SCHAUMBURG, ILLINOIS—After an extraordinarily long period of regular use, a suburban Chicago couple reported today that it finished an entire full-sized container of Vaseline. Sources confirmed that the fragrance-free “Wonder Jelly” had been sitting on the bathroom counter for God knows how long.

“I think I bought it, jeez, sometime during the Bush II administration,” said Henry Foster, 37, of the 13-ounce, blue-and-beige container of name-brand petroleum jelly. “I remember I just kind of randomly got it one winter because my knuckles were really dry and starting to crack, and then at some point I also figured out it made a pretty good lip balm, so I liked to keep it handy. I would never had guessed then that three apartments and two kids later it would still be sitting on my bathroom sink. I’m really going to miss the little guy.”

Henry’s now-wife, Liz Turner-Foster, inherited the ointment unwillingly during the couple’s courtship, initially regarding it with skepticism. She was grossed out by the prospect of sharing semi-translucent goop dotted by another human being’s fingertips, and, admittedly, somewhat troubled by the fact that it predated her relationship to Henry and for all she knew had been used by him or even, God forbid, an unknown third party for some kind of unsanitary off-label purpose. Liz considered secretly replacing it, but before she got around to making the swap she badly gouged her shin during a harried shaving accident in Henry’s shower and resorted to using the Vaseline as a salve since he didn’t have any Neosporin in the apartment. “At first I couldn’t believe I was even touching the stuff, but it really made my gash feel better. I came around pretty quickly after that and started using it like it was my own,” Liz said. By the time the two married and bore their first child, the tub of white petrolatum had become a fixture on the bathroom counter between Liz’s electric toothbrush and Henry’s Speed Stick. “That space just seems so empty now,” Liz said. “I really can’t believe it’s gone.”

The Vaseline served the Foster family faithfully for years, soothing innumerable shaving nicks, minor cooking burns, and even helped Liz navigate a particularly nasty bout of hemorrhoids late in her second pregnancy. Unfortunately, its seemingly inexhaustible supply lulled the Fosters into a false sense of security that it would last forever. “You just kind of get comfortable in the routine of smearing a bit over a patch of eczema here, my kids’ skinned knees there, and you start thinking it’s impossible for the stuff to ever run out. Then when it does you just feel completely blindsided,” Liz said, remembering that it even survived an ill-conceived experiment by the couple’s eldest child apparently designed to determine how much of its viscous contents could be streaked along the tail of Mister Kitten Britches, the often-moody family tabby cat, before he totally freaked out.

But for Henry the writing was on the wall. “I knew the end was coming,” he said. “I popped the lid open one night and saw it was getting low and I thought, Jesus, this thing is actually going to run out soon.” But while Henry braced himself for the unthinkable, Liz had trouble letting go. “She just kept scraping the bottom of it night after night, determined to coat her fingertip one last time,” Henry said. “Finally, the other night she was holding it up to the light over the medicine cabinet trying to dig some out of a crevice on the inside edge of the lid, and I just took her hand and said, ‘honey, I’m sorry, but it’s all gone.’ It’s been really tough on her.”

Henry also has concerns about how his kids will receive the news. “Honestly, we may end up just quietly getting a new one and hope they don’t notice that it has a label that doesn’t look a hundred years old,” he said. “I don’t know that they’re ready to process this kind of thing yet.” This tension has been compounded by the fact that it will probably take at least three trips to Target before one of them actually remembers to buy more.

Nonetheless, despite uncertainty around the future of the family’s moisture retention and wound care, life for the Fosters has had a way of pressing on. Henry and Liz, their fingers knotted together comfortably in Liz’s lap while their children tease a dour Mr. Kitten Britches with a pipe cleaner in the next room, believe now more than ever that every day is a gift. They will fondly remember the grace and stoic dignity with which the erstwhile ointment occupied its station on the bathroom sink, and look forward to opening their home and hearts to a replacement tub. “It’s what the old Vaseline would have wanted,” Liz said as she dabbed her eyes with a neatly folded tissue.

