Illiterate people must not be allowed to write in English anymore. Chinese has this covered as they were smart enough to devise a language so difficult, everyone is full on illiterate and not just halfway like my peers. English needs to get tough. When stupid people can communicate, all communication will be stupid. I want that on a bumper sticker. Not on my car, though, it’s kind of stupid itself.

The word “abysmal” is what I am moaning about at this time. What a crime. The word could be so much more beautiful and utilitarian at once. All one can think at this point is “Really terrible and why didn’t you just say, ‘Really terrible,’ instead, Oreo big stuff?”

It could have meant all the inky black, pressure, and cold–ephemeral creatures, with teeth like satay skewers and eyes the size of saucers, brushing you and disappearing to flash like paparazzi slow motion.

But illiterate people–writers in this case so I guess “individuals” is better than “people” for my suit– have ruined it.

So I file my report. In conclusion: Illiterate people must not be allowed to write in English anymore. Penalties must be devised.

Ah.

Ms Exie Shortbread, my copy editor, informs me that there has been no foul and “abyssal” is the word I want. Tucked away scant ems below the deepest I made it into Merriam. Webster. She further informs me that “abysmal” proper still contains the senses I indicate when taken by a literate reader.

Ah.

Some hundreds of you have written to ask about Exie over the years though I’ve just been handed the mail this week. It’s not her real name as I’ve said. When I delivered my second book’s manuscript,                  , to her and she found it therein she was also curious and asked.

“Why are you calling me ‘Ms Exie Shortbread’?”

Skating at the time, I replied, “Because it seems very sexual without in fact seeming sexual at all. Just like you.”

Hence the naked mole rat. While it has nothing to do with the story, it does have the benefit of being quite distracting as well as introducing the word “naked” into this page. Perhaps lessening one copy editor’s ire. She was mad about the “copy editor” thing in equal measure; coffee-spoons.

She loves nudibranchs but no one searches for pornography in Latin outside the Holy See anymore.

I just read some things I wrote in the ex-expatriation phase of all this. Lost my pace, my style, my narrative voice. It’s really difficult to conceive today–a million candlepower v some decimal albedo–what must have been going on in toto.

It’s legal. It can’t be thought fair. Glibness is a sorry trade for the time and reasons to be explaining what one had and wronged or had lost and righted. Like any other sucker, I thought it was a bargain when I inked it mine.

The rubber chicken does better at parties. I lack the hieroglyphs I used to be able to twist out of the 90-penny chain dermographia.

Dear Saint Sebastian,

I have found a new patron: Bartholomew. As my public relations agent Orión would say: “You’ve may indeed have got the point but I’m aflayed you’ve missed the…” Oh, God. You can’t make me do this.

Invulnerably,

V-i-v-i-0

PS: The cops asked if I’d slipped her a mickey but I knew what put her over the edge into the fun house. She was fucking goofy. No pooh.

I got a lawyer for 10 minutes for free as a Seattlite at apogee and as part of Microsoft’s new Explain to America they can’t sue® program. I didn’t even want to talk about how open source software is Terrorism and they let me ask my question anyway. Damn white of them, I say.

Back on to the cyclobenzaprine.

Since I let that jerkwad intern, one “Dr” John MacDougle, at the Spokane free clinic prescribe a generic drug to “save me some money,” I’m as out of luck as Martha the Passenger Pigeon. If he’d just put a crowbar into his thrifty little skirt wearing McTightas—I’m entitled, I’m Scots—and wrote the scrip for Flexeril® like a man, I’d be about $5 million to the better right now thanks to Merck and Co.

So my advice to the young man in need of pharma is: Insist on the brand name. What the hell do you care? The co-pay is the same either way. Or are you trying to save an insurance company money? After Noam Chomsky’s famous 1973 proof!

Given the axiom: Money = Evil.
Architecture ∉ Good
Architecture ∉ Evil.
Money + Architecture = Tall Building.
∴ Tall Building = Evil.
Tall Building ∈ Insurance Company.
∴ Insurance Company = Evil

Remember, there is nothing wrong or unethical about hurting a corporation. Any people who might sometimes get hurt in the middle deserve it for participating in the evil as the Good Linguist teaches.

But I’m tired of losing out on the cash that should be mine. It’s too close this time. I can taste Benjamin Franklin’s green ass.

Things finally going my way, there was a slot in the Physics 102 at the Seattle Protestant College. I’m enrolled and I plan to use my knowledge to build a time machine to go back to that appointment with MacDougle and insist on the proper prescription so I can finally have my share in the American$Dream. Just one prescription between me and my millions. The time machine should be complete sometime between the Super Bowl and the World Series.

As my own lawyer I advise you to retract two of the whoppers and one of the minor fictionalizations.
–or–
Oh, what a !Tangled hamper.

Joe Haldeman is not dead. Joe Haldeman’s wife was not in “Playboy” this May but in September of 1967. I am not in possession of any such medical records alluding to Joe Haldeman being repeatedly anally probed by vacationing extraterrestrials who refer to Earth as Club Med: Hedonism MMX.

