Far from finding such scenes stupefyingly disjointed (and, as anyone with even the faintest familiarity with The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack knows, these are exactly the sort of stupefyingly disjointed scenes that XOXO delights in recklessly strewing throughout the epic), audiences at public recitations demand that vagrant, drug-addled bards (those dwindlingly few vagrant, drug-addled bards who have survived all the Chinean-inspired anti-bard violence) chant these very noncanonical bloopers in their entirety, demanding, in fact, that the surviving bards belt them out like the cast of some Broadway musical to the exclusion of the rest of the epic (i.e., the canonical bloopers), prompting one expert to describe this “neo-epic” (that is, this version of the epic purged of everything but noncanonical bloopers) as a “labyrinth of corridors invariably culminating in a flooded men’s room.”
Vance spins the wheel of his BMX bike, and in the blurred strobe of its spokes, as Vance spins faster and faster and faster, you can just barely discern the inchoate contours (i.e., “early drafts”) of everything that’s about to happen.
The mesmerizing metronomic beat of the spokes ticking against the empty Sunkist can.…They are SO high. This Gravy is super-potent. It’s military-grade Gravy. Their eyes are glazed over and orange dribble runs down their chins.
Along with the humming hyperreality of being so high in the glare of a midsummer’s day, there’s an unmistakable overtone of impending violence and revelation.
They’re SO high.
They’re SO FUCKING high.
Wednesday: 8:00 PM Eastern
“A Mule with a Red Bonnet”
Three more cars go by. License plates: AGV-66N, OAM-17W, RMP-45Y.
AGV: A grainy video
OAM: of a man
RMP: resembling Meir Poznak
A grainy video…of a man…resembling Meir Poznak…
A grainy video of a man resembling Meir Poznak, ex-bard and leader of the hard-line anti-XOXO paramilitary organization T.S.F.N. — General Command, based in Jersey City, has surfaced on the Internet in recent days and shows him announcing his retirement in favor of a mule in a red bonnet.
The man, bearded and wearing fatigues, is shown seated in a wooded area, next to a mule in a red bonnet, identified as his successor.
In December, Poznak was nearly assassinated by a nanny from Côte d’Ivoire pushing a stroller rigged with explosives.
A few of the dwindlingly few vagrant, drug-addled bards who have survived all the Chinean-inspired anti-bard violence are partying at a crowded club in West Hollywood (Les Deux). Throbbing dance music.
“Quiet!” one hisses to the others, covering his cellphone. “It’s Meir Poznak!”
Poznak recites the following lines:
Everything that’s screwed in
Or glued together
Is coming apart
At the same time.
The next day, The Capo di Tutti Frutti is found dead in the underground parking lot of his apartment complex. His hands had been bound and his head bludgeoned with a bat. His entrails had been eaten. Police suspect that a God ate his entrails because fingerprints on packets of tartar sauce found near the body were not human, and because fresh mounds of loot drops (or “God guano”) had been discovered in the woods nearby.
Wednesday: 9:00 PM Eastern
“The Ascendancy of Hmm Uh”
Hmm Uh, who inauspiciously began her career as a gob of phlegm on the street (“some guy on the street hawks up a big gob of phlegm and spits it on the sidewalk, and Ike stops, and he kneels down, and he says to the gob of phlegm, ‘Fräulein, my band, The Kartons, is giving a Final Concert later this week, and I’d be very much honored if you would attend’”) and then inexplicably reappeared in the guise of a “speech disfluency” or “verbal placeholder,” has suddenly (within, say, the past two minutes) become perhaps the single most influential Goddess in the history of the Sugar Frosted Nutsack pantheon (that “moaning menagerie”). “Impertinent with the scope of her new power, she burns with the inferiority complex of a former hawked-up gob of phlegm and speech disfluency.” She’s now the paramount Goddess. Elected to the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Goddesses, Hmm Uh requests several days’ leave to engage in a celebratory series of drunken bisexual orgies, conducted first in one of the world’s largest open-pit asbestos mines in a town in south-central Quebec called Thetford Mines, and then in a succession of squalid gas station lavatories along Interstate 19 in Arizona. The Goddess La Felina, “champion of the sans-culottes and scum of the earth,” is said to be partying with Hmm Uh. Other debauched participants in the drunken bisexual orgies are said to include: creepy, unsavory looking porcelain Hummel figurines brought to life, leprechauns with disproportionately large, erect phalluses jutting out from their green breeches…and…umm…Transformers robots with huge, unruly tufts of fern-like pubic hair sprouting from their crotches like weird fucking Chia Pets — although, according to an updated report in USA Today, this is not true.
