Unknown posted:

Wow. Great topic, Skrewloose. I have so many memories of watching “Fantasy Island” as a very young boy. It was like the illicit money shot that followed the hour-long tease of “Love Boat” on Friday nights. Because of those memories, of course, I would have to go with Ricardo Montalban. I actually have yet to see Malcom McDowell in the role, however, so to be perfectly fair to him as well I have to admit that his English drollery and barely controlled, simmering prole rage might have won me over, had it only the chance.

Ah, so, what would be my fantasy? I know precisely what my fantasy would be.

I would receive Eighty Thousand Dollars.

Now, as we all know, “Fantasy Island” was never simply about a person experiencing his or her fantasy. No. It was about a guest arriving at this mysterious “Island of Fantasies” to receive what was clearly some kind of highly experimental and probably illegal form of psychotherapy to which they obviously hadn’t given any sort of informed consent. That aside, every guest on the island came away from their “vacation” having learned what mistaken insecurity lead them to think that their life was somehow lacking and thereby giving rise to their wish-fufillment fantasies in the first place .So that we can all more fully appreciate the “Fantasy Island” dynamic at play in my fantasy, I need to give you some of the back story that surrounds my need for the $80k.

It’s very simple.

I had a brilliant idea. A brilliant idea. All I needed to bring it to fruition was $80k.

Although I’m still a little leery of someone stealing my idea, I think I can lay it out on the table for you guys in sufficiently vague terms; I think I’ve found a simple way to employ an off-the-shelf laser commonly used in fertility clinics to localize an electroporative field on the surface of a Human ovum, allowing rapid influx of Ca2+ through the zona pellucida, which should hopefully in turn cause the cytoplasmic re-arrangements that should lead to proper formation of the primitive groove, thereby overcoming the fear of teratological complications that have heretofore plagued research into human parthenogenesis. Or, in other words, for $80k, I’m 90% sure that I can bring a genuinely parthenogenic human embryo to term. Yes, that’s right; I could create a human ovum that would grow to be a perfect clone of its “mother.” Now, once I realized this, I immediately set about finding a way to raise money. Now, there’s no way in hell that the NSF is going to give $20k to an unaffiliated researcher, and certainly not one that caused that fiasco in ‘97, so there was obviously no chance of getting the money from them. (Also, there’s that whole “unaffiliated researcher” part, which involves some arguments that are better off not being rehashed, and also as a tire iron, a full set of broken metacarpals, and a fully dismantled ABI 973 Sequencer) So where could I possibly get this money?

From you guys, of course.

I could easily imagine the obvious responses that a request for donations would elicit. Somebody would say “Use Google.” Some hemorrhoidal hard-case would launch himself into a tirade that would go just like this: “When I was your age, I funded my illegal scientific research by working my way up from fry cook to burger chef. Now, it wasn’t ‘fun’ and it wasn’t ‘glamorous,’ but if you really want to accomplish something in life you need to be willing to make certain sacrifices, sometimes even including your own dignity and blah blah blah buh-blah blah buh-blah buh-buh-blah.” First of all, if you’re doing discovery-driven science, like I am, you’re in a race, and there’s no point in being in a race unless you’re in it to win it. Can any of you name the first mammal cloned from a differentiated adult cell?

Yeah, if you guessed “Dolly,” you are correct. Now, can any of you name any of the sheep, cattle, pigs, and mice cloned subsequently in the same way? No. Of course not. Do you see my point? If I were to work as a fry chef for ten years, I’ll be beaten to the punch by some panty-waisted NIH apparatchik who’ll use the technique to make droves of extra mice that he can kill through the “painless” method of cervical dislocation while he beats off furiously under his soapstone bench.

Don’t think I’m coming to you guys just because I’m too lazy to seek out funds on my own. No. It’s not like I haven’t done absolutely everything I could possibly do to get that kind of money on my own. I’ve submitted applications to numerous different IVF Shared-Risk Financial Programs, both under my name, and under the names of the two young women that are going to help me in this endeavor (one donating eggs, and the other obviously serving as a surrogate). Now, the applications of the first young woman were all rejected because of her already large and outstanding medical school loans, and the applications of the other young woman were effectively disqualified on account of a string of arrests she had racked up for solicitation and flagrant public indecency. When my applications were rejected, for no reason at all as far as I could tell, I called each of the financial institutions only to hear the same lame excuse each time: Nobody wants to fund infertility treatment for single, unmarried men.

Well, gently caress.

Somebody could have told me that before I wasted all that effort applying. The process was a lot of work, because just to submit the application I had to submit a sperm sample to demonstrate that I was genuinely oligospermic. Since I lucked out (In that my mother was a vegetarian, and therefore didn’t imbibe much of the bio-accumulating and highly efficacious estrogen mimic and pollutant, 2,3,7,8- tetrachlorodibenzo-para-dioxin, which effectively incapacitates the developing seminiferous tubules of any unlucky XY fetus that happens to cross it’s path, thus leading to the amply documented epidemic of infertility among American males born between the late fifties and the present day) and have a slightly above normal sperm count, it was obvious that I was going to have to specially prepare a sample of my sperm that had been artificially weakened. This isn’t exactly impossible, but it’s not trivially easy, either.

First of all, have you ever tried to cum in a 750-microliter eppendorf tube? It’s not easy. It’s like trying to cum into a straw. You wouldn’t believe how many attempts failed before I figured out the right way to do it, which is to put it in the reservoir tip of a smaller-than-usual condom (which holds the conical bottom of the tube surprisingly well) and make sure you get a really, really tight fit. Even then, difficulties still remained to be surmounted; it’s pretty difficult to reach a sexual climax when you have what feels like a toothed lamprey trying to suck your urinary meatus inside-out.
I got myself out of this dilemma through the application of a very clever regimen of highly disciplined operant conditioning. Every night during animal planet’s thrice-monthly shark week, I would religiously watch each program with my thumb on the VCR’s record button, waiting for images of lampreys attached to sharks. I was very quickly able to assemble a 43-minute long videotape consisting of nothing but exciting, pulse quickening scenes of sharks shooting through the deep dangling long, black lampreys (My enthusiasm may sound a little odd, but if you were to see this video, I am perfectly confident that you would agree.)

Equipped with this behavior modification tool, I initialized an intense daily visualization program in which, while viewing the video, I taught myself to see my penis as a silky-smooth ruthlessly-efficient 80-million year old predator stalking the seaweed veldt of the Pacific basin. Suddenly, a trio of lampreys appear and attach themselves to me! At first, I am horribly scared! My little shark brain doesn’t know what to do! I swim as fast as I can, trying desperately to throw off the lampreys that seem to feed off my pain, and suck and suck and suck on my flesh! I swim so hard that I nearly exhaust myself, slowing down, sinking down, while those little, circle shaped rows of teeth nibble on my sensitive dorsal regions, sending arcs of strangely exhilarating electric pain up and down my sleek, aerodynamic frame.

