“Here we are at the Flint International Airport, where you will find many earthly delights, such as a Mobius-strip moving walkway, the MicroBall Hall of Fame, and the official tombs of the ‘Lost Presidents,’ the six men who collectively ran this country between the two terms of Grover Cleveland, and who are commonly misremembered as one ‘Benjamin Harrison,’ a name that has in fact never been given to a single child in America,” informs our tour guide, Horny Todd, as he enjoys a Mongolian cigar a-la mode and swings in a hammock being wheeled up and down the aisles of our DIY 747.

“And a word of warning from years of experience: by the time you get your Jamba Juice, the deaf mariachi of Terminal C will have already made good advances upon your position, having detuned his instrument to sub-audible desert frequencies that have the property of converting j-beverages to ayahuasca soda. The floor will start to tremble at 2 hertz, then out of nowhere a pilot will tell you to ‘watch it’ as he wheels his little bag of fertility gods into you and you feel the spear of wooden penis on your shin, then when you look back the mariachi is strumming in stride beside you, making sipping noises with lips fat and pink from a diet rich in white stewardess cunts. The shadow of his sombrero won’t let you see his eyes (his soul), but if you buy him a double matcha shot and a bloody gaucho steak, he’ll give you a special prayer language that, when stammered, will make your flight nonstop and your inflight entertainment The Cosby Show with sinister booing instead of a laugh track.” Many passengers tap this information into their Palm Pilots while several others politely applaud.

Todd goes on for hours, each story more childish and phallic than the last. He speaks of a man named Laad, whom he regularly has televised sex with. Laad, being Swedish, has of course testicles full of petrol rather than semen, and as a party trick, Todd says, Laad will stick a strike-anywhere match in his urethra and then ejaculate. The match will ignite on its trajectory outward, setting aflame the man’s shiny black seed as it sprays from his member, turning it into a little flame thrower (“all puns intended,” Todd chuckles), a talent which apparently has garnered attention from both the Swedish army and the Olympic Council’s Torch-Lighting Committee. Todd’s smoke, plaid as it seethes out of his arabesque teeth, wafts into my eyes, and he interprets my blood-tinted squints as subversive doubt. So he opens up the front five overhead compartments and helps Laad down out of them; the adonis is already disrobed, oiled, and aroused. His needle-shaped eyes fixed on mine, Todd inserts the match into Laad, then lifts me from my adobe seat and inserts the Swede into me. After several extended shivers from the man inside me, I feel a short, sharp enlightenment and wake up weeks later as the plane is pulling into New Orleans, with 370 new gmail accounts to my name, each one filled to capacity with all-caps emails from dozens of ex-wives demanding both child support and children.

I also have a new best friend, Black Man Lookin’ Glass, who looks like a 13-year-old Polish girl, but is in fact just 11. She knows her way around Gatorade City and helps me navigate through the underground maze of Pizza Palaces, where we troll day and night for scraps of Lasagna Vaginase. Near-blind in one eye and neon in the other, she can read any graphic novel (even 3D) without looking, merely by smearing her rhinocerean lips across the pages, sucking in the ink as it stimulates her mind, her tongue, and her social status.

We pick around the underground for hours before coming across a particularly modern room: mustache halves of disgraced pizza farmers lay like lightning forms across the path, clumping in areas to make a greasy, bristled carpet. The walls are a translucent hazel – whiskey bottle in color. Through the east wall I see some horses both surrounded and physically bound by earth, with only their eyes able to move, bulging as if to say, "I haven't always been like this.” I think of riding one of these horses, bareback and drunk, through my honeymoon, but my RCA Portable SVHS Home Video Camcorder is surely six tons over the support capacity of any equestrian spine.

In a leg of the Italian labyrinth that smells of expertly microwaved vomit, we find a toppled Royal Crown vending machine acting as the de facto sarcophagus of an ancient Jamaican Princess, who seems to have sacrificed herself by smoking roughly ten dozen blunts, stubbing each of them out on a different place on her body where a man had touched her, roughly in chronological order. Black Man kicks the button on the machine with the most vaudevillian logo (ChocoTab XTra) and chortles as it spits out the Princess’ bejeweled skull. Strapped across it are the ceremonial Oakley sunglasses worn by the Princess’ people, with a blue condom taped over one eye and a red condom over the other, both of which fall open when Black Man palms the skull and slides it across the floor to me in a perfect WNHL assist. Still wielding the FedEx tube filled with cooled magma from our last adventure, I swing down at the oncoming skull (which speedily declares its posthumous last rites as it approaches) and shatter the thing like a pre-war television screen, releasing a blinding cloud of all the accumulated knowledge of the entire cosmos, which, had we been asked before, we would’ve guessed would be located in her pelvis.

