Oliver Lee Bateman's Blog, page 5

Kate Upton's Game of War

You won’t — I really believe — get too much out of reading it. Because you won’t understand it; the content will seem strange to you. I wanted to write that my work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one.

Kate Upton’s Game of War, the hypothetical game that almost did yet never will, was advertised so much on Twitter that I started to believe its hype. Me, of all the people that ever were and ever will be, proving himself as gullible as a first-year rube congressman from a rural district in Kansas! Goes to show and shows to go, amiright?

There’s a certain wonderment, an infant joy even, that’s lost when you have to stop believing in whatever you think something is because you’ve actually encountered it. I felt this way when I began to watch Friends, the TV series that was just Seinfeld but with prettier, sweeter people in nearly identical roles to George, Elaine, Jerry, and the rest of the gang (Lisa Kudrow as the Puddy character, et al.). Did you know that David Schwimmer, the erstwhile “Ross” of circa 1998 “Ross and Rachel” fame, patterned his character on a series of Nicolas Cage acting performances from the 1980s? It’s true, it’s true, as Kurt Angle used to say before the concussions so racked his brain that he couldn’t even tie his shoelaces without the assistance of a nursemaid.

But now to Kate Upton’s Game of War. Could this be an autobiographical game, your own chance to experience Kate Upton’s battle to become America’s Next Top Model against all odds, evens, and the withering comments of catty judges Tim Gunn and Simon Cowell? Or could it be a game in which the object is to woo the fair Mdme. Upton, affiancing her against the best wishes of her thousands of ther swains (Roy Hibbert, LeBron James, Danzig, Jerry Seinfeld, Channing Tatum, Brandon Lee, Christopher Meloni, Tilda Swinton, John Kruk)?

"For, Mdme. Upton, you deserve this state,/Nor would I love at lower rate./But at my back I always hear/Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near."

Or maybe it’s just the same game as a bajillion other games, Candy Crush meets Mafia Wars with Warcraft 2-generation graphics. Maybe it’s turn-based and doesn’t require the least bit of skill, thus making it “casual.” Maybe there are upgrades that you can buy to speed things along. Maybe that’s all it is, a giant slot machine that generates money for its cynical creators. Maybe it’s Maybelline.

But how much money could they be making from this, given the amount they’ve spent promoting it? Surely they’ll never recoup the costs associated with Kate Upton (she’s priceless!). Perhaps, then, this is just a labor of love: Kate, we love you so much that we want you to have a game that is yours. We believe in you. You don’t have many years left before you hit the Crawford Line (roughly age 31, at which point you go “ker-poof” and vanish from the stage you’ve been strutting and playing upon, or, worse still, TMZ starts posting pictures of your big-a$$ caesarean section scar to score cheap pageviews because we’re all such horrible, doomed creatures who want nothing more than to laugh at the inevitable decline and death of all the beautiful things in the world). You have to make these last days and minutes and hours and seconds count before inevitably succumbing to Kobe Bryant’s marriage overtures (the Black Mamba’s career is winding down, so the moment to strike is nigh!) or Anna Nicole Smith style overspreading/oversaturation.

"Daddy, where do people go when they don’t go anymore?" I never asked (my old man was a rat bastard and hated being questioned by anyone, especially his ungrateful progeny). "Son," he never said,

"You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that, oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell."

Which is what Raymond Chandler wrote years ago, and I like to think it’s something my father would’ve said, if he had ever said anything to me that wasn’t “hey you shit-for-brains.” Oh Dad! What a gas you were. What a kidder. I never believed all the bad things they said about you, and boy there were plenty. You had a good heart and a secret soul that only I ever got to see.

But my father has kicked the bucket and bought the farm, leaving me a prisoner of Kate Upton’s Game of War. I go to bed at night and wonder: could this be the one, the one that changes everything? Each day we ask ourselves that, about so many things, and it puzzles me as to why. We want to change our life from one thing to another, but once your FICO score soars above 800 (mine is 808), isn’t it smooth sailing until they put you in a pine box and bury you in a potter’s field? You lock eyes with your possible beloved/potential betrothed in the supermarket or atop a counterscarp in Kate Upton’s Game of War and think to yourself: “could we live happily ever after?” What comes after ever after, alas and alack, is more of the same: an endless desire to change that isn’t a desire to change at all. Desire, in fact, isn’t the desire to be desired, pace Lacan; it’s merely a wish to just rest, to strip yourself of all cares and concerns, and to live in an imaginary now that is instantly (instant by instant) the future. You can’t, though, can you? You always want something else, something which isn’t anything at all and never can be. You want Kate Upton’s War and Peace, but you’ll only ever have Kate Upton’s War.

I’m getting ahead of myself, though. The 6.91 update just dropped and man did they buff Troll Warlord. I’d say they buffed him so much it’s almost like they traveled full circle and nerfed him. He’s easily the strongest character in DOTA 2 if you put all of the expensive armors and Skadis and swords (celebratory Sange & Yasha just ‘cause I’ve got mad $$$ to burn, broham!) on him. In 6.90, he was terrible, but now he’s the first ban in every pro game or so I think I read in the comments section somewhere but I could be making that up (hell, I thought Enigma and Nightstalker were the same character for the better part of a year). I heard Dendi got 607 kills with him on his MMR 2000 “smurf” account. I also heard they’re reskinning him and renaming him Vorpal Gorelord because Blizzard’s threatening to sue them again. Vorpal Gorelord is easily one of the best in the laning phase if you get every last hit. He’s unkillable if you avoid taking any damage (I suggest blink dagger + shadow blade for permanent invisibility/escape). And all of this will hold true until he drops to the mid tier or bottom tier in 6.92, since all good things must come to an end and one update runs into another like two squires at play on the fields of Kate Upton’s Game of War.

Spoiler: I played it and it sUx0r. You click buttons and wait your turn. You check it every few hours and life goes on. You can speed things up by spending money you don’t have to buy bits of code you don’t need. Kate Upton isn’t anywhere in the game (I know, I searched every nook and cranny and sub-menu (there are hundreds; it’s clunky and cumbersome)). You can gain some bonuses for correcting the spelling of other playas (not players, there’s a difference), but I prefer to flex my county spelling bee-level orthography skillz when insulting other YouTube commenters who have the temerity to suggest that powerlifting champ and all-around “man’s man” Mark Rippetoe’s back squats aren’t deep enough. How deep is deep enough, you couldn’t-pop-a-grape-in-a-fruit-fight geek? In conclusion, it’s worth one fork out of nine, which is exactly the same rating I gave the Applebee’s Neighborhood Bar & Grill in my hometown (the one fork was because their boneless chicken wings, though inedible, were also unlimited in quantity).

