The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

9

For anyone attending a performance of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack today, there’s likely to be little if any suspense about what actually happens. The story, with its escalating crises, divine interventions, and hyperviolent denouement, is so well known by now that an audience at a public recitation would not only be able to anticipate every single plot point, but would probably know many of the lines by heart and almost be able to lip-sync along with the bards. And they’d know the history of the making of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack. They’d know how each “section” became known as a “Session” and then as a “Season.” They’d know how these Seasons were produced — over the course of hundreds, even thousands, of years — by nameless, typically blind men, high on ecstasy or ketamine, seated in a circle, and chanting for hours and hours on end as they sipped orange soda from a jerrycan; and how every new improvisational flourish, every exegetical commentary and meta-commentary, every cough, sniffle, and hiccough on the part of the bard is incorporated into the story, and is then required in each subsequent performance; and how numerous unrelated episodes have, over the centuries, fallen into the epic’s orbit and gradually become incorporated into the epic itself; and how vernacular variants are incessantly generated in its mutagenic algorithms; how it’s been “produced” through layering and augmentation, repetition and redundancy, more closely resembling the loop-based step sequencing we associate with Detroit techno music than with traditional “writing.”

Adults and children alike would be familiar enough with the plot to already know (before the bards even opened their mouths to deliver the first words “There was never nothing ”) that the saga of Ike begins with him making a lewd mandala of Italian breadcrumbs for the Goddess La Felina and then engaging in an extended adagio with the waitress at the Miss America Diner and writing his narcocorrido “That’s Me (Ike’s Song)”; they’d already know that Ike gets high with his daughter’s boyfriend, Vance, and makes a list for him called “Ten Gods I’d Fuck (T.G.I.F)” and neglects to include the Goddess Shanice, which incurs her eternal wrath (FYI: La Felina was #1 on his list); and that Koji Mizokami, the God who fashioned the composer Béla Bartók out of his own testicular teratoma, helps Ike shoplift an Akai MPC drum machine from a Sam Ash on Route 4 in Paramus, New Jersey; and that Bosco Hifikepunye begins supplying Vance with the hallucinogenic drug Gravy to sell on the street; and that Ike goes to Port Newark for a tryst with La Felina, who’s transformed herself into a container ship; and that she promises Ike that before he martyrs himself, she’ll appear to him in human form and fuck him; and that she says she’ll get in touch with him on his cellphone and let him know exactly when and where; and they know that he’s photographed there by the ATF; and they’d already know that while Ike is interviewing for a butcher’s job at Costco, a God impregnates his daughter; and that Ike accidentally kills his father as they wrestle for Ike’s cellphone because Ike’s father is trying to change Ike’s ringtone from “Me So Horny” to John Cage’s 4'33"—the composer’s notorious “silent composition” consisting of four minutes and thirty-three seconds in which the performer plays nothing (e.g., a pianist going to the keyboard and not hitting any keys for four minutes and thirty-three seconds) — and Ike immediately realizes, to his horror, that having Cage’s 4'33" as a ringtone would essentially mean that he’d have no ringtone, and that he’d almost inevitably miss La Felina’s call, which, for Ike, is literally the booty-call of a lifetime; and they’d already know that on the morning of his father’s funeral, Ike wakes up with a incredibly gross (“grotesquely purulent”) case of conjunctivitis and, after delivering the eulogy (a phantasmagorically anti-Semitic diatribe, akin to Céline’s Bagatelles pour un Massacre), he tries to pull the pillars of the synagogue down and crush the congregation; and that his daughter gives birth to a half-divine, half-mortal infant named “Colter Dale”; and that soon after The Kartons begin their “Last Concert” (which happens to be their first concert), the ATF/Mossad raid on the compound begins; and that after retreating into his two-story brick “hermitage” and reciting The Sugar Frosted Nutsack in its entirety to the infant Colter Dale, Ike is killed. (And they know that, in a coda, Colter Dale—who mythologically functions as Ike’s successor — explains how Ike’s so-called “delusions” are actually irrefutable proof of the Gods’ existence.)

So audiences do not necessarily have to concentrate on each word, gesture, or nuance of meaning that comes from the bards. If your neighbor talks, you don’t try to quiet him. The overall impression at most recitations is chaos, as food vendors, children, and adults ceaselessly move up and down the aisles. No one can be expected to sit through an eight- or nine-hour performance without talking, eating, or getting up. Young children romp in the aisles, and when the action gets exciting they mass by the footlights like moths drawn to a flame. The predominantly female audience will continue to talk long after a recitation has begun. Many people doze during less interesting scenes and, in fact, bring their own straw mats on which they sit and sleep.

But when the bards’ recitations get particularly lurid (e.g., the scene in the Tenth Season in which Ike goes to his daughter’s school to have a meeting with her math teacher, loses his temper, and threatens to sodomize the teacher if he doesn’t agree to give her a passing grade), spectators leap to their feet and the children howl with uproarious laughter, clap, whistle, and yell out encouragement. It may shock some people unfamiliar with orally transmitted epics that audiences would find men threatening each other with anal rape so entertaining. Perhaps it’s not hard to understand why uneducated, working-class, middle-aged women might find homoerotic sadism wildly diverting — but children? It could very possibly be that the children don’t even understand the content of what’s being chanted here at all (the language in this Season is almost impenetrably thick with de Sadean bombast) and are being whipped into paroxysms of excitement by nothing more than the hysterical cacophony of the bards. Also, the scene has an undeniable slapstick quality, with all its tumultuous, pants-at-the-knees, chase-me-around-the-office antics. And usually bards portray the math teacher as such a stock commedia dell’arte villain — i.e. the sanctimonious martinet moonlighting as JV basketball coach and driver’s ed instructor, etc. — that it’s easy to cheer on Ike, even if you disapprove of his cell-block bluster.

There was one prominent and controversial expert who actually believed that the traditional style of the bards (i.e., slurred, mumbling, etc.) so garbles the content of what they are chanting that almost no literal meaning is actually ever transmitted. Jake S. Emig, in an erudite and exquisitely reasoned treatise, only slightly marred by vitriolic ad hominem attacks on several female colleagues (who’d reportedly objected to explicit photographs of himself that he’d texted them), contended that since audiences can’t understand anything that the bards are chanting, they are creating each time, almost out of whole cloth, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack for themselves, out of what they think they hear. After subjecting thousands of hours of taped recitations to sophisticated audiological analysis, he wrote, “It is more than likely that there is no originative, coherent epic, that there is merely a succession of misinterpretations of the bards’ muffled cacophony, of their static, their white noise.” Emig, an enigmatic figure, started his career as a semiprofessional hockey player. For several years he was a forward for Thetford Mines Isothermic, a team in the Ligue Nord-​Américaine de Hockey (LNAH), which is generally considered the most violent hockey league in the world. Emig’s teammates on Thetford Mines Isothermic included veteran NHL defenseman Yves Racine and right winger Gaetan Royer, who played games with the Tampa Bay Lightning in the 2001–02 season and also played for the Bartercard Gold Coast Blue Tongues in the Australian Ice Hockey League (AIHL) in 2008. Emig was forced to retire from professional hockey as a result of post-concussion syndrome (PCS) and a succession of DUI arrests. It was then that he became interested in the field of forensic audiology, received his Masters of Applied Science degree several years later, and soon thereafter became an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Forensic Audiology at Lake-Sumter Community College in Leesburg, Florida. Almost immediately upon publication of Emig’s study, “Castles of Hardened Bullshit,” his work was completely discredited by discoveries that he’d crudely altered much of his audiological research to suit his thesis. Less than a week after these revelations surfaced, Emig was found dead at his gym, Bodies-N-Motion, on East Main Street in Leesburg. At first it was naturally assumed that Emig, distraught over the self-inflicted damage to his academic reputation, had committed suicide. But forensic allergists were able to determine that the scholar had succumbed to food-associated, exercise-induced anaphylaxis. Emig, who was allergic to shellfish, was also receiving weekly immunotherapeutic injections of dust-mite extract to treat his chronic allergic rhinoconjunctivitis. On the afternoon of his death, he’d ordered a bowl of num pachok chon (a Cambodian freshwater-snail noodle soup) from a food truck parked near campus. He’d been intrigued by a photograph of the dish taped to the truck, but was completely unaware of its ingredients. After consuming the soup, Emig went to the gym and began a vigorous session of aerobic exercise. Within a half hour, he reportedly broke out in giant hives, began to wheeze, vomited, collapsed across the elliptical, and died. There’s a significant cross-reactivity between house dust mites and snails, and the combination of dust-mite extract in the immunotherapy injections with the shellfish in the noodle soup and the strenuous exercise proved to be too much for Jake Emig’s system to withstand. Soon after his death, a law was enacted — known today as “Jake’s Law”—that makes it a federal crime to knowingly sell any noodle soup containing freshwater snails to anyone receiving immunotherapy injections of dust-mite extract.

Intriguingly, when volunteers at Manatee Community College in Bradenton, Florida, who’d been locked in sweltering Porta-Johns and subjected to bards chanting the words “sugar frosted nutsack” nonstop for twelve hours, were asked what visual images occurred to them most frequently, the majority reported envisioning a white planet with a kind of scrotal topography (i.e., “ridged,” “wrinkled,” “corrugated,” etc.). Some simply saw the planet spinning in empty space. Others saw themselves actually on the planet, in a car on an empty highway traversing a desolate, bluish-white, furrowed landscape which radiated out infinitely to the horizon. One of the students (Heidi, a junior majoring in Public Safety Administration / Homeland Security who “loves Godiva chocolates and champagne”) visualized herself standing on the planet, disproportionately large, “like The Little Prince.”

The phrase “sugar frosted nutsack” occurs 3,385 times in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (including this sentence). Scholars suspect that this number corresponds to Section 3385, Title 8, of the California Code of Regulations: “Appropriate foot protection shall be required for employees who are exposed to foot injuries from electrical hazards, hot, corrosive, poisonous substances, falling objects, crushing or penetrating actions, which may cause injuries, or who are required to work in abnormally wet locations.” It’s thought that this mystical numerological correspondence might derive from the concern that bards have traditionally had about maintaining the health of their feet, since they are peripatetic and spend the preponderance of their lives walking from village to village. (There are many other eerie mystical numerological correspondences. The flight distance between San Diego, California, and Bogotá, Colombia, is 3,385 miles. The date 3/3/85 is the birthday of Lithuanian supermodel Dovile Virsilaite. The sum of the digits—3+3+8+5—equals 19. The smallest number of neutrons for which there is no stable isotope is 19. The composer Béla Bartók finished his Opus 19 in 1919 when he was 38 (twice 19). The product of the digits—3x3x8x5—equals 360. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Petition for Amerasian, Widow(er), or Special Immigrant is I-360. The area code for most of western Washington State, including the city of Bremerton, is 360. Ben Gibbard, the lead singer for Death Cab for Cutie, was born in, believe it or not, Bremerton! There are actually so many mystical numerological correspondences that you’re like, this is so fucking weird.)