These particular side-effects of cyclobenzaprine are apparently well known to occur in a small percentage of patients and are followed by psychosis akin to that caused by fungally tainted rye.

I’ll be under observation for a few days; or longer, they say, if I refuse to recant on the !Hamper. Why not just get it over with and sue the freakin’ Khoikhoi, Joe? Don’t wait up.

This is somewhat necessary. This is somewhat necessary. This is somewhat necessary. This is somewhat necessary. This is somewhat necessary. This is somewhat necessary. This is somewhat necessary. This is somewhat necessary.

Monkeys make monkeys make monkeys make monkeys.

This is somewhat necessary. This is somewhat necessary. This is somewhat necessary. This is somewhat necessary. This is somewhat necessary. This is somewhat necessary. This is somewhat necessary. This is somewhat necessary.

Monkeys make monkeys make monkeys make monkeys.

So I’m playing around with new signature blocks, as the kids call them. I can’t decide—clever or cleaver?

• V
• VI
• VIV
• VIVVI
• VIVVVI
• V5VI
• V-i-v-i-o
• Thank Christ! That crazy cunt can’t remember any of that night.

It appears Joe “Look What I Did in Your Hamper” Haldeman is dead. He gave up writing science fiction immediately following an unexplained 8 day disappearance which ended with a sudden reappearance at the Tucson General emergency room where he was treated for “unspecified colon injuries.” From there the Freedom of Information file I got from the FBI is nothing but a bunch of blacked out lines.

I found a blog entry about the man where a WWII buddy said that Joe found science fiction to be too painful and something he couldn’t joke about anymore.

His 19 year-old widow (see the May issue of “Playboy”) somehow got wind of my last post, and is suing me. She claims the !Hamper Incident to be a work of fiction. I, of course, kept no evidence and, in point of fact, after all chemical agents proved ineffective against the smell, to end this particular forever war I had to have a contractor tear out the entire room.

Does anyone know a good lawyer. My friend Spen Kafford apparently became one behind my back. He has also threatened me with litigation if I continue to use his name in my anti-Cuba literature. I think maybe I’ll ask his buddy, Fidel Castro, for help instead.

So, there I go. Sued twice on the Internet in my first week.

Oh, I die. Before I die I eat at a table on the piazza outside la Scala and I spill my Beverly and Campari; use the insalata tines for to stir the aperitif; moltissimo maleducato. I bloat with stress induced intestinal pressure of a level seen only upon the oceans’ plains. I expel a cloud—a miasma—that kills everyone in the primo circolo and blinds every inhabitant of the secondo. The newly appointed Pope is visiting town. He dies. Many millions of Catholics weep. Italy loses credibility in the UN.

My frappéd carcass so resembles Cthulhu that the responding HazMat team is driven insane. Each returns home to murder his family. Dante’s statue is animated and walks to Firenze and Bologna where it destroys all Renaissance art. My ancestors are so shamed that every gravestone crumbles to dirt. Humiliation seven generations deep.

The explosion when the gas reaches the prayer candles in the Duomo destroys it utterly and sends flaming rock into all the neighboring countries. It is interpreted as a terrorist attack. Switzerland blames Turkey, France blames Morocco, and Germany blames Islamic soccer fans. All Muslim nations are wiped off the Earth. Blood runs over the banks of the Seine like the flooded Nile. Europe experiences race riots that destroy its tourism for all time. The Canadian dollar becomes the new banking standard to which the €uro is pegged. My embarrassment is greater in volume than all the flowing freshwater in the world.

I find out it’s Internet, not Enternet.

And if you think I’m gonna apologize to Joe “Look What I Did in Your Hamper” Haldeman for being that embarrassed without mentioning him, you’ve got another coming. After what he did—with my own grandmother in the house!—I don’t owe him anything.

I just got back from Singapore yesterday after eight years of smoking Afghani hashish–cut with the menses of 72 virgins–in the back room of a Malay chemist’s shop on Ang Mo Kio to find things changed!

First there is this whole Enternet thing and then Y2K came in like a lamb and blew out like Heidi Fleiss’s birthday cake. I mean, why did I bother hiding out in the East? The world didn’t end. Burroughs couldn’t get me; he died the week I left! I swear—I have no friends.

I must say, I’m quite angry no one “informated” me about this Enternet. Exie, Orión, and CM all had many chances par avion to bring me up to download speed about electronical mail and such like. I have so much lingo to catch up on. I’ll have to find myself all over again. It’s a goddamn scandal. :(

Did I type that frowny face thing right? No, don’t tell me if I did. I’m too embarrassed already. Watching a single episode of “Three’s Company” at this point would probably put my return address in Benzodiazepine City, Xanax 90210.

If this is the new millennium, I call.

Oh, and the United States—well, New York City–was apparently attacked by Iranian Contras or something too.

Your favorite writer,

Vivian Five VI