Tuesday, April 25, 2017

dramatis personae non grata

Dramatis Personae Non Grata
* denotes point of view character
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* DickJackson Jones - First half Aborigine/half Irish Inuit astronaut, commander of The Flying Turtle, an advanced SSTO spaceplane prototype based on the X-33 VentureStar, equipped with the first practical EM drive

Roger Dodger - Kiss ass white boy and pilot of The Flying Turtle, first white boy left on Mars

Ramona Tostada - First female Mexican astronaut (later remanded to zeroth) and mission specialist aboard The Flying Turtle, Two Dog Night Light operator

Charles 'Charlie' Caoutchouc-Jambes - French Vietnamese rubber tycoon and astronaut tourist aboard The Flying Turtle

Pinot Noir - Chinese peasant and homebrew inventor of the Long March Bottlerocket

* Skyler Montgomery - American physicist and inventor of the Two Dog Night Light, aka moonbeam, brrr-beam, lunar laser, looneybeam, crazylaser, ice box beam, a lasing heat sink aka freeze ray

Mung Bean - British physicist and winner of the Nobel Food Prize for splitting the ham-burger

Thaddeus Thomas - Amish inventor of the Pulverizorator, the ultimate farming implement

Sabathius Malachi - Amish usurper of the Pulverizorator, repurposed as the Ultimate Death Dealer for the SCSG

* Bobbie Kay Rudolph - American theoretical physicist at CERN, responsible for creating the dimensional rift into the Infinite Realm of The Far Flung Hunger by colliding anti-martinis molecules at light speed with the Great Big Giant Hadron Collider while shitfaced

Sir Ferlin Goolsby - President of the United States of America and Baja, California

Terri Peterson - Secretary of Defense

Terd Burgleson - White House press secretary

John 'Rocketman'  Elton - NASA administrator

Sargent Schneider Schnitzkies - drill sargeant, US Army

* Captain Killian Gore - Captain of the USS Donald Trump aircraft carrier carrier, US Navy

Little Big Junior - American AM radio talk show personality, founder of the Little Big Brother Tea Party party

Walks Carefully On Eggshells Like A Bear - Russian double agent adopted by Navajos at birth

Pyotor the Awesome - Tsar of the Soviet Confederate State of Georgia, aka Ivan the Awful

* Generalissimus Nathanial Warbottom - reluctant Lord Marshal of the SCSG armed forces

Olivier Bustier - Engagé Volontaire in the French Foreign Legion and sole survivor of the Gay Bomb

* Dempsey 'Dim' Witt - moonshine bootlegger and Commissar General of the SCSG Coordinated Information Apparatus

* Svetlana 'SuperSvet' Hicks - special agent of the Apparatchik Chicks

Apparatchik Chicks - elite all-female SCSG battalion of the Coordinated Information Apparatus

Stardog - lead singer for Stardog Champion, a Seattle based band from American annexed Baja, California

* Dreyfus Marlowe - convenience store clerk and heroin addict with a heart of gold from Austin, Texas

Todd Trilby - Pothead psychonaut, Dreyfus's best friend, aka Toddmonsah, Monstah Boy, Monstobulous

Ignatius - demon from hell and Dreyfus Marlowe's heroin dealer and tormentor

Bad Friday - shipwrecked Rapa Nui serial killer

* Purl Ashblaque  - gunslinging grunge wizard, summoned via DMT by Toddmonsah to battle Ignatius

Charnala - former gunslinger turned witch and Purl Asheblaque's sworn enemy

Mrs. Bojangles - Canadian high school algebra teacher and cast iron bitch

Ricardo 'Dick' Cabeza de Queso - Mexican cheese smuggler and Ramona Tostada's older brother

* Twit and Twat - two highly intelligent African Grey Parrots constantly bumbling into Deus ex Machinas

Phuc Sum Yun Gy - South Korean internet troll, grammar Nazi and Best Paladin WOW gamer

Emperor Cannibalus the Starvling - Dark Lord and Emperor of the Infinite Realm of the Far Flung Hunger

* Ash - Praetor to Cannibalus the Starvling

Xdfhitef - 'The Stupidest Genius', an alien demigod exiled from the 13th dimension, aka the devil, Lucifer, Satan

God - God the Father Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth and of all things visible and invisible, aka Yaweh, Jehovah, Yeshua, Joshua, Jesus, The Father, The Son, The Holy Spirit, The Holy Ghost, The Holy Trinity

Ball - just the cutest kitten, ever.

screaming eyeballs

Dreyfus patted himself down and located his cigarettes in his right front hip pocket, then did it again to locate his lighter. He stopped walking and pulled a smoke from the pack and cupped it up to his face with both hands to shield it from the wind. After a couple of faulty flicks, he turned around, away from the wind, so that he was facing the direction from which he'd just been walking. * flick, flick * Then there was a sudden flame, well shielded from the wind by the brunt of his back and by his little two-handed cave. The lighter flame was brilliant to Dreyfus's dark adjusted eyes and left a stark, orange afterimage imprinted upon his retinas. It took about half a minute for the afterimage to fade, and when it finally did, Dreyfus was just about to spin aroud and resume his walk when he thought he saw a shadow of something just barely beyond the floating blue gauze left behind by the brilliant orange. Something... unfriendly, was the only word he could think to describe it. Something that was moving toward him.

Suddenly Dreyfus was flat out terrified, and the thought of looking up to see what was moving toward him rendered him completely paralyzed and unable to move. Instead, he just stared at the bright cherry of his cigarette and tried to take a small measure of comfort from the light of it. As he stared, it seemed as through the cherry was shrinking, becoming smaller and smaller, but also brighter and brighter. As it shrunk, the surrounding blackness collapsed into it, making it ever smaller but ever brighter, until all he could see was one excruciatingly brilliant pinpoint of orange, surrounded by a thick, suffocating darkness that pulsated, like a reverse ripple effect, moving inward and collapsing in shrinking waves toward him at the center.

This is what it feels like to play hide and seek with the devil, Dreyfus thought to himself. Or was it tag? Playing tag with the devil? Was that the game he was playing? Had been playing, for the last fifteen years? With the devil? Was that really what he'd been doing? He could hardly credit the thought...

Suddenly it felt to Dreyfus as though he'd been torpedoed, right in the gut and just below the belly button. It was like a dense, liquid compression wave that expanded, but instead of moving outward, it went DOWN. Not down as in toward his feet or the ground, but into another direction of down that went deep inside of him. Down through a dimension where local gravity is expressed in units of pain, and altitude is measured in painful increments. Down down down went the compression wave, compressing and liquifying and squeezing his guts ever downward toward some hard, flat surface of smooth, limitless agony that lay waiting below. Dreyfus felt it all in exquisite detail as it happened, and it even seemed to him as though he could hear it... a rumbling deepness that vibrated like a subwoofer, going lower and louder until it passed beyond hearing and crossed over entirely into pain. Dreyfus's world had suddenly collapsed into a singularity of simple feeling. No need for fancy grammar, parts of speech, sentence structure, or complex rules of rhetoric. The language of this place consisted of just one word-like concept... suffering.

Terrible. It just terrible. The awfulest... jst the worst, the very worst, ever. Just acknowledging the reality of the vague shape that he'd actually seen which precipitated this dip into tangible agony made his eyeballs want to scream forever. Yet despite the reality of actually being inside of such an impossible horror, the thought of his eyeballs screaming for eternity - two eternally pissed off eyeballs inside of his sleep deprived head, constantly bitching inward at his shriveled, unslept brain, for eternity - made Dreyfus chuckle under the ocean of pain, just a little. Suddenly it was the funniest thing he'd ever known, and simply because it was all wrapped inside the absurdity of this evil, insidious, unrelenting suffering. Dreyfus laughed out loud! Why? Because it was hilarious to him, and just the funniest thing, ever.

