PURPLE PIRATE SPACE MONKEYS FROM BEYOND URANUS!

Chaos reins supreme like an angry tyrant seated in his red overstuffed throne wielding a far-reaching and heavy pointed stick! In this episode, our stalwart companion of the slow and meandering cyberstream is assailed by rays from above. Is it a probing Heavenly Intrusion questing discretely to herald the coming of a new age? Mayhaps the evil machinations of a master race of purple pirate space monkeys from beyond Uranus? Or is it merely the dark influences of the half cooked burrito that he purchased at the corner bodega located down the street from where he works. You know, the one that keeps getting closed by the health department! That store that was on the cover of the newspaper last week, with rats the size of small puppies that sit in the deli case and grin at you through the window... that one! I suggest that you soundly grip your armchairs in disbelief and horror and read on, because this one is a clencher!

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I am not one of those fortunate individuals who works a nice 9 to 5 job with weekends and the occasional Friday off. As well, though I have many years experience at my place of employment, I am not even a day-shifter. Instead, I am one of those sorry, sad individuals that the majority of the populace take some bit of pity on. As they are heading home for the day, looking forward to a nice evening in, I see the looks on their faces. They spot us, as we are just heading off to work but already tired from the day, with nothing to look forward to but 9 hours in a florescent room with no windows. Turn those frowns upside down fellow passers by, your feelings fall on deaf ears and eyes for all is not as it appears. Secretly, I have discovered a masochistic bend in my personality. Most especially, it is all the more apparent since being married. I deserve to suffer. I am the worlds most lowly and humble servant and it is my destiny to tread endlessly. I like to stretch these single night shifts into doubles. If I', lucky, they will last the entire weekend. If the forecast says its going to be a nice day, I immediately begin calling my office to secure those slots that have the greatest probability of maximum sunshineness. Your toil is my foil, my pain, your gain, let me work for you. And what more, let me believe for you.

In those hours, few and far between when I find myself at home and not putting the men into menial, I like to find odds and ends tasks to occupy my rabid slavering brain. Like a dog after a bone, like a snake after its tail, I am my own Ouroboros when not functioning as a public servant of sorts. Just before I leave for work each day, my Herculean list of tasks near completion. brow peppered with sweat, back broken under the whip, I make my way to the mailbox in eager anticipation for letters hidden therein. Perhaps Uncle Sam wishes to enlist me, or an operational error at the electric company has billed me a million dollars in error. The possibilities are far beyond reckoning!

To better salt my quest for treasure, I subscribe to every magazine, mail in every free offer. My junk mail surpasses in a day my regular correspondence for the year. My mailbox is more a mail fortress, a mail citadel - the Fort Know of my block. The local post office reserves my neighborhood exclusively for rookies and temps, unwilling to sacrifice veterans in shouldering the load that is the burden of me. Neither rain nor sleet, dark of night, hateful dog, nor postal patron may slow my carrier, but I will grind him till dust under the weight of advertisements destined for my door.

Today, as I stepped lightly towards the black boxed shrine of deforestation - I was struck by epiphany. Did distant angels blow long horns in triumph? The wind was strong, the September air full of the chill anticipation of winter. And in this chill, the mailbox lid rattled. In all my time here, sequestered in the woods, the mailbox has been too full to close tightly. Today was no exception. Yet in its rattling, I felt something more. The boyscout, tense before the scout master, unraveling the codes of Morse, cried out from within me. What is this, can it be? The randomness of the wind, the chance ray of sun that fell through the clouds and landed upon my head as if a halo from on high. There could be no doubt. A message was hammering itself out, the door of the mailbox against its body, again and again, a message from a far off place.

"You are the one" it intoned, the music of the spheres traveling through space and time to reach my ears with the jarring of the mailbox door. More the sounds of bells now, than a creaking in the wind. Again it spoke to me "You are the one, spread the word, move the people" in Morse code, clear and precise in my mind, the message causing a hearkening back to the rigorous training of my scout days.

Without conscious effort, I found myself on my knees as I gazed up reverently at the mailbox. In response, a very strong gust of wind freed the door finally from its grip, and as the message ended the mailbox opened to offer itself to me. Like manna from heaven, like hosts from a chalice, like snow falling on pure ground, the junk mail began to cascade and gather around me. And like a pulsar ejecting new matter into a young universe, the mail piled high around me, higher than my waist, and more still poured forth. The amount was inconceivable, the process unending - I was the messenger and here was the message. EVERY... SINGLE... PIECE of mail was a solicitation, and all spoke but one word - GIVE!

