This is probably one of the most obscure, inside, and altogether incomprehensible posts I've ever written. Fortunately I have seen fit to provide linked annotations. Enjoy!
This is probably one of the most obscure, inside, and altogether incomprehensible posts I've ever written. Fortunately I have seen fit to provide linked annotations. Enjoy!
Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology From: mmcirvin@world.std.com (Matt McIrvin) Subject: Re: The nature of Kibology Date: Wed, 19 Mar 1997 22:17:04 GMT
Andrew Hime <hime@kali.wf.net> wrote:
Feel good that at least someone out there has heard of the Shop Assistants... they only used their first names, their records are long out of print, and they sounded like JAMC. Oh, my friend Chris likes them.
When I found out that both President Clinton and the "Gaseous Wiener" from "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" were physically incapacitated, I felt that it was time for me to make my move. I watched sixteen hours of "Pinky and the Brain" for moral support, then took out a billboard that said
THE "SPICE GIRLS" WANT YOU
TO ACCEPT ME AS YOUR LORD AND MASTER!
SINCERELY,
YOUR PRESENT AND FUTURE RULER,
MATT McIRVIN
And then it had a photo of me with an evil grin, and the part of the photo where my eyes were supposed to be had been torn out and replaced with a picture of evil red glowing eyes, because I figured that would get me the support of those crazy kids who listen to that "hard rock and roll," and that would cover everyone who didn't like the "Spice Girls." And below that it said
"TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF
THE REST OF YOUR LIFE." -UNKNOWN
THIS MESSAGE COURTESY OF
McIRVIN COMMUNICATIONS
Since the billboard was prominently visible from Porter Square, where attention would be attracted to it by that red windmilly sculpture thing, I figured that I'd be universally acclaimed as world leader within a couple of days.
Sadly, it was not to be. I rode back to Porter Square a couple of days later to check on the reaction. On the escalator, I was so deep in thought that I failed to notice the sticker that somebody had pasted on the big bump sticking out of the wall:
WARNING! BUMP-WILL-KNOCK-YOU-OFF!
STOP-CLONING-PLANET-JUPITER!
RAISE-EVIL-DEAD-ARNOLD-TOYNBEE!
DILUTE! OK!
The bump, a gentle wave of pink marble, hit me squarely in the forehead, knocking me clear into an alternate reality. In the process, I forgot Spider-Man's secret identity.
No sooner had I picked myself up off the comb plate of the escalator than I noticed that the marble wasn't pink any more; it was sepia. The sky visible through the glass ceiling was sepia. Everyone on the escalator was sepia. They were waddling up the escalator unusually rapidly, and they all wore handlebar mustaches, bowler hats (except for a few straw boaters), bell-bottomed pants, and huge lapels! I myself had one of the straw hats, a pinstriped bell-bottomed suit, and a completely useless cane. My eyelashes felt huge.
"This world,"
I thought to myself in swash Bookman on a black title card,
"seems to be a camp-nostalgic delusion from 1975! Whatever shall I do?"
I tried to cry for help, but all I could hear was a manic rendition of Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag." I waddled in double-time to the door and emerged onto the street at what used to be Porter Square. My billboard was nowhere to be seen; the street layout was unchanged, seemingly modern, but Model Ts moved spastically up and down Massachusetts Avenue. Occasionally one would halt, spew steam, and emit a fan-waving woman in a hoop skirt and a guy in straw boater and handlebar mustache, who would gesture angrily and bang on the hood.
The place was clotted with barbershops and ice-cream parlors. There were six different medicine shows going on around the square. Each one had an oily-looking individual with a glass bottle of miracle elixir, and a man in a striped singlet lifting spherical barbells marked "1000 LBS."
"What,"
said my next title card,
"would Philip K. Dick do in this situation?"
The answer came to me immediately: He would, of course, look for a can of Ubik. I figured I would be able to buy one from one of the medicine shows, or at least Elixir of Ubique, which would be a step in the right direction.
Before I could get across the street, though, the Joplin stopped, there was an ominous piano flourish, and a siren started blaring. The medicine shows packed up and the crowds converged on one of the ice-cream parlors. It was somebody's birthday at Farrell's.
I decided to take advantage of my new-found ability to walk at twice normal human speed, albeit with a strange waddle. I set out toward Tufts University in the hopes that the Sepia Zone, like flesh-incinerating green warp core plasma, was confined to low altitudes. As I walked, color gradually returned to the world. I followed the local ground slope upward until I was high atop the campus hill in Medford.