My father (RIP 1998, may G-d rest his s-ul) shared a surname and perhaps a common origin with many prominent nineteenth century Mormons, including a personal bodyguard to the Prophet. Like this man, my father had multiple wives. Unlike him, and much to his chagrin, my father had to marry them seriatim. Or common-law marry them seriatim, I suppose, because formally marrying someone implied a commitment, and if one committed for all eternity (the religious assumption; “better to marry than to burn with passion,” which of course means you can only do one or the other, and anyone has ever watched two married people sit next to one another like brother and sister realizes that Saul of Tarsus knew the deal), what is there left to hope for? He answered the concern raised earlier—“the more things change, the more they stay the same,” to put it crudely—by leaving open the possibility of a comeback, or at least of another move before the checkmate. He was always coming to crossroads and always coming back from a collapse, only to burn down what he’d just rebuilt and start afresh. One moved until he ran out of moves; he moved for the same reason that a snake or lizard or alligator moved, because it was that or the bitter end; and then his last move was to the grave.

In Kate Upton’s Game of War, we are all foot soldiers denied knowledge of the campaign’s objectives.

—OLB

Even the Dishes Told All

My old man used to kick off his boots, chuck another PBR tab into the pile and start cracking packs. He ripped into the foiled card packages with weathered palms, his stuffed and yellowing calluses skittering along 4th Edition and Ice Age wrappers.

“Another goddamn Staff of the Ages, you gotta be”, whipping the card across the room, “fucking kidding me.” He’d just sit there for a moment and stare. He’d dig his big toe into the red berber carpet and shake his head. He was disappointed, and you couldn’t blame him. He hadn’t fought off merciless apathy for forty years for this kinda bum luck. “What’s next, a Naked Singularity,” he’d shout into the empty room. The room wasn’t really empty. I’d been sitting there the whole time, but you can’t always see the trees in the forest.

Around this time he’d hike up his pants and start looking for me. I was right there and I had a playset of counterfeit Winter Orbs that he loved to bend. See, he thought they were real, and he didn’t believe in the “honor” of control or combo decks. “I play Magic to feel alive, to ride with giants and dragons, veins bulging out to fucking here.” He’d end this speech — I heard it four or five times — with one fist clenched and violently beating on his thighs, the other cupped, his arm sticking straight out. He’d bellow, reach down and snag a Black Vise — also counterfeit — and crush it. “This I swear, by the stars!”

Now, if I’m being completely honest, it wasn’t my old man. It wasn’t even me. We weren’t much a duo, but we had what we had. That was enough. He was an old man and I was just covered in Wonderbread crumbs and his junk rares.

I guess I learned a lot from my old man in those good-ol-days-that-never-were. How to deal with disappointment (don’t), how to game the system (get played by it), and how to hold out hope that your odds are different. That’s what separates dreamers, grifters, con-men, and futurists from the miserable rest of the lot. Pops knew how to hedge against bad luck by amassing it, heaping up this huge staircase of aw-fucks that he’d eventually climb, preparing to just walk right out of the world through the ceiling.

And, you know what, I believed him. I could picture my paunchy Fosters-can-of-a-father stripped down to his signature A-shirt and tighty whites, beating the shit out of Baron Sengir and a couple of dragons. “You saw how I dealt with that little shitheel trying to sell us Oriental Trading Company magazines. We’ve got enough gluttony in this house without any more conspicuous consumption.” He loved turns of phrase like that. He patterned himself off “real men” like Noel Coward, Statler and Waldorf.

I’ll never forget the night my mother made some rubberized porkchops for brunch. He took one look at the sad cut, spit out his milk, and snarled. “I’d say this meal is a real joke but a good joke’s a terrible thing to waste and this is just terrible waste.”

So, she’d get fed up and leave. He’d eventually have a heart attack and I’d grow up alright after all. Guess my old man won.

—EH

I Declared War on Net Neutrality

"If we could understand the order of the universe well enough, we would find that it surpasses all the wishes of the wisest people, and that it is impossible to make it better than it is — not merely in respect of the whole in general, but also in respect of ourselves in particular." Nora Roberts, "Northern Lights"

I don’t remember exactly when or how it happened, but close only counts when it comes to horseshoes and hand grenades and this promises to be anything but. It just so happens to be the story of my life, which my press agent wants to bill as containing multitudes but which I know for a philosophical fact is really just a monad.

[John Ross “J.R.” Ewing’s smiling face, topped by his trademark “ten-gallon” hat, fills the frame. This is an advert for Prime Time Malt Liquor and it’s pretty darn effective, if you ask me. What I mean is, I’m hooked! Then again, that’s easy for me to say because I’m an alcoholic hellbent on destroying the lives of those closest to me. My eventual vehicular homicide-suicide will be one of those great tragedies you hear about on social media all the damn time, which is why I’ve hidden most of the assholes and braggarts in my various feeds. Look, we get it, Guitar Hero creator Les Paul is dead. He’s deader than dead. He’s got a hole in his head. Game over, man, game over. Are you gonna be sad forever? Forever, forever ever, forever ever?]

"Forever never seems that long until you’re grown," Camden told me as she kicked me out in one of those crushing scenes.

"What am I do? Where am I to go? I’m gonna be out on my fanny!" I shouted. Look, I didn’t mean to shout, but I don’t have much of an indoor voice, and "said" just wasn’t going to cut the cheese & mustard there. It’s a pain in the ass, though; must I always type "shouted" at the end of some declaration I’ve made? Is this to be my fate, so schwer, so leicht?

[Babe Ruth glowered at the towheaded rookie pitcher who had the misfortune of being the only person standing between “the Sultan of Swat” and a record-breaking fifth 60-homer season. He dug the hard soles of his Buster Browns into the dirt around home plate, passed his immense wad of Black Death tobacco from one chubby cheek to the other, and death-gripped his 56 oz. Louisville Slugger.

"Lay it on me, rook," he ordered his opponent. "Lay that hard heat right down the middle, belt-high if it’s an inch."

The rookie, who would later go on to great fame as the star of the 1950s television program Adventures of Superman before dying under suspicious circumstances, nervously worked a nail file against the baseball tucked in his glove, hoping to catch the Babe napping with a well-timed “scuff ball.”

"C’mon, rook, it’s getting late and I’ve got a hot date with a gallon of Prime Time Malt Liquor and a pair of showgirls," Ruth continued. He was a man of prodigious appetites, you see, so it stands to reason that this dialogue I’ve just written is especially true to life. Also, and I suppose this digression is taking us somewhat far afield here, I have it on good authority from noted sportswriter Fred Lieb (1880-1980 RIP) that Ruth once ate 15 pounds of ribeye steak in a single sitting, washed it down with 30 Bayer aspirins, and didn’t even need to get his stomach pumped. How ‘bout them Granny Smith apples, huh?

The rookie (we mustn’t forget about him, digression be darned!) took a deep breath. “It’s now or never,” he said to his imaginary tiger friend Banjo Kazooie, who was voiced by notorious ham actor Nathan Lane in the Disney adaptation of this climactic at-bat.]

