It's tough to admit one's failures as a man, so tough it might almost be manly to do so. Almost.

There is always an excuse not to be a man, to not take charge of one's own life and to support others in same: too many bills to pay, not enough time, not enough energy, not enough motivation. But not a single one of these holds water to someone determined to transcend them.

As my high school track coach Tracy S. once said, " GYST!". Translation: get your shit together.

Just now I left the company of my roommate to do some writing, my manliest of manly tasks per diem. En route to the writing chair, I noticed we were out of water. Seeking not to imbibe the noxious toxins of the local tap, I grabbed my keys to drive to the store to get some bottles, only to stop just short of my car door when I realized I was just resisting what I should actually be doing.

Moments after this, I settled into my front-lawn writing chair, when I was accosted by two neighborhood youths looking to sell me a newspaper subscription to fund their text book needs. I'm a sucker for doe-eyed youths in need of learning materials, but on this particular occasion, lacking cash, I uncharacteristically told them "no".

It was as though the world was conspiring to stop me from writing, yet again, and I had flipped the tables, risking the resentment of my fellow man to simply do what I was put here to do.

So now I am writing inside, seated in a badly-stuffed couch with a glass of iced tap water at my side and cramps in my fingers. The time is 6:18 pm, and I have 54 minutes of writing left to fill by daily quota. And I couldn't feel manlier.

But that's the problem: entering a flow state with one's life's work is the least of our manly problems. Kids and loved ones need food and shelter, vision and hope for the future. Cars need cleaning, oil needs checking, bathrooms need to be scrubbed, basements aired out. Our is the most impossible task: do all of this, AND fulfill our higher, more unusual/unique/personal talents.

For me this has always been writing.

I once asked David Foster Wallace at a book signing if he had any advice for writers.

"Yeah, don't it," he said in his lisping Midwestern drawl. "It's just too hard. If there's anything else you can do, do that instead."

Last year I got it into my head that I was going to be a writer of published short stories, the scourge of such stalwart journals as Analog and Glimmer Train. But the process of writing, editing, finding publishers, and submitting (and having rejected) your work is just too goddamn hard. Not to mention: no one reads the shit. Name one friend who actually reads literary journals and isn't a grad student in creative writing, and I'll give you five dollars. There's no surer way to remain unknown than to write for short story collections.

This is what I told myself at least.

But I did have a few pieces published online, which was gratifying, if not as full-seeming. It was a start.

But again: writing is hard. After the short stories, I tried my hand at National Novel Writing Month. True to form, I wrote 50,000 words of science-fiction loaded with jargon and cryptic terminology. In my head it made sense: to the poor reader of a first draft, probably not.

Fortunately, I had friends who believed in me, more than myself at times.

But now, due to the lack of participation of my Zaadz pals, my old fanbase seems to be increasingly silent. Do I need a fanbase to keep writing? I don't know. To think so seems to be more of the same: resistance.

Now to my true calling: the Four-Hour Work Week.

Timothy Ferris's book of the same name changed my life, simply because it separated the notions of "life's passion" and "money-making endeavors" into two distinct categories. Meaning: in order to write, I'll need a financial "muse", a self-sustaining system of online product sales to fuel my travels and other dreams.

And the dreams are big: to be the biggest writer of all time. To outrank Borges or Houellebecq in the esteem of international critics. To be the world's poet laureate. To pal around with celebrities of every stripe, pitch them ideas, and burrow deeper and deeper into my own writings, my own memories, and the newest/latest/craziest ideas. I am a re-framer. It is simply what I do.

With my 4HWW money I will pay for lessons from the best of the best of the world's writers. I will have an editor. A personal assistant. A whole army of virtual assistants. I will be an amazing typist. An even more amazing reader and researched. I will synthesize. And I will reframe. Name the topic, and I will reframe it.

Take manliness: manliness is in short supply in higher-sensitive Boulder, CO. The needs of woman are to be honored, but we must not roll over to do so. This is why I think the old ideal of the self-sacrificing, ready at a moment's notice man is what we need more of. We are to all be firemen, rescuing and protecting and standing strong and building things for the future, caring for the young and sick and leading the way and uniting the earth for the benefit of the future. Owning an iPhone is a distraction: we're here for bolder, braver things.

In some ways, men may be seen as centurions, and sentries. To hold to one's life's work is to hold to a spear and a shield at the gates of experience, guarding them from anyone who would subvert the beauty and goodness of the world, allowing those in who need its sustenance and balm. One's Practice is one's Weapon, one's Staff and Guard-Piece, to be wielded when needed, but for the most to be practiced, day in and day out without fail.

This is why I need to become a better typist, reader, researcher. This is why I need to maximize my cashflow, and live abroad. Money is a sturdy set of boots, living abroad a sure avenue of knowledge useful in the overall benefit of mankind.

If only writing weren't so quaint.

To augment writing, I choose design, and performance. All three are presentation languages, means of creating and conveying ideas. Each have their own unique province of communicability, not to mention their blind spots.

To be creative, and to be healthy doing it, and to support others in doing same: not bad for a life's worth of work.

So in this interest, I write the following short piece, based on my experiences in the car today.


ERRANDS, AND WHY NOT TO RUN THEM [6:38]

It seems so absurd: This heat, these transit-beasts.

We live on a small moon unfortunately close to a burning gas giant. Ours is a society which spends much of it's time indoors: the better to avoid third-degree burns.

I have actually seen a flame touch-down near the moon's equator. I was in my transit-beast, and he was already whining under the heat. The flare made him shit his transit-beast diapers.

The smell, of course, was horrendous: I saw other people wincing beneath their beast-canopies, perched as they were on a multi-colored array of transit-beasts.

In our world, it is possible to buy everything. And yet each item is only sold by one store and one store alone. The surface of the world is laid out in a distorted formation: within each cells stands a single, square-sided cement storehouse, and between the cells run the avenues.

There are no traffic signals, and their are no pedestrians: just the slow, silent frustration of transit-beast waiting for each other to move.

I went out on a Tuesday morning to get a tooth brush: I came back that Thursday morning, and the run across the parking lot almost killed me.

The transit-beasts themselves do not make matters more pleasant. To sit atop them, under one's canopy, affords very little protection from the sun's heat, which is absorbed by the beasts and radiated upwards. One is assaulted on all sides by this furnace blast of smelly, dry air.

The physical effects of such long, frustrating periods of time being spent out in the hot air, waiting in line to cross half a moon to purchase a mundane utensil are difficult to explain. There is a tightening in the chest, a wheeze. There are burns, and there are blisters, and there are burns which look like blisters and blisters that look like burns. One's hair stands on end (the moon's sand creates a lot of static electricity), and one's ends all split. The pigment drains, and everyone is gray.

The moons doctors say the cumulative effect is that we live about half as long as everyone else in the solar system. And yet we continue.

To top it off, the transit-beasts themselves require an exhorbitant amount of work to feed and maintain. They must be washed and bathed every 6 hours. They must be fed a pricey mix of spare steel and bean gruel every 3. In addition to their daily, endless commutes, they require additional exercise, up to an hour or two a day running on treadmills, hopping through low hoops, and sprinting through heated ash. To fail in these maintenance procedures means one loses one's transit-beast, and has to save up another five centuries to by another one. We only live for thirty.

In the five-year interim between losing one transit-beast and purchasing a new one, one has to walk. As the moon is too hot to be traversed unprotected, one must do this only at night, and night's last for an hour, with the first and last twenty-minutes lopped off to allow the moon to lose heat and gain more heat, respectively.