After approximately another week of this training I was not only capable of overcoming the discomfort of the eppendorf tube impinging on the delicate bulb of my glans, I was even finding somewhat arousing. Truth be told, it was actually difficult for me to return to what most of you would consider the “normal” procedure. (Some of you are probably asking, “But adaptive, why didn’t you use the established technique for acquiring sperm samples from men who are either dead, uncooperative, severely neurologically impaired, suffering from a catastrophic vertebral injury, or are actually horses? That technique of course being Electroejaculation (EEG), which involves the rectal insertion of an electrical probe that looks something like an electric hair-curler, followed by the application of increasing electric current until the probe either induces ejaculation or heats itself to the point that it threatens to inflict first-degree burns on the entirety of the anal cavity.
To answer your question, I want to be clear: I assure you that the reason I didn’t employ the obviously appropriate method had nothing to with any unscientific, Freudian phobias about being anally penetrated. In fact, if there’s one thing I look for in a potential female companion, it’s an extremely advanced case of penis envy. The real reason that I did not use this clearly superior method, in addition to the fact that EEG would be more expensive, is that I have a pathological fear of allowing probes explicitly designed to discharge electricity into my body. This may seem cowardly, but if your third grade school nurse was named “Benny” and walked around in 5-inch-high rubber-platform shoes attractively complemented by thigh-high PVC boots, and one of the little games you played with “her” resulted in your being rushed to the emergency room in a state of cardiac arrest, you wouldn’t consider this cowardice either, goddammit. )

In any case, once I had a high-throughput method for producing suitably sterile specimens, reducing the sperm content was a simple matter of dropping the eppendorf tubes into my microcentrifuge, cranking the speed up to 20,000 rpm, and waiting a few minutes. It was fairly easy to calibrate the temporal duration of the centrifuge runs to produce the desired results. Running a series of samples for consecutively decreasing time intervals I was able to determine precisely how long it took to remove all the sperm from the ejaculate. I could tell all of the sperm had been removed from the ejaculate when the contents of the liquid in the tube changed from being a uniformly milky white to perfectly clear, with all of the sperm congealed in a snot colored pellet affixed to the outer side of the tube. Then it was a simple matter of deciding how much sperm I wanted to include, and I opted for way under the clinical definition of oligospermia, somewhere around 5 million sperm per ml. Given that I already knew my sperm count was just above 20 million per ml, I just spun 75% of the sperm out of the semen. Simple. Finally, I made sure the pH was still somewhere between 7.2-8.0 , and that everything else was kosher. Then I thought that I merely needed to hide three of the tubes on my person, sign in at the fertility clinic, wait for the nurse to take me back to the appropriate room, and then spend ten minutes glancing with utter disgust at banal tit-porn. Then, uncap the tubes, push the “call” button, and voila! I would be proud recipient of instant “Infertility Financial Risk Insurance.” (Basically a kind of extremely low-interest loan that can be used for whatever kind of nefarious purpose you can imagine, provided you get a doctor’s signature at some point. Believe me, the doctor-patient relationship is the greatest money-laundering loophole ever created by man.)

But as you already know, all of this work was thwarted on account of my marital status. I was disqualified before I even left the gates. Before you raise the question of why I didn’t just marry one of my two female accomplices, you should know that I tried, and that neither of the comely young ladies would consent to enter even a sham marriage with me, for reasons that will become apparent before the conclusion of this post. (Actually, it won’t, because I’m not going to reveal the identities of my coconspirators. Take that, CIA. Just so that you know, however, the reasons that were tendered to me as explanations, as opposed to the real reasons, were that they were “busy that day, and couldn’t get to the courthouse.”) So before I had even started, I was out the $50 I spent for single sterile bag of eppendorf tubes, as well as a great deal of time. Despite all that work, I had gained nothing of value, and learned nothing of value, other then the fact that a person can buy an entire bucketful of 2 to 8 inch lampreys at any adequately stocked fishing store, and that if you are prepared to supply an average sized aquarium filled with a thick stew of water, sand, and dirt, as well as a constant, willing blood supply, they make well-behaved pets. (Also, as a trivial aside, during my research on consolidated human ejaculate I read in a book that if a person were to hypothetically eat small chunks of dried and concentrated sperm, it would theoretically taste almost exactly like those red-dyed pistachios you can buy at sporting events and county fairs. I would give you the title of that book, but I lost it.)

Okay, so now that I’ve established that I did everything I could to acquire this money on my own (Note: I also attempted to attain the money through both credit card fraud and small-business-loan fraud. The long-term consequences of these actions are negligible (in taking away my right vote, the fuckers have done me a favor, frankly) and I don’t see them hindering the project in any way whatsoever. (Technically I need to register with the local authorities upon crossing state lines, but not if they don’t know that I’ve crossed state lines.)), I’ll sketch out the reasons that I need a whole $80k:

First of all, the only possible location that we could hope to realize the aims of this project without incurring certain potentially hazardous legal complications is Ghana. Ghana makes extraordinarily liberal provisions under its reproductive law, primarily as a result of the fact that has no reproductive law whatsoever. Also, it’s the safest nation in sub-Saharan Africa, and how shall I say this? Sub-Saharan Africa is not a place where health inspectors suddenly show up to make sure that all your tools have been properly autoclaved and all of your isotopes are kept in clean rooms. So it affords us a little bit of leeway in pursuing creative approaches to the problems at hand, and also has real benefits with respect to our bottom line, and as prospective investors I know that you value that.
So, in a stroke of incredible luck, the absolute safest place in Ghana, the Labadi Pleasure Beach, located just outside Accra, actually still has a number of yearly-leased properties available. I’ve spoken to a nice Ghanian man, Victor Kisseih, about securing a lease for a brand new, three bedroom house intentionally built for westerners. He said that he’d hold it for me as long as he could, but that I need to confirm my intent to commit to the lease soon, because shortly into the new year, a fresh crop of those pretentious loving peace core tourists will swoop into the real estate market and spoil it. Also, I told him I was Kenji Furuya, frontman of the world-famous J-rap group, Dragon Ash. (Dragon Ash is huge in Ghana. Huge.) It’s $4800 for a year, which is ample time to complete the entire program, if everything goes according to plan. But I need that money soon. Mr. Kisseih’s number in Ghana is (021)248404, if you wish to call him to confirm that I’ve already set this up, but for the sake of Mitochondrial Eve, don’t loving outbid me and don’t tell him I’m not actually Kenji Furuya; I have a feeling that could queer the whole deal.

Ok, so I’m explaining where all of this money is going to go. Well, that’s actually kind of boring. Just know that the only reason that any of this is even remotely possible for the absurdly low price of $80k is that, in addition to my working for free, I also bring to the table a fairly complete set of gynecological instrumentation. Over the years, I’ve built up an impressively complete collection, everything I think we could possibly need, from lateral vaginal retractors, to uterine vulsellum forceps, to some really ticklish-looking endocervical brushes, to uterine dressing forceps, sponge forceps, Russian tissue forceps, uterine tenaculum hooks, to pretty much all the basics you really need to be able to say: “I’m not technically a gynecologist, but I could probably solve your problems in a pinch.”
(As an aside, for any potential hobbyists out there, you should know that you can get a surprisingly diverse array of gynecological equipment for extremely low prices, provided you are willing to purchase it used, and not to ask any questions about where it came from. In fact, much of this equipment is so cheap, that even if you weren’t planning on performing unlicensed gynecological procedures, you owe yourself to look into acquiring some this fine German quality merchandise if for no reason other than to have them available as conversation starters, or possibly for purposes of self-defense.)

