billy was my older brother. He collected broken baseball bats from the stadium, and he knew what rap music was. My father said you can't spell "crap" without "rap", but it was always under his breathe , otherwise Billy would hit him. My mother worked double shifts at the hospital and always slept during the daytime. We had to keep the TV down low, sweating alone in our underoos in the un-air conditioned family room where the black and white TV flickered through its daily retinue of re-run cartoons. Billy liked to hit in me in my right-hand shoulder, which is why I always held her to my left. The girl. You know how certain flowers give off a smell that sticks the insides of your nostrils together with its polleny-thickness? That described her. First there was the deodorant, which she applied liberally and allowed to leave white streaks on her black Vision Street Wear t-shirts. Following this was the Hair Net, always applied in gusts and salvoes whenever she'd undergone a severe blast of windstorm. Subtler, yet just as meaningful, was the mixed concoction of grape Hubba Bubba and warm canned beer which was always on her breathe. We'd kissed three times that summer, and each time took me farther and farther into the drug store that was her body's chemical smell aura. "Do you want me to give you a blowjob?" she asked one day. I said no, but I meant yes. Randy at school -- the one in shop class with the Air Jordans -- he always said a blowjob was better than sex. "Sex means you're equal to the girl. Blowjobs mean you're better. Trust me man, you want to be better." Randy's dad beat his mom with meaty fists every Sunday night -- everyone knew this. She went to Sunday night bowling league, got drunk every time and ended up calling him for a ride. This pissed him off, but the leers of the other bowlers (all men) from the arcade made him swing at her. I came home that night without a blowjob to find Billy on the phone with his hand down his pants. I cleared my throat and ran upstairs, hoping not to hear a single syllable of what he was saying to his girlfriend. "--twist--" is all I heard that night. Our TV room was directly below our bedrooms, and Billy kept it loud. I knew it was to mask whatever sounds his penis made when he stroked it, so I never bothered to ask for it to be turned down. I instead covered each ear with a pillow and drew comic book characters on the ceiling with my mind until I fell asleep. I never wanted her to see the inside of my house, because the living room was filled with Mom's dolls, and everything smelled like grandma. Dad kept long hours in his shop, drinking heavily-creamed coffee while he attached little plastic arms to little plastic drill sergeants with Testor's. Mom always said his lifestyle fit in perfectly with hers: I always thought it was because she liked World War II trivia. "Mom hates dad, that's the real reason she works doubles." We had starfish living in the nets in the rafters of our Florida porch. When we were little Billy told me they were still alive and pooping very small, invisible turds down on us all day long. Every time I got sick he said it was because I didn't wash my hands after reading comic books out on the porch. I read a lot of comic books. "Ok, well if you won't let me give you a blowjob, at least let me give you a handie." I didn't want a handie, I didn't want anything. Randy said I needed a girlfriend, but I didn't know why. She was fun to hang out with, but I didn't know what the end goal was. Were we supposed to hang out until graduation, then get married, and hate each other forever? Was my sole purpose for being put in a womb and tossed out into this neighborhood to find her, spray her insides with baby batter (as Billy would put it), and raise more brats like me and my bro? I really wished we had a microwave. "Not until your father gets a second job too." Father always said he had a second job: tracking Reagan. "He's the worst president since Truman. He never fought in no wars, and he wants to solve all of our conflicts with ICBMs. I hate him." Dad felt that if things weren't settled in trenches with ammo clips and errant grenades, they weren't settled at all. I never had an opinion. "You fuck that girl yet Tommy?" Billy asked me the morning after I caught him masturbating. He was eating a salad bowl full of Honey Comb, which had two Eggos resting on top. Syrup and milk had mingled to form a sweet creamy goo, which spilled from his chin as he took each bite and watched Donahue. I went straight to the refrigerator to wrap my lips around a bottle of OJ so I wouldn't have to talk to him. Mother was on his way out. "Ignore him," she said, repeating the same words I'd heard her say re: Billy since I was about 5. "He just wants to make you mad or sad." It didn't make me mad or sad anymore, only bored. The whole thing was boring: this stupid brother, his ways, my dad's models, mother's sleeping and work, the lack of cool appliances. At least she, the girl, offered the promise of adventure, even if it scared the shit out of me. "Hey prude, let's drink some beers and do some graffiti." She always called me "prude" on the phone -- I think it was to impress her little sisters. I didn't care. We met behind the plaza, near the row of three green dumpsters and the rug store truck. The sun was setting behind the tall copse of maples behind Mr. Gugliano's house. She had a cigarette between her teeth, which she was lighting with an old report card. "Fuck it," she said, "I hate those classes anyways." She had burn marks on her jean jacket, and purple dye where she'd tried to write her name, but fucked up the "y". I wanted to hit her, but instead I grabbed her knee and sat down. A rock pierced through my jeans and into my scrotum, but I didn't move. "Here's the beer" she said, looking over my shoulder to be sure none of the neighborhood tattle-tales were walking by. There was Mrs. Kzanski, who used front yard raking as a pretext for peering into parked cars. There were the Lalncorn Twins, who were always drawing hopscotch in the road of their cul-de-sac, complete with the names of that week's offenders. And there was McKinsey. McKinsey was the war hero my father wrote annual paoens to in the neighborhood news bulletin. He'd shot down 16 Japanese fighters in the Pacific Theatre, and had a row of 16 tattoos on his belly to prove it. And he hated what America was becoming. "Goddamnit," he'd always say in his drunken, washed-up slur. "I didn't lose my anal virginity to Tojo's sock