That leaves 20 actual minutes per diem in which to walk, after which one must scurry for shelter. Since the parking lots are all gated, the only place left is to beg for shelter beneath the canopy of someone else's transit-beast, who have little incentive to risk allowing a desperate, sun-stroked stranger to commandeer their only means of transportation.

And so, we're slave to the beasts.

But this doesn't tell you anything about our work and indoor situations, which are even more absurd. For work, what do you think I do? I live to about 500 years, must be pretty important, right? Wrong?

I maintain the transit-beast grids, and make sure the food gets directed to the food depot store to make sure the beasts can get fed. My neighbor, JimmyJimmy, picks up litter during nightfall, and during the daytime spends his time sorting the names of newborn transit-beasts.

They are born off-world, but great fanfare accompanies their entrance into our flimsy atmosphere, after which they will begin their 800 years of servitude before collapsing in the carcass piles of G-122.

I have been to G-122, and it is the only place where this cycle of pointless activity finds any release: the transit-beasts expire with great elation on their dead lips, often following by their owners, who are often too old to be scurrying in the dark for five years as they wait for their new beasts.

To maintain the grids, I should mention, means I take an actual piece of white blank white paper, about 50 by 50 centimeters in size, and draw a grid of 5-milliterer intervals on it. I then fill in all the squares with the location of each storefront, writing their names above them, and the name of each avenue in tiny print in the interstices. Following this preparation time, which oftens takes about 6 hours to complete, I then draw every single transit-beast into the avenues with green dot of ink, based on their last known coordinates. I then in turn name each of these, climb aboard my own transit-beast, wade through a day and half's worth of traffic, and hand it off to my manager, BobBob. BobBob will scan my artwork for a grand total of 15 seconds, looking for transit-beast traffic jams, before crumpling it up and shuffling back to his manager's desk. I then go home, sleep for 20 minutes, and begin it all over again the next day. Hand cramps? Yes.

But G-122, the charnal ground, is where I vacation during my twenty-minute vacations every 15 years. The dying transit-beasts rumble in in a great, long, endless line, are assigned a Die Pile, have a few last rites said for them (read: some bored bureaucrat reads the time and location of each of their poop droppings, in order to aid the Long Term Disease Control Initiative), and keel, while myself and a few prey-birds linger on, hoping the ribs crack in a slightly different way than usual to give us a brief moment of entertainment during an otherwise dreary, sun-drenched existence.

It goes without saying that our moon is decidedly without women, their comforts and their charms. We are the defeated, the ones who spent a previous life misreading their cues, and now we're doomed to live in confinement with other heterosexual males, gnawing at the nobby shoulder-blade flesh of our unfeeling transit-beasts the way we once nibbled the smooth, graceful necks of our beloved femme-folke.

But these we took for granted, and now these we will live forever without, toiling on a stone, hovering above an infinite ocean of orange flame, rotting into our pubic bones as we wait for traffic to inch forward.

Note: "Power Hour" #5 set to private access.

Why I'm Leaving Boulder

I'm leaving Boulder. Let me tell you why.

First, there's the lack of ghosts. Not enough history haunts the backstreets and exposed rooftops of this burg. It's too new, too developed, too TOO. At the same time, there's absolutely nothing new about it. The mountains provide an ancient foil to the absolute newness of mini-malls and downtown office buildings. (New Urbanism does not equal awesome.) There is nothing in between, no mid-range. It's all bass and treble, like some freaky trip-hop song where a gap in the speakers sucks the air from your ears. Vacuum, vacuum.

I blame the States. We swept this way, westward, 150 years ago, and wiped the slate clean. Forget a palimpsest: we could only deal with a sterility, an emptiness. The Indians faded into oblivion. At least the east coast had time to fester, time to breed new/old weirdnesses, swamps and creoles and Enlightenment architecture and pre-automobile roadbeds and unthinkable outrages like witch hangings, submarines, and New York City. Colorado instead brought us Noodles & Company, and a purple baseball team.

Back to that mid-range: where is it? Where's that interstice of humanity, of history, between the 20 and 200-year mark? You're either a brand new baby or a very old mountain: everything else is buried and hidden by the official culture of rock climbing and organic food and consciousness. I'd prefer to not be adrift in space with a coffee shop's worth of punk music aficionados, thank you very much.

In some ways, the past has never left. But it's not the Colorado past of which I speak, but the biblical one. I am Job asked to slay his son (his life) on the kill-slab of consumerist mediocrity. Pay your high rent, buy your high-priced food, discuss your high-minded theories and pretend it's progress, cosmopolitan.

I don't hate Boulder: I just hate the semblance of worldliness when the real thing is only a plane ride away. Worldliness is not an affect, it's a pedigree, a series of notches in a belt. And it has to be done right.

Scraping my car tires halfway across the continent: that's one way to do things. Not the recommended way, but one way. It's too bad (or too good) the United States isn't more divided into ethnic subgroups and languages. I suppose it is the nature of a relatively undefended colony to allow one culture to wipe it clean and plant itself in every borough, homogenous.

One culture that embraces every culture is not the all-culture. Repeat that.

I am now an expatriate in the world, living everywhere and nowhere. What is a home, conceptually? What is native soil, if it's all been topped off with parking lots? WIll the dirt which grew my childhood food care if I move far, far away? Hardly: much of the food I consumed was grown far, far away as a matter of course. What about my parents, my neighborhood, the web of relationships which birthed me? These are phone calls and letter campaigns away. Their lessons have never left me. The memories are hard to part with.

What I am trying to say is this: home is only inside, and it's wherever you bring it. It's in your breath, in your quality of consciousness, in your posture as you stand upright to assess a new situation. We are not rootless: we have instead found a new, larger root in the very earth itself. To explore the world today is akin to exploring one's backyard or forest back in the day: getting to know the local environment before venturing onward.

And trust me, we're venturing onward. Not even WIRED magazine can convey the depths of our intent to leave this planet (yes, here I go with the science fiction again, bear with), and to explode our sensory systems so that the spaces beyond don't look so black and empty. We're only surrounded by the absolute-zero emptiness because that's all our sensory systems will allow us to see. I am agitating for a merging of the actual and the virtual, to a degree where we're fighting through fiction-texts at the same time we're fighting through the emptinesses of space in our out-sized mancraft, who strides across the planets and stars the way a child might traverse a stream by balancing on exposed rocks poking through the surface. The planets are but the exposed sections of some deeper, mysterious unity we have yet the eyes to discern. But it's there.

Bring things back to earth: expatriatism is merely an outgoing stance towards one's neighbors at this point. Cafés are the same everywhere you go, only the languages are different: and these can be hacked. We're hurtling through space at XXXmph, and every view is a good view through the front windshield depending on the time of year (certain polar zones nonwithstanding).

I want to go to Antarctica to write about the haunting bone-chill WHITE which fogs the entire pseudo-continent. I want to amble through Europe, marvelling/praising/condemning the decayed infrastructures of Italianate empires past (Their ambitions are rendered quaint by the horrors and glories to come). I want to chase the Buddhists through Asia, stomping on the skulls of Mongolians hordesmen past as I search for the next iPhone, toss Nintendos into old ravines as I dream of manga characters mating in the whitesand beaches of American trash-raves and floating subcontinents of condoms (thus far disproven).

Oh penguins.

It's a pity the vastness of the world can't be apprehended without research. At some point, generations from now, such knowledge will be available in pill form, uploaded to the transhuman cortext to give the user the "big picture" in the time it takes to acquire a caffiene buzz today. At this point, we've developed a sort of social proreciption, the ancestor to Twitter, where census data and personal confession merge, and whole populations can be gauged for danger and pain the way we feel into a stomach for aches today.