Now, the obvious fund raising benefits of employing the once-famous former goon known as “Random Lady” as the surrogate are off-set by the need to acquire a few pieces of equipment that might otherwise not be essential were we not to use her as the host. For starters, given her history, in addition to all of the obvious transvaginal ultrasound equipment that I already have squirreled away in my closet, I’d also like to purchase (or at least come into possession of) a laproscope. Ideally, I’d also like to have the ability to produce high-resolution hysterosalpinograms, as well, but given that the radioisotopes needed for producing hysterosalpinograms are not the easiest of contrabands to be transported, I realize that’s probably unrealistic. In any case, these tools will help me rule out any physical abnormalities in the reproductive system that “Random Lady” may be at a higher risk of due to uh, or that is, that may have been induced by infectious agents, gross physical trauma, and extreme self-abuse. You know, the regular. Also, since the endocrinological assays that are going to have to be run daily to monitor her human chorionic gondaotropin levels will require that I work in close proximity to batches of her fresh urine, you guys are going to have to spring for a battery of hepatitis shots. No, Seriously. Finally, I’m going to need test kits to screen her urine for metabolites of drugs of abuse. That may seem overly harsh, because presumably if she were to consent to carry what might be the most important fetus in the history of the planet, she wouldn’t risk it by ingesting any drugs. Still, just as a precaution, I think it’s worth it.

(Let me tell you a quick story that should clarify my insistence on this point. The first and only time I flew out to see her, we had planned to drive to the Grand Canyon. I rented a car and swung by her dorm around eight in the morning. I pick her up, she’s beautiful, smiling, filled with sparkly goodness, and when she hops in the car, she tells me that before we leave for the Canyon, she has to do an hour of volunteer community service at a clinic over on Indian School Road. I figure, no problem, I’ll just spend that hour with myself, busily avoiding scorpions. I have no idea where Indian School Road is, so she directs me onto West Grand, and we get there pretty quickly. I pull into a parking lot, pay the guy on the bench the entry fee, and prepare to wish her luck, when she tells me there’s no problem with me tagging along to the clinic. I’m pretty happy about this, because I think that maybe I can help with community service and prove what a nice guy I am.

We cross the road, and walk down to the front of the clinic. There are two benches outside on either side of the entrance. We each take a bench. Nothing happens for five minutes. I’m confused, but I figure that if I wait quietly for long enough, I’ll figure out what’s happening. A minute later, a person comes out of the windowed doors, the first person that had come out while we were waiting. The guy is medium height, already has his cigarette and lighter in hand, obviously planning to light up immediately. He’s got a shaved head (quite possibly to conceal the early stages of male pattern baldness) a cow-style nose ring, and wears a wife beater that reveals not only the beginnings of a pot belly, but also a number of tattoos that must have looked really cool in 1991. Everything about him screamed “I was one of Fugazi’s original fans, but never embraced the straight-edge ethic; I am now slowly attempting to attain a modicum of respectability.”

Just as he comes out, “Random Lady” hops up off the bench, right into his path, and says in this unbelievably winsome tone of voice, “Can I give you a kiss?” The guy eyes her up for a second, eyes me up for a second, and says “Sure, why not?” He leans forward for a little peck, and “Random Lady” goes up on her toes, grabbing the back of his head with both hands, and just goes to town on him.

When she came up for air, the guy laughed, “We should party some time.”

“I’ll see you around, sugar,” She said to him, waving goodbye, and looking at me with all the smiles and pride of job well done. I started to feel this pit open up in my stomach, and even though it was about 80 degrees out, my skin is suddenly totally covered in goosebumps.

A few more minutes pass, and a woman comes out. She’s short, late forties, wearing a Harley-Davidson T-shirt with the Harley logo severely worn, and although an obvious brunette she’s suffering from a peroxide job that reminds me of the decade-old yellow popcorn you buy at the movies. Her face is a topographical map of wrinkles, presumably a result of spending a lifetime on the back of a motorcycle. She’s wearing those bright neon mirrored wrap-around Raybans and the sort of oddly-pleated acid washed jeans that pull the waist tight, but produce a strange sort of distended bun thing just below it. She has these marks on her lips that look like burn scars.

“Random Lady” does her little thing again; “Hey, excuse me, would like a kiss this fine morning?”

The lady spread her lips broadly, presumably intending to smile, but instead revealing a gap from which all of her incisors had fled. She says, toothlessly, “Shure, honey bring it on over, don’t be shy!” “Random Lady” cradles the woman’s head, just as before, but this time, the stranger-lady grabs “Random Lady’s” rear end and gives it a solid squeeze, eliciting a happy squeal from her.

As soon as that happened, I reverted to the all-purpose-plan-for-hopeless-emergencies-and-certainly-impending-dooms, the plan I had hit upon in the process of barely surviving that hellish little acid trip I suffered through as an eight-year-old when that dirty loving pedophile dosed my skim milk. This is what I learned: Sit quietly, rock very slowly, and wait for death. Once your neuroendocrine system lets you drop into the plan, time begins to simultaneously speed up and slow down. Your senses become acutely focused, and everything you experience takes on a richness that it wouldn’t ordinarily have. The way that man smelled of nicotine. The moistness of that dead lump of chewing tobacco. The heat coming off of the concrete. The looks of surprise and satisfaction that came across all those men’s faces when she had finished kissing them. The way that look gave way to one of prurience. The way “Random Lady’s” exquisite little pink tongue licked the lips of those people, like a puppy dog, and lustily licked her own lips, like a little girl finishing her first illicit taste of crème-de-mint.

I watched a parade of people come out of the clinic, although I thankfully forgot almost all of them. Probably the worst was the mother. She was the only one that didn’t want to kiss “Random Lady”. The suppleness of the flesh on cheeks indicated she was young, probably about 22. Bags under her eyes, and a certain haggardness that permeated her made her look much older. She was modestly dressed, wearing a dress-suit combo that seemed at least a decade out of style.

She was holding hands with an adorable little munchkin girl, probably about three, wearing a pleasantly poofy flower-patterned dress that had probably once been donated to a church and wearing her honey-colored hair up in pigtails sprouting out of each side of her head. They, the pigtails, were wrapped with those elastic band plastic ball combination things that I don’t know the name for. They’re not barrets; those are the folding kind. Her story seemed pretty clear. She was that sort of beautiful neighborhood sweetheart that wanted nothing more than to settle down as soon as possible with the neighborhood stud. She’d probably had the kid at 18 or 19, slowly got fed up with her moronic, provincial husband constantly demanding that she mother him, and realized there was a much larger world out there, one that her childish husband was not equal to.

“Hi!” she squeaked, in the friendliest way possible. “Can I give you a kiss?”

The mother demurred, feigning business, so “Random Lady” says; “Would a dollar sweeten the deal?” And she flipped a folded dollar between her fingers. The woman looks at her suspiciously, then leaned over to dispense a quick little peck while she snatched at the dollar. “Random Lady” was having none of that, of course; she grabbed her head and held on for all she was worth. The woman’s eyes were open, darting around nervously the entire time that “Random Lady” was forcing her tongue down her throat. The little girl, all angelic sweetness and light, is suddenly afraid, and pulls on her mother’s hand and says:

“Mommy?”

“Mommy, do you know that woman?”

At any given moment, when I think about that horrible hour on that bench, I can hear those words exactly as she spoke them, in a little voice, rising with a swelling fear.

“Mommy, do you know that woman?”

Like she thought something was going to take her mommy away forever.

“Mommy, do you know that woman?”