Hmm Uh looks half-Russian, half-Korean. She has a perpetually salacious grin on her big, round face. Big-haired, buxom, retroussé-nosed, she is simple and unlettered (and depraved).
It’s amazing how prescient the Chineans were, how uncannily they anticipated the ascendancy of a Goddess like Hmm Uh. Yes, Hmm Uh is zaftig, hairy, and uninformed, but she is refreshingly young (early twenties) and much, much more cheerful than the gloomy and world-weary “chubby, sweaty, hairy, unkempt, and uneducated middle-aged women” who’d habituated the epic up until now.
Now Hmm Uh—patron Goddess of Inarticulation and Illegibility, of High-Pitched Gibberish, Nonlexical Vocables, and Hysterical Spastic Aphonia — is the star of her own reality show. She’s the only woman on an offshore drilling rig, thirty miles out in the Kara Sea, an icebound Arctic coastal backwater north of central Russia. Total darkness engulfs the region in the winter. Hilarity and puerile boorishness ensue as Hmm Uh entertains fifty super-horny, frequently drunk, and stir-crazy Russian oil workers. “The waters of the Arctic are particularly perilous for drilling because of the extreme cold, long periods of darkness, dense fogs, and hurricane-strength winds. Pervasive ice cover for eight to nine months out of the year can block relief ships in case of a blowout.…Until recently, Russia regarded the Kara Sea as primarily an icy dump. For years, the Soviet navy released nuclear waste into the sea, including several spent submarine reactors that were dropped overboard at undisclosed locations,” according to a report in the New York Times by Andrew E. Kramer and Clifford Krauss.
Hmm Uh, who used to spend Spring Breaks at Novaya Zemlya, an Arctic testing site for nuclear weapons during the Cold War, says, “Radiation isn’t so bad. I think it makes men better at sex.”
Wednesday: 10:00 PM Eastern
“Meir Poznak: Behind the Music”
Meir Poznak begins to seriously, almost obsessively, ponder the idea of “fucking with the mind of the mind-fucking God.” He begins to think about whether it’s somehow possible to subvert XOXO, the God who subverts almost everything we think. He wonders whether it might be possible to inoculate the epic against XOXO with denatured infusions of XOXO, or whether a form of mithridatism might actually be feasible (i.e., protecting the epic against the poison of XOXO by gradually administering nonlethal amounts of XOXO). Of course, he has to concede, there are myriad enemies, real and perceived. The world of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack is a world of paranoia. There are endless provocateurs. Endless spies and traitors. Double, triple, and quadruple agents. But behind it all, pulling the strings and tying it all into knots, is XOXO. Vance and Ruthie and the Daughter (whose name is withheld because she’s a minor) and her unborn son, Colter Dale, have all been suddenly and unceremoniously “deported” from the epic and turned into football hooligans. (Vance because Mogul Magoo bristled at the notion that a street-level Gravy dealer was thought to be a God by the Chineans. Ruthie and the Daughter for their own protection? Or because they became superfluous? There’s no consensus among the experts.) Vance ends up in Serbia, where he joins the Grobari (“Gravediggers”), a gang of violent thugs associated with the Belgrade club FK Partizan. Colter Dale, a Liverpool Football Club fanatic, actually strangles his unborn twin brother (a Manchester United fan) to death in utero, using their mother’s umbilical cord. Put a stethoscope to the Daughter’s pregnant belly and you can hear a drunken Colter Dale singing the Liverpool FC anthem, “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” over and over and over again (“When you walk through a storm / Keep your chin up high / Etc., etc.”). XOXO’s “disappearing” of Vance, Ruthie, the Daughter, and Colter Dale guts the band The Kartons, leaving Ike a solo act, which, at the end of the day, is what he so quintessentially is anyway. Meir Poznak, as anyone with even the faintest familiarity with The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack knows, is seriously, almost obsessively, pondering all this…pondering exactly how he might fuck with the mind of the mind-fucking God.