puppets so that our young people could dress like faggots and listen to noise music." He thought of Bryan Adams as noise music. He passed the girl and I as we crouched by the dumpsters, squinting hard as he attempted to pick out details amidst our shadows, before ambling on to the plaza proper. He'd be back. "Man, fuck McKinsey," she said as she pulled the can -- now warm -- from the brown paper bag her older brother had snuck it to her in. I dipped a finger in and tasted it: metal and aspirin, mixed with old bread. "Good shit, right?" she asked. I was sure I was drunk already. From another bag she produced another can, this one a can of Krylon, forest green color. "My old man used it to paint the Adirondack chairs. He won't miss it." She started in on her name, but the paint ran out halfway through her "S". We sat beneath that backwards forest green "c" and finished the beer. The wall was brick, with bright white mortar, the same type my grandfather used to lie in between the bricks at the Bausch & Lomb plant. "What do you want to do when you get out of this neighborhood?" she asked. I didn't have any dreams. The sky was fuzzed out, and the trees looked woozy. "Shoot people," I said. It was all I could think of: dad loved soldiers, McKinsey was a killer, and my brother just made me mad. "I want to shoot Russians, and Commies, and every other bad guy on the planet." "Sounds like fascism to me," she said, using the strange "f" word her long-haired older brother always used. I didn't know if it was good or bad. "Yeah," I said, as though agreeing with her. "I know you shouldn't kill people, but some people need to be killed." Just then a car sped by, screeched, and smashed into something. It was on the other side of Gugliano's trees, but we could see enough to know that the car was upside down, with its wheels still spinning in the air. We pushed through the bushes. A rock spiked up into my keds, but I kept going, ignoring it. People were shouting. "Get help!" screamed a man. The girl just stood there, dumb, then sunk to her knees and started crying. I didn't know what else to do. The man had blood on his hands, and a small flame was emitting from the dashboard. He leg looked like it was still stuck in the car, while the rest of his body lay in the grass. I ran for Gugliano's. He was on his porch, sleeping in a rocking chair. The pee hole in his boxers was wide open, and his doberman looked at me through the screen door and growled. "Mr. Gugliano! Wake up!" He shook awake, reached for his glasses, and squinted up at me. "Tommy Miller, is that -- oh jesus!!" He'd seen the smoke rising from his lawn. A few days later I found her wandering around by her self on the circle. There wasn't any beer on her breath this time. "That was fucked up," she said, regarding the accident. The man had struck a street pole. The police said he was drunk, and that the nerves in his right hand were severed. We found out later that he worked at the knife company with my dad's friend, and that he had a lot of social problems. His wife had left him, and his kids were stabbing people in the elementary school. Billy had gotten into a fight with the eldest brother, and for the only time in his shortening life, had lost. "Still want to give me a hand job?" I asked the girl. Her eyes glared to a color which looked distinctly acid-washed. "Why did you drink all of my beer?" she asked. "You gave it to me." "But it was for ME. You're supposed to bring your own stash." My ears stung, my chest heaved. "My brother won't give me any," I said. "Well talk to him," she said. "Someone has to get you some -- you can't drink mine." I felt fucking stupid. I couldn't ask him. He'd call me a faggot and wipe dick grease all over me. My dad didn't believe in underage drinking, and my mother was never home. Only Randy could get me alcohol. "No way dude, I only have enough for me," he told me the next day. "I get one 4-pack of Bartles and James a week from my parents, and it has to last." By "last" he meant he would drink it all on the day he got it, then beg around town the rest of the week for an older kid to get him more. It was a racket, and an addiction. "But it's the only way she'll give me a handjob." His eyes lit up. "I'll let you have a half a bottle: but you have to recap it and bring it back when you hit the halfway mark." The next day, she was holding my bottle in her hand, trying not to laugh. A black line had been drawn in permanent marker at the halfway mark. Above the line, the word "Tommy" was written. Below that, it said "Randy". "Let's get fucked up," I said. She leaned against the green dumpster, and sighed. "Sometimes I wish the more popular boys wanted to fuck me," she said. I wasn't listening: it was hard enough painting the blue "T" as it was. I leaned to the right as I finished off the crosspiece. A power box sat along the brick wall, and I had to lean over it to write. It was awkward, a fact compounded by the booze. As I began the "O", I felt a foot ram into my windpipe. It was Billy. "Hey faggot, is this your girl?" She was sitting on the ground, in the gravel, nursing a shin. I punched Billy in the face with the spraycan. A shot of blue sprayed back and into my eyes. I howled. After he'd kicked me into submission and left through a small gap in Gugliano's trees, and after I'd smashed the rest of my spray cans on the power box, knocked out a streetlight with a handful of large stones, and scraped my knuckles on a cinder block, she tackled me, sat on me, and unzipped my pants. "Relax or I'll kill you," she said, and then handed me her second beer can. "Now drink this."