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Bottles.

What is it about bottles? Why must they haunt our lives so much. They are something like arenas unto themselves, Galactic Congresses (cf. recent Star Wars movies), antechambers of glass or plastic cells, stuck in silent conversation about the dumb liquids they might contain. You're an air molecule: somehow you get mixed up with a bad apparatus, and wind up injected into a pile of sugary fluid, for the sake of "carbonation". You're then tossed into a long crypt/tube called "bottle", shipped and slapped across continents fair and wide, and left to stand on a chilled shelf, until the moment when this private, self-contained environment is pried open, and you find yourself with the rest of the contents screaming down a tube of a fleshier, pinker, warmer, sort.

And yet, still, the bottle. Caverns. Their silent utility is something of a conspiracy, the way the insides of each bottle face each other, forced to do nothing but talk shit about the outside world. When a label gets applied, the conspiratorial pressure grows even worse: their submerged conversations (these cells and molecules) may now occur behind the closed door of logo branding and nutrition information. What, oh what, do these bottles portend?

Perhaps I am paranoid. Perhaps the bottles (and their more trustworthy cups) will simply lay in wait for an eternity, obedient tools at the disposal of thirsty beings, or children in need of things to carry beads in. But perhaps not.

I remember an argument a year ago at my old place of business, the philosopher-run Integral Institute. One of the employees insisted that a wine bottle buried in the dirt would never one day be sentient.

"I can ASSURE you," she insisted.

Another employee and I disagreed.

"It's simple human arrogance to say that some technology or force will not one day arise to breath life into the inanimate."

And indeed, it is.

Conceive now of a search engine, a meatspace Google capable of tagging, tracking, and crawling through the present locations of every object in the world. Everything, every rock, tree, stick, bush, t-shirt, coffee mug, movie theatre, child, child's toy, economics professor, SUV, creek, and gasket will be tagged and given a location. What happens if one day an entity emerges which means to do something with this tagging ability. Say some cretinous space-larva, a shit-talking slug the size of five jupiters, gains control of object search technology, and decides he wants to have a talking to every buried bottle in the world.

At once, each bottle -- all the glass, brown and green, or plastic, clear, blue -- arises into the sky at once, to be given instructions by this slug-being. He'll have his invisible minions invade the microtecture of each thing, giving them mouths and voices, and setting them loose in the world, biting and conspiring and pouring shit on the people who once embraced them with lips certain they would not be betrayed. Had these bottles not existed, the slug-being would've never made war, simply slipping back into the blankness of space to harass some other race.

But no: because there were bottles, they could be used against us, and the otherwise unarmed slug being was able to bring us to our knees.

Ban the bottles, and ban them now.

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Slow it down.

The green is there to be looked at. The breezes are there to felt. It's no accident that hands fit so well together, though probably an accident that palms sweat so bad.

The city.

Where we lived was horizontal, flat, a cake, a cookie, a plane, a sheaf. But here, it is vertical. You have to look UP to see life as much as you need to look OUT. Or don't look, but don't forget, either: we're in the slot-canyons where dreams are conceived, morphed, defeated, and died. So many have worked as baristas. So many have owned laptops, gone to see bands play, thought about getting a tattoo, and enjoyed a good blog post.

But we are a foam: an arrangement of inconsequential affluence and influence, trading band names beneath the moon which only cares for the cold. Like the cold of our ice cubes: why don't pints of beer carry ice cubes? Must one buy the $8 martini to experience the deep-space anguish of ice? People on Pluto need us to remember them: they need the ice to do it.

But nevermind that for now: focus on the love. It's in the love of each midwesterner assessing the M-hattan skyline from the Heights for the first time. Or the deep, womb-like feeling of standing in Central Park, at the center of a baseball diamond, with the protective wall of high-rises on all sides, the trees inserted between you and them, the armies of squirrels and service-minded taxi drivers, even the kids on stilts: they will protect you.

But from what? From the Outside. From the things no one else can see. From the future events, which lie in the wings and portend the future of evolution, with or without humans. At this time, your collection of window-sill cigarette butts will be irrelevant. Not that you shouldn't focus on them.

Keep on, collect things. Assess the weeds peeking through cracks. Remember the precise shape of clouds which put the tall towers into comical situations, if however briefly. Remember the fog of a storm, lit from within from the flashing neon of reddened advertisements. Remember the red underwear, and your plans to go to Peru. Remember how small your life became in a city so big. To eke, to survive, takes a focus unknown in the provinces, where everything can be tried, at least once. Provided, of course, that you've heard about it. From one of your friends. In New York. City.

Something bright bounced off the calm ocean murk that morning. Had beer fighting it's way out of my veins, and the grease of a hamburger stuck in my mustache, a few things I did the night before to feel proud and/or guilty for. The City is huge, and important, but becoming irrelevant, and you can feel it. The internet, for one, undermines the importance of proximity per say. NYC becomes a luxury item, never an asset, a liability rather than a catalyst for connections and change.

The cities were not always so: they were dangerous. They were ill-understood, thus ill-organized, and thus always ready to be touched by a socio-political match: a revolutionary's words, a new, more primal form of a music, or an act of injustice so profane it could not ignored. From that moment on, a city could be lit aflame, from Battery Park on up to Norwood. The heat would pour out of the subways, igniting all loose paper and souls, and the fight would be carried forth into the highest of towers, where the stockpiles of life-provision will be kept.

With helicopters overhead, you'll forget your old meaningless, happy life, the way keyboards clacked and lattés tasted, and you'll remember those arms you threw with and legs you ran with (once again), and you'll grab a co-revolutionary for a kiss and steal a beer from a turned-over truck and you'll knock on every sewer plate hoping a sentient turtle with martial arts skills will answer back, burst forth, and win the day.

But alas, flatness is God, for no city's expanse lasts for forever, and they've yet to build a tower taller than the width of the county. To cover a world in such beings, in fact, would be to inflict the earth with an unholy inversion, all extension and no skin-substance, like a firework bursting forth and frozen as metal, stone, glass, and commerce.

Squeeze Liberty's titties now: and see what comes out. Can it be used to caulk piled-on towers together, building a brick fortress out of the smaller buildings? Can it bring the boroughs together, obviating the rivers? Can it glue the sky to the floor, making verticality all but unknown, creating a world where we shuffle past in an impossible, occluded maze?

Let's run downtown and see what happens.

("Come here, my dear, come here, my dear")

You've enticed the scant soil and have built things through the layers of subways devoted to each historical era. You've not heard shotguns go off, but the explosions of biplanes in the sky fighting the King Kong virus from their onboard computers is more than compelling. If only a band could be started to capture that same emotion.

Rest assured, in Brooklyn, they will be, and it will last for an hour and a day, and women will lose their panties, and men will switch genders, and alcohol purveyors will lick their lips and hope for some product placement -- a T-shirt ideally, an armband secondarily.


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To summarize: Boulder is but one lens with which to perceive to the total world experience. Your life can only be shown to be so much by a single place, which will never exhaust what you are capable. We are all thus haunted by this hidden ability: to never be expended no matter how far we range. But we can certainly try.

Congrats to Gwen on the launch of her travel site Expatriette this week. The site is dedicated to hip, edgy, female travellers, and (ahem) has a really sweet logo*. Boys aren't banned (not yet at least, muhahaha), so fellas, feel free to click away as well. And, in true Gwen Bell form, she's come out swinging: check out her hilarious post "Beyond Backpacking". (Warning: not safe for Leonardo Dicaprio fans.) CONGRATS GWEN!!! *Designed by who else? Us!