The men who do attend public recitations of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack tend to be academic experts, connoisseurs by avocation, or individuals who aspire to be bards. Audiences, though, are composed predominantly of working-class, middle-aged women with little education, who are seeking to establish romantic relationships with the bards. These women chatter, eat, drink, smoke, spit betel juice and pumpkin seeds on the earthen floor, call raucously across the auditorium to each other, and, in imperious voices, order vendors to bring them fried chicken, beer, tampons, whatever they need at the moment. They frequently demonstrate the warmth of their feelings by giving small gifts to bards during the course of a performance. A “donor” will toss them gifts of cigarettes, candy, cologne, or a small amount of money. A gift is often wrapped in a note, requesting a favor of the bard in return. A bard may be asked, for instance, to perform a private recitation. In some cases, bards receive quite large sums of money or valuable gifts ranging from expensive toilet articles and wristwatches to flat-screen TVs, Mercedes-Benz cars, and luxury apartments — anything to pamper them. Often there is a sexual attachment between the donor and the bard. Liaisons between lusty middle-aged women and handsome young bards are especially common. Some of these women are widows, some are still married. They love to make a show of themselves at the public recitations and squander their husbands’ money on bards with whom they’ve become infatuated.

Most of the blind bards were, at one time, sighted audience members whose wives left them for the bards they met at public recitations. These distraught men, suddenly bereft of their spouses, then blinded themselves and, in turn, became itinerant bards, traveling from town to town, chanting what they remember hearing or think they heard at recitations, although they, too, mumble in such an incomprehensible manner (the traditional style) that it’s truly remarkable they convey anything at all to their audiences, one member of which will invariably include the sweaty, lusty middle-aged woman with the spectacular big-ass ass who will become the bard’s new wife, leaving yet another jilted man to gouge out his eyes. This is the endless reproductive cycle of the bard.

An Inside The Sugar Frosted Nutsack reunion season finale features an exclusive interview with a real husband and real wife who’ve just emerged from a public recitation of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (an interview which is, of course, immediately incorporated into The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, and which experts today consider an integral component of the epic itself, and which audiences naturally expect the bards to ritually chant in its entirety). The real husband and real wife spontaneously perform a power ballad (with its shades of George Jones and Tammy Wynette) and a Wagnerian duet. This combination of declaimed passages (in which the blind, vagrant, drug-addled bards attempt to realistically imitate the voices of characters) and sung passages of greater (or lesser) lyrical beauty provide an enjoyable variety, keeping the recitation — even of long, mind-numbing exegetical monologues — from becoming tedious. Keep in mind that almost immediately after this interview is conducted, the woman leaves her husband for a blind, vagrant, drug-addled bard she met at the very performance she just attended, and that her husband promptly enucleates both of his eyeballs and becomes — what else? — a blind, vagrant, drug-addled bard.

T.S.F.N. If we were to ask you to pick the one thing you liked most about the performance of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack you just listened to, what would it be?

REAL HUSBAND The sheer mind-numbing repetitiveness of it. And the almost unendurable length. At first I wanted to just walk out — the bards seemed drunk or fucked-up on something, and I figured, OK, here we go, this is gonna be like Britney Spears at the MTV VMAs or Japan’s Minister of Finance Shoichi Nakagawa at the 2009 G7 meeting in Rome. But then once it got started, I really got into the way the bards kept up that mesmerizing beat by banging their rings on those metal jerrycans of orange soda. And I really like the way that they wander around from place to place…their vagrancy. And I love how they’re actually blind — I mean in real life. Although, it seemed like a couple of them could see but were…what’s the word?…Shit, I’m completely blanking out here.…Sweetie, what’s that thing where you see words backward or reverse some of the letters?

REAL WIFE Dyslexic.

REAL HUSBAND Dyslexic, right. And there was something about their completely mumbled, uninflected delivery that made it…even more sort of mind-numbing. It felt like it was just going around and around in circles and it felt like, at some point, I don’t know how to put it…maybe you should talk to my wife, because she’s so much better at articulating things like this — she was an arts major (and she has a spectacular big-ass ass, thanks to Fast-Cooking Ali).

T.S.F.N. OK, how would you describe the effect?

REAL WIFE Well, I don’t know how much better I am at articulating any of this, but, to me, that sense of it just going around in circles, in these sort of endlessly spiraling recapitulations — it felt like, at some point, it was just going to drive me crazy. And then I thought, like, duh, this is what it feels like to have XOXO inscribing your brain with a sharp periodontal instrument. This is what it feels like to be Ike. That was one of those epiphany moments, for me at least.

T.S.F.N. An epiphany about what exactly?

REAL WIFE About how — and I think you could say that this is what The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is fundamentally about, I mean, this is my interpretation anyway — about how we each have this ridiculously finite number of things inscribed in our minds, and that what we do, moment by moment, is continuously postulate an extrinsic “world” for ourselves by reshuffling and recapitulating these ridiculously finite number of things. But it’s a completely closed system — there’s no “world” actually extrinsic to it. What makes Ike so magnificent is that he’s pared down his deck to a single card, The Hero—a man standing on his stoop, on the prow of his hermitage, striking that “contrapposto pose, in his white wifebeater, his torso totally ripped, his lustrous chestnut armpit hair wafting in the breeze, his head turned and inclined up toward the top floors of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, from which the gaze of masturbating Goddesses casts him in a sugar frosted nimbus.”

T.S.F.N. Your husband wasn’t kidding. That’s some straight-​up hyperarticulate, high-pitched shit!

REAL HUSBAND (gushing) I told you! She’s pissah smaht! She’s phenomenological!!

T.S.F.N. What else did you especially like?

REAL WIFE There were these two tiny, busty bards with the T-shirts that said “I Don’t Do White Guys.” I loved them. They reminded me of Snooki.…Like weird little twin Snookies.

T.S.F.N. What else?

REAL WIFE The “10 Things That I Know for Sure About Women” list made me cry. It’s so beautiful.

T.S.F.N. It doesn’t bother you that it was plagiarized from Oprah’s magazine?

REAL WIFE No, are you kidding?! I think that for a man to steal something from Oprah’s magazine and say he wrote it — to do that for a woman you’re falling in love with — that is just the most romantic thing in the world. Seriously. I think Ike is super-sexy. Every time the bards describe his body and talk about his guinea-T and how he’s completely shredded and his vascularity and how you can see his butt-crack when he genuflects toward the Burj Khalifa, that kind of thing, it’s a huge turn-on for me. It makes me sweaty. I have to start fanning myself with my program.

T.S.F.N. That’s funny. Wouldn’t you rather see a reenactment of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack than just hear people reciting the story? Wouldn’t that be even more powerful?

REAL WIFE I’d rather listen to something than see it. It says in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, in Season Eight: “The Gods’ designs are revealed not in incandescent flashes of lucidity, but in the din of the incomprehensible, in a cacophony of high-pitched voices and discordant jingles.” And I believe that. And I’d certainly rather hear a story told by spaced-out blind bards than see it acted out by celebrities.

T.S.F.N. You mean like in a movie?

REAL WIFE Right.

T.S.F.N. You don’t like movies?

REAL WIFE I don’t particularly want to see two hours of George Clooney playing a human resource specialist or Gwyneth Paltrow pretending to die of the plague or Ben Stiller portraying some disaffected slacker, no. When we come to hear a recitation of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, we’re not coming to hear fucking rich celebrities pretending to be bards. These are real bards. They are really blind. They are really itinerant. They are really high on ecstasy or psilocybin mushrooms or hallucinogenic borscht. They are not playing fucked-up bards. They are fucked-up.

REAL HUSBAND Also, we love the whole ambience here, the whole scene — the way people bring their families, and their straw mats and folding chairs, and sit out here for hours, and bring food. And the way they chant along. It’s a little like mass karaoke.

T.S.F.N. What did you guys bring?

REAL HUSBAND We packed a lunch. We brought, let’s see…we brought shawarma, tongue sandwiches, Fig Newtons, orange soda, of course.

T.S.F.N. How did you and your wife meet?

REAL HUSBAND Well, the funny thing is — we’re both from Jersey City, but we met in Manhattan. I was working as a waiter at this place on Seventh Avenue and Nineteenth Street. And my wife was going to Parsons at the time. We met at the Limelight, actually.

T.S.F.N. So you were waiting tables and…anything else? Trying to become an actor? Musician? Putting yourself through school?

REAL HUSBAND I’d actually enrolled in a songwriting workshop at The New School. But I got terminal, fucking insurmountable writer’s block immediately. Like the first day of the class. And it was crushing because I’d really made up my mind that I wanted to be a songwriter, even though I’d never written a song before. I’d never really written anything except lists, actually. I was a great list maker. So, anyway, I decided — and this is going to sound crazy, but it’s the Gods’ truth — I decided that I’d try to become gay, because so many of my favorite songwriters were gay, like Cole Porter and Elton John and the Pet Shop Boys, and I was thinking that might sort of jump-start me creatively. So I went to one of those Christian therapists who “cure” gay people, and I asked him if he’d take whatever he says to them, y’know, whatever secret incantation he uses, and say it to me backward, so I’d actually become converted to being gay.

T.S.F.N. That’s so funny.

REAL HUSBAND Yeah. Well, it didn’t work anyway. And then the two of us met at the Limelight and started dating, so the whole gay conversion thing became moot. And it’s probably a good thing I never became a lyricist or a jingle-writer, because she has to help me finish my sentences all the time!

T.S.F.N. How about you? What were you doing at Parsons?

REAL WIFE It’s an interesting question because, during the recitation, my husband and I were talking about how people sort of “abuse” XOXO, and it made me think about something that had happened to me at Parsons.

T.S.F.N. Tell us about that.

REAL WIFE Well, I’d been there a couple of years, studying painting, and I’d been doing all this, y’know, completely derivative work—Kenneth Noland rip-offs, imitation Agnes Martins, second-rate Peter Halleys, all this shit. And then I came up with this idea, which was to use photographs of very grim, morbid sorts of things and make these kind of unfocused, blurry paintings out of them. Really cool idea, and I’d never seen anything like it. So, I’m thinking, y’know, finally, here I go. So I did this huge, unfocused, blurry painting of Joseph Goebbels’s family, based on a famous photograph of Joseph and Magda Goebbels’s dead children’s pajama-clad bodies (Helga Susanne, Hildegard, Helmut Christian, Hedwig, Holdine, and Heidrun) after they’d been put to sleep with morphine and poisoned with cyanide by their parents. And I showed the painting to one of my instructors at Parsons, and he was like, that’s amazing, that’s brilliant, that’s a completely new, unprecedented idea. And I was just totally euphoric. And then, a couple of days later, the same instructor comes up to me and says, you better go check out the new Gerhard Richter exhibit at MoMA. And I was like, why? And he said, just go. So I went to MoMA and there’s this fifteen-painting cycle of unfocused, blurry paintings that Richter had done based on photographs of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof and their deaths.…It occurred to me at the time that maybe XOXO had taken the idea from my head and given it to Gerhard Richter. It crossed my mind. I’ll be honest. And I pretty much gave up on painting after that.

