Layomatic Outstressing [Verrsion 3: Cacotopia]

Note:  This piece was sort of being renovated. Sort of expanded. I was so medicated when I started it I was still finding errors after about 500 reads.  The most egregious errors have been corrected.

{This thing got sort of out of control,so it had to be moved up there ^}
Some of the language reprinted here is not English.  The one so disturbingly similar to the official language of the United States is a dialect that has no official name, but which many people will know well.  The dialect of the veteran news reporter unfurling his second sheet to the wind  should be easily recognizable to many.  There is a second dialect, which does not yet exist in its entirety, but which has already begun to expand exponentially like the technology which it so heavily borrows from and desecrates terms from.  It is the mature channeler dialect -  a thing of beauty that gores English and splashes the blood of grammar about on the world's grand stage.  Readers have been warned.  


The blog had been reviewed:

"I found one crazy asshole (a blogger) makes lots of claims and promises before weaseling his way into the online life of anyone too fresh to know a Dead Beat Grub Worm Hooch Bum (the proper name for one) when they see one, and once there affixes itself to any common route for positive matter of any kind flowing through their life.  Even law enforcement should consider this blog a waste of time, except for the random new member of any hypothetical backwater department a civilian can only imagine, one who could really use a good bust for odd offenses of mild white collar severity (to help them climb up the ladder,  maybe even make the news, like on Law and Order Grosse Tete).  The only thing positive that could be found in the utter waste of time and space in such an action (directly proportional to the time this guy spent on his work and the space it took up - very little, the same as there obviously is attached to this), is that it would be the perfect climate for a religious condemnation of 'old days' proportions should there be any legal transgressions connected to this scumbag.  What a [expletive deleted].  I need strong mouthwash after only a few hours."

I, LSR, have only one response to the content of that "review" before moving on: The powers that be always know where to find me. I do have a comment about the scribbler.  He gave readers neither a name nor an address for the subject.  Well done - burnt...

The layout for "Symbols" has never looked anything but satisfactory no matter where I have  seen it from over the years. Satisfactory was always acceptable, as long as nobody had any difficulty reading the writing. Now the messages the writing once contained stir up large proportions of negativity. Blog posters, who sometimes think of themselves as authors, wind up in federal prisons going about routine daily transcription of their thoughts and ideas, and, most dangerously, things they have discovered somewhere else on the Internet,  Such writing can no longer be found here.  Instead there's a lot of music, poetry, fluff literature, images... and layout meant to impress.  Everything here was assumed holding steady at "not presented incompetently."  Presumptions are stupid things.

On Black Friday I witnessed a child of the neighborhood open a wrapped Christmas present outside in the yard.  i noticed that it was one of those pads people talk so much about. Many have said I should wear a padded helmet, but nobody has ever insisted I deserve an expensive piece of portable technology to hone my -- whatever it is. If anybody listened to me I could be a retired millionaire next year from making padded helmets with all the technology of electronic portable tablets.  C'est la vie.

I know the kid's mother; Charlotte-Celestine Althea. Presumption again reared its ugly head, with good reason.  Cellie may have a rich debutante's name, but she always operated on a budget when it came to her only child.  So I wanted to see what the ultimate budget pad could do, but not because I cared.

I was also always looking for some reason to get into Cellie's place so I could slip the graphene hose of my hyper-silent gravity vac into the totally unnecessary port of her sewing printer labeled "Clear Jam."  Once in the privy I could siphon the garment printer synthene in under a minute.  That's when it hit me.  I had liberated the Hi-ho-Pad from the moronic clutches of her welp when, scrolling past "Symbols" just to grimace at the only thing I ever created in my life, I noticed the layout was off center.  Badly off.

I left without even scamming the vial of joo-joo. It was all I needed to make one person's source for clothes into another person's criminal fantasy come true.  It was more, or worse, than that.  It was ultimately the only income I could count on after almost two decades of study.

The world went to shit for everyone not perfectly described in the preppy handbook years before the book described them, but nobody noticed until full economic lockdown made changing one's socio-economic status impossible.  That sort of thing meant absolutely nothing to somebody like myself, who took a deadly serious religious vow of poverty early in life.  How early?  Too early to know what it meant.  Once I found out I publicly declared hostilities against materialism in short order.

Ignorance may be bliss, but it was also youth.  Only the youth think that part of the old saying exists, is conspiratorial and is kept hush-hush.  "Enough pleasant nostalgia," I thought to myself.

I opened my ancient device people called a "laptop" back in the long night. That old saying was once "back in the day," but because of the terrible conditions that existed in the era that immediately followed the one in which I bought the laptop, that turn of the coin evolved with the "long night" part.

Kids always giggled when they heard the word "laptop," espcially if "back in the long night" were added.  They thought the device itself was a PZ-toy.  I love kids.  Sometimes they get the biggest kick out of the smallest things about language.  And the great humor that hormones can cause to wash over them in seconds never stopped making smile, I knew because of the memories of all the fun I had at their age.

