The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

6

Putting aside what might be construed as a cynical attempt to pathologize an authentic oracular hero in order to sell him drugs (e.g., Clozaril, Zyprexa, Risperdal, etc.), in other words, for the financial benefit of the pharmaceutical industry (once we assume an organic basis for deviant theologies, we legitimize a market for diagnostic assays and treatment modalities), and putting aside the even more fundamental issue of the pharmacological colonization of the Western psyche, is there any validity to the diagnosis of folie à famille for the Kartons (the family, not the band)? Ike Karton doesn’t seem to fit the textbook profile of “the inducer.” He can’t really be described as domineering, for instance. Of course, in his unassuming way, he casually offers up incidental remarks and observations about the world — that people like Anna Wintour, Gisele Bündchen, Ronald Perelman, and Jon Bon Jovi should be dragged from their offices or homes and guillotined on the street, or how it would be much more entertaining in the Winter Olympics biathlon if, instead of shooting at targets, the biathletes shot ski jumpers at the apex of their flights like human skeet, or his admiration for the ferocious Renaissance politician Cesare Borgia and Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov and the ruthless one-eyed Prime Minister of Cambodia, Hun Sen. But he has never tried to “proselytize” or “indoctrinate” his family. He has never sat his wife and daughter down and formally told them the entire saga (i.e., the entirety of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack) in the classic style — that is, high on ecstasy, swigging orange soda from a gourd, tapping his aluminum wedding ring on the tabletop to maintain that mesmerizing cadence — from beginning to end. In fact, he won’t formally tell the whole saga in the classic style from beginning to end until — in the Penultimate Season, and shortly before being gunned down by ATF and Mossad sharpshooters — he sits down with his half-divine infant grandson, Colter Dale, pours out a sacred libation of Sunkist, and, tapping his ring on the tabletop, begins chanting to the rapt, wide-eyed infant from the very beginning: “There was never nothing. But before the debut of the Gods, about fourteen billion years ago, things happened without any discernable context. There were no recognizable patterns. It was all incoherent. 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. 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…” And with that unprecedented gesture, Ike incorporates (and consecrates) what had heretofore been simply an academic prologue into the very body, the very heart of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (and it has been considered its First Season ever since). But prior to the Penultimate Season, over the years, Ike has, every now and then, sat down with his wife and his daughter and his daughter’s disreputable boyfriend, Vance, and, in his soft, confidential, hoarse whisper, informally shared with them several vivid but isolated and disjointed little fragments. And despite the fact (or maybe due to the fact) that these disjointed little fragments seem to lack any discernable context, Ike’s wife, his daughter, and Vance are sufficiently enthralled so that they appear (to some experts) to suffer from a form of folie à famille. Such is Ike’s galvanic (albeit diffident) charisma, his magnificence. Such is the inky dye of his faith that, over time, drop by drop by drop, it slowly seeps into and stains the porous minds of his loyal, loving family. (There are some experts, although they constitute a persecuted minority within the expert community, who believe that there has actually been only one bard — that one being Ike Karton. And within this group, there is a dissident faction who also believes that there has actually been only one expert, that one also being Ike Karton. Although this is an extremely controversial and virtually indefensible position, it does have one vehement and disproportionately influential proponent: Ike Karton.)