Dearest Camden,

I wanted to explain in writing as well as pictures why I’m breaking up with you (the pictures, mostly of Brett Favre’s poorly-lit “junk” and vintage Crocs, are attached to this e-mail). First of all, you’re a nag and a scold. Second, I’m completely incapable of having a normal relationship with anyone because I’m an amoral narcissist who will stop at nothing to remain the cynosure of all eyes. Third, why would you want to date someone who corrects your pronunciation of “cynosure” (or, even worse, “hypostasis”…but that was only once, and yes I DID apologize)?

So in short, our break-up is a great move with little downside risk and plenty of upside potential. I recommend it without reservation.

Best wishes for a great summer,
Oscar

[The year was 1998, and I was out raising hell. That’s what me and the other neighborhood toughs did: we were in the hell-raising business, and business was good. I had probably egged every house in that neighborhood and went through more TP than “Family Feud” host Louie Anderson when he had that diverticulitis scare. Dude had to get a part of his intestine removed. Sucks to be him, right?

Anyway, I was out raising my usual quota of hell when Hurricane Fran hit. It hit hard and it hit fast. There was a reason they called it “The Storm of the Century,” and the was reason was because that’s what the local weathermen, who were starved for ratings and pageviews and Facebook likes, called any storm in which the winds exceeded 10 mph (i.e., 15 kph).

I dove into a drainage ditch but it was too late. Cars, livestock, and other debris hurtled across the landscape, and not a single building was left standing between Capital Blvd and Peace St. Some wags would later argue that it was the worst disaster that ever happened, but I’d like to remind those wags of a little event called “Ted Nugent quits the Amboy Dukes.” Don’t believe me? Go and listen to “Journey of the Center of the Mind” 10,000 times in a row and try telling me there wasn’t at least one more so-gr8-it’s-gr9-single in that group. I double-dog dare you!

Anyway, when the storm subsided and life more or less returned to normal, I realized that nothing would ever be the same again because a) I was an orphan and b) I had super powers. My powers consisted of having all the time in the world and not knowing what the h-e-double-hockey-sticks to do with it. Now that I was an orphan, my manservant took it upon himself to explain that with great power comes great responsibility. We went on a handful of adventures, which is where I met Camden Camden, aka “the girl of our dreams.”

I sure did love CC. She had everything you’d want in a girl: all of the girl parts plus a nice mouth and normal eyebrows. I can’t tell you how much I respected her for not wearing those nasty-ass fake eyebrows the kids are so crazy about nowadays. You can’t watch a YouTube video without seeing those things; like really! REALLY!]

"REALLY? REALLY?" asked incredulous former SNL "Weekend Update" host and resident cutie-pie Seth Meyers, and of course the guffawing crowd lapped it up like mother’s milk. They loved easy, soothing, and repetitive jokes like that, and who can blame them? I know I could sit back and watch Jason Biggs hump that warm apple pie 24 hours a day, eight days a week (a popular Beatles song, plus I’m getting the eight days figure from the fact that I’d be doing it "twice on Sunday" per the colloquial expression).

I sat in the audience with my beloved Camden Camden and it was clear our date wasn’t going well. She had rebuffed my advances, which was mind-blowing given that I’d written the book on pick-up artistry (hey, quick sidebar: this book, entitled “The Game,” once reached #3 on the Amazon.com bestseller list, so it was obviously pretty good; not that I’d know, because who has time to read books anymore? I know I don’t!). I kept hitting her with my best negs, telling her that her plain jane eyebrows reminded me of rancid dogshit twice warmed over, and all she did was recoil in horror like I was some sicko who had spent years 6-12 of his life pulling the wings off flies, bees, birds, and fallen angels. I had actually spent those years killing mice with an air hammer, which goes to show how little she knew about me. No wonder we broke up in one of those crushing scenes!

"Oscar, could you please stop blowing hot air in my ear?" she asked while Seth Meyers continued to perform the hackneyed schtick for which he was well known and well loved across the entirety of the English-speaking world.

"I’m kino-escalating!" I shouted, because as noted supra, I don’t have an inside voice.

"Yeah, whatever, just watch the goddamn show," she said. "I’m sorry I even agreed to this."

"I bet you are!" I continued to shout. "I’m a real piece of work!"

And I was, too. How many of you viewers at home can say you survived Hurricane Fran and emerged not only unscathed but with all the time in the world? Other than you, Scott. I read your email and I promise I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

[The last memory he had of summer was the burning Scwhann’s refrigerated truck he had passed while doing 115 kph down a two-lane highway somewhere in the badlands of North Dakota. He was going to find himself, which of course he never did, but it was a pleasant journey nonetheless.

This was the reverie he contented himself with as he lay dying in a hospice in Troy, NY (“the City that Works!”). Like most of the past, it probably hadn’t even happened, but it was enough to coax a single tear through those ugly false eyelashes and down a once-chubby but now raisin-wrinkled cheek.

And with that, in less than one hundredth of one half of one hintillionth of a split fucking second, “the Sultan of Swat” struck out swinging. Goodbye to all that, my Babe.]

—OLB & JRP

The End of My Career as the Internet

One of the hardest things to do is anything, know what I’m saying? That’s what Coach always told me, and since Coach was also my father (a fact I learned too late for it to do me any long-term good, alas), he was always right. But really, I just got tired of it. Someone writes an easy joke and slaps it on a .jpeg of Betty White and suddenly it’s everywhere. Or there’s a news clip where a person falls down or acts in a very stereotypical way. Then the lolcats, lawlzcats, roflmaocats, afkats, brbcats, aslcats: sure they’re fine in the morning, real sweet-like, but when you get to midnight and they start caterwauling, you’re about finished with the whole kit and caboodle.

I guess you could write fiction on me, but I wouldn’t read that and neither would you. So if you wanted to write fiction, you’d just pass it off as fact, which is what most of us call life itself. That’s what my dad/Coach (recently deceased RIP) never tired of repeating: “If a person’s lips are moving, he’s lying.” He also saw a white light in 1994 and it changed everything. After that, he recognized that life was a vale of tears and decided to start behaving like the lillies of the valley, which is certainly one way to go about it. When he died, it was unexpected, even though he’d been diagnosed with heart disease years earlier. “Never saw it coming,” he said, which is easy enough if you remember to keep your eyes closed.

You can have any argument on me and none of it matters. You change nothing and no one cares. But you’re heard, and in precisely the same way that you’d hear yourself when you record your voice on a cassette tape and play it back to assuage a pain born from loneliness that starts around the same time that the brbcat caterwauling does. It’s a pleasant feeling, to take it personal and make it personal. Does consistency matter? It never mattered to me. I’d tell you one thing and then I’d tell you another, especially if I was trying to sleep with you (this is already too long for McSweeney’s, hahaha, and I/we are/were certainly trying too hard, or not trying at all, but either way cut the shit and order; the McRib won’t be on the menu much longer). The sex would suck, though. “Seven minutes in heaven,” I’d say with a polite laugh followed by a high-five. “Now that’s that. Catch you on the flip side, broham.”

