Fido and Skrit were alone now, and now that you mention it, things were getting, sort of, soft? Melty and ragged around the edges? Yeah, heh heh, it was really starting to take hold.
Skrit said, "That would be the Ontogenene-Six."
"Damn," Fido said.
Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology From: mmcirvin@world.std.com (Matt McIrvin) Subject: Re: Quote of the decade. Date: 6 April 1997
RGRIFFITHS@ubmail.ubalt.eduNOSPAM wrote:
This actually happened to a child in a North Carolina barber shop once. This is probably the origin of your fear. It seems the barber was hung over or something and
- (a) accidentally plugged the hair vacuum into the 220v line, supercharging it and
- (b) sort of blacked out while the kid's mom was next door at McDonald's ordering a cup of boiling hot coffee.
Because the kid's head was still developing and sort of soft, the hair vaccuum performed a partial lobotomy on the kid. Horrible, horrible.
It's true only the way I heard it, it wasn't a hair vacuum, it was a shoe store x-ray machine, and it wasn't a kid's brain, it was the ozone layer. And it pulled six feet of intestines out of Richard Gere!
It was so true Thomas Pynchon wrote a 3,000-page novel about it. It's coming out next week!
Excerpt from Thomas Pynchon's new novel, "Funcoland"!
[page 1,784]
Fido and Skrit were alone now, and now that you mention it, things were getting, sort of, soft? Melty and ragged around the edges? Yeah, heh heh, it was really starting to take hold.
Skrit said, "That would be the Ontogenene-Six."
"Damn," Fido said.
It seems that they are in an endless corridor hung at intervals with No-Pest Strips, an endless trinity of rails to their right attached to the barricade behind which robots with yellow smiley faces toil at scooping heaping ladlefuls of, eergh, what, mashed potatoes? onto trays that move seemingly of their own accord along the rails, trays which, now that they look more closely, are actually pushed by barely visible figures, slight disturbances in the air's index of refraction perhaps, and now the Ontogenene-Six is making them hear some kind of uh yeah barely audible voices, coming from those gray null areas pushing the trays along, trays made of recycled shreds of something that looks oddly familiar, pinkish, and here and there, oh ho ho, one can see a fragment of fingernail, as the voices sing to the big-band beat
You're looking at most
Of the company of ghosts
Of the existentially bereftFor though we're gone
We still try to get along
Till there's very little of us left...
Walking absences, holes in the semiconductor, as puzzled over by Fido back in the stat. mech. class he took in college during his brief sojourns in consensus reality: "but why, prof, why do we treat these things as particles, with masses and charges, when what they really are or perhaps I should say aren't is, dig, things that aren't there?"
"If you do it that way," said the Prof., "the math works out."
So be it: the math doesn't particularly worry about the details.
But isn't it always like that? You think you've escaped the Man, you think you've achieved some sort of center, your own tiny corner of grace, and the next thing you know, you're in some sort of twisted other place of your own making, face to face with something far more serious. Doors of perception. Always keep ahold of Nurse for fear of finding something worse. Nemo me impune lacessit.
"Think I'll get me some mashed potatoes," sez good old Fido, as he starts to become transparent.
"Guess we've got no choice," Skrit skritches out.
But that's Fido and Skrit. Faced with possibilities beyond any fevered imagining from Sunday school, the potential for horror, transformation, rebirth or limbo, the partition function of a Fermi gas, they soldier on, unaware.
-- "The estimable Mr. McIrvin's TV viewing habits have never been what could be termed 'respectable.' [...] When Matt McIrvin says something like '...one of the most incoherent hours of TV I've ever seen in my life,' take him SERIOUSLY." - "Gharlane of Eddore"