The couple plans to hold a private service tonight after the kids go to bed in the form of debating whether to recycle the empty plastic container with or without the lid.♦

CHICAGO, IL—In a bold move that shook the city to its core, a typically well-mannered Chicago man declined an invitation to dinner with acquaintances yesterday without even attempting to make up a plausible excuse. As news of the incident spread across social media, a rash of copycat “No-Scuse” refusals followed, threatening to throw an already fragile urban social system into full-blown collapse during the peak of holiday party season.

Eyewitnesses in the produce section of the Whole Foods where it happened were stunned by the harsh rejection. “My hands are still shaking,” said Dylan Chandler, 25, a mustachioed grocer who’d been stocking a nearby bin with organic honeycrisp apples. “The guy looked harmless, but then he was just like, ‘no thanks bye’ when the lady invited him and his wife to dinner. I wanted to say, dude, haven’t you ever heard of ‘hey sorry no we have plans that night’? It was like he had zero fucks to give about basic human decency. Honestly, though, a little part of me thought, man, I’d like to do something like that one day.”

Tameka Harris of Bronzeville nearly fainted. “I seen some shit in my time, but that was straight cold blooded,” Harris said. “I mean, homeboy ain’t even say why he couldn’t eat dinner with the bitch. He was just like, kapooyah!, nah bitch, and bounced like she ain’t nothin’. She just stood there holdin’ her lil’ fruit like, the fuck just happened? Man, that joker was cold as ice!”

In an effort to limit the damage, Whole Foods announced this morning that it would provide complimentary buffet dinners and trauma counseling for affected shoppers and employees through the end of the week.

Momma’s Boy

Perhaps as shocking as the epic brush-off itself is the identity of the unlikely man responsible for it. He is South Loop resident Mark Miller, 35, an estate planning attorney and upstate Michigan native with a long history of near-pathological politeness. Even a cursory examination of Miller’s past reveals nothing like the embittered reprobate one might think, but rather, in a friend’s words, “a garden-variety nice guy.” Often the first person to arrive at parties, Miller is notable for maintaining eye contact and nodding empathetically during conversation, and he hasn’t interrupted anyone since 2009 when his own mother went on a 20-minute tirade about how none of her sewing circle friends knew how to properly perform a half-double crochet. A former love interest who asked to remain anonymous went so far as to describe Miller as “probably the best listener of any guy I know,” although she broke off their brief tryst after a handful of dates, noting that the relationship lacked a certain “passion.”

At work, Miller is chronically focused on accommodating everybody else. Most coworkers know him as the guy who holds the door open for people for awkwardly long periods, and he frequently picks up his group’s Starbucks orders without any expectation of reimbursement. “He’s really just the sweetest guy,” said paralegal Margaret Cox, stressing that she is not sexually attracted to him whatsoever.

The only mark on Miller’s record came in 2011, when he gently confronted a fellow customer at an area Jewel-Osco for cutting in line, but when the man claimed that he had been there first, Miller immediately backed off, going so far as to apologize for his mistake even though the man was obviously lying. According to excerpts from Miller’s diary obtained by this publication, he really beat himself up in the days that followed, and hasn’t spoken up for himself since.

Among family, Miller is regarded as a quintessential “momma’s boy” who calls home at least three times a week on his way to work. “My son has always been such a kind and gentle boy,” Miller’s mother, Nancy Miller, said when reached for comment by phone, her voice quavering as she held back tears. “I never thought he’d be capable of something like this.”

A Perfect Storm

So why the sudden break from character? Apologists are quick to point to a “perfect storm” of agitating variables that ultimately led to Miller’s rebuff. He woke up that morning with a moderate hangover having consumed three beers the night before, and dragged himself to the store at his wife’s insistence to pick up blueberries for a tart she planned to bring to a social gathering that afternoon, one that Miller was reportedly dreading. Insult was promptly added to injury in the parking garage when some asshole in an Audi Q5, the very vehicle that Miller has wanted since 2013 but that his wife insists is “Euro-trashy,” bogarted the parking spot he’d attempted to claim with a blinker. But rather than protest and potentially relive the ignominy of the 2011 Jewel-Osco clash, Miller simply drove on without comment, a quiet, corrosive rage roiling just under the surface as he staggered into Whole Foods.