"Once upon a time" is how a lot of myths and superstitions and saws and sayings and old wives’ tales and shaggy dog stories start. "Twice upon a Time" was the name of a sitcom I pitched to the WB back when that was a thing; it was going to star the Olsen Twins and the Raven-Symone twins and it’d have been MOTHERFUCKING fantastic, pardon my French and my shouting and my (over) reach. But it was already a movie starring Molly Ringwald, aka America’s Sweetheart, and George Newbern, aka the guy who voiced Superman in many of the DC Universe animated series. He was no Tim Daly, let me tell you, but you try meeting that guy’s salary demands. He was on Wings, for crying out loud! But no, this show was going to be what made me, my one shining moment, but instead I’m still here and I’m nothing more than a repository for all your shitty dear diary entries and quasi-public breakdowns because nobody loves you and they never will. When really, I just wanted to sway in the breeze like a lilly of the valley. Is that too much to ask?

"Sir, there are customers behind you. Will it be the McRib, or will it be jack shit?" asked the truculent clerk, as played by Molly Ringwald. With her hair in curlers and some weird moisturizing goop on her timeworn face, she sure didn’t look or act like America’s Sweetheart anymore. And yet she was so great on Caroline in the City! Unforgettable, even.

"Look, just let me think for a minute. I’ve already seen Jack Shit, and I thought that Tom Cruise was way better in Mission Impossible 2. Do people forget that John Woo used to be a great director? I mean, he had John Travolta and Nicolas Cage switch places and faces! In a movie! And I watched it!" Why was I so excited? I was just ordering a McRib, or at least contemplating doing that. So close and yet so far.

"I don’t have all day," spat the clerk. By which I mean she spat tobacco into a small styrofoam coffee cup to the right side of the register. Spat it disdainfully, even.

"I know you don’t have all day. I asked your manager and he said you’re off at 5," I replied, following that up with a wink and a spot-on "meeeerooow" noise I’d learned from my brbcats.

"Look, order your McRib, you pervert!" As I watched her recoil, I realized I should’ve included a trigger warning. "So it goes" is what I’d write here if I were Kurt Vonnegut. That’s an effective one, right? That would sure as heck trigger me to start thinking about the work of Kurt Vonnegut, which is good albeit a bit repetitive.

"I’m doing a little something called pick-up artistry," I explained to her. "Right now, I’m opening the set. At around 5:13, I expect I’ll be closing it. And at 5:20, you’ll be telling me you never want to see me again."

"One McRib," the clerk hissed into the microphone a la prime-period Bell Biv Devoe. "That’ll be $4.98."

I turned out my pockets like a sad hobo clown in one of those old-timey road movies. Sullivan’s Travels, maybe? I remember that one; the dude from Ride the High Country was in that. I’d suggest you LimeWire or NetFlix or BitTorrent or SoulSeek one or maybe both of those cinematic landmarks. “Sorry, but it looks like I can’t even buy a clue,” I said sheepishly. “Any chance I can steal your heart and pay with that?”

That ended about the way you’d expect. I ate a tasty McRib and developed a saintly red nimbus of McRib sauce around my chapped lips. The clerk as played by Molly Ringwald never called me again, even though I’d given her everything I had, which was nothing. See, what had happened was this: in a truly funny mix-up of the sort that often leads to Doris Day falling head over heels for Rock Hudson, I had asked my pharmacist for my weekly “Bateman’s Dozen” of male enhancement pills, and what I got instead were twelve mail enhancement pills. The pills worked like a charm—I’d never received so many Arby’s and Long John Silver’s circulars before or since!—but not in the way that I’d expected.

"Is it always this bad?" she asked.

I had to rack my brain for the answer to that Daily Double. “Yeah, probably. Sometimes I like to pretend that I ‘had a thing’ with this person or that one, but that’s only so that I can summon a few tears during a job interview or at the end of a long speech. Otherwise, I just sit around the house waiting for the cats to start their screeching and washing dishes one at a time. Because what else is there? You, I guess, but I don’t love you, Molly Ringwald. Once upon a time I did, when you were America’s Sweetheart, but certainly not now. Now you’re just yesterday’s papers, or at least yesterday’s Arby’s coupon fliers, which come to think would’ve been a catchier Rolling Stones tune. More relatable to me, anyway. You see that huge stack of junk mail over that? I can’t burn that stuff fast enough.”

When I stopped talking, I noticed that she’d already left. I smiled a secret smile and my secret sharer smiled a public one. “You old dog, you still have it. There’s some fight in you yet,” I whispered to me/him.

Which brings me to why I took the Manny Pacquiao fight. Yes, I know I was the 5:1 underdog, but I needed that payday. McRibs and Molly Ringwalds aren’t exactly cheap, especially not with inflation the way it is (“a dollar buys a nickel’s worth,” declaims Peter Finch in Network, and man is he right about that!). So yeah, Pac-Man, bring it on. I’ll beat your sorry keister from pillar to post and hold you down for the long three. Wait, what? Only a two-count? Are you kidding me?

BOOOOOOM went the steel chair against the back of my noggin, felling me like a mighty oak stranded in the midst of a storybook forest.

"I can’t believe what I’m seeing!" shouted palsied announcing great Jim "JR" Ross. "The Rock is beating him like a government mule!"

"Isn’t he one of the good guys?" asked doomed, clueless announcer/former NFL player Mike Adamle.

"The Rock has just beaten the hell out of him! What a turn of events! I’m sorry, folks, but we’re out of time…but it looks like the road to Wrestlemania just got started right here on RAW!"

Sorry, JR, but the road to Wrestlemania started a long time ago. It started back when I was five years old and I asked Coach where babies come from. “Uranus,” he had said, and as luck would have it, he was almost right. Old Coach, what a joker he was. He’d introduce me to all his male chauvinist pig friends, and when they remarked on how big I was (steroids) and asked what sport I played, he’d say, “Oh, this nancy here, he doesn’t play anything but the skin-flute and the meat-whistle!”

It was called positive reinforcement and it was how Dr. Spock said we should raise all of our children. He had five Pillars of Parenting, as I recall:
1) Judge not lest ye be judged.
2) Spare the rod and spoil the child.
3) If you put your uneaten food in the garbage disposal, dad/Coach will fish it out and make you eat it, because what, you think you’re too good to finish all your food, you rat bastard? When I was a kid, there wasn’t a scrap of food on the table and we were all on pins and needles. We were on pins and needles because the pain distracted us from hunger, is what I mean. Your grandmother was an early acupuncture devotee and let me tell you, that stuff worked, or I wouldn’t be standing here today. Now eat those moldy tomatoes and corn rinds!
4) It’s not stealing if you don’t get caught.
5) It’s not true unless it’s true for you.