He didn't know what was going on: the red lights, the blue lights, the shouts and the smashing glass. It was always something in his neighborhood, and tonight it was the kids across the street, running around with their hair on fire. "Do something! Roll around!" he shouted at them through his closed window. They couldn't hear him, the idiots. They carried on in their private TV show, unawares that they could simply walk away and end the drama forever. But instead they stayed, fought, and eventually died. "Get the diapers, and get out!" screamed one of them. She was the mother, or the aunt, or the bride-to-be; he could never tell. They were the crazy family, the hippies, the hybrids, the ones without discipline, language, substance, or form. They came and went freely, their doors perpetually unlocked, their smiles perpetually immune to the vissitudes of fate. And now they were on fire. It had started early, in the back room, in the day time. They were playing video games, doing bong rips, and lighting queef (the little fuzz-dust which accumulates at the bottom of a weed canister) on fire in bottle caps. They had fallen asleep in one of their drunken, characaristic masses: all arms akimbo and legs flopping to the side, genitals to the side, with things (hairs) poking out and little nobs of fur and skin exposed to the elements which suddenly, inconcievably, now consisted of fire. The girl/mom/thing had felt it first, that orange blaze creeping along the carpet from the TV table where the 86 wires had gotten crossed in precisely the wrong combination, sparking a wad of newspapers to catch flame and pass it on to a wad of Burger King wrappers, a DVD box, and a case of condoms. She'd gotten a whiff of the burning rubber and nudged one of the semi-nude men to, quote, stop jerking off so much it's making a burning smell. When he didn't respond, she turned around aghast to discover a flaming skull in his stead, and a gleaming skeleton in place of the others. At that point, she knew: get the diapers, get the babies (as many as she could), and tumble out onto the grass where the dew would put out her flames of thirst in the cool of the aloneness and all of the night breezes which conspired to bring her happiness whenever the men would leave her the fuck alone. Of course, the men never died either: the three or eight or sixteen of them had tumbled down the stairs after her, unaware that they had briefly been phantasms in her over-active, traumatized imagination. She of course continued to see them as burning skulls and skeletons, but this was in arrears: even in spite of the fact of them being hippies and stoners and unemployed and hustling stolen radio equipment across state lines, they did the right thing when it came to this emergency: get out, and get help. Help arrived soon enough in the form of four gleaming fire trucks and a whole flotilla of police cruisers. They spread out in a grid of cooperation, indentified chokepoints and secured material assets before they could be smudged any further by the flames of the building. They were past the point of putting it out: better to keep it contained, and to allow the flaming pyre to burn itself through the bottom of the space station, and out into the cold, flameproof expanse of space. A mile below would be a trailer park, and a mile below that, a box slum: no one would miss this section of the asteroid belt should the blaze burn further. And he, our author, the one with the discilpine and the form and the substance and the coherence, he was here to document it all, to inscribe it upon aluminum/zinc space plates, and to send it sailing through the various orbital forces and magnetic transit belts like the proverbial message in a bottle it was. There was no other way to get the word out. These disasters were happening with shocking (and increasing) frequency in the astro-favelas now that the governments were all retreating to the outer planets ion lieu of the Interior's internecine conflicts, animal outbreaks, solar flares, and other outbreaks. The Interior had been cut off from the galactic economy too many times to be of use anymore: it was increasingly just a dumping ground various stolen space cargo, things that didn't work, peoples (and races) who didn't want to do any work, and the rest of the mad-tangoing passions that the old worlds were famous for producing. And here he was, sitting on the edge of it all, ready and waiting to report to the inactive and immobile leisure castes of the Exterior worlds the horrors and the outrages they'd been too long sedated to do anything about anyways. It was a thankless job. Anyways, the fire. As predicted, the emergency brigades let it burn itself through with nary a precious drop of retard-o-foam spent to keep it in check. The ill, icky, greenish chemical flames and brown chemical smoke spilled into the thin, budget-priced atmosphere of the favela, where it would no doubt linger for weeks to come. And the hippie/hyrbid men (it was a very old epithet) stood around and mingled, not knowing what to do now that their cumshack/stoner palace had been terminated. They never had beds--or possessions--per say, but there was a certain amount of sadness that went when seeing your only source of protection from solar radiation and cosmic particle damage now a burning heap of slag, and the only woman you've ever impregnated running around pulling diapers out of bushes and coraling a group of children near a hop-car. Hop-cars weren't made for space travel: at best they could leap between the levels of the astro-favela, and this only after months of charging. They'd been cruising hers around every Tuesday night looking for other chicks to pile and to impregnate, but they could never find any: even for mid-level slum dwellers, they were still rather abject and low. This made him smile. What also made him smile was her inability to calm down, even now that she'd herded each ounce of offspring into her budget container ship and had located a new source of food for the ten whelps which would keep them alive for at least another week (he'd located an unused pizza plant in his background, switched the dial at its base to "pepperoni" and presented it to her beyond the gaze of the police, who were notorious for snatching/sniffing/destroying food donations between disaster victims). The police, mind you, lived nowhere near the astro-favela, but in a very cold, very northerly storage locker floating 100s of millions of miles above the solar system where the police grunts trained and shivered and ate crap and shivered some more. They came from every world, inner and outer, and they were fed gruel (beans and bolts, the usual military food supplements), augmented with metallic skeletons, and instructed on how to identify and eliminate anything not representing a Perfect Human Specimin (PHS) at 100 thousand paces or more. And there were no PHS's at the blaze tonight. The author laughed to himself at the very thought of the mythical PHS the police had sworn to protect. They, of course, were anything but: you don't wake up one morning with a rebar in your and a handgun grafted to your palm and mistake yourself for perfect. Nor were the beings which yielded, birthed, and housed them anything resembling a PHS: they had parents with six limbs, eighty eyes, as many as one hundred wingflaps, and quite often the sorts of folks found swimming in schools (like fish) in the liquid wastes around the dying atmospheres of dead moons. But here, they were the normal ones. These hybrid-hippies, these dreadlocked monster with their trust fund sacks protuding disturbingly from their bellies, their visible clouds of un-hygenic stench, and their propensity for fucking anything that moved, they were about as far away from PHS as you could get, and yet here they were, being protected by the galaxy's crack force of trained non-PHS killers as though they were the very chosen children of Thomas Gee Cauldron himself. Cauldron. The author laughed aloud next at this name as he inscribed it into the aluminum/zinc plate. Cauldron himself could not prevent these disasters. The interior worlds were rotting from within, and the astrosexual gangrene would spread itself from the core worlds, from the sun (the very Source of all life in the first place) on out, leaving only a whirling pile of junk and debris spinning where once stood the proud Homes of Humanity. He, Cauldron, was as typically decadent as a late-era emperor could get: he dance, he womanized, he spread the wings of his space-catermaran across vast stretches and blocked out the sun for millions of beings while he went on pleasure cruises, fucked very expensively-designed hookers, and let a myriad of drug-substance run through his supposedly perfect PHS body. The author knew it for a lie, as did the hybrid/hippies, were they ever to rise above the dim, hedonistic mess of their lives and recognize the situation for what it was: fucked beyond repair. He realized his situation too was hopeless, and yet he had no other choice: inscribe his observations on these plates, set them adrift to the winds of fate blowing magnetically between the planets, and hope that some affluent extra-solar intellectual picked them up, deciphered them, and radioed back to their home solar system for the largest rescue force the astro-favelas would ever know or see. He realized the chances were slim. "My babies, my babies!" On and on she prattled while the hippie males mingled and schemed, and the children took in the dwindling mass of grayed, melted plastics with their big saucer eyes, and wondered why they too couldn't have red and blue lights mounted to their shoulders like the police did. They, the children, reach from time to time into their pockets to procure small slices of pizza from the pizza plant that he, the author, had given them, nibbling on them whenever a favela-bat blocked out the sun and kept them safe from the inquiring eyeballs of the goddamnged police. Just then, one of the children got really tall. The author knew that the pizza plant he grew in his backyard had some augmentation vitamins running through it (he'd saved up and payed for them, so it better have), and this child must have bitten into a particularly dense concentration of them, for he'd gone from 3'9" to 17'2" in the space of a minute. If only his skin had kept pace with the elongation of his bones. "Owwowowowoow!!! Mommy!!!! Owwowowow!!!" The police all turned toward the child at once, discipline tubes brandished and armed, but the kid wasn't menacing anyone, only dying. "Mommm!!! Owowowowowow!!!" She ran over to console the freshly gigantic boy, but he was inconsolable: his muscle tissue was showing, viscera moving and blowing in the magtides of that sector of the astro-favela. Suddenly, and unexpectedly, the author felt a grim sense of responsibility for the imperiled lad, and had to do something about it. "Sir! SIR!!" bellowed a policeman as the author bounded over the disaster containment fence, holding a long stretch of utility fabric. They chased him down before he could reach the lad, but not before he could give the bolt of cloth a good toss, over the the their helmets and into the pen of children on the far side of the property. One of the many shorter kids caught the material, gave the author a knowing nod, and ran it to the shrieking giant. The 9 shorties took turns passing the bolt around his elongated, exploded body, wrapping the adaptive fabrics around the gaps in his carapace until his completely covered. At that point, the author, now cuffed and in permanent lockdown in the back of a lieutenant's safety cab, squeezed the activation trigger he'd secreted away in his anus, and suddenly the utility fabric activated, melted into the child's DNA, and gave his body the structural integrity it had been missing for the last few minutes. Now he would be a giant, and unstoppable. "Now honey, what do you say to the nice man who just saved your---" "Roarrahahwrwr!!" The kid was pissed: who could blame him? His house had just burned down through citizen neglect, his male role models (which one was his daddy again?) had all let him down, and the police (and author, due to his role in the near-lethal augmentation vitamins being placed in the pizza plant) were all dicks to him. One by the one, the officers were tossed from the surface of that level of the astro-favela. Some fell down to the box colonies, some shot up and got spiked to the bottom of the townhouse flats: either way, they all got knocked the fuck out. "Kid, easy... KID!" It was the police chief, the only disaster respondent left on the scene. The child towered over him, seething, a bloody foam pouring down his neck, the entrails of the second-to-last policeman dangling from his mouth bones. The kid lifted a massive size-110 foot, and brought it down with all the forceful rage of the four interior planets and every hybrid/mutant/hippie/non-PHS who lived in them. The flattened cop let out a sickening squish, and suddenly things were very silent, save for the burbling crackle of the last few embers of the burning/melting tenement house dripping onto the corrugated living quarters of the level below. The author smiled: the entire block would be dashed out by a few routine blasts of the management laser hovering just a few miles ahead in a matter of minutes, but for now, the neighborhood had the prideful glow of a place which had grown unruly, uppity, and rebellious: a very quaint, old, and very ancient feeling. "Momma, what's going to happen to our house?" The kids were crowded around the space giant, their former brother, all of them gripping ahold of a finger of their astonished mother. The males, the men (one of whom sired the newling freak) all gaped up in awe, gripping their crotches nervously, if not a bit protectively.

