WELCOME TO NEW ZEALAND
The he tapes it back to the glass.
“Real funny,” Christian groans.
“I’m not joking. The dirt underneath this store is owned by New Zealand.”
“Sure it is.”
“Hawaii’s not attached to the U.S., but it’s still considered part of the country.”
“Yeah, but Hawaii’s surrounded by water, not another country.”
“Hey, Mr. Man, I own this store and it’s going to be in whichever country I want it to be in! Actually, I don’t want it to be in New Zealand anymore.” He crosses out New Zealand and writes in another country.
Now it reads:
WELCOME TO VENEZUELA
The cashier is proud of himself. “There. Now we’re in Venezuela and you can’t buy that whiskey unless you have Venezuelan money.”
Nan comes in. Her expression says I’m sick of this.
She punches the cashier in the face. He screams straight to the ground.
“My tongue is broken,” the Cashier cries.
Nan takes the money and the whiskey, walking toward the door. “What are you going to do, call the Venezuelan police?”
The cashier bleeds.
As we leave the store, we discover that the sun is ready to go in for the night, heading back home to his wife and kiddies, who are all sit-waiting for him to come down to them with crab sticks and dinner rolls perched on their flowery kitchen counter.
On his way over the horizon, the sun accidentally brushes against a mountain range and catches the landscape on fire.
And as the sunset becomes a forest of flames and red-orange swirls with smoky demons crawling their way to the cloud people, and as the abstracted vegetation and forest creatures fall over in disgust, all that Mr. Sun says about his action is this:
“Sorry about catching you on fire. I’ll try to be more careful tomorrow.”
Scene 4
History Comes Alive
The warehouse spits a wad of throat-snot onto a passerby and then goes about its daily routine of sulking in its foundation. When the passerby insists the warehouse explain itself, the warehouse waves him away with a little wooden finger and calls him a log of boob poop.
The warehouse doesn’t realize, however, that there is a group of Gorguals nearby. Gorguals are an alien race that excrete food-waste from their breasts, which work like buttocks. And there’s a hole — the breast hole — between both mounds, which lean forward over a toilet for defecation. In other words, their boobs poop. The Gorguals don’t take offense to the warehouse’s boob poop comment since they do not speak English or the language that warehouses speak; and even if they did speak English or Warehouse they would not have taken offense because crapping (an informal term) is accepted socially within their culture. Translated from Gordual tongue, the term crapping is referred to as stool liberation.
The sun is gone, eating dinner with his family, and the warehouse is taken by old Earth-toys, all punks and skinheads mauling each other and skreaking, which makes the warehouse very bitter and inclined to spit at passing ones on its carpet walkway.
Inside of the warehouse’s guts, a concert is in session. A legion of color shuffles soundly, merrily around and round-a-go. I am behind the stage, muzzy from the round-a-go crowd movements and all the shifty colors, ticking sick.
My band is playing already, but I am not yet onstage, liquor-inhaling.
Christian is running the performance, rape-screeching and scratching sheet metal with Mortician, who plays his distorted bass with a knife and a cellular phone. We are an electronic noise band, which is a very popular Japanese food creation. Actually, I didn’t mean to say electronic noise is a very popular Japanese food creation, though it is a genre of music invented by the Japanese music underground.
This is what I meant to say: the name of our band is A Very Popular Japanese Food Creation.
Very few people in the room enjoy our style of music, even though they mosh and punch each other as if dancing to it. They’re all waiting for the headlining brutal oi!/punk skinhead band to play, and that will be the start of a large kicking/punching/fork-through-the-skull festival I assure you.
Within the center of the room, there are two things: one is Vod, who is sitting on the toilet playing his bagpipes to the electronic noise, and the other thing is a history book that smells of rotten human.
History books and rotten humans are two things that you’ll always find in a graveyard. Long ago, you could only find rotten humans there and never any history books, and this made the cemetery a very boring place to visit. My mother told me, long before I came to hate her, that the whole point of going to the cemetery was to visit gravestones and a plot of dirt, where you were to put flowers if you had the money for them.
Now the whole point of going to the cemetery is to read history books. Let me explain:
It started when all the governments of the world decided that it would be a very neat idea for everyone and everyone to write journals of their lives, including every day, every moment, every thought, every person, every creation, and every thing important to each individual from day to day to day to death, so that everyone will have their memories and their life story written down, to live eternally after department. But only two copies were to be made. One is sewn into the stomach of the deceased and the other is for the public to read.
A Gravestone is not just a stone with a name and a date to another date anymore. It now has a little waterproof/airproof drawer inside that contains the autobiography of the person buried beneath. And ever since I was a child, I’ve been going to the cemetery and reading the lives of the dead. And every time I read about someone, that someone becomes alive again.
Not too many people care to read history books anymore. Nobody even cares to write them; even I have given them up due to my acid ocean eyes. I still go to the cemetery and look at the pictures and titles, but it’s disappointing to know that I can’t read them entirely.
They don’t let you steal the history books. It’s very important that you don’t, for history’s sake. But they don’t have any security guards to stop you, only the gatekeeper, and he doesn’t really care. Still, I’ve never heard of anyone stealing a history book besides myself.
I stole The Story of Richard Stein.
It was such a great history that I had to keep it. But I still had respect for the readers of the books of the dead, especially the readers of Richard Stein, so I didn’t take the book on display. I thief-slithered onto his grave one night and dug that old corpse up. I stab-cut into his gut with some pizza shears — which was quite the ass painting — and filched the book resting inside. It’s just as good, but it has a rotten Richard Stein smell on it. It’s the only book that I try to read other than comics. But I already know the majority of it by heart.
His words are called wisdom by the critics on the back cover.
Richard Stein has taught me much about the world we live in. His book is my bible. Well, something had to be. The real bible is very boring, being on the level of a bad coffee table magazine. Not that I hate everything the bible says. Personally, I agree with most of the biblical messages, I guess, but I just think the writers weren’t any good. Matthew and Mark were okay, but Luke and some others told as drome a story as a ten-hundred-page book about dentistry. (Just in case you didn’t know, drome means boring and droll means interesting, so you don’t get confused.)