We're on a main bike route. Well, several. The bike routes cross in the street out front. It's a Scottish nightmare: white plaids on black background, so many stripes and lines and subtle cues you'd want to hang yourself with a long piece of haggis (sheep gut). For one, the cyclists are always smashing into each other. The police have broken up one row after the other, and this is only Wednesday. There are plenty of police. My brother says we have descended into a police state, but I disagree: a prevalence of hornets does not mean the whole world's become a hive, does it? No. I tend to think these "boys in blue" have been chased from somewhere, and they are just now taking their frustrations out on cyclists and innocent bystanders alike. Our house is a single story, but the trees which grow up and through it's walls stand several miles high. We are like so many ants gathered around a very large fern, cowering in our rock pile: the tree provides shade, security, stability, and scenery. Were it not for the tree, we'd be engulfed in the sea of asphalt that this town has become... and it's only getting worse. The Public Works department must have found a mysterious, boundless source of funding, because they've been at it since the day I was born. Buildings have been raised to build highway onramps; parks have been sculpted into the sides of cliffs so that mothers have a place to take their youngsters after school; streets signs have doubled in size; the cyclist population has mushroomed in size to take advantage of the tangled sea of smooth bike courses. I wonder what this "public" was that they seem so hell-bent on serving. All day long, my brother and I play video games. We live in our shack, surrounded by the sound of ten-speed chains switching gears and the sudden application of brakes. We have been playing the same game for all of our lives: it's called RotoCrossing, and it looks suspiciously like a standard police raid on a cyclist row outside. I wonder, now, what lies beyond that sea of melted stone and rubber and glue called "Asphalt". I want to know where the tree came from, why it bends its tree-head in the wind, as though looking longingly beyond the horizon for other trees to stand with. There's a reason the tree has been placed so prominently near the bike intersection so long ago: it's a landmark, in a land suspiciously devoid of them. Meanwhile, the public works projects proceed apace. It's as though the very asphalt which constitutes this world is the Public Works departments private plaything, it's sculpting tool. You''ll see them in their hard hats: the PW ants and stragglers, those who came up from the coal mines and down from the wild bird farms in the clouds to work in the never-ending tangle of public utility. I have seen the bike swarms on a cold winter night, racing each other around the manmade turns far out in the distance, a cluster of silver light jockeying for position, whirring away soundlessly as the world churns beneath them. At certain times of day, the computer keeping all of the trails, streambeds, park systems, canyons, overpasses, underpasses, tunnels, rolling hills and bridges held together collapses: this is when the deaths occur. The bikers will slip into a sudden sink hole, or carroom off an unexpected ski jump, and end up in a tangle of body parts and liquid, overheated metal. An ER helicopter will dart overhead, some mothers will scream over the radio, and then the event will be forgotten: another hiccup in the asphalt sea's slow, churning history. This one particular day, my brother had had enough. "I've heard of a time where men did more than sculpt their environments and ride their asses raw on tubes of metal going 40 mph. I aim to find this time." And so, he hoisted a few satchels upon his broad shoulders, put me in his Little Brother boy carrier (my little compartment for riding shotgun with my big bro, kind of like a pet taxi, only cozier and more humane), strapped three bicycles together (one main, two spares), and hit the roads, in search of... The noise was deafening. The cyclists did not take well to one of the "tree boys" invading their turf, and they'd play cat-n-mouse games throughout the day as my brother peddled in a beeline away from the tree. As long as it got smaller, he got happy: we were really doing this, we were really trying to find something on the edges of it all. When the cyclists were harassing us, the police came and bugged us. My brother, being 7'6" and lean with muscle mass from years of playing our full-bodied video games, would shrug them off three at a time, laughing as they fell into the drainage ditches and out of site. "Go bro!" I would scream with pride. We came now to a series of ditches far deeper than the ones we left behind. The Public Works department had gotten really creative here, digging the the things miles down into the surface of the asphalt, so far one could see the ashen, dirty surface of the original earth of yore. "Down," said my brother. This was unexpected. We had expected the asphalt to just stop at a copse of trees or an authentic river bed, but after three days of riding, this didn't seem to be the case. It was only a change in the abstract grooves laid out by the PW, not an actual shift in geology. We were really into something now. Police Bats hissed from their wall cubbies as we descended into this earthern, evil-smelling manmade canyon. They were harmless, sitting as they were behind plates of bulletproof glass, but we knew this was only a function of the Policeman's Benevolent Association having stumped for years to keep the winged, red and blue-lit beasts in their underground cages and out of the hair of an already harassed humanity. "You see," said my brother, pointing to what looked like a rusted out ER 'copter, but with wheels. "That's what men used to do for food, before our video games systems were invented to feed us food pellets whenever we beat a boss level." "What?" I asked, innocently. "I don't get it: what's it do? Kill food pirates? Bring down food beasts?" "It's a tractor," said my brother. "I learned about this in my Retrograde English class. The whole thing is designed to row lines into the dirt, plant seeds into them, and grow food plants out of them: much like our tree, but with food pellets raining down." I was flabbergasted. "How? Why?" "That's simply how men worked down here on old earth, before the asphalt came and swept it all away. Can you imagine? The ground you stand on every day would also feed you! No videogaming! No begging for policemen to open up their emergency vaults when your gaming thumb is sprained! And, best of all--" He shook his fist towards the surface we'd just come down from -- "No fucking cyclists!" Deeper we searched. We came now to a very old, very drippy tunnel, which smelled like a casket filled with old femurs and moss. "Subway tunnel," he said. "They once got around on long, metal houses on wheels, which lived and moved underground. This made it easier to do farming on the surface." Further. The next object of wonder was a large, low building, with a bright blue sign out front that said "PHARMACY". "This where they purchased things, or simply 'hung out'. You could get what was called a soda -- a kind of fizzy water made of sugar -- and talk to some friends while you drink that." "Friends?" "You know, people who talk to each other every day, like you and me but no related." "You mean like a peloton, a cluster of cyclists?" "Sort of, but without the competitive flare or psychodrama with the police. These would have been people you just felt at ease with, and could drink soda with and talk about the farms and the subways." "Why would anyone do that?" My brother stared down at the "PHARMACY" sign