The squirrels were ready. They had minions amongst the spiders, the centipedes, the millipedes and the worms. And now they were issuing the command: "Attack the birds! Attack the nests! Attack the grackles and the robins' red breasts!" (They always spoke in rhyme) There were flotillas waiting on the shores of the lake: creepy crawly things, four-legged furry things, jagged forked-tongued things. And they'd had enough the birds' shit. "Birdshit bad! Brownshit good! One bat, two bats, three bats wood!" The bats were the most devious allies of them all: they'd spent years infiltrating the bird ranks, donning their costumes and learning their ways. They were originally rats, all of them, and they'd sold their souls for the good of the Glorious Cause. They were heroes. "To the rafters! To the rooftops! To the capital's dome and bus stops!" The counter-insurgency had begun. The insects, rodents, lizards, and bats targeted the largest, most important nests in each sector. They laid down tarp (stolen from the unwitting ally humans) to cover up the worm fields. They gathered loose straw and strings, put twigs in quarantine, and persuaded the fleas and other flying bugs to stay in this night. And the squirrels were commanding it all. "Counter-insurgency Agent 717, reporting for duty sir!" said a tall red-tail to the Commander-in-Chief, Generalissimo Chubbycheeks III. "As you were, Agent 717," said the fearsome general, whose black fur seemed to fill the entire command center on top of cliff 9-6-9 in semi-urban SquirrelRegion 88. "Have the river battalions reported in yet? Has the confiscation of field eggs proceeded apace? Where are we with the anti-flight propaganda? What about the bat defectors -- have they been put down? Have the geese droppings been burned in effigy? What about the bread scraps and frozen faux-worm parts? Where's the poison patrol?" The Generalissimo spoke in a rapid-fire series of questions which he already new the answer to. It was the agent's job to simply stand at semi-attention and listen to the black-furred behemoth talk. Otherwise, he'd get stapled to a stop sign, and get left to the crows. The dreaded, hated, hateful crows. "Where are the crows? Have we rounded up their children? Have we snipped away their support nexus? Have the key nest-lofts been eradicated. Have the anti-caw bugles been sounded?" By this point, the neighborhood was in cacophony. 75 squirrels from seven neighborhoods were making a head-on rush against a stronghold of cardinals, bluebirds, bluejays, and whooper-whills. Humming birds could be seen darting across the fields carrying supplies. A stork had drop-lifted an entire colony of fruitbat defectors into a key chestnut stronghold, and the rodents were just now realizing the sudden threat to their food supply. Things were not looking good. And yet, down below it all, between the fluff green leaves and the spiky grey-brown branches and all of the fangs and claws and bills and talons and feathers and limb-bones, a chipmunk was in love. His name was Henry, and the object of his affection was a woman, a Starling, a bird. And Starling had no idea that Henry was in love with her. Each night she perched atop the brown split-level at the end of Clancy Street, shook herself three times, made a soft "coo-coocoo", and fell asleep. Henry would see this each night from across the sleep, where his terrorist cell kept their recon gear. His job was to monitor all bird movements in the region, and to plot out which assassinations should take place at which time. This is when he had seen Starling, sunning her self atop a juniper, looking every bit the paragon of Beauty the birds were so loathed for. And yet unlike the star-crossed lovers of human lore, Starling was no innocent pigeon of breeding and grace: she was a leader, a fighter, and a chipmunk/squirrel/centipede/frog/spider/gerbil/aphid hater to boot. And on just this very night, she was planning out the Grand Retaliation, which had as its first movement the eradication of Henry's own Chipmunk Brigade! To make it worse, his crew in return was seeking out her destruction. It couldn't have been sadder for ol' Henry. He could not explain to his mates his attraction for said bird. She was a foul air-pooper, like all the rest. She saw trees from the top-down, not the bottom-up. She preferred the open blue of the sky to the calm serenity of the ground. She held her nose at such notions as "burrowing" and "slithering", keeping her planetary involvement to a minimum. They were all like that, those birds: pretentious, misanthropic, ready to deal death and destruction at the drop of a garden snake. Their V-shaped squadrons were the envy of all land animals, who could never manage such feats of coordination. Ants could steal Ritz crackers from the floor of a trailer, but they'd never spell out Arabic numerals with the simple positioning of their bodies. And so, the birds had to go. And with them, Starling. Meanwhile, the non-traitorous fruitbats had made a grave discovery: the carp spawning in the ponds around the neighborhood were giving birth to baby bird eggs. It was the foulest, most treacherous tactic the fuckin' hollow-boners had pulled yet! They knew, from aeons of observation, how readily the carp spawned, and they also new it to a simple matter of inserting bird DNA into the carp foodstream so as to have their future platoons reborn alongside squirrel swampside HQ. Worst of all, the big-scaled carp were too stupid to know the difference. They spawned, cared for, fed, and raised this birds, and suddenly there was now a squadron of CROWS arising from the very muck of the trusted swamp itself! With 99% of all units located at the front several blocks away, the Generalissimo and his command staff were caught completely off guard: land-lubber HQ fell in a matter of minutes. Black fur met black feather (a lot more black feathers, as I recall), and lost. Hard. But back to Henry: Henry knew the counter-insurgency wasn't going very well. A troopship had gone down in one of the northern cul-de-sacs (it was a large deer the squirrels had gutted and filled with their mates, moving him on wheels towards Bird HQ Central). He also new that Starling only had but minutes to live. His chipmunks were on their way, crossing the street with long wires gripped in their mouths. The plan was to erect a large, mid-air cage around the bird as she slept during her Command Nap. The wires would serve as the crosspieces of the cage, spread as they were from tree to tree all around Starling's brown house. When she would awake to discover the ruse, they crank