T.S.F.N. What did you mean about people abusing XOXO?

REAL WIFE I think it’s too easy for people to always blame things on XOXO. Everyone’s always, like, oh, sorry for what I said last night, XOXO must have kidnapped my soul and plied it with drugged sherbet, y’know? I think sometimes people just use that as a way of avoiding responsibility for what they say — it’s like the equivalent of — oh, I was drunk or I was so tired…

T.S.F.N. Was it a huge disappointment to you that you didn’t eventually become an artist?

REAL WIFE No. Look at the so-called “art world.” Fucking David Geffen sells a de Kooning to this hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen for 137.5 million dollars. Such “art lovers”! Right? It says in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack that a time will come when all fettered monsters will break loose and the plutocrats will be dragged out of office buildings and guillotined on the street. That includes the “art lovers.”

T.S.F.N. Some people think that that whole business about Ike getting hit by a Mister Softee truck on Spring Break when he was eighteen but initially telling people he was hit by a Hasidic ambulance to foment some apocalyptic Helter Skelter — type global war is really confusing. Do you agree with that?

REAL WIFE When I went to my first recitation and I heard the bards chant that part, I thought to myself, I don’t see how a dispute between club kids and Hasids could set off any kind of apocalyptic global war.

REAL HUSBAND What about World War One? Who was that guy…the Bosnian Serb…the nationalist? Uh…oh fuck!..What was his name, sweetie?

REAL WIFE Gavrilo Princip?

REAL HUSBAND Yeah, Gavrilo Princip. Gavrilo Princip assassinates the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, right? And it sets off the whole fuckin’ First World War. I mean, that’s a pretty apocalyptic war. If the conditions are right, you never know what can set it off. Club kids and Hasids could conceivably do it.

REAL WIFE I’m not sure that’s the best analogy.

REAL HUSBAND You don’t think World War One was an apocalyptic global war?

REAL WIFE That’s not what I mean.

REAL HUSBAND You don’t think World War One was an apocalyptic fucking global war?

REAL WIFE I never said it wasn’t.

REAL HUSBAND Trench warfare. Poison gas. Fifteen million deaths.

REAL WIFE The Archduke Franz Ferdinand was heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. There was an extremely complicated situation…

REAL HUSBAND I’m just sayin’.

REAL WIFE …with all sorts of interlocking alliances.

REAL HUSBAND I’m just sayin’. If the conditions are right, you never know what can set it off. Club kids and Hasids could conceivably do it.

T.S.F.N. You seem to really identify with Ike.

REAL HUSBAND People tell me I sound like him — y’know, the raspy, whispery voice and everything. And I have the same kinds of fantasies he does about big, sweaty, uneducated, working-class women, and about being ogled by masturbating Goddesses…

T.S.F.N. Do you think your wife is a Mossad agent?

REAL HUSBAND (looking askance at his wife with mock suspicion) Hmmm…

T.S.F.N. Possible?

REAL HUSBAND (laughing) Seriously, I tend to interpret that whole “everyone’s wife is a Mossad agent” thing in a more sort of metaphorical way — that people you’re intimate with might be, like, “double agents,” y’know? It’s a weird kind of paranoia you get about people you love — that they might turn out to be completely different from who you think they are, that it’s all been some sort of diabolically patient plot against you. I think that’s a pretty normal fear you have in any serious relationship. And that’s why it’s such a popular part of the epic, because so many people can relate to that fear. But personally I don’t really worry about it too much.

T.S.F.N. Why’s that?

REAL HUSBAND Have you ever heard of Cupid’s Stigmata?

T.S.F.N. No, what is that?

REAL HUSBAND It’s a term they use in online dating. It’s when two people share some uncommon anatomical feature with each other, which usually means that they’re sort of predestined to be together. And my wife and I both have double ureters draining one of our kidneys (which is an anomaly occurring in, like, 1 in 150 people), and we both have port-wine stains in the shape of Nike swooshes on the smalls of our backs (which is, like, 1 in 10 million people), so…

T.S.F.N. Is that true? That’s amazing!

REAL HUSBAND (totally cracking up) No, I’m kidding. I’m busting your chops, man. But seriously — we’re really close. Really really close. And I think that what they say about Ike and Ruthie is sort of true about us too — that we’re utterly inscrutable figures who, paradoxically, understand each other perfectly well. And we’re both lifelong connoisseurs of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack.

T.S.F.N. You’ve been going to recitations your whole life?

REAL HUSBAND Absolutely. And I was in one when I was a kid! In, like, fourth grade. It was a school recitation. I played a fuckin’ bard! I probably still know the lines…

T.S.F.N. Do it. Do a little for us.

REAL HUSBAND I don’t have a jerrycan of Sunkist to tap my ring on, but…

T.S.F.N. C’mon, do some.

REAL HUSBAND OK.…This is, like, totally from memory…and it isn’t verbatim, it’s sort of paraphrasing…

T.S.F.N. Go for it.

REAL HUSBAND OK…Ike is strolling down to the Miss America Diner. Instead of a monocle and a walking stick, this flâneur sports a tight guinea-T and a baseball bat. Uh…he’s loaded with gem-like apercus and aphorisms.…He enters the diner and…no, wait a minute…

REAL WIFE Doomed, elusive Ike, Warlord of His Stoop…

REAL HUSBAND Doomed, elusive Ike, Warlord of His Stoop…never ostentatious, self-righteous, or flamboyantly narcissistic, enters the diner…as if in a trance…a trance abetted by the obbligato of miscellaneous conversations, which is akin to the drone of the bards. “It’s his favorite restaurant!” a friend of the hero tells The Sugar Frosted Nutsack in an exclusive interview. No, wait — that’s not right…” There are two opposed facets to Ike’s character, a friend of the hero tells The Sugar Frosted Nutsack in an exclusive interview. “He abhors celebrity and yet covets immortality.” Ike himself is said to be troubled by the ambivalence in his character. “I dwell in anonymity. How is it, then, that I am enchanted by eternal renown?” One of the things about Ike that makes him so indisputably a hero is that he doesn’t leave his own contradictions to the effete disputations of armchair scholars. He grapples with them himself, in his own lifetime.…Uh—

REAL WIFE Three crazy things to report…

REAL HUSBAND Three crazy things to report: The Sugar Frosted Nutsack has received a letter demanding that Ike be replaced by actor Chace Crawford…six bards were hacked to death by jilted, machete-wielding husbands whose wives had been seduced at a public recitation…we are now learning that the bards have been decapitated, and that the severed heads of the bards continue to cacophonously chant The Sugar Frosted Nutsack…hold on…we have just received confirmation that only one head is still chanting — let me repeat that: only one head is still chanting…we are now learning that drunken Ukrainian Cossacks, Mexican banditos wearing sombreros and crisscrossed cartridge bandoliers, khat-chewing Somali pirates, Indian Maoists (i.e., Naxalites), and Punjabi Taliban are playing Buzkashi with the headless carcasses of the slain bards. OK, we have just received word that all hell has broken loose. Children all over the world are now strangling their fathers with the intestines of their mothers. A single Chinook helicopter has been sent in to evacuate the loyalists, but its blades have been immobilized with what experts are calling “military-grade ass-cheese.” Ladies and gentlemen — we have just received an important clarification: all of this is apparently just part of a Cirque du Soleil show. Let me repeat that, for the benefit of those of you who are just tuning in: all of this is apparently just part of a Cirque du Soleil show. No one could really disregard it or completely purge it from their minds—

REAL WIFE Even though this all turned out to be just part of a Cirque du Soleil show, this notion of severed bard-heads was like a remark stricken from the record in a courtroom — no one could really disregard it or completely purge it from their minds…

REAL HUSBAND Right, right.…Even though this all turned out to be just part of a Cirque du Soleil show, this notion of severed bard-heads was like a remark stricken from the record in a courtroom — no one could really disregard it or completely purge it from their minds. In fact, in the Twelfth Season, some experts begin referring to the vagrant, drug-addled blind bards simply as “Severed Bard-Heads.” And a strange idea began to take root in the public imagination — that these severed bard-heads are gathered by itinerant children toting surplus NBA ball bags and sold to “processors” for only several rupees a head. Then the severed bard-heads are crushed in a kind of wine press, resulting in a “juicy pulp,” to which is added the spit of the horniest, hairiest, chubbiest, and most uneducated subproletarian women in that particular town or village (aka “La Felina’s Angels”). Enzymes in their saliva catalyze various chemical processes that culminate in what we today call “hallucinogenic Gravy.”