Like she’s scared she’s done something to make her mother angry.

“Mommy, do you know that woman?”

Like she’s suddenly even more lost in a world that was already far too complicated.

I looked away from the mother and daughter; I felt the sudden crazy fear that if I watched them for an instant longer I would lose my immortal soul, something I would consider laughable under ordinary circumstances. Turning away from them, I looked through the windowed doors into the building. The doors opened into an atrium that appeared to be shared by three different offices. I looked at the doors to each office. One was marked Radiography, but the lights were out. One was markedPediatrics, but the lights in that office were also out. The lights in the last office were on. It must have been the only office that opened this early.

Addiction Treatment & Recovery

That’s when I understood.

These people were all heroin addicts. They were coming in for their morning maintenance swig of methadone. “Random Lady” was sucking out the residual methadone, mixed with whatever sort of food and mucus was stuck in their teeth. I felt dizzy and flashed on a story about methadone clinics on 60 minutes I’d seen when I was a kid. About how they were run for profit. About how the methadone was artificially orange-flavored. That’s what she’s tasting. She’s tasting oranges.

When about an hour was up, I picked my soul up off of the concrete and followed her, as if in a dream, back to the rental car. We both got in, and as I was about to turn the engine over, I looked at her and, as if it made no difference in the world, asked: “Why do you do that?” She replied instantly:

“I just like to help people get their days off to a good start,” all sunny and chipper and full of good cheer towards her fellow man. I look at her sharply, like I’m not buying it, and ask again her again.

“No, really. Why do you do that?” She crosses her arms and leans back in her seat. She scowls at me like I’m some sort of pissy old fogey.

“College isn’t getting any cheaper, and neither is heroin.” she says, angry at me for my unspoken accusations.

I never asked her about it again.

I’m pretty sure that the trauma triggered some sort of psychosomatic blindness because I don’t even remember seeing the Grand Canyon, even though I’m pretty sure we made it there. Anyway, the point of that whole sorry story is that Methadone metabolite EIA tests come in packets of 5 for $175. Over nine months that’s going to come out to more than nine thousand dollars, I think. Yeah, see? $80k is a loving bargain man, believe it.)

Ok, I guess that brings us to the other half of the equation:

The donor.

“Differential.”

Now, I imagine that the first question most of you want to ask me regarding “Differential” doesn’t concern the considerable technical prowess and biochemical sophistication that she brings to the project, but rather what the realistic odds are on getting her into bed with “Random Lady.”

I’m not going to tell you what those odds are. Not yet.

I will tell you that “Differential” was not selected because I thought the sight of “Random Lady” would have dropping her trousers. No, she was selected for other qualifications. Now, I’ve only met “Differential” once, but you only have to talk to her for five minutes to know that she’s the sort of person Maslow wrote about : a true self-actualizer. People like her are like those runners that compete in hurdle events, commonly referred to as “Hurdlers,” I believe. For them, life is clearly delineated, marked with obstacles that can be identified, measured, planned for, practiced for, and ultimately effortlessly cleared. People like this develop a sort of fearlessness. They may, sometimes, perceive themselves a being driven by internal fears, but they banish those thoughts into bottomless pit of eternally repressed emotions that eventually reaches critical mass and propels them to become the fiery suns of all-conquering megalomaniacal psychosis. More important than the fact that they’re never more than an emotional supernova away from either suicide or ubermenschen,they never turn down a challenge. That’s the one thing that is always true about these people: They’re game.

Ask them to help you swipe a box of cookies from the grocery store, just for fun, and they will never talk to you again. Ask them if it’s possible to get a -70C freezer out of a room that was built around it, get it down four flights on the service elevator, get it on the loading dock and into a stolen U-Haul trailer and off campus in the fifteen minutes between the time the night watch leaves and the time the morning security habitually shows up late, and they will say: “Yes. I will show you how.”

This is the devil-may-care bravado that we need behind us to achieve victory. This is why “Differential” was willing to come aboard and assist with the project. She knows that we all get only one crack at this marble block, and we have to make it count. I mean, gently caress those billionaires trying to circle the earth in a balloons. That’s penny-ante poo poo. You know those fuckers must be not only totally impotent, but also thoroughly brain-dead. I mean, never have there been men as rich as those that presently walk the Earth desperately seeking something to purchase so that they can inscribe their stupid name on it in an attempt to quell their fears of mortality, and never in the history of the world have there been so many avenues of research in which a suitably fat stack and a willingness to operate outside the normal strictures of peer-review could produce so much of meaningful, lasting importance, and what do these fuckers do? They try and win some race straight out of the seventeenth-loving century. I mean, c’mon Mr. Richard “Virgin” Bancroft or Ashcroft or whatever your loving name is, you want a thrill? You want to know you’re alive? Spend twenty minutes with me in a pitch-black room. I’ll chew right through your goddamn abdominal cavity if it means getting to the cool million you keep in that rectal money tube so you keep lodged up your rear end so you can wear that great big yellow-toothed Limey “I’m a millionaire smile” every place you go. Yeah, after that, balloon racing will be about as interesting to you as getting hand-jobs from your mother.

Alright, back to the important topic at hand. Can I promise you hot sex between “Differential” and “Random Lady?” Well, let me tell you, I put it to “Differential” straight: Would she do “Random Lady”? Her exact words were: “Just because I have easy access to a lot of antibiotics doesn’t mean I go around looking for new ways to catch gonorrhea, adaptive systems.” Now, that would seem to pretty clearly put the kibosh on the whole thing. Trust me, though, in and of itself, this does not present an insurmountable barrier to uniting “Differential” and “Random Lady” in Sapphic bliss. I can’t even begin to tell you the number of sweet, God-fearing Catholic girls majoring in Education I knew in college that got themselves busily finger-banged by “Jamie the Women’s Studies T.A.” the second that their R.O.T.C boyfriends passed out on the couch. I mean, we are talking dozens and dozens. Easily. I know because Jamie was my girlfriend. Still, even though I secretly worry that deep down, when she ovulates, “Differential” thinks about rigid, blood-swollen cock, purple with anticipation and dewing with a single drop of pearly-precum, I can’t help but see, maybe purely out of hope, slight indications of what my older, happily cohabiting, jeep-driving, golden-retriever owning, soft-ball playing woman friends call “the unmistakable glimmerings of a baby dyke awaiting guidance.”

(Please note that I’m not stereotyping my older woman friends. They actually drive jeeps, play softball, etc. I’m not using those traits as a sort of shorthand to imply that they’re lesbians; they actually do all of those things. They’re good friends of mine, productive members of the community, run a successful independent business, and gush unbelievable puddles after the women’s collegiate soccer games when all the fans have cleared out of the bleachers and the coach convenes an immediate post-game meeting, during which the sweaty soccer girls strip out of their adidas jerseys and trunks, revealing tight, black sports bras and bikini bottoms. Incidentally, that’s how I met them; all three of us share a mutual interest in collegiate female soccer. Also in sloppy-wet pussy.)