It was in this inflamed state of mind that Miller was approached by Rebeka Stahl, a former law school acquaintance notable for introducing herself as “Beka with a K” and widely regarded as obnoxious, possibly even “on the spectrum.” As Miller blearily surveyed the produce options, Stahl approached from the rear and greeted him with a jarring “Well, it’s Mr. Miller!” so unnecessarily forceful that it startled an old woman inspecting a navel orange nearby.

Dread washed over Miller when he heard the screech of Stahl’s inimitably penetrating speaking voice, and he barely had time to turn around before she assaulted him with commentary on how the blueberries he’d been perusing were subpar, that she much prefers to get hers from the farmer’s market near her office on Thursdays, but that she herself had been forced to “slum it” at Whole Foods to pick up a kumquat for a “secret recipe” marmalade. Stahl then unleashed a torrent of self-referential verbal diarrhea for upwards of seven minutes that included her analysis of the 2016 presidential election and that her and her husband who, she reminded Miller, works for a “Big Four” consulting firm recently closed on a “600 K three-bed” West Loop condo. Sources confirmed that at no point in the exchange did Stahl ask Miller anything about himself.

Stahl then insisted that the two couples get together for dinner or drinks in the near future. Miller managed to remain polite but neutral, deflecting weakly by citing a generally busy holiday schedule. But as Stahl, not to be deterred, scrolled through her iPhone calendar and began suggesting actual dates, Miller had what he would later describe as a “weird flash of spiritual clarity” and did the unthinkable: overcome with a sensation of confidence, he casually tossed the nearest tub of blueberries into his basket, looked Beka dead in her squinty little eyes, and said, “No thanks, I’m good. Later.” Miller then strode off to audible gasps and one “Oh hell nah!” from shoppers close enough to bear witness to the seismic shut down, leaving a gobsmacked Stahl to finger her kumquat as the hiss of a vegetable mister kicked on in the background.

Stahl has since been hospitalized for shock. She is not expected to make a full recovery.

‘No-Scuse’

Even as Internet pundits churned out indictments of Miller’s bad behavior in the hours following the incident, anecdotal reports surfaced throughout the city of other so-called “No-Scuse” refusals to attend office Christmas parties and other holiday functions. A vocal group of millennials have even taken to Twitter to pledge allegiance to the trend and express outrage at the “historical normalization of functionally non-consensual event invitations” at the hashtag #KThanxBye.

“We’ve seen an alarming uptick in No-Scuse rejections around downtown and in some areas of Lincoln Park,” a Chicago Police spokesman said at an emergency press conference, pointing to pockets of the city on a projector screen. “We are calling on the citizens of Chicago to ‘Just Say Yes’ to all holiday events, no matter how inconvenient or cringe worthy. We must all do our part to contain this menace. If this thing continues to spread, we could be facing the largest epidemic of sulky, butt-hurt white people since the end of the Civil War.”

But some experts fear the damage is already done. “This is the beginning of the end of polite society,” said Dr. Stanley McCaulkin, a professor of sociology at Loyola University Chicago and one of Miller’s most ardent critics. “The guiding principle of the modern bourgeoisie social contract is that no one ever expressly reveals that they don’t like one of their peers. You just avoid the people you don’t like, engage in elaborate, apologetic excuse-making when faced with an actual invitation to interact with them, and, if all else fails, you suffer through the occasional painful dinner or birthday party or whatever it is so that the folks in question are never able to confirm that you don’t actually like them.” According to Dr. McCaulkin, it’s taken the species generations of hard-earned evolution to develop a sense of civility under threat of unwanted social obligation. He warns that Miller’s subversive act could roll that progress back a thousand years.

