New World Order v2.0?

There's been a few strategically placed nuggets in the "news" (HA!) today that suggest that BushCo. is rethinking their "today Iraq, tomorrow The World!!" strategy, so I'm putting on my fortune-telling hat... um, turban... and going to suggest a scenario. But first:

a) You can't win a "war on terror" anymore than you can win a "war on the colour blue", and it's obvious the Yanks can't win the Iraq "war", no matter what; it's Vietnam without the Draft. So scratch one war (but don't say "lose"; the Yanks don't lose wars, as everyone knows).

b) Support for the "war", and Republicans in general, is falling like a lead turd out of the ass of the American public and this isn't good because of the House and Senate elections next year. They lose control of either and you can forget Dubya's coronation as God-Emperor.

c) Maybe Haliburton has stolen as much money in Iraq as it needs right now and would be okay moving on to greener pastures.

d) BushCo's already thinking about invading Iran and Christ, how're you gonna do that with all the bodies tied up in Iraq?!

e) The whole "steal their oil" thing hasn't really worked out as far I can tell, and China's currency isn't tied to the U.S. buck anymore, so that probably changes the whole dynamic anyway, doesn't it? And speaking of oil: if invading Iran looks a little tricky, then how about Venezuela? They've got oil, they don't have The Bomb and the leader is a fucking commie, isn't he?!? Sounds like a walk in the park to me.

So I'm thinking : get of Iraq and just let them deal with rebuilding their own fucking country if they want to indulge themselves in luxuries like electricity and running water so bad. Fine! Whatever! (and imagine the shitstorm if Haliburton actually had to do what they're getting paid to do! Nosirreebob, I'm not tellin' 'em!) And as for the inevitable civil war : if they want to blow each other's heads off, that's their business. I don't recall too many A-rabs crossing the pond to help out with the U.S. civil war, so fuck 'em on that score too.

Bring the boys back home, let things settle down for 6 months or so, at least long enough for Dubya's approval ratings to inch up to, let's say, -30%, and get the House and Senate races over, then invade somebody new. Easy peasy! We'll probably need another 9/11 somewhere in there to galvanize the Great Unwashed but that can't be too difficult to arrange. Tip : this time, blow something up in a Red State if you *really* want to get the rednecks frothing at the mouth, but that's just detail.

Oh, and next time, they should just go it alone and fuck this "coalition" crap... nobody believes it anyway, or gives a rat's ass if Poland sends over a half a dozen grunts to clean army barrack toilets. So "Bush Jr. Jr." Tony Blair can just go fuck himself... sure, he was an okay yes-man when it counted but now he just looks like a lame-duck pussy and man, it's embarrassing!

You'll see, you'll see...

- g-spot -

A Wee Monetary Monograph

Wow. Computers sure have sped up calculations 'n' stuff, but our logic as economic beings remains untouched by their benefits. Witness:

Hewlett-Packard Co. has just announced that it's going to improve its efficiency by eliminating 14,500 jobs, or about 10% of its global workforce. This will eventually save/earn/steal the company an estimated $1.9 Billion USD per year as a result of these terminations, mostly in infotech support, human resources, and their finance sector. This is on top of around 2,000 golden handshakes back in May, so that's actually 16,500 terminations this year out of a work pool of 150,000. Yes, I wrote "terminations" twice; let's avoid "downsizing" - it's soooo "nineties".

Military science has given us a much-abused word: "decimation". The Romans invented it. See the "deci-"? This means "Ten", of course. The Romans discovered that in most cases, if you wanted to break the morale of an opposing force or population, or if you needed to discipline a company of naughty Legionnaires, all you had to do was kill one out of every ten in order to change the general mood to one of compliance; it must have something to do with losing a toe or finger. The Nazis and Soviets both employed this technique successfully upon their targets, and upon their own troops, in WW II. One decimates an enemy in order to control or conquer it; Hewlett-Packard has crossed that magic threshold of human group consciousness in their employment roster. Everyone left at HP is bound to be happyhappyhappy! that "The State" has decided to keep them on board....and everyone knows that a happy worker is a productive worker!

As a shareholder of HP, I'd be extremely worried about the long-term implications of all this. Leveraging an enormous grab attempt on a market sector by standing on top of a pile of dead job positions is no way to run a well-rounded business, and it all seems like nothing more than a bottom-line attempt to offset the liability, over the span of a decade, of HP's $19 Billion USD purchase of Compaq back in May, 2002. I don't know if I'd trust any company that pumps out products, but which then skimps on the service surrounding those very products. Additionally, the round of "downsizings" (Ouch! That ninties-ism again!....) in the early nineties brutally reminded CEO's - intelligent CEO's - that a company is actually its people, and that bottom-lining can lead to logistical and human resource management disasters. The consultants slunk away a decade ago with the tatters of the whole "downsizing" solution, and came back with their share of the dot-com bubble concept, but that's another story. Or is it? "Good" corporations are based on "good" counsel. We only have to look at the success of companies like Hewlett-Packard in the marketplace over the last few years to see that all the artificial money cleverly went someplace, despite the trail of broken, binary dreams; the spate of monopolisation in recent years by megacorps admittedly has been some brilliant, sneaky shit. So much, though, for the thousand competing blossoms of a thousand companies in the rolling, golden capitalist fields of the American Dream. The ex-commies haven't even tried to catch up to any of this fake capital creation made off reality's back, sensibly: they just buy the printers. They've become a fucked up version of capitalism and we're going to become a fucked up version of socialism, run by the tenderly merciful Universal Corporation. And so the lessons of the last ten years are lost to us; history has died in the information age.

That $1.9 billion in lost yearly incomes is going to have to be made up in the economy, and not just in the area of reduced consumer spending. At an imaginary, moderate income tax rate of only 20%, in the neighbourhood of $320 million will be lost to governments' coffers annually until those fifteen thousand workers or so find equivalently-paying, taxable jobs: this is the direct revenue cut made from about $1.6 billion in wages and labour costs. Out of the total $1.9 billion figure culled by HP, another $300 million per year is to be made from "benefits savings". Those benefits will now either have to be forgone by terminated employees, or paid for from alternate sources, again, a depletion in the flow of capital through the general economy and/or a depletion of workers' savings. Of course, none of that scooped capital is going to get squeezed out of HP in its turn for the benefit of society at large; the company's accountants will have scrubbed the taxes clean with write-off plans long ago. And, none of that $1.9 billion is ever going to become anything REAL in the near future: it's never going to become bicycles, or food, or solar panels, or any of the other consumer products that markets and governments have to start focussing on; this newly fermented money is staying in people's stock portfolios, growing fatter and fatter, helping HP to brighten our lives with more and more printers and photocopiers, and with more and more shiny features. It seems that we don't need a real economy to deal with the challenges of our lovely, little new century, if the Hewlett-Packard boardroom's philosophers and their ilk everywhere are to be believed.