When the little male devil Kirby Darwin Dawson, Cellie's kid, PZ-toys had different names in different ages his curiosity was voracious.  When he heard the term "sex toys" he lost his mind with glee.  He did not let me in on his chain of thoughts at the time, and that made me more than a little curious myself.  I could not imagine where the giggles came from, as the word "sex' had been through a tough time in the last century.

It later got back to me Kirby slandered me to everyone in the world that he could.  LSR, he said, fantasized about abandonment.  That seemed quite mean to me, and not funny at all.  He had devised the most brutal non-vulgar slur with a sexual base of anyone in his class. To explain it I should start "Masturbators are scum..."  Hm.  This explanation will take some effort.


During these long days of the corporate theocracy the word and act of sex spawned fears about a cacotopia nearly everyone of normal station had concerns about.  Those who did not wait for marriage before partaking of the forbidden fruit increased the risk of "abandoned born living," although ABL babies were rampant among married couples as well.

By the time the most prosperous cities were densely over populated, around the time of the seating of the 12th North American Curia, the streets were filled with depressed youth, the Abandoned.  The Abandoned were children of God who could see from the very beginning of their awareness that a lifetime of poverty awaited them, no ifs, ands or buts.  If they ever faltered for a moment and forgot their place, then they need only glance at the faces around them to remember the fate that awaited them.

Anyone involved with creating a member of the Abandoned, humanity so gripped by hopelessness and despair, was punished extra-judicially at the personal level of society; they were shunned, on a universal basis.  That measure carried across the board without any  rule ever being written, nor any words ever spoken openly. That was a harsh stone to cast, but "society" was not a being that could be reasoned with, and definitely no beast that could be  trained.  As for the offender, when they were gone their Abandoned took their place

Tactics eternally whispered in the corners of the dining halls of highest requisite:  One enters with no path to the other side, one dies with no path to the other side.  Men hunched over tables and prayed incessantly.  At regular intervals individual prayer milestones were reached; that man was given one protein ball and one carbohydrate cube.  The two cubes were portioned to be exactly what was required for another period of work before prayer.

Nobody owned.
Nobody questioned.
Nobody dared.
Nobody cared.

  The outer rings of the halls were graced by women, the most dignified seated at the outermost edges... [snip]
[story temporarily cut due to time limitations]

Union replaced sex as the most common reference noun for the act, but making love never left the field of play.  Fucky-fucky remained the undisputed champion in my copy of "English in the Field;" the one that never stopped whirring, loudly, like a small hovercraft, when on trips and in crowds.  In some of the (my? [his?]) dimmer memories preserved at risk of permanent damage to acuity, a P5 pumped out rounds with such perfection of tempo, accuracy, and power, from my hands, power flowed from my hands <--[mnemonic burp due to longevity]

It was a shame, in my opinion, that the stealth defunding of education had been so successful the late 20ers and early 30ers believed such social movements as shunning were original ideas and a path to improving the "nation."  Without any real background in history they could never know most of what had happened since corporations took over the nation's finances (as part of a "patriotic duty") constituted a reversal of hundreds of years of progress in the right direction.  The fundies even paid to have the word progress demonized, just to be sure.  [Note*  Fundies might be from any religion or walk of life, they just made sure they got paid (funded) as soon as the nation did]

I threw off all the layers of useless thought and sat down with my lappie to get to the bottom of the layout business.  All the anatomy terms buffeted me like tropical winds.  This might be bad. It could herald a new attempt by the presentation fanatics to wave their arms at AI with formatting.

A lot of people believed the singularity took place not long after the turn of the millennium, back when death was still a sure thing, no matter what.  And a rising percentage of the old timers believed that establishing communication had to take place through not just words, but the presentation as a whole.  The fact that corporate "free-sites" ("You're free and so is your tiny corner of Paradys-cyberee, as long as we can exercise our drilling rights over the spot where you exercise your imagination!") continued upgrading the formatting code indicated there was a cadre of true believers in the very upper echelons.

After studying the xh-tea-melee I concluded that the changes were indeed an intensification of a not so secret desire to devise a way for humans to make cyber bodies using all the free multimedia publishing tools at their disposal. This time the only changes had been that the template customization details had been drawn further inward, further away from the vulnerable surface of a dermis composed entirely of symbols.

Nobody gave a fuck I saw all this shit coming.  I'd probably spend a week in a jail somewhere just for thinking I had managed to become something besides an antique toyboy-pimp-gigolo hybrid.  Sometimes I could just smell it when there was trouble on the horizon (or it could have been the review that called for a law enforcement investigation - too early to tell at this point).

I settled down to dig into the underbelly of the derpnet.  Every now and then I met a chick because of the blog.  No way I was sacrificing the joo-joo potential.  Fffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuu: time to work.


 
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Symbols of Decay is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License..
Related written works at Angelfire, Sex Symbols, Cymbals of Silence.Repent or Die