That's when Ignatius realized that things were starting to go not exactly the way he had expected. So it was that the demon made his first fully fledged, fully physical, fully stereotypically demonic appearance, in the flesh, fully real and fully there, and pulled forcibly into physical reality by the insipid yet undeniable laughter of the object of his torture.

early outline

Scenes, in order, and appearances of characters

1.
Dim Witt and Buckeye. Somewhere in south Georgia. Dempsey 'Dim' Witt is dropping off a barrel of hooch for Sheriff Buckeye Buck at the local whorehouse/saloon. Lots of smalltalk. Maybe some largetalk. There's an old fashioned CRT behind the bar, with a news guy talking about President Goolsby's weapons of war program for the war on global warming, and the upcoming launches of the unprecedentedly expensive 250 billion dollar cooling laser aboard the absurdly expensive 750 billion dollar Flying Turtle, a prototype launch vehicle equipped with the first practical EM drive, and in other news the brand new retarded expensive 1 trillion dollar aircraft carrier carrier, a floating city ten miles from fore to aft, five miles from starboard to port, with a mile high superstructure, a carrier for carrying aircraft carriers, makes its maiden voyage. As an afterthought, the reporter mentions how Georgia once again graciously volunteered to foot the 2 trillion dollar bill, reminiscent of their generosity by volunteering to foot the bill for the New Clear Nuclear Deterrent program of the previous generation. Dim and Buckeye, upon hearing the news, lose their shit (later on when things have developed beyond the point of no return they present a single, very fancily printed 2 trillion dollar bill to President Goolsby, absolving Georgia from all debt and backed up by the Space Bank. Eventually... when Space Banks become a real thing, that is, so just hold onto that 2 trillion dollar bill until then, President Goolsby, because it's... it's like a railroad bond. It'll be worth quintillions someday when there's a such a thing as Space Banks. And then the unanimous middle fingers go up and Georgia officially secedes)

2.
Walks Carefully On Eggshells Like A Bear. A Navajo Indian who flunked out of secret agent school. He is drunk in the corner of the saloon and lifts his head when Dim and Buckeye start yelling about the news on the CRTV. He thinks about a lot of stuff in his drunken stupor (dunno what yet. His back story probably). He makes a decision, gets up, staggers over to the bar, and is the first to suggest the secession of Georgia from the US, and proposes a new Navajo Confederacy. He's smart, but the more he talks, the more his upbringing influences his drunken speech, until the Navajo lifestyle he's describing sounds like a communist state. He's laughed off and thrown roughly out of the saloon.

3.
Peter. Another drunk in another corner of the saloon has been paying attention with half an ear ever since Dim and Buckeye came in. This is Peter, and he's a secret true communist. An autistic outcast, extremely intelligent, but almost a psychopath in his inability to read and understand the emotions of others. He's not without empathy though, he just doesn't perceive what other people are feeling. His thoughts reflect this. He has been treated cruelty his entire life because southern country hicks can be cruel assholes. Therefore, and because he's autistic, he has a black and white idea of wrong and right, and he gets an idea... just a pipe dream, really... for the perfect utopia, with him as the new Tsar. Better than Marx's. A true equality, in black and white. Pure. Nobody has ever listened to him before about anything because he's an asshole. He doesn't know this about himself. But the time is ripe for a revolution in Georgia, and folks are just about ready to listen to anyone and consider anything. Peter gets up and discretely follows Walks On Eggshells etc. out of the saloon.

4.
Susanna 'SuperSuze' Hicks. Adopted as a baby, her origins are unclear. Fourteen years old and completely naive and with no idea at all that she's just grown into the hottest woman who has ever lived, EVER. She's just started high school in podunk south Georgia. Through elementary and junior high she's gathered a reputation as a tattle tale, only because she has a knack for finding things out. What to do with the info? Tell, tell, tell! She's got the genes of a secret agent, because unbeknownst to her, her REAL mom was/is? one (a Russian one), like Beatrice Kiddo in Kill Bill. There's a story there... Susanna is following a couple of kids in her class who wanna get it on. Susanna doesn't realize this, she takes all clues and cues out of context. She's innocent. She's playing spy, she's SuperSuze. She's gonna report to headquarters on these naughty kiddos. Then she sees them just about to have sex. She doesn't understand, but she knows that the game just got serious! She blackmails the couple into giving her information pertaining to her mission. Flustered and discombobulated by this, the guy shouts out this thing (dunno what yet) that he saw, and that's the secret info, please don't tell on us, and SuperSuze leaves them alone, satisfied with a mission well completed. (The info she has seems innocuous, but it's something important. Dunno what yet. When she tattles it though, that's what gets her noticed. Her path to the Apparatchik. She eventually gets baptized and becomes Svetlana, the SuperSvet. The Awesomest of All Apparatchik Chicks. Lots more about her, she's a main character.

5.
Something going on in the fucking White House, with President Goolsby and the press secretary and the secretary of defense. Some preliminary shit about pissed off Georgia. A small item,Mr President, about one Thaddeus Thomas, an Amish inventor, and a14 year old girl from South Georgia named Susanna Hicks, possibly something of import, but most likely just blown out of proportion. Oh yeah, there's also this  issue of pissed off Georgia, speaking of Georgia. They're talking about seceding? Heh. Appease them with a fortieth mortgage on the air they breathe, that'll shut em up. A press conference about the launch of the Flying Turtle, stopping global warming by freezing the moon with the cooling laser, the insane genius of it, because sunlit surface of the moon is 200 degrees F, and all reflecting down onto the Earth. Terd Burgleson, the press secretary, handles it. Terri Peterson, secretary of defense, realized something possibly maybe important concerning the Amish guys and the Georgian girl... Nah.

6.
Dickjackson Jones, astronaut and Commander of the Flying Turtle. He suffers with the awfullest cluster headaches. He's Big, he's Black, and he's Tough, so he's able to hide it when he's suffering with suicide headaches. It's actually a superhuman ability, but he doesn't know that about himself, that his ability to mask agony that would have absolutely everybody else writhing on the floor and screaming like an animal isn't normal. He copes because he has hope, hope that comes from a recurring dream about Mars. About Olympus Mons, an inactive volcano for billions of years, erupting very gently and blowing 'smoke signals of peace' out into space from the caldera. Walks On Eggshells has similar dreams, later on. For now though, the Flying Turtle is on the launch pad, counting down, and Dickjackson is in command cool as a cucumber, and right in the middle of the worst headache of his life, ever. It's the mildest of a new category of headaches to come, though. This poor guy... he's gonna be the most tortured character in the entire story... but he's Dickjackson Jones, and he's one cool negro. Aborigine, actually. Half Aborigine actually, and half Inuit/Black Irish/pure blood Aryan. There's a lot going on here, with Roger and Ramona and Charles that I'll figure out later. For now It's the widely publicized launch of the Two Dog Night Light. A lot more shit about this...

7.
Dreyfus Marlowe.


old notes

DISCLAIMER THING

If you're reading this, then know that here is a story that I'm willing to tell you, and it's a real humdinger if you're a human being. If you're some far future alien life form who happened to get hold of this by some clusterfuck of probability, then it probably won't make hardly any sense to you at all. You can go ahead and read it though, if you want. Maybe you'll like it, who knows... but I doubt it, so you might just wanna file it somewhere and get on with your totally alien and probably totally gross and disgusting alien business. Hey, no harm, no foul.

