======================================== *** THE INNER SWINE *** Volume 6, Issue 2, June 2000 www.innerswine.com ======================================== "In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular." - Kathleen Norris CONCEPT BY: Jeff Somers, Robert Gala, Ken West, Jeof Vita COVER ART BY: Jeof Vita EDITOR: Jeffrey Somers PUBLISHER In Absentia: Cassie Moore WEBMASTERS: Jeof Vita, Ken West, my own bad self ADVICE & FREE DRINKS: Send Resume c/o The Inner Swine - we need toadies, dammit CORRECTEUR D’EPREUVES EXTRAORDINAIRE: Karen Accavallo STAFF DISSIDENT: Rob Gala OVERALL OFFICIAL COOL CHICK: Lauren Strutzel OFFICIAL GENIUS NAME FOR A PUNK BAND: Me First and the Gimme Gimmes FRIENDS OF THE SWINE: The Duchess, who never ceases to inspire me with her cheer, her beauty, and her sense of humor, despite my (more than) obvious drawbacks; Misty S. Quinn, Esq, whose fine friendship means I never ever have to be the only one who wants one more beer, which is such a comfort in this sad world; Jeof Vita himself, who is an extremely busy man these days and yet still gives us the benefit of his immense talent; Lauren "LL Cool J" Strutzel, for still considering me a decent choice for a wedding date, and who I miss terribly; Rob Gala, who grows so weary of my bullshit and yet gamely agreed to be our interview subject; Cassie Moore, who is once again my boss and therefore deserving of more than the usual sucking up; Sean Somers, my brother, who bequeathed his battered old laptop computer to me against his better judgement, which has enabled me to download pornography no matter where I am (joy!); Kris Kane, our web host, because the man knows his business, and treats us fairly. Which of course makes us distrustful and paranoid; Ken West for continued technical support and tolerance of my social awkwardness; RA, whose friendship is like a fine wine, giving my life a touch of class it would otherwise be sorely lacking; Elizabeth Augoustinatos, who will once again be going away, which makes me sad. ======================================== TABLE OF CONTENTS ======================================== EDITORIAL: "PIS#19: I Have Enjoyed Selling Out and Can’t Wait to Do So Again COMMENTARY: "The Book Deal: I Sold a Book and I’m Still Broke" FICTION: "From My Body to Your Plate (A Gus Pustule Story)" INVOICE: "I Wanna Bill You For Wasted Time" INTERVIEW: "10 Questions with Rob Gala" FICTION: "The Witch King of Angmar" VIRTUALLY ARTLESS COMIC: "Mr Mute! #5" COMMENTARY: "Doth Protest Too Much: Getting Hit by Cops Proves, and Changes, Nothing" COMMENTARY: "My All-Consuming Black Hole of Debt" COMMENTARY: "Bungalow 208 on the Lake of Fire" FICTION: "And Everyone and I Stopped Breathing" ---------------------------------------- The Inner Swine Volume 6 Issue 2. Magazine published March, June, September, and December by Oinking Sow, Inc. © 2000 by Jeff Somers. (There is no company, really) Individual subscription rates: $5.00 (cheap!) per year in U.S.; $6.00 (cheap!) per year foreign including Canada. Single Copy $2.00 (cheap!) plus $1.00 (cheap!) for postage and handling if ordered by mail, but stop teasing me, you’re never going to order a subscription, you heartless bastards. Free trades are absolutely entertained, send me something, and I will mail you treats. Checks payable to Jeff Somers, Editor. Address submissions and correspondence to Jeff Somers, The Inner Swine, PO Box 3024, hoboken, NJ 07030; mreditor@innerswine.com. But if you send me something, make it good or I will be angered. All submissions or requests for Guidelines (there are no guidelines, though) must be accompanied by S.A.S.E. Misty Quinn (left) finds TIS subscribers very attractive; she told me so at the TIS holiday party last year, right after the Nude Olympics and just before the cops showed up. ======================================== WHAT THE FUCK'S BEEN GOIN' ON? ======================================== FUNNY, what a difference filthy lucre makes. Back in 1995 my mailing list was a few grumpy friends (I’m using the term friends as loosely as I am legally allowed, here), my long-suffering family, and some wacky co-workers. My income from it, therefore, was subsequently measurable only in the form of buttons, pocket lint, and the occasional pledge to buy me a cocktail. With nary a plug nickel in sight, reactions to my drunken (and rather belligerent) announcements that "I publish a goddamn zine; what the hell do you do?" were met with varying degrees of scathing sarcasm and numb disinterest. Now it’s 2000 and suddenly I have zine income to report on my taxes. Not a lot, mind you. Not even enough to actually pay for the creation, production, and distribution of this albatross-round-my-neck. But no one knows that, and when they hear that I made money off of it, what was once just my crazy hippie thing suddenly becomes a defensible use of my time. People ask questions. Seem interested. Ask for copies (free copies, of course). Fuckers. I sit there, I smile, chat them up, and focus all my Jedi Knight powers on making them burst into flames. I can’t help it, it irritates me that nothing matters to these bastards except how much revenue something generates. These are the same people who believe that America Online is the ‘best’ ISP in the country simply because it has the most customers. They are morons, of course, but like every other ethically-compromised full-of-himself artiste, I want the morons to like me. And buy my zine. A lot. SINCE the March 2000 issue, piggies, I haven’t been drunk nearly enough, although I did have an out-of-body experience on St. Patrick’s Day which made up for some of the drought. I got my typeset proofs for my novel, Lifers, which the dummies over at Creative Arts Books are, miraculously, still publishing despite my plummeting stock, and I’ve been busy desperately trying to fix all the bad writing and continuity errors in the story. God, I must have been drunk when I wrote that thing. Wait a sec...you didn’t read that! It’s good! Really! Please buy my book! Ahem. On April third, of course, baseball season started once again (I’m not counting the cash-driven Mets/Cubs opener in Japan) and that soft click everyone heard was the universe snapping back into order. We of course are in a rotisserie baseball league, and have been firmly in last place since the season began. But we’re used to it. Like mold, we spread: Both Desert Moon Periodicals and Tower Records increased their standing orders with TIS, so I guess we’re selling issues. Thanks, America! And we sent about 50 issues each to WeFest and the Santa Barbara Zine Fest 3, along with some stickers. Some of those issues were...well, what we call ‘classic’ issues. Which is to say, issues we didn’t manage to fob off on anyone years ago, and which have been collecting dust for years in my living room. What the fuck. We gave them away, after all. Well, that’s it for news, except to warn you about the newest Gus Pustule story which appears on pages 16-26. Our loyal readers know that Gus is a pseudonym we use when several people write a story together, by adding to it and passing it on. They generally get a little weird. This one has as its subject matter the consumption of human feces, so be warned. If that doesn’t sound entertaining to you (we can’t imagine a world where that subject wasn’t entertaining!), don’t read it. Otherwise, what can we say, we’re a little slow. If you want to read exciting things here, do something exciting to us, like a bomb threat, or a dead rat in the mail. Until then, enjoy the new issue, already in progress... ======================================== 1999: The Year of ME Heres what they're saying about ME: ======================================== David R. Wyder of Blind Cow Publications (87 Richard Street # 7, Passaic, NJ 07055; members.aol.com/dczines/index2.htm; DailyCow@aol.com) sent me some issues of one of his other zines called Buttrash and had this to say: "Thanks for your last two issues of TIS. Your zine has become one of my favorites but don’t worry I won’t let anybody know. Each issue is a fun and enlightening read from cover to cover. I particularly enjoyed your piece in the Dec. issue (A Day at Work with Jeff Somers)...I don’t understand people who have "careers" and seem to enjoy WORK! It’s all a fuckin’ death trap and con in my opinion. That December issue was strong in many ways and I found myself shaking my head so many times in agreement that I got a stiff neck. Attention readers of THE INNER SWINE: This zine causes physical damage! (After reading the March issue my anal cavity was itching like crazy-you tell me what’s going on here with this shit that you write? It affects me physically as well as mentally...As always TIS fills me with excitement (and dread) upon arrival in the mailbox. Please count me in come June!" While David begs off then by saying "Oh well, enough brown-nosing" (enough brown-nosing? My friends, we haven’t even begun!) his words warmed our hearts. Buttrash is a tasty melange of weird clip art and slogans, along with some posters that made me laugh (I especially giggled at "All the world’s a stage, and most of us are desperately unrehearsed"). I’m generally not a big fan of cut and paste publications, but this one was restrained and plus it had lots of pornographic photos sprinkled throughout. Ask David for an issue and throw some lucre his way. DB Pedlar of Skunk’s Life (25727 Cherry Hill Road, Cambridge Springs, PA 16403; dbpedlar@toolcity.net) fame checked in: "Wow, the Swine stop by to pay the skunks a visit causing laughter and mischief. The skunks and I never complain about those two combinations. Thanks. With all the Swine readers admitting to spending time with your zine while on the toilet, have you ever considered placing the Swine in every proctologist’s office across the country? Maybe lobbying them to name a disease in your honor, something for those who spend way too much time on the toilet. creating a drooping or malformed butt and having it named the Swine Round Ring Syndrome. Maybe even a marketing deal with Fleet Kit to package a copy of the Swine with every kit." Hmmmn....Swine Round Ring Syndrome - Catch It! DB also sent me another publication the skunky one is involved with: Contessa’s Tome ($2, same address as SL above). DB is generally one of the smarter people who post on alt.zines, so I was more than willing to take a gander at a "historical zine" which states as its "focus and main goal" to be "educational...and to have fun while learning". Since I’m a fan of certain historical fiction (I love GM Fraser’s Flashman series), I figured I might like it. It certainly lives up to its mission, a zine which deals with historical facts in a fun and entertaining ways, While we agree with DB that it isn’t for everybody, it’s refreshing to find a zine that isn’t obsessed with punk rock, bad attitude, and the pathetic naval-gazing of its aging, boyish editor...uh, I’ve said too much. Let’s just say that Contessa’s Tome is fun, and if you like history it’s worth a look. Some guy named Mike emailed me: "Dear Sinners, I recently came across your little web page, and was rather ‘intrigued’ by the subject matter...I am (as always) to be a proud resident of the wonderful state of New Jersey - although I am away at college in D.C. I have been an avid reader of Fade 2 Black (www.fadetoblack.com), but I am sad to admit that your page was somewhat more enjoyable - more reactionary, perhaps? I read the Manifesto (www.innerswine.com/manb.html) - and I hoping that you are honest about it, because although it is rather humorous, I hope that you are not simply attempting to be bitter for the purpose of entertainment alone..." He actually went on for some time after this point but failed to mention me or my zine again, so this is all I quote. All I can say about this email is that I am bitterly disappointed that he didn’t once offer me any money or free liquor, and I’d have to call the whole experiment a failure. Vincent Voeltz of Breakfast ($2.50 to 3621 153rd Lane NW, Andover, MN 55304-3020; breakfast@winternet.com) sent me a really nice email: "I realize that by writing this I may end up in your stupid rag, but I’d just like to say that the "virtual prison" story ("Turn to God or Turn Away", TIS 6(1), p. 45-57 -Ed) was quite good. I actually *cared* about what was going to happen next, and stayed up past my bedtime to finish the tale. More than I can say about Ally McBeal, for instance.... :)" We appreciate anyone who works a reference to Ally McBeal into TIS. Thanks for the nice compliment, Vince! Rumors of a new issue of Breakfast continue to bubble up, like Elvis sightings. Some guy named Aaron on AOL sent me an email entitled ‘can i kiss your ass.......p-p-please?????’ which was sufficiently asskissing to get printed here: "...i found a copy of your zine about 3 years ago ago in the stall of my favorite public toilet. having a few minutes to kill i picked up the thing and started leafing through it. within minutes i was laughing. you’re one funny s.o.b. a sorry s.o.b., but funnier than shit. it was 2 years later that i found THE INNER SWINE in a tower records sittin on the shelf. since then i’ve picked up the last 4 issues. you truly are an amazing writer at times, the fiction is great even if the rest of the zine lags at times (which is’nt often). i want to see how the book turns out and hope you don’t blow off us bottomfeeders who look forward to your cynical rants in the zine every 3 months. keep being the bastard you truly are and i’ll keep eatin it up. thanks for the laughs. thanks for being more pathetic than me. cheers." You’re quite welcome, although I must say modestly that my patheticness comes naturally. Although I wonder about anyone who has a ‘favorite’ public toilet, I am quite touched by the compliment. As for blowing off the bottomfeeders... personally, I can’t wait to sell out and hire professionals to keep you people away from me. Vic Flange of Fleshmouth (http://www.fleshmouth.co.uk/) had this to say about our web site: "Inner Swine is a site about a zine about something or another, and unfortunately tries to be a catalogue for various publications, plus a sampler, plus a web site. There is much that suggests this should be good - audio clips about bad writing and slogans such as "everyone is an asshole, especially us", but it tries too fucking hard to stay on the right side of mass appeal. So what does that mean? It means it's wank. Come on, stick your fucking necks out. You have nothing to lose but your fucking heads." We’ve never been referred to as "wank" before, and kind of like it, to be honest. Fleshmouth is an interesting web site, filled with anger. My favorite part was the "feedback" section, wherein Vic publishes the angry letters of those not happy with his web site and/or reviews. While once again searching the Internet for my name or the name of my zine, I discovered this mention on www.stylequeen.com: "Brash commentary on the state of the union from Jeff Somers, who I've had a mad crush on for four years, even though I haven't seen him in three. (Does this qualify as cyberstalking?)" The main reason this is cool is that I used to work with the StyleQueen herself, but hadn’t heard from her in years. The "mad crush" thing naturally didn’t bother me, since I assume that everyone has a mad crush on me. And I’m usually right. Vincent Romano of Offline ($1/Free to low-income, 35 Barker Avenue, #4G, White Plains, NY 10601) sent me a copy of his publication with this rather vague missive: "I read about The Inner Swine in A Reader’s Guide #12 and am definitely interested in giving it a read. Enclosed is $2 for your latest issue, and a copy of my zine...Hope you enjoy it. If you do reviews I’d appreciate one. Looking forward to receiving your zine, Peace." I don’t do reviews, of course, but I do mention trades and other correspondence, mainly to prove that I exist through the validation of third-parties. Offline is an earnest publication that almost completely failed to engage me, but that’s probably my fault, as I am not very bright. If discussions concerning the evils of