See how many printers you can spot in the garbage over the next two weeks.


The Turning of The Worms

Nuthin' For Sumpthin'

I hate to admit it but *everything* bad in the world is not the fault of the Republican party (even if they'd like to take credit for it all). Take for example, the latest round of high-tech job losses in the U.S. (in spite of the bullshit "growth" numbers they love to throw at people... "the chocolate ration has been raised from 7 to 5 grams! Whoo-hoo!") You have to keep something in mind, which is that high-tech, as we know it, is not something that you can sustain an economy as large as the U.S.'s on... seriously, why did the dot.com bubble bust? It may have had less to do with shoddy political leadership and more to do with the fact that hundreds, if not thousands, of high-tech companies were offering inferior product, some were offering utterly useless product... and some weren't offering any product at all! For many, it was a shell game of promises of stratospheric return on investment made to dim-witted, greedy investors, with "no stink to back up the fart". In a real economy, where the share value of a company is tied to it's stability, management and product value over the long term, instead of what the stock market is now, which is basically a large slot-machine, you couldn't have this many companies go under simultaneously without entering some sort of Great Depression.

There is also a more unnerving undercurrent : high-tech, for the most part, doesn't produce anything "real". Populations need goods and services, not a complete redesign of a corporate web-site using the latest XML or PHP off-shoot. It was the same when "multimedia" was heralded as the new wave of economic growth... a product without market (although that didn't stop the incessant spin of advertising from literally inventing the market). But how the hell does it make sense for 6 billion people to agree to pay each other to devise more and more clever ways of shuffling ones and zeros around?!? To what end?

Certainly there are real and practical and valuable applications of technology but North America is, as usual, missing the point : aside from its inherent uselessness, an information-based economy is not sustainable, long term, because when the rest of the planet catches on (which they're doing), 3rd world governments and multinational corporations will stop paying their workers $1 / day to make Nikes® and will start paying them $2 / day to work on Windows 2008 and all we'll have left is what we started the Information economy to be rid of in the first place : manufacturing, which, like it or not, is what the world *actually* runs on (that, and defense contracts).

I, like everyone else, have been doing everything I can to avoid digging ditches for a living, so I'm part of the problem not part of the solution, and I'm lucky enough to be pretty good at what I do so I'm doing okay for now. But someday, it won't matter how good I am because someone will be doing it for 1/100h of the money I want and eventually, no one will want it at all.

By and large, politicians have very little effect on a country's economy; the predominant factors are the greed of its corporations and the laziness of its citizens. The politicians just grease the wheel that squeaks the loudest.

- g-spot -

Bastard Programme

Our Mindset,
Which Art in T.V.
Hollowed be thy brain!
Thy flicker come,
My head be numb,
With FOX, NBC, or C-Span.
Give us x-rays....our landfills, lead,
and turn off our thought processes,
as we turn off the minds of those around us!
And lead us to love masturbations,
and commercials cheap and evil!
For thine is the sitcom, the talk show
and the sportscast, for Lever 2000,
White Bread!


The Turning of The Worms

The Falcons Come Home To Roost

My oh my oh my.... "homegrown British boys" it seems they were, eh? I thought it was al-Qaeda; at least, that's what Tony told us a few days ago. It's going to be interesting to see how the powers that be are going to set the spin cycle on their great publicity machine in order to to deal with this heavy load. Then again, it might not be that hard: somehow, a significant percentage of idiots populating the English-speaking world (and elsewhere) are still clinging fast to the idea that the evil former President of Iraqistan, Saddam bin Laden..I mean, Osama al-Hussein...I mean...that terrorist guy in Afgharaq...you know, the dude with the beard....was responsible for 9/11. So we had to destroy Kandahar and Fallujah, to make the world safe. So dudes from a boring neighbourhood in Leeds MIGHT have had links to the heart of the "world's most fearsome terrorist organisation." See, citizen? It all makes sense. Right?

Why would "they" want to blow up nice, British subways and trains and planes and stuff when the Forces of Light are only trying to make the world safe for business and everyone? Nasty fanatics...

I suppose "The Western World's First Suicide Bombers" are about to be traced to a Mastermind/Evil-One who must be pursued around the planet AT ALL COSTS, including the price of British civil rights being flushed down the loo. Funny how the press hasn't tried to link any of this to the case of Mohammed Bouyeri, the confessed killer of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh: one would have thought his trial to be the perfect grist and fodder for the Anglo-American propaganda mill, a sure proof of an Evil Internationalist Islamic Nasty Brotherhood. Maybe the fearful symmetry of assasination and bombings in Europe is being left alone by the press because the Bush/Blair war machine thinks that it's a happy coincidence which should be left to work its subliminal charms unaided. Or perhaps it's because the whole topic raises the thorny issue that Iraqis, Afghanis, Iranians, Pakistanis, Malaysians and Indonesians actually DO have multiple, valid historical reasons for wanting to cornhole America, England and Holland with a set of wire brushes for a century or more of economic, military and political tomfuckery. This round of bloodshed, if the media-military complex is not COMPLETELY full of shit about what's going on in the world, has nothing to do with ideology or "contempt for our freedoms"; it's about pecking the eyes out of former colonisers. And about not getting laid or getting buzzed enough on life, etc.: happy people don't go around exploding themselves on buses.