We’re immediately picked up by the Human Police for this, and while it was only a misdemeanor, both Black Man and I had a series of uber-felonies under our belts for dozens of counts of psychoanalytical fraud. The cop, his dreadlocks long and expertly woven into several forbidden emoticons, tells us that we typically would’ve been trialed and executed immediately, but due to the grandiosity of high-profile Mario murder case, every court in the entire state is housing a full-scale subtrial 24 hours a day, in order for the massive amount of evidence to be presented within our lifetimes (the trial has already gone on in this manner for the better part of 20 years – though according to the official quantum analysts, merely nine days remain). Similarly, he says all prisons in the state are filled to capacity with the millions of accomplices that Mario amassed during his career of terror, so the 2nd Assistant Deputy Clerk has assigned us to an abandoned Fruit Roll-Up Factory where they’ve been sticking criminals awaiting execution and asking them not to leave.

Both of us being chemically dependant on guilt, we decide to give it a try, and after the cop drops us off in the parking lot, we head inside and make ourselves at home in a massive mixing vat (labeled “Thalidomide!” in Comic Sans) that has been converted into a Victorian-era loft. We easily integrate into the complicated prison caste system that exists between the other inmates who stuck around, of which there are three. They only refer to themselves by their prison numbers – this term being a misnomer of course, for the penal system had long ago run out of actual numbers to assign convicts, and now each one is instead identified by the billions of letters of their DNA code. Our favorite of the three is AGTCCATCA (as he liked to be called), who valiantly holds the Czar-Friend position, and the other two, who happen to be identical twin brothers and so both go by GCTTTCAGT, are the resident Shaman-Cobblers.

The three of them teach us how to survive in the Sugar Dungeon, though their advice mostly consists of things like building styrofoam condoms, skinny dipping in the lake of oxidized barbeque sauce, and reading them bedtime stories from the Norton Anthology of Kidz Bop. AGTCCATCA one night invites us over for a friendly game of Pokemon Khaki, and recommends that he and Black Man fall in love. Because he had provided only sound advice in the past, Black Man immediately agrees, possibly swayed by the prospect of being heir to a Czar-Friend’s fortune, which typically consists of NASA-designed ass implants and a lifetime supply of tickets to the Patrick Swayze Show. Having been appointed the Minister-Gatherer of the society, I lead the heretical marriage ceremony, which consists solely of a revolting kissing game one of the GCTTTCAGTs devised, in which the betrothed squeeze the head of a live spider between their stiffened tongues until it splashes open like the berries in fruit pornography. The spider’s blood, tasting like coffin dust and donuts, is a dry blood that, when hydrated with the saliva of two true lovers, makes a diagram across their tongues depicting the sexual maneuver they must die trying to pull off. For Black Man and AGTCCATCA it turns out to be the Inverted Volcano, a rare and blessed fortune that inspires an extra week of rejoicing among us.

Afterwards, to help us emerge from our respective k-holes, I switch on the 1912 Zony Tombsound in hopes of catching Paul Harvey's weekly show cataloguing the items Lincoln kept under his stove-pipe hat, which we have a ritual of listening to, correcting, and philosophizing on. But instead, a brisk and manhandling voice blares over the speakers:

Hi there, Erik Rapewhistle reporting. As you have undoubtedly heard, the trial of the millennium has come to a dramatic conclusion with the extravagant and Tostitos-sponsored execution of Mr. Mario “Mario” Mario in downtown Nabisco City. Following the now infamous act of goodwill and brutality that put an end to nearly one hundred years of plumbing-themed mayhem and halted the presses of several domestic violence fanzines, we're starting to get a nice feel for the world without Mario. Parliament was called into session off-season, with some senior members graciously returning early from sex tours in places as far away as Wampum Beach, and it was unanimously decided that November 20th would be a national holiday (Mario expired just after midnight, the 21st, but speaker-elect Ken K. Rat proposed that the festive spirit of the murder sits snugly in the evening hours of the 20th). The black community expressed support for the white community's desire to make bids for a new zoo animal in honor of the event; fingers are crossed for a pure-bred barn owl that might fill out the upper portion of the hog garden and keep the rats moving along.

