or, “The Miserable, ‘Modernized, Anglicized and EgÕhhh-sized’ ”
The action takes place in El Segundo, year of our Lord, 2009.
A block in this medium-sized city has formed a “gas line” that stretches to the next larger city, and from there to the next larger and so on all the way to Beijing (and back).
The middle class has found that the government-mandated “hybrid” vehicles could be modified to get more “pep” by hooking up the batteries in series and running a hydrogen-gasoline mixture known as “hydro-ethylene”, “hyrdo-eth”, “Hydra”, “Ethyl-Hi”, “Ethie” or simply “Hydra”.
It was like the lingo of the drug pushers with Meth (crystal meth, “iced-’T’ ” and all that rot).
Because the government had been offering incentives to buy the hybrids, and due the high failure rate of the batteries and all the fires on the interstates, they offered a program whereby if an individual’s vehicle had met with some ill-fate, the government would then offer vouchers on the next purchase of a vehicle. The failure rate was about 60% before the advent of hydra, which had essentially driven it up effectively to about a 78% rate, with intensely more horrific fires on the highway ensuing.
Capitalism had found its refuge (as it always does) in the under-markets. It was the black-market trade in hydra where it still thrived in the sub-soil; where it will perpetually lie dormant, waiting for its next resurgence in a truly free society totally exposed to the light of day. In flagranté delcti, naked, and unabashed.
People began trading the cocktail in the era of the “greenheads”. It was said they had ivy growing through their ears and into their brains, but that assumed they had any brains to begin with.
The ivy probably found a seed in the cranial cavity and began to grow from the inside-out given the fact they all appear to be as inanimate, and almost half as lively (other than for their hyper-prolific nature where reproduction and growth is concerned – thus the obvious link to ivy).
Still, while as prolific as kudzu, they were also every bit as saavy.
At any rate, the geniuses, led by their chief-superior genius Sir Peuxk, had imposed their own form of religion on the rest of society. Of course, it wasn’t his real name, but all the underclass referred to him as such as any who got too close would naturally heave from the putrid stench that surrounded him.
It was said it came from years of living “au natural”; not naked, per se, but more, like Jim Morrison, or a swine…essentially swimming in their own muck like a gimp Nam soldier in a 70’s VA hospital. Man, they were “D” luxe apartments in the sky…royal treatment for the boys who ensured our lifestyle.
The ivy-heads worshipped in a religion not of deity, but a religion in which they had made an agenda their god.
They served this agenda with supreme regularity, and all were condemned to hell who had not joined their cause. They would eventually be covered in kudzu and smothered by the regulation and regularity of “the system”. It was a smothering vine, this cult, smothering…indeed.
They would be persecuted in the workplace, driven from their homes and forced to feed off the land that provides that ever-more valuable “hydra”.
Such as always is the case, life endures and finds all alternate avenues of existence.
Strict enforcement policies had been instituted, and an already over-taxed federal government decided to redirect any drug enforcement officers to the task of regulating the illegal trade in hydra.
But, oh, how those cars did fly.
The ivy-skulls were so married to their philosophy that they had no such provisions for their own, hybrid-police vehicles.
It was said “the government force-feeds hybrid, and we feed our bellies with hydra”.
There was very little the agents could do. Most were the bottom-of-the-barrel anyway. All the good agents who were committed to getting kids off junk, they’d left for the coast (took retirement, found other avenues of sustenance, like dealing in hydra).
What was left were the other brainless who had been educated in public schools and whose main interest was to party like it was the end of a millennium; these dregs were ultimately committed to bringing down a world, a society, a bold and beautiful democracy and mold it into a pig sty.
They wanted a world that swims in the same pig shit they swim in when high on meth at their “enviro-friendly, drug-and-sex-swap-fest-concerts”. Hippies, swimming in effluence of every bodily variety and wrapped in the suffocating kudzu they call “the agenda”.
Damned ivy-heads.
But there was one, very beautiful aspect in all this…a beautiful irony, of sorts. Hydrogen could be readily produced from the excesses of this “green” society. In an extraction process whereby the chlorophyll of Kudzu reacted with the salts naturally produced by the plant (for it grows in very poor soil), a bit of electricity could be added to a stew of kudzu and water and voilá – hydrogen at the one pole, oxygen then released at the negative and bled into the atmosphere.
This would explain the incredible rate at which hydra had taken over this society. It was a commodity that platinum, gold or even plutonium could not rival and it was free, cheap and as readily available as the rays of the sun. Of course, it was effectively and equally as dangerous as the sun’s fuel – its fusion energy melts all…and a hydra vehicle with batteries in series … man, they’ll melt asphalt like a solar flare. All you got left is a tarred hippie who got too close to the flame.
Everyone wanted hydra, and especially the hippies.
You know how they are. They want peace. They want a piece. They want ganja. Then they want cookies. Then they want a little bear to take of the edge; then some speed to perk things up a bit. Then more ganja, junk food, and beer.
They want, they want, they want. And oh, how peaceful, man. And, oh, how cool. And oh, how totally, numb-skull fried (like kudzu).
But, of course, to get the pep in the hybrids, it had to be mixed with petrol, and thus the spark that would ignite a blaze of war that would prove even hotter than the hellfire of an A-bomb in full “bloom”.
For while the hippie herb-head wanted everythang “groovie”, they hated those mean, old oil men. For they represented that over-thirty set that could never be trusted.
What a viscious and cruel fate it is to get old and have to stand in as leader of the dregs.
Especially when the dregs have come to realize that they too need the speed of hydra.
For very different reasons, but without question, as needful as any.
For in the end, it would mean saving the earth, and God knows, the green-heads loved the earth (and all things, of this world).
{Precipii apologizes for this divergence into fiction. Normally we are ONLY dedicated to commentary on current events, but this morning we wax, poetic, on a truth lightly-peppered with lies. What was it Hitler or Goebles said “Big lies, little truths”. Well, if we ever indulge in any further (and more feeble) attempts at fiction, we will dedicate ourselves to profound truths and incey-wincey lies (reverse propaganda, or death by needle prick).
The editors at Precipii will leave this page in tact for a bit, then move it to another page accessed from the banner above with some appropriate button/title like “fiction” or “heap-big stories told from forked tongue”, or, maybe just “fork-ed tongue”. Yeah, sounds good.
Happy reading, gentle readers! }.
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… in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.
—Adolf Hitler , Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X[1]