Whether you believe conspiracy theories about Dick Cheney being the controller of the 9/11 flights, or whether you believe the conspiracy theories about Kim Jong-Qaeda generated by FOX-CNN-Pentagon, the fact is that the events of September 2001 and the subsequent follow-up by much of the west's military have opened the door for any disaffected and repressed loony to walk into a crowded subway car and become instant history, and an instant entry in the history books. Remember Columbine High? Same thing folks; just different accents. Tea or Coffee? English or American? But therein lies the way to end all this bloodspilling. While in no way wishing to detract from my esteemed colleague, g-spot's, comment that the draft should be reinstated so as to put some American ass on the line and stop the war right away, I sugggest another, perhaps complementary route. Just round up all the damaged, useless fucks who have had their souls and minds crushed by living in the plastic mush of Middle North America and England...all the Columbine losers, all the bigots and jingoists, all the ranting, wanking, crusading Bible thumpers, all the flag-waving, Superbowl-Sunday-butt-slapping, wife-beating closet cases, all the mumbling, babbling, jumpy crackerjacks who populate the slums of New York and London and Vancouver, and put them on bombing patrol instead.

One backpack each. Five kilos of Semtex, a jar of 2" roofing nails, and a fifteen-minute chemical detonator. Fighting fer Jay-sus? Leave your backpack (with a Bible) in the locker room of an Egyptian bus terminal, and walk away. There: you Bible Freeks are happy now. Want to die in a blaze of glory because you've got nothing else to live for? Go backpacking in the near east and REALLY rock the Casbah! There. You're happier and the CIA is happy, too; you've left your country a better place in more ways than one. Consigned to a life of desperate addiction that even your own government leaders don't want to help you with; they would rather just lock you up in the American gulag of two million souls? Off to Riyadh! One way ticket! And you thought crystal meth was a blast!!!

As we in the west are living under the tattered umbrella of international terrorism, according to Great Leader and Dear Leader, let's fight fire with fire and kill lotsa birds with one hand grenade! Line up at the departure gate with your bombs, o patriots, with government sanction! The stewardesses will be passing out the phials of mercury fulminate momentarily, so please extinguish all smoking materials; next stop, Tehran! You see, Afghanis and Iraqis have proven to the world that assymetrical warfare works: history's most powerful military can't even secure a two-mile by two-mile hunk of property in the capital city of a country that they've been demolishing, irradiating and depopulating for more than ten years; it's Tom and Jerry, and Jerry wins. Always. So does the Roadrunner. So does Bugs Bunny. So does Hannibal the Cannibal. The prankster with the most time on her or his hands wins, Forever and Ever. Ho Chi Minh.

If good ol' fourth-gerneration warfare works for "them", why not, finally, try it ourselves on a large scale? You can't fight "terrorism"; it's not a "thing" into which you can pump bullet holes. A War on Terrorism is like A War on Parachute Drops, or A War on Amphibious Beach Assaults, or a War on L-ambushes. Terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy, so stop fighting it man! Use it! Just chill out, grab a Miller, get yer ol' Glory, get with the groove, and get into the game!!!...

Let's see how long those durned terr'ists fuck with us once WE start blowing up in THEIR laundromats!!!


The Turning of the Worms

Open Letter to the People of the Good Ol' U.S. of A.

I've done it! I've figured out how to end the Iraq debacle... um, fiasco... sorry, war... within a couple of weeks and it won't involve dropping a bzillion tons of explosives or gassing / poisoning / nuking anyone.

For this to work though, all of you, be you a rabidly-religious, head-up-your-own-ass Red Stater or a bleeding-heart, tree-hugging, hand-over-the-economy-to-the-crack-addicts Blue Stater, are going to have to be grown up for 5 minutes and come clean about something, which is: most people don't give the sort of shit required to actually get anything concrete done until their own ass is on the line. Admit it, everything's a shame or a damned outrage until someone sticks a knife point in your gut and then it's time to break out the straight-razors and baseball bats.

Most of us have a skewed perception of what went on in the U.S. in the 1960's. We wistfully remember rioting in the streets, war protests, peace, love, dove, beads, bells, crash-pads and incense, Nixon getting his ass tossed out of office... and man, that just proved how great America really was, didn't it!? Freedom of Expression in it's purest form! Democracy in action! One for all and all for one!

In reality, the Youth of America were not protesting the Vietnam War as much as they were protesting the Draft. Again, everything is a despicable shame (tsk, tsk) until someone forces you out of bed and into army boots. Then, and ONLY then, will most people drop their PlayStation controllers and get out and organize and run the goddamn carpetbaggers out of town on a rail (personally, I'd string 'em up with piano wire, but I digress...)

As much as I admire clear-thinking, thoughtful, intellectual discourse, I have to say : six exclamation marks at the end of a left-leaning blog rant isn't going to stop the lunatic planet-rapers who are running the country, so let's get moving, people!!!!!!

It's been said that the Iraq War would be over in a week or two if BushCo reinstated the Draft. Damn straight; it's the only thing that would get the Silent Majority, that lovable 95% of us who are too dumb or too complacent or too scared or too self-absorbed, out of our La-Z-Boys and out onto the street where the only action with any consequence can take place. Nope, not even Bush is stupid enough to force a situation that would guarantee millions of pissed off teenagers showing up on his front lawn, so you know it would take Herculean stupidity to make it happen.

Or would it? I've enjoyed reading over the last few weeks about the escalation of calls by the Left for Republicans to start joining up to actually fight this war they so relish. Excellent point. However, why not go one step further? Somebody register "www.startthedraft.com" and get a grass-roots campaign happening to ENCOURAGE King George to start up the Draft! Really, how could they respond except by saying "Umm, sure, okay..."? Two or three weeks, and Gawd knows how many riots later, the boys would be on their way home.

You can talk all you want but until the People are physically threatened, and I mean ALL of them, indiscriminately and without prejudice, nothing of any substance is going to happen.

Cordially yours...

P.S. I maintain that it's not that the Republicans are too evil, it's that the Democrats aren't evil enough.

- g-spot -

Any publiciy is good publicity, I guess

It's rather interesting how Tony Blair was describing the attack in London as "Islamic" before they'd scraped the body parts off the walls of King's Cross Underground. How do you tell the difference between an Islamic Jihad explosion and an Irish Catholic one? Before you've got the "perps"? Or a few of their toes to test for Islamic Terrorist DNA? Must've been all those security cameras they've got all over England; you can spot those fanatical devils right away with one of those things, I'll bet. Good idea, those. Maybe if they installed more of them they'd be able to STOP the next attack that will have "the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda attack." I guess that'll be in Tony's next "Churchillian" speech.