on the juice (one of the nearby human allies was an electrician, and his chipmunk residents knew how to read his manuals), and electrocute her against one of the sides of the cage. This Henry could not allow. Slipping forward in the moon-cast shadows of the chipmunk HQ front lawn, he dodged past his fellows to intercept the weakest among the group, one Roger P., who'd been stupidly tasked for the chipmunk command to carry the battery connectors for the electrocution to take place. Intercept Roger P., and defeat the whole mission. But Roger P. wasn't alone: one of the deaf-mute robin-traitors was flapping and hovering above him (the only proper use for a bird, thought Henry, save for the lovely Ms. Starling), guarding his movement in all directions. Roger P. was almost in position, towards the eastern backyard of Starling's brown house. Henry hadn't much time. "Hey Roger!" he hissed as the little chipmunk began unwinding a spool of insulated line. "Henry, why aren't you in position? You're supposed to be guarding the right fl--" Before Roger P. could finish, Henry hit him with a filbert square between the eyes. The little rodent fell down like an engorged honeycomb torn from a hive in a windstorm. The robin-traitor appeared a moment later. "Hey, fucker! That's our ally! Why'd you bean him!" Henry hadn't time to deal with the bird. He brushed pass, hoping the feathered mass of disgustingness would see the intent look in his eyes and back off. "Hey, get back here Henry!" Henry ignored the bird as he snatched up Roger's gear and stashed it in his 'roo pouch, tied around his little waist like one of the human allies' fanny packs. The bird could only beat its wingtips about Henry's head uselessly, as it had been de-beaked and un-taloned during the interrogation which preceded his admission into the Mighty Landlubber Army. "I'm here for my lady!" hissed Henry as he scaled up the back gutter to the red tile roof of the brown house. All around, chipmunks were pulling wires across treetops, weaving the vertical and horizontal bars of the cage. The trap was enclosing. Farther afield, he heard the screams of the command HQ as the last bits of the Generallisimo were torn asunder by the woodpecker snipers. The Carp Crows were moving westward, destroying everything in their path as they took on woodchuck, praying mantis, prairie dog, and exotic mandrill alike. All around the neighborhood, the sound of snapping legs and mangled fur was creating a din which sounded eerily close to failure. Far above, seagulls mixed with chickadees and Canadian geese danced with augmented penguins and reborn dodos swinging from ropes. Here and there, a bat could be seen duking it out with a falcon or an eagle. The birds had spared no resources in their quest to defend their sky and their treetops. If there was a time for treason, this would be it: when things looked bleakest for the landlubbers. Starling was asleep in her nest, beautiful bird eyes squinched up in her little bird cheeks as her tiny bird neck shifted to the right, and to the left. She was a dove, pure white with a bit of lavender around her beak and jowls. Henry crept along the top of the roof, careful not to let his claws scrape on the tile. She would be his, oh yes. "Henry, what the fuck?" It was one of his longest-running mates from the terror cell, one Jiminy J., who had followed him up the gutter pipe and was wondering what he was doing. "I'm sorry," hissed Henry back, careful not to wake the important -- and doomed -- bird. "But she is too beautiful to zap! I must have her!" "Have you gone mad?" Henry looked past him: the cage was now fully erected, set apart from the night sky as it was by the moon's glow its gleaming wires had caught just right. It would only be a matter of time before they discovered his deceit and brought out a back-up energy source to fill the roll left unfilled by the very stunned Roger P. "This WAR is what's mad," said Henry, turning himself in full to address his long-term friend. They'd spent many a winter holed up one of the local oaks, playing cards and drinking whiskey, dreaming about the return of summer and the chance to chase chipmunk girl ass. They'd skipped rocks down by the creek, tried soda from the leftover cans of human allies at the mini-mart, and cursed the night sky together anytime a bat was seen doing maneuvers, not knowing as they did of the counter-insurgency and the role the bats would play. But now the bats were all dead, the Generallisimo was torn to shreds, and every creature with legs and a body was now laying in a bloody heap by some bush or tree with white turds sprayed rudely in his dying (or just injured) face. The gutted deer had served no purpose: the gull squads had stopped all afronts to the main command copse where the bird generals held their meetings and plotted strategies. Only Starling remained, the one small vulnerable (and important) bird-thing which could bring the squirrel troops and everyone else a much-needed, if too late, morale boost. And Henry was here to protect her. "This war is mad," he repeated. By now a hundred or so squirrels and chipmunks had descended upon the rooftop, anxious to hear the outcome of what was already being called by the cockroach commentators the Starling Fiasco. "Let them win," he continued, to the gasps of these hundreds. "They are far more graceful animals: they can see farther and do more. Who cares if they prefer flimsy nests over the holes and trenches we sleep away in? Maybe their annual migrations are the way to go! Maybe cloudscapes are the true beauty we're missing out on here in our green dungeons! Let's become birds! Let's climb aboard their backs and--" THWACK! It was Starling. She'd awoken, seen Henry with his back to her, and done what any threatened bird would do: kicked his ass off the roof. But as he fell, moments before his torso would turn and his terrified legs would run his body into a bush for cover, he looked up to see her silhouetted against the moonlight, and he knew that they were flying together.