Some experts devote entire careers to the study of a single scene. For example, the unusually lachrymose (albeit highly ritualized) scene between Ike and his father at a restaurant, when Ike’s father says to him something to the effect of “I hate to speak ill of the dead, but your mother was a fat, sweaty, uneducated, subproletarian woman who didn’t have clue one.” And Ike indicates that he is weeping by slowly touching his sleeve to his forehead. And the father, noting this, says, “You know, I just realized something.…My father said almost the exact same thing to me at a restaurant when I was your age.” And then the father slowly touches his sleeve to his forehead. Or Ike’s lengthy and disjointed conversation with La Felina at Port Newark about whether Rachel Lee, the Korean-American mastermind of the “Bling Ring” (the gang of well-off Valley kids who burglarized the homes of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Orlando Bloom, and Audrina Patridge, a regular on the reality show The Hills who famously complained after the burglary that “They took…jeans made to fit my body to my perfect shape”), constitutes a new kind of anarchist insurrectionary, a “Neo-​Bandito” representing perhaps the new “lumpen celebutante,” or whether she’s just someone slavishly in thrall to the celebrities she admired, etc. (This colloquy all by itself is considered by some to be a stand-alone mini-epic.) And there are some experts who devote entire careers to the study of a brief vignette or a single passage: the God Rikidozen absently tapping a Sharpie on the lip of a coffee mug, and the unvarying cadence of that tap-tap-tap becoming the basis for the standard 124 beats-per-minute in house music; or the Dwarf Goddess La Muñeca turning her mortal girlfriend, Chief Warrant Officer Francesca DiPasquale, into a macadamia nut, a jai alai ball, and then 100,000 shares of Schering-Plough stock; or when Bosco Hifikepunye makes Mi-Hyun fifty feet tall and turns Lenin’s corpse and Ted Williams’s cryonically preserved head into anal sex toys for her; or when Ike says to the God of Money, Doc Hickory, “Can I ask you a stupid question? You don’t find me dour, do you?” and Doc Hickory’s like, “Dour?” and Ike goes, “Yeah, y’know, humorless,” and Doc Hickory’s like, “I know what dour means. I’m just wondering why you’re asking me,” and Ike goes, “Because I heard that Mogul Magoo told Bosco Hifikepunye that he thinks I’m all, like, dour and shit”; or when Shanice gets Lady Rukia to get XOXO to sabotage Ike’s daughter when she’s taking her tenth-grade math final and answering the question “If each of ‘Octomom’ Nadya Suleman’s octuplets also have eight children and then each of their children have eight children and each of their children have eight children, etc., how many offspring would there be in eight generations?”; or Candace Hilligoss getting out of the bathtub in Carnival of Souls (to creepy organ music); or Ike inviting a gob of phlegm to a concert. And then there are those experts who devote entire careers to the study and minute exegesis of a single line. And among these particular experts who were entranced with the phrase “severed bard-heads,” there were several who became fixated upon the significance of the line “We have just received confirmation that only one head is still chanting — let me repeat that: only one head is still chanting.” Contrary to their colleagues, who’d confected a theory of myriad free-floating severed bard-heads — that is, swarms of airborne anthropomorphic “scrubbing bubbles” or “nano-drones” whose punishingly repetitive high-pitched chants comprise what we think of today as The Sugar Frosted Nutsack—these experts contend that there is, in fact, only one severed bard-head. These experts — who collectively have become known as the “Jersey City School” because most of them actually reside in Jersey City and are, in fact, all people who babysat or taught or coached Ike when he was a child (including his driver’s ed instructor and the chubby babysitter with the big-ass titties who “mildly molested” Ike while they watched F-Troop together) — believe that “the one severed bard-head” is inhabited by all the Gods, which accounts for the polyvocal buzzing or droning quality of the head. They have determined, allegedly through the use of spy satellites, electronic eavesdropping, and information provided clandestinely by the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, that “the one severed bard-head” containing the Gods is kept in a minibar on the top floor of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. All of which leads inevitably to the question: Is “the one severed bard-head” Ike himself?

The identification of “the one severed bard-head” with Ike himself is persistent and completely understandable. Of course, one can hear in the cacophonous buzz that emanates from Ike’s head an echo — an analogue — of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s enigmatic dictum “the myths think themselves in me.” Also, the bards’ recitations are garbled, fragmentary, repetitive, and almost inaudible. Ike’s continuous self-​narration is garbled, fragmentary, repetitive, and almost inaudible. They are analogous. But are they one and the same? Isn’t Ike’s self-narration (and, of course, this very speculation, these very sentences) instantly and retroactively incorporated into the epic The Sugar Frosted Nutsack and dutifully transmitted from generation to generation of chanting, drug-addled, blind “severed bard-heads” who maintain their trance-inducing beat by banging their chunky chachkas against metal jerrycans of orange soda? An infinitely recursive epic that subtends and engulfs everything about it (i.e., everything extrinsic to it), and that has, for tens of thousands of years, at any given moment, been subject to the impish and sometimes spiteful corruptions and interpolations (or the out-and-out sabotage) of XOXO, presents a phenomenon that’s difficult to get your mind around. The Ballad of the Severed Bard-Head

REAL HUSBAND

He abhors celebrity

And yet covets immortality.

What is the meaning of the paradox?

What are its latent properties?

REAL WIFE

These portions can seem hopelessly corrupt.

XOXO is winning the battle to ruin the book,

But he hasn’t won the war.

REAL HUSBAND & REAL WIFE

I’m a severed bard-head!

I can’t stop reciting what I started!

This shit ain’t for the fainthearted!

We ain’t toasted, we Pop-Tarted!

So dump me in the toilet bowl and flush me!

Throw me in a garbage truck and crush me!

A trash compactor or a wine press works OK,

It’s like all that stupid shit in the Cirque du Soleil!

Suicide-by-cop sounds fun,

But you can never find a motherfuckin’ cop

When you need one!

REAL HUSBAND

Some scholars have recently compared

The Sugar Frosted Nutsack to Abacus 2007-AC1,

The mortgage investment vehicle which

Goldman Sachs VP Fabrice Tourre created.

REAL WIFE

And which he described,

In an e-mail to his girlfriend,

As a “Frankenstein” creation,

“A product of pure intellectual masturbation,

The type of thing which you invent telling yourself: ‘Well, what if we created a “thing,”

Which has no purpose,

Which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?’”

REAL HUSBAND & REAL WIFE

I’m a severed bard-head!

I can’t stop reciting what I started!

This shit ain’t for the fainthearted!

We ain’t toasted, we Pop-Tarted!

So dump me in the toilet bowl and flush me!

Throw me in a garbage truck and crush me!

A trash compactor or a wine press works OK,

It’s like all that stupid shit in the Cirque du Soleil!

Suicide-by-cop sounds fun,

But you can never find a motherfuckin’ cop

When you need one!

REAL HUSBAND

“Going into the forest to gather wild garlic”

Is a euphemism for those times

When Ike stares off into space,

Listening to the voice of a particular

God who’s speaking to him.

REAL WIFE

Or when he thinks

The writhing Goddesses are

Ogling him and masturbating,

Or when he thinks he hears

The distant whine of a

Drone aircraft circling overhead.

REAL HUSBAND & REAL WIFE

I’m a severed bard-head!

I can’t stop reciting what I started!

This shit ain’t for the fainthearted!

We ain’t toasted, we Pop-Tarted!

So dump me in the toilet bowl and flush me!

Throw me in a garbage truck and crush me!

A trash compactor or a wine press works OK,

It’s like all that stupid shit in the Cirque du Soleil!

Suicide-by-cop sounds fun,

But you can never find a motherfuckin’ cop

When you need one!

REAL HUSBAND

Ike had a dream about La Felina.

There was something dangling from her snatch.

At first Ike thought it was a tampon string,

But as he came closer

He could see that it was a fortune.

REAL WIFE

He pulled it out and read it.

It said, “To propitiate XOXO,

So he allows your story to be told

In a quasi-coherent way,

You must kill your father, etc.

REAL HUSBAND & REAL WIFE

I’m a severed bard-head!

I can’t stop reciting what I started!

This shit ain’t for the fainthearted!

We ain’t toasted, we Pop-Tarted!

So dump me in the toilet bowl and flush me!

Throw me in a garbage truck and crush me!

A trash compactor or a wine press works OK,

It’s like all that stupid shit in the Cirque du Soleil!

Suicide-by-cop sounds fun,

But you can never find a motherfuckin’ cop

When you need one!

The REAL HUSBAND and REAL WIFE stop tapping their wedding rings on their cans of Sunkist orange soda, and the tempo slows.

The sky darkens.

REAL WIFE I just want to tell you something. We both knew exactly what we were getting into when we signed on to this whole Sugar Frosted Nutsack thing…

REAL HUSBAND I realize that.

REAL WIFE I’m fated to leave you for a blind, drug-​addled bard, and then you have to enucleate your own eyeballs. It’s all foretold in the epic. You have to really do it — I mean, the eye thing.

REAL HUSBAND I know.

REAL WIFE No regrets?

REAL HUSBAND In the Thirteenth Season, when Ike tells The Waitress at the Miss America diner about his intention (and destiny) to commit suicide-by-cop and thus enable his family to collect on his life insurance policy, The Waitress says that “fate is the ultimate preexisting condition.” And I believe that.

(The following is sung to the melody of “O Sink Hernieder, Nacht Der Liebe” from Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.)

REAL WIFE

At the risk of hoisting myself

On my own petard,

I’m leaving you

For a blind, drug-addled bard.

REAL HUSBAND

What about Cupid’s Stigmata?

REAL WIFE

My heart’s started an Intifada!

As she departs, he calls out to her—

REAL HUSBAND

Instead of humiliating myself

By begging you to come back,

I’ll devote the rest of my life

To chanting The Sugar Frosted Nutsack!

He takes a melon baller from the picnic basket…

REAL HUSBAND

’Scuse me while I kiss the sky!

…and blinds himself.

We hear the opening bars of the Mister Softee jingle softly repeating over and over again, as if from a vast distance…over and over and over again…for hours, for days…​months…years…as if for an eternity…

Until—

REAL HUSBAND We’ve got a caller.

Apparently the Mister Softee jingle is the ringtone for the Husband’s cellphone, which he retrieves from his jacket pocket.

REAL HUSBAND Hello, you’re on The Sugar Frosted Nutsack.

CALLER Hello?

REAL HUSBAND You’re on The Sugar Frosted Nutsack.

CALLER I have a question for Ike.

REAL HUSBAND Ike’s not here. He’s at the Miss America Diner. I can give you his cellphone number or the number for the diner.

CALLER Maybe you could help me.

REAL HUSBAND I’ll try.

CALLER OK. I have a couple of questions, but let me start with this one: why is Ike’s daughter’s name never revealed?

REAL HUSBAND Out of respect for her privacy.

CALLER OK. I know this question will probably make me seem hopelessly provincial, but…why is there so much sex in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack? You can’t listen to even thirty seconds of a public recitation without hearing these drug-addled, vagrant bards chanting about cocks and pussies and clits and tits and balls and asses and shiksa asses and spectacular big-ass asses and hot Jew jizz and fucking and masturbating.…​Why?

REAL HUSBAND Because it’s sex-drenched and death-drenched.

CALLER But why is it sex-drenched and death-drenched?

REAL HUSBAND Because Ike is obsessed with sex and death. The seventeenth-century samurai Yamamoto Tsunetomo, describing the proper attitude of a warrior, wrote, “Every day without fail one should consider himself as dead. There is a saying of the elders that goes, ‘Step from under the eaves and you’re a dead man. Leave the gate and the enemy is waiting.’ This is not a matter of being careful. It is to consider oneself as dead beforehand.” The Marquis de Sade wrote, “There is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image.” Combine the two and you have Ike Karton. (FYI, Vincent van Gogh’s last words before he shot himself in a wheat field in Auvers-sur-Oise were “Fuck Kirk Douglas.”)

CALLER There are just these punishingly repetitive references to anal sex toys and bedraggled, sweaty, chubby, mature, subproletarian women and hairy, Asian, midget, hypoglycemic, type-O-negative plumpers who squirt, etc.

REAL HUSBAND There is also — and I don’t know if you’re aware of this — a punishingly repetitive use of the phrase “punishingly repetitive.” In fact, the phrase “punishingly repetitive” is used 251 times (including this sentence) in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack.

CALLER Is there any mystical significance to the number 251?

REAL HUSBAND Not to my knowledge. But did you know that it’s impossible for a horse to vomit and that Turkish Taffy was Harry Houdini’s favorite candy?