However... if you're human, then I'd advise that you continue reading, because this is YOUR story! It's all about people... human beings, just like you. Stupid, smart, retarded, insane, evil, benevolent, funny looking, socially inept, miserable, deliriously happy, bright shiny and dusty people, plus a few really exceptional ones thrown in here and there. Statistical anomalies.

So, I might ask myself... how do I know all of this, and why should you trust me to continue reading any of it? Because I'm the book, I'm the storyteller, and I'm telling you this. So, you can trust me to know what I'm going about! Ok?

Ok! On with it then.

Firstly. Let's see... um. Dang, there's so many to choose from. So many points of view! It's hard to decide which ones should take precedence. Ok, lemme back up. Let's see... um, um, um, um... Ok! Here we go, this guy looks interesting, and there's a lot of interesting folks around him, too. Huh... WHOA! Oh yeah, this guy is connected, he's a major focal point! Cool. We'll start with him. His name is... hang on... Dempsey Witt. From... Georgia, Podunk county, United States of America plus Baja California, the year 2060 AD.

Ok. We'll start with him.

Dempsey Witt - Dem to folks who knew him, Dim to his friends - was taking the scenic route to work today. It was a fine, almost spring morning in southern Georgia in January. The January dandelions were letting go, the January honeysuckle was in the air, and the smell of springtime in January was almost blowing in the wind, as fine as nostril wine, in the back country of southern Georgia.

'Almost is all you need,' Dim sang out loud to the tune of a hundred year old Beatles song that was squeaking out of the old dashboard sat-radio. 'Oh, and you know what else?' Dim continued out loud, 'Almost only counts in horseshoes, thermonuclear war, and 180 proof distilled spirits!' The proof - no pun intended - was the almost full load of almost 100% pure grain alcohol in the bed of the pickup, and also proof that Dim was in a pretty good mood that morning, for a dilapidated old bootlegger. He hardly even noticed any of the potholes as he bullied the old Ford Electric down the well neglected oil roads of southern Georgia, Podunk county, USA - well neglected in the upkeep, but well familiar in the driving of. That's the way that the oil roads of back country USA had been for the last hundred years, and Dem was sixty-six years old and could vouch personally for a bunch of those years. 'Oil roads were made for runnin' moonshine,' his dad used to say. They were the arteries and veins of it - and right now, Dim was the beating heart that was pumping the vital hooch to the vital organs. If Dim was the heart that pumped the hooch (or mule kick, as his dad used to to call it), then Sheriff Buckeye Buck was definitely the liver that did the processing. Sheriff Buck was the organ that filtered the 'lectric honey (as his mom used to call it) - that Dim delivered, so that it was provisioned fairly and according to the Law of the Land (county), according to Buckeye Buck that is, who was the hooch accountant... no, the County Liver...

Yeah, there ya go! That's the analogy I was looking for!

That's what Dempsey Witt was thinking that morning as he trundled over those ragged oil road potholes. In case you hadn't already figured it out, work for Dempsey Witt was running moonshine, and the running of it was work for Dempsey Witt. Dim, as he was known to his friends; Dem to just folks, and for the last 25 years, he'd almost forgotten a life that had ever been any different. Later on he'd maybe  think about how strange all of that seemed in retrospect, once understood from a point of view outside of his world of rural Georgia and right after the universe had exploded in his face; but whatever future that was gonna be, Dempsey Witt had no idea of it right then. He had hooch to deliver today, and not some time hence.

So! As I was telling, it was a fine, spring-like January morning in Southern Georgia that Dempsey Witt, Dim to his friends, Dem to just folks - he always liked to make that clear - pulled his old hooch laden Ford 'Lectric into the front yard of Madame Maybell's House of Well Repute and Oasis, at right about 7:00 AM. Dim cut the juice, then reached under the dashboard and fumbled around until he'd found the heavy toggle that switched the Ford's power from 'battery' to 'solar'. That was a rigged up feature, not common to that particular model, by the way. Nobody in economically devastated Georgia could afford a charge at a fillin station since 2041, when
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Etc Exposition, history
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After a medium-sized while, the front door of Madame Maybell's cracked open by just a smidge, and an amplified caterwaul issued forth -

"BEELZEBUB IS A PRETTY GOOD GUY!"

(this is their secret back n forth)

Dim rolled down his window and hollered back -

"AS FAR AS DEMONS GO!"

And again, from the crack in the door -

"BUT HIS BROTHER BAAL..."

"LORD DON'T HE WAIL!" Dim yelled, close to cracking up. And again, from the crack in the door -

"AND BAPHOMET..."

And then both of them together, "IS JUST PLAIN PSYCHO!"

The front door to Madame Maybell's House of Well Repute and Oasis slammed open and half a dozen shotgun barrels poked out, pointing in all directions, like some kind of Looney Tunes ensemble.

"We gotcher dead to rights!" came the challenge.

Dim stepped out of the cab of the truck and walked around to the back. "Dead to rights?" he yelled, as he fiddled with the tailgate latch. "You don't even know what that means, you asshole!" Dim yanked the latch up and down furiously about a dozen times, but it wouldn't open. He slapped the tailgate in frustration and yelled to Sheriff Buck. "Gitcher fat ass down here and help me unload these kegs of moonshine!"

Sheriff Buckeye Buck of Podunk county, state of Georgia, USA, lumbered out onto the front porch of Madame Maybell's. "Shut up you dimwit," he hissed, his eyes shifting left and right as he leveraged his considerable bulk down the front porch steps. "What if I was posing as myself as an undercover cop? You don't know who might be hollerin' out the door, hiding in the nooks and crannies and alcoves! Great Godahmighty, son!"

Dim gave the latch of the tailgate one last, exasperated yank and decided to just skip the damn thing. He clambered up over it and into the bed of the pickup and shouted back, "First off, I'm old enough to be YOUR pappy, SON!" Heh, Dim chuckled and thought, I sure get a kick out of myself, don't I? "And nextly, concerning your cornfed paranoia, well... there wouldn't never be no problem of an undercover cop to begin with, would there, you thick country bumpkin! Because you'da  justa been POSING as one!" Dim manhandled one of the big aluminum kegs toward the back of the truck. "Kinda like how you're constantly posing as the Sheriff of Podunk county," he added, "when you're really just the Hooch Man for every back-woods whore house and broken down saloon in all of southern Georgia!" Oh boy, Dim laughed down into his chin, he was sure hot today.

Suddenly six girls with shotguns, ranging from about ten to fourteen years of age, burst out of the open door of Madame Maybell's and went charging around where Sherrif Buckeye stood on the steps, like rapids around a boulder, and very nearly sending him tumbling. "You girls... you girls! Dammit, you girls!" blubbered the Sheriff.

Dim looked up from wrestling with the aluminum keg, just as one of the older girls - about thirteen years old, by the look of her - leapt up effortlessly into the bed of his pickup and offered him her shotgun. "Sir, would you mind keepin' a hold of this for me, just for a bit, til me and the girls is done here?" She said.