In any event, whether Miller’s accidental revolution has any real staying power remains to be seen, but in the meantime the man himself has developed quite a following. At press time, as many as 40 women were camped outside of his townhome just to get a look at the newly minted legend in the flesh.

Among the legion of admirers is Tameka Harris, the shopper who saw it all go down. “Man, I ain’t been able to get that lil’ man out my head since yesterday,” Harris said, pointing her camera phone at one of Miller’s windows hoping for a walk-by. “The way he was just like, ‘Bye Felicia’ and whatnot. Oooh child! He done lit a fire up under me. Tell you what, he goin’ have to No-Scuse my ass direct ‘cause I’m tryin’ to get me a piece of that!”♦

WASHINGTON, D.C.—In an increasingly common moment of candor, President Obama revealed during a press conference today that if Republican candidate Donald J. Trump wins the presidency on November 8, he intends to spend his remaining time in office “farting repeatedly and bare-assed” into the historic Oval Office Screaming Pillow.

The President’s comment refers, of course, to a relatively obscure bit of White House lore dating back to 1915, at the time of the Lusitania disaster and an otherwise trying time in then-President Woodrow Wilson’s personal life. Wilson lost his beloved wife Ellen Axson Wilson in late 1914, mere months before World War I broke out in Europe. Ellen was not only a wife to the President but a political confidant, and her death came at a time when he most needed her level-headed counsel during mounting domestic tensions around the European conflict. Fortunately for the grieving Wilson, in early 1915 he met a dazzling young Virginian named Edith Galt, with whom he was immediately enchanted, reportedly commenting to a friend after their initial introduction that “Ms. Galt is exquisite, with an intellect nearly as massive as that bosom of hers.” After a (scandalously) brief courtship, Galt became a de facto—and of course secret—nighttime occupant of the White House living quarters.

The night in May 1915 that Wilson learned German submarines sunk the Lusitania steamship along with more than a hundred American civilians—a tragedy that would ultimately lead to American participation in the Great War two years later—Wilson called for Galt to join him, hoping some wee-hours romance may help to soothe his terrible distress. But Galt arrived late, only to then casually inform Wilson that, regrettably, she had just been paid a visit by “Mother Nature,” and had a “crazy bad headache” to boot.

At that fraught moment, the prospect of being limited to making out and, at best, some unenthusiastic hands stuff was more than Wilson could bear, and legend has it that he stormed out of the bedroom like a man possessed, grabbing the nearest throw pillow on his way out, and spent the remainder of the night in a Lincoln bedroom closet, screaming and weeping into the pillow for hours until he exhausted himself into fetal-position slumber.

The Screaming Pillow has been a staple of presidential stress relief ever since, helping Wilson’s successors weather the storms of their respective administrations, from Kennedy’s Cuban missile crisis to Clinton’s impeachment, from Nixon’s Watergate to George W. Bush’s failed attempts to learn the rules of chess.

So, President Obama’s vow to break wind into a White House artifact that has served such an intimate role to so many American leaders is an indication of just how little he thinks of Mr. Trump. “Sure, I know Harry Truman was clutching the Pillow to his chest when he decided to drop nukes on Japan,” Mr. Obama said, “but if that criminally insane piece of shit orange-faced fucktard [Mr. Trump] slithers his way into my house, I’m a eat Bush’s baked beans and blast my ass into that floral-patterned petri dish every night till January 20^th.” (The Pillow as “petri dish” refers to the fact that, per tradition, it has not been cleaned since Calvin Coolidge drunkenly urinated on it in his sleep in 1928).

In any event, and much to the relief of an exhausted electorate, the fate of the country at large will be decided tomorrow, although the Screaming Pillow’s sanitary condition continues to hang in the balance regardless of who wins the November 8^th contest.