If you followed these rules, you’d be sure to raise a child who turned out to be a world-beating genius or a career criminal, maybe both. Hopefully not both, though, because then the world would be in for a world of trouble, ha ha ha. “One meeeeeelion dollars,” as Mike Myers never tired of joking. If you don’t get the reference, you’re either 14 years old or you’ve been living inside one of those Hurricane Fran storm shelters they’ve been keeping sealed like time capsules so that when E! finally does its ultimate or at least penultimate Remember the 90s special, they have some vintage talking heads for it.

Those poor suckers aren’t the only ones trapped in 1996, though. I remember how I was in 1996, and if you don’t, your ass better call somebody (or at least look at this: http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/jam.htm). This is how I’ll always remember myself, so ugly and insignificant, just me and a few other angry young losers who are now being overwhelmed by all of the people who want to use me to matter, who want to “significate” and “slacktivize,” who want something other than what they have. As for me, I never wanted anything, yet here I am.

—
OLB & JRP

Dress Is a Dress Is a Dress

I didn’t want to write this about the dress, and you didn’t want to read it. But I’m afraid of the alternative, standing bare-ass naked in front of Peter at the gates, the judge smiling and donning his doge mask, magisterial and questioning, “Did you do all that you could? Did you Just Do It?”

See, I’m deeply concerned my thoughts are meaningless. Or, if not meaningless, tremendously unimportant. I immediately know the dress is a private language argument, sewn into a sheath monstrosity. I know that I have a really gripping take on color-space — how far is blue from white in CIELAB space, what about CIEXYZ? I know what cobalt really is, with all empirical accidents stripped away, reduced to its chemical entelechy. I just have so much to say, and I have such a remarkable intellectual C.V., perhaps tempered only for this discussion.

But, I can’t say anything about the dress. You’re already bored reading about it, so over it. You only clicked on this link because you are a scab-picker, a hate-reader who is already penning your “deep.” retweet. Fortunately, I’m a hate-writer. I only can release myself to unfettered creation in the service of absolute crap, the kind of shitshow that has no expectations and no potential.

H.P. Lovecraft used to go to parties and flirt like a real PUAH, mewing lines like, “We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.” Neg intelligence, neg possibility, neg the race. Can you imagine the purchase that he’d get on the World WIDE web? I’m sure you can and I’m sure you follow @ModernLovecraftStuffebooks. He gets it.

Peace.

Heavenly Warrior IIIx4: Forgiveness Night Electric Black (Special M Edition)

My dearest Razorkina,

You will find this note, should you find it at all, next to the cookies and milk. How long have I been leaving these out for you? A day, certainly. Or perhaps longer: perhaps this note has always been on my nightstand. Or maybe it’s on the coffee table now; maybe I’ve moved and there simply wasn’t room for this nightstand any longer. But none of that matters, because if you’re reading this, you’ve materialized in my reality and are now ready to do the work I created you to do.

I suppose I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. I’m very excited, you see. You are, or will be, the only thing that has ever mattered in my life—my life which until now has been perfectly fine and perfectly meaningless.

My name is Hideki Toriyama. My father’s name was something else. My mother’s name was, too. My wife’s name is never anywhere near the tip of my tongue. We have two children together. She wanted four; I wanted none. A compromise, one of so many, that brought me to this point.

They tell me I was a brilliant student. The awards that bedeck the walls of my office indicate that they’re right. Interactive Electronics Monthly dubbed me the “Game Designer of the Century” in 2000. Greater than the Tetris guy, greater than the Nerf ball designer…the greatest of the past hundred years.

I work for the same game company that my father did. He developed card games and slot machines. I helped transition our business into console video games. In those days, I wasn’t anything at all; I was a lost soul, twisting and turning through the world like a dog chasing its tail, and for a precisely similar purpose.

When I designed the first Heavenly Warrior, I felt like I was just connecting the dots. There were pirates and goblins and liches. There were hit points and turn-based action menus. The story consisted of little more than a dozen dungeon crawls tied together by the flimsiest of premises.

It sold well enough, but it was nothing. Well, almost nothing. You were in there—the first you, Princess Kina. What did you say? “Oh my hero” and “Now justice is right.” “Vanquished are they.” “Together we teamed the win.” Sweet nothings.

In the second game, we had moved from 8 bits to 16. Sort of: we were still utilizing an 8-bit CPU tethered to a 16-bit GPU, if you want to split hairs. But it was enough. I could dream in 482 colors now, and I could oversee the coding of these dreams into reality.

I wish to underscore that I have always been faithful to you, Razorkina. I was faithful to you before you were so much as a neuron charge in my nervous system. I never touched my wife and felt the slightest bit of affection, and before her, there were no other women at all. I married her because that’s what you’re expected to do. You can’t just sit alone in your dorm room, masturbating to balloons on which you’ve drawn hundreds of insectoid eyes. Polite society, which in its gray monotonous drudgery is antithetical to iridescent flights of fancy, will not countenance such deviance.

Now don’t get me wrong, it countenances plenty of deviance. You can buy a teenager’s soiled underwear out of a vending machine, or pay someone to let you suck on his or her feet, but wanting to copulate with a telepathic elephant made out of crème fraîche and angel tears remains out of bounds. Everything is acceptable so long as it is uninspired.

Just the other day, nude photographs of a Hollywood starlet leaked onto the Internet. Millions of curious horndog fans rushed to see them—and what did they get for their trouble? A few blurry selfies in hotel bathrooms, and a body that looked exactly the way a body of that sort would be expected to look. Such is what passes for excitement in a world that has billions in the bank and contents itself by spending pennies.

When I began work on Heavenly Warrior III, I cashed in my chips. We were working with a graphics chip that was capable of trilinear filtering, meaning I could produce the smoothest textures imaginable. The other two consoles at the time were utter shit, relying on nearest-neighbor interpolation to create pixelated textures that recalled nothing so much as my misbegotten art school attempts at pointilism. But the PC Engine 64 gave me the stars themselves as a backdrop.

In the second game, I had begun moving away from the staid sword-and-sorcery aesthetic. Airships and trains were added, and the bestiary was revised to contain only those creatures that no one had ever thought of before. Why fight a mere goblin when you could battle a giant’s tongue (with accompanying infected tongue stud) or a nanny-goat demon modeled on Whistler’s Mother?

Here in the third iteration, I bade farewell to the rest of it: I killed your love interest, because it made no sense to have such an overpowered and well-rounded blank slate of a protagonist. Hiro was the hero onto whom players were supposed to project their fondest hopes, but I saw no reason to leave such a critical part of the game to those violent, half-illiterate teenagers.