Dim stared wordlessly at the girl with his mouth hanging open. In all of his sixty-six years, this was probably the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. She was about 5' without an inch to spare, with dark brown hair that went down to her unusually broad shoulders. She was wearing a tank top, on the front of which was printed the image of a fur covered monster that was lifting up the fur fom it's midsection and pointing to a set of well chiseled abs. 'THE ABDOMINAL SNOWMAN' was printed underneath, in large letters. A long, brown summer skirt decorated with paisleys and flowers flowed down from her waist to her ankles, almost covering the pair of well worn sandals that she wore on her small feet. The girl was obviously in great shape, Dim could tell; simply by observing her arms and shoulders, which were smooth and well defined. She was simply the epitome of youthful exuberance.

"Sir, please? Time's a-runnin' out, and we gotta get this evidence to... to..." The girl looked around frantically for a second, as if she were trying to locate... " to where it's supposed to be!" she suddenly shouted. "And right quick! Please, zillions of lives are at stake!" She gave the outstretched shotgun an impatient shake, and Dim took it from her. Then the girl smiled a smile that could have gone down in history, if history had been paying attention. History was busy somewhere else though apparently, so only Dim saw that smile... that heart wrecking, ship breaking smile.

"Thank you sir!" she said, and then to the others waiting below...

"Girls! Let's get to it! You know what to do!" And with a tchika-tchika THUNK, one of em had jimmied the tailgate latch that Dim had been struggling with, and then it was down, and all six of the shotgun girls immediately began unloading the barrels of moonshine and rolling them up to the front porch of Madame Maybe's. "Were rollin' over and turnin' states evidence!" shouted one of the younger girls amidst the flurry of activity. Another, older girl shouted, "Shut UP! This is a black op, STUPID," to the younger one who had just blabbed about turning states evidence, whatever that meant.

Dim watched it all with his jaw hanging open. What the heck had just happened? he thought to himself. That smile, from that girl, the beautiful girl... It had poleaxed him! Suddenly Dim was overcome with a feeling of paternal love for her, whoever she was. He knew right then and there that he would die to save her, to protect her... What the heck is happening, Dim stuttered inside his own head. That girl had smiled the most perfectest smile in all of the history of the human race, and... she'd had no idea! How could she have? She was still existing inside of the perfect naivety of unspoilt innocence!

Dim was sure, more sure than he'd ever been in his life about anything, that this girl, who had just smiled that miraculous smile, had no idea that she was the most beautiful newborn woman who had ever just crossed over from childhood, through puberty, and into young adulthood. She just didn't know it. Amazing!

"Lookit em go," commented Buckeye Buck with a smile, as he finally made his way over to where Dim stood stupidly in the bed of the old electric Ford pickup, now empty of 7 and a half barrels of the bestest moonshine in all of southern Georgia. "They're something, ain't they?" Buckeye laughed. "A tad excitable though, but that's youth. Didja see how I almost broke my neck, with all of them tadpoles scurrying past me down the steps? Lordamercy! Dim? Dim, you awake in there?"

Dim came to with a start. "Uh... yeah." He dug around in his pocket for a second, as if he'd lost something, and then his hand just kind of settled there.

Sheriff Buck's eyes narrowed. "Now, Dim, you ain't been at the hooch this early on a Sunday morning, I know you ain't, cause you and me both know that I'd hafta... heh." He'd meant it as a joke, but after he'd said it, it didn't seem like one. Sheriff Buck glanced down furtively at his dusty boots, then up again at Dim, waiting to see how he'd take it.

Dim shook his head in annoyance, as if he were trying to rid it of an infestation of fleas. "What?" he barked, and then noticed Sheriff Buckeye standing right there, leaning against the side of the truck, and looking up at him with the most retarded look of questioning suspicion that Dim had ever seen. It was the look of an ignorant hick, stupid and glazed, Dim thought. For a couple of seconds as he looked down at the Sheriff, he was filled with disgust at the sight of him - 'What a stupid bottom feeder... how do I even know this backwoods inbred hillbilly?' -  And then he'd snapped out of it, and saw his friend Bucky again. Sheriff Buckeye Buck. Dim called him Bucky. Young and dumb, yeah, but with a lot more smarts than anyone would ever know, unless they knew him as a friend. Dim felt ashamed for thinking those things about his friend. He'd been discombobulated by the girl's smile, that's all.

Dim recovered his composure and resumed his pocket digging, producing a pack of smokes and a lighter. He casually popped a cigarette out of the pack and put it between his lips, then cupped the lighter flame with both hands and inhaled deeply. "That's real funny," - cough, chuckle - "I guess Boss Hog just caught me red handed being human," Dim said as he exhaled a lungful of smoke.

The import of the moment hadn't been lost on Sheriff Buckeye, though. He'd seen that look of contempt cross over his friend's features, just for a second. With all of the years that they'd known each other and run hooch together, he'd always known that Dim had looked down on him with a certain measure of contempt... an ashamed and we'll hidden contempt, but still there, nevertheless. It's why Buckeye Buck had maneuvered himself in the lofty position of Sheriff of Podunk county, after all. He'd done it for the good opinion of Dempsey Witt, because Dempsey and Buck's dear departed dad, Billy Buck, went way back... back to a time when the Sheriff's name was Witt, and when Buckeye was what you hollered at the scamp that always getting under his dad's heels...

"Was that a gaggle of gun toting girlies I just seen blow through here and carry off a truckload of South Georgia White Lightning, slicker'n goose shit?" Dim suddenly blurted, in an attempt to preempt the gathering mood.

Sheriff Buck relaxed visibly and laughed. "Heh! That's my secret service in training. Ain't they somethin'? A tad bit rambunctious, but that's just young'uns being young and playin' purtend, as young'uns ought ta."

Dim suddenly remembered the shotgun that he'd been holding the whole time, that the girl with the bedazzling smile had asked him to hang onto. He lifted it up for a closer examination. He tested the heft. He released the pump action and opened the chamber, revealing a bona fide12 gauge slug resting within. He turned it over and examined the stock, which had 'Mossberg' printed on one side, and 'SuperSuze', in very stylized, curlicue letters on the other. He stared at incredulously as he realized that he was holding it as a favor, just for a bit, for a 13 year old girl with a bedazzling smile playing secret agent with a half dozen prepubescent girls, also armed with shotguns, who had, for all he really knew at all, just made off with eight kegs of South Georgia White Lightning!


"Say, what the hell..."

"Sir! Commandant... I mean, commander, I mean... I mean, sir!"

Dim spun around and there she was, standing right there in the bed of the pickup and saluting smartly, and smiling a smile that could crack the Earth in two, if it wanted. Dim just stood there, held captive by that smile. He was alarmed... extremely alarmed, and also completely discombobulated. How the hell had she done that? How had she clambered up into the bed of the pickup like that without making a sound? How had she just appeared like that? And how long had she been standing there? And why the hell had she called him Commandant?? Just how the hell could she have known that...

"Mission accomplished, sir!"
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"Thanks for holding onto my gun, sir! Oh.. and, mission accomplished! I'm special agent Susanna 'SuperSuze' Hicks, by the way! Nice to meetcha, and thanks again for holding my Mossberg for me! Bye!" She saluted crisply, then leapt from the bed of the truck and was gone.








intro.2

The Nonplussed

An Introduction
by
Anon
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Hi!

Are you ready to embark upon a fast and furious, laugh-a-minute adventure, filled with action and intrigue? An epic tale of good versus evil, festooned with heroic deeds of derring-do performed by the common man against withering odds? Are you ready to be literally poleaxed when you suddenly realize that it's all gonna end in tears anyway, no matter what, for everybody, even the bad guys, and how that's just the shittiest, most cynical, most realistic ending to every story that you've never read or heard, EVER?! Great! Then let me tell you about Mankind, and a planet called Earth.