and sighed. "Because they could," he said at last. Soon the supervisors had gotten worried, and they sent an elevator down to pick us up. With reluctance, my brother hoisted the bikes onto the elevator, along with my boy carrier, and we were taken back to the asphalt's surface, where things made sense again. My brother was silent as he began the long pedal home, defeated. The next day, we realized that the tree had doubled in length. This, we suspected, was modification performed by the supervisors to attract more cyclists to our intersection, and sure enough, they were all outside, clogging the asphalt in all directions as they smashed into each other and brought their rows to the police for moderation. The white plaid of stripes on the surface had all but been occluded by these cyclists who, grateful for the new, more prominent landmark (the tree was now miles high), pedaled towards our house in great, flock-sized pelotons, happy they could navigate once again. "There was an older age," said my brother as he punched the air that morning to beat Level 664-A of RotoCrossing, "When cyclists did not rely on our sparse, isolated tree for navigation." "Yeah right," I said, thinking back to the photos I'd seen of our world from space, where it looked like a perfect, gleaming sphere of asphalt. "No, for real: they had these things called mountains, and these are other things called cities, and by gauging the distance between the two, and their respective heights, one would know exactly where he was at all hours of the day. No getting lost for years, no having to join a peloton or being locked inside a tree house like we are." "And no police to show you where to go?" "And no police. Just mountains and cities." "What were these things?" "Mountains were piles of stone which had been built up by the old earth through very long periods called 'geological processes'. I think had something to do with the water in the ditches digging so deeply that it separated whole sections of earth off from others, then sculpted them into like these triangle-shapes." I sat down at his feet to await the food pellets. They were slow to form this morning: something must have been wrong with our video game system. I looked up at my brother, hoping he'd do something, but he was still staring off into space (the weirdo). "Cities, on the other hand, were manmade, and they were huge! Imagine if the Public Works department was allowed to build vertically, could build houses the size of our tree outside!" "Pshaw, that's nuts," I said. "Yeah, then imagine a bunch of these tree buildings all clustered together, like a forest, only with people inside." "That's woo-woo," I said, twirling a finger around my ear to signify my disbelief. But then a thought occurred to me. "But what if one of these 'cities' things was grown up on top of one of these 'mountain' things -- wouldn't that be so tall it toppled down?" "I guess so," he said, looking back at me as though his mental spell was broken. "Now what about our food?" We ate our pellets in silence, looking out our sole window at the bike swarms getting into heated arguments across the expanse of asphalt. "Hey bro?" I asked, finally. "Yeah?" he was chewing methodically, robotically, hypnotically. "What do you think we would've found in that ditch if we kept walking and the superiors didn't come back for us?" He stopped chewing. "I don't know." The next day, I was back in my boy carrier, and we were back in the ditch. This one was different, bigger. He pointed at a long, gleaming tube. "Missile," he said. "Used by one city to take down another city. Very dangerous." Behind this, a stack of pieces of wood covered in some sort of material, with these crazy designs on it. "Artwork," he said. "People in the cities used to get mad at the missiles being shot at other cities, so they would use these things called 'paints' to make marks on this material like you see here." "It looks like a video game on pause." It sort of did. We walked further. There was another store, this one with a sign that said "GROCERY". "What's that?" I asked. He didn't answer: instead we went inside. I was sure the supervisors would come for us, or a secret police bat platoon would pop up out of nowhere to suck our brains out, but we were safe for now. There were all of these silver bags along the lines of this "store", and plastic bags below them. He held up one of the plastic bag, which had a sort of yellowish writing on it. "Corn chips!" he said, with a gleam of excitement in his eyes. "Corn chips were grown on farms and put in these bags!" A chill ran down my spine: we'd found the actual food of the old earth! Millions of people ate this stuff every day, without having to play any video games to get it! Just then, there was a whoop. "Shit, cops," said my bro, and he grabbed my boy carrier and stormed out. They were standing outside by the bicycles, taking photos. "Hi guys!" said one of the officers, whose officer nameplate said "Charlie." "Hi!" said my brother. You had to sound really happy to see them or they would get mad. "We're very sorry," said Charlie, "But the supervisors have suggested we help you out of this ditch so you can go back to the tree house. We're really sorry we left you down here." They always made it sound like it was there fault, as if we were always innocent and they were always at fault if we did anything bad. My brother sighed, hung his head, and let the policemen load us into the elevator, bikes and all. "See anything cool?" asked Charlie as we rode to the service. "Some dirt, some garbage," said my brother. "We saw a missile too!" I blurted out. The policemen all looked at each other. "What?!" They were all like bent around my boy carrier now and looking at me. "It was a missile," I repeated. "It was used to take down other cities." They all looked at each other, quizzically. "He's young," said my brother, waving them away from me. "He thinks everything he sees is some ancient object." I felt betrayed. I sulked. The ride to the surface continued in silence. On the ride home, I asked my brother why he'd insulted me in front of the policemen. "They're not ready," he said. "Ready for what?" I asked. "For the glorious revolution." "Huh?" "For the glorious revolution of mankind, when we throw off the yoke of the asphalt and the peloton and begin to hug the original earth once again!" My brother was being super weird. "How are they going to do that." "No, little bro, WE are going to do that. And it's going to fucking rock." He kept pedaling. The sun was setting now behind our tree. We were still miles away, but already I could see the veins within the leaves, and the jagged exterior of bark, fortified as it was with glass. I wondered what beings lived up towards the top, which always looked like it shaking and spitting out little objects. "How are we going to do it?" I asked. My brother looked up at the tree, and licked his lips. "First, we get that missile to work, or at least find an ax." "An ax?" "Kinda like a sharpened piece of asphalt. It's what the farmers used to remove smaller trees from their farmland." "Ok..." I said, not getting it. "And what will you do with it?" "Chop down the tree of course!" I looked up at him, horrified. A large smile had crept across his beard, and his eyes were the size of bicycle tires, seen from a short distance. "But why do that?" "So we can crush all of the supervisors living above it." Of course! The top! That's who lived there! "It's like we're making war on old city," he explained, "Only this time, we won't have our own to live in. We'll have to live in a peloton, or kick out a police bat and live in one of their caves. Sound like fun?" "I guess," I said, "As long as I get to make the artwork." "Deal."