I though my hands into the air, then I wrenched my palms, I groveled in the sand and dust there. I am unworthy I bemoaned the mailbox. I am an ant. I am the runt, lowly, commonplace below all the other ants. I am the most disdained. I am pariah, untouchable, unheard oft ignored, but I will change all this. As God as my witness I will carry forth the word!

Whether it be the Lord on his high mount, aside Olympian heroes and many armed servants of darkness, or orb carrying round bellied dignified deities or tentacled, antennae, prehensile tailed volcano abusing ice cube soul transforming galaxy travelers, it was not my motivation, my intention to question. My mission was deliverance, my salvation in the trip itself.

I gathered up a double handful of the junk mail and rushed to my car. Into the city must go you the many pieces of mail did cry. And like a flagellate, like a horse haired shirt, mountain climbing mystic, the paper envelopes did cut and abrade my flesh, chastising the messenger, keeping his pride in check while his soul did soar on wings like those, but less than, those of the angels in whose company he found himself. And into the city, now transformed like Babylon did I sojourn. Upon arrival there, I found the largest square to be found and parked where I could most block all others from passing so as best to spread the word. I threw the doors to my car open, but as much as I threw them open, so eager was the word to be spread that the doors threw themselves open and out poured a forest, a river of paper. For my double handful of mail that I had brought into the car had grown, like loaves and fishes it did pour forth, swallowing the men and women immediately around me who sought to distract and apprehend this messenger on his mission. Men and women in uniforms, red and blue swept away, an undertow of great wrath pushing away the non-believers, dragging them down, but raising and holding afloat all who embraced the message. Give, give, buy, buy, buy. Give all that you have. Work hard. Buy everything you can. If you don't have one, then you need one. If there is anything left over after you get one then give to those who don't yet have one, so they too can get one.

No more did anyone stand around me, we were all afloat. The great wave spread out from its point of origin. I, a mere vessel, was flooded with the light of accomplishment as the tidal wave of mail rode down the unwary and carried them along, consuming and transforming non-believer into prophet, tree into pulp, pulp into paper, paper into junk mail, and junk mail into hymnal. And after a time, my surroundings white, in the bleached, sterile world of the word, there was a growing silence. Emptied of energy, all the converts turned internally to reflect on the message that still ebbed and flowed around them. Was this it then, had my journey ended? Was the fruition of my mission in this moment?

Nay, reader. I shake my finger at you for even pausing to question. For even as I did so, did there appear before me yet another vision. A man, bearded, ancient beyond the walls of time, did walk atop the floods of paper, as a man walking on water, and did stop before me.

He eyes were serene. In them I did see accomplishments, as if a pebble dropped into a deep pool. The message rippled outward from them, reaching ever further, enveloping all, soundlessly, seamlessly, in serenity.

My work here, I ask, is it done then.

The man smiled, no my son. Your work is a lifetime of work. I come before you not to have you make pause, but to ponder. As the message you carry is tainted, as if heard only through one ear.

This then, is not what I was to accomplish, I asked, my arms waving round me at the ocean of white, papers upon papers, still cascading outward as I gestured, the entire population of New York City like flies to sticky paper within its confines.

Your journey must transcend the physical and embrace the intellectual. Join me son, step outside of your element, the box that you are in, hasten yourself from it.

Think outside of it I asked?

If you must limit yourself with such a mundane description as that, then yes he said, think outside of it. But do more than that. What I ask of you might not be attainable in words, because the thought it needs to encompass is more eastern then western, more left than right. I ask you to contemplate things for which western society may have no vocabulary, as the descriptions for intangibles such as these cannot find root in a language so caught up in the physicality's of existence.

Huh? I responded, my eloquence now fleeting like a shooting star.

If I said to you, the great, astonishing bearded man spoke, that your pufrot could no longer quibble in harmonious union with the pufrot of your fellow fellows, would that resound soundly in your fabblefou as it should, or would it fall upon deaf ears?