This evening I watched the candidates for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination debate race in front of a live audience at Howard University. The event was produced by PBS, and it included eight candidates, including Dennis Kucinich, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bill Richardson, and Joe Biden. Each candidate was given 1-2 minutes to pontificate on a number of topics, including taxation, education, the military, and Katrina. And, as naive as it sounds, I actually paid attention. What happened to our democracy? Did we ever have one to begin with? Do we owe it to future generations to pay attention, to enter the shark fields of partisan of politics, hoping to wrest the moral truth from the shades of gray and compromise which modern media star politicians are forced to traffic in? I wonder. I, like most my age, would like to find a way to be political without really being political. I'd like to be a good world citizen: aware of the dignity of human beings everywhere, fair in my dealings, just in my decisions. But isn't that a bit too easy? At the same time I watched the debate, my drink sat on a copy of Philip K. Dick's Radio Free Albemuth, a thinly-veiled autobiographical account of the FBI's surveillance of the legendary sci-fi author in the 1960s for his (alleged) drug use and (alleged) anti-war activities. Now, I'd like to think that by approaching my Twitter account with awareness, saving up for a Prius, and not getting in the way of the Daily Show, I can pretty much insure a better world by default. Besides, I knew dirty activists back in the day, and their haranguing and placards were just as ineffective as my coffee-addict laptop apathy is today... at least that's what I like to tell myself. But shouldn't political progress, and stewardship of the future, be a bit difficult? Didn't our ancestors work a little bit harder to insure things like labor equality, women's right, and environmental protections that would have never been just "handed down" by the rich and powerful? Shouldn't progress entail suffering? Again, I'm not sure. My grandfather was politically active well into his 90s. He supported a man on death row, gave to various Latin American causes, and owned an entire set of Noam Chomsky cassettes, which he recommended to me every chance he got. He was aware of the influence the moneyed class had on American politics, and in his own small way, through church functions and the way he touched individual lives, I'd like to think he provided a counter-balance. But I also wonder if it's naive to think that I could live a similar life today and still be just as effective, just as loving, and just as responsible. Senator Obama speaks in strong, stentorian tones, but he is full of shit. Senator Edwards makes no attempts to hide his Southern accent, speaks the plain truth about things, and still seems slimy. And Hilary is just... Hilary. Must I watch these douchebags and agonize over my electoral choice next year to insure my grandchildren can inherit a clean and beautiful world? Isn't there more I can do? To hear Rich Dad, Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki tell it, the best I could do is become financial literate and independent, thus providing a platform for my direct descendents to stand on once I retire. Forget his paternal, pro-Capitalist stance for just a moment, and note how myopic such a vision seems to be: save for my kids? Spend my life giving them a bank account? Pile up a trust fund? Contrast this to the whole notion of "self actualization", and the need for we New Agers (or whatever the fuck we are, this is Zaadz after all) to "find our highest purpose". For Kiyosaki this is money, for everyone else this is apparently some amalgam of Eastern mysticism and Western ambition, mixed with a bit of environmentalism and a very dim glimmer of class awareness: this we call "conscious" business. Is conscious business the true vehicle for true stewardship of our future? Can I just trust Yahoo! Green and Microsoft IM to have my species' best interests in mind? Is everything going to be cool in the Middle East once Middle Americans are mixing Agavé nectar into their Fair Trade teas, and doing yoga on biodegradable mats transported across the globe in biodiesel vehicles? Or are we missing the whole fucking point? I think it's telling that Transformers is poised to be a summer blockbuster this year: we may talk green, but secretly, everyone is sick of being human. We're sick of having to worry about health, and the health of our planet. We're sick of having corrupt politicians out-fibbing each other to get our meaningless votes. We're sick of shadowy, cut-rate franchises running off our top soil, keeping poor people in their favelas, and hiring frustrated jocks to keep down dissent with the jackboots of private mercenaries. Most of all, we're sick of suffering. What the Transformers promise is that, even if we can't end our civil wars or eradicate death, we can at least move beyond our frail, corruptible forms and off this bland planet we call home. We can run a marathon out in space in the shape of an F-14... why not? Human suffering is only a sign of our inability to figure out a cure for it: it's not impossible to eliminate. The solution, however, might lie in becoming something beyond human, something gleaming and shiny and mutable, with glowing eyes and razorblade shin bones and laser blasters for hands and 100-watt speakers in our teeth. Why am I so affected by science-fiction? Why must I continually agitate for the transcendence of humanity by semi-sentient technology? Why must I dutifully issue forth the Singularity? Because I've given up on these fuckers, and I've given up on myself. There: that's one answer. Far from being a positive solution, science fiction is a dead man's game, a place for defeated minds to think and conjecture in peace, without having to take on the myriad complexities of the current moment. Science fiction is easy, and it's a place to hide. Our culture is awash in it: in spaceships and boombeams and interplanetary landing parties and all the rest. We've seen Star Wars and Space Odyssey; we've played with our Han Solo dolls and hummed along to the Star Trek theme song. Some of us have even masturbated to Barbarella. But geekdom isn't confined to such overt forms: it's simultaneously found in the promise of new web technologies and gadgets, i.e. Web 2.0 and iPods (or iPhones). The point is: science-fiction is so commonplace and ubiquitous, it's ceased to be subversive. In Dick's time, yes, sci-fi was perhaps as subversive as it got. The Feds had a tight hold on space flight, Vietnam was afflicting the monoculture with continual bloody images, and the picket fences were in danger of decay. Drugs and psychosis and robotic landlords and ass-raping butt-bots were the scourge of straight-laced, industrial Capitalist society, which prized predictability and Taylorist work ethics following the