CALLER It says, “Ike suffers from irregular clonic jerks of the head and neck ever since he was hit by a Mister Softee truck on Spring Break when he was eighteen years old.” What college was he attending at the time?

REAL HUSBAND Ike was going to F.I.T., but after one semester he dropped out and worked part-time in the meat department at a Gristedes on the Upper West Side.

CALLER You don’t happen to have the exact address, do you?

REAL HUSBAND Why?

CALLER Because I’m planning a weekend where I go and visit all the key sites in Ike’s life, like the barbershop where he went as a kid and experienced “the thwack of a straight-edge razor on a leather strop, combs refracted in blue liquid, Jerry Vale (‘Innamorata’), hot lather on the nape of your neck mysteriously eliciting the incipient desire to be whipped by chain-smoking middle-aged women (and/or sweaty Eastern-bloc athletes) in bras & panties,” and the park bench in Lincoln Park where he read “10 Things That I Know for Sure About Women” to Ruthie when they were dating, and the two-story brick “hermitage” where he and Ruthie and their daughter live, etc. So I’d definitely want to go to the Gristedes where he had his first butcher job.

REAL HUSBAND All right, let me put you on hold for a moment and I’ll check on that for you.

The REAL HUSBAND’s MOH (Music on Hold) is Richard Wagner’s “O Sink Hernieder, Nacht Der Liebe” from Tristan und Isolde. Several moments pass, and then—

REAL HUSBAND You still there?

CALLER Yes, I’m here.

REAL HUSBAND Sorry that took so long. I’m newly sightless. The address of the Gristedes is 251 West 86th Street at Broadway.

CALLER 251? You’re kidding.

REAL HUSBAND No, why?

CALLER That is so fucking weird.

REAL HUSBAND Why?

CALLER Because 251 is the number of times the phrase “punishingly repetitive” is used in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack. And it’s the address of the first place where Ike had a butcher job. You don’t think there’s any mystical significance in that?

REAL HUSBAND Honestly, I think it’s a complete coincidence.

CALLER You seriously think the fact that the phrase “punishingly repetitive” is used 251 times in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack and the fact that the address of the Gristedes where Ike Karton had his first butcher job is 251 West 86th Street is a complete coincidence?

REAL HUSBAND I really do.

CALLER You’re being serious?

REAL HUSBAND Yeah.

There’s a long pause…then—

CALLER It says in the Fourteenth Season, “Even within his small, haimish Jersey City neighborhood of attached two-story brick homes, Ike conducts himself with the guarded reserve and fateful solemnity of an exile. Doomed hero, dear to the Gods, unwavering, set apart by his fealty and his inexorable fate, but never evincing the hauteur of a freak, he calls his bowel movements his ‘little brother.’” I don’t completely understand what that means.

REAL HUSBAND You know how some women call their period their “friend”? It’s sort of like that. Ike is very courtly. He’d never say, “I have to go take a crap” or “a dump” or anything like that. He’d say, “My little brother is visiting.” Or “Excuse me, I think my little brother is here.” Or “Could you pull into that rest stop over there, I didn’t expect my little brother to get here so suddenly. He must have taken an earlier flight.” Or “He must have decided to take the Acela, instead of the regular Amtrak.”

CALLER Oh…I get it.

REAL HUSBAND And the closer Ike gets to the violent death which is his inexorable fate, the more intensely kindred he feels with things that are considered by most people to be base or odious, which is one of the things that makes him such a hero, I think. So there’s also a symbolic component to his calling a bowel movement his brother. It’s the same sort of thing as in the Fifteenth Season, in that scene where he and Vance are going to meet the God who’s supposedly selling hallucinogenic Gravy to Vance, and some guy on the street hawks up a big gob of phlegm and spits it on the sidewalk, and Ike stops, and he kneels down, and he says to the gob of phlegm, “Fräulein, my band, The Kartons, is giving a Final Concert later this week, and I’d be very much honored if you would attend.” This is Ike, with his sort of plainspoken eloquence, expressing the paradoxical nature of his character — destined for the glory of a martyr’s immortality but, at the same time, fervently wedded to those things most despised, most anathematized, to the lowest of the low.

CALLER You’re the one who’s actually reciting what I’m saying, right?

REAL HUSBAND Yes. You’re like a Japanese bunraku puppet and I’m like the chanter (the tayu) who performs all the characters’ voices.

CALLER So does it have to say “CALLER” like that? I don’t feel like being some sort of boldface signifier. Can’t I just be part of your recitation?

“Sure.”

“That’s better. Thank you. It was like being on speakerphone before. I want to ask you a question about these itinerant children who are toting the surplus NBA ball bags around and gathering severed bard-heads and selling them to “processors” for only several rupees a head. Doesn’t this drive home the whole issue of how detrimental cheap foreign labor is to American workers? If you have an unlimited supply of these vagrant kids outside the country who are willing to sell severed bard-heads for several rupees a head, it doesn’t matter to an American severed-bard-head scavenger how quickly our economy recovers or how fast it grows — the market value of a severed bard-head is going to be several rupees.”

“So what do you suggest?”

“A tariff. A tariff on foreign-scavenged severed bard-heads.”

“I don’t believe in tariffs or quotas or any form of protectionism. I think that protectionism leads to reduced consumer choice, higher prices, lower-quality goods, and, in the long run, economic stagnation and coercive monopolies.”

There’s a long pause…then—

“What does ‘military-grade ass-cheese’ mean?”

“I’ve always thought that military-grade ass-cheese is just basically the shit that gums up the works in your life. Do you know what I mean? This is just my interpretation, but I think it’s basically the shit that just fucks everything up.”

“OK. Is it true that Ike buys a grenade launcher from an undercover FBI agent at the Miss America Diner?”

“No, that’s not true. This whole business of Ike buying a grenade launcher from an undercover FBI agent at the Miss America Diner is what experts call a ‘noncanonical blooper.’”

“But is it in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack or not?”

“It is now. Thanks to you. Thanks to you bringing it up.”

“OK. I guess this is my last question: There’s a vignette involving a pet groomer named Rebecca Nesbit and a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon by the name of Dr. Giancarlo Capella. And I’m not sure why it’s even included in the epic — if, in fact, it is — because it doesn’t appear to involve Ike or any of the Gods. And I was just wondering if it’s also considered a noncanonical blooper. And I’m also curious as to whether you think that noncanonical bloopers are the work of XOXO.”

“First of all, yes, this is an out-and-out noncanonical blooper that was not part of the original epic, although, again — as of right now — it’s considered totally authentic. Rebecca Nesbit was a pet groomer (actually, I think she advertised herself a ‘pet stylist’) who, following her divorce in Jersey City, New Jersey, moved out to Southern California with her kids and had a laser vaginal rejuvenation performed by Dr. Giancarlo Capella in Beverly Hills. As a result of the procedure, Nesbit’s vaginal muscle strength was increased so excessively that it resulted in traumatic penile injuries to two of her boyfriends—Donald De Vries, who, during intercourse with Nesbit, suffered a tear of the tunica albuginea (an injury sometimes referred to as a penile ‘fracture’), and Sonny Ghazarian, who, under similar circumstances, suffered a crushed penile shaft with extraalbugineal and bilateral cavernosal hematomas. De Vries and Ghazarian filed a joint medical-malpractice lawsuit against Capella (who was uniformly portrayed in the press as a combination Richard Simmons / Josef Mengele, or luridly compared to the Mantle brothers, the twin gynecologists in David Cronenberg’s film Dead Ringers, or to Dr. Heiter, the demented surgeon in Tom Six’s The Human Centipede). In a dramatic courtroom demonstration before a rapt gallery, a pneumatic squeeze-bulb dynamometer was used to show that Nesbit now had a vaginal grip-strength of well over 4,500 pounds per square inch (PSI). (Keep in mind that a commercial trash compactor typically has a maximum operating pressure of only about 3,000 PSI.)”

“This is exactly why we need comprehensive tort reform in this country. There’s an epidemic of these frivolous lawsuits and it’s bankrupting our health care system. I have a very good friend who’s a pet stylist in Jersey City, and he’s been doing 2,500-PSI vaginal rejuvenations on some of his dogs, but he told me that because of all the publicity generated by the case in Beverly Hills, he’s had to stop. He can’t afford the insurance anymore or risk the litigation.”

“There are a number of experts who actually think that Nesbit and Capella were impersonated by Fast-Cooking Ali and La Felina.”

“Why?”

“You gotta look at the injured parties here, the plaintiffs, these guys Donnie De Vries and Sonny Ghazarian. They’re exactly the kind of rich, privileged, good-looking scumbags that Fast-Cooking Ali and La Felina loathe with a passion, tooling down the PCH in their little Porsche 911 Cabriolets, in their fuckin’ Moss Lipow sunglasses.”

There’s a long pause…

“You there?”

Another long, long pause…then—

“Are you still on?…I can barely hear you.…I’m going to put you back up in boldface.”

CALLER I was just saying that I was listening to Tony Bennett singing “The Shadow of Your Smile” on YouTube. And I read this comment that someone had posted about how “The Shadow of Your Smile” had been her late father’s favorite song. And how he always used to sing it walking down the street, and how, when this person was a little girl, she would be so embarrassed and beg him to stop singing. And she ends the post by saying, “Oh, what I would give to hear him sing one more time!” And that made me so sad that I just started crying. And it’s so weird because my own father died recently, and I don’t really think of him that much and when I do it’s not with much emotion. My first conscious memory of my dad — he’s wearing one of those, y’know, those belligerent T-shirts that say, like, “Stop Reading My Shirt, Asshole!” and these polyester Hawaiian swim trunks, and Velcro sandals he got at Dollar Tree, and socks, and he’s drinking fuckin’ Keystone Light from a go-cup, and I was like, “Ewwwww, that’s my dad?” So, y’know, I don’t really miss him in that painful way you miss someone when you’re really grieving. But that comment on YouTube made me feel so much intense grief on behalf of this person I don’t even know. It’s so weird…

REAL HUSBAND I don’t think that’s so weird at all. I completely get that. Everyone typically thinks that when you’re intimately close to someone, like your husband or your wife or your mom or your dad, that it opens you up so much to all these powerful feelings of connectedness and enables you to understand the other person with such incredible empathy. But I really think that when you become habituated to someone, it can actually do completely the opposite — totally anesthetize you, totally numb you out and blind you to the other person. But then you’ll be somewhere completely random or you’ll just be reading, and you’ll come upon something so abstract, like, I don’t know, an equation in a math book or some mask in a museum or a comment by a complete stranger on YouTube, and suddenly you’re just flooded with all this raw emotion. I really think that the idea of grieving for a father, I mean in theory—the abstract notion of children grieving for fathers — can actually cause us to experience so much more anguish than our own personal grief for our own fathers.…Do you know what I mean? Does that make any sense?