At the very least, Phony Tony is piggybacking Gulf War II on dead people's backs. No class, but it gives him the spotlight for a moment. Don't expect much talk about any dossiers on Iraq for a while in the media; what's the start of a couple of wars a few years ago next to something like this? This is news! Come on, folks!...

I bet more than 37 people die each day from the pollution in London, but no-one talks about that very much. I once went for a four hour walk there, and when I blew my nose, black streaks came out. My hair felt like tar. My cousins were surprised that I was surprised. That's truly terrorising, and a sign we're oh so surely fucked in so many ways here on this big, blue and green marble in space. Apart from that, it's not to say that 37 (or more) deaths aren't horrific or in any way deserved, but after Fallujah they can hardly come as a shock, no matter who is responsible. And the real shock is that the deaths of a few dozen people in a series of commuter bombings can be used by any British Prime Minister to conjure images of the Blitz, and to circularly use this formula as an ingredient for war in the current 'depleted' uranium-gassed, artillery-soaked messes happening 'over there' in the hills and sands. Where it doesn't really matter. Right, citizen?

The Turning of the Worms

Brainpeelings on the carpet: an Overture

A shit-rain of mutant gnats raged hungrily around the seventeen horns of The Most Evil One as he daintily plucked a few of the lesser damned souls from the cauldron of lava, and shook them vigourously in his talons, a slew of screaming, glowing, rainbow fibres who eerily resembled spaghetti in their post-mortem torments. Newly minted pumice flew from them across the cavern in an orange-hot spray that quickly faded into the darkness.

"Fuck!", rasped The Lord of Rats, "Not another fucking song?!?!"

"Just a short session this time...a jazz ballad or two", said The Most Evil One, using three of his claws to comb out the tangles in the mass of writhing, flashing, multicoloured souls. Their screeching had faded to an unpleasant mewling that tickled the fancy of His Most Evilness; the corners of his lips bent into a craggy asymmetry of a smile which signaled the end of a peaceful midnight for "Rats". Sending pneumonia across China with his hairy, lithe hordes would have to wait until the end of the bloody music; just a few years delay, a brief "tick" in the clock of eternity, but an irksome bother nonetheless. "What about my schedule?!?", said Rats. "This shit's going to totally mess my co-ordination with the Iraq thing, besides, those stupid ballads take my headaches away each time. I can't get off-balance again for decades."

"Too bad.", said The Most Evil One, as he straightened the last of the souls into a hanging mass of florescent pasta that writhed slowly like earthworms dying in a refrigerator. Out of the torment of their cauldron of lava, the bundle of souls was starting to loose its spectral dance of shimmering hues, and was settling down into being a softly glowing, softly squealing mophead of agonies that hung limply from one set of talons and claws. "I need the jazz to help me concentrate more on the Ebola stuff we're doing with The Baron of Plagues in Africa. It helps me think. Like Hitler with Mozart. Or Wagner. Whoever. You can handle a few little tunes until "Plagues" gets here." He shook the assembly of the damned out a few times to sort out any last knots: the mophead squealed and flashed momentarily, and then got quieter and darker after a collective gasp. "I think someone else you know might be arriving as well...", said the Darkest One.

"Who?"

"I'm not telling you."

"No, really. Who?"

"I'm not telling you."

"Why not?"

"How do you keep an idiot in suspense?"

"That's not funny!"

"I'm the Lord of Darkness. It's funny. I say it is."

The Lord of Rats shuffled across the cavern, nestled himself as uncomfortably as he could into an unpleasant crevasse, crossed his arms across his chest, and looked across the wide expanses of grotto at a distant volcano that was spewing streamers of fresh, dead souls into the smog on a mushrooming cloud of sulphur and magnesium. Maybe, he thought, it wouldn't be so bad if he just hypnotised himself by gazing into the rising clouds of burning, damned beings....fucking, stupid jazz...always.....

"Stop that shit!!!", howled His Eminence of Evil, "I can always tell when you're tuning out. Did I space out when you swept through Asia Minor and Europe in the Renaissance? I watched you when you sent that wave of rabid Norway rats through Honduras after that flood, didn't I?"

"That was 1883, Year of Their Lord, Evilest One!", rasped Rats, his harsh voice echoing off the vaulted ceilings above, "You haven't paid any attention to anything I've done since last tea-time. And there is the Iraq thing...."

"Fuck the Iraq thing! It can wait! And China!", thundered The Most Evil One, loosening a shower of cinderised souls from the granite rafters with his roar. They floated downwards around him like blackened, twitching cobwebs, momentarily scattering the gnats, who needed a moment or two to reassemble themselves into their mobius strip flight paths around his horns; they buzzed angrily. "The longer you bitch, the longer it'll take me to finish", he said, snapping three slender stalagmites from the floor with his free claw, and deftly using the other one to loop a few of the souls held in its grip around the stalactites' ends. "I can never get the fucking triangle shape right; it takes me forever to tune these things. In any case, the Americans have things rolling along nicely with that uranium ammo I got the Canadians to sell them and the British. Your rodents are only the icing on the cake". He thought for a minute. "Sorry. I didn't really mean that. I really like your rats. You know that. Just a couple of songs?", he said, softening in a rare moment that almost left the bounds of deep irony.

"Whatever."

Absolute Evilness had managed to balance the three stalagmites in a rough triangle between the talons of his feet, and in his fangs. "Puh yuh fiher heyah." he hissed through the curved scimitars that lined the entrance to his maw. "What?!", barked The Lord of the Rats, "I can't hear a you-know-who-damned thing with those stalagmites in your mouth." The Most Evil One spat as he took them out for a moment with his free claw. "Put your fucking finger here! I need your help with the knots.". Rats groaned as he got up from his nasty crevasse and stepped across the little valley in the middle of the living room. This was getting worse. Much worse. He sat down on a low hill and pressed his left paw down on the souls wrapped like wire around the ends of two of the rocky spires and started to surreptitiously let some of his nineteen minds drift about while His Most Evilness became absorbed in tying the tortured dead into crude granny knots; surely His Evilness was too focussed on manipulating the flickering strings with one claw to notice a little inattentiveness for just a moment or two. The slender strands of the damned flickered briefly and squeaked as their knots were tightened before they faded back into their more normal, pale, grey glow. The Master of Evil started on the second corner of his 'device'.