militarism, the connection between pornography and misogyny, and the ‘Graden of Vegan’ sound interesting to you, by all means send Vincent a buck. AIko from Cobweb Junction (PO Box 60774, Sacramento, CA 95860-0774; www.cobwebjunction.gq.nu) sent me issue #4 of her fine publication along with a note written on the first piece of stationary I’ve ever received from the usually punker-than-thou ziners: "Doesn’t this stationary make you want to puke? Some random person sent it to me, so I thought I’d get rid of it on you. No need to thank me. Anyway, here’s CJ #4 and $5 for a subscription to TIS...hope you like CJ #4. Let me know!" Awww...the stationary in question is pink and blue and has a little baby angel on it, and did indeed make me puke. Anyone who sends me money is loved deeply. I love Aiko. Who knew? Kelly from Phony Lid Publications (http://www.FyUoCuK.com) emailed us an uplifting little note: "Just a note to let you know that I was in San Francisco this past weekend and of course went around to all the bookstores to distribute and thought I’d try out this stuffy bookstore on Market called Stacey’s. A real tourist oriented bookstore, though there in the magazine section was about four zines (or what I would consider to be zines) MRR, Flipside, Holy Titclamps and lo and behold, The Inner Swine, in all its glory with it’s new UPC code." We went on to discuss the sordid business of getting your zine distroed in this sad world, but I’ll spare you all the nuts and bolts of our discourse. It’s nice to get stuff like that in your mailbox now and again. Because if not for such emails all this might as well be another one of my hallucinations. Phony Lid itself is ambitious in its goals, and extremely passionate, and I encourage all my readers to check out their web site and see what’s up, and maybe order a chapbook or two. Well worth your time. Someone actually emailed our "Subscriptions" POP3, which sent a delightful chill down our spines. Ryan Reno first requested "free shit" and then sent this nice email: "Hey man. Got TIS today and started reading. I fell in love man, finally someone just as self-centered "my way or go fuck yourself" attitude that I enjoy to pump out each and every day...When I get paid in a week or so I’ll shell out some money and send it to you for a subscription so I no longer need to mooch off my friends and yourself. Much Love" Now, we actually encourage mooching, just not off of, well, TIS. And anyone who promises me money is cool. So we thank Ryan for his kind words and will have Ken West checking the mail for monies on a daily basis. We just hope Ryan doesn’t disappoint Ken. Ken can be...unpredictable. WELL, that’s it for the mail bag this week, babes. Enjoy this issue, or don’t. I’m sleepy now. ======================================== *** EDITORIAL *** Pig In Shit #19: I Have Enjoyed Selling Out and Can’t Wait to Do So Again The Inner Swine sold to Microsoft, Inc. by Jeff Somers ======================================== FRIENDS, I am happy to report that after months of delicate negotiations, I have sold The Inner Swine and its parent company, Oinking Sow, Inc., to Microsoft in a deal worth 17.5 billion dollars in cash, Microsoft stock options, and fifths of Wild Turkey®. I know all of you reading this are sharing in my joy and excitement, even if none of you will ever see so much as a bent dime out of it. Over the past twenty years or so, a fundamental shift has occurred in our society, culminating in our current world wherein everything has been boiled down to mere commodity, even thoughts, ideas, and sentiments. In a world where the Hallmark corporation uses our most tender emotions to sell greeting cards, where even the most idealistic people form corporations and launch their IPO almost before the office furniture has arrived, where everyplace is potential advertising space - well, in such a world it isn’t long before even slow people like myself come to the conclusion that everything we have, from our thoughts and feelings to our bodies and abilities, are just commodities. So when Microsoft asked me if I’d be willing to sell the intellectual property which represents my thoughts, beliefs, and personal style, my only question was: how much, bubba? The rest of it was just haggling. While I will continue in my capacity of Editor-in-Chief managing the day-to-day operation of the magazine, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates will be stepping in as our newly created "Content Tsar" and will guide TIS to even greater glory than its current readership of over 17 people across this grand country. As everyone knows, Mr. Gates took some second-hand C code, some old-money family connections, a half-completed Harvard education, and a complete lack of morals and built the world’s largest corporation out of those slim resources. Think what he can do with my proven talent! That’s right: just about anything he wants. He owns us now. Mr. Gates’ plan for the future of TIS is grand in scale and breathtaking in vision, and is outlined below. First though, I’d like to anticipate the hate mail and personal attacks that no doubt will follow the publication of this, the final issue of TIS overseen exclusively by Your Humble Editor. Let me answer some of the common questions which will be hurled my way and get some of the unpleasantness out of the way, want to? How can you sell such a personal project and watch it be turned into corporate drivel? It was remarkably easy once I saw the trucks pulling up to deliver the cash (I demanded it be paid in 5- and 10-dollar bills) and bottles of bourbon. But everything’s a commodity, don’t you see? In this instance I sold my attitude and limp-wristed writing. But every day for the past 10 years or so I’ve been selling my time, my very existence - so this really wasn’t so bad. Sure, for the rest of my life Microsoft is going to be pumping out propaganda in my name, ruining my legacy. but I’ll probably be too drunk to notice. How much control will Microsoft and Mr. Gates have over the editorial content of TIS? Complete, 100%, as-if-I-were-a-puppet-on-a-string control, baby. I sold it all. I can’t even use the TIS Office bathrooms without a pass from Mr. Gates. He’ll return margined notes on all my articles and will have final approval before we go to press. He’ll probably ghost-write a lot of it too. Actually, all I have to do is provide a clear, non-pornographic photo of myself for byline purposes and stay out of everyone’s way. They’ll just put my name on everything. Also, I have to get a Microsoft tatoo on my left arm. In other words, just for clarity’s sake, you just sold your soul. Yes. Doesn’t that horrify you? Nope. I am wrapped in a warm money blanket and filled with whiskey-love. Let’s face it; people sell their intimate stories and personal experiences to television on a daily basis. Slept with someone famous? They’ll pay you to describe the sex on national TV. Killed a few small children for fun? There’s some cash waiting for you over at Rupert Murdoch’s offices. Got a terrible secret and some minor celebrity? Oprah or Rickie or someone will be willing to slither some money your way and you can share it with the horrified studio audience. I don’t see much difference - at least I’m not telling you about my battle with pills or the way my old Scoutmaster used to touch me. Count your blessings. To put it all the best way I can, piggies, I sold the only commodity that I have left to sell, and this makes me no different from anyone else in our day and age, the Age of The New Materialism. No longer do we value objects over more important matters in order to qualify as Materialistic. Now it means that we regard everything -including our inner lives- as objects. Welcome! Please affix a price tag to yourself before taking your seats. The bidding will begin in a few moments. THE NEW MS-TIS®[1]: As I said, Bill Gates as our new Content Tsar has a bold plan to make TIS the cutting edge in sarcastic perzines. Bringing the same innovative spirit which has brought such computerized triumphs as that little animated paperclip and the recently announced Single Instance Storage technology (and here we thought that symbolic links had been a part of the Unix operating systems for decades! Silly us), Mr. Gates and the TIS development team will overhaul the current TIS paradigm, building on its strongest parts and replacing the rest with pure Microsoft goodness. I had very little input on this operation, since shortly after the process began I became lost in my new 117-room mansion and could not be reached for several weeks. Hey, it wasn’t funny. I almost starved to death. in the end I was rescued by some vagrants who had squatted in my garages. It still isn’t funny. The five-step plan that the Microsoft Development Team came up with follows in all its simple beauty. I recently had my pool drained and filled with dimes. I heartily endorse this new direction, reflecting concepts and ideas which are outside the box. I have a car made entirely out of gold. It burns sixteen gallons of gas to go around the block. In the final analysis, I’m sure that all my readers will agree that the new MS-TIS® will be better than, funnier than, and, most importantly, more expensive than the old, crufty, DOS-based TIS, with an electronic subscription going for about $55. Also, I recently bought Iowa and am too busy printing up eviction notices to care. MS-TIS®: BETTER THAN JUST TIS! Notes from the MS TIS Development Team: 1. No more paper. This is the Internet Age, morons - why are you bothering with a printed magazine? Print is dead. No one under 50 reads newspapers and the coming generations are only interested in web content, and XML and VRML are gaining acceptance and will soon make HTML look like COBOL. So MS-TIS® will only be published on the web, using MS Frontpage Proprietary Extensions, of course, so only people using Internet Explorer 5.01 will be able to access the pages, and then only if they let us set a cookie, and then only if they fill out three pages of forms asking for personal "marketing information". That’s why the web is better than print: control! 2. Color! What’s with this black and white shit? Ever since Ted Turner colorized the world and led us from the Black and White era, some print-based delivery modules have insisted on relying on an outdated protocol. Sure, almost every pair of eyes in the world can process black and white information -but it’s a new millennium, babe, and color is how professional, A-list entities express themselves. We have chosen yellow and purple as our base colors, and the entire issue of MS-TIS® will be printed purple on yellow. You’re welcome. 3. Security! In order to embrace and extend MS-TIS® and make it proprietary, the entire issue will be in code. Subscribers who successfully fill out our personal info forms and configure their PCs to read our MS-TIS® web page will also have to memorize a complex algorithmic code to be able to read the text. This will keep unscrupulous thieves from stealing our content. This makes your MS-TIS® experience more secure and protects your personal information, which we will of course store as plain-text cookies on your hard drive. It’s a feature, dammit. 4. TIS Assistant! We’re proud to announce the addition of the MS-TIS® Assistant, which will be an animated Levon Sobieski that will pop up from some unspecified region of hell to offer MS-TIS® readers assistance. Levon will, of course, speak no English, but will grunt and gesture angrily in an attempt to communicate to our dullard customers what they are doing wrong. After a few minutes if the problem has not been resolved, Assistant Levon will throw up his animated hands in disgust and reboot your computer without warning. 5. Constant upgrades! We on the MS-TIS® development team were horrified when we realized that TIS had not had a major upgrade since its inception in 1995!! At Microsoft, Inc. we’re committed to making previous versions obsolete within a minimum of three years, and MS-TIS® will be no different. We’ll refer to the 2000 version of MS-TIS® as Version 2.0, and by 4.0 we expect all previous TISs to be unreadable. When we brought this issue to The Editor, he said that in many peoples’ opinions TIS has always been unreadable, and then laughed heartily until something bright and shiny caught his attention, but none of us knew what it meant. Of course, every time a new upgrade becomes available all subscribers will have to purchase new code algorithms and subscriptions. You gotta like the way these stock-optioned kids think. Well, I gotta, they paid for my good opinion, after all. The final barriers between commerce and the rest of our lives has been thrown down and nowadays everything is for sale, all the time - why should I be the only one who doesn’t cash in? Our private stories: material for cheap television shows with an endless need for new and more outrageous stories. Our pain and suffering: now considered consumer demographics for pharmaceutical companies that run cheerful advertisements for their drugs to an ignorant and reactionary public, duped into pressuring their doctors into prescribing drugs whether they believe they will help or not. Our private space: now just another advertising palate, as if seeing ads on urinal grates, buses, coffee cups, and every available flat space on the street weren’t enough, now they reach you in the home and school, through television, radio, web pages, spam email, junk snail mail - everywhere. Everything’s a commodity, pigs. Start selling. Me, I recently used 117 million dollars to wallpaper my study. Later on today I’ll be paying 75 million to clone a Brontasuarus just to slaughter it and have a Bronto Steak for lunch. And I’ll be launching my new zine, The Hidden Bastard, with a $200 million advertising kickoff next week on NBC, CBS, ABC, and FOX, running prime-time infomercials starring verious Playboy Bunnies. See you there! And start selling! ---------------------------------------- [1] MS-TIS is a registered trademark of Microsoft, Inc. and is protected by national and international copyrights. We will send someone to pull your eyelids off with a pair of rusty pliers if you so much as whisper it without mailing us $5 cash. ======================================== *** COMMENTARY *** The Book Deal I Sold a Book and I’m Still Broke by Jeff Somers, Superstar ======================================== Jeff Somers, Superstar. Well, last year I sold a novel, which I may have mentioned about six thousand times before. One might expect that such a momentous event would result in fame, fortune, and even more book deals, but I am here as a sad and lonely pilgrim to let you know that it just doesn’t work that way. I have no more money than before selling my book, no one recognizes me on the street, and I don’t have to kick groupies out of my hotel room because a) no one is paying for me to stay in hotels and b) there are no groupies. The sad truth is, I sold my soul to the publishing industry and haven’t had even one evening of debauchery to show for it. I must have misread the contractual fine-print. PART ONE: BEFORE THE BOOK DEAL Here’s how a marginally-talented shlub like me sells a novel: perseverence. I started writing when I was about ten years old, shortly after the second Major Head Trauma of my life. Since that time, I’ve produced a hell of a lot of writing, most of it execrable but some of it sufficiently coherent for submission. Since I was about 14 I’ve been sending stories and novels out to publishing houses and collecting bland rejection slips in return. Over the years, I sold two short stories to paying markets (one netted me a whopping $7.50 and the other magazine folded before they could print (or pay me for) my story -but I still count it, for I have so little, and I’ll attack you like a crazed dog if you try to take it away from me) and managed to hook onto the Jeof Vita Express one glorious summer co-writing a comic book called Sliders: Blood and Splendor for which I got paid an obscene amount of money, all of which is spent now. So I’m not a complete failure. Call me