To mark this year's Independence Day, I decided to forgo the hot dogs and fireworks and do what I do best: launch a blog. Please check out Foreignerd, the latest project by the Plunge Artist team. And Happy Birthday America!

Well, it was my last hurrah at Integral Institute, and it's finally out on book stands now. Meet The Integral Vision, a graphics-dense introduction to the controversial scholar's "theory of everything". Special thanks to the Zoosphere crew for co-directing the illustrations with me and doing the production work, and Feliciano Type Foundry for the amazing fonts. From Publisher's Weekly:

"In a scant 200+ pages chock full of handsome illustrations and spare, Zen-like diagrams and tables, he forges ahead on his established path, posing, 'What if we attempted to find the critically essential keys to human growth, based on the sum total of human knowledge now open to us?'"

This weekend I participated in Startup Weekend in Boulder, a crazy-ass social experiment wherein 72 people threw together a functioning internet start-up in a single weekend. The results: VoSnap, a web-based "quick vote" service which allows you to send your friends a polling question (i.e. "Where should we eat tonight?") to which they can reply via SMS text-messaging or email. Art Direction by me. =) Now Digg it! (More soon...)

The café should not have existed. Too many horrible things had occurred to insure its placement on the sterilized upper evil crust of the social sphere it rested upon. Case in point: the skeleton. No one knew about the skeleton, but nevertheless there it lay, hundreds of feet below the eastern parking garage, the same garage where the spotlessly-heeled parked their spotless cars and ate customized foodstuffs from spotless plates at the Spotlesse Bistro on 9th Street. The café was on 10th street, and the skeleton was from the 10th century. Far below the asphalt and newly-placed brick, the skeleton exerted a mysterious influence on everyone who came near. The strangeness for the baristas, of course, was so commonplace as to be unnoticed, but for the infrequent visitor to the café, it was astonishing. First of all, purses, pocketbooks, and wallets all hung open like the slackened jaw of a skull screaming in the wilderness. There was a stiffness in the joints of those waiting in line, as though their bones were suddenly chilled, tendons suddenly gone non-elastic. The skeleton's music selection, too, was something to be noticed. The crumbled old thing had a taste for peppy, upbeat pop songs with strange lyrics, such as the marimba jam with the chorus about the sofa, or the all-acapella number about a wombat and a stencil. These it kept repeating, in spite of the thousands of choices floating within the hard drive of the staff iPod. But it was at night when the skeleton really made its occluded presence known. A wind howled on this block completely unlike anything heard elsewhere in the city. It combined a low roar with a high scream, sounding like a banshee shriek in slow motion, with the colder nights in particular lending it an eerie keen. This howl was known to have properties beyond just the aural -- it was known to leave small cracks in windows, divots in windshields, dents in the grills of Mercedes Benzes, and a shattering echo in the minds of those who heard it unprotected by ear muffs or high-collared coats. It is this same howl which awoke John Princely one Thursday night, drove him into the kitchen, into the cupboard, and into the bottle from which he never returned. This is his story. John had studied the history of the city since he was very young. He knew about the early migrations which brought daft, angry settlers to these parts, who dueled it out in desperation with the previous tenants of the land being grabbed, those darker-skinned folks with a taste for animal pelts and putting plants between their teeth. They were feral, sullen, and most of all, wily, the way they hid in the oily bushes, pouncing on immigrant children in the middle of the night, trashing their cupboard wagons and making off with small captured game animals. The settlers had had enough. There was a settler by the name of Princely (no relation to John, that he knew of), who had erected a high wooden tower out of birch beams, which he would stand atop of each night with a spyglass and a stash of quick-lighting signal torches should any of the pelt-lovers show themselves. On one particular night, a gang of three pelteers shot through a barricade and made off with a leather bag of pistols, which could be heard firing into the middle of the night just moments later. Princely saw the muzzle flashes, lit his torches, dropped them amidst the settlers to rouse them, and accidently burned his whole tower down, self included. It is his skeleton which lies now below the city streets, freaking out the descended immigrants. And John is one of them. John also has a girlfriend, a strong blonde with dark armhair, who is part pelt-lover. Their fights often take on the characteristics of one of the early land-grab fights, with her hiding in the "bushes" of their one bedroom apartment (blankets, mostly), and he keeping watch for her assaults through a series of webcams installed throughout the apartment. We join them now: "John honey, the dishes." "In a minute." John is playing a game called Werewolf Nightmare Dream 3: The Becoming on his laptop. He is seated on the north side of the room, she on the south side. She is reading a book called Johnny Came Princely Down the Mountain, partly for the irony, partly because she's actually into the plot. Her name is Becky, and she is in "a mood". "John honey, if you don't scrape the chicken-fuzz and bird meat from those pans, I will leave you for good, for the howl in the night." She simply did not understand. Werewolf Nightmare Dream 3: The Becoming was not just any game: it was a revolution. Thousands of kids around the internet-land had become addicted, and many more had sold off valuable property in order to fund the rent on their play-spaces, which they all called "crypts". John, at the age of 23, was the eldest of any player, and was treated as such. "Hi Jon!" John let the misspelling slide. "Hi Danny," he sighed, unable to find an emoticon to convey the precise level of his apathy towards the kid, who was 12. "Jon, when do we attack?" There was a copse of trees in the southlands containing a colony of werewolves fond of sunning themselves on the long, flat rocks in the middle of a clearing at copse center. They were fish, the trees were the barrel, and the Werewolf Nightmare Dream 3: The Becoming community was gearing up to be the shooting gun. "We wait for now," said John, eyeing his girlfriend as she responded happily to a text message from an unknown suitor. The real wolves were closing in, and they were decidedly more pelt-loveresque than John found comfortable. Weird things had begun to happen within the game. A low, rumbling, digital yelp was heard in the polygonal distance, and infinitesmelly small avatars were disappearing in small clouds of pixellated bloods. It was a set-up. "Jon, look out!" Danny was running in front of John, brandishing a double-sided axe with extra razor-blade nunchaku dangling from its edges. Two werewolves were approaching them through a tall stand of bushes. They were eight relative feet high, with long dangling fingernails and mangy manes filled with man-gristle. They were approaching quickly. John's girlfriend sighed aloud and stepped into the kitchen. He could hear her stacking up plates in the sink, each one gave off a loud clatter which overrided the sound of howling deadmen coming through his headphones. She would be leaving in a matter of minutes. "Jon, dagger!" It came through the air a split second too soon: John grabbed it by the handle, twirled it around, and whipped back at the approaching monster. The wolf fell back with a sickening, femur-snapping thud, coming to a halt on a pile of knife-edged boulders. The second of the two wolves was now sailing through the air directly towards John's head. This time he had a few seconds to draw his sword, which gleamed in the fake moonlight like a stiff purple tongue ready to lick any competitor into oblivion, which it did so now. Wolf #2 howled as the tongue split it in half, then disappeared into the dirt. Danny's avatar reached for a high-five, John ignored it and moved on, hoping to thwart the mounting counter-attack. His girlfriend was now pulling back her hair. She was looking in the bathroom mirror, and her eyes had been done. She had a beautiful neck, which glinted now with the silver tennis necklace John had bought her that previous Christmas. She was going out. He called a halt on the attack and dislodged the ear buds from his ears. "Where are you going hon?" "Out," she said, failing to elaborate. "Can I come with you?" He was only half-serious. "Only when you beat your game," she said, equally half-serious. What she really meant was no. The wolves howled "CCHHARRGEE!" as John re-opened his PC. They were angry, furious, steamed and obliteratedly-overdriven with ragelust at the gall of John and his teenage compatriots. The wolves were an old, elderly even, gang of gamers, and had dominated the Werewolf Nightmare Dream universe for over a decade. It was one of these wolves who, early on, had taken John under his fur-wing with a sound round of advice: "Don't let the outside world influence your decisions in the wolf-lands," he said. "Remember, the outside world is mutable, and damn near infinite. You can always start over. But if you accrue over 10,000 hurt points in the wolflands, you're done forever." It was advice John was hard-pressed to forget. Yet now, here he was, 23 years of age, and already burned out on the wolf universe. His real universe had just thrown on a sexy blouse and walked out the door, and he had no job to speak of, only Werewolf Nightmare Dream. #3 had just come out, and he'd exhausted the excitement of its playtime functionality. Basically, he could kill anyone anywhere in the wolflands, and all he'd see for it was increased esteem amongst the teenagers. Other than them, no one in the outside world knew his hidden talents for kicking ass. He thought of the early settlers, and their war with the pelteers. Those were the days of real world heroism and bravery, and not this synthetic bullcrap he and his younger mates called "gaming". He wanted out, but he didn't know how or where or how to start. Which wasn't the best attitude to take with a full-scale wolf-blitz descending on his battalion at present. "John, the shurikens!" A kid named Ari was minding the left flank, and had seen the ninja stars flying in at the nick of time. John presented his over-sized, soft-wood bo staff, and took the stars out of the air like so many burdocks alighting on a Christmas sweater. This is when the howl began. It started with a low rattling of John's apartment's eastern windows. It was flowing through the undercarriages of the parking garage next door, and creeping unsubtlely through the argyle-shaped gaps of the garage's chain link fences. Pigeons were flapping, and a mist of tiny snowflakes was pushing past his curtains, smacking like tiny snowballs at the brick edges of his neighbor's chimney. His girlfriend was out there, somewhere in that howl, somewhere in that dead of night where the skeleton's memories crept. She was vulnerable out there to its cryptic influence: this much John new. He slid his laptop across the shag carpet and watched as his teen-mates were picked apart one-by-one by the elderly werewolves (elderly being 24 and above) of the opposing team. Their screams could be heard piling atop each other through his earbuds, which themselves lay on the floor. The windows shimmered with ice. "Call me, call me, call me," John chanted from his easy chair, like an incantation to bring his girlfriend back. She would not be back. John passed out a few hours later. The laptop screen had gone dark; the bloodbath was so complete that the developers of Werewolf Nightmare Dream 3: The Becoming had been forced to take it offline to retool it in order to be more competition. John, the one defector from the werewolf corps, the only one on the teen/human side who could hold himself in battle, had pulled out at a crucial moment, and now the recently pre-pubescent of the earth would want to kill his ass in real life... assuming he would let them. As the howl quickened and grew loud enough to wake him, John knew what he must do: drink himself into oblivion. It was the only way to commune with the haunted spirits of the colonizing immigrants of yore, deep down in the darkness of the bottle, where the ruggedness of moonshine, leather chaps, wooden earthworks and steel-girded pans slapped the sound of adversity from the trenches of the stubborn pioneering men. John would reach them, 80 proofs at a time. He unscrewed the bottle of Jameson, and drew a first swig. Nasty. Swill. He drew another. Unbelievable. Stench. They were there, down in the bottom, beyond the glass cave ceiling of the bottle, which trapped them forever under a million pounds of liquid, 'lest John and the other drinkers of the world free them from their prisons. If enough people drank, John thought, then Princely and his people could fight their ways to the surface of our world, and we'd all have a chance of fighting back to being men once again. "Or not," said John aloud as he sniffed the bottle one last time, winced, and fell back in his chair one last time. And the howl continued.

