The Woods, and the Darkness, and the Howling Winds...

Will the sorrows never cease? They seem to reach back forever...

All kidding aside, shit, it is dead around here. Save mr. nathan murphy's forays into swashbuckling p-p-piracy, all seems to have been lost. The roar has died down to a whimper, which may have as much to do with a cocaine shortage as anything else. But I am not one to level accusations.

Instead, I will tell a small tale of mine, because nothing gets the ol' brainboxes a-whirring like inane fictions drawn up by a maladjusted ass. If this weren't the Internet age and was instead let's say ancient Roman times, and I had to haul my toga-clad ass into the Forum and hold court with such paltry bullshit, I'd no doubt be shouted down by your big-nosed Senator-strokin' selves. But it is the Internet age, and maladjusted assery is the order of the day. So deal.

Long ago in the distant future I time-fucked my way into a position as the adjutant to a fascist official in the dictatorial regime of the day. I held a big glorious title and wore an accompanying big glorious sash, a bright teal blue silk sonofabitch that served its purpose perfectly, whether that was complementing my tabi shoes or being wrapped around my neck during a hot summer session of autoasphyxia. The district HQ I was assigned to covered much of the Middle East and Northern Africa, and was located deep in the heart of future-modern-day Cairo. I didn't speak a word of Egyptian but I had a healthy supply of blue eye shadow so I was assured I'd get on just fine.

The man I was working under was a big towering black man with a squeaky voice who would've reminded me of Mike Tyson if by that time Mike Tyson hadn't been such a distant, forgotten memory. He hailed from Brixton, a place I gathered was stuck deep in the heart of mush-mouthed Britannia, and although I had my big fancy liberal arts ejumucation I could barely understand a word he said. He may as well have been speaking Egyptian, and no amount of blue eye shadow would parse his mangled speech. This didn't prove to be too much of an obstacle, thankfully enough, as my job seemed mostly to consist of listening attentively and then doing absolutely nothing that I was told to. Turns out that this particular fascist regime wasn't so big on protocol so much as they were on skull-smashing, which it also turned out I was curiously adept at.

"Dey li' big fukkin' eggs mate," Brixton-Tyson said to me one scorching afternoon, as we lay in the sun, chests heaving after a spirited half-hour training session that involved chasing screaming villagers around with hammers and setting upon their craniums real vicious-like. I was trying to use saliva to wipe the blood stains off my soiled sash, and wasn't paying him too much attention, which might have explained why I was able to understand him for once. It also might explain why I didn't detect the tinge of regret in his voice, though to be fair in my line of work regret was the kind of thing you left at home or in a brothel.

"You mean how they crack or how the insides run out?" I answered, disinterested. It wasn't the greatest of fucking metaphors, pretty simple really, but for Brixton-Tyson I'm sure it was a real cranial leap.

I was answered with silence, which suited me just fine. I continued scrubbing at my sash with my fingertips, getting nowhere. I briefly considered the psychosexual implications of attempting erotic autoasphyxia with a human-blood-stained sash, and concluded that even for a fascist that was pretty gauche. So I kept on scrubbin'.

Eventually the silence piqued my interest and I glanced over at Brixton-Tyson, who was staring at me and my efforts with unconcealed disgust. Sweat beaded on his forehead and above his lips and dripped down off his cheeks. Surprisingly, he seemed ready to vomit.

"What'samatter you?" I asked, doing a horrific imitation of his own garbled non-speak.

"Oi," he answered, wiping his brow with the back of his hand, "you fuckdinna 'ed."

This from a man I'd just witnessed swinging a severed head around by its ponytail like a mad cricketer bowling for the Ashes.

"We smash heads, man," I reminded him. "If you can't enjoy your work then what's the point of even doing it? We might as well be free-market men, am I right?"

My little joke did not go down well, which made sense since it was awful, but Brixton-Tyson's downbeat reaction was still off-putting.

"They're only peasants," I offered. "Look." I nudged a nearby crushed skull with my foot, and the body attached to it twisted uncomfortably.

Brixton-Tyson shook his head. "Iss abbawt clawss innit?" he postulated.

Class? Sounded to me like he was going soft so I quietly promised myself I'd report him first chance I got. I gave up on my sash, which was a lost cause at this point, and stood to leave.

"Hey man, forget about it," I told him. "I'm gonna go, you know..." I pointed back towards home, made a jerking motion with one hand and pulled an invisible noose around my neck with the other while crossing my eyes and letting my tongue dangle freely from my mouth. He nodded quietly, and I left, juggling a small head with my feet as I walked--probably belonged to a midget, I reasoned, since children weren't allowed out of the factories before dusk.

I fully intended to submit my boss for a loyalty review that night but fortunately for him a new regime took power just after dinner and as a result he and every other district manager was shot to death on the spot. This new regime took power under a guise of promising reform, and they did indeed curb a lot of the skull-crushing we'd been doing, but on the plus side they were also very adept at selling cheeseburgers, so it evened out in the end. As a result of my excellent service to the government and my impeccably clean sash I was awarded a position as Vice Admiral of Human Resources, which of course meant two things: minimal responsibility and truckloads of poontang.

The moral of the story? The world loves an asshole. So don't hold back on your bad selves. The worst that could happen is people will take umbrage with your deranged rantings and post inflammatory comments below your writing. It's not like you told someone they could park somewhere by mistake and they ended up getting a ticket. That shit is punishable by death.