“Honestly,” the President said to reporters with a wry smile, “even if Hillary wins, I’ll probably give it a couple toots for good measure.”♦

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL—Following a major faux pas by NBC in which it inadvertently aired images of a Swedish weightlifter’s vagina, the International Olympic Committee rocked the sports world today with an announcement that female Olympians will no longer be permitted to bear “any skin whatsoever, except that on the hands and feet” during competition. The announcement came amid a flurry of surprise at an impromptu press conference called after the 31^st Olympiad wrapped up two fraught weeks in Rio.

The radical rule change was also precipitated by widespread reports leading up to the crotch contretemps of compulsive masturbation among adolescent to middle-aged men around the world during essentially every Olympic event. Although self-abuse among spectators is always an unfortunate feature of the summer games, some metrics posit that the trend reached an unsettling peak in 2016. “We’ve been getting literally thousands of calls from wives, children, coworkers, and passersby that men of all ages have been indiscriminately whipping out their members in offices, living rooms, restaurants, street corners—pretty much everywhere—and ferociously jerking it to streaming images of barely dressed athletes,” an IOC spokesman said. Perhaps most disconcerting is that, this year, reports weren’t confined to the masturbatory staples of gymnastics, track and field, and beach volleyball. “Men really ran the whole gamut in 2016,” the spokesman said. “We received numerous complaints of public wanking during virtually every event, including fencing, archery, dressage, even golf. I mean, sure it undermines these gals’ elite athletic achievements, but points for creativity.”

Although the IOC admitted obliquely that “Bategate 2016” could be “potentially problematic if left unchecked,” it was initially reluctant to do anything about it. By Day 10, the IOC was faced with widespread social media outrage at a problem that seemed to be worsening by the day, but all it could muster was a typically complacent institutional shrug of the shoulders. “Listen, I get that these guys shouldn’t be arm wrestling their purple-headed stormtroopers out in the open,” the IOC spokesman said under fire from reporters during a press conference late in the games, “but let’s give these kids a break. They had fun, they made a mistake, life goes on.”

But that was before the now-infamous Day 12 accident involving Swedish-born bikini-model-turned-competitive-weightlifter Greta Garbo (granddaughter of the famed actress) jolted the IOC out of its insouciance, ultimately leading to the seismic shift in dress code. That evening Garbo, who is accustomed to publicly donning skimpy swimwear and the like, showed up to the medal round of the “snatch” competition (the snatch, for the uninitiated, is an Olympic lift where a barbell is yanked from the ground to above the head) adorned in nothing but tricolored nipple tassels and a chain-front crotch-less lace thong reportedly sewn together by Ralph Lauren himself. Unfortunately for the decorated Swede, as she initiated the movement, a nipple tassel interfered with her grip and she lost hold of the bar halfway through, and ended up essentially flinging more than 75 kilograms straight into her own forehead. She knocked herself out cold and fell onto her back, legs spread eagle, and for millions of international viewers the absence of fabric in the center of Mr. Lauren’s handcrafted panties suddenly became painfully conspicuous.

A melee ensued shortly thereafter, but not before Garbo’s splayed legs filled up televisions screens from Moscow to Lima for a staggering 14 seconds, her nether region centered tightly in the picture as though by intention, in what has since been dubbed the “Crotch Shot Heard ‘Round the World.” Those 14 seconds became a social media cause célèbre over the hours and days that followed, with conservative interest groups leading the charge against the “international travesty of moral decency” in a hashtag campaign called #14SecondsTooMany.

And then a strange thing happened. Rather than come to Garbo’s defense and her autonomy over her body and all choices concerning it, notably rabid feminist pundits joined the fight for stricter clothing regulations. New interest groups formed overnight and the leader of the pack, a coalition of activists called Feminists Against Greta Garbo’s Snatch, or F.A.G.G.S., began advancing a new kind of fem-centric doctrine holding not that scanty fashion options are a woman’s sacred prerogative, but rather that, in the atmosphere of irremediable global chauvinism they’d been complaining of so mightily throughout the games, “notions of feminine sovereignty command that a woman shield her body from view of all these goddamn asshole perverts who think the female form exists solely to get them off,” F.A.G.G.S. chairperson Rebecca Franklin Martin-Smith-Crowder-Johnson-Wang said.