"I think I feel Decay coming. I thought you said she was going to hang out in Africa a while longer.", said the Viceroy of Rodents, his different minds snapping back together into one as he sensed the Princess' approach. "Is that who you're keeping me in suspense with?"

Absolute Darkness took the stalactites from his mouth. "Affirmative, you idiot. We need her for the planning on the Syria-Iran job. Those dumbass mortals got too bogged down in Fallujah and the schedule's going to need to be sped up in a few years to make up for the lost time now, but the Iran start date's still set for after breakfast."

"Look who's talking about schedules now!"

"Shut the fuck up. Put your paw here." He started tying the last corner together. The souls whimpered and glittered in the darkness like tortured psychedelic vermicelli.

"I can definitely feel her coming; my skin's crawling nicely.", said Rats. "Can I give her some of my rats to take back to Kandahar? Rats and decay always go together so well."

"Superfluous. The uranium ammo thing again; it's doing its job nicely up there as well. Just like Kosovo and Iraq the first time. And all those experiments they did before. Besides, the stuff'd bake your rats, and we need as many of 'em as we can get for Basra; that's the best route for you to get them into Iran."

"I know that! They're my job! I don't mess with your shit. Where else do you think I'd put them?!? And what about China?"

"Isosceles!", The Lord of all Evil triumphed, holding up his triangular framework.

"I think you want a right triangle. You tried an isosceles last time and it didn't work."

"Didn't work!?! It worked alright, with a little fine detuning. Anyhow, it was an obtuse."

"No it wasn't. It was an isosceles. And it didn't work; it almost sounded in tune."

"Are you saying I wasn't discordant?", shot back the Master of Darkness. He grasped the remaining bundle of souls with the talons of both feet and stretched them apart, balancing the triangular frame of stalagmites on his six knees. The fibres shone brightly with the tension and started singing like a thousand toilets in an immense dysentery ward. He deftly plucked one of them from the skein and started tying it across his crude framework. This was rapidly followed by others. The gnats buzzed around his horns with irritation as he worked almost quietly.

"So what about China and Iraq?"

"Fuck 'em. Let 'em eat yellowcake. They can wait a bit longer. Nothing like a little song or two...", said The Master of All Evil.

"Decay is definitely coming. I can feel her... that rotting cabbage and vomit smell, also...I'd know it anywhere.", said The Lord of Rats, trying to steer the conversation away from "the music thing". It always ended in a fight.

"Stop thinking about sex all the time."

"I don't!"

"Yes you do!"

"No I don't!" The Lord of the Rats got up from the hill, stepped across the living room valley and slunk back to his crevasse to settle uncomfortably. He sighed. "That's better. I think I feel Plagues coming, too. Did you notice? The grotto's just gotten darker; his aura always does that to the atmosphere after a good bender. Where's he been?"

"Stop trying to change the subject. Africa."

"I know that. Africa's a continent, not a country. And no, I'm not trying to change the subject. Where in Africa?"

The Most Evil One had almost finished tying his souls in tight rows across the triangle, making something that looked like a piano frame; only a dozen or so sparkling strands were left stretched between his feet, squeaking forlornly. "This is when the bloody frame usually breaks and I have to start all over. He's been in Gabon. And I'm getting a cramp in the arch of my foot."

("That's because you should be using a you-know-who-damned right triangle. And I hope you're getting a bloody cramp in your foot!")

"I heard that!!!!", roared The Most Evil One of All.

"I didn't say anything."

"You thought it! I heard it! That was in your third midbrain! I heard it! No repressed aggressions around here! You know the rules! Don't forget, I'm the chief revolutionary around anywhere, and that means here! I can smell the rot of sedition and the vice of mutiny better than any of you! I invented them! I make chaos better than you, better than The Princess of Spite, The Baron of Plagues, better than Decay, better than Rot...better than any of you!!! I'm the worst! So don't you ever hide your anger from me!!! And don't forget that all of you've only sunk so low because I gave all of you the idea to storm The Gates in the first place; there's nowhere lower to go than here. And don't forget it: two minuses don't make a positive; you can't get back up there by plotting any little rebellions down here. You-know-who is still totally pissed at us, you know. But still, we're the only beings in existence who've gotten our own domain." said the Lord of all Horrors, stirring a small caldera of lava with an antenna to emphasise his point. A bunch of burning souls wrapped around it like cotton candy at a fairground snack booth; he shook himself loose from them and splattered magma all across the carpet of dead bugs.

"Ow! Shit! Watch that!, said The Lord of Rats, slapping hot cinders off his feet with one of his tails. "I wasn't planning 'any little rebellions'. Nobody is. We're all behind you."

"Like a bunch of red-hot fireplace pokers in the ass, I suppose."

"In your dreams. We're all still all evil, too, you know. Nothing but our own self-interests down here, O Darkest One", said The Lord of Rats, slightly cowed and groveling. "I promise I'll try to be angrier." His Most Greatest Darkness, appeased, stood up, walked across the cavern, and inspected his newly-strung musical toy in the glow of the lava pool in front of the bookcase; the Lord of Rats quickly crammed a few boulders from the floor into his ears as a jazz prophylactic.

"Now dat's da bomb!", said The Most Evil One, plucking a few of the tautly stretched souls into a howling chorus of not-A-minor. He hopped up and down, his claws and talons and broken hooves clattering wildly on the stones: his gnats were momentarily confused by the sudden movement and exploded into a buzzing frenzy around his many ears and antennae that didn't subside until some minutes after they had regained the sanctuary of their forest of horns; indeed, a few of them were to become permanently lost in the smoky darkness as they buzzed about desperately looking for their host, only to be swallowed up, unnoticed, in the incandescent clouds billowing from the surrounding volcanoes. "A dischord!", raged The Lord of Infinite Horrors, " And I didn't even have to untune the the strings! Now, a ballad!"

The Lord of Rats used his claws to push the boulders deeper into his ear cavities. "Can't you do one of those annoying, twiddly pieces that you do in a not-quite-pentatonic scale? I don't think I've got the focus for a ballad."

"I want to do a ballad."

"What?"

"I want to do a ballad."

"Why?"

"Because. Why should I give you any reasons?"

"I don't like ballads. They relax me."