success-lite. Submitting stories isn’t so hard, though: there are plenty of small magazines who will gladly read your unagented story and might even pay you for it, and since the stories are short the postage is cheap. I average about 75 submissions a year. Submitting books is a lot more work, of course: more expensive, harder to find a publisher which will read your idea without an agent soliciting them. So I do it much less often. When I’ve completed something that looks vaguely coherent, I’ll gather info on anywhere from 10-30 possible publishers, make up sample pages and a form letter, and mail ‘em all out. Then you sit and wait. After a few weeks, the form letters come trickling back in. Thank you for sending us your proposal, but it doesn’t fit our current editorial needs. Translation: My name is Sandy and I’m a 22 year-old recent college grad getting paid 16 grand a year to read the slush pile here at BigAss Publishers, Inc. because I want to be Jackie O when I grow up, and your book didn’t have any kittens in it so fuck off and die you creepy weirdo. The translation, of course, is approximate, but the sentiment is about the same. This is what I did with my book Lifers. The trick is, once you mail out the submissions, you have to put the rest of it out of your mind. If you think about the rejections piling up, you’ll go crazy. Now, what will often happen is that one of the publishers will write back and say "We love this book! Send the whole manuscript along with some info on yourself! We’re very excited!" This first happened to me when I was about 15 years old, and at that time I pissed myself and had a seizure of joy, but since then I’ve learned a hard lesson: most of these letters come from what is known as a Vanity Press. A VP is a publisher who expects you to kick in a certain amount of the costs. They’re also known as Subsidy Publishers. You pay them a certain amount -say, $15,000- and they’ll publish your book. The deal usually supposedly involves all facets of the deal: composition, printing, distribution, marketing. Now, I suppose that if you’ve got the money, there’s nothing shameful in paying to see your book in print. Since I still eat Ramen Noodles on a regular basis, I can’t say I have any money. So my reaction to these vanity presses is usually to write them a nasty letter asking them why they didn’t say they were a vanity press. You see, that’s the problem I have with VPs: they usually don’t tell you the nature of their deal until they’re reeling you in. First, they hook you with the sought-after acceptance letter. Then, after you’ve told everyone you know that you’re getting published, after you’ve had a few weeks to get used to the idea of success at long last, they hit you with the small detail of having to mortgage your house if you want it to really happen. Fuckers. A nasty letter is the least I can do. Anyway, I got one such letter for Lifers this time around. Creative Arts Book Company wrote me back asking for the whole manuscript, and seemed very enthused. I don’t excited about such letters any more -you get enough of them to realize that wanting to read the whole book just gives you that many more pages to make them not like the work- but you don’t ignore them. I sent off the whole manuscript and forgot about it. They wrote back some weeks later with the familiar con: we love your book, but unfortunately in these desperate economic times we cannot actually purchase it from you. So if you’ll loan us a few grand we’ll do some of the work for you. Fuckers. I wrote them a nasty letter and forgot about it. Oddly enough, they wrote back, saying they still thought there were possibilities, and that they’d be in touch. I didn’t believe a word of it, and forgot about it again. Then they called, about 8 months later. Another of their books had sold well, and they thought my book would appeal to the same demographic. I told them my position: I didn’t need to get rich, but I could and would not pay them to publish the book. They had to pay me, even if it was a nominal amount. Eventually, for some odd reason, they agreed, and after TIS Legal Counsel The Duchess was fetched from the local Nordstrom’s to review the contract I was paid a nominal advance along with 15% royalties for my book. Naturally I’m excited; the book is due out in Fall/Winter 2000 and I like the editor I’m working with very much. But nothing’s changed. PART TWO: SINCE THE BOOK DEAL Now, being a published author ain’t exactly being a Rock Star, granted, but still you’d think I’d get an NEA grant or something. But the funny thing is, you mail off the edited manuscript, and....nothing. I go to work every day. I’m still a paper-cut covered zine nerd, cranking out his photocopied monument to himself on a quarterly basis. I still eat Ramen noodles far too often. There are no endorsement deals, no movie offers, no phat checks. Only the minor comfort in knowing I’m not the only disoriented idiot who thinks I know how to write. Someone else does, too, and they paid me for it! Cold comfort. Considering that I earn what Stephen King tips in a year. So here’s the bitter truth behind The Book Deal: People aren’t impressed. When I tell someone that I’ve sold a book, they struggle mightily to be impressed. Some genetic imperative from the Bygone Age of Literacy is bubbling in their brains, urging them to be impressed, but it’s swallowed up by the fact that people equate being an author with being John Grisham. Under that condition, I wouldn’t be impressed either. Their first question usually is, who’s the publisher. If I could say either of the two Major Suckholds of Publishing Conglomeratism that people actually recognized, they might manage to be impressed. But for some reason Creative Arts Book Company just gets blank nods. The only aspect of being published that even momentarily impresses people is the fact that the book will be available on Amazon.com. This just proves another of my bitter, negative little theories: people these days are only impressed by huge corporations who would gladly crush them underfoot. But I digress. The chances that anyone’s gonna actually buy your book are the same as the chances you’ll spontaneously grow a third arm. In other words, it has been rumored to happen, and The Weekly World news has written stories about it, but lord knows it ain’t common. Generally speaking small book deals like this one fade away into the dust of your life like all those other hopes and dreams, except when its all said and done you’ve got two boxes of unsold books in your bedroom for the rest of your life. Agents don’t want you. I thought that if nothing else, I’d be able to parlay my moment in the financial sun into getting an agent. So after I sold the book I contacted about twenty agents who cheerfully mailed back form rejection letters printed on recycled hundred-dollar bills. The literary world apparently views my sale as a momentary fluctuation in the Space-Time continuum of publishing, an aberration they want no part of. Don’t worry, they will be remembered, and harshly. So, that’s my life as a writer. This zine, which goes like hotcakes because I give most of them away (if you paid for it, I guess you’re my Sucker for the Day), and a book sale that just means I may not be able to file a 1040EZ form next year. Like I keep saying, kids: it ain’t all milk and cookies. ======================================== *** FICTION **** FROM MY BODY TO YOUR PLATE by Gus Pustle [1] ======================================== I. Baxter sat in the Green Room working on his third bourbon on ice in a row, playing nervously with his Zippo lighter. He glanced at his watch and swallowed; he had three more minutes to get as drunk as possible before stepping onto a sound stage, and in front of eighty-million people on live television, and an unknown number of people watching via the Internet. He was seeking that magical level of inebriation that numbed you to the terror and humiliation waiting for him out there, but left you moderately in control of your faculties. He needed a comforting bubble of chemicals, and now regretted that he’d never taken up heroin. As it was, the booze was just making him sweaty and queasy. An upset stomach, he thought sourly, was the absolute last thing he needed. The Green Room was empty, and quiet. On the several television screens hanging from the ceiling, the show’s host was silently doing his monologue, standing in a perfectly tailored suit, one hand in pants pocket, the other gesturing for effect. The Host was a blandly personable man, his face the tight, tanned mask of several professional facelifts, incapable of any expression more complex than perpetual mild amusement. Baxter sat on the single couch, a sumptuous piece of furniture, upholstered in leather, soft and inviting. The wet bar was off to one side, along with a plate of sandwiches. There were several flower arrangements on the floor, each bearing a well-wishing from various people: the network president ("Best of Luck"), the Host ("Welcome to the Show"), several celebrities, a humorous one from his friends ("Eat Shit and Die Ha Ha Ha") and the grim, funeral-like arrangement from Malcolm bar Mackleby, Baxter’s patron, benefactor, and the reason, the young man thought with a grimace, that he was here at all. Malcolm bar Mackleby, billionaire, obscure heir to the Mackleby Fertilizer empire. Creep, thought Baxter. Malcolm bar Mackleby was a creep, plain and simple. He knocked back the last of his drink and stood unsteadily to fix himself one more snort. A knock on the door startled him. "Two minutes, Mr. Thompson." Baxter nodded to himself. Laboriously placed his tumbler on the swaying bar. Carefully unscrewed the cap on the bottle of bourbon. Methodically poured a generous drink. Dimly, he could hear the applause from the huge and rowdy studio audience, now being whipped into a frenzy of excitement by the Host, who was a pro well worth the money the Network had paid him, despite his sepulchral appearance. Baxter closed his eyes and rubbed at his temples, wondering what in hell he’d been thinking, all those months ago, when he’d agreed to this. At first it had seemed like easy money, but then the publicity had kicked in. He’d never imagined that the arrangement he’d come to with Malcolm bar Mackleby in a local bar one evening four months before would have blossomed into this: a prime time television special, contracts signed, advertising sold, an audience of eighty-five million or more tuning in to watch the event. The talk-show appearances, the monologue jokes on all the late-night shows. The magazine articles. Baxter Thompson was a celebrity, a household name, and all because one night four months before an obscure billionaire name Malcolm bar Mackleby had sat next to him in Pete’s Tavern, gotten into a conversation, and then suddenly turned to him and said, "Hey, Baxter my new friend, would you eat human shit for one million dollars?" Baxter opened his eyes and glanced up at the screen. The Host was waving to the audience, the little FOX network graphic was in the corner of the screen, and the show’s logo had been superimposed on the screen: "WHO’D EAT SHIT TO BE A MILLIONAIRE?" II. Hoyt was ready to punch the mirror in. And that face! His face ... staring back, mocking him. He paced back and forth nervously, running the water to drown out the noise coming from outside. "What the fuck, man! Why now?" Splashing the cool water on his face didn’t seem to help, but he did it anyway. The cigarette balanced defiantly on the edge of the sink had built up some nice ash. Hoyt grabbed it and in one puff, toked it to the filter, and just kept on sucking. He tossed the butt into the sink and watched as it whirled its way into the piping. "This can’t be happening!" He gripped the sink with both hands and bowed his head, dripping into the sink ... water or sweat he could no longer be certain. "GOD DAMN IT!" he screamed as he hauled off and punched himself hard in the stomach. "DAMN IT! DAMN IT! DAMN IT!" Each cry followed by a thud of flesh against flesh. The thick sound like a rubber mallet against filet mignon, rare. Hoyt’s stomach was already bruised from repeated beatings. The purple welts raising ever higher as he punished himself for failing yet again. How long had it been? Almost an hour since he started? He collected himself and stood at the sink again. The white noise of the water doing its best to clear his mind and relax him. As relaxed as once can be when one is naked, bruised and sweating like a pig. Hoyt stared at himself and began to giggle a bit. Hoyt Danbridge was well educated. Healthy. wealthy and wise by most accounts. Harvard educated with a PhD in molecular biology. His studies in genetic reconstitution paved the way for huge advances in the fields of amputation and limb regeneration, not to mention the fast food industry. Danbridge found a way to basically draw raw genetic material from waste product and reconstitute it into new cells. Any cells could be replicated from urine, fecal matter, dandruff, sweat or any other "waste." Japan had already started work in reconstitution and had attempted to work it into fast food with limited success. Scientists had found a way to recycle shit into an edible beef by-product. The problem was ... it tasted like shit ... warmed over. Danbridge found a way to fully extract the beef molecules and reconstruct them into a 100% beef burger. Naturally, this was not reported to the masses but McDonalds and Burger King immediately jumped on the coattails of this genius and doubled their production ... and tripled their sales. One fan of this medical breakthrough was Malcolm bar Mackleby. Mackleby had friends in high places and latched onto this new discovery. After all, he and Danbridge were kindred spirits, two entrepreneurs in shit. Malcolm immediately placed Danbridge on a stipend to work his magic to elevate his fertilizer business into the next millennium. And so it did. Malcolm’s production went into overdrive and the purity of his fertilizer all but wiped out the competition. One fateful night, bar Mackleby and Danbridge were seated in a booth at Pete’s Tavern catching an episode of that Regis Philbin epic, "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" when the idea popped into his head. Malcolm scanned the bar, chose one sap, and sauntered over. After a few minutes, Mackleby sat back down with Danbridge and explained. "Hoyt, my friend, we’re gonna be rich. Richer than we are today. I just asked that poor boy over there if he would eat human shit for one million dollars. And the sucker said yes. Now he don’t know that anytime he has a Quarter Pounder, he’s getting a quarter pound of ass-feast, but what he don’t know won’t hurt him. Now here’s why I need you ..." And so it goes. Hoyt Danbridge, Harvard grad sold his soul that night for a cool 12 million dollars, plus infinite research funding and his own laboratory with assistants. His price: He would have to provide the shit which Baxter would eat. One problem. He was constipated. III. Malcolm bar Mackleby stood with the Host on stage, hands in his expensive pockets, looking relaxed and affable. The audience hummed expectantly while the commercial break went on invisibly, and the two well-dressed men watched the red lights on the cameras out of the corners of their eyes, waiting for the world to return its attention to them. Up close, the Host was even more bizarre-looking, and kept distracting Malcolm. His skin was leathery and unnaturally brown, pulled tight around his face, which was ringed by a single puckered scar that wound its way around his hairline, powdered with makeup sufficient to hide it from the audience. His smile, which softened to mild amusement on-screen, never changed, and when he spoke there was the subtle impression that his voice actually came from somewhere just to the left of his mouth, as his lips were incapable of moving properly. "Just be yourself," the Host advised quietly, fussing with his tie, "and you’ll be fine." Malcolm reflected that this was sensible advice. He shrugged. "Fuck you." he said distinctly, in