Excited Delirium Book: Chapter 28 (Kite’s Thoughts on Religion & Drive to NYC)

Author’s Note: The following is Chapter 28 of the my online book "Excited Delirium". Please post comments. Please tell your friends about this story. If you’ve missed a chapter, please click here for Chapter 1 (Prelude) or here for the full index .

“So why are you so down on the Univists anyways?” Chaos asked Kite shortly after they left the US-Canada border guard station in Buffalo.

“All I said was that I didn’t want to listen to the bullshit-filled hateful crap that was spewing on the radio. I know it’s a good ploy for the drones at the border, making them believe that we’re holy and all by having that shit in the background, but that’s about as much as I can tolerate.”

It was a strategy that never failed. As long as they came through the border listening to Christian rock or the Univist talk channel, they could be wearing burkas with ‘I love Osama’ printed on them and they’d still get through because most of the border guards were into optics as much as anyone was. If they listened to WKRS, the Univist station call name which was short for ‘the cross’, they’d fly right through inspection.

“Man, that’s just so not you,” Chaos said as he shook his head. “I didn’t have you pegged for being loathsome of anything besides the Fortune 500.”

Their next stop was the Garamond Personnel office, and they kept at each other as they neared their destination.

“It’s not that I’m being loathsome. It’s far from it. Most religions are a pile of doctrines and edicts based on a bunch of things that simply did not happen,” he said with a hint of passion showing.

“Like what?” Hummus asked, spurring him on.

“Like this. If I told you about a dude that was born on December 25, of a virgin, with 3 kings as visitors, who was baptized at 30, who had 12 disciples, traveled about his land performing miracles, including walking on water, was betrayed by a follower and was crucified and 3 days later was resurrected, who would I be talking about?”

“Yeah, we get it. You read The Da Vinci Code along with 30 million other people. You’re smart. Religious people aren’t,” Chaos asserted jokingly, trying to stir his emotions.

“Hold on guys … we’re here,” Kite said as they pulled into the lot. “I’ll just register myself for now. There’s no point labeling you guys unless we really need to.” He jumped out of the vehicle and ran into the Garamond Guy Personnel office while Chaos and Hummus waited.

After what seemed like hours, Kite casually walked from the office with a big frown on his face and then faked that he was about to do the ‘double thumbs down’ move before quickly turning them upwards. It was basic and juvenile, but the group consistently did their best to be reckless about their profession.

“Nice work … you’re all set up?” Chaos asked as Kite jumped into the car.

“No prob … the name worked and we’re in,” Kite responded gleefully.

As they pulled away, Hummus wasn’t about to let Kite forget what they were talking about.

“So earlier, you were talking about religion and superstition and all that stuff.”

“Yeah … how there’s been a lot of plagiarism over the centuries,” Kite responded. “The traits that I described earlier … December 25, 3 kings, etc … they don’t just apply to Christ.”

“We know all that. You’re talking about Horus, the Egyptian god, right?” Hummus added.

“Horus, yes. And Mithra, Attis, Krishna, Dionysus. Zorather of Persia. Odin. Baal. Indra. Thammuz of Syria. Bali of Afghanistan. Prometheus. Adonis. Mikado of the Shintos. Cadmus. Fohi of China. And about 50 other mythological figures or ‘people’,” he said, making the double quote sign around his head, “that became key figures in almost all the religions of the world. How is it that so many characters have the exact same traits across such a diverse range of cultures?” Kite asked, not expecting an answer.

“Really bad broken telephone?” Chaos suggested jokingly.

“Sure. Sure, man. I saw this film the other day online called Zeitgeist . They went into this in some detail. The key point they make is that we’ve been very good at personifying very universal astrological events. It’s called ‘anthropomorphization’. I dare you to say that three times quickly,” he said, mainly in an effort to moderate his delivery and tone it down a little.

“Isn’t that where the Decepticons and Megabots change into cars and tanks and shit?” Chaos teased.

“Yeah. And Jesus Fuckin’ Christ changes into a Tomahawk missile to battle Satan,” Hummus added.

“Ha ha. Only in a defense contractor’s biggest wet dream, you jack offs.” He was eager to continue. They were still a long way from Syracuse let alone Manhattan, so he felt he could kill at least another hour or so trying to share his ideas. It would be this or an arm-crushing afternoon of punch buggy, the game played by eight-year olds on family road trips when the siblings smacked each other time they saw a VW.

“So, the best example of APM is Christ. He represents the Piscean Age as well as the personification of the sun rising and setting, particularly with the winter equinox, the darkest of all days in the northern hemisphere.”

“Thank you, Dan Brown,” Chaos joked.

Kite didn’t pause. “So, as people who were dependent on the earth for their food and very existence, the return of the sun and the lengthening of days was a big deal! The return of the sun on December 25 was the sign of a return to longer days and a cause for partying. This is why we all celebrate something at the end of the year. It’s all just astro-physics personified.”

“Dude, speaking of partying, what’d you do with GB?” Hummus asked. GB was short for Genghis Bong, which was a plastic and metal assembly designed by the most ingenious folks in the world: teens that want to get as high as possible off what little weed they could scrounge.

“He’s here under the seat,” Chaos said to Hummus who was in the back.

“Awesssome!” Hummus said as he reached under and pulled out a pipe. “Now that we’ve cleared the border, let’s get high!”

Kite was flabbergasted. He twisted around in his seat with a quick jerk so that he could see both of his friends. “Are you fucking insane?” he shouted, his face growing red like a car driver being forced to wait for a pedestrian when he was late for work.

“We just crossed THE international border, both of you look like you could have done time at Millhaven, and we’re all on a make-or-break mission and you think ahead just far enough to risk putting us in some clammy Halliburton-run prison for the rest of our lives?” Kite was livid and he wasn’t holding back. “You’re fucked,” he blurted out pursing his lips with “f” so tightly that they turned white.

“Hey, easy man. We had a plan. The radio worked. We’re through. They’re off chasing Osama in a broken down Sunfire, not a group of business men in a BMW,” Hummus said, trying