Now, it just so happens that I happen to find that gleam of dyke-ishness insanely attractive. Pretty much every single picture of me with every single one of my ex’s looks like someone took Morrissey, cloned him, shrunk both of them by a few inches, threw them in front of a camera and told them to hug. Many of my girlfriends have left me for women. That’s a price I’m willing to pay. Again and again, if need be. There are just some amazing perks about dating lesbians working through a sexually confusing moment in their lives, or perhaps deliberately exploring what they’re capable of responding to. First of all, you can learn how to do things with your hands and other people’s pubic bones that no man or woman would independently discover in a lifetime of heterosexual practice. No poo poo. And when your girlfriend insists on giving you a haircut, you don’t have to worry she’ll try and make you look like Fabio; she’ll give you a nice high&tight flat top, whether you ask for it or not. Also, you tend to develop a fuller appreciation of rugby. Those are just the advantages that come off the top of my head.

(I did happen to make the mistake of off-handedly mentioning my attraction to this to “Differential,” which prompted her to state very unambiguously that that sort of thing would not be tolerated in any way, shape or form. (Her exact words were: “If you Fuh-King touch me, ever, I will kill you. With a loving Hagedorn needle. In your left loving nostril. IN YOUR LEFT loving NOSTRIL.” Now, I’m not exactly sure what a “hagedorn” needle is, but assuming that it actually can be used to kill in the aforementioned fashion, I’m extremely frightened of it. Also, it bears noting that the way she said “loving” was like she was discharging an Ithaca pistol-grip shotgun. The “Fuh” was an explosion of an anti-personnel flechette round, and the “-king” was the crisp, keenly-cocked re-admission of a shell into its chamber. It was, you know. You know. Chill. Back of neck. Rapid ascension of testicles. The whole bit. And she did actually repeat the “left nostril” part, I’m not making that up.)

Okay, all of that is probably tangential. What we’re really talking about here are two beautiful women in bed. That is, we’re talking about what the odds are that twospecific beautiful women will wind up in bed. Now, with a basic understanding of probability, we can tell what the chances are if we know the probability that eachwoman will be willing to sleep with the other. Now, when it comes to “Random Lady,” we can confidently assume that probability is 100%. With regards to “Differential,” we are lacking some information, and have to use a special kind of number technically known to statisticians who subscribe to the “Bayesian” school of probability as “the Universal Prior.” In this case, the “Universal Prior” is 30%. Now, again, using “math” we can tell that the odds of these two young women making a love connection are obviously somewhat less than 100%.

Fear not. I have a plan for dramatically increasing those odds, and I can state it succinctly in one word: Liquor.

These women love their liquor. Especially those funny-colored mixed drinks with the I-have-no-idea-what in them, because I’m as dry as the Mojave. A few bottles of this, a few bottles of that, a couple of those blue colored ones with the umbrellas, maybe some of those coffee flavored milky Russian ones, combined with a few stretches and yawns from me, leading me to beg to be excused from the great game of charades we’ve got going for an early bedtime, and I can pretty much guarantee goon-girl on ex-goon-girl action.

In fact, if I come back the next morning and “Random Lady” and “Differential” are not an exquisitely braided tangle of fair-skinned thighs, mussed and knotted hair, sweat-soaked sheets, I will return all of your donations. In fact, I’ll go further. If this plan doesn’t result in “Random Lady” and “Differential” getting down to a form of grunting tribadism so pure, so suffused with a gleaming sublimity bespeaking a whole other order of evaluating the meaning of your life, so undeniably an eruption of divinity into this world that it could, and should, have been ripped from Greek myth, I will refund your kind donations in full.

In fact, if upon opening the door, and gazing upon the tableau of their naked, cotton wrapped bodies, I am not struck down by fear, fear of something so incomparably ancient and yet so eerily new that an apprehensiveness does not slowly build within me, growing towards an absolute conviction that I am in the presence of something so indescribably beyond all human comprehension that it does not crush and shatter my consciousness in such an absolute and irrevocable fashion that I fall out this universe entirely,
…into the absinthe-soaked and sweat-drenched body of Arthur Rimbaud, in London, loving that detestable orangutan, Paul Verlaine. What a spineless piece of merde.The way he let me, a boy of merely sixteen years, twist him around my finger and lure him away from his beautiful wife and luxurious home in Paris to this English hovel.

“Donne-moi ton foutre,” he grunts, “Donne-moi ton foutre!” SHUTTHEFUCKUP “Donne-moi ton foutre!”

While I’m digging my dirt-encrusted fingernails into the fat that hangs from his pelvis, he turns his head to me.

"Je veux lecher ton foutre," He says. Again, insistently, "Je veux lecher ton foutre."

FUCKINGPIECEOFSHITWHYHAVENTYOUBOUGHTMEANYNICEVELVETCOATSYOUCHEAPPEDE

I pick up the lamp of the table by the swinging handle and whip it down on his pathetic balding head. A thick gash opens instantly, unleashing a satisfying red flow. He makes a hiccupping noise with the impact of the blow, but doesn’t lose consciousness. I hit him twice more, with solid arcing blows delivered with enough force to ensure that I won’t have to deal with his poo poo until sometime after the sun rises. I pull out of his hideously filthy oignon. I push his body off of the bed and make myself comfortable, preparing to settle into a deep sleep, knowing that despite all of this, he will still buy my breakfast in the morning.
…..until finally waking 12 hours later, to find the women gone, outside the compound, outside the security perimeter, out, gone, somewhere between Accra and anywhere.
I search for them desperately, to no avail, and they return at their leisure the next day, bearing meaty shashliks dripping with grease and fat black Sangiovese grapes, neither of which could possibly have obtained anywhere in west Africa. I try and talk to them, but I find that I have trouble looking at them when I talk. When I look at them, my eyes hurt as if I’m looking out the window, into the glare of the sun out on the warm and inviting ocean that I have been too busy to visit.

And you must read faster now, much, much faster now. You must read faster to understand. Faster! Faster! You must read faster now, to understand. You must readfaster to understand!

…I come in a matter of days to suspect that the course of events that has been set in place in that bed, wet with vaginal secretions and perspiration and even, (from where?) blood, will lead to a heedless violation of all natural laws, and open a fissure between this world and the over-pressured chaotic void of chattering dread that surrounds us, allowing an inflowing of radical indeterminacy into the painfully mechanistic world of the bankers the statesmen, with their trivial and boring ambition to manage and plan, that work endlessly towards realizing that ultimate crime, the murder of nature, which could never be brought about in truth, but only through a sort of make believe of control. The belief that everything is under control. That the economy is under control. That government is under control. That the schools are under control. That the prisons are under control. That the hospitals are under control. That war is under control. That disease is under control. That the environment is under control. That you are under control. That your life is under your control.

For the truth is that not one inch of this world has ever, or ever will be, subdued by the forces of control. This is the truth that shall finally capsize this boat, which has served us admirably, but is now our prison galley, sailing forever away from our home. And when this boat is capsized, when all become aware of the lie of control, when the sweet squirminess of two girls in simple, ecstatic, sexual love pull back all of the lies that we have so carefully matted against the windows of the world like lace doilies of some fearful, ancient dowager, whose betrothed died the day before our sacred matrimony was to take place, sparing us even the dignity of the widowed, when you understand that there are no guarantees, no promises, no second chances, that you are subject to death without warning…(admittedly, none of this quite makes sense. I swear to you, sixteen hours ago it di
d. I had some sort of vision of how all of this would unfold, and I can't quite recapture it now. Perhaps the things of which I now speak will only become truly clear when they come to pass. I'm fairly sure there was a lot of blasphemy, though. Great, heaping portions of it that would swell even the generally agnostic forum reading-public into an angry mob thirsty for my blood. Perhaps it's best I forgot it all)…When you suddenly understand that just as you are subject to death without warning, so too are you free to live without warning, that you are free to love without warning, that you are free to love who you want, without warning. That you are free to love what you want, you are free to love how you want, without warning. When you take that and tattoo it on your heart, that you are free to live without offering warning.