a low voice. The Host seemed startled. "Excuse me?" Malcolm was smiling cheerfully, waving now and then to members of the audience who called out to him. "Fuck you. Speak to me again when the cameras are off, and I’ll have your legs broken." The Host returned to fussing with his tie, muttering to himself. Malcolm bar Mackleby was generally assumed to be the richest man in the world. He wasn’t sure, as his net worth varied from day to day, but he thought he came out as number one at least ten days out of every month. He was immensely proud of the fact that he’d made his fortune from shit -fertilizer, to be exact, formulated from animal feces and processed with various chemicals. From there he had found ways to make all sorts of wondrous things from excrement, animal and, though he often denied it in various courts, human. He looked the audience over, grinning at them and waving. He calculated that at least half of them were wearing clothing manufactured by subsidiaries of Mackleby Inc., the fibers of which were synthesized from the excrement of the members of a small Chilean village, who received various plastic trinkets in return for their shit. He noted a popular brand of shoes made from Sheather, a leather synthetic manufactured by Mackleby Inc. and sold secretly to many shoe designers and manufacturers. They had found a way to manufacture glassware, plastics, and, ironically, air fresheners from human shit as well. Malcolm figured half the western world was surrounded by human shit on a daily basis, and he was delighted. The stumbling block had always been food. That is, until Danbridge had come along. Oh, making something edible and nutritious from shit hadn’t been too hard. Making it palatable had been. Now that Hoyt had solved that problem for him, Malcolm knew there was only one barrier to the worldwide domination of Mackleby Inc., and that was the conventional wisdom which stated that people would not willingly consume something made from human feces. Government regulations forced him to label all his products as such, but the clothing and other rules were satisfied with a cryptic MFS (Made From Shit) label. The FDA, however, had insisted that the origin of all foodstuffs be explicitly labeled, and his marketing department had conducted several studies which had convinced Malcolm that people were, quite simply, adverse to eating shit. He had tried human shit, various animal excrement (on the theory that people might find kitten shit or horse manure more aesthetically pleasing), even insect droppings -nothing made any difference to the poll numbers. People just had a resistance to the idea. And that was what had inspired this show. Malcolm bar Mackleby knew that if he could show people on national television that eating shit was no less healthy or appetizing than anything else, he’d have a winner on his hands. All it took was money. He knew you could get anything done with money. As his willing star Baxter had proven, people would do absolutely anything for money, and with it’s implied glamour attached, before long people would be lining up to order a Shitburger Deluxe with extra Fecal Fries. Suddenly, the director stepped forward. "And we’re back in three, two" he backed away, miming the final count. The red lights went on. Like a piece of machinery, the Host began to speak. Malcolm bar Mackleby’s smile was wide and eager, glinting with evil. IV. Nica squinted at the TV screen. Rage and anticipation pounded through her, with equal force. She took another sip of her bourbon, neat. On the screen, at full-volume, was the FOX TV special Who’d Eat Shit to be a Millionaire? "Look at that evil, ego-maniacal, cock-sucking, snake-smiling bastard bar Mackleby up there on stage" she seethed out loud. "I wonder where Hoyt is hiding, that lily-livered, spineless back-stabbing snake. No doubt trapped in the john this very minute--constipated as usual." She shook her head in disgust. "Stay tuned! Right after this commercial break, we’ll be back with the contest you’ve all been waiting for!" bleated the spectre-like Host Nica Forrester walked across the cool slate floor of her stark apartment and entered the bathroom--sheathed from floor to ceiling in the same fecal-hued tiles. "Let me just check while the commercials are still running." Reaching behind the toilet, she loosened and removed one of the tiles. Laying it gingerly on the cold floor, she reached into the wall, behind the plumbing and pulled out a metal box. Blowing off the dirt and grit, she reached between her breasts for the key--the only existing key--kept there. Carefully, she slowly lifted the lid and sighed. "It’s still here. Thank God. I knew it would be but Thank God." With a delicate touch she unrolled the papers inside and smiled from ear to ear. Nica Forrester, PhD was a scientific genius. Graduated at age 21 from both Harvard and MIT simultaneously with a double Masters in Molecular Biology and Genetic Research. The program had been created specifically for her, after her own design, when she convinced the faculties of both universities the benefits of merging these 2 sciences. To this day they still call her in for consultations on new advances in this field. From Cambridge, MA she went on to study with some of the most esteemed minds in the field, world-wide: 2 years in Tokyo, 2 more in Beijing, 3 in Berlin at their world-renown genetics lab (which has mysteriously erased its Nazi birth-right), 6 fascinating months in Chile, working under Dr. Arturo Ernesto, and finally, recently lured back to the US for research in the government-sponsored lab in Bethesda, MD. . Still grinning, she returned to the living room as the commercial ended. She was sure she was the only person in the world who knew that Hoyt Dandridge had made a terrible miscalculation in his formula. She wasn’t sure what the poor ‘contestant’ was going to be eating...but she knew it wouldn’t bear any resemblance to food. She knelt close to the screen as the show’s logo popped up on the screen. "I’ve got the formula, Hoyt, you dolt, and you don’t even know it! I will see to it that you NEVER profit from my genius!" V. The Instant Nielsen numbers indicated that almost one hundred million people were watching Who’d Eat Shit to Be a Millionaire. The studio audience was abuzz with the sure knowledge that they were witnessing entertainment history, and fell respectfully silent as the red lights came on and the host glided to his mark, seeming to float slightly above the floorboards of the stage. Malcolm bar Mackleby stood off to his right, hands in pockets, smiling. "Welcome back, everyone! It’s time to meet our lucky contestant, who will walk away from this evening a million dollars richer if he can manage to consume a one-pound "shitburger" live here on stage. But first, let’s introduce his benefactor, and our sole sponsor this evening, a man who needs no introduction: Malcolm bar Mackleby, of Mackleby Inc.!" The audience sat dumb until a blinking APPLAUSE light flickered into motion, and then offered up a limp clapping noise for a few seconds. Malcolm bar Mackleby stepped forward waving as if acknowledging a much more enthusiastic reception. "This must be a very exciting night for you, Mr. Mackleby." The Host read off a cue card with frightening vivacity. "Well, Tom, it sure is. All of us down at Mackleby incorporated have been very very excited about this new food source for some time now, and we can’t wait to show it off a little here." Mackleby said with easy charm, studying the Host’s bizarre appearance with clinical detatchment. This guy looks like he was assembled in the dark, he thought grimly. "Why don’t you tell us a little about what we’re about to see here, Mr. Mackleby, if you don’t mind?" The Host read, his smile, close-up, seeming to suggest to Malcolm that his name was and had never been Tom. Mackleby had to admit that the man was a pro, and nodded amiably. "Sure thing, Tom. You see, we at Mackleby Incorporated, well, we deal in shit. We take it, we process it, and we make a lot of useful things out of it." The audience groaned and tittered. Malcolm held up his hands in a practiced gesture and put a surprised expression on his face. "I know, I know - but that’s just anti-excrement predjudice. The American Indians have known for thousands of years that to waste something was a sin. We’re only learning this now. Nature gives us a resource like this, we can’t just flush it down the toilet!" The Host generated a sudden burst of hearty laughter. The audience was shocked into a nervous accompaniment. "I’m convinced that once the people of America see the benefits we have been able to wrest from our own bodily waste, this kind of predjudice will disappear. Why, this suit I’m wearing right now was manufactured from processed human excrement!" The Host gasped. "No!" Mackleby nodded in good humor. "It’s true! And it doesn’t stop there. We at MAckleby Inc. make all manner of things from human excrement. And we’ve finally tackled the last roadblock - we’ve made food from shit, Tom, and it’s going to solve World Hunger." The audience, prodded again by the demanding sign, clapped politely. Malcolm acknowledged them with a wave. "The only problem we’ve encountered is this predjudice I’ve mentioned - people just don’t want to eat something made from human shit." The Host laughed professionally. "Well, I can’t imagine why not!" The audience laughed, and The Host beamed. "Well, Tom, that’s why we’re here tonight. We’re going to show everyone how silly that predjudice is. We’re going to change a lot of minds tonight." The Host nodded. "I sure hope you do." He turned to face the audience directly. "And now, let’s meet our contestant and walk through the process tonight, okay?" Baxter stood woozily on the stage, shadowed and unseen by the audience. The lights which were focussed on The Host and Malcolm bar Mackleby were blinding and hot, and he couldn’t see the audience beyond them. he felt feverish. He was sweating feely and could feel makeup oozing down his face. He didn’t pay much attention to what The Host and Mr. Mackleby were saying; he was concentrating on not falling over, and listening to a vague, distorted voice in his head that kept saying you wouldn’t know crazy if Charles Manson was eating Fruit Loops on your front porch over and over again, a desperate, whispered mantra. When the spotlight hit him in the face, he blinked into it and barely resisted the urge to run. "Mr. Thompson, come and say hello!" Baxter shuffled forward, still feeling blind and thick-tongued and stupid. He noticed dumbly that Malcolm bar Mackleby had vanished from the stage. When he neared the edge of the stage, The Host reached out and gently pushed him back from the edge, chuckling professionally. "Mr. Thompson, tell us a little about yourself!" The Host projected cheerfully. To Baxter, his voice was unnecessarily loud, it buffeted him and seemed to push him backwards with its force. The Host had seen a thousand people get spooked on stages and studio sets, and it took him only a second to realize that Baxter Thompson wasn’t capable of uttering a single coherent word. "You were born in New Jersey, isn’t that right? And up until your fateful meeting with Mr. Mackleby a few months ago, you worked as a temporary office support person and lived with your Mother, isn’t that right?" The audience and The Host made a silent agreement to accept Baxter’s complete lack of reaction as assent. "But now everything’s going to change for you, isn’t it?" The Host went on silkily. "We all know what you’re here to do: Mr. Mackleby is going to take human feces, process it with his wondrous process, and you’re going to show the world how safe and tasty it is by eating the result." he turned his masklike face to the audience and grew serious. "Here’s how it’s going to work, folks. Mr. Mackleby’s partner, Mr. Hoyt Dandridge, is right now, um, providing the human feces backstage. We’ll meet him in a moment when he produces the sample. Then we’ll actually get to see the sample being processed, and then Mr. Thompson will consume the result, live, here on TV! You’ll see for yourselves that there will be no possible way we could cheat. Mr. Thompson will eat shit here on live TV and get his million dollars, and then he’ll tell us in his own words what the experience was like." The Host paused for a dramatic moment. He had the audience in his hands, and he knew it. "Of course, should Mr. Thompson prove not up to the task, naturally he will get nothing." There was an appreciative rumble from the audience. The Host brightened unnaturally. "And now, let’s meet our final player in tonight’s historical event, Mr. Hoyt Dandridge!" Next to him, Baxter Thompson thought to himself I’m going to vomit right here on the stage. VI. The crowd was excited. The guy, the contestant, the whatever looked green-gilled and ready to faint, and it looked likely that some good sport was going to happen. The apparatus, the machine that was supposed to process the stuff gleamed in new, modern gloss, already humming. Two anonymous men in white lab coats stood ready to make it work. The crowd didn’t care about them. The crowd also wasn’t sure if it liked The Host, but they were willing to accept him as long as he seemed to be on the same team. He was bizarre, and creepy, but he was amusing, and seemed as excited about the prospect for humiliation and disgust as they were. The red lights came on, the music swelled, and everyone sat forward. "Folks," The Host drooled silkenly, "the time has come for us to get this show on the road." He grinned hugely, and then sobered in a disturbingly fast display of insincerity. "As you know, Mr. Mackleby and his associates take their crusade to make shit the world’s favorite fast food substitute very personally, and therefore they knew from the beginning that they didn’t want to let anyone not personally involved be here today. So, naturally, the sample that will be processed and then consumed by Mr. Thompson will be provided by a man intimately involved in the whole process, Mr. Mackleby’s good friend and business partner, Mr. Hoyt Danbridge!" The Host’s voice rose in volume suddenly as he announced the name, and he turned and started to clap, signalling the audience to applaud expectantly. Some exuberant people hooted and hollered too. For a moment, as applause crashed everywhere, nothing happened. The Host was still in control. He acted as if he could see Mr. Danbridge just off stage, and began waving him on. "Come on, Mr. Danbridge! Let’s not be shy!" The audience began to taper its applause, and the signs blinked on sternly, flashing APPLAUSE. The crowd wearily complied. Suddenly, from the wrong side of the stage, a man ran into camera range, and the crowd stopped clapping immediately. In the ensuing silence, the Host turned and even he seemed to be shocked. Hoyt Danbridge was sweaty, shirtless, and pale. His upper body, naked, was covered in angry red welts. He was wearing tan khaki pants ("Think casual," Mackleby had said. "This is a big event, but we’re not pretentious. That’s what you’re thinking") which were stained bright red, a stain that spread outward from the backside. Great googly-moogly, the Host thought calmly, that’s his own blood. Hoyt was grinning widely, eyes popping, and he was carrying a crystal tray, on which steamed a lump of bloody human feces. "I did it, Bob!" Hoyt shouted. He stalked towards the Host so viciously the spectre took an involuntary step backwards before catching himself. Hoyt stumbled and weaved a little, and everyone suddenly realized that Mr. Danbridge was leaving a thin slime of blood behind as he walked. "I had to...resort to....extreme....measures...but I did it!" He stopped in front of The Host, weaved a little, and steadied himself. When he handed the tray over, The Host took it gingerly, his smile in place. He glanced sideways and caught the signal coming from his Producer. He nodded subtly, calculated that Mr. Danbridge would manage to stay upright for about five seconds, and whirled to face the audience dramatically. "Ladies and gentlemen!" He announced, holding