"Why are you shouting?"

"What?"

"Why are you shouting?"

"Oh, sorry. I just don't want to hear a ballad right now. I've got a really nasty headache and I don't want to lose it. Ballads relax me; they really do. Please? I hate ballads."

This exchange was interrupted by a flock of messenger pterodactyls who swept in, leaving vortices in their wakes through the smog: "The Princess of Decay! The Baron of Plagues!", they cawed and croaked, "The Princess of Decay! The Baron of Plagues! The Princess of Decay! The Baron of Plagues!". A deep funky malodour approached like a tsunami full of rotted villages, and an overarching aura of darkness tunneled into the volcanoes' glow as the two arriving Evil Ones entered the vast cavern, sucking almost all of the faint, remaining, orange light from its depths with their presences.

"Welcome, your Unworthinesses!", shouted The Lord of Rats to his old companions, greedlily sucking the odours that wafted from under the Princess' ragged skirts into all fifteen of his nostrils. His scaly tails were going all stiff and long; his whiskers quivered like a dog shitting razor blades.

The Master of Darkness was ignoring all three of them: "Shit!", he said, plucking at his un-F-sharp string (above Middle-C) with a talon, watching it suddenly fluoresce from grey into agonised yellowhite with each "pop". "I think this one was actually a President when it was alive..."

"Which one, O Dark One?", groaned the Bringer of Plagues, always a poet, opening his chasm of a mouth and releasing into the smog a vomit of flies that unnerved the gnats still circling amongst the stench of The Most Evil One's seventeen black horns. They crowded together in their flight paths for safety.

"That actor. The bullshit artist. Remember? Nicaragua, Granada..all that groundwork stuff that got laid down for the big job we're on now? How was Gabon?"

"Guinea. It sucked: I was great!", he said, releasing another torrent of flies as he croaked.

"Guinea? I thought you were doing Gabon." A tentacle turned a bit blue and its tip twitched in annoyance, a bad sign.

"No. Guinea. Gabon was the last job. Remember?"

"Oh."

The Princess of Decay chimed in with a rasping cough to break the obvious tension, "Is that a troglodyte that you've got there?"

The Evil Master regarded his strings closely. "Which one?"

"I think it's that G-sharp above High-C; it's a different colour than the other ones."

"That's un-G-sharp to you. You're right: it was a Neanderthal once", he said, releasing a stroboscopic display of pink and green into the gloom by poking the unfortunate spiritual remains of the paleolithic sinner stretched out in his lyre with a broken fingernail. "How was Africa? Did you have fun too?"

"I was in Asia. Neanderthals are pretty rare down here, aren't they? What did that one do?"

"Asia? Not Africa?" The tentacle turned a deeper blue and slow waves started traveling along its length from base to tip. "Asia's a continent, not a country. Where in Asia?"

"Hey!", said Rats, "That's my line!"

"Indonesia", Decay hissed. "Why are you shouting tonight, Rats? O Dark Master," she hissed again, "It was Indonesia..that IMF thing a few years ago, with the Lord of All Covetousness. Remember? And I've still got mountains of flesh to work through on top of all that from that big tidal wave or whatever-they-call-it-wave just this last December; those maggots your brother sent aren't doing their job very well. Little bastards. They get lazy in the heat, and..."

The Master of Infinite Darkness turned away and absent-mindedly started fingering himself in one of his vaginas with his now totally blue and oscillating tentacle to keep it from smashing something he didn't really want to smash just yet : these whining sessions of hers could go on for centuries if she was given the chance. He started plunking the strings of his lyre dejectedly with his tongues; would he never get to play a few, simple, little, fucking jazz ballads in peace? The Baron of Plagues casually crushed an ogre or two under his single, pedestal-like club foot to distract himself from the scene and stared at the floor; Rats was still sniffing the air like a crazed coke addict who'd lost his stash in zero gravity.

The Princess of Decay went on for a while about carrion beetles and gangrene until the solemn gloom of the chasms swallowed all conversation and the foursome sat quietly on their heads in the smog. Only the roaring of the volcanoes and the shrieking of damned souls was to be heard, punctuated by the odd "plop" from a bubble of magma bursting in a pool.

"Fuuuuuccckkkk!!!!!! screamed The Most Evil One, leaping to his hooves and pincers, and smashing his lyre against a column of gneiss that soared upwards into the darkness. The tension from the tightly-stretched souls exploded the arms of their stalagmite frame into pieces across the reaches of the living room as they shrieked in luminescent unison from the sudden shock; as they snapped in all directions like an insane ball of rubber bands in a blender, the flash of light they gave off was so bright that it blinded everyone momentarily and blackened the cavern walls even more than usual for a few hundred miles around. "I can't fucking take it! I've totally lost my whim to do a ballad!!!", shrieked....

"Holy Fuck", said Cindy, snapping her eyes open and sitting bolt upright in her seat. An almost circular, middle-aged lady across the aisle looked over in a brief moment of pallid disgust and then settled back into her Reader's Digest as her brow creased deeply into its permanent furrow. "How was that one?", asked Jack.

"I think the E's started to kick in."

"Shhhhh!!!!!!!", warned Jack loudly, attracting another sharp glance from the fat cow.

"No, no, no!", whispered Cindy. "I think I can really feel it now. At first it was just the acid I could feel, but there's definitely something else now. Holy shit, that one was weird. Who was it? I'm starting to feel really trippy, Jack. I..."

"Never mind that.", he said, cutting her off. "What'd you see?"

She pulled the small manila envelope off her forehead and folded over the little piece of tape that had held it there. "Here", she said.

He took it from her. "O.K. What'd you see?"

"That was really fucking weird Jack. How long was I gone?"

"Just a minute or two"

"O.K. It is the E starting to kick in, then. That felt like ages. It was all sorts of devil-shit...really hard to describe. It felt like half an hour. Wow. He was building a guitar thing out of stalagmites...stalactites...whatever...those pointy things in caves. Anyway, he was making some kind of weird musical instrument and stringing it with souls, a "liar" I think he called it. That sounds right, doesn't it? Really fucking weird. Anyhow..."

"Who was?", said Jack.