Chaos of Tojo y Adolf. (I don't really know if this is true or not, but for argument's sake, let's pretend so: sci-fi mattered then, but not now). What I think could be more subversive is what K-punk and others are calling "hauntology": a form of multi-media practice which infects the present -- with deregulated capitalism victorious in every direction -- with glimmers of what could have been, or what once could have existed, had social institutions never been so badly dissolved. To make a long story short: perhaps stewardship of the future means fomenting an eruption of the past, of reminding our leaders, in patient (and not guilty-inducing tones) that the world we've inherited needn't have been so should certain right decisions been made in our past. The reason to do this is because new decisions are unfolding all around us right now, and the only way to make the ghosts of the past-that-should-have-been to cease in their howling is to avoid creating new ones. ...or something like that. The thing is, my deepest dread is that political action, the thankless work of those who work in (or work to reform) the civilian sector, IS the best use of our time in taking care of the future. Compound this with that fact that a) no one can really predict the future, and b) we never really know the extended outcome of anything we do, and it seems like we're in the unenviable position of being asked to fight for a world which may never exist, which we might even be actively preventing by the way in which we're fighting for it in the first place. I don't know. What I do know, or at least strongly suspect, is that every person on that stage at Howard University tonight was a professional liar, with the possible exception of Kucinich and Senator Stone from Alaska. And if I'm going to be lied to, at least make it entertaining, like sci-fi. Then again, maybe the best sci-fi authors we own (and owe) today are George Bush and Al Gore. Both are continually telling us grandiose of a very specious world, one in which Al Qaeda lives in the drinking water, the other where displaced polar bears will be surfing along the costs of Arizona after the next carbon-triggered ice age. Both of these stories, of Terror and Sun Terror, have commanded great armies of lobbyists and fans and hustlers and hand-shakers to the voting booths and credit card scanners of the market place, giving people hopes and thrills alike in their description of a morally simplified world where big actions and heroic languaging have formed the substance of reality. If only really life were as bicameral as the cartoon opinions of those in power. In real life, there is very little reason to be heroic, let alone methods for doing so. Chances arise spontaneously, out of the blue, like the traffic accident by partner and I phoned in the other night from our car: all that matters is how one has been trained and taught to react to certain distresses -- it's hard to tell if this makes up for all of the suffering we sponsor through our tax dollars and apathy. Furthermore, in real life it's never clear what the right thing to do is. We have our easily-mislead gut instincts, followed by our equally-confused Google research minds, the opinions of our friends, and the feelings of our parents, which we either react to or follow. We have to guess most of the time, and in the words of one Stephen Malkmus, a guess is the best we'll do. My theory is that we embed ourselves in such thick webs of relations and obligation that as we get older, what's the "right" thing gets clearer and clearer, not out of some moral enlightenment, but out of the undeniable pressure to go with the flow of the great wave-river of life, which itself is being drawn in imperceptible directions by the gravity moons of the muses and fate. Once you admit you're not in control, that you can't stand outside of your life and "fix" it for the better, is when you are liberated to make the very small changes within it that do matter. Lack of freedom makes the smaller things ever more crucial, as they are the only places in which we can declare our choice to do what's right, what makes people smile a little wider, enjoy a life a little bit fuller, render things in a more interesting light. Defeatism? Capitulation? Happy-faced fatalism? Perhaps. But it's better to accept the harsh, full-forced gravities laughing down at our weak bones than it is to suppose oneself some sort of freedom fighter (notice the distinction?), make an endless string of compromises to assemble a world-historical level of power, and realize one's true powerlessness in an absolutely tragic fashion: as the one causing all of the suffering one has sworn to fight. Now, I'm not saying that Obama or Clinton or Edwards or (here's hoping) Kucinich can't turn things around: I just hope they realize that it's going to take a lot more than a bunch of people with good intentions to do so. It's also going to take, on a simultaneous track, a whole lot of people digging a whole lot deeper into what makes the universes inside and all around us tick... and finding ways for us to wield more power within that great, sentient, ridiculously complicated clockwork. And now if you'll excuse me, a brief ancillary foray into the speculative fiction I'd someday like to be famous for: He was 105: this much was true. He was born to a world where all communications were limited to sixteen syllables and seven vowels: nothing else could be permitted... thus spoke the Willful Constraints [WC] act of December '07. He'd spoken a total of 55,678 words in his lifetime: blink it up on Google if you don't believe me. He'd even invented the neural net which replace the web, the one you have to blink two times to gain access to. [Doing it now? Great!] The WC did more to accelerate the development of the human race than any social agreement since the Magna Carta, or perhaps even earlier with the cuneiform signing of the first wheel patent. The WC forced people out of their heads and into their souls, their bodies, their pheromones, and their artistry. Society had grown much more silent, and much faster as a result of the obviated need to read and write. Pictures flew across the double-blink at the rate of 817 peta-pixels a second: a billion times faster than the gigabit machines of yore. It now like a cloud, a candy cloud blink-spinning around the earth faster than a lung beetle could grow up, find a host, and grow you a new set of breathers after a particularly gruesome sport-mining accident. The End.