The Princess has not made herself available to the press--or to anyone, it seems--during a self-imposed isolation in the Pink Palace, locking herself in the royal arcade with a coyote and two Algonquin tweens. The boys have sent some words up through the chimney, but the chiefs on duty are hard-pressed to read the slangy smoke signal vernacular of casinotown youth. The Princess was last seen walking home from Mario's uptown swamp lodge on the morning of the 19th with a black eye and VHS stains on her arms, with a hornet or two flying out of her mouth whenever her lips parted in polite greeting of her public, who still, for the most part, kneel in her presence. Someone close to the royal family confides that the Princess is suffering in her own way and that all of this has come as an awful surprise.

And before we know it, the cops and robocops are swarming the factory, gathering up us remaining convicts to be processed through the penal system that is slowly starting back up. But there are still some kinks, as instead of being trialed, I am sent to a clay dungeon in Lower Pittsburgh and made a contestant on David Lynch’s Double Dare. I quickly make my way up to the 90th round, where I have to answer the Quizz Wizzard’s question “Easter Bunny Fingers Whom?” for the chance to win a special GG Allin iPod that automatically converts all songs to the sound of dogs lapping up boiling coffee, then whining in pain for hours. I know the answer but can only seem to speak in stereo,

“and the right is all quotes from H.P. Lovecraft’s
101 Most Favorite Tim Allen Quotes,”

which is a clear violation of the rules. The show’s host, the Tie-Dye Power Ranger, shakes his helmet and hands me the consolation prize: a wood-paneled six-shooter with plutonium-tipped bullets and a handle shaped like another, smaller six-shooter, to be used on myself immediately after returning to the site of my father’s deflowering and asking the resident Earth Nymph for a do-over.

But instead I opt for the Quantum Moesha Challenge, where I get to live if I can tattoo a working Commodore 64 daughterboard onto my own face, while on enough heroin to kill Hagrid. I get through the fourth Frasier Node Cluster before running out of face space, since most of my flesh had been burned off during Round 56 (the shot-for-shot recreation of the Minor Steampunk War of 1799). This means immediate disqualification (and thus Death-by-Rodman) but luckily I had secretly encoded a Jungle Crypt hivedrive in my face and am able to hack into God’s internet and upload my consciousness into there. I start off at his homepage (Martin Luther King Ate My Balls) but he almost immediately finds me there, and I have to use a secret Google cheat code discovered by my Apache godparents to slip into www.ZEROGRAVBABES.gov/ APOLLO69MISSION.4D, where I try to find a nice Maplethorpe Matrix to lay low in. But I guess I used an old codec because after two short nanominutes, God is on my tail furiously chanting, “∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞,” until my internal javascript is totally converted into sanskrit.

This resets all my Euclidean indexes, forcing me to download back into Middle Earth, somewhere near Uncle Gretzky’s Cabin, dressed up as the Grand Duke of the Redfaced Platoon of the Annual Princeton Wild West Show. Unfortunately, the show isn’t for another eleven months, so I make my way across whatever country I’m in, surviving on roasted thickets of my own beard, which is high in backfats but still wholly Atkins-compliant. Also, betwixt my whiskers grow some delicious MacroRamen seeds, which (as common knowledge claims) bolster one’s cholesterol, immunity to Dragon AIDS, skills in DVD navigation, proficiency in both White and Black Magik Calculus, and of course, the body’s beard-growth enzymes. I suck these seeds down with every beard-meal, which causes more beard to grow, which in turn causes more seeds to sprout, and soon enough – about the time my beard’s rate of growth exceeds the local speed limit – I’m forced to continually consume it. This only makes it grow faster and stronger, soon extending its fibers into my gums, then my lungs, and eventually my adamantium bones. Soon I’m almost 99% beard, every part of me is sporting some sort of bristles, down to my very molecules, which when viewed with the proper scientological equipment, could be described as Rasputinesque. A mass of beard, I roll across the countryside looking like a giant salt-and-pepper tumbleweed.

One night I find myself under a freak occurrence of the Aurora Cooperalis which, coupled with the increased state of astrological entropy, roots my beard-veins straight into the ground, where they continue to grow and spread and eventually make themselves the veins of the Earth, extending down through the crust, the mantle, the layer of angelfood cake, and into the very core, which, being a virgin, accepts them graciously (but nervously) and allows them quick access to the inner core. There they entwine themselves with the soul of the planet, Richard, who, now having been almost totally converted into beard as well, spreads the strands to every molecule of the Earth, causing the whole planet to turn into one grand, hurtling mass of my beard hairs, leaving in its wake a cloud of trillions of MacroRamen seeds, which, in one year, it will run right smack into, most likely resulting in even more astronomical growth. With any hope, my beard will eventually make up almost 99% of all the matter in the known universe, which would be a very nice gift for my birthday, which is today.