Quick Sanity Test

Do you hear voices when you are alone in the room with only a so-called television? Or that device they call the radio? When you open a book, do you think the book is talking to you, addressing all its thoughts and the essence of its being to you in a personal way? Is Britney Spears singing to you what she can't tell you personally about your love life without blushing or coughing and looking away? Does Adam Lambert know all about the philosophical crises you faced last winter? Well, let me tell you a little secret. The television is probably unplugged, and so is the radio. The government officially stopped all television and radio transmissions in late 2003. They had programmed these devices to implant a false sense of visual empathy with various societal and cultural agendae within the viewers. They just needed a little time to let the microchips they were putting in food get assimilated by everybody. Some of you apparently weren't eating the right breakfast cereal. Or any breakfast at all. The chocolate proved more successful. Sooner or later everybody eats chocolate. The funny thing is, if you are one of the few people who didn't ingest the various chips, when you walk into a room where everybody is "watching" the big football game or the latest "wild and crazy" reality show, all you see is a blank grey screen with nothing on it. Bummer. And this radio thing. The people are singing "along" tunelessly with nothing but static, sometimes interrupted by bleed-over from various government walkie-talkies and cell phones. An implantee hears the Jonas Brothers and is bopping around the dining room. The non-implantee hears, "Joe, did you get that chip job fixed in Sector 4?" "Hold on, I'm watching these toob jobs. They think they're watching the fucking Superbowl. It's April, for Christ's sake." "Yeah, the time's on a feed too. In California, it's January. In Rhode Island it's fucking August." "Be careful with that. I think they're starting to use it on us. They told me my vacation was all used up and my wife had a defective chip and swears we haven't gone to the beach in five years." When you open a book, you read Tolstoy or Shakespeare or Jackie Collins. When a non-implantee opens a book, he or she instantly breaks out laughing, because all books actually contain only a series of dots and dashes which are made of a radioactive isotope which triggers certain linguistic sequences in the mind of the "reader." Sometimes there is funny grafitti written by non-implantees, like "YOU'RE NOT READING...YOU'RE RADIATING" or sometimes a more earnest plea, like "WAKE UP! I HAVE NOBODY TO FUCKING TALK TO" or sometimes it's just a drawing of Tweety Bird or a dick or something easier to draw like a Hershey's kiss or a jack o'lantern. But of course, you don't see these messages. You are busy feeling sorry for Anna Karenina or Cordelia or some Hollywood slut who got herpes because she drank too much at a pool party. Britney Spears is actually a 74 year old molecular biologist. Everybody sees a different Britney Spears. It all has to do with your ideal of beauty. The Jonas Brothers are three Australian guys who are actually 51, 53 and 56. They aren't even remotely Jewish. In many versions of Tolstoy's book, Anna Karenina does not roll under the train like a disappointed pencil falling out of a Hello Kitty pencil box called Russian society. In other versions, she marries her gay hairdresser in a delightful marriage of convenience and moves to the Riviera. But when the people who had chips which interpreted the novel as tragic and who experienced the protagonist's "suicide" discuss the novel with chipees who read the gay hairdresser version, the chips automatically compensate and translate so one person says "I really hated that when she killed herself" and the other person hears, "I loved it when she ran off with her gay hairdresser" and the latter person says, "I know exactly what you mean!" And everybody is happy. This is why some conjugal situations last for many years. It works fine if everybody never hears what the other person is saying. The government is wise and figured this out decades ago. It just took them a little while and a few think tanks to figure out the mechanics of The Solution. In fact, most chipees believe America only had one Civil War when we've actually had seventeen. Many of these civil wars were actually very silly and some were fought over things as trivial as hair product. But millions of people died in these wars. Of course, all memories of these wars have been erased, even from the minds of those who have been combattants in one (or several!) of these wars. Haven't you ever noticed a scar on your body and thought, "I wonder where I got that?" It wasn't that time on the frat house roof or the escapade with the ex-con with a sensitive side. It's quite probable that you have seen active duty in one of our many Civil Wars. There's a 98% chance you actually did see active duty. We Americans are extremely violent. For instance, my mother was a staff sergeant in the Civil War known as The Roquefort/Brie conflict (a.k.a the Nasty Cheese Imbroglio) back in the early fifties. You should have seen the map of the United States then...it was hilarious! Talk about gerrymandering!(And you should see the flags. They're to die for. I have a precious flag from my Mother's first Civil War that reads: "OUR CHEESE, NOW AND FOREVER. NOT THEIRS." When my mother visits, she stares right at it and asks when I got interested in "Penguin Artificial Insemination." I don't even want to imagine what her chip tells her she's seeing. Non-chippees often sell flags from the various American Civil Wars on EBAY, but of course chipees think these are auctions for Alvin and the Chipmunk memorabilia and pass right by them without even clicking.) That Cheese conflict was where she reconciled with my father who was on the opposite side. They later fought side by side, curiously enough, in the Miniature Golf/Skeeball Conflict of 1969. Some people still call this Vietnam, and non-chippees have to stifle their chortling when people start going on about that one.... I mean, they get so serious. Of course, if you're a chippee what you are reading right now, right here, is a blog post about the 14 Places My Cat Has Regurgitated a Hairball. (Nudge Nudge, Wink Wink). But if not, you're not. You're reading what I'm actually typing. I mean, if they haven't gotten to me yet. Once I sat and typed DEVO lyrics for seven hours on my blog and somebody wrote to me and told me how much they enjoyed my feature on averting Dutch Elm disease before it happens. I just said "Thank You." It seemed like the right thing to do.