The latest Paris Hilton hysteria has got me thinking: are we being robbed? With the media so focused on the blonde-tressed heiress's inane flounderings through the Los Angeles penal system, aren't there a whole lot more important topics -- ahem, Net Neutrality -- we should be focusing on? With everyone's attention made increasingly scarce by increased workloads, the proliferation of TV channels, and the latest web 2.0 app-of-the-minute, who's NOT getting attention? What about the old, the sick, the elderly, the brilliant, and the necessary? Redistribution of wealth has long been a concern of social justice movements past and present. But their focus has traditionally been on material wealth, not attention wealth. Without seeking to minimize this very real concern (people still starve in America, FYI), what would it mean to give people a fighting chance in an economy increasingly focused on one's ability to capture, keep, and redirect attention from others? Is it only the stars who will survive? Hilton's family may hog a lot of financial wealth, but she herself is guilty of attention greed. And it is people like she who must be fought should the lore-filled grandmas, mute starving children, and good-hearted scientists of the world get a chance in a spotlight. But how do you fight for justice in an attention economy? For one: make the uninteresting and obscure accessible and fascination. Find ways to reframe things currently perceived as "boring" or "lame" using marketing techniques, design, copy writing, web apps like YouTube, and other tricks of the purple cow trade. More importantly: help those who are struggling to get noticed find in themselves what actually is WORTH noticing, why the world needs it, and how it can be made more public. This past winter marked the passing of my last remaining grandparent, my maternal grandfather Joe. As with all of my previous grandparents, what I regretted most with his passing -- along with missing his voice, face, and presence -- was all of the knowledge and experience he contained within his slender frame, knowledge which could/should have been better captured for the benefit of all of us. While he was by no means unnoticed (in fact, he was a pillar of his local community), he certainly had more to share that could benefit humanity than an attention hog like Hilton. (Interestingly, he himself was a staunch advocate of social justice.) So now, with the Grandpa Joes of the world fading away and Parisian idiocracy holding sway, what will a new movement for equality, fairness, and most of all, compassion, look like in an Attention Economy? How will it sound? Where will it appear? But most of all: who will notice it? Us, I hope.

Michael Goldhaber has posted a thought-provoking response to my previous piece on the attention economy. Some of his solutions to the unfairness of having the world's eyeballs affixed to Paris Hilton-style media spectacles include: 1) Paying more attention to our own circles of friends and relations rather than more distant kinds of stars. 2) Offering more and better modes of attention getting to allow each person to find the best mode for getting attention for what is most truly and importantly to his and her concerns. 3) Realizing and supporting situations in which attention flows equally to all -- partying, communal ecstatic dance, social networking, etc. I resonate deeply with all three of these. Re: #1, I know of plenty of folks who waste hours a day charting the obscure maneuvers of far-off celebrities, whilst their personal lives are in high disarray. Were they actually to put some energy into their local communities, paying attention to local causes rather than watching Access Hollywood and collecting memoribilia, we'd all be better off. For #2, as I mentioned in my previous post, there is a class of attention-getting professionals who blend marketing, design, copy-writing, and leveraged technology to tip the scales in favor of new ideas. These folks could definitely lend a hand to more important causes. And for #3, I agree, but I have a concern. While I've been to plenty of parties where attention was distributed more equally, I also worry that "equal distribution" isn't enough: it's not just that ALL people need to have a more equal share of the attention wealth, but IMPORTANT people and ideas (read: necessary for the healthy and happy functioning of global society) do even more so. How we do THAT, of course, is the real question....

I thought Philly's was bad. I thought DC's bad. I thought wrong. Buffalo, New York, my unofficial second home, has the worst airport I've encountered on my slow-paced Foreignerd world tour thus far. It's not that the runway is mismanaged (Philly takes that prize). It's not that the concourse sprawls on boring and forever (umm... DC). It's just that, if you're on foot, if you don't have the foresight to rent a cab, hire a shuttle bus, or lease out a rental car, you're fucked. I tried to cross the street, tried to go to McDonald's. Closed to pedestrians. I headed over to the Hilton (where I now type this, thanks free wifi!) for a couple good beers. Nothing but Coors. The entire concourse is devoid of an open restaurant. Wifi in the airport is a non-starter. The city bus stopped running at 5pm. Hey, at least it's not raining.

I've got a sadness that only CGI can cure.

Robbie didn't think the Last Days would be so anticlimactic, but they were. He was a lowly tank, an M-1 Abrams, piloted by another thinkcan like himself. Herman was a newer thinkcan, but crude in his functioning: they'd designed him to drive an M-1 Abrams in a straight line, running over Crisstings and Lionmen alike, swiveling his turret in lazy arcs across the sky as the spiderplanes flew overhead.

The spiderplanes were the ones who did the actual fighting: up there past the stormclouds, in the rare air where the ozone had all been destroyed long ago. The other humans, the non-Crisstings and non-Lionmen, had seen their skin boil away in a matter of years when the last of the ozone dissippated. A harsh new light rained down around the globe, like God Himself had replaced the sun with a garish ultraviolet bulb, and everything felt, well, tangy.

It was under this light that the spiderplanes engaged in fierce combat. Both sides -- the pious, white-wearing Crisstings, and the hideous, blood-jawed and pelt-wearing Lionmen -- had purchased their spiderplanes from the same company, HalliburgerKing Wristcomputers, a NLC (No Liability Company) based in the post-nuke wild of Michigan.

The Canadian steppes had been flattened, but not HalliburgerKing's headquarters, a massive, sprawling steaming skull which covered Lakes Michigan and Superior with its massive, grey bulk, sucking up every last bit of freshwater for use in its fowl Beasts of Labor, especially the spiderplanes.

Well, here they were: the Last Days.

Someone had tipped off the Crisstings to a Lionman presence in what was once eastern China, and the Crisstingers went apeshit, bombing away whole mountain ranges and vacuuming out the breathable air for miles around. The Chrisstingers were the most vicious of all Crissting troops: they had the bodies of grown warriors, but the minds and hearts of wee children -- Apocalypse was a very large preschool game to them.

Robbie watched all of this on a newscast while he was parked in a thinkcan motorpool which covered the entire Arabian penisula. The motorpool was a vast, almost endless parking lot containing every functioning gas-powered motorized vehicle known to man, gathered here to take advantage of the peninsula's last remaining drops of oil.