the tray up over his head. "We’re pausing here for commercial!" The red lights went off, Hoyt Danbridge collapsed into a bloody pile, and Malcolm bar Mackleby came storming onto the stage. "Get him off!" He shouted. EMS workers appeared and swarmed over Danbridge. Makleby ignored them and stomped over to where the Host stood holding the tray far away from himself. "We go on." Mackleby hissed. The Host smiled at the audience and appeared to speak out of some orifice other than his mouth. "What if your ‘good friend’ there dies?" "We go on!" The Host nodded at some random individual in the crowd, shrugged a little, as if saying all in a days work. "Will the, um, condition of the, er, material make any difference?" Mackleby shook his head. Behind him, Hoyt Danbridge was dragged away. "I don’t give a fuck. All he’s got to do is survive five fucking minutes after he eats it. After that, well, we all die, right? Could be anything. So we go on." The Host shrugged again. "Very well. We’re back in ten." VII. The rest of it seemed to go by in a dream, for Baxter. There seemed to be no sound. The lights which were fixed on him seemed to narrow his vision down to a pinpoint. He saw Mr. Danbridge appear, thought to himself he doesn’t look well, and watched him collapse with indifference. He saw Mr. Mackleby appear with only the mildest rise of hatred within him. He felt calm as the EMS workers dragged Danbridge from the stage. He watched the Host speak to the audience, hand the tray over to one of the white-coated technicians. Saw it being scraped into the slot. Watched it hum and bubble and beep. To the crowd, he appeared suddenly casual, calm, relaxed. He felt numb, disassociated, far away. The technicians silently removed the output from its slot in the machine, placed it on a plate, and carried it over to where Baxter was standing in solemn seriousness. Baxter watched them curiously. What were they up to, he wondered. They stopped and held the plate out to him. That looks like a steak. He thought. Before thinking anything else, he reached for it. As his hands clasped its edges, everything came flooding back. Sight. Sound. Smell.... The smell was terrible. Baxter snapped back, his ears filled with the shouting of the crowd, his eyes blinded by lights, by the flash of the Host’s impossibly white teeth. He felt the warmth of the plate, its heft and weight. What he was mostly aware of, however, was the reek of the steak sizzling on the plate. He thought to himself, one million dollars and fought the urge to wrinkle his nose and push the plate away with every fiber of his body. He glanced up at movement, and took the golden fork offered to him by one of the technicians. The crowd shifted uneasily. The smell was overpowering, and people began to hold their noses, make faces, wave things in front of them. The cameras spun away from the audience, concentrated on Baxter, who stood with a piece of the stuff speared on his fork, held up before his face. He seemed to be frozen, staring at it. "Come on, come on," Malcolm bar Mackleby hissed under his breath, watching from offstage, "Come on you stupid bastard." The Host was smiling slightly, feeling his face, or parts of it, melt under the hot lights. He was humming something, his eyes bright. Inside his suit, he seemed to shift impossibly. Baxter raised the fork, and opened his mouth. The studio grew still. He placed the hunk of synthetic meat into his mouth, began to chew. Again. Swallowed. In the hollow silence, he smiled slightly, looked around as if seeing his surroundings for the first time. "It’s delicious." he said. And felt peaceful saying it. ---------------------------------------- [1] GUS PUSTULE IS: Jeff Somers: Is the Publisher and Editor of this magazine and an Olympic Champion Leap Frogger. He lives a sad, lonely life, and basks in your pity. Jeof Vita: Is the cover artist and token Asian on this magazine. He was far too enthusiastic about the subject matter of this story, and freaked everyone out a little. Alison Culshaw: Is an occasional contributor and long time confidant of The Editor, and the only person who, upon reading the beginnings of the story, was willing to risk reputation and nausea on contributing. ======================================== *** INVOICE *** I Wanna Bill You For Wasted Time by Jeff Somers ======================================== "I wanna tell you what’s on my mind / and I wanna bill you for wasted time / and wasted cigarettes that quenched your fix / and wasted spit I left there upon your lips" - Screeching Weasle. I’m going to start billing everyone I interact with for my time, because someday I’m going to die and it will be too late to sue for compensation. I don’t summon the muscle electricty to click my mouse at work unless I’m getting paid for it. Why shouldn’t the rest of my life be the same? I’m a valuable commodity, kids. If you want to access the incredible resource of ill-temper, useless trivia, and soured charm that I represent -well, there ought to be license fees, and per-hour charges. In that spirit, kids, I have prepared and provided below: The Bill for producing this here zine [1]. Everyone should remit payment to me within 30 days, and keep in mind the TIS legal department (the lovely and talented The Duchess, sedated and given something warm to drink) will be tenaciously litigous on this matter. For your convenience, you can simply photocopy this bill and write your name on it, for your records. If you take advantage of this, please tack on a fifteen cent convenience charge. Thank you. ---------------------------------------- THE INNER SWINE The Best Damned Publication About Jeff Somers Out There 293 Griffith Street #9 Jersey City, NJ 07307 DATE....................... Customer’s Name: Address: PUBLISHING THIS ZINE 3/00 - 6/00 Inspiration in form of cocktails----------$676.45 Research at "Runway 69" on 8th Avenue in New York---------$1,345.00 Fines related to episodes of public urination during "reasearch" @ Runway 69---------$550.00 Buying enough drinks to get Jeof Vita to create new cover---------$135.00 Karen Accavallo’s proofreading services---------$75.00 Paying Karen Accavallo off to avoid sxual harrassment lawsuit (again)---------$12,000 Settling various plagarism lawsuits---------$25,000 Lunch---------$37,564.98 Hiring of Dwarves to be personal "Oompah-Loompahs" for folding and stapling of issues---------$1,500.00 Bolstering sagging confidence via more cocktails---------$323.78 Postage---------$125.00 Hiring of indigents to serve as envelope lickers---------$50.00 TAX----------$4,763.71 TOTAL----------$84,158.92 ---------------------------------------- Well, there you have it. Cost of producing this issue for your grubby reading pleasure: Almost eighty-five thousand dollars. And how much have I earned on it since publication in June 2000? About $5, measured in spare change left behind at the TIS offices by inattentive visitors (there’s a reason we refuse to repair that low-slung couch in the reception area; it’s a spare-change goldmine, baby). Please make out all checks and money orders to me personally. We accept cash, checks, rare baseball cards, jars of pennies, indentured servitude, and farmstock as well. Now, you may have paid for this issue of The Inner Swine you hold in your hands right now, which means that anywhere from 35% to 50% of that cover price came to me, golden crumbs from your hard-earned plate, and you’re thinking dude, I so demand a refund, how can you have the balls to bill me? For most of you, the transaction is simple: I put out a product, you pay for it, everyone’s happy, or not. Still, people might wonder where, exactly, does their money go, if not directly into offshore bank accounts listed under a name you’ve surely never read in these pages? This dedication to the American spirit of getting your money’s worth is laudable, if damned annoying. Bowing to pressure from my fans, who are proving more and more adept at skirting my security measures and showing up uninvited inside the TIS compound (often stealing my underwear from the laundry hamper), I offer my readers a complete audit of TIS resources, detailing where, exactly, your money is going (See Figure 1). ---------------------------------------- FIGURE 1 BEST BUCKS YOU EVER SPENT Your $$$ Well Spent BOOZE - 65% ASPIRIN - 15% PUBLIC URINATION SUMMONSES - 10% PHOTOCOPYING, STAPLING, POSTAGE - 5% OTHER* - 5% Figure 1. Allocation of monies earned from The Inner Swine sales. * Other category may include some or all of the following: pornography, pizza, paying Ken West to leave me alone, vienna sausages in lieu of food, video games, purchasing of own magazine in order to "fluff" sales numbers. --------------------------------------- We certainly hope this article clears up how it is that you owe us all that money. If not, take another long look at that figure...I mean, consider my bills, you greedy bunch of leeches. If I don’t get my "medicine", I get the shakes pretty bad. Don’t you remember this little scene from last issue: I thought not. You bastards don’t even read this magazine. And I’m supposed to give you a break on the price? Get the hell out of here. And send me money. ======================================== *** INTERVIEW *** The Inner Swine Interviews #7 NOT ASHAMED OF BEING A SPIN DOCTORS FAN Ten Questions with Rob Gala, Staff Dissident ======================================== 1. What is the best hallucination you’ve ever had? My lawyer has advised me not to answer this question, so I will not. However, I will fictionalize what my answer might have been. I have had many wonderful visions, some of them real and some not. Some have been chemically induced and others totally natural. One that sticks out in my mind was the time I got pulled over for having my brights on despite oncoming traffic. I was sitting in Oklahoma Highway Patrolman Olchefsky’s car at 11 pm on a dark rural highway. My terrified companions watched from our vehicle "the bugger" (as in the things hanging out of your nose) as the Officer’s Rollie Fingers-like handlebar mustache grew up around his head in perfect unison with the pink and teal paisley patterns on the top and side of the patrol-car, lifted the shotgun up our of its rack and blew Officer Olchefsky’s brains out, splattering me with bits of blood, brain and skull ala Pulp Fiction. At the time it was difficult to enjoy because I was in the middle of a seemingly lucid and explanation of what four high-school aged boys from Tulsa were doing on the road at that hour on a school night just outside of McLean, Oklahoma which is home to a federal penitentiary. 2. Exactly when did you see through Jeff Somers’ bullshit and know him for the egocentric little shit he is? Please be as specific as memory allows. I’ve always thought of Jeff as more of a stereotypical white boy -clueless, sheep-like consumption habits, lacking a sense of the magic of the universe and politically absent. Over the years his sweet, boyish nature blossomed and then shriveled and died like an early spring flower brought to a premature death by a late-season frost. I never really thought of Jeff as egocentric until TIS went global and he started receiving death threats. And I know he thinks these threats are coming from me, however I will never threaten, my good friend. J Now, the precise moment when I began to think of Jeff as a shit was when I saw that mangey old Mets cap he still has, the one with paint splattered on it. It stands on it’s own, stiff from the grease and snot in his hair. It smells like a smokey bar seat after a two-bit ho’ wearing no panties drank a few cheap beers, ate cheese fries for dinner and laid a big, wet fart on it. 3. In fifty words or less, can you explain what Fermat’s Last Theorem is, and whether the evidence indicates that Fermat solved his own "last theorem" or not? Please quote primary sources. I can’t imagine any of TIS readers actually understanding Fermat’s Last Theorem let alone wading through my entirely too complicated answer, but I will say this: If you rearrange the letters in Fermat, you come up with Me Fart. Any bullshit I spew about Fermat would be much less entertaining than Ken West lighting a fart and having his pants and the sofa catch on fire, leaving a huge melted burn on the couch. It sounds hilarious, but he interrupted a critically hilarious moment of Ren and Stimpy, which at the time (1991), was all the rage. 4. How many variations on the lame joke "This must be a Gala event!" have you heard in your lifetime? None. If you want to poke humor at my name, do it in person you spineless wimp. 5. Which will happen first: human beings evolving true psychokinetic powers, or me being able to eat a fish caught in the Hudson River without dying immediately afterwards of horrible intestinal convulsions? Some of us already have true psychokinetic powers, but if you’re talking about the human race in general...Hmm. Given the fact that people consume more mind-numbingly dumb brain candy than TIS all the time, and the fact that most of society is devolving instead of evolving, and since I have all the necessary documentation to prove that TIS is my brain child -I think given your overall health and general vital nature, you can eat all the fish you want out of the Hudson River. It won’t hurt you one teeny weensy little bit. In fact, I just sent you a hand-crafted fly-fishing rod for your 1997 birthday gift. It’s late, so I airmailed it. 6. Are you now ashamed of your long history of Spin Doctors fandom, including all those live bootlegs you made people listen to in college? My lawyer advised me not to answer this question, but I rarely follow his advice. I am not ashamed of being a Spin Doctors fan from March 1990 to January of 1991. They killed live, wrote semi-catchy songs for college kids and were babe magnets. I met women just going to NYC for shows while you were sitting in the dorm lighting your farts on fire with slow-death-by-overconsumption of over-the-counter-drug-boy. After January 1991 it was all downhill and I got out before it got ugly. 7. If there was a man the size of a planet floating through the universe and you were living on him, which part of his body would you choose to live on, and why? Definitely the eyebrows. Nice plush forest, you can see things coming as they happen, hopefully if this planet-size-man is not a loser, your close proximity to more attractive environs will provide opportunities to find a better home, you can go spelunking for vacation in the ears or hike through the old growth on the scalp without having to travel too far, and when the shit hits the fan above ground, easy access to the nose provides more shelter. 8. In 50 words or less please defend your existence and consumption of valuable food and oxygen. I elevate the level of humanity by recognizing the divinity within all, er most living creatures and by treating everyone who hasn’t given me reason not to, with respect. My career is dedicated to ending the reign of oppression by corporate pig-swine, and I give you a reason to get out of bed every morning because you know that before you are cold in your grave, I will take over TIS and turn it into a rag for the underground resistance movement that it was meant to be, you pugilistic thief of ideas. 9. What do you see in the following: [IMAGE] I see bloated corporate yuppy swine burning in hell for their crimes against humanity and mother earth while the German Green Party, African, Indian and oppressed peoples all over the world, are trained and supervised by the U.S. military to enforce environmental and human rights protections across the globe. 