CALLER I love you. If your wife ever leaves you for a vagrant, drug-addled bard, I’ll be waiting.

REAL HUSBAND (cuing Foreigner’s “Waiting for a Girl Like You”) She’s already left me for a vagrant drug-addled bard.

There’s a long pause…like an eternity…and then…nothing.

It’s sometimes said that, here, for a moment, the world disappears, that there’s a fade to pure white…like a T-shirt bleached of sentiment…like an empty page…like the tabula rasa of an erased mind…and then—

a flourish of calligraphy:

Eleventh-Century Poem by Su Tung-p’o Entitled

“Re: Ike Karton”

Ike is known to sometimes walk backward

To leave misleading footprints.

Or to wade through puddles,

Leaving no tracks at all…

P.S. Ike also walks backward to hide his face from security cameras.

Backward, Ike enters the Miss America Diner. With the exception of a Chloë Sevigny doppelgänger who frets over cold pancakes in the corner, all the other patrons are the ostentatiously generic people whose photos are already in the picture frames you buy at the store. They are the world’s most famous nobodies: Joe Shmoe and John Q. Public sit at the counter drinking coffee and eating buttered rolls; Every Tom, Dick, and Harry are squeezed into a banquette across from Mr. and Mrs. Consumer, tucking into large breakfasts of eggs, sausage, and toast; Jane Doe and Your Average American Sports Fan clasp hands across unopened menus on a table. They all fall silent as Ike, dear to the Gods, Warlord of His Stoop, the world’s most anonymous somebody (“illustrious and unknown”), enters, backward. How Can T.S.F.N. Defeat XOXO?

The Fifteenth Season is rough going. Many people find sitting through a public recitation of the Fifteenth Season almost unbearably harrowing. It features some of XOXO’s most vicious and cunning assaults on The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, and includes attacks on the itinerant bards themselves, attacks that leave hundreds massacred, maimed, and mutilated. It is also the first time that XOXO resorts to such “asymmetric tactics” as deploying what’s referred to as “military-grade ass-cheese” and momentarily effacing the world and scrawling across its white emptiness in his elegantly insouciant calligraphy. (In a recent poll, 59 percent said XOXO was winning, only 21 percent thought T.S.F.N. was making progress.) Also, in a ruthless effort to humiliate Ike, at the behest of the Goddess Shanice who remains (and will forever remain) implacably hostile to Ike for omitting her from his list, “Ten Gods I’d Fuck (T.G.I.F.),” XOXO steals ideas from the minds of exceptionally brilliant scientists, cultural theorists, and scholars and transplants them into the minds of dim-witted celebrities, enabling them to write erudite and abstruse books, which are released by prestigious publishing houses to tumultuous critical acclaim. Within the same three-month period, reality-TV star Heidi Montag comes out with Capitalism and the Florentine Renaissance (Hill & Wang), Kate Gosselin quickly follows with Mirror Neurons: The Bio-Epistemology of Countertransference (W. W. Norton & Company), and Abercrombie & Fitch model and 90210 star Trevor Donovan weighs in with two prodigious tomes, The Jade(d) G(l)aze: Twelfth-Century Goryeo Celadon Pottery and Ceramics (Abrams) and Proust, Mallarmé, Racine: The Intersexuality of the Text / The Intertextuality of Sex (Yale University Press).

Ike—unfailingly self-abnegating, a hero cast into the maelstrom of life — of course, violently abhors the exaltation of rich, privileged celebrities, for whom he prefers the gulag and the guillotine. (This is the central reason he’s so beloved by La Felina and Fast-Cooking Ali.) Shanice’s vindictive utilization of XOXO against Ike is tacitly abetted by Mogul Magoo, because it avails the plutocratic God of Bubbles yet another way of vexing, by proxy, his eternal nemesis La Felina, who champions the lumpen, the subproletarian, the unsung, the village idiot with his half-witted smile and tear-filled eyes, the anomic, the disaffected and misshapen, the disinherited, the lame and crippled, the unheralded; who loves everything that’s defiled and damned; who loves everyone who’s pockmarked and putrid; who exalts the physically deformed and the mentally unbalanced and the sans-​culottes and the scum of the earth; and who wet her pants during the September Massacres of 1792.

XOXO attacks The Sugar Frosted Nutsack where it’s most vulnerable, when it’s most “keyed up,” most “hyperesthetic.” In the face of mounting criticism for his indiscriminant use of military-grade ass-cheese, XOXO simply shrugs. “I’m a legitimate businessman,” he’ll say, slyly assuming the role of one whose motives are eternally misinterpreted.

In the spring of 2013, a group of experts, including former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, Dog the Bounty Hunter, and controversial Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Dr. Giancarlo Capella, make a startling assertion. After conducting what they describe as “an insane amount of research,” based on new information made available through “totally unprecedented access to the Myanmar military junta’s secret archives,” they reach the conclusion that the actual title of the epic is not — nor has it ever been—The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, but is instead — and has always been—What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Although, that summer, Dr. Capella and Dog the Bounty Hunter (who are both in Lithuania to promote a chain of vaginal rejuvenation clinics) recant their assertion, claiming that XOXO had plied their souls with drugged sherbet, Greenspan continues to defend his findings. Greenspan admits that, yes, his soul was plied with drugged sherbet, kidnapped, and taken to XOXO’s garish hyperborean hermitage miles beneath the earth’s surface in Antarctica, where it was kept captive for five and a half God-years, and, yes, there was a suffocatingly sweet smell at the hermitage, as if Eggnog Febreze was being continuously pumped in through the ventilation system, and, yes, every so often XOXO would chastely kiss his soul on the mouth, and that, at some point, XOXO shampooed and cornrowed his soul’s hair, and that, using a sharp periodontal curette, he carved secret wisdom into Greenspan’s soul’s mind. This wisdom includes, according to Greenspan, the curious notion that The Sugar Frosted Nutsack isn’t — and never was — really about Ike Karton at all, but is — and always has been — about the war between XOXO and the epic itself, i.e., the war between the boldfaced and the italicized. Why Is It SO FUCKING EASY for XOXO to Hack into T.S.F.N.?

By clicking on a link and connecting to a “poisoned” website, a T.S.F.N. employee inadvertently permitted XOXO to gain access to T.S.F.N.

Having access to the original programmer’s instructions — or source code — provided XOXO with knowledge about subtle security vulnerabilities in T.S.F.N.

Understanding the algorithms on which T.S.F.N. is based enables XOXO to identify and locate weak points in the system.

Then Greenspan admitted — not realizing that his microphone was still on — that XOXO might be a cluster of multivariate, random variables, or possibly entropic vectors…

Thanks to the contradictory conclusions of Greenspan, Dog the Bounty Hunter, and Dr. Capella, there was a great deal of confusion about what the real name of the epic actually was. Some experts, deliberately or inadvertently, began corrupting or blithely mixing-and-matching the titles, e.g., The Sugar Frosted Bard-Head or The Severed Nutsack, etc. So this bunch of guys in Arizona decided to conduct an experiment in which they called the epic using various names in order to determine which of those names the epic would respond to most readily: “Heeere, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack [or The Ballad of the Severed Bard-Head or The Sugar Frosted Bard-Head or What to Expect When You’re Expecting or The Severed Nutsack or T.S.F.N.], [kissing or clicking sounds], come!”

It turns out that the epic most obediently and enthusiastically responded to the name T.S.F.N. And so “This Bunch O’ Guys” (as they came to be known) announced with great fanfare, at a hastily convened press conference held in a huge open-air outdoor mall called the Promenade at Casa Grande, that T.S.F.N. is the epic’s authentic name (a finding many experts around the world admittedly endorsed for no other reason than it’s the easiest title to type).

Keep in mind that even though T.S.F.N. is an epic whose origins date back thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years, an epic which has accrued and been transmitted via public recitations by drug-addled, vagrant bards (still referred to as “severed bard-heads” in some parts of the world, e.g., Phlegmish-speaking regions of the Upper Peninsula), it still responds more readily to the “come” command when it’s delivered in a friendly, welcoming, and soothing voice. (You could even wave a tasty treat around to lure your epic over if necessary.) Your “come” command should be something your epic looks forward to hearing, something with which it has a positive association. Remember, there are many things an epic could be doing at any given moment — it could be subjecting itself to recitation by severed bard-heads, of course, it could be yielding to scholarly exegesis, it could be undergoing adaptation by Peter Brook for performance at the Bouffes du Nord theater in Paris or by Robert Wilson or Gisli Örn Gardarsson for the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Your goal is to make coming to you a more attractive option to your epic than any other alternative action. You’re Gonna Love This

In the Sixteenth Season, Dog the Bounty Hunter captures a fugitive Lloyd Blankfein (ex — Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Goldman Sachs). As part of Blankfein’s community service, he’s ordered to play the role of the poet Sebastian Venable in a Cirque du Soleil production of the Tennessee Williams play Suddenly, Last Summer. (It would be more accurate to say that Blankfein is, winkingly, playing himself playing Sebastian Venable.) In the Williams play, Venable is cannibalized by the street urchins / male prostitutes he’s been paying for sex. (In the play, we only hear the story as narrated by Sebastian’s insane cousin, Catharine Holly. In the movie version, we actually see fragments in flashback, as Catharine (played by Elizabeth Taylor), under the influence of Sodium Pentothal, relates the grisly story to the lobotomy specialist, Dr. John Cukrowicz (played by Montgomery Clift), of how, while vacationing in the Galápagos Islands, her cousin was beaten by street urchins / male prostitutes, who then tore him apart and ate his flesh.) At the end of the Cirque du Soleil production, Blankfein is actually cannibalized by street urchins / male prostitutes. No one in the audience even lifts a finger to try and help Blankfein. Even though it’s horrifically grisly—Blankfein is hacked and torn apart by flesh-eating, subproletarian ragazzi di vita (hustlers) — his agonized cries for help go unheeded. Everyone in the audience thinks it’s just part of the Cirque du Soleil show. But it actually happens. In real life. These are not actors (i.e., rich fucking celebrities) pretending to be flesh-eating, subproletarian ragazzi di vita. These are real flesh-eating, subproletarian ragazzi di vita.

XOXO’s fingerprints are all over these mutations and deformities (i.e., the mind-fucking God’s “trashing” of the epic) — the power ballads; the operatic self-enucleation of the REAL HUSBAND’s eyeballs; the talk-radio drivel about cheap foreign labor and tort reform; the suborning of experts with the expedient of an abbreviated, user-friendly title; the suggestion that an epic that’s been declaimed by chanting, drug-addled bards for tens of thousands of years is actually some sort of compliant, domesticated pet that can be beckoned merely with the tantalizing display of a bacon-flavored treat; etc. The frat-boy prank of changing the word “Flemish” to “Phlegmish” is classic XOXO, as are the screeching gossip-magazine headlines that plunge Ike into the cauldron of his own contradictory abhorrence of celebrity and yearning for immortal renown, his introversion and diffidence and how shamelessly he revels in the masturbatory gaze of moaning Goddesses. And although the ritual dismemberment and cannibalization of Wall Street titan Lloyd Blankfein by feral male hustlers (or ragazzi di vita) “reeking of Thierry Mugler” bears the unmistakable imprint of La Felina, the abrupt and arbitrary switch from German to Italian as T.S.F.N.’s pet foreign language (e.g., ragazzi di vita) seems right out of XOXO’s bag of tricks.

