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.