YOU ARE FREE. TO LOVE. AND. TO LIVE. AND. TO WANT. WITHOUT WARNING.

When that supremely simple fact becomes clear, when it becomes as obvious as the pleasure those two women feel, in bed, drunk like only the holy can be drunk, as obvious as that endless series of undulating orgasms emanating outward from that small, sacred, central spot cradled between their bodies that wracks them with a shocking terror of release, of freedom, of something so fantastically, wonderfully beyond their wildest imaginings, that they can do nothing but cling tightly to each other’s precious little bodies, it will produce an indwelling without parallel in human history. It shall be an indwelling not only of all of the world’s usual suspects, the creators, prophets, visionaries, junkyard warriors, tinkers, madmen, melon-fuckers, but also the The Synaesthesiacs, who see sound as color, the Shaughrauns, those who wander in error, the Tirshathas, disguised viceroys and prefects of Persia, and the Tirthankaras, forgers of passage in unknown worlds, thePhysiolaters,slathered in dirt, the Beheminsts, who are both poets and lechers, the bleeding Penitents, the blameless Parasuicides, the Oudstryders, crippled in distant wars, the elderly Oubaases, ancient watchers of clouds, their brothers the Crambazzles, storied and dying, the proud Armigers, with their heraldry, the humble Cordwainers,in smocks and sandals, the Deforciants at the front, the German Cousins, given up so long ago for dead, the Pleionosists, who are mocked for wearing spiked helmets, but always enjoy the last laugh, the Polymaths, valuably voracious, the Psaphonics, full of ponderous plottings, the Vigesimatiors, who kill every twentieth person (keep count), the Adoxographists, arguing constantly with the Floccinaucinihilipilificatiors about nothing, the Antiscians, unknown, unknown, always unknown, the Apanthropiacs, alone, alone, always alone, the Apocatastasists, brave lovers of all the damned in Hell, The Water Bailiffs, playing their four-legged Virginalls, and well, the Gaberlunzie, toothless and kind, the Abacinates, bearing copper and blind, the Galligantusi, fearing the deaths they cause with each foot-fall, The Armomancers, scapula in fist, the Cheiloproclitics, who awake when their lips are kissed. The Tallow Chandlers, setting lit candles in the ground as they follow, the Gynotikolobomassophiliacs, forever nibbling on fair maidens’ earlobes, the Geloscopics, cackling forth our only future, the Abderians, cackling forth nothing, thePtochocrats, regal in sackcloth, the Gamomanics and Gamophobics, hand in hand, terrified and ecstatic, the Grapholagniasts, eternal anus-gazers, theCacospectamaniacs, who dream endlessly of shiny, shiny, shiny lumps of poo poo raining from above. The Carkers, lusty ripsnorters best avoided, the Pythogenisists, that fell out of the dumpster this morning, unafraid and expecting love.

Unknown posted:

All of them, all of them, all of them and more will draw nigh to the most-high Bonecrafter and All-Provoking Mother. All of them, all of them and more shall desert the cities of Rome, Jerusalem and Mecca, leaving them windswept backwaters of no consequence, all of their supposed greatness reliquated to mute history books that will soon be burned, gladly, gladly burned.

Towards this great end there shall be a gathering of forgotten heroes, of the Pyrrhonists, who are frightened men, but sharp, the Pernoctators, who read through dawn, the Philoxenists, who speak only to strangers, the Dysteleogists, shouting “No Purpose! No Goal! No End!” The Dririmancers, faces mottled with blood, muttering dithyrambs as they do their deadly work, and finally the Accipitrines, hawk-nosed and effete, all and more shall surround those that must still be cleansed from the earth, those who cling stubbornly to the dead cities and the dead powers, the fearful Hadehariasts, tortured souls that seek to torture you by speaking endlessly of Hell, always of Hell, the Agiotagers, short-selling their mothers, the blattoid blodderers, gurrrrrrrrgling forth their bletcherous botanophobia, the bowdlerizing Agapetae, flaunting their modest lies, the Adhocracts, who always sought to have their way with you, the Balatrons, with their nonsense, theAcrocephalics, pointing and pointing and pointing, the blandiloquent Blatherskites, cloying with you, but toying with destroying you, the Apeirophobics, who covertheir eyes when it counts, the Brevirostrate bromidrosiphobiac buffarillas, who never leave their bufoniform baths, the Autovoxiphilliacs, singing blissfully only to themselves, the Battologists haggling with the pleased Comprachico, who deforms children before he sells them, and all of the foul philosophasters, the third-hand criticasters, the Fysigunkus, the Malversationists, plotting powerfully for ill, and the Misoneists who vomit forth an endless stream of hatred, all shall be entombed with their books and their paraphrenal devices in the subterranean cromlechs from which they were spawned. And we, we who shall survive shall summon the babies born with crushed faces, the millions of expendable dead, the birds of paradise extinct without appeal, all of the lost, all of the drowned, we shall summon them all, and all that they lost, all of it, all of it, all of the invective, all of the accusations, all of the terror, all of the needless pain, all of the pointless punishment that we have borne on our splintering backs lo these many years, all of it, all of it, all of it, all of it and more, and it shall be as a noxious pestilence, a boiling tar of wasps and broken glass and flaming razor-wire, and we will bring it down upon all of them, all of your gyrovague monks, all of your lying masses, all of your fat idleness, and I can already see it filling up your mouths, evil mouths that have spoken falsely of blessings and curses, that have maligned the simple seekers-after-truth, and I bring it down upon your hands, so that your flesh may bake and crack, down upon your hands that sought so zealously to torture, to slice out their tongues in the name of love, and I bring it down upon your faces, so that they might melt, those faces that accused only the courageous will drip from your skulls, and I send it down to cook through every fissure of your minds, the minds that you used to build penal carts to send around to collect your foul Gaol delivery. And I see it press into your ears as a burning ore to CAUTERIZE the foul gently caress-holes that allowed such lies to penetrate you in the first place. Nothing shall escape save for the ascending smoke of your half-choked words, pathetic pleas for a mercy you never granted, and even those words shall be caught and set ablaze, and even they will be consumed, until nothing remains but the ashes of their ashes.

Then, only then, when the world is free of the old powers, the Abecedarians, held tight, tiny-toed and fresh, shall finally be carried forth by the Assankanites, who behold only the number ten raised to the sixty-third power, forever and ever, side by side with the Boustrophedonists, writing left-to-right, then right-to-left, and back again, followed by the baleful Kiyoodles, hungry dogs, nearly dead, and then the Kirkbuzzers, who steal from churches, but only to eat, yet also the edaciousMellisugents, ravenous suckers of honey, the Molendinaceous, who spin after the wind, the Entheates, whom even we fear, the Minimifidians, who say perhaps; perhaps not, The Eroteme, who asks, “?,” and receives meaningless meandering messages mfrom mthe Mytacisticist, mwho malways muses mthe mletter “m” meven mwhen mit mis mnot mcalled mfor.

All of them, all of them and more will follow, and watch as the All-Mother shall sit to dine with the last, lonely Apikoros, with whom she shall eat pigflesh, and consume it with him as if it were the last remnant of a long-dying god.