I began to reimagine the other returning characters. Guru the Engineer went from a man in a miner’s hat to a panda bear that could astral-project itself into the body of a steam golem that rolled along on huge tank treads. Rokk the Red Mage was no longer some pitiful Errol Flynn knockoff, but instead a two-headed sideshow freak with gem-encrusted magic staves for arms. And you, you were my pièce de résistance: I took your eyes and your silly white mage powers and gave you those beautiful blades in their place.

In that moment of creation, I found true love. Ours was supposed to be an age of extremes, a century of freaks…but it was all so damn monotone and monochromatic. I had thousands of colors at my disposal now; why should I use this palette to render another stupid huge-breasted vessel to be filled by the libidinous urges of whatever moron happened to be playing her? No, you were mine, and you would remain virginal forever: Razorkina, the blade of revenge, who needs no man to save her and no woman to comfort her.

That was rather selfish of me, I admit. You’ve gone through thousands of hours of story by this point, all of it filled with adventures so ridiculous as to seem impossible, and you’ve done so by your lonesome because of the whims of one vain little man.

A vain little man who used to look out his dorm window, and where most people saw the sun, he saw a vessel in which he might dock his throbbing member and impregnate the universe with his seminal fluid. A vain little man who exchanged pleasantries with acquaintances yet always looked beyond them, dreamed and prayed beyond them, because what else is a heaven for but to be filled with one’s own cosmic sexuality?

So here we are, Razorkina. You have your cookies and milk, but you do not have your mission. You likely have your suspicions, though. And you certainly have your hatred. Time for you to have at it.

Razorkina, I want you to finish your snack and then rip my human, all too human body to shreds. I want you to baptise yourself in my blood. And I want you to live-tweet all of this on my Twitter account because, my god, think of the retweets we’ll get. I want the fans to see my genius revealed at last, in one blinding flash of glory.

Sure, these mouth-breahters liked Heavenly Warrior III just fine. But all they ever did was bitch about some billiards game that one of the junior programmers worked up as a lark. “Can’t we have more Q-Ball?” they’d beg. No, of course you can’t have it. You can’t have any Q-Ball, because Q-Ball was never the fucking point. The game in its entirety, not some ridiculous minigame, was my gift to the world.

After you spring to life and tear me limb from limb, they’ll understand what it all meant. They’ll say, “Oh that Toriyama, he dreams in color, he dreams in red,” to paraphrase a Pearl Jam song that of late has been rocking my “On-the-Go” iPod playlist.

Because art is what we live for and what we die for, Razorkina. The games and movies and books aren’t theirs and they never were. “Chinatown was great until that bogus ending,” they say. “2001 is such a slow movie that I don’t think anybody could even watch it now,” they say. “I guess Dubliners was all right but who wants to read a bunch of stories about Dublin,” they say. “Marlene Dietrich’s disguise in Witness for the Prosecution just ruined it for me, because who could believe that shit?” they say. “More Q-Ball and less of all this other crap that makes the game load so long that it’s hard to play Q-Ball,” they say.

They’re all a bunch of assholes, my beloved Razorkina. They’re all a bunch of assholes, and they deserve my beautiful death almost as much as I do.

Affectionately,

HT

—OL “Eddy” Bateman

The Worst in American Unfinished Fiction, 2014

1 - “When your dad’s a dime-novel P.I. and your ma’s a three-buck whore, you spend most of your life in debt. Two dollars and ninety cents to be exact — not even counting the inevitable student loans. But those forty or sixty thousand dollars are chump change compared to that red-light ledger line. You couldn’t wipe that out or wash that off with all the hedge funds and all the gold stars and all the Summer’s Eve in the world. Because when the cards are counted, you were bastard born to a louche dick and a loose hole and you’re gonna choke out your days dying for fulfillment.”

Mr. Whiskers finished his monologue, bid adieu to his silent interlocutor, the mirror, and scampered out the door, pawing his trilby hat off the nightstand. It was trivia night and he had to look good. His team, Kiddie Night at the Ebola-rama, needed his expertise on Ingmar Bergman films, Belle and Sebastian cover art, and middle-brow cheeses.

“Shit, it’s already 8:10.”

He was half-an-hour late.

2 - The secretary closed the goddamn door. “Fi - nah - lee!” He stared out his new floor-to-ceiling office window. The skyline was bodacious. “If this view was a woman … Jesus. The truly awful, unspeakable things I would do. Shit they can’t even print in gonzo-press comics. I’d do to her what spring does to the cherry trees,” he thought, mumbling softly to himself. “Who would have thought, ten years ago that a little, booger-faced shittheal from Boise-Sacramento — that hayseed suburb of Baltimore, New York — who would have guessed that little Hugston Feverfew would be here now.” Mr. Feverfew undid his pants and pressed himself against the window, riffling the folds of Pierre Cardin sport-chambray. “Top of the Worl —” The glass began to crack.

3 - Flatface and Roundhead were locked in a mortal struggle.

“You can’t break a boulder,” Roundhead shouted, rolling around in a defensive fetal ball.

“Paper beats rock,” Flatface screamed. He splayed his limbs and fell like a Buster Keaton wall, covering Roundhead. Flatface, necessarily expressionless, clenched his 2-dimensional lantern jaw and drew his arms into a bear hug.

Roundhead began spinning like a cartoon hedgehog. Flatface banged around on every rotation. Luckily, he didn’t have a nose to break.

“I’m gonna crush you, Flatface.”

Roundhead had overplayed his hand.

“Too late.”

The camera zoomed in on Flatface’s eponymous feature. The crowd went wild, shitting themselves with laughter.

4 - Moments after the wild consummation of a six-year campaign to “get with” the popular girl, he burst into flames. Dudley Pumpter, the loveable sitcom sidekick, the glasses-up-his-nose wisecracker and semi-professional card game critic, crawled out of the ashes that were now burying his horrified conquest. “Just my luck. Already a born-again virgin.”

As Dudley smoothed out his feathers, a car fishtailed into the yard, blasting Hardwire’s new hit single, “Cracka, I Was Born on Martha’s Vineyard”. Dudley’s day was about to get worse. He was dead in the sights of the popular girl’s overprotective ex-boyfriend, Whitney Stafford III. “Whit-Staff” captained the varsity captaining team and “kicked nerd asshole”, aptly promoting the special brand of aggressive masculinity passed down the business end of his dear old dad.

The popular girl rolled her eyes. It was happening all over again.

Whit-Staff sensed the eye-roll and rolled his eyes in response, harder, bowing his optic nerve aneurysmically. He didn’t need this small-town drama. He was headed to the University. Sacks of easy women, bindles of snatch, faggots of ladies lashed together with sorority and mediocre confidence. Whit-Staff converted his fish-tail into a full donut and roared westward, ready for God-hood.

5 - The Buddha began to pound his chest and moan. The rest of the Soulcycle class riddled him with disgusted sneers.