And then, before Jane Q. Public could even begin to digest this seemingly drastic pivot, an up-and-coming group of radical Islamist terrorists seized on the opportunity to enter the fray, clamoring alongside the F.A.G.G.S. for the IOC to institute a dress code more aligned with Sharia values and to forever banish the “cheap orgy of unholy flesh mongering” that is the summer games. “We’re very happy to join with F.A.G.G.S. in the global fight against the wicked practices of the IOC and Western infidels,” a spokesman said on behalf of the Coalition for the Use of Nuclear Terrorism for Survival of Sharia, known internationally as C.U.N.T.S.S. When asked whether he had a riposte to offer critics who say that cozying up to Western feminists as political bedfellows will tarnish the C.U.N.T.S.S. brand, the spokesman—who reportedly only recently left his post as Donald Trump’s campaign lawyer—aggressively repeated “Says who?” several times before eventually making the case that because the two groups share a complete ideological rigidity and intolerance of opposing viewpoints, they are actually pretty compatible.

Regardless, though C.U.N.T.S.S. and F.A.G.G.S. may have historically different agendas, they’ve proven to be tremendously effective when united against a common enemy, and together they followed the Garbo/rampant masturbation ordeal through to a most impressive conclusion. “The sheer number of vociferous tweets we were getting on the exposed skin issue alone was just too much for us to handle,” the IOC spokesman said. “We were really sick of hearing about it, so we just kind of threw up our hands and said, okay fine.”

Of course, the wound is still scabbing over, and whether the rule change sticks remains to be seen. Some F.A.G.G.S. detractors, Garbo herself among them, are already trying to upend the change, arguing on social media that the new rule is regressive because it’s driven by a “heteronormative agenda” rather than legitimate concern for women, further muddying the waters and leaving disinterested observers scratching their heads as to exactly what it is that the feminist contingent ultimately wants. But one thing is certain: for every perceived misstep the IOC or any of the other Olympic powers that be may make over the next couple of years, F.A.G.G.S. and C.U.N.T.S.S. will be waiting in the bowels of the Internet, ready to take to Twitter to carry forth the inextinguishable torch of popular outrage.♦

© 2016 Matthew C. Douglas

GRANT PARK, Chicago, Illinois—Downtown Chicago is reeling this weekend from the sudden influx of tens of thousands of just-hatched teenage clones flooding Grant Park for Lollapalooza 2016, the iconic alt-music festival now in its 25th year. “It’s really something to see,” South Loop resident Mike McNally, 35, said as he watched a group of scantily clad female hatchlings stumble onto State Street from the Harrison Red Line stop. “It’s remarkable how they all look more or less identical, and seem to lack even the most basic capacity to make an independent decision. I mean, this is the third group in ten minutes I’ve watched come up from the subway. They’ll just stand there for a few seconds, totally oblivious to the fact that they’re in everyone’s way, and then they’ll just kind of twirl around in synchronized circles and bellow in unison ‘oh my gawd, like, which waaaay/oh my gawd, like, which waaaay’ for a while before they start walking in the total opposite direction of Grant Park. Happens every time.”

While the annual rock fest always leads to a temporary population boom downtown, this year it just so happened to coincide with the hatching of the largest-ever crop of artificially created teenage clones at the Illinois Center for the Advancement of Molecular Cloning, located in a nondescript office building 30 miles west of the city in Downers Grove. And while the massive inrush can be an annoyance to locals, it also represents a capstone achievement for the Center. “We’re very proud of the 2016 release, not only because of the numbers but the unrivaled quality of our product,” says Dr. Gavin Dinkus, director of the Center’s program on adolescent cloning. “You look at these kids and you think, wow, you know, these guys are almost human.” Indeed, the 2016 “graduates”—in industry argot—are the culmination of a lot of hard work. “We’ve really tried to showcase the advances we’ve made over the last year with these little boogers, and I think it’s obvious in the result. I mean, short of having a conversation with one of them face to face, you almost can’t even tell they’re genetically engineered knockoffs. Not to mention, a lot of them are pretty easy on the eyes,” Dr. Dinkus said with a proud, fatherly smile.