By this point, a small circle of people around them on the aeroplane besides the fat woman had noticed that there was more weirdness attached to the young couple than just their peculiar little game of pasting envelopes to each other's heads with sticky tape and then closing their eyes and trancing out for a few minutes, only to snap back to life and beg of the other, "O.K. That was freaky. Which one was that? Who was it?" while the other giggled and said, "Tell me what you saw." It was getting really weird, very repetitive, and now, not only tiresome, but more than a little worrying. The stewardesses were starting to look scared, too. This young couple was definitely...glowing...with 'something'. Was it just passion? Very drunk and stupid? And just weird, in any case? Or...maybe...zealotry? Terroris...?....

"I'm feeling really hot. Fuck. Who was it, Jack? Show me who's in the envelope."

"Not yet. What did you see? Tell me what you think. Who do you think it was?"

"Not Mother Theresa, that's for sure. I almost got Gandhi right."

"That was before the Sid kicked in over Montreal. What about now? You didn't get a face? We've gotta get a comparison between being straight and not."

"On an aeroplane? This was a great idea...not! 'So we won't get bored', you say ! I can't believe we're fucking doing this! We could get in so much shit....I'm definitely not fucking bored!", she giggled. "I'm starting to feel really trippy, Jack...I'm gonna lose it!"

"Shhh! Chill."

"I told you. Heeheehee! There was all this devil-shit and flames and caves, and all these spirits of the dead that looked like that glow-in-the-dark rave spaghetti, and..."

"What!?!"

"I told you. I couldn't get a face. I'm really tripping now, Jack...fuck, this stuff comes on strong an' fast!"

"Yeah...I think I'm starting to feel it kick in now, too. Whooosh!"

"O.K. No more envelopes. Who was it?"

"Just one more? Then I'll show you."

"No. I've had it. I think people are starting to look at us."

"You're just tripping."

"No I'm not. I need to chill for a moment. Who was it, Jack?"

He passed her back the little manila rectangle and she fumbled with it in slow, erratic motion for a few minutes trying to find the flap. The whole damn thing was starting to cover itself in scintillating, brown triangles that danced and shimmered across the surface. The trippy envelope triangles ("hahaha!!") felt like little, fuzzy, moving, geometric, raised velvet and felt patterns. They all looked like intersecting, little envelope flaps. Like wallpaper in Timothy Leary's bathroom. Where the fuck did that idea come from, she thought.

"...fuck I'm tripping....where's the goddamn' flap...."

Cindy finally found it and got it open just as the fat bitch started melting and ballooning in the extreme corner of her peripheral vision. She just managed to stifle a blast of cackling as Fatso started to ooze onto the floor in a black puddle of dress and fat, with glowing broaches and a necklace floating and bobbing on the surface, but about half of the explosion of laughter escaped from her nose and through her hand in a very un-First Class, unladylike way, accompanied by a thin stream of snot that shot onto the back of the seat in front of her. The stewardesses were looking terrified now. She reached into the envelope.

"Oh shit. I'm not surprised now. That's who it was. Figgers.", wiping the back of her hand on her shirt. Fatso was turning green with rage.

"Could you guess?"

"I totally forgot to guess. There was all this devil-shit. I told you. But now it all makes total sense..."

"Whatareyoutalkingabout?!?!", said the fat puddle of roiling ooze, who had somehow recoagulated herself from the floor into a person and was glaring from her seat at the two of them. "What are the two of you...you!...you...going on about!!" Her face and body bubbled and shimmered like a pot of weird gruel in the fields of their increasingly multi-molecular vision. "Huh?", they chorused in unison, each doing so to buy back a few moments of reaction time, lost to the gale of drugs.

"Whatarethetwoofyoudoing?!?!" You're making everyone very nervous with...with..whateveritis you're doing! Why don't you just stop!?"

"Huh?"

"You heard me. I suppose you think that you're very clever, acting like that way on an aeroplane in this day and age. Whodoyouthinkyouare?!?!!!"

Sensibly, they chose the course of least resistance and assuaged her matronly rage and fear by looking away and slunking down as low as they could in their seats. The circle of terrorised passengers relaxed somewhat, sensing that perhaps their odd flight companions weren't about to explode in an orange, ammonia-fueled blast of heat and light. Fatso Bitch Loudmouth put on a pair of headphones and cranked up the volume, feeling victorious; she got out her third Readers' Digest of the flight, and started blobbing and melting and glowing in the corner of Cindy's vision again. The cadre of well-trained stewardesses snapped back into their routine stiffness and quickly shuffled a free round of drinks about to mellow everyone out.

"Drinks?....Miss?"

"Could we just have a couple of bottles of water please?"

The stewardess handed them over, trying to look as fierce as she could before scurrying away. Her aura looked olive-green with gold flecks to Cindy. Jack said he thought he saw orange with yellow.

"Thanks", said Jack as he cracked the seal on his bottle. "I couldn't have managed to talk to her like that. I'm getting too fucked up to speak."

"See? I told you. It comes on really fast with the acid. It's weird. I can 'feel' them apart, but they blend. This is reaaaalllly mellow E. How're you doing?", she purred.

"I'm totally fucked. This is great. Do you wanna do another envelope?", he growled.

"No! Absolutely not."

"O.K. Then give me one of yours. My turn."

"No way!"

"How come? Let's do another round. Just one each."

"No! Firstly, I'm grooving just fine, now, Second, I doan' wanna! Thirdly, in case you forgot, we just freaked the fuck out of everybody in this stupid thing and got chewed out by that fat cow over there. Also, I need you out here with me in this 'plane and not in your head, with one of my envelopes pasted to your head. And, I need a break from all this clairvoyant shit right now coz these stewardesses are freaking me right the fuck out with their uniforms; we can get back into all this psychic shit when we get to the hotel, but not now. Fourth...um...fourth...ah...."

"You're tripping out. Chill."

"O.K. You're right....Stop telling me to chill."

"I haven't been."

"Yes you did."

"No I didn't. When?"

"Just now. And before."

"When?"

"Earlier."

"No I didn't."

"Yes you did...when...uh...ah...um...oh, sorry...maybe you didn't. I'm just tripping out.".