And then, sub-Saharan Africa, with it’s lush jungles still defiantly intact, shall become home to the new people, a people arisen from a complete confluence of all genetic diversity, producing a new race of short, lithe, caramel colored, black haired, proud explorers with fearless obsidian eyes protected by sexy, elliptical epicanthic folds. They will hold nothing resembling “ideology,” and there will be no usury, and governing will not be the avocation of the professionally deceitful adhocracy, but a shared duty to be shouldered by all, united under a heretofore unimaginably uncompromising love of this life, and this world, and this body. We shall be witness to the birth of a fascism of clitoral pleasure, feral with an explosion of breasts, round, shaped like avocados, pendulous, arching, reminiscent of champagne glasses, eternally budding, and areolas that are elliptical, slender, great, wide, fat, and buttocks that are narrow, spherical, heart-shaped, sagging, cervixes tickled by fingers, cocks, and nipples that are tended by sucklings and fawns, and also free, and also severed, and labia that hang like curtains of velvet flesh, and that are drawn taught as tempest-blown sails, and the hallowed clitori, large like thumbs, small, like jellybeans. Some too sensitive to be touched, some that can bear only the warmth of a lover’s breath, others that demand constant, vigorous attention and playful biting. Every woman shall be met at her menarche with a bath of rose petals and serrated blades. Each shall have the option of endless procreation, of extending her line forward into perpetuity. Each shall have the option to be clean of all men, for all of time.

And what of the men?

They shall be freed from the manacles of the broodmare that have led to their long, sad atrophy, weakening and warping their originally god-like minds to the sorry, shallowly sensual and sessile state in which they presently pointlessly persist. The existence of men will no longer be guaranteed, nor taken for granted. The possibility of imminent extinction will propel them forward, beyond the insipid flaccidity of the those who ignorantly presumed to rule, blind to the long-ago erosion of their never-more-than-imagined sovereignty, and those would be rulers shall have their cocks split lengthwise and their scrotums removed with white-hot tongs in explosions of hissing semen and cooking connective tissue.

Each man will be free to find an ancient, never-spoken-of purpose, and each will be free to claw his way back from the syphilitic stupor in which he they currently lives. Men who find no purpose, men of no utility, will be ground underfoot and all shall be held blameless in their deaths. No longer will anything be assumed in the relationships between and within the sexes. There will be no unspoken assumptions. Fears and hatreds will rage as openly as wildfires, and will be spoken of as bluntly. There will be no coercion stemming from disparities in power, or weaknesses of affection. There will be no sentimentality. Everything will be negotiable. New words will be needed to describe entirely new concepts of relatedness. Polyamarous tribes of book-readers will run loving, fisting, flaying, and fleeing into the depths of the forests never to be seen again. Some will burrow deeply into the earth until they encounter the dark mineral intelligence that hath hacked forth each new age, be it of bronze, be of it Iron, and the things that dwell within the rocks will whisper: “we have no more unimagined alloys for you. You are on your own.” Others, through unsparing deliberation or unanswerable despondency shall scatter as celibates, and disavow the use of tools entirely, choosing to live off the grubs they rip from the soil with their fists, seeking to duel dangerously with the long dark lonely night of the soul. Others shall find a way to bear the fruit of man (impossible?) from the loins of men, and vast quantities of semen will bubble forth as if from undersea vents, giving birth to societies for which the Spartans could only have hoped, and they will hurry down deeper and deeper into the warm earth, and will wage endless wars of such savagery that Valhalla shall be emptied, and an ocean of blood and brains and sperm will swirl at the center of the earth, amidst the force of unholy thermonuclear concussions, blasting all the souls of men free, free, free to fight and die again.

And then. At long last.

A foudroyant boundary shall be riven between the time and place of that once-feared stasigenesis of the eternally crippled souls, and the new and perdurable order of the All-mother, one that shall be thick with the foughty odor of menstrual effluvia and after-birth. We shall set theChargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg the task of guarding this boundary, for it knows the power of all distinctions, and fears them too well to allow any other passage. (And if you have questions about its name you can ask it your own goddamned self. Frankly, I don’t enjoy talking to it very much because it freaks me the gently caress out. And if you want to make fun of its name, by all means, please march right up to it and make fun of its name. Good loving riddance to you, man.)

…Each of us that has survived, that has endured the tests of the all-mother, that breathe the musky air of this, our newly born world, shall make of our umbilical cord a noose, and thereby never forget the foul smelling darkness of which we come, and the foul-smelling darkness to which we rush.

All of us, all of us, all of us and more, shall hearken unto to the All-mother as she croodles softly to her newborn plisky fawn. And we shall draw near her and lower our heads to lick at her ankles in fervent jubilation for her triumph, and to exalt her, and her infinite, infinitely wild progeny. And we shall worship her in all her slick, lubricated concupiscence, and through her we shall discover new kinds of love, new kinds of sex, new ways of living that will be measured in saliva-coated flesh, weighed by caterpillars, packaged in rotting carcasses, bought by the leaves, sold to the dirt, marked-down by the maggots, planned by the ants, and known across time for the howling cries we bark for the sexy bitch what born us so….
I can only put it thusly: if the heedlessly initiated and zealously pursued goal of producing womankind from womankind does not lead to a complete psychotic break with the whole of human history, if all of these events do not come to pass in the fullness of time,

I WILL REFUND YOUR DONATIONS IN FULL

And please, don’t whine to me of the bioethicists, those pathetic philosophasters and mealy-mouthed mush-minded murders of my moral certainty. Do not complain to me that the creation of a new order of human life ought to be hijacked by a fearful people that say, ah, but what if the creation is an abomination? What if it is ugly to all who behold it?

WHAT OF IT? God produces a thousand crushedbabies a day, monsters that for the lack of a few flecks of cholesterol lose that essential ability to bind those few, crucial cell-surface receptors and leave some new soul lacking ventral tissue fates, and almost always born dead, though the most unfortunate survive, and are born with single, cyclopean eyes, protonasal protuberances with no normal human anatomical analogue, but alive, nevertheless, gurgling, a blindness propelling them forward through what kind of shadowy existence you or I would not dare to guess at, for fear that we may adequately imagine it, imagine what it might be like to live as a half-brained Cyclops baby.

And for what reason are a thousand such afflicted girls brought into the world each day? For what reason is but one such afflicted girl brought into the world on any day? So that she might find the glory of resurrection, the self-aggrandizing sacrifice of God for his own glory? Shall we pretend that God brought her into this world to find the love of his only Son, shall we pretend that this girl will come to know and worship the Holy Trinity, when she can know neither light nor dark, nor speak nor listen nor move in anything other than a hideous sea-anemone like flopping? If this is not God’s fault, than whose is it? Shall we blame her suffering, as God does, upon the disobedience of Adam? Shall we tell ourselves that all is right and good with her crushed face, because she must pay for the sins of Adam, her 6000-year removed Great-Grandfather?

If you believe that there dwells an eternal soul within this accursed child, where shall it make its home in the everlasting? If she cannot declare Christ her personal savior, confess her culpability for the original sin, how shall she enter Heaven? If God will make an exception for her, and admit her soul into heaven after the brief flickering that is all she shall ever know of life, then what possible purpose does subjecting her to this pointless torture serve?