I realized that the Model Ts were nowhere to be seen. In fact, there were no cars at all on the streets. In fact, the street ran out about halfway between Davis Square and the Tufts campus. Once I got to the top of the hill (no longer able to waddle at double speed), the reason became clear. There was a headstone-like marker next to the library, reading
THIS MARKER HAS BEEN
PLACED
BY THE BABSON GRAVITY RESEARCH
FOUNDATION
TO COMMEMORATE THE DISCOVERY
OF A SEMI-INSULATOR
IN ORDER TO HARNESS GRAVITY
AS A FREE POWER
AND REDUCE AIRPLANE ACCIDENTS
ANNO DOMINI 1961
I looked out toward Boston, and realized that the sky above the city was filled with flying vehicles and people. Evidently anti-gravity had been discovered in 1961 by the Babson Institute! Judging from the scene, it must have gotten a lot better than the "semi-insulator" described on the stone, in the intervening 36 years.
Directly above me, some students were bobbing around and tossing a Frisbee to each other. They must have been wearing personal anti-gravity belts, or something.
But... what of the Sepia Zone? I could still see it: there was a flickery yellow haze cradling the bases of the skyscrapers, and occasionally there were black flashes that must have been distant title cards. In fact, I was feeling distinctly sepia myself; my mustache, which had returned to its normal size, was growing again and curling up at the edges...
"Of course!"
said the title card which filled my field of vision.
"One can't do anything gravitational without messing with time somehow. Babson's gravity insulator, however it works, must send whatever lies below it into an era that never even existed!"
Because of all the text on the title card, I was immobilized for quite some time.
Those kids above me-- they must have been pulling a vile prank on me, sending me back into the Sepia Zone by hovering over my head. I could hear faint laughter over the strains of "The Entertainer," which seemed to double with speed and insistence every second. The more I tried to reason my way out the predicament, the more words showed up in swash Bookman on those damned title cards, and the longer I had to sit there as the sepia fog filled my mind with visions of tall sundaes and barbershop quartets singing "Sweet Adeline"... I was pinned to the ground by the razor-sharp spikes of my increasingly anachronistic lapels, and my mustache seemed to be curling into my ears, into the center of my brain...
They must have carried me to a soda counter somewhere in Central Square, and set me down on a stool in front of a tall glass of sarsaparilla. Eventually I got a steady job, painting signs that read
"PAINLESS DENTIST, NO COCAINE USED."
It gets kind of monotonous after a while, eating nothing but root-beer floats and getting blitzed on patent elixir. But it's life of a sort, and until those gangs of anachronizing hoodlums stop attacking the Zoners whenever they go up a stairway or a hill, it's all I've got. I'm afraid to use those old-timey elevators; I've read too much Phil Dick.
-- More Matt McIrvin than you need! http://world.std.com/~mmcirvin/
The major theme of the rest of the story is the craze for Gilded Age imagery that possessed some people for a few years in the late 1960s and early 1970s (before they decided that the 1950s were cooler because of "Happy Days" and "Grease"). Somehow the vicious and mercenary late 19th/early 20th century was sufficiently long-gone that people could safely imagine it to have been an innocent time (and therefore view it with the mingled nostalgia and ironic smirk reserved for imagined innocent times), populated with genteel folk in jaunty jalopies who spent all their time at ice-cream parlors and quaint medicine shows.
The craze particularly manifested itself in certain animated cartoons, sepia-toned advertising images, and, most egregiously, Farrell's ice-cream parlors, whose entire interior design attempted to hearken back to imagined halcyon days of yore. The bell-bottoms and giant lapels are supposed to be 1970s anachronisms; the enormity of 1970s lapels fascinates me for some reason. Back
This is only a slight alteration of an actual 1961 marker on the Tufts campus, which I discovered on that same walk-- the real marker says that it is to "remind students of the blessings forthcoming" from an imagined "semi-insulator."
The Babson institute is a unique, bizarre footnote in the history of science. It was founded by a rich, eccentric entrepreneur who decided that, through trial and error, he would discover an anti-gravity substance analogous to H. G. Wells' Cavorite. The institute tried thousands of substances (without success) over a period of decades. Martin Gardner made fun of it in his book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science; personally I think he was a bit too mean-- we need a few people who are willing to bet on really long shots.
Anyway, the story has an ending that Gardner could never have foreseen: Mainstream gravity theorists like Hawking and Penrose started entering the organization's annual essay contest, and now it's a respectable patron of research into gravity and cosmology. The Tufts marker still stands. Back