10. (Two Parts) A. Since life is really a meaningless existential hell of coincidence, suffering, and the soulchilling awareness of your own downward spiral into paralysis, idiocy, and death, how is it you found the energy to answer these questions? Can I answer first with a question of my own? With that kind of outlook, how the hell do you find the energy to go through the motions of your pathetic existence? This question and my answer are the perfect medium to examine and understand the difference between the philosophy of the editor of TIS and myself. When I proposed the name of The Inner Swine, to me it was to be an expose on how evil, in it’s human incarnation has driven the controlling forces of multinational corporations to conquer, divide, exploit and oppress people all over the world. Since your attempt to eradicate me from this life and my exodus to the better I do not agree that life is meaningless. It is only what you chose to make it. Life has whatever meaning you give it. Your ASSumption that life is meaningless reflects only that YOUR life is meaningless. On the contrary, as I age I grow more aware and empowered to affect my environment and make decisions based on available information which is ever expanding. I pity you in your self-inflicted blindness as you stumble through the quagmire of a life you have built. I really pity you for the smell in the hallway in your apartment, but that isn’t quite as dramatic. B. Do you now wish you had the last few moments of your life back to relive? Thanks to tantric yoga and psychokinetic powers, answering these questions only took five minutes. It sounds absurd, but it’s true. ======================================== *** FICTION *** The Witch King of Angmar by Jeff Somers ======================================== WHEN the report that the Beckels Sphere had become unstable, it preempted and interrupted every broadcast in the world. All the uplinks were seized by priority interrupts, and no one complained. I was with Denise, sharing a bottle of wine, when the hulking monitor in the corner of her living room came to life without warning, the looped report stating in clipped, computer-modulated sentences that the world was going to end now, it was unavoidable. Denise took my hand. We were both trembling. I’d visited the Sphere once, about three years ago. Not with Denise, with Natalie. We were in the process of breaking up, and the trip out west to see the sights had been the perfect tableau to break up to. We were at that precise, bizarre moment in the death throes of a relationship where you’re still sleeping together but no longer emotionally together, if you know what I mean -your spirits had discovered the dark, unpleasant truth but your brains and bodies were still rutting like animals, playing a program long ago legacied and obsolete. We’d planned to see all the major sights: the Grand Canyon, the Badlands, Mount Rushmore, all the great cities. And of course, the Beckels Sphere -not a natural wonder, but possibly the single greatest manmade wonder. If, that is, anyone ever figured out what it was, exactly. Arguing about what the Beckels Sphere was became a favorite thing for Natalie and I to argue about, one of those classically unwinnable arguments decaying couples utilize like a jackhammer, widening the small crevasses already appearing in their bonds. Might as well argue about the Meaning of Life or Whether There’s a God, but we beat at it and beat at it, and for an unwinnable argument we got pretty mad at each other about it. Anyway, the Beckels Sphere: you have to take a monorail to the site. At the time it had existed for thirteen years and it had outgrown two of the black stone walls the Government had built around it, but it was pretty dangerous and they had to have some sort of barrier -especially since every year a couple of dozen nuts tried to kill themselves by swan-diving into the Sphere. The Government, always conscious of lawsuits, had tried to shut the site down, but public outcry was thunderous. Aside from being an amazing phenomena, the Beckels Sphere had also been a secretly funded government project that had blown up in their faces, costing lives, billions of dollars in equipment, and an entire administration’s jobs. The Feds were still smarting over that PR disaster, and it would be a long time before public sentiment would allow them to hide the damn thing away. The monorail was surprisingly well-run for a Federal program; it was comfortable, uncrowded, ran on time, and served a great menu. The ride from the shithole Arizona town to the Beckels Sphere Site was forty minutes. Natalie and I sat together in a gross pretension of affection, her head resting against my shoulder, and we spent the time watching the automated tour guide give us the background. "Dr. Daniel Beckels was a Ph.D. in both Anomalous Materials Physics and Progressive Energy Theories and was without a doubt one of the most brilliant men of his or any generation," the pleasant, neutral male simulation said, "after a successful career in the public sector, during which he acquired over seven hundred patents and co-invented the BGH CPU chip, he was named part of the Research Team at what was then the United States Department of Defense Raven Base Labs here in Arizona. He was forty-three years old and perhaps the most respected theoretical physicist in the world. "Exactly what Dr. Beckels and his fellow scientists were working on remains Top Secret and will remain so for twelve more years, until the Freedom of Information Act releases the pertinent documentation, barring congressional enactments regarding the FIA." I remember being amused at this single-sentence capsulation of Governmental arrogance. "The facts we do know are these: on April 9th, 2004, Dr. Beckels entered the Raven facility at 3:05AM Central Time. He powered up several of the main computer systems and several of the Experimental Field Projectors, which were used at the time to simulate theoretical dimensional environments. At 4:56AM he entered a strange voice-entry into his personal log -which was stored in digital servers off site and so survived the events which followed- which we reproduce for you here:" A crackling, but eerily preserved, digital recording came over the small speakers of our personal seat-monitor: "I’ve set everything to what-the-hell and I’m going to press the button. Let’s see what happens." I remember thinking that Dr. Beckels’ slightly Midwestern drawl was friendly and comforting, but a shiver went up my spine. I thought, if that’s madness, we’re all in trouble. "At 5:03AM, the Raven Operating System noted a general power failure stemming from an overload in Dr. Beckels’ lab. The backup generators came up in five seconds, right on time, and almost immediately failed. Immediately after relaying this information to its off-site servers, the Raven Operating System ceased to exist, as did most of the Raven Facility, swallowed up by the sudden and still inexplicable appearance of what we now call the Beckels Sphere." Our guide simulation faded away, replaced by a still photograph of a large complex, with gleaming white buildings, nestled in a small desert valley. "When you arrive at the site, please remember that almost the entire area the Sphere now covers was once the Raven Facility." I remember thinking this was impressive. "Theories on what the Beckels Sphere actually is are abundant, but none have been able to adequately prove their claims. Dr. Beckels indeed made absolutely no reference to anything resembling the Sphere in any of his known research notes or academic papers. That its creation might have been a complete accident is the most popular current theory. What we do know for sure about the Sphere remains comically little, even after thirteen years of study: it is a perfect sphere, it is nonreflective and absorbs light shone onto it, it emits no energy or radio waves that we can detect, it is currently expanding at a rate of about twenty-six yards every two years, and as far as scientists can tell, anything which enters its diameter ceases to exist." A picture of the Sphere appeared on-screen. The valley had not changed much, but the facility was gone. In its place was what looked like the world’s largest marble, black. Not shiny. The photo had been taken only days after the accident, and some remnants of the Raven Facility still existed past the edges of the Sphere. In the photo, the sun was obviously high in the sky, but nothing gleamed on the Sphere. It was like darkness itself. "Scientific views on the Sphere differ greatly, especially concerning what happens to objects and life forms which enter the Sphere’s area.. Currently, the Sphere penetrates the ground to a depth of fifty-three yards. Seismic tests show that this rock and dirt seems to have completely disappeared. Probes sent into the Sphere cease reporting back or responding to commands once they have entered the Sphere’s diameter. There has been no way discovered of gaining any knowledge of what, if anything, exists within the Sphere." We shut off the guide, then; we would see it soon enough. The monorail hums along gently, and then you’re there: inside the great black wall the government had to rebuild every few years when the Sphere got too close. There’s a gift shop and a small café, and we’re kind of purposely allowed to mill about there for a few minutes, allowed to spend some money. Then our guide -a real, human one, looking nothing like the virtual guide we’d been watching- arrives dramatically. Naturally, he’s a Marine, one of those big, booming middle-aged men with permanently leathered skin and a habit of issuing orders. The Raven Facility is still DOD property, after all, and out of sight of all the tourists the place is crawling with grunts and NSA personnel. The guide first has to walk us through the rules and regulations, and safety precautions. The speech poured out of him in a single, monotonous drone, without breath, without pause, without sanity. "Ladies and gentlemen please, your attention." he booms in a southern-bent drawl. "Welcome to the Beckels Sphere National Facility. Under the specifications of Executive Order #45667743 of 2005 A.D. this facility has been made open to public examination -but that does not mean that you have free reign to do as you please here. Please note the following rules of behavior: only those with Department of Defense Research One-Day or One-Week passes, with all proper signatures and Portable Background File entries, are allowed down onto the desert floor. If you do not possess that paperwork, you will not be allowed off of the Viewing Grandstand. If you attempt to leave the grandstand, you will be apprehended and escorted away from the site. Please remember that the Sphere is very dangerous and incompletely understood and we do not know how it will react to every situation or condition -please refrain from tossing objects into the Sphere and avoid any kind of physical contact with it. Ladies and Gentlemen, I regret to inform you that it is not legal to photograph any part of this facility. I am afraid I will ask you to leave all cameras, digital recorders, and any other recording devices here in the lobby, where officers of this facility will be glad to watch them. If any one is caught with a recording device in their possession they will have that device confiscated and they will be arrested on charges of Suspicion of Espionage. Please remember that this is a Restricted Access Government area. Please cooperate. Anyone not giving me this cooperation will be arrested and detained. I hope you understand that this is for your safety." We all understood. But to us, thirteen yards a year was slow. If you couldn’t stay out of its way at that rate, you probably deserved to cease to exist. The Marine looked us over for a moment, and then nodded. "If you’ll form a line two across behind me, I will take you inside the walled area to see the Beckels Sphere." We quickly lined up. Natalie and I held hands, and I’d forgotten how annoying she’d been all trip and squeezed her hand. Secretly, I have to admit I kind of hoped that one of our group was one of those Beckel Suicides, come here to hurl themselves into the Sphere or die trying. The DOD did its best to prevent this, but still every year a few desperate folk made it. Rumors abounded as to what, exactly, happened, but I wanted to see it. Then I felt ghoulish, which didn’t change much. Once he was satisfied that we were paying attention (thinking no doubt how much he hated civvies) our Guide turned, signaled, and led us through the large automatic doors which opened for him. We marched down a metallic ramp after him, and then out onto a large metal platform which the sun was baking to a hot and crispy simmering heat. And Arizona opened up around us, blazing heat and bright bright sunshine.....and there it was. Perfect, in every way. Perfectly round. Perfectly black. Perfectly silent. Something about perfection disturbs the human eye, I think; we’re so delicately imperfect and revel in the possibilities imperfection allows us. Imperfection gives you all sorts of chances to cheat, to bend the rules, to find loopholes. Perfection allows none of this by definition. The Sphere loomed there and it seemed to slide away from my eye. I couldn’t focus on it. I found myself studying the rocks and reddish dirt around its base, watching the Sphere from the corner of my eyes. "Please feel free to approach the railing for the best view," our Marine guide boomed, his voice lost in the immense atmosphere all around us, "but please do not make any attempt to mount the railing. The fall from this height would kill you." I remember reading, when planning that trip with Natalie, how the Government had a continuing problem in that the Sphere was expanding, if slowly. Every time they built one of these Grandstands, the Sphere inched towards it until one fateful tour trip a lucky suicide managed to do an impressive flying leap into it. This was usually the sign the Government waited for to spur a new Grandstand. The whole site should have been off-limits, of course, but public sentiment was still strongly anti-secrecy regarding Government projects and so far every Senator who’d suggested shutting the tourist trip down found themselves unelected. Slowly, we moved forward, spreading out. The Grandstand was huge and the forty-five people in our group had more than enough room. Natalie and I took a far corner and leaned against the railing, staring at the Sphere. There was no sign of the Raven Facility left, the Sphere was now filling most of the valley. Only a thin sliver of blacktop, the old access road which had led into the parking lot, remained, stretching from the Sphere like a blood vessel or a long, thin finger. As I stared at the road under the hot sun, I imagined it pulsed, filling the Sphere with darkness pumped from our own Earth. In the hushed quiet, marred only by the howling wind in our ears, the Sphere eventually forced you to look it straight-on. There was nothing there. Nothing. That I was looking into the absolute absence of anything was obvious to me, no matter what Dr. Beckels successors in Theoretical Physics muttered into their unkempt beards. I knew, looking into it, that the Sphere was nothing. The opposite of everything. And I remember turning to Natalie and not seeing much more. Denise was trembling. I’d met Denise shortly after the grim return trip with Natalie, two people on a succession of planes and rental cars not speaking to each other. After the Sphere I’d been unwilling to put any more energy into her and had ended it all with one sentence, an unembellished statement of fact. I had hoped Nat would choose to find another flight home -I would have gladly payed for her unused tickets to avoid sitting next to her the whole way home- but she didn’t. To punish me, I suppose. Denise had been a friend of a friend, introduced a few times. I could recount the boring details of how two people sought each other out and started spending time together, but why? It’s always pretty much the same. I asked mutual friends about her, they told her I’d shown interest, a number finds its way into my hands. We had lunch or drinks, or went to the movies with another couple. We didn’t hate each other immediately. We continued to see each other, more and more often. Eventually we had sex and from that moment on we’d been more or less a couple. We’d been living together for four months. My motivations for asking a woman to move in with me were always the same: sex. I always regretted it, after a while. I had just about managed