Surprise! I'll bet you didn't see that coming. Heh! This story is about you.

Your story begins more or less right after the middle of, and during, the early second half and third quarter of the late 21st century, more or less. The year 2060, in other words. However, before diving face-first into the action, a little exposition might be helpful for understanding the finer points of how everything got chucked into a handbasket and tossed onto the Old Express Bus to Hell.

Ok, let's get into it.

First we gotta backtrack all the way to January of 2018, where it all began, when somebody, either accidentally or on purpose, knocked over Pakistan's bucket of fuck-its... probably India. Somebody said, 'Aw, fuck it!' and during the next twenty or so minutes a dozen 50 kiloton tactical nukes were airburst at 5000 feet directly over Mumbai, at a rate of about one per minute. I remember watching as the drama unfolded on the flatscreen behind the bar, and hearing some college yokel, fresh off the boat from East Texas and a couple of stools down from me, declaring, "Hot dayum, it's towel heads versus diaper heads, and 20 million diapers just got slaughtered like a sacred cow! Didja see that? Holy Sheee-IT!" I almost fell off of my stool, I was laughing so hard. Hilarious, yes, and extremely inappropriate... still, though. Hilarious!

New Delhi was next, and after that the towel heads - I mean the Pakistanis (heh, sorry) got THIS close to landing the entirety of their remaining nuclear arsenal, about 75 low yield tactical nukes, right onto the Ganges and into the big-ass middle of Laundry Day, which would have effectively won Pakistan the war. However, and luckily for India, those 75 nukes were accidentally intercepted by a slew of MRBM's, automatically and simultaneously launched by Dead Man Switches from both Turkey to Russia and from Russia to Turkey, and with every single one of those missiles from both sides just happening to slam at the same exact instant right into those 75 Pakistani SRBM's aimed directly at 850,000,000 Indians doing their laundry in the Ganges. The resulting nuclear clusterfuck that day was definitely the awesomest thing that has EVER happened about a hundred miles above somewhere in Eastern Europe or Russia or possibly the Middle East, or maybe India. Nobody really knows anymore.

You can probably guess most of what happened next, as a bevy of high ranking Indian middle fingers all punched down onto a corresponding bevy of Big Red Buttons labeled 'Fuck Pakistan!', and before anybody knew what the heck was happening, a backyard nuclear brawl had expanded into an international nuclear skirmish, as North and South Korea and parts of the Middle East all called dibs on the batters box at the same time. It only took four days, starting with Mumbai, until New Delhi, Karachi, Islamabad, Mecca, Cairo, Damascus, Tehran, Baghdad, Pyongyang, Seoul, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were all just a bunch of radioactive, crater shaped mirrors smoking in the desert.

At this point you might be wondering what the West had to say about all of this nuclear bullying that'd been going on in the Middle East for the past several days. It was immediately downplayed as 'just a little nuclear dodge ball' by the right wing media... because those Turkish MRBM's that wound up saving 850 million Indians instead of killing a corresponding number of Russians were NATO missiles. What a scandal... LOL.

And so the entire event is generally remembered today as just the Falkland Islands Part 2, but with nukes, and in the desert Instead, and minus the British. Calling it that was an obvious cover up in 2020, even to the common retard... but forty years later, hardly anyone except for me actually believes that the sequel to the Holocaust that killed another six million Jews plus or minus a few million Muslims back in 2018 really happened. And the saddest thing is, nobody today misses or knows about or even gives a shit at all about any of those Jews and/or Muslims, or if they ever even existed or were wiped from existence at all.

Here's an interesting side note... All of this is straight from a history book, by the way. It was immediately following the nuclear skirmish of 2018 that the United States declared absolute victory over The War on Terror, after confirming that Mecca had been vaporized, along with a shit ton of Muslims. It's too bad that almost all of the actual, bona-fide hippies were either dead or incontinent by that time, because what followed was their long sought after No Nukes War on Nukes. It was this twist of fate that probably saved the entire planet from being engulfed in a full blown, worldwide nuclear holocaust, because... and here's the irony. It's long been established that when the United States wages war on something, that it absolutely does not go to war on that thing, but instead just spends trillions of dollars to make it look like it it did. So it was that in 2019 the United States initiated a new nuclear deterrent strategy, touted as 'The New Nuclear Deterent, for a New, Clear, Nuclear Age!'  The defense budget was immediately quintupled and spent on fast tracking the development, production and immediate dismantling of 50,000 brand new, 500 megaton thermo-quantum PlanetBuster bombs, which really, really pissed off the state of Georgia when the other 49 States just kind of chucked the bill for all of it onto Atlanta's doorstep at 2:00 AM that Sunday morning.

But there's good news! As it turns out, the whole global warming thing was just a practical joke cooked up by Al Franken as an SNL skit that kinda got outta hand, so the liberals just ran with it. What a relief!

Here's the bad news, though... I mean, the other bad news. Kim Kan Kook, the latest cult of personality fad in North Korea, was totally serious when he ordered a nuclear sneak attack upon Antarctica to take out the Anti-Santa Clause, once and for good. Of course the West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapsed immediately, resulting in a three meter rise in sea levels everywhere. Many coastal cities around the United States were flooded, such as New York City, New Orleans, Seattle, Houston, Miami, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Rio, Greece, Plymouth Rock, and Mobile Alabama... etc.

The liberals referred to the following nuclear cold snap as 'The Big Ass Winter Of Your Discontent', referring to the GOP, of course. In response, the GOP merely laughed it off as 'just a wimpy ice age'. When the clouds finally broke in 2025 for the first time in almost seven years, survivors of planet Earth unanimously voted that the almost extinction level event would henceforth be referred to as 'The Almost Only Counts in Horseshoes and Global Thermonuclear Wars Ice Age' event, and so it's been recorded in this history book ever since. The GOP ran with that, touting it as the final nail in the coffin against the liberal scare tactic of global warming.

However, it was the liberals who had the last laugh when, in 2040, almost 750,000,000 people around the world died of skin cancer simultaneously. That was when it was discovered that the average 22 year gestation period of a skin cancer directly correlated with the decimation of a good portion of the ozone layer almost exactly 22 years previously, and right around the time of the Falkland Islands skirmish of 2018. The entire world immediately lumped the blame on Britain and Venezuela of course, and that's why those two countries simultaneously ceased to exist in 2041. Don't question it... just accept it, ok? It's people on planet Earth that we're talking about here.

Fast forward to 2050. Since thethe massive influx of ultraviolet rays that the ozone layer totally used to have a handle on... until the GOP murdered it, according to the Dems. Nobody understands the logic of those politics anymore by the way, and nobody really cares. Politics signed a 10 billion year contract with the Liberal Media and Fox News back in 2016, and it's been the Prime Time Reality Show ever since, and number one in its time slot now for almost 50 years running.

Now it's 2060, and after all of THAT, the whole world is just sick and tired of camping out under a tent like a bunch of cub scouts. Enter the new weapon for the new War on Antarctica - the brand spanking new 6 trillion dollar Two Dog Night Light, and the absolute last fucking straw for Georgia.

That's a good place to start, huh? Let's begin our story there, in pissed off rural Georgia, on February the somethingth or another, 2060.

situations

Spray bottle filled with vinegar for spraying dogs

Apple magic trick, up down smash

Gap tooth spit trick

Hey everybody, here's Mr. Mouth

Empty Shelf - The Search for Food

Dumpster diving for dollar bills

Hey bro, where you coming from? The cotton fields, muthafucka!