“Riddles in the dark,” thought to himself. “I hate the kinda yuppies that come to the nighttime class.”

6 - “I just can’t remember”, screamed an on-the-brink Mr. Whiskers. “I’m sure that Fanny och Alexander, or ‘Fanny AND Alexander’ — as you might know it — took place in Sweden. But the city … Ahh which one. I know it’s not Stockholm, too obvious for the Berg-meister. Maybe Uppsala — or, or, or … Malmo! It’s gotta be Malmö. Who would think Malmö?”

Mr. Whiskers began manically hopping. He was really leaning into the umlaut-o’s that he knew, very well, were actually distinct characters in Swedish.

The rest of Kiddie Night at the Ebola-rama sipped their Negronis and doodled on their answer sheet. Until now, they were batting a thousand. They’d breezed past softball quiz-tions like “How many times does Clint Eastwood say ‘you’ in For a Few Dollars More”, “How many Beatles were alive in 1952” and “How tall is Bojan Bogdanovic”. No one had ever gotten a perfect score at the Wednesday night Trivia-Off at Mutsy’s Saloon. If they could just slam this last question, they’d likely get a free round, maybe even a plaque.

Mr. Whiskers scribbled down “Malmo” and ran their sheet up to Brandon, the bearded quiz master, the arbiter of fate who’d made it as far as the last round of Jeopardy auditions eleven times.

“1. Cinnamon”
“2. Money on the dresser, drive a Kompressor”
“3. Pornhub”
“4. Either Italy or Uranus”
“5. The Szyk Haggadah”
“6. Al Jolson in overalls”
“7. Baboons, luna moths, and Skeeter from the cartoon Doug”
“8. If you’re feeling sinister”
“9. Purple”

Nine correct answers. But that didn’t surprise them. Kiddie Night at the Ebola-rama clenched their collective jaw. It all came down to this.

“And finally … number ten … Uppsala.”

Silence. And then nothing.

—
EH

Heavenly Warrior III - 19 (Z Final Type)

The three of them huddled around the LED television set, the last of its kind in North America. On the screen, a game that resembled a cross between billiards and jacks was taking place.

"Come on, come on, I have two meal credits riding on this," pleaded one of the two men playing the game. He pushed a few buttons on the game controller, which was held together by a combination of superglue and electrical tape.

"Snake eyes!" shouted his opponent in recognition of an unsuccessful turn. "You got red Solo cupped, Terry."

"Oh fuck. Fuck goddamn. What is wrong with me?" Terry asked. "I don’t have anything left to eat. I can’t beat you, man. I can’t do anything with this game anymore. I just want to die."

"You got reg-flipped," said the onlooker. "He canceled his run, played a niner, and then Q-balled your ass. That’s top tier shit. Pro."

"Yeah, pro my pwn-hole," Terry sneered. "That was cheese, plain and simple. Used to handle that weak Sriracha with the greatest of ease. I was top tier, a two-slot camper when we were the opening event at EVO in 2016. That was our year. The year Q-Ball went big-time."

"Just pay me, brocephus," said his opponent, who was considerably younger but no less bedraggled and worse for wear. "I don’t have time for a history lesson."

"Like, that move you did was fine, but as I’m saying it was total mud tier cheese," Terry continued. "We never played like that on the dollar circuits."

The opponent shrugged. “You were at EVO twice, like we give a shit. Why’d you even ask me to play this dumbass game if you’re starving and can’t give up those creds?”

Terry turned off the television and scanned his meal credits into his opponent’s account. “I just wanted to get back to what was pure and tebow, get you kids playing a classic again. One more time, so you could see the perfect game as I knew it. So you could see how balanced it was.”

The opponent’s friend laughed. “It’s just some mod game that you gotta dust off and boot up with that old zip drive. And all you doing is rolling dice and pushing buttons. Rando and goatse.”

His opponent patted him on the shoulder. “Anybeans, look, we gotta amazingrace back to the labor camp, Terry. You just take it easy, all right? Maybe we do one tomorrow, huh?”

Terry nodded. “Yeah, I’d like that. You guys go and dox all that info you been mining. I’ll just kanye it here for a while. I’m cool, I’m milano.”

After the pair of them had departed, Terry eased his aging body onto the rice mat that served as both his couch and his bed. The media conglomerates no longer supported his LED set, and he’d stubbornly refused to invest in a VR implant, so all he was left to entertain himself with were Blu-Rays of The Boondock Saints and Fight Club and the homebrewed modification of Heavenly Warrior III - 7 (X Type) that he and his friends had devoted a half-decade of their lives to creating.

A half-decade rendered completely goatse first by the refusal of Heavenly Warrior’s creative team to embrace the competitive gaming community’s obsession with Q-Ball and then by those wretched implants. The former couldn’t believe they’d created the perfect game and the latter had made controller-based games obsolete altogether.

Terry caressed what remained of his custom, retrofitted Xbox One controller in his arthritic hands. Every ache he felt in his fingers reminded him of a past battle. He had bested far greater adversaries in the past than today’s cheese strat-abusing Data Engineer 1 - Entry Level. He took the legendary CF_69burgerTime420 to extra throws at the Worlds in 2016 and then went straight-up rolls against deaf-mute Q-bal savant LoL_BoogerBrigade51482. A few months after those triumphs, he had won the entire 64-man invitational at the Gamespot World Series.

God, what a year that had been: back when wages were denominated in dollars, he had cleared over $5,000—and totally tax-free, at that. It was almost enough to afford the food and water he needed to sustain himself while devoting 20 hours per day to Q-Ball. He was grateful to his parents, who let him flourish like a tuber hidden from the sun in their basement while he chased his dreams of gaming glory.

And he was glorious, wasn’t he? He was one of the highest-karma’ed members of reddit.com/r/QBALLINFO. Some of the other posters, the ones who could never hope to equal his proficiency on the d-stick or his facility at reg-flipping, used to draw funny caricatures of him on wide-ruled notebook paper and upload them to the forum. Why hadn’t he saved a few for these lean years? That picture of him slicing open the heart of Heavenly Warrior protagonist Razorkina with a radioactive Q-Ball sybian had always brought a smile to his face.

But no cared about Reddit karma or even Reddit itself nowadays. The implants had ruined everything. Games today were nothing but sad, graphics-heavy affairs that consisted of people uploading their conscious minds into the bodies of genetically enhanced house cats and terrier dogs and then cutting a bloody swath through hundreds of sewer rats. How could anyone who had experienced the beauty and simplicity of Manifesto Q’s version of Q-Ball possibly derive any enjoyment from bathing an eight-pawed, eight-eyed cat’s body in the blood of swarms of dead rodents?

Terry, who could no longer undertake the thousands of hours per week of Q-Ball practice needed to maintain top-tier skills, should have been training the next generation of Manifesto Q players. He should have been the right hand/cat’s paw of Hideki Toriyama, helping this visionary redesign ever more sublime versions of Heavenly Warrior in which all of the detestable actual gameplay was removed in favor of balanced Q-Ball duels with minimal load times.