to remove all of Natalie’s presence from my place when I asked Denise to move in -and now the place is as much hers as mine. That’s the way it is with women. Men could pack their belongings into a single bag and you’d never know they’d been there. Women show up with the same bag, but then start shopping, filling the place with duplicates of everything they already own. She was shaking as I limply held her, watching the virtual anchor read us the reports. ".....the former Raven Government Lab has begun exhibiting unexpected random growth increases after sixteen years of steady and predictable increases in size. The first report came from Sergeant William Tanner, assigned to guard detail at the facility, at 2:31AM this morning. At that point the Sphere had suddenly grown two yards without any warning. "Sergeant Tanner issued an alarm and all Research Staff arrived within moments. Shortly afterwards the Sphere increased another six yards, undermining the integrity of the scaffolding erected around its base, on which the staff had gathered to observe. An emergency evacuation was called and the facility remains closed at this time." An aerial view of the Sphere appeared in place of the anchor. Even at the distance it was obvious that the Sphere had swelled to within inches of the most recent wall. A live, real voice obscured by rotor blades came on. "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Beckels Sphere seems to have lost whatever predictable pattern it had. In the hour or so since I arrived on scene it has expanded three times: once by a sizable margin of at least three or four yards, and twice in much smaller spasms. As you can see it threatens to absorb the most recent security wall erected around it. According to the size increase it had demonstrated up until this point, it would not have reached this current size for another two years. "The whole area has been cut off and armed personnel have arrived to make sure no unauthorized access is granted. It is not apparent if any scientific equipment or, more importantly, any research conclusions has been lost to the Sphere’s aggressive growth. Such research might hold the only hope the Government has of stopping or controlling the Sphere." Denise and I said nothing, but I suspect we were thinking the same thing: before it’s too late. I shook my head. Everything I’d read indicated that there had been no significant breakthroughs regarding the Sphere; a thing that won’t generate any readings on any instruments doesn’t offer much data to analyze. Besides, I’d seen it. I’d looked into it. I’d felt its invisible and nonexistent breath against my cheek. I knew the Beckels Sphere was nothing. And now it was coming for us. I looked down. Denise’ hand wasn’t trembling, mine was. "You’re just leaving?" I was tossing clothes into my bag without really paying attention. "Yes." "You’re just leaving me alone?" I didn’t look at her. It was an effort to remember she was there, to keep replying to her. "What difference does that make?" In response, she started weeping, which had always been Denise’s Way. When in doubt, weep. I sighed, and pulled back from my sudden decision enough to pause, turn to her, and grab her by the shoulders, gently. She looked up at me with tearful, hopeful eyes. "I think that Sphere’s going to keep getting bigger. And bigger. It’ll eat the world, then the Sun, and then everything else -eventually. I think this is the end of the world. Maybe I’m wrong. But something in here -" I pointed at my head "- tells me I’m not. Maybe I’m crazy. It doesn’t matter, I guess." I sighed again. "Go. Go with me or go somewhere else, but go somewhere. Don’t meet it sitting in this lousy apartment, wringing your hands, crying, Denise. Meet it head on. Somewhere." Miraculously, she stopped crying. In the background the President was outlining the Government’s Emergency Plan for dealing with the Beckel’s Sphere. From what I could tell, it boiled down to run away and hide. My eyes wandered to the gas gauge and realized that we were going to run out of fuel in a few minutes if a lucky, untapped gas station didn’t appear somewhere on the road. Finding stations wasn’t so hard out here. Finding one that hadn’t already been ransacked and bled dry, however, was. I made this announcement to the group and it was greeted with stoic silence and a few nods. We’d all known we’d have to walk eventually, and we’d made it further in the SUV than I would have imagined. We’d been passing similarly gasless vehicles for about half an hour. The jowly black guy, I think his name was Harry, offered everyone gum. We all took a piece in silence. I’d picked Harry up two days ago, still in Colorado, still in the sane world. He’d been jocular and agreeable as we snuck around blocked roads and army posts around the Rockies, but he’d fallen silent once we’d made it through the quarantine border. The sight of the Sphere on the horizon made us all less inclined to speak. I’d thought to bring four large containers of gasoline, so we were still driving after most others were walking, and I began to pick people up if they asked. A few pleasantries were exchanged, they’d settle in in the back, and then silence would take over again. None of us had much to say. As of two weeks ago, our stories were the same, and everything that came before really didn’t matter anymore. Everyone was slowly realizing this, but we were the first. Initially we’d been called crazy, people who quit their jobs and decided that the world was ending, people intending to hasten our own destiny. But I knew that if the army had really been trying to stop people from getting to the Sphere, we would never have gotten through. I’d seen an occasional uniform making its way west, too, beyond the Rockies. It was night, and the Sphere was hidden out here in the desert. When the car sputtered and died I steered it to the side of the road and we all got out, groaning on stiff legs. Feeling foolish I put on the hazard lights anyway, and for a moment their static clicking was the only noise in the air. It was freezing, and I pulled my jacket closer. Some of us weren’t wearing much, but they didn’t seem too concerned. After a moment, I shrugged and started walking, pulling on my gloves, staring ahead into the darkness that hid the Beckels Sphere. It had eaten Arizona, and was nibbling the edges of New Mexico, Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and California. Mass evacuations had been implemented, but the death toll was still pretty high, and the cost in money was incalculable. Part of the problem was the spastic nature of the Sphere’s growth: sometimes it would remain stable for hours, not growing at all. Then it would suddenly and quickly swell to twice its size, consuming everything in its path. The Sphere had never shrunk, so what happened to everything inside the Sphere was still a mystery. Theories abounded. One part of the scientific community contended that the very instability that made the Sphere so dangerous now was a Good Sign, that it might indeed someday collapse or fragment. Other scientists grimly came up with calculative models concerning how long it would be before the Sphere either consumed the world or undermined the planet’s structure in some devastating way. A huge brain trust spread across the globe worked frantically to study the situation and discover a solution. The rest of the world either bided its time or was making their way across New Mexico with the rest of us. As the sky lightened and the sun dawned, I realized that I could make it out, a huge wall of dark on the horizon. I felt the familiar squirming in my head, my perception’s revulsion at perfection. Although a great deal of it was underground, now, as it expanded, it was still perfect. A curve so graceful and gradual it didn’t seem to belong on our Earth, otherwise filled with misshapen and damaged stuff. Silent. Seemingly still and static. I looked around, and as the dawn grew lighter I realized there were hundreds of us, walking across the desert towards it. Someone not too far off had a radio playing the news; the Sphere had grown almost ten yards overnight. I was sure that whatever Dr. Beckels had begun so many years ago was coming to fruition, just as I was sure I knew what the Sphere was, when so many of the world’s brilliant men and women were perplexed: the Sphere was nothing. I was a civil servant. I processed forms for the Internal Revenue Service. I sat at a small desk in a grey cubical in a large office building. I got good benefits, mediocre pay. I was bored most of the time. Processing a form had become second-nature for me; I could work without thinking and let my mind wander, which made me restless. My building was located at a strip mall off the highway. At lunch I liked to take walks, but there was no place to walk to, so I just wandered the grounds. The people I worked with were okay, I even liked some of them and had had affairs with two of the women. We were all warily friendly. The forms were black and white, very often smudged or written on so illegibly that translating a single line could take an hour. They were all requests for extensions. That’s what I did, I processed extension requests, people claiming they didn’t have enough time. Sometimes we went out to a bar after work, ordered jaunty drinks with umbrellas in them and tried to get drunk like we had back in school, get crazy, have fun. Usually we just ended up depressed. Sometimes we went out to lunch, too, to a Thai place in the same strip mall. Usually we ate lunch at our desks. Sometimes I ordered Thai food in from the place nearby, which always seemed silly. I wore the same shoes every day. I knew the Sphere. I knew it intimately. We all did. We’d all stared down that black maw in endless dreary smeared gummy days, filled with nothing. We knew the metallic reek of nothing. All of us, me especially. I had nothing, I contributed nothing. I worked a nothing job with no consequences and I had no relationship I couldn’t walk away from and be forgotten from in time. I swam in the lukewarm waters of nothing every day, it had permeated my skin, burned me a little. I knew nothing very well. The Sphere was like coming home. The army sent a helicopter to circle around the Sphere and yell at us. They didn’t try to stop us by force, but the loudspeaker on the helicopter played a message begging us not to throw our lives away. No one knew what really happened when you dove into the Sphere, but they all did know you didn’t come back. You either died, or maybe traveled to another dimension, like through a wormhole. Either way your life on this plane was over. We waved at the helicopter and cheered as we walked. I didn’t know if we were the first group to reach the Sphere or not, but it felt like it. News helicopters were circling around much further off, filming us for the mid-day nets. We waved for them too, smiling. Like most suicides, we were cheerful. I didn’t really think of it as suicide, though; my mind kept using the word because it couldn’t think of a better one, but it didn’t feel exactly right. Certainly I expected everything to end when I entered the Sphere -but I expected the whole world was following soon after, and the whole universe after that. "I used to work here." The man who’s name I thought was Harry said. He’d been keeping pace with me ever since we’d abandoned the SUV. "Well, at the Raven Lab. I knew Dan Beckels. I was a Junior Fellow with the lab, pretty fresh from my Ph.D. If I hadn’t been sick that night, I would have been at the lab when this....happened." I looked at him again. Forties, soft, jowly, light-skinned, close-shaved afro. Looked gentle and well-read, with that squinty look heavy readers get. I pictured him in a lab coat and a pocket protector and it worked well. "Do you know what it is?" "Know?" He shook his head. "I don’t even think Dan knew. But I’ll tell you what I think it is." "Okay." "I think this is the threads of the universe pulling apart. The fabric unraveling. What was here before the universe?" I smiled. "Nothing." "Exactly." He nodded. "That’s what I think. At any rate we’ll find out soon." I looked around as we walked. "It’s gorgeous out here." Harry nodded silently. "It sure is." I wondered if Daniel Beckels, Ph.D., was inside it, like the Wizard of Oz, pulling levers and eating the world on purpose, if he was The Witch King, giggling as he watched our world devoured. If he still existed, if he had ever, if any of us had, or if perhaps this Sphere growing before us was awakening, the coming consciousness of God, rising from slumber, wiping all of us dreams aside. Standing right beside it, a few feet away, I stood, and waited. It was quiet, except for the wind. You didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary, or sense anything, no movement, no energy. As close as we were, the Sphere filled the sky. Before us, the world had disappeared. I stood next to Harry, who I still knew almost nothing about, and just studied it for a few moments. We were probably about fifty feet away, and in the back of my mind I knew that it might swell up at any moment and consume us, and I didn’t want it to happen that way. I wanted to be deliberate about it, choose it, walk into it. "What the hell were you guys working on?" I whispered. Harry shrugged his bulky frame. "A lot of different projects. In a nutshell, we were developing materials which could not naturally exist in this universe." I nodded. "Well, you got one." He nodded. "Or," he said slowly, "the absence of one." I wondered where Denise was. Or Natalie. Or a dozen other people, forgotten and meaningless, like me. Harry chose to just stand and wait for it, however long it took. I shook his hand and turned away, walking slowly but steadily forward, towards the artificial night ahead of me, the flat, black field curving upwards. The army and the news copters had written us off; if we were intent on hastening what had seemingly become inevitable, they were not about to waste sensible people on stopping us. They had their hands full evacuating the entire southwestern United States. As I walked, I thought about everything I could. I considered the crunch of sand beneath my good, solid walking shoes, which were comfortably snug and secure on my feet. I savored the warm wind in my hair and the smell of heat in the dry air. I felt my clothes against my skin, rough and hot and itchy, damp with my own sweat. I listened to the empty, echoing howl of the wind, filling up this huge space. The play of natural light on the reddish dirt, hurting my eyes when it flashed off of glasslike rocks. The Sphere, soothing them with its blankness. The shift of my joints as I walked, the pleasing operation of a familiar and beloved machine. My lungs, filling and emptying. My heart beating strongly in my chest. My smile as I considered the ridiculousness of cataloging my existence when it was all going to stop in a few seconds. Closer in, the wind died down. The sun got blocked by the Sphere and I stood in its shadow, which seemed bright and cheerful compared to the thing’s actual darkness. I expected something, a buzzing, a tickle against my skin, but there was nothing. The air didn’t move except when I did, the sand didn’t shift except when I did, and there was no indication that there was anything on the other side of the darkness before me. I was two feet away. I reached out and my fingers were centimeters from the edge. Without warning, sound, or movement I could discern, my arm was consumed up to the elbow. I gasped. The Sphere had expanded perhaps a foot. I stared at where my arm entered it; was the rest of my arm gone? There was no pain, no blood, and in my confused moment I couldn’t be sure if I could still feel my hand, my fingers. I breathed once, twice. I closed my eyes. I wanted it to be seamless. I wanted perfection. It was like coming home. ======================================== *** VIRTUALLY ARTLESS COMIC *** Mr. MUTE! #5 LET THE LAWYERS HAVE THEIR FUN ======================================== Lawyer jokes are a never-ending source of amusement in today’s society, and