Mountain of register receipts collapsing

Bickering with Barriers

My teeth are on fire

Is this all? I was so afraid. I always pictured it as being so much worse, and with so much more suffering. This is more like something from a book.... I can do this. I mean, I can die like this. What a relief.... Thank you.

Boogers have absolutely no smell, whatsoever.












intro

The Nonplussed

An Introduction
by
Anon
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Hi!

DISCLAIMER THINGY

If you're reading this, then know that there's a story here that I'm willing to tell you, and it's a real humdinger if you're a human being. If you're some far future alien life form then you'll probably just think the whole thing is gross and disgusting. Go ahead and read it though, if you want. Maybe you'll like it, who knows... but I doubt it. You should probably just file it away somewhere and get on with your own gross and disgusting alien business.

However... if you're human, then I advise that you continue reading because this is YOUR story! It's all about people - human beings, just like you - stupid, smart, retarded, insane, evil, benevolent, funny looking, socially , miserable, deliriously happy, bright, dim, shiny and dusty people, plus a few really exceptional ones thrown in here and there. Statistical anomalies.

So, I might ask yourself... how do I know all of this, and why should you trust me to continue reading any of it? Because I'm the storyteller, and I'm the one doing the telling, which means you have two choices - you can either stop reading, or you can just trust me to know what I'm going on about like a lunatic here.

You're still here? Cool.

Now... are you ready to embark upon a fast and furious, laugh-a-minute adventure filled with action and intrigue? To bear witness to an epic tale of good versus evil, festooned with heroic deeds of derring-do performed by the common man against withering odds? Are you prepared to be literally poleaxed when you realize that all of this is gonna end in tears, no matter what, for everybody, even the bad guys? And to understand how that's just the shittiest, most cynical, most realistic ending to every story that you've never read or heard, EVER?! Well then, wrap this concept around your noggin, if you can - now I'm going to tell you about Mankind.

However! Before diving face-first into the action, a little exposition might be helpful for understanding the finer points of how everything got chucked into the proverbial handbasket and onto the ole express bus to hell.

First we gotta backtrack all the way to January of 2018. It all began when somebody kicked over Pakistan's bucket of fuckits, resulting in a dozen 50 kiloton tactical nukes 'sploding over Mumbai. New Delhi was next, and after that Pakistan got THIS close to landing about 75 nuclear howdydoo's right onto the Ganges and smack dab in the middle of laundry day. However - and luckily for India - by a fantastic stroke of luck, a completely unrelated nuclear exchange between NATO and Russia just happened to be at the right place at the right time, making a thermonuclear sandwich out of those 75 Pakistani missiles. The resulting atomic clusterfuck was definitely the awesomest thing that has ever happened about a hundred miles above Middle Eastern Europe, EVER.

You can probably guess most of what happened next, as a bevy of high ranking Indian middle fingers all punched down simultaneously onto several big red buttons, and before anybody knew what the heck was happening, a backyard nuclear skirmish had expanded into an international nuclear brawl as North and South Korea and assorted parts of the Middle East all called dibs on the batters box at the same time. It only took four days - starting with Mumbai - until New Delhi, Karachi, Islamabad, Mecca, Cairo, Damascus, Tehran, Baghdad, Pyongyang, Seoul, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were all just a bunch of radioactive mirrors smoking in the desert.

Immediately following the nuclear skirmish of 2018, and after confirming that Mecca had been vaporized (along with a shit ton of Muslims), the United States finally declared absolute victory over the War on Terror. What followed was the flower childrens' ancient and long sought after No Nukes! War on Nukes, and it was this twist of fate that probably saved the entire planet from engaging in a full blown, worldwide nuclear holocaust, because - and here's the irony. It's long been established, of course, that when the United States recognizes something despicable and goes to war with it that it absolutely does not go to war on that thing, but instead just spends trillions of dollars to make it look like it it did. So it was that in 2019 the United States initiated a new nuclear deterrent strategy, touted as 'The New Clear War on Nuclear War'. The defense budget was immediately quintupled and spent on fast tracking the development, production and immediate dismantling of 50,000 brand new, 500 megaton thermo-quantum PlanetBusters, which really, really pissed off the state of Georgia when the other 49 States just kind of chucked the bill for all of it onto Atlanta's doorstep at 2:00 AM one Sunday morning.

There's a bright side to all of this though. As it turned out, the glaciers weren't really melting, the West Antarctic Ice Shelf was fully intact, and the penguins and polar bears were just fine. After the nuclear fiasco in the Middle East, it was finally deemed sufficiently safe to reveal that the whole global warming thing had just been an elaborate practical joke cooked up by Al Franken as an SNL skit that kinda got outta hand, and the liberals had just ran with it. However... after this revelation, Kim Kan Kook, the latest cult of personality fad in North Korea, was totally serious when he ordered a nuclear sneak attack upon Antarctica to take out the Anti-Santa Clause once and for good. So theWest Antarctic Ice Sheet collapsed anyway, which resulted in a worldwide five meter rise in sea levels.

Now it's 2060, almost 40 years since the entire world forcibly relocated North Korea to the south pole. The rise in sea levels has made all of the continents look funny, and everybody hates the new world maps. The new coastlines smell bad, and there's talk of nuking Antarctica again, because... you know. North Korea. Mankind has PTSD, and it's looking like it might all end in tears before it's supposed to, and right as it's starting to get good.


brand spanking new 6 trillion dollar Two Dog Night Light, and the absolute last straw for Georgia.

That's a good place to start, huh? Let's begin your story here, in pissed off and hung over rural Georgia, on New Years Day, 2060.
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Dempsey Witt was passed out pretty hard for a Sunday morning, which used to be unusual. If he could've seen himself curled up on the kitchen floor and cradling his service revolver like a teddy bear, he would have been moderately disappointed with himself, what with it being a Sunday morning and all. He used to make it a point to pass out somewhere closer to his bedroom on Sunday mornings, with his service revolver tucked snugly into the waistband of his underoos instead of hugged up under his chin. Nowadays though, simply waking up was a disappointment, and he was always bitterly surprised when it happened.

On this particular Sunday morning however, a ray of sweet sunshine containing the first photons of the gathering dawn gentled softly upon Dim's left eyelid like angeldown. To that left eyeball, the substance of that single spark of hope almost discerned felt like a Nazi jackboot stomping onto the left side of his noggin.. Dempsey SCRRAHGOUGHLED awake, choking on the snotty boogers of his own wet, ugly snores. With a mighty HAAGGHCK! a slimy fhlurghph PSCHFLOOP'd across his tongue and sphlURGH'd somewhere over there, across the kitchen.

OHGODNONOTAWAKEAGAIN was the sound that fell out of his face. He passed out and immediately bounced awake again. Minutes of trauma transpired - severe trauma, traumatic trauma - trauma like a 900 pound retarded kid made out of sharp edges, bulldozing through his awareness. Eventually his lips made a moist 'pop' as they came unstuck. The inside of his mouth was dry and sticky. He tried to build up a little saliva by smacking his tongue and lips together. It made a nasty noise, like a dog licking its own asshole. Tastes like a dog's asshole too, he thought.

Dim continued to lie there in the darkness for an interminable moment, blind and with the taste of a dogs asshole in his mouth... and pleasantly surprised, for once. He'd really expected hell to be so much worse than just the world's godawfulest hangover. He decided to risk opening his eyes to see if it really was demons and pitchforks and a lake of fire, but everything remained dark.