But even amid this quantum leap, Dr. Dinkus and his team are keenly aware of their prototypes’ limitations. “No matter how good the science gets, we’re talking about a breed that’s had very little time to acclimatize to the nuances of a complex culture,” a feature that often hinders their collective ability to make challenging decisions. To accommodate this, the Center outfitted this year’s class in the style of dress dubbed “Basic,” primarily because it removes the “heavy burden” of choice that the graduates are not always capable of bearing. “There are only about three different variations with this style of clothing,” Dr. Dinkus said, “so even the ones with extraordinarily limited intellectual capacity seem to be able to pull on high-waisted short shorts and a striped tank top. Floral-themed headbands also seem to be within their reach.”

One of the Center’s chief disappointments this year was its failed attempt to imprint each individual graduate with a unique manner of speech. “I won’t bore you with the details but the process was just too unwieldy to master before the release date,” Dr. Dinkus said, “so we basically just gave them each the same cache of words, superlatives like ‘super’ and phrases like ‘I feel like’ being some of our staples. As far as the voices go, we use the same base program and basically just try to vary the pitch a bit. Ultimately they all pretty much sound the same.”

But Dr. Dinkus is quick to remind critics of one of the Center’s major triumphs: the clones’ expert smartphone use and mastery of social media. Center staff was thrilled with how quickly they got that one right, nailing it down with an earlier generation and holding steady ever since. “I swear, it’s like these kids come out of the synthetic womb already programmed to Instagram a ‘duck face selfie,’ Tweet some cutesy observation about a trending topic, and fire off a group text all at the same time.”

In any event, the 2016 rollout’s overlap with Lollapalooza presents Dr. Dinkus with a prime opportunity to amass new data to address the areas still short of the mark. Marshaling the graduates together in large numbers will allow the Center to further study why they immediately pick up social cues and modes of communication from one another, but struggle with assimilating characteristics from older generations of naturally conceived folks who actually have the ability to consider people other than themselves. “I know everyone in the neighborhood hates it, but Lollapalooza is a blessing for us,” said Dr. Dinkus, describing the tacky, large-scale music festival as a crucible that could generate lots of valuable new information.

McNally, the South Loop man anxious to reclaim his neighborhood at the end of the weekend, also acknowledges that Lollapalooza and the clones are “perfect for each other.” Engineered to value cultural homogeneity and the safety of the herd above all else, they’re well-suited to unblinkingly worship the middle-class values so perfectly embodied in the tepid, self-congratulating musical fare that’s been a mainstay of Lolla since alternative music turned, in McNally’s words, “totally gay.”

Fortunately for McNally and other city dwellers, graduates’ life expectancy averages only about 72 hours, so by Sunday night, the clones who don’t make it back to the Downers Grove facility before mandatory deprogramming (which, according to Dr. Dinkus, is nearly all of them) will be lying dead in rotting flesh heaps in Grant Park and along city streets. Ryan Sumner, a veteran Streets and Sanitation worker, isn’t looking forward to cleaning up the mess. “I expect I’ll have some choice words for these selfish lil’ bastards come Sunday,” he said as he tossed a garbage bag full of $10 beer cups into his truck, his head swiveling to track a particularly attractive clone. “I mean, take that one, she’s probably never done nothing for no one in her short little life, but, goddamn, that ass though!”♦

A hopesick phenom knits a needlepoint into a friendly abscess and grasps for ‘Round Midnight. The tar expands and loves his arteries to death. Waiting, he envisages his mother’s stern face, epileptic hammer action, a taped-up Monk fake book. At the water’s edge, a beached Steinway beckons him to wail into its belly.