no wonder, since its always the lawyers fucking things up, unless it’s the cops. How galling that to get anything done in this country you have to hire some asshole in an expensive suit and listen to them prattle on in latin and -worse- legalese while you sit there with a dumb look on your face. It sort of ruins the whole illusion of us Americans as independent beings who can do anything we want with our trembling, bloodstained hands when we have to hire people to get basic things done, or to defend us against our enemies. Faced with this kind of insult on top of injuries, a lot of Americans have fallen in love with the idea of simplifying the whole process. We have little kits which propose to allow you to write your own will, computer programs which suposedly allow the common man to navigate the legal channels. We also have various movements which propose to grant greater access to the legal world, the most prominent of which proposes to recast the language of the lawyers in simpler terms, plain English, so that anyone could understand. Imagine being able to perform complicated legal manuevers without having to hire a mouthpiece, without having to invest thousands of dollars! Whew, that would be fantastic, wouldn’t it? That would be taking the country back from The Man, who obviously uses the complexity and expense of legal remedy to stop us from using it more effectively, right? Right? Sorry, no. I get up in the morning and go outside for a cup of coffee, look around my neighborhood, and you know what I see? That’s right: indolent, violent morons. Morons who can’t see past their own miserable noses and who never think twice about soiling the pond as long as they’re swimming away from the spot. These are the people who trip and tackle each other for the lame seats on the train every morning, knocking old ladies out of the way. These are the people who don’t have the mental wattage to comprehend recycling. These are the idiots who litter, who urinate in public, who buy Limp Bizkit CDs. If you simplified the legal process, these would also be the people who would be suing you. A lot. Your average human being is dumb as a post, of this I am teeth-grindingly sure. There is no doubt. I’m not exactly Einstein myself, but I tend to be able to cower most of the churls out there with the merest spark of my mighty brain. Aside from being dumb, most people are greedy, sticky-fingered little bastards who would push their own Mothers down the stairs for a few bucks. Doubt me? Stick some cash in Mom’s pockets and let her stand on the top steps for a while, if you dare. You’ll see. The Lawyers are necessary, god bless ‘em. You don’t want your moronic neighbors working on your car’s brakes, or operating on your gall bladder, right? So thank god they can’t easily sue you for millions and garnish your wages until the year 3045 - because they would, because they’re stupid, and because they’re cruel. Don’t worry; I plan to kill them all, someday. I’m smart, but I’m cruel too, baby. ======================================== *** COMMENTARY *** DOTH PROTEST TOO MUCH Getting Hit By Cops Proves, and Changes, Nothing By Jeff Somers ======================================== Astoundingly, there are people left in this world who remain shocked and dismayed that money makes the world go ‘round. They seem to wake up, have an epiphany along the lines of my god, those evil corporate bastards actually run everything, and file out into the street where they are promptly beaten unto coma by police in riot gear. And there they are on TV at night, being carted off by EMS, looks of complete, dazed amazement on their tiny, dimwitted faces. Now, no one here at TIS denies that our Corporate Masters are evil, evil people, or that they are, indeed, our masters. Still we generally regard protestors to be some of the dumbest people taking breath today. The fact that so many of them end up in Emergency Rooms after the cops beat the crap out of them is pretty much The Natural Order of Things, you ask us. Let’s consider the logic here. You wake up one day and realize that money runs the world, so to force change upon the rest of us you march out into the street with a bunch of other penniless radicals and spend the day getting into fights with armed men and women authorized to beat you with clubs, spray you with pepper spray and tear gas, and then lock you up in jail cells. Duh. If the world is run by money, and populated by money-whores, why in the world would you try to change it without money? Because one thing is for sure: the fine, upstanding men and women of the WTO and World Bank who secretly run the show do not give a fuck about a bunch of penniless radicals, and probably laugh their asses off as they sit inside their hotels and office buildings, watching the cops turn your face into something resembling hamburger. ADVERTISING and Campaign Finance are the two currents in the Sea of Cash that move us all around, big mudslides of cash that relocate entire populations at random whims. Protests grab news coverage and could possibly be put under the heading Free Publicity, traditionally considered a useful item. By themselves, however, headlines are empty and of little value. Today’s caffeinated society of dimwitted citizens quickly tire of stories and wander off seeking something new, and forget all about the outrageous conduct of the police, or the complex global issues raised when crowds of penniless radicals shut down a city to protest something like the World Bank. If the protests are going to mean anything, brothers and sisters, aside from raised insurance premiums on your end, you’ve got to couple it with the unholy offspring that the modern marriage of advertising and campaign finance: polls. Polls are the most powerful force available to us, and we’re too dumb to know it. Let’s get two things straight: 1. polls are not objective, they are carefully designed and implemented to skew data in a certain direction, and 2. the American political process is a prisoner to them. The way it works, simply put, is candidates need lots of cash to win elections. Lots of cash. They go begging, borrowing, and whoring around the country looking for the cash, like truffle-hunting pigs. The people with the cash, on the other hand, only want to back winners. Why waste you money? Sure, someone has to lose, but at least you can pick someone with half a chance. But how do you tell? Kazaam! We give you polls. Polls form an interlocking web of opinions that the politician has to pay attention to, narrowing down to the poll which tells him how many of his constituents would vote for him if the election were held that afternoon. Instead of spending your time and, more importantly, money getting beaten, posting bail, and suing various police departments, The Inner Swine officially encourages you to start Polling Companies and start spitting out the sort of skewed, subtle, outrageously inaccurate polls that today’s political process lives on. Flood the world with your own version of the numbers, and the least you’ll do is cast doubt on their numbers. Do it well enough you might even get the politicians to do their little Alfred E. Neuman dance, singing What, me worry? as they completely change their positions faster than Al Gore can suck Satan’s cock for one more year of political viability. And polls are easy! STEP 1. Start with the result you want, work backwards from there in selecting language and questions that will get you there. STEP 2. Find a few hundred mildly retarded American Citizens and record their lumbering, predicable responses to your verbally disingenuous questions. Sure, pollsters are fucking evil shitheads who will be used as kindling in the Lake of Fire, but sometimes you gotta dance with the Devil to get something done in this world. Believe me, you might never get the taste of Satan’s cock out of your mouth, but the first time Dan Rather reports that 83% of Americans would vote Communist rather than elect Gore or Bushie Jr., the warm feeling of having actually accomplished something (without getting kicked in the head, to boot) will make it all worth it. And for those haunting memories of Satan thrusting into you, well, there’s always sleeping pills and booze. That’s how we get by here at TIS, anyways. ======================================== *** COMMENTARY *** My All-Consuming Black Hole of Debt By Jeff Somers ======================================== Friends, I am bad with money. It’s mysterious to me, like an alien lifeform that escapes from my wallet every night to rejoin the mothership. I wake up and overnight I have somehow gained thousands of dollars of debt, with no memory of how it all happened. All day long grim men in starched dark suits show up and cart away my prized possessions to pay off mysterious debts despite my weak protests. The numbers on my bank statements change without warning, and the math never works. Process servers show up at all hours in the strangest places, knocking me down and straddling me while they stuff my pockets with liens and lawsuits, then heartlessly mocking me before leaving me there on the ground. Money mystifies me, and it shows, painfully. I’m a lost cause. Just call Mastercard or my Mother and they’ll tell you that. But I can yet do some good for the rest of the world, I can try to determine where I went wrong and pass this knowledge on to future generations of pathetic losers, pathetic losers who may yet have hope of outpacing their debts. Losers of the world! Unite! And learn from my bitter experience. Before they finally get the welding equipment here to cut through my office door (back in rosier times I had the foresight to make my office law-enforcement proof) let me pass on my hard-won financial wisdom. JEFF’S FIVE RULES OF FINANCIAL HAPPINESS Follow These Rules and I Guarantee You Will Not Be Broke and Spiritually Depleted Like I Am 1. For God’s Sake, Don’t Decide to Drive Cross-Country When You Have No Job and $200 In the Bank. Back in 1994 it became apparent to me that my recent raise at my job to the stunning amount of $7.50 an hour was not going to afford me the lifestyle I had come to covet, so I decided it was time to finally leave my college town and start the rest of my life. It wasn’t a decision I came to easily; while my life with Jeof Vita and Ken West was squalid and pathetic, it was easygoing, and I hadn’t had to work hard in fifteen years at that point. I wasn’t looking forward to a life of adult responsibilities and cares. So, I decided to go out with a bang: I’d drive cross-country in the 1978 Chevy Nova I’d bought from Jeof as one last grand Gen-X gesture before getting a real job and beginning my long, torturous slide towards death. I had about $200 in the bank, but I bought a box of 100 Pop Tarts at a local warehouse store and set off gleefully. I tried my best to live within my poverty-level budget. I bought cheap gas, from places called Cooter’s Fuel Farm or Gene’s Gas-a-hol Emporium (Gene’s motto: almost like real gas!). I slept and washed up in roadside rest stops, along with woozy truckers and easily spooked tourists (upon encountering me in the restroom at 6am, stripped to my skivvies and lathered up at the sink, the typical tourist reaction was to faint). And I ate Pop Tarts, and lots of em. Despite these heroic efforts, I arrived home some months later with a slight case of scurvy and some serious debt, mostly from buying gas on my credit card. I had gone from being a penniless slacker to a penniless slacker known on a first name basis by several national banks. 2. Jesus Christ, Don’t Be a Goddamned English Major. Better Yet, Don’t Go to College, Get a Job and Start Contributing to a 401K When You’re Twelve. Ah, the life of an English Major in college. It’s like this: ------------------------------------- THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL Never go to class | Never wake up before noon | Make up BS for a living for four years and get praise for it | Don’t even realize you’ve graduated until they mail you your degree | Spend months partying to celebrate having no more classes | Spend rest of life evading Collection Agents and treading water above the poverty line with your useless degree | End up drinking Prestone with former Professors behind Dunkin Donuts on Central Avenue. | Get into the Business School now, while you’re young and can still tolerate boredom in life-threatening levels. ------------------------------------- 3. Don’t Touch Demon Alcohol Until You’ve Got A Nest Egg to Blow In the Taverns. When you drink a lot, the thing you never notice, because you’re always drunk, is how damned expensive booze is. Or at least booze that won’t have you pissing blood the next day. Getting that first job and having a real credit card can induce dumb people like myself to utter the most dangerous phrase in the book: this round is on me. Say these magic words and people who have been nursing the same stale beer for six hours suddenly need a good snort of bourbon to get the night going, and before you know it a single round of drinks has cost you $134.00. Emerging from the hospital a few weeks after my cross-country trip, I landed a job paying me something less than I had always envisioned myself making, and believe me, I’ve never been ambitious. In such depressing circumstance, of course, I found myself drinking even more than I had in school, which had previously been thought impossible. I didn’t have any money to spare, of course, and so it all, waking up in a Port Authority restroom two years later with an eviction notice and several unopened credit card statements stuffed in my pockets. If we raised the legal drinking age to, say, 45, I wouldn’t be in this mess right now. 4. Don’t Have Any Friends More Ambitious Than You Are. My ambitions don’t go far beyond beer, sleep, and finding spare change in my couch every now and then, but the people I have somehow found myself mixed up with are slowly evolving into high-rollers and "glitterati" who make more than rudimentary salaries and can even afford to buy enough food to feed themselves on a daily basis. As a result, people who I’ve known for years and with whom I used to have a close understanding are now drifting away from me and becoming alien, incomprehensible people who always want to do expensive things. I just don’t understand them any more. Suddenly, I can’t settle bets with a dinner at McDonald’s -they insist on places with waiters and menus. Suddenly, my suggestion that we bike to our vacation spot and sleep in gas station restrooms is met with scorn and derision. Suddenly, no one wants to be seen with me just because I am wearing Kleenex tissue boxes as "shoes". The whole world has gone mad. In order to maintain my relationships, I have been forced to pony up ridiculous amounts of cash for movies I’d rather have snuck into, accommodation I didn’t need (why pay extra for a bathroom?), and endless celebrations of birthdays, anniversaries, and other such schemes. Trust me: make sure you hang around with people as poor as you are, or you’ll get raped. 5. Don’t Ever Own an Automobile. The automobile in modern day America is a conspiracy of money-suck. Don’t believe me? Then you don’t own one. They get you with parking tickets, speeding tickets, seat-belt tickets, twenty-five-feet-to-the-corner tickets, today-is-Monday tickets, your-car-is-the-wrong-color tickets. They tow you and make you pay for the service. You have to pay huge amounts of money just to get insured so you can drive legally, and when you do get in an accident, the insurance rates go up so high you might as well settle it off the books no matter what it costs you. Plus, the damned things break down and require endless maintenance and repair. None of it, of course, is free. My point here is, cars is expensive. Don’t own one unless you’ve got an extra five thousand dollars sitting unused in a desk drawer all the time. Being able to drive places is nice, but you’ll probably just get a speeding ticket anyway... As I’ve complained in this rag before, I can’t seem to keep my own car on the street, between the friendly cops towin