Shall we accept the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, and comfort ourselves with the thought that, no matter how terrible the suffering visited upon this child, it is precisely what she deserves for having an evil soul? A soul created by God, with no prior existence of its own, to be evil and therefore have abundantly earned the agony of its existence? If we can believe that, and accept that, is there any lie too terrible for us to believe?

Those who believe this, those who worship these basest of lies, they are not fit for discussion. They are fit for consumption. When I turn on the television and see the electronic preachers condemn the paralytics, the malformed, the half-dead, the born-crushed, to an undignified death that could have been prevented but for their superstition, I do not become angry.

I become hungry. I think of boiling their fat jowls down for dinner. I dream of eating their quadriceps with drooling pleasure, thinking about how satisfying a delicacy their testes will make in stew. I view them as the Chimpanzees of the Gombe view the Red Colobus monkeys. They may look like my people, but they are not my people. They are my people’s food. I extend to them no rights, no recognition of personhood. I would happily forego a plate of the finest Angus beef for plate of their haunches. A Steer has at least the decency not to defame or inform on its own kind. There never

Inescapable Duck posted:

Obviously they're Betazoid

ChickenOfTomorrow posted:

purple death ray posted:

And y'know why is it racist to say that all black people like fried chicken and watermelon? Lots of white people like fried chicken and watermelon! If you ask me, this politically correct thing has gotten out of hand, and all lives matter.

whorelord posted:

i grew up in a tiny village so absolutely nothing has ever happened here, though we do have olivia colman's favourite bridge so that's something i guess

shut up meg posted:

?

eli porter posted:

a couple of homeless guys regularly go gently caress down by the quarry

big beef city posted:

what's the other ones name

Sulla Faex posted:

i thought tarantino had a foot thing because he's ethnically half-foot?

purple death ray posted:

They put those expanding foam things in there and it conforms to the horses and holds them in place

Badger of Basra posted:

trying to imagine what an eyewitness account of the city of seattle sending a homeless person to austin would even be

i say swears online posted:

sebmojo posted:

oh christ i'd forgotten all about that story

sebmojo posted:

oh christ i'd forgotten all about that story

Nucular Carmul posted:

Thank you, this is exactly it. Wanted to show this to my friend.

Kenning posted:

It was about Jesse Helms, and was by autopsy-turvy. I found it offsite, weirdly:

Megillah Gorilla posted:

China unveils revolutionary new train which does not run on rails but instead follows painted lines on the road:





It's a loving bus. Literally a bus.

CAPS LOCK BROKEN posted:

It's also autonomous and powered by batteries, but don't let those innovations get in the way of your 2 minutes hate

Shumagorath posted:

but enough about what ur girl left u 4

Platystemon posted:

BREAKING

COMEDY FORUMS MODERATOR RECEIVES PRESIDENTIAL MEDAL OF FREEDOM

Ghost Leviathan posted:

I heard emu farming was a big thing around then as well, there was a King of the Hill episode about a guy trying to get rid of his emus. Also, the way Americans, or at least Texans, pronounce 'Emu' is goddamn hilarious.

Apparently they were marketed as something like 'bigger, better chicken'. I think there might have been attempts at kangaroo farming too.

hallelujah posted:

omg do you have any cassowary stories

Outrail posted:

What was the end goal on raising raptor birds? I mean wtf.

Splicer posted:

Are they lower greenhouse gas emissions per kilo of meat? Because if so, new bubble ahoy!

Dogen posted:

So are we all gonna spend our trumpbux on guns with which we can take others’ trumpbux and toilet paper?

i say swears online posted:

estate sales

quote:

lookit that posh peach. want to make your man squirm? garnish that gash with garnets and cash!!! jam some bills in those labes, let em flutter and fly. girl you nasty but your stench trench got the eddie bauer package

Son of Rodney posted:

EVERY MORNING I WAKE UP AND OPEN PALM SLAM A BAR OF SOAP INTO MY HANDS. ITS CREAM SOAP WITH ALMONDS AND OLIVE OIL AND RIGHT THEN AND THERE I START DOING THE HAND WASHING MOVES ALONGSIDE WITH THE RECOMMENDED HAND SANITIZING GUIDELINES FROM MY LOCAL HEALTH AUTHORITY. I DO EVERY MOVE AND I DO EVERY MOVE HARD. MAKIN WHOOSHING SOUNDS WHEN I SLAM DOWN SOME CORONA VIRUS BASTARDS OR EVEN WHEN I MESS UP TECHNIQUE. NOT MANY CAN SAY THEY ESCAPED THE GALAXY’S MOST DANGEROUS VIRUS. I CAN. I SAY IT AND I SAY IT OUTLOUD EVERYDAY TO MY COLLEAGUES OVER ZOOM AND ALL THEY DO IS PROVE PEOPLE IN QUARANTINE CLASS CAN STILL BE IMMATURE JERKS. AND IVE LEARNED ALL THE RECOMMENDED SOCIAL DISTANCING STEPS AND IVE LEARNED HOW TO MAKE MYSELF AND MY APARTMENT LESS LONELY BY SHOUTING EM ALL. 2 HOURS INCLUDING WIND DOWN EVERY MORNing

dumb. posted:

Lobok posted:

But what if I don't want to choose? Maybe I want my kid to be poorly rested and malnourished.

Captain Hygiene posted:

That's why I recommend my highly technical duck-and-weave strategy to avoid droplets, making every grocery trip both safer and a good way to exercise

D-Pad posted:

I grew up on an ostrich farm. My parents started raising them very early on in the ostrich bubble that happened in the US in the late 80s and 90s because our neighbor was an exotic animal guy and was part of the original group that started the "industry" back then.

The hope was that they would take off as another type of meat and had the potential to become similar to cattle farming. It was mainly a bunch of rich guys at the beginning who traded them for stupid amounts of money at the beginning. My parents were getting 40k-75k for a good breeding pair and chicks would sell for $2,500 and it was easy to raise a ton.

The insane prices were because of their rarity in the states at the time. What actually happened was that every livestock person saw how much money could be made and started buying in. This created and sustained a bubble for 6-8 years before the market saturated and everybody looked around and realized they had a bunch of giant birds that nobody wanted the meat of and nobody else wanted to buy in at those prices and they became worthless over night and sold for less than the cost of feeding them.

My mom had begged for my dad to get out of the business that year and he wanted one more year and promised he would sell out then. He lost a fuckload of money, but since we had been poor before he got in and had several years of making six figures he came out ahead overall and then proceeded to lose it in another venture that actually would have worked but ran into extremely bad luck.

And that's how my family went from poor to rich and ended up solidly middle class because of giant birds and the weird decade of optimism that was the late 80s/early 90s

ChubbyChecker posted:

Pirate Radar posted:

I think she’s just dumbing it down for him, but yes, other species do it too. There was a study from MIT that looked at this sort of by accident, because what it was originally focused on was roadkill. Somebody noticed that crows were getting hit by trucks on the Mass Turnpike at higher rates than you’d expect, so they did some field study to figure out why. It had to do with pattern recognition and murder behavior (murder of crows, I mean), and how they set “watchcrows” to warn the group of danger while they fed on other roadkill. Crows can definitely tell the difference between trucks and cars, and it turned out that trucks were more dangerous because none of the Boston watchcrows could say “TRUCK!” but of course they could all say “CAH, CAH, CAH”