Well, dimwit, he thought to himself... that could mean several things. The most likely thing is that the eternal darkness of hell is right here and now, and you're at the beginning of it. Either that or you forgot to drain the methanol from that batch of hootch last night and you've finally drunk yourself blind, idgit.

He lay there in the darkness for another interminable moment trying to decide if he was in hell or blinded by methanol...

"THAT GAWDAM DOG!" he hollered out loud, as murky details of the night before came back to him. The sound of his own voice was like an inside-out kick to the head, and his hands jerked up reflexively to catch his eyeballs before they popped out of his noggin. He could feel the skin of his eyelids pulsing against his palms as his eyeballs tried to make a run for it.

...or so retarded hung over that you just forgot to open your eyes, idgit.

Once his eyes had stopped bouncing around inside of his head like a couple of pinballs, he very carefully tried to open his eyelids, and discovered that they were stuck fast. He could feel something dry and crusty rubbing against his palms.

"What's this hairy hogwash??" he whisper-shouted as he scurried backwards on his ass and hands across the kitchen linoleum, reaching frantically for some kind of stable purchase. He finally backed up forcibly against the fridge, which he'd left open the night before after a drunken search for sustenance. The impact jolted a jar of pickle juice perched precariously on the rack above, which tipped over, spilling green vinegary liquid all over his head and onto his eyelids, immediately dissolving the dried crusty muck sealing them shut. His eyes flickered open. He could see!

"I can see!" Dim exulted, and then the pickle juice was past his eyelids and into his eyes.

"I'M BLIND!" he screamed. He scrambled to his feet, one hand furiously trying to punch out the fire in his eyes while the other hand groped around blindly for something to put out the fire that didn't involve smothering it to death with punches to the face. If you can imagine someone doing all of that, then you're imagining him exactly the way he looked while he was doing it.

Dim abruptly recognized the kitchen sink with his thrusting, outstretched hand. "WATER!" he exclaimed breathlessly, and he immediately put both of his hands to the task of making water happen in the sink.... but what happened instead of water was just bad luck. His frantic, jerking hands happened upon the jar of methanol that he'd carefully extracted from the latest batch of hootch the night before, which he'd reserved for some future project involving that gawdam dog and left safely in the sink to await its purpose. However, being blind, hung over, eyeballs on fire and desperate for relief, Dim completely failed to remember to put the two and two of the previous night together. Instead, he latched onto that jar of methanol, thinking it was cool, precious, fire-quenching water. He upended it upon his upturned face and directly into his pickle juiced, on fire eyes.

The pain was so tremendous that the nerves conducting it from his eyes to his brain actually backed up like a traffic jam. Fully five seconds transpired as he stood there, immersed in a kind of un-feeling... much like what you get when you touch something so hot that your brain freaks out for a second and tries to think that it's freezing. Five seconds of a rapturous, expectant, kind of hot-cold-numb limbo transpired for Dim as he stood there in his kitchen with an upturned jar of methanol held over his hopefully expectant, pain wracked face. Then the traffic jam of nerve endings became a pileup that just kept piling up and piling up and piling up, until it was a 7:00 AM rush hour traffic massacre of pain, pointing with pointy, painful, on fire points that piled up and piled up, pointing right into his eyeballs from every direction, and every direction was ON FIRE!

Dim SHRIEKED, and finally woke up the gawdam dog.
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After a medium-sized while, the front door of Madame Maybell's cracked open by just a smidge, and an amplified caterwaul issued forth -

"BEELZEBUB IS A PRETTY GOOD GUY!"

(this is their secret code; not so secret though when hollered, and through an amplified megaphone)

Dim rolled down his window and hollered back -

(these guys...)

"AS FAR AS DEMONS GO!"

And again, from the crack in the door -

"BUT HIS BROTHER BAAL..."

"LORD DON'T HE WAIL!" Dim yelled, close to cracking up. And again, from the crack in the door -

"AND BAPHOMET..."

And then both of them together, "IS JUST PLAIN PSYCHO!"

The front door to Madame Maybell's House of Well Repute and Oasis slammed open and half a dozen shotgun barrels poked out, pointing in all directions, like some kind of Looney Tunes ensemble.

"We gotcher dead to rights!" came the challenge.

Dim stepped out of the cab of the truck and walked around to the back. "Dead to rights?" he yelled, as he fiddled with the tailgate latch. "You don't even know what that means!" Dim yanked the latch up and down furiously about a dozen times, but it wouldn't open. He slapped the tailgate in frustration and yelled to Deputy Buck. "Gitcher fat ass down here and help me unload these kegs of moonshine!"

Deputy Buckeye Buck lumbered out onto the front porch of Madame Maybell's. "Shut up dimwit," he hissed, his eyes shifting left and right as he leveraged his considerable bulk down the front porch steps. "What if I was posing as myself as an undercover cop? You don't know who might be hollerin' out the door, hiding in the nooks and crannies and alcoves! Great Godahmighty, son!"

Dim gave the latch of the tailgate one last, exasperated yank and decided to just skip the damn thing. He clambered up over it and into the bed of the pickup and shouted back, "First off, I'm old enough to be YOUR pappy, SON!" Heh, Dim chuckled and thought, I sure get a kick out of myself. "And nextly, concerning your cornfed paranoia, well... there wouldn't never be no problem of an undercover cop to begin with, would there, you thick country bumpkin! Because you'da  justa been POSING as one!" Dim manhandled one of the big aluminum kegs toward the back of the truck. "Kinda like how you're constantly posing as Deputy of Podunk county," he added, "when you're really just the Hooch Man for every back-woods whore house and broken down saloon in all of southern Georgia!" Oh boy, Dim laughed down into his chin, he was sure hot today.

Suddenly six girls with shotguns, ranging from about ten to fourteen years of age, burst out of the open door of Madame Maybell's and went charging around where Sherrif Buckeye stood on the steps, like rapids around a boulder, and very nearly sending him tumbling. "You girls... you girls! Dammit, you girls!" blubbered Buckeye.

Dim looked up from wrestling with the aluminum keg, just as one of the older girls - about thirteen years old, by the look of her - leapt up effortlessly into the bed of his pickup and offered him her shotgun. "Sir, would you mind keepin' a hold of this for me, just for a bit, til me and the girls is done here?" She said.

Dim stared wordlessly at the girl with his mouth hanging open. In all of his sixty-six years, this was probably the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. She was about 5' without an inch to spare, with dark brown hair that went down to her unusually broad shoulders. She was wearing a tank top, on the front of which was printed the image of a fur covered monster that was lifting up the fur from it's midsection and pointing to a set of well chiseled abs. 'THE ABDOMINAL SNOWMAN' was printed underneath, in large letters. A long, brown summer skirt decorated with paisleys and flowers flowed down from her waist to her ankles, almost covering the pair of well worn sandals that she wore on her small feet. The girl was obviously in great shape, Dim could tell; simply by observing her arms and shoulders, which were smooth and well defined. She was simply the epitome of youthful exuberance.

"Sir, please? Time's a-runnin' out, and we gotta get this evidence to... to..." The girl looked around frantically for a second, as if she were trying to locate... " to where it's supposed to be!" she suddenly shouted. "And right quick! Please, zillions of lives are at stake!" She gave the outstretched shotgun an impatient shake, and Dim took it from her. Then the girl smiled a smile that could have gone down in history, if history had been paying attention. History was busy somewhere else though apparently, so only Dim saw that smile... that heart wrecking, ship breaking smile.