Robbie had a diesel engine, which meant he hung out with the other diesels, swapping stories and trading jokes about what all of the other horrible engine types had done to deserve being less than great: the little 2-stroke lawnmowers were too dirty, the hemis were too small, the rotaries too weird, the hybrids weak, the V6s and V8s brainless and simple.

"We diesels are the only ones who can run both on road AND track," as one of the smarter thinkcan diesels -- a flat-fronted semi-hauler named Jimmy -- had put it.

On the first of the Last Days, Robbie was watching the newscast with the other diesels, when the order came out: drive.

As none of the vehicles could be trusted to drive alone, they were awarded with smaller, humanoid-shaped thinkcan drivers, who came down from helicopters and dispersed across the peninsula in great waves of gleaming limbs.

"The idea is simple," said Robbie's superior, a garbage truck named Bobby. "We're to function as a low-rate 'sweeper' force, cutting down all remaining land-based humans at the knees. Only the spiderplane pilots will remain. This is what HalliburgerKing is looking for. This will be the future."

No more humans. Just thinkcans, everywhere.

Robbie felt a shudder run through his pleather seat cushions. Like the rest of the vehicles in the motorpool, he'd been designed to be a protective shell AROUND humans: his whole existence was made to protect them from harm. True, he had a gun, but this was only used on occasion to free other humans trapped inside of buildings or dirt mounds. This is what he told himself at least.

It all made sense now: the thinkcan drivers were here to make sure the older thinkcan vehicles didn't suddenly become sentimental and drive in such a way as to spare human lives. HalliburgerKing wanted free reign across the planet for its thinkcans -- especially the spiderplanes -- and the loud, stinky, highly-talented humans would simply get in the way. Robbie thought -- and smiled -- about the windtraps a nest of wily humans had set to bring down a spiderplane in the High Urals. They were wiped in minutes, but the effort was notable.

Now here they were, driving at full speed across what was once Iran, beelining it for what was once China, flattening tens of billions of humans beneath their feet.

Over the course of the century they'd reduced their material needs by 99%, figuring out a way to hack their DNA to allow them to find simple nourishment by simply standing in the sun. They'd grown like weeds -- literally -- from this point forward, often spending their whole lives standing in the same place. The need for architecture had vanished, and with it the need for roads, electricity, airports and malls. A half a trillion silent, standing people, looking dumbly up at the sun, thinking bleached-out thoughts. It was no matter: it felt horrible to crush them underneath his chassis.

"Faster! Faster!" screamed the little thinkcan driver perched in Robbie's turret.

Robbie had quickly begun to resent him, or it.

Older thinkcans like Robbie, the pre-HalliburgerKing models, had grown up and around humans, built to serve and be serviced by them. They grew to love each other, as evidenced by the obsession the older humans had with washing and waxing their cars, hosting airshows, and finding motorcycles sexually appealling. It might not have been real "love", but it was affection.

HalliburgerKing had changed all that. The organization was founded by one RebelDawnNine, a thinkcan/human hybrid who'd spent his entire childhood in outerspace, coasting around the stripminemalls of the asteroid belt, and felt little affection for the home planet. He wanted it smooth, gleaming, and chrome-plated, the better to hurl through the cosmos with it.

This was not hyperbole: RebelDawnNine was constructing an elaborate "slingshot" apparatus somewhere out past Saturn, which would use some secretive principle of advanced physics to hurl the planets of the solar system in every which way across the galaxy, like massive billiard balls with molten cores and atmospheres. The motivation behind this absurd act, as usual, was unknown, but Robbie and his fellow thinkcans knew what it meant for them: certain death once they'd swept away the humans.

He slowed down.

"Damn it Robbie! More speed! More speed!"

The driver spoke the words "damn it" with the over-articulated sterility common amongst the newer thinkcans. The driver was free of any of the rust, mold, or other biospheric debris which covered the likes of Robbie and his fellow vehicles. This, in microcosm, was what RebelDawnNine intended for the entire planet: sweep away the human-weeds, level the mountains, fill the oceans with their dust, and make the whole thing as hard and bullet-like as possible.

Robbie and his fellow vehicles would do their part, but RebelDawnNine needed the spiderplanes to finish it.

Over the years, while the majority of humanity had willingly turned itself into little more than a glorified cornfield, the Crisstings and Lionmen had secreted themselves away to caves and swamps underground to perfect their own DNA manipulations.

The Crisstings traced their lineage to an obscure, Old World sect of desert worshippers, who'd left behind home and hearth to be illuminated by the desert's purity. They hated the earth with a passion, but they were not spacesailors by any stretch: their escape and migration would be inward, into their minds, into the seat of consciousness from which all things arose. They tinkered with their DNA to the point of being able to subsist in caves for centuries on end doing little else than counting the number of breaths they took and waiting for revelation. One such Crissting, a bald, impossibly thin man named Cyprisseria, had counted his breaths up to the daunting number of 567,889,003 at which point he'd stood, raised a finger, said "aha!", and decided he had to tell everyone about it.

He was met with resistance soon enough when he ran across a patch of Lionmen dueling it out on the Pampas, who were none-to-pleased to have a cataract-riddled wisp of a man telling them what to believe.

The Lionmen had once been Australians, Argentinians, Russians, and Irishmen: stern, bold stock who prized unarmed conflict ("sports", as Robbie heard they were called), honor, bloodshed, and having their way with womanfolk. They word robes made of sheep turned inside-out, hung themselves from makeshift crosses for fun, brewed their own spirits, and tattooed themselves with the names of famous mountain peaks. As the years wore on, as the bulk of humanity went to seed and the Crisstings lost themselves in the endless caverns of their own minds, the Lionmen fixed their DNA to allow them to withstand the rigors of such hard-partying. They installed second livers, increased the size of their fists, and made hair grow from every single spot of blank skin on their bodies. They grew to be the size of giants, drinking 180-proof whiskey from massive oak flagons, headbutting each other during grueling ten-day contests called ManFights.

When Cyprisseria emerged from his cave in order to prosletize for his obscure method for escaping the prison of the body, the Lionmen laughed, put him in a massive cistern, filled it with animal meat, and had him for dinner on day five of that year's ManFight. When Cyprisseria's brethren discovered the fate of their leader, they poured from their caves all across the planet, and declared Holy War upon the Lionmen.

Unfortunately, neither sect had planned for the coming of RebelDawnNine.

To RebelDawnNine and the HalliburgerKing consortium, the warring religious sects would be very useful idiots in the long-term project of wiping the earth clean, packing it like a snowball, and whipping it into space.

And so again, here we are in the Last Days, with Robbie the Tank being piloted by a human-hating thinkcan driver to wipe the plains free of human weeds, with the last remaining Lionmen and Crisstings duking it out overhead in the very spiderplanes which would soon finish Robbie and the rest of the vehicles off for good.

Robbie had only seen a spiderplane up close once, and it was a gruesome site.

The Lionmen had shot one down over the Arabian sea, and a flotilla of maintenance craft had swarmed it, but not before Robbie and the other diesels had commandeered a large pier outside of Dubai to watch it sink into the Gulf's brown waves.

Unlike the rest of the thinkcans produced by HalliburgerKing -- and there were many of them -- the spiderplanes were the only ones which did not gleam with the spitshine polish of RebelDawnNine's preferred aesthetic. Instead, they were black, and furry, almost shivering when they moved. They got their names from the fearsome, impossibly long legs they used to propel themselves from mountaintops and into battle, and the thick webs of burning, solvent goo they poured from their nosecones as they flew overhead. One always knew a spiderplane clash had occurred by observing the local terrain, for they left trails of death and destruction wherever they want.

And now Robbie was headed right towards them.