So she stared out the window into the high-altitude blackness through the twin reflections of her glittering, bottomless pupils, and after a few minutes started to get a bad case of perma-grin that soon felt like thin, icy, broken glass spiking upwards inside her cheeks. The pupils and the sky and her reflection, and she, became One. She had to do something soon or she'd lose it and piss herself laughing in the once-again-to-be-scared-shitless First Class compartment. Probably a whole fucking-scared-shitless planeful of passengers this time round, she thought, as she felt a dangerous explosion of hallucinogenic giggles starting to balloon within her like a corona of insane baboons. That was a really, fucking funny visualisation, she thought, and wished immediately that she weren't having it. Probably a very, very bad scene at the airport if she didn't deal with the now-supernova of giggle-primates ("No!") with little elevator-man uniforms ("Haha! NO! No no no no no!!!....") bursting from within her belly ("Sorry, officer, you see, I've got these minkeys, no...I mean...these monkeys, no...I mean baboons, you see, and....hahaha...NO! Baaaad visualisation! NO! NO!! NO!!!"). This had to stop. Now! Everyone on the plane would freak if she let the baboons out. ("Hahaha!") She held back her giggles like a fart at a memorial service, took a deep breath, and turned to face Jack. "I need a sober conversation right now or I'm gonna completely lose it. We'll get busted for sure."

"Talking might make me lose it. I'm totally fucked right now. Just chill out into a body stone..."

"Talk to me Jack. I'm fucking serious."

"About what?"

"About anything! Something normal."

"O.K. How'd we start this?"

"What? This trip, or this trip? Which one? Or all of the 'trips' we're on?"

"All of them. It was that blog that started it. Remember? Brainskin?"

"Brainpeel. The one with all that weird shit."

"Yeah. Brainpeel. Hey!"

A bell dinged and the seatbelt sign came on. "Ladies and gentlemen...", the landing announcement began. Cindy and Jack somehow managed to get themselves fastened normally into their seats and settled in for the descent towards The Great City.

"Yeah. Brainpeel. That's a freaky image...like an apple peel. Remember that cannibal in that movie, feeding brains to that cute little boy on the aeroplane at the end?"

"Yuch! Don't remind me right now!", retched Jack.

The fat woman in the dress flashed a look of disgust and instinctively glanced at her air-sick bag for a moment before staring resolutely out the window and turning her headphones up as much as she could stand. Really!

The young heroine and hero felt their minds and bodies blend across the medium of their combined energy fields, as the big jet slid through clouds and air with a smooth, singing.......something......sound....

Jack roused as the lights of The Great City rose to greet them like an enormous, upside-down, pyramidal UFO. He couldn't shake the image. It twinkled and glowed. "O.K....so we're clean?"

"Yeah. Oh, fuck...shouldn't we dump the envelopes? Kinda hard to explain to 'authoritites' in our condition, if we get asked any questions about our condition, especially after that wee scene we had with Readers' Digest Fatso Lady over there, don't you think? Or am I just tripping on paranoia?"

"Don't you want to keep your picture of 'Buddy'?"

"Blech!", she said. "Devil-shit. Let's chuck 'em all in the first trash can we get to. No questions is good questions; I'm too fucked to deal with Officer Smiley. We can make up some more envelopes later. If we just leave 'em here here in our seats, they might seem a little weird to whoever goes poking through 'em ."

"Good thinking.", he replied. "You're sure we ate everything?"

"And you're not?!", she grinned. "We ate everything; I don't know if I'll be able to walk. And I have to pee."

The jet made its landing with absolutely no sensation of motion, thundered as it braked on the tarmac, and slowly pulled into the terminal area. An announcement forbade anyone to collect articles of luggage from the overhead bins until the plane had come to a complete stop, a command which was soundly ignored by everyone seated near "the weirdos", and not enforced by the uniformed cadre at all.

"See you again...see you again...." the mock-fierce stewardess was saying to everyone leaving the First Class cabin. Jack and Cindy floated down the aisles with their bundles. Jack was watching great, slow, peristaltic waves of colour and motion travel up and down the big cylinder. Gotta keep a lid on, he thought.

"Have a nice STAY....Misssss..." , Madame Fierceness Stewardess said to Cindy, who smiled back into her cold, blue eyes and said, "Umm....", and then waltz-floated away. Jack looked glazed and just followed quietly.

In the terminal building, Cindy 'nonchalantly' tossed their handful of small, psychic-experiment, manila envelopes at a bin and they walked on, failing to notice that one had fallen to the carpet, which became a fuzzy, brown, moving, geometric, raised felt-patterned ocean of giggly waves that swept them towards a new landscape, a scorching dirtwhite prairie of glowing linoleum, across which they gracefully hovered to the checkpoint, before gliding towards the taxi pick-up.

"Brainpeel? That was the blog?", Jack managed, testing his ability to speak normally.

"Yeah. Brainpeel. I think it's the site that put all that 'weird-devil-shit' in my head. Hey, are you hungry?" The taxi whooshed through ribbons of sodium-lit roads; The Great City approached like a twinkling, upside-down UFO pyramid in the night.

"We'll get something. Yeah, Brainpeel. I'm brainpeeled. But don't you think you were picking up on 'Buddy' through the envelope? You almost got Gandhi right over Montreal, and that was before the A's kicked in...."

"Blech! No 'Buddy', no envelopes, no anything right now. I've got a better idea: let's peel something else at the hotel."

"I'm in", said Jack.

Back at the airport, a late-night janitor finds a small, brown, manilla envelope with a piece of tape hanging off it. It is lying on a fuzzy, brown, geometric, raised-felt-patterned ocean of brown carpet, next to a trash bin. He picks it up and looks inside. He looks quizzically at the picture that he finds inside, is amused for a second, and then a wave of disgust crosses his face. He puts it back and tosses the envelope where it should go, in the trash can. "The Boy President.", he thinks. The Boy President, indeed, and his gang of wretches...where they belong...

And he continues his voyage across the fuzzy, brown, geometric, raised-felt, patterned ocean.

And the taxi, with Cindy and Jack, grinning and giggling in the back, is swallowed into the aurora of The Great City, burrowing through the lights of the pyramid of glass and towers, towards their hotel.

Peel your Brains and Peel your Selves in Love and Peace! Welcome! Leave the crust of media pollution on the fuzzy brown carpet and enter! Enjoy!

You are invited.

The Turning of the Worms

For as much as it pleases Almighty Gawd...

This is the acorn, mighty oak to follow.

- g-spot -