When I imagined shooting up in my head I had it all worked out, from the boiling point down to the butterfly insertion of the gun metal into the bloodstream. It was all happening at my tattoo artist’s house: he was in the bathroom and I heard his belt flake apart and smack out of the loops with its laminated woefulness and schoolboy sanctimony and I became afraid of it because I knew it was devious. The rest is an indelible gash, specific and remorseless:

I bought this imaginary dope with a hundred dollar check gifted to me by my dead great aunt. She’s in the ground now, and her flesh looks like browned house potatoes; most of it has completely disintegrated but the bones and jewelry hold solid because of their unexceptionable architecture and molecular integrity. I saw all of this in a dream and if you don’t believe it you may as well floss the toenails of God with pond roughage. But the feeling (the injection came later), I’m sure you want to know: if it was very peaceful, we’d be friendlier than this and we’d all sink down into a great pool of cloudy Chlamydia piss and waterproof termites (the flesh eating bacteria have movie night in a different temperature). In this space we were all in together I knew that the termites would make less work for me in the long run and I understood the auspiciousness of death. I can’t fucking explain it so don’t ask me. Please. But more than all that, in the grips of my fortune there was an ineluctable sense that life was a presumptuous snuff-spitting blowhard spouting off at the mouth and talking all big about how it fucked Betty Mae Hoolihan Reese (you know, that girl) in the back of a neon black Dodge Intrepid with a blown transmission and fourteen inch wheels (which seemed odd to brag about); there were wild allegations and all of this he-said-she-said sort of thing, and ultimately the dryness in the air proved that after invisible hands unearthed Betty’s pussy from poop brown wicker basket underwear with thoughtless jagged leg holes, she said she quote unquote wants it in the slimy cunt but first you have to tell me about God. This is now widely regarded as truth, especially in the Universe.

Jesus Christ, though, the sensation of these rapacious ninja children slicing at me with stunted swords!; their gills had been stuffed with seashell shavings and razor blades until they were gutted and made extinct by jealousy. It felt dull going in, but once the blood started gushing out it wasn’t red, it was baby blue and turned to powder, you know, like the color of the sky, and I knew in that quote unquote pinhead atomic moment that it wasn’t my blood going out into the world but the sky’s breath coming into me; it coursed boiling ejaculate through my stapled-together veins and, spitefully, it gave me a horrible abscess that would become pregnant with bliss. It’s a terrible thing, but we live in a place where the sky is a commercialized jerk-off joint where intrepid maquereaus fashion deadly weapons out of crusted tampons and live chinchilla teeth. I hate to be here for too long, but the tattoo artist needed to finish the job; after all, only the outline of this fanatical face was fitted on, the one I chose out of a prejudicial lineup of entirely light-skinned African American males and wrung out in mirror shade reverse and horror show sing-alongs; then the artist switched the colors from primary to secondary (after he asked me to bring paper towels with me to the job) and poisoned the canvas of my body with this domineering malediction and turned my gooey beige anodyne hide into the kind of evil which no one is really capable of. It hurts like a motherfucker, too. But the imaginary jacked-up dopesicles (forgive me if I digress from time to time, between naval-gazing I jump from casual rumination to tautological certitude with no hard proof) hammering through the canal of my arteries and spider veins, rushing to flood the eyeballs and “once and for all,” they say, radically condense the world from an intractable terrorscape to something I can slice in two with a borrowed Leatherman and smear like ambrosia all over compact latissimus dorsi. I feel like someone who just got tried for murder and danced his way to the gravel on piano key neckties. In this fantasy, I’m the toughest man alive. Pious itinerants make pilgrimages from the lady-boy rapist Far East to be near my bright-light creativity and spark plug brilliance. In this double-jeopardy realm I’m the cleanest cat that ever was and the way I think changes history every minute: I’m lauded as the first person to master mind control and braindrain gravity because every thought zap in the amygdala generates more and more peace until my mind spins off its axis into the quadrant opposite and all I feel is a hollow-tip absence of everything that ever caused me grief. But the truth: I’m deathly afraid of needles and risk.