Instead, he lived alone in the closet-sized cenobitic shelter that the Pan-American Social Services Agency subsidized for him. He had all the time in the world, since he was too old to dox in the data camps, but little of this time could be directed where it mattered most. Instead, he watched The Boondock Saints and Fight Club over and over again, sometimes exceeding a half-dozen combined viewings per day, and pondered what he had done to offend the universe.

"Haven’t I paid for my crimes?" he asked the surveillance speculum that hung suspended from his cell’s narrow ceiling. "Haven’t I?"

Thousands of miles away, the Data Processing Assistant 2 - Extern assigned to monitor Terry’s building made a brief notation in his file: SUBJECT BLOOD PRESSURE DIASTOLIC AND SYSTOLIC WITHIN ACCEPTABLE RANGE AND NO SIGNS OF COHABITATION IN DWELLING.

—
OLB

Heavenly Warrior Legend I

She had been a princess, the heiress to a mighty empire. That was once upon a time, when there were fewer and simpler colors, when the music was tinny and repetitive. Life had seemed like a dream within a dream: silly pitched battles against villains so generic she could only remember them as “PIrate King” and “Lich Lord” that occurred while completing inane quests for enchanted amethysts and cursed harps.

She was just plain Kina then, a soft-spoken girl who wore a white kimono, cast healing spells, and generally stayed in the background while the other Radiance Champions did the heavy lifting. In those days she still had her blue eyes, through which she absorbed the splendors of what had seemed to her and her companions like the whole wide world. The five splendid buildings that comprised “City Town.” The three rectangular rooms of the “Elf Tower.” The “velvet plain Robes” of Hiro, her beloved red mage, and the shadowy features of the black enchanter peeking out from underneath his “cotton Wizard hat.” What was that enchanter’s name? It didn’t matter, most likely; it could’ve been whatever we wanted.

Only Hiro mattered. He could do anything. Karate, the “Jump” attack, fire spells, ice spells, even low-level cures of the sort she had devoted decades to mastering. Oh, how he would calmly wait his turn, and then, after she or the grey sage had restored the party to life, tear into their foes with reckless abandon. Oh, how his words still echoed, even if it now appeared they had been said in a different lifetime, or not at all.

"I am Hiro, champion of the Light!"

"You fiend. We are come to conquer."

"I have harp."

"Kina my princess. The winner is you."

That last one—“my princess”—could almost melt a heart grown cold after dozens of climactic space battles against cyber-punk villains intent on destroying the earth with meteors or fusing with meteors or giving birth to meteors or transforming meteors into comets (and then sometimes even transforming those comets into dragons, which in turn gave birth to meteors) or what the heck ever. After a while, she couldn’t keep track. Besides, all she saw were heat signatures anyway; her eyes, her beautiful blue eyes, had been sawed out and replaced with razor guns because, uh, reasons. She was Princess Kina no longer; henceforth she was Razorkina, the salvation of the multiverse.

Nobody saved the universe quite like her. She had killed the meta-daemons Beelzebub and Beelzebub Jr. plus two separate versions of Beelzebub Jr.’s ghost, one of which had been a cyborg. And didn’t the cyborg ghost also have a ghost? Yeah, that’s right: a ghost of a cyborg ghost of a ghost of a clone of Satan himself. She missed the simplicity of the “Pirate King” and his “All Hands on Deck” attack. At least then the villain’s motivations made sense: he was a pirate, and he lusted after booty. Her booty, in fact—she had been taken captive by him.

She was a weakling no longer. She had loved Hiro, the Hiro of “Kina my princess,” but no one after him. Who could love her now, with her gruesome eye-weapons that jutted out four feet in front of her face? Certainly her current three-man crew, one of whom was a giant bioslime teddy bear that contained the nœther-soul of her great-grandfather’s sensei and two of whom were clearly an “item” of some sort, had nothing to offer.

So she flew the airship, which wasn’t the same airship as the other fifty or so she’d flown but was still called “airship” because that’s the way things were, from city to city and collected q-balls. The game was essentially an updated version of jacks, and she couldn’t stop playing it. It struck her as the only thing left to do, an urge no more or less explicable than the one her old companion Nimbus the RageWolf-Dog had to chase his own tail.

A game intended as nothing more than a diversion from harsh reality had consumed all that was left of her threadbare life. The firmament was rendered in a billion colors, and her kingdoms had never been vaster or more intricate, and yet what would it avail her if her razor-eyes never saw any of this again? She remained the salvation of the multiverse, and sometimes the winner was her—and sometimes it wasn’t.

—
OLB

In the End, the Dog Will Bury Us

“Ladies and Gentleman, I’m pleased to present Master Jane Stockton. She will be reading a selection from her new work ‘In the end, the dog will bury us’. Afterwards there will be a brief Q&A and some refreshments. I would keep yammering [pause for laughter] but, well, you all know me. Let’s get to know the woman we all know better than ourselves, a woman who needs no introduction — it says so right here in her rider — Master Jane Stockton”.

“In the end, the dog will bury us. He had to keep reminding me of that, those last few months. They both had cancer, you see. My father. The dog. His was untreatable. The dog’s was responding favorably to chemotherapy. ‘It’s not so ruff’, the men in white coats would say. But I didn’t trust the doctors. They were optimists. I never trust optimists. It turns out they were right. At my father’s funeral the dog howled. My aunts joked that he was singing Pachelbel’s Canon. The joke was on them. My father hated that song. Eventually, the summer turned to winter and the paint started cracking. The British racing green chipped off the walls in state-shaped chunks. The dog howled then, too. My roommate joked that he was singing that hot Top 40 hit ‘The Paint’s Peelin’ … Out Like a Drag Racer.” Later, the winter turned to … the next season. I wouldn’t know. I was dead. At my funeral, the dog howled. There was no one left to joke about his singing. I thought it was pretty funny anyway. In the end, the dog will bury us.”

Q - “Fantastic work. How long did it take you to write ‘In the End, the Dog Will Bury Us?’” A - “The first few drafts were written in the summer and the fall. You can see the influences. Editing only took a few weeks. But my editor was busy. She was moving to the suburbs. I think she’s trying to get pregnant.” Q - “What’s it all mean, doc?” [Audible laughter] Q - “The symbolism’s all over the place: futurism, the American nanny state, modern literature. What’s the semiotic crampon we should hang on? A - “What does a dog’s death mean? It just dies.” [Audible clapping] Q - “Why do people call you ‘Master’.” [Audible laughter] A - “Because I received an MFA from SUNY Stonybrook in Creative Fiction.”

“Refreshments provided in memory of Dr. Steve Lerner. He loved life but it didn’t work out, in the end.”

—
Erik Hinton