"Thank you sir!" she said, and then to the others waiting below...

"Girls! Let's get to it! You know what to do!" And with a tchika-tchika THUNK, one of em had jimmied the tailgate latch that Dim had been struggling with, and then it was down, and all six of the shotgun girls immediately began unloading the barrels of moonshine and rolling them up to the front porch of Madame Maybe's. "Were rollin' over and turnin' states evidence!" shouted one of the younger girls amidst the flurry of activity. Another, older girl shouted, "Shut UP! This is a black op, STUPID," to the younger one who had just blabbed about turning states evidence, whatever that meant.

Dim watched it all with his jaw hanging open. What the heck had just happened? he thought to himself. That smile, from that girl, the beautiful girl... It had poleaxed him! Suddenly Dim was overcome with a feeling of paternal love for her, whoever she was. He knew right then and there that he would die to save her, to protect her... What the heck is happening, Dim stuttered inside his own head. That girl had smiled the most perfectest smile in all of the history of the human race, and... she'd had no idea! How could she have? She was still existing inside of the perfect naivety of unspoilt innocence!

Dim was sure, more sure than he'd ever been in his life about anything, that this girl, who had just smiled that miraculous smile, had no idea that she was the most beautiful newborn woman who had ever just crossed over from childhood, through puberty, and into young adulthood. She just didn't know it. Amazing!

"Lookit em go," commented Buckeye Buck with a smile, as he finally made his way over to where Dim stood stupidly in the bed of the old electric Ford pickup, now empty of 7 and a half barrels of the bestest moonshine in all of southern Georgia. "They're something, ain't they?" Buckeye laughed. "A tad excitable though, but that's youth. Didja see how I almost broke my neck, with all of them tadpoles scurrying past me down the steps? Lordamercy! Dim? Dim, you awake in there?"

Dim came to with a start. "Uh... yeah." He dug around in his pocket for a second, as if he'd lost something, and then his hand just kind of settled there.



CH. 1 edits


     Sheriff Dempsey Witt of Podunk County Georgia celebrated the new year by doing the same thing that he always did on a Saturday night - by getting stupid drunk and trying to kill himself. He'd come close a couple of times to actually knocking himself off, but he almost always never succeeded. Invariably, he would pass out before working up the required cojones to actually do the deed. It didn't help that Dempsey Witt was also a hopelessly happy drunk so he always became really shitty at suicide after a dozen or so shots of double rectified spirits.

     However, at the current moment he couldn't have given a horses patoot about the meticulous plans he'd made the night before while he was three sheets to the wind and at the end of his rope... that is, the plans he'd made to never have to wake up with another planet sized hangover, ever again. At the moment he was safely ensconced inside the bowels of oblivion, and that was the plan. The problem was that the plan seemed to be perpetually stuck inside a gosub loop that was attached to an if/then statement of somewhat dubious logic, resulting in an infinitely repeating subroutine... like a closed, time-like loop.

     Whatever, who cares. Dempsey certainly didn't. To him, it was simply another repetition of his weekly routine, which began like this...

1. Drink yourself silly on Saturday night.
2. Carefully plan your suicide.
3. Wake up Sunday morning, disappointed and with a planet sized hangover.
4. Sober up and sheriff the county until next Saturday and -
5. - keep the county in its cups.
6. Repeat.

     
   





     He came to that morning buried underneath an avalanche of murky confusion and with absolutely no idea who he was, where he was, or why the silent depths of sweet oblivion had felt it necessary that he should be vomited back into existence. There was no identity, no ego, no perception, no nothing. For Dempsey Witt, the entirety of his being during those first moments of non-oblivion consisted merely of a familiar sense of resignation, accompanied by mild disappointment. No biggie... just a kind of 'all encompassing 'oh well'. Plus his head felt like it was crammed full of steel wool, which made any attempt at thinking comparable to having the inside of his noggin scrubbed vigorously with a brillo pad.

     After passing out again and immediately bouncing right back to suffocating (I don't think the suffocating part was mentioned earlier, so... yeah, suffocating) underneath an avalanche of murky confusion, Dem became aware of a cold, hard surface pressing uncomfortably against his entire body. He couldn't begin to fathom what it might be, which made the inside of his brain itch like the image of a madman's head fungus. He could feel the cold, hard 'whatever it was' trying to squash his eyeball as it pushed against the side of his face, just pressing and pressing, like some kind of giant, really bad spatula.

::: squashed eyeball afterimages, memory triggered, horror buried in the subconscious, a dream no a nightmare remembered, the imminent arrival of the far flung Hunger from the Eleventeenth dimension, the STARVE-ling :::

     A kong, drawn out gasping, choking, suffocating, and drowning noise, like that of a dying, pathetic creature, issued forth from his throat as a perfectly causal reaction to some insanity-spanning horror that most likely lurked just beneath his conscious memory. No doubt about it... it was definitions like some kind of fucked up Jack-in-the-box.

     No likey, he thought. He said it out loud - 'No likey no likey no likey' - and then he shouted - 'ME DEFINITELY NO LIKEY!' He awoke suddenly, as if from a nightmare, and the murky confusion transmogrified into a conscious thing. 'What the heck happened, and what the heck is this crap that's happening!' he screamed inside his own head. Then he passed out.

::: Exposition :::

     Consciousness came crashing into his noggin like a forty car pileup.

::: Exposition :::

     Well, there was the cold, slick thing he had cradled like a teddy bear against the declivity near the top of his chest, with the long end of it pushed up snugly under his chin. 'Huh', he thought, feeling vaguely repulsed. 'What's this thing?' Although he held it like a teddy bear, it definitely wasn't comforting like a teddy bear ought to be. No, this thing was... could be... comforting, yeah. But not like teddy bear comfort... more like 'Smite Thine Enemies' comfort.

     What the hell? he thought. Never mind, I don't wanna know.


     he'd been more and more of a mind to do something about the problem once and for all, but he never seemed to get around to it because he keep passing out at the crucial moment.

::: Exposition on suicide and plans for suicide and screwing up his own suicide :::

What he'd gotten instead was the grandmother of all hangovers.

The inside of his mouth was dry and his lips were spit-welded. They made a moist 'pop' as they came unstuck. He tried to build up a little saliva by smacking his tongue and lips together, which made a nasty noise, like a dog snacking on its own nether regions.

'Tastes like a dogs butthole.'

He tried to inhale through his nose and was greeted with the smell of snotty, freshly snored boogers. His eyes were gummed up and crusted over.

::: yada yada yada :::

Dim was definitely disappointed. He'd chickened out again. If he was really serious about blowing his brains out, really, he was gonna have to man up and do it sober.






Ubiquitous, he thought to himself as he heaved and pulsated while trying to catch his breath. Ubiquitous. He'd learned that word some twenty years ago from some science fiction novel that he'd been reading, and at the time he'd thought it a pretty damn cool word. Ubiquitous - meaning ever present, abundant, all over the place, filling the nooks and crannies, just all over everything. The boogers in my nose are ubiquitous, he mused as he threw up all over the kitchen floor. The ubiquitous vomit covered the kitchen floor.

He thought of all the ubiquitous things in his life that he hated. The ubiquitous waking up that happened every day was the worst... then there was the ubiquitous hangover, followed by the ubiquitous passage of time. Inside of that was the ubiquitous dread, from which he observed and followed his own ubiquitous habits, every day, ubiquitously. Oh, how he hated that word. If was just so... pretentious! And ubiquitous!