My ears it seems are no longer deaf, but perhaps more befuddled than before. Have I suffered some sort of mental incapacitation this day. Am I indeed the one that flew over the cuckoo's nest, or merely an observer of the bird that made such a journey?

If, the man said, if I must state it in such a way do that you are most able to absorb the impact of my words, then let me say this, I need you to think outside the box that is outside the box you think you are stepping from!

Then, I begged, do I need to be the bird high above the bird being observed flying over the cuckoos nest?

You are the shadow of the cloud that falls on the bird, above the bird, and the observer of the bird, and the nest, and everything around it. And you are as much the molecules in the soul of the worm in the stomach of the bird, as you are the echo of the cry that escapes the birds mouth as it falls dying from the sky, having flown over the cuckoos nest and into the 4th story window of the skyscraper next door.

Then the man laid his hand upon my head and said rise, rise my son, the child of my mind and tell all!

I leapt to my feet, my spirit souring, my soul and body light.

Speak. Set free the true wave of understanding the man prompted!

It was not the mailbox that spoke this morning I shouted to the crowd, but my inner pain instead, echoed in the form of the mailbox!

Good, go on the man prompted.

The apparent appearance of the ever expanding wave of mail, was in fact a psychotic break that only seemed to manifest as a literal physical translation of my emotional and intellectual expansion of my mind. Indeed, it was a cry for help from my unconsciousness after the near breakdown of my exhausted and fatigued, and overworked body.

Well, you're kind of drifting there son, lets rain it in a little. He chimed.

What I took to be God in Heaven, Aliens in their hovering spaceships, Angry Kali and reticent Buddha were indeed indigestion, sleep deprivation, dehydration and gas.

No, hold on there, the old man said stepping forward.

All religions are basically the same in that at their utmost fundamental levels they attempt to deliver a message of peace and unity, sameness in our disparity and a greater need for understanding and a more fundamental willingness to listen to our fellow man.

No, the old man bellowed.

In fact, I continued, one might go so far as to say that the great texts by which we live our lives are truly only allegorical, to be used as a guide, a reference, and that any attempt to translate them literally is in fact only an act of farce on the part of the translator.

No, I said No, again bellowed the old man as he stepped forward and put his hand over my mouth. Rather than attempt to breathe through the rather odorous sweat of his palm however, I felt inclined to pause at that time.

When he removed his hand, I asked inquiringly - No?

No, said the old man. No, no , no.

Around me the crowd surged, and several called out - tell us, show us the way.

The old man again raised his hands above the crowd simultaneously silencing them and moving them as one to be seated. Then he turned to me.

My son, my precious child., allow me to explain. It WAS in fact Alien, physical and metaphysical gods of Scientific, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and a panoply of other religions that trained their communicator ray on your mailbox to deliver their profound message to you this day. They indeed want you to spread the word.

The bible, and all the books of all religions are in fact to be treated as literal truths, especially when they further the motives, motivations and interests of your government. Everyone is right, and everyone has the right to treat you badly if in any way you disagree with their perspective or opinion. Do not question religion, do not question government. Do as you are told and work hard for the man, and there will be pie in the sky when you die!

I am even more confused now then when we began I replied. What was I to see when I stepped outside of the box, what great truth?

This, my son, the wise man said, his arms enveloping all the paper that has swept over and buried those around us. This, this is the great truth. This profound wastefulness is what you needed to open your eyes to.

What then, I asked, lost, what then, and how then should I have spread my message?

Again he strode forward and put his hand on my forehead, as I kneeled before him, a penitent awaiting the truth.

His eyes were filled with love, and his word was love. The Internet, my naive child. Use the Internet. Email is the cheapest and most effective method for reaching the most people the most quickly. Spam, and spam again. And don't forget, and this is so very important, make sure to use a header that will attract their attention!

Peace, enlightenment, truth, answers, I sputtered?

He laughed then, and smiled. It was radiant, it was a rainbow of light. My innocent child, don't be silly, those are not the things we need. Everyone, all of you, stand now he shouted.

Everyone did in unison, we were all on our feet.

Repeat after me, the quickest way to reach the most people. You must include in your header
Nude Aliens, Free Viagra, Necrotizing Fasciitis , Paris Hilton videos & common cold viruses that turn everyone into Gorgeous Lesbians.

Spread the word children, spread it.

And we all rushed forth............