An expert once observed that XOXO “totally gets off on injecting military-grade ass-cheese into the synapses of the epic.” But is the “XOXO effect” always harmful? It undoubtedly maximizes the mutability of the epic, which is a good thing, right? And although the Sixteenth Season is rough going and many people find sitting through a public recitation of it almost unbearably harrowing, it is also one of the most beloved Seasons. Grafting the culturally prestigious melody of “O Sink Hernieder, Nacht Der Liebe” from Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde into “The Ballad of the Severed Bard-Head,” especially to cue the REAL HUSBAND’s self-enucleation by melon baller, couldn’t really be called “bad,” right?

But last September, the highly regarded but reclusive Caltech biochemistry professor Pot Pi, or someone writing under his name, issued a controversial statement declaring that XOXO was, in fact, a form of delusional parasitosis, akin to Morgellons disease. (Not much is known publicly about Pot Pi. There are no official photos of him. And the authenticity of existing images is debated. Apart from the fact that he is missing one eye, accounts of his physical appearance are wildly contradictory. Some people who have met him describe him as having the voluptuous curves of a Beyoncé or a Serena Williams, while others describe him as more closely resembling Representative Henry Waxman. And while he has been characterized by some as shy and untalkative with foreigners, others contend that if you get a few Mike’s Hard Lemonades into him, he becomes a screeching cockjockey.) Pot Pi’s hypothesis that XOXO is a form of delusional parasitosis is one with which Ike Karton violently disagrees. Ike unequivocally rejects any suggestion that the Gods are symbolic or allegorical. And just as he would dismiss any pantheistic or structuralist or semiotic interpretation of the Gods, he categorically repudiates a psychopathological one. Ike communes with the Gods themselves, he is their beloved, he is their sexual fantasy, he is their chosen one, even though they occasionally array themselves against him when they’ve taken umbrage at something, e.g., Shanice’s pique at having been left off the “Ten Gods I’d Fuck (T.G.I.F.)” list. But the bottom line is: the Gods are real and they intervene in human affairs. Period. And this is why Ike sent one of his elegant little Joseph Cornell / Unabomber boxes to Pot Pi at Caltech — a box containing a butcher cleaver stuck to Pot Pi’s photograph and splashed with blood and cold vomit, and a note that read, “You must not forget that traitors (i.e., thorns in the eyes of the Gods) have ALWAYS been slaughtered by cleavers.” It’s Almost Impossible to Get One’s Mind Around XOXO

What shape does one’s mind need to assume in order to get around (i.e., “apprehend”—with both its meanings of “capture” and “understand”) XOXO?

It’s impossible to know where XOXO ends and you begin.

XOXO calls into question the provenance and chain of custody of every single thought in your head.

XOXO is the inside and the outside.

Sometimes it actually appears as if T.S.F.N. is holding its own against XOXO. Maybe, with an invulnerability conferred by its morbid ingestion of everything extrinsic to it, T.S.F.N. simply cannot be killed, like Jason Voorhees or Freddy Krueger or Michael Myers. So powerful is the human tropism toward boldface signifiers that whenever the severed bard-heads manage, even momentarily, to wrest control of the epic from XOXO and return to the basic story of Ike and Ruthie and Vance, the audience (which has glazed over, staring torpidly at their feet during the interminable and frequently incoherent exegetical Seasons) perks up, looking alive and avidly interested. But these moments are far and few between, and given the overwhelming perception that XOXO has carte blanche access to the bards’ brains and to your brain (via public recitation, book, Kindle, Nook, iPad, iTunes, etc.), it’s reasonable to ask: Why hasn’t XOXO just killed T.S.F.N. by now? And the answer is, according to the experts, because XOXO is content to simply toy with the epic, to just keep fucking with it forever.

XOXO, who sometimes likes to pose as “an innocent Canadian tourist,” once boasted — not realizing that his microphone was still on — that when he kidnaps someone’s soul and brings it to his hyperborean hermitage, he likes to fillip the soul’s mind with his index finger so that it oscillates back and forth trillions of times a second between, what he called, “its regular state and its antimatter state.” This hyperoscillation, XOXO explained, is that state of mind called “going into the forest to gather wild garlic.”

Of course, one could reasonably say (along with the CALLER) that there’s “too much” sex in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, that it’s punishingly repetitive. But whether that’s a function of Ike Karton’s fixations and fetishes and his compulsion to be punished or whether it’s the result of the impish perversity and malice of XOXO, we can’t possibly know. Nor can we know ultimately — because of XOXO—whether what you’re hearing or reading is what was originally intended. We can’t know — thanks to the legerdemain of the God XOXO—whether what you’re reading is what was written. Mogul Magoo V$ El Brazo

In Season Seventeen, a protracted battle begins between El Brazo and Mogul Magoo over who owns the rights to T.S.F.N. Mogul Magoo (who was originally the God of Bubbles) had asserted himself as God of the Nutsack. He’d dutifully submitted his boilerplate rationale: Anything Enveloping Something Else. Just as a bubble is a globule of water that contains air, the scrotum is a pouch of skin and muscle that contains the testicles. Ergo, it’s perfectly logical and reasonable to conclude it falls within his purview. Thus, he reasoned, he owns exclusive worldwide rights (including all derivative works) to T.S.F.N. This completely infuriated El Brazo, also known as Das Unheimlichste des Unheimlichen (“The Strangest of the Strange”), who, as the God of Urology and the God of Pornography, considered the nutsack his inviolable domain and thus claimed ownership of exclusive worldwide rights (including all derivative works) to T.S.F.N. The antipathy that developed between these two Gods (and, subsequently, between Magoo and the Goddess La Felina) would have significant consequences. El Brazo threatened Magoo and his cohorts with liquidation in a “Night of the Long Knives.” In response, Magoo beefed up his posse of “Pistoleras”—the divine, ax-wielding mercenary vixens who are total fitness freaks with rock-hard bodies, each of whom has a venomous black mamba snake growing out of the back of her head, which she pulls through the size-adjustment cutout on the back of her baseball cap. Neither of them could care less about the literal or the allegorical and mystical implications of the epic, or that many fashion critics are saying “Finally, a drug-induced epic that celebrates real women’s contours and silhouettes.” This is just a heavyweight dick-swinging contest between two Gods. Even though most legal experts conclude that Mogul Magoo can make the more compelling case for ownership of T.S.F.N. — its tail-chasing, vortical form is clearly consistent with his proprietary concept of “enveloping,” and there’s no question that severed bard-heads (aka “scrubbing bubbles”) fall within his realm — he is, characteristically, playing several moves ahead of everyone else. After tense marathon negotiations conducted at the 160-story, rocket-shaped Burj Khalifa in Dubai, this shrewd, uncannily prescient, and relentlessly enterprising businessman — who already owns the entire Rodgers and Hammerstein music catalogue, as well as the rights to such all-time favorites as “The Mister Softee Jingle,” “Under My Thumb,” “Tears of a Clown,” “White Wedding,” “What Have I Done to Deserve This,” “Party in the U.S.A.,” Billy Joel’s “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song),” “The Shadow of Your Smile,” Foreigner’s “Waiting for a Girl Like You,” Richard Wagner’s “O Sink Hernieder, Nacht Der Liebe,” and “The Ballad of the Severed Bard-Head”—shocks everyone by suddenly conceding ownership of T.S.F.N. to El Brazo in return for acquisition of the ringtone rights to the narcocorrido “That’s Me (Ike’s Song)” (“Do you hear that mosquito, / that toilet flushing upstairs, / that glockenspiel out in the briar patch? / That’s me, Unwanted One, Filthy One, Despised / Whore, Lonely Nut Job…”).

Whether Magoo’s wager that he can make more money from the ringtone rights to a single neo-pagan narcocorrido than from the public performance royalties that would accrue to him from thousands of years of spaced-out blind bards chanting a mind-numbingly repetitive fugue-like epic while swilling from jerrycans of orange soda remains to be seen. But financial history has shown that it doesn’t pay to bet against the chubby, pockmarked God of Bubbles. Ike’s New Horoscope (SPOILER ALERT)

The A&P will start carrying that Kozy Shack butterscotch pudding you like so much. Your anal fissure will start bleeding again (so don’t wear the tight white jeans, in case you start spotting). Your daughter will get pregnant. You’re going to have dinner with your father to try to persuade him to change his will, and you’re going to get into a really nasty fight with him, and you’re going to say, “You know how they say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree? Well, I’m like an apple that Vladimir Guerrero picked up and threw as far as he could. That’s how far from your fucking tree I fell.” What Is the Mystical Significance of Bold v. Italics?

This is the innermost secret of the epic.

Before the arrival of the Gods, everything was wildly italicized. This was the time of the so-called “Spring Break.” There were only phenomena and vaguely defined personages, and there was really no discernable distinction between phenomena and personages. There were no “Gods” per se, no dramatis personae, there was only an undifferentiated, unidimensional T.S.F.N. — only the infinitely recursive story and its infinitely droning loops, varying infinitesimally with each iteration. But once the Gods arrived and got off the bus, they insisted on being boldfaced signifiers.

This whole epic is about the war on the part of T.S.F.N. to vanquish the boldfaced signifiers and reestablish the “golden age” when things happened without any discernable context; when there were no recognizable patterns; when it was all incoherent; when isolated, disjointed events would take place only to be engulfed by an opaque black void, their relative meaning, their significance, annulled by the eons of entropic silence that estranged one from the next; when a terrarium containing three tiny teenage girls mouthing a lot of high-pitched gibberish (like Mothra’s fairies, except for their wasted pallors, acne, big tits, and T-shirts that read “I Don’t Do White Guys”) would inexplicably materialize, and then, just as inexplicably, disappear.

One possible conclusion that could be drawn from this, of course — and it happens to be precisely the conclusion reached by the apocryphal “Justices of the Eighteenth Season” (these Justices who seem almost bard-like in their black hoodies, their scrotums dusted with confectionary sugar) — is that XOXO, whose ongoing and indefatigable campaign to undermine context and disrupt cohesiveness (i.e., his vandalism and vajazzlement of the epic) is, by now, familiar to anyone who’s not totally brain-dead, is actually working in collusion with T.S.F.N. And, in fact, the majority of the Justices — the vote was 8–1—question whether the so-called “war between XOXO and T.S.F.N.” might not have always been a front or a pretext for this collusion between XOXO and T.S.F.N.

But this whole notion of “Justices in black hoodies, whose scrotums are dusted with confectionary sugar” seems suspect. Who are these “Justices”? Are we meant to infer that they are the habitués from the Miss America Diner—Joe Shmoe, John Q. Public, Every Tom, Dick, and Harry, Your Average American Sports Fan, etc. — those men who so shamelessly and ostentatiously flaunt their vaunted anonymity? And what of this so-called “8–1 decision” suggesting that XOXO and T.S.F.N. are now working in cahoots, that they are, one or the other or both of them, double agents of some kind? Isn’t this all beginning to sound suspiciously familiar? Isn’t it more than plausible that all of this is part of the incredibly sophisticated disinformation campaign being waged by XOXO? This vexing suspicion is the very basis for the lone, dissenting vote — that lone, dissenting vote belonging, of course, to Ike Karton.

The hero Ike—unwavering, irreproachably self-​abnegating, aloof, Warlord of His Stoop — offers neither oral nor written opinion. His dissent is mute. He strikes a pose of implacable mute dissent. He just stands there on his stoop, on the prow of his hermitage, and he strikes that contrapposto pose in his white wifebeater, his torso totally ripped, his lustrous chestnut armpit hair wafting in the breeze, his head turned and inclined up toward the top floors of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, from which the gaze of masturbating Goddesses casts him in a sugar frosted nimbus. (This is the “glaze of the gaze”—the onanistic scrutiny that sugar frosts Ike’s every move — which Abercrombie & Fitch model and 90210 star Trevor Donovan analyzes in his book The Jade(d) G(l)aze: Twelfth-Century Goryeo Celadon Pottery and Ceramics.)

Many of the epic’s most perceptive commentators have underestimated or missed altogether or dismissed as so much incoherent, dilettante bullshit (or as the product of the Brownian motion of Ike’s paranoid ideation) the complexities of the Boldface v. Italics case and this whole notion of “Justices in black hoodies, whose scrotums are dusted with confectionary sugar” (with its choral judgment of the dissenting voice — that judgment and that doomed voice staking out the dialectical polarities of martyrdom). One expert said, “With most of T.S.F.N., we can sing along by ‘following the bouncing ball,’ as Mitch Miller (whom many experts consider to be the ‘inventor’ of karaoke) used to instruct viewers of his 1960s television show, Sing Along with Mitch. But in this Season, we’re being asked to follow the red rubber tip of a paranoid flâneur’s walking stick as he jabs it at your head.”

After the massacre of drug-addled, blind bards by jilted husbands (a bloodbath purportedly masterminded by XOXO), a shadowy splinter group was formed, calling itself T.S.F.N. — General Command. This group, which was fanatically anti-XOXO, began recruiting members in the fetid, overcrowded refugee camps to which the surviving bards fled after the massacre. After establishing links with La Felina, they forged an unlikely alliance of convenience with the nihilistic, glue-sniffing street punks who’d hacked to death and cannibalized Lloyd Blankfein. On an oppressively hot summer night, marked by a bizarre outbreak of ball lightning which left all of Jersey City reeking of sulfur, an assassination commando unit comprised of blind T.S.F.N. — General Command bards and glue-sniffing street punks — who’d recently taken to calling themselves giovanetti martirizzati (“martyred youth”) from the zozzo mondo (“slob world”) — supposedly descended on the Miss America Diner and slaughtered the eight “Justices in black hoodies, whose scrotums are dusted with confectionary sugar,” in retaliation for their having promulgated the idea that T.S.F.N. is working in collusion with XOXO. What Makes Ike a Hero?

His implacable hatred of the rich is, among other things, what makes Ike a hero. An anarcho-primitivist, he strives to restore the world to an antediluvian arcadia (what he calls “Spring Break”) where no one man or woman seeks more wealth or notoriety than the next, and where the Gods are content to be indistinguishable from phenomena. And he dreams of a new Jacobinical Terror, of deploying guillotines outside Soho House (in West Hollywood and New York), of harvesting the severed heads of Hollywood A-listers and dropping one down the chimney of each and every child who’s been good that year (i.e., each child who’s militantly resisted celebrity worship in his or her school and who’s been modest, reticent, and almost naively kind to others, especially the misshapen and the misbegotten).

Basically, at every moment, Ike is trying to figure out how to constitute himself and how to situate himself in history. And this, among other things, is what makes Ike a hero.

Like all epic heroes, Ike hears the narration of the epic in his head and frequently mouths the words (sometimes audibly) to himself as he ritually reenacts the epic. This, of course, is what is meant by the term “epic karaoke” or “recursive karaoke” or “karaoke mise en abyme.” The ritual reenactment and murmured karaoke recitation of the epic of which he is the hero constitutes Ike’s life. This is the life to which Ike is doomed. This is why he is so frequently described as “death-drenched.”

This is Ike the Chimera—the hybrid beast with the severed head of a bard and the sugar frosted nutsack of a hero.

That statement, “This is Ike the Chimera—the hybrid beast with the severed head of a bard and the sugar frosted nutsack of a hero,” is considered to contain the innermost embedded secret within the many embedded innermost secrets of the epic, i.e., this is the very moment when the epic most suggests a Russian Matryoshka doll or a Chinese nested box.

How can Ike be ritually reenacting something that he appears to be doing extemporaneously and for the very first time? It is because this takes place in the “realm or the zone of the heroic,” on a “heroic plane”—it is fated, choreographed by the Gods.

Ike is the hero of the epic about the bard who simultaneously recites and reenacts the epic of which he is the extemporaneous, albeit inexorably doomed, hero. This is why scholars frequently refer to Ike as the “Möbius Stripper,” i.e., the man whose lascivious dance (i.e., “his life”) is performed for the delectation of masturbating Goddesses.

Ike’s ongoing self-narration (which is an echolalic karaoke recitation of what he hears streaming in his head) is extremely similar to — and thought by many experts to actually derive from — the flowing auto-narrative of the basketball-dribbling nine-year-old who, at dusk, alone on the family driveway half-court, weaves back and forth, half-hearing and half-murmuring his own play-by-play: “…he’s got a lot going on that could potentially distract him…algebra midterm…his mom’s calling him to come inside…his asthma inhaler just fell out of his pocket…but somehow he totally shuts all that out of his mind…crowd’s going ca-razy!…but the kid’s in his own private Idaho…clock’s ticking down…​badass craves the drama…lives for this shit…​Gunslingaaah…he can hear the automatic garage-door opener…​that means his dad’s gonna be pulling into the driveway in, like, fifteen seconds…un-fucking-believable that he’s about to take this shot under this kind of pressure, with the survival of the species on the line…and look at him out there — dude’s ice…is this guy human or what?…his foot’s hurting from when he stepped on his retainer in his room last night…but he can play with pain…we’ve seen that time and time again…he’s stoic…a cold-blooded professional…Special Ops…Hitman with the Wristband…hand-eye coordination like a Cyborg Assassin…his mom’s calling him to come in and feed the dog and help set the table for dinner…the woman is doing everything she can possibly do to rattle him…but this guy’s not like the rest of us…he is un-fucking-flappable…he dribbles between his legs…OK, hold on…he dribbles between his legs…hold on…he dribbles…hold on…he dribbles between his legs (yes!)…fakes right, fakes left, double pump-fakes…there’s one second left on the clock…and he launches…an impossibly…long…fadeaway…​jumpaaah…​​it’s off the rim…but he fights for the offensive rebound like some kind of rabid samurai…throwing vicious elbows like lethally honed swords…the severed heads of his opponents litter the court…spinal cords are sticking out of the neck stumps…but there’s no ticky-tacky foul called, the referees are just letting them play…there’s somehow still.00137 seconds left on the clock…now there’s a horn honking…might that be the War Conch of the Undead?…etc., etc.”

Ike is constantly testing his own self-narration against “empirical reality” (which is itself actually an illusory construct inscribed by XOXO in Ike’s mind, which Ike realized after being hit by the Mister Softee truck). So, Ike’s tactical response to XOXO (everyone’s, for that matter) is not far from a kind of delirium. Ike’s methodology is to echo the epic: “Ike’s doing this, Ike’s doing that,” and to compare what he’s saying he’s doing with what he’s actually doing, and see if there’s any “wobble.” This, among other things, is what makes Ike a hero.

Ike Karton, unemployed butcher, inveterate mumbler, Warlord of His Stoop, believes — and justifiably so — that he’s fated to die very soon at the hands of Mossad sharpshooters. And he will stand in front of the Miss America Diner (sometimes in close proximity to this other solitary psycho who angrily paces the perimeter of the parking lot bellowing at passersby, “Are you staring at my girlfriend’s tits?!”) and murmur to himself, “He is fated to die very soon at the hands of Mossad sharpshooters,” to which he will almost immediately append, “He is also fated to stand in front of the Miss America Diner (sometimes in close proximity to this other solitary psycho who angrily paces the perimeter of the parking lot bellowing at passersby, ‘Are you staring at my girlfriend’s tits?!’) and murmur to himself, ‘He is fated to die very soon at the hands of Mossad sharpshooters.’” These bracketing redundancies, the compulsive conjuring up of these Matryoshka dolls or Chinese nested boxes, can occupy Ike’s thoughts for hours upon hours. This is one of the reasons (in addition to the whispering campaign conducted against him by Mogul Magoo, Shanice, and Bosco Hifikepunye) that Ike was fired from his job in the A&P Meat Department, and it is one of the things, among many, that makes Ike a hero.

For doomed Ike, everything — every concept and every percept — is a totem of death. Everything bespeaks evanescence. Even a brand new Quiznos on the corner of West Side Avenue and Stegman Parkway (a Quiznos that hasn’t even opened yet!) reeks of mono no aware (“the pathos of things”) and lacrimae rerum (“tears of things”).

Of course, we know that Ike’s soul has been repeatedly kidnapped by XOXO and taken to XOXO’s hyperborean hermitage. And we know that Ike has developed (or is perhaps feigning, as a tactical ploy) Stockholm syndrome.

Ike’s heroic maneuvering to situate himself in an appositional space vis-à-vis XOXO—that is, to juxtapose himself somehow in relation to XOXO, to find a place interior to him or outside of him — may account for Ike’s fractured motion, for the sort of cubistic way he has of moving through space (“the feral fatalism of all his loony tics”).

Ike was asked at the zoning board hearing if his soul had ever had a homosexual relationship with XOXO, and Ike—ever the discreet, gallant, old-world gentleman — said that they’d merely had “tickle fights.” (And this, among other things, is also what makes Ike a hero.)

None of the above.

All of the above.

ANSWER: P. All of the above.

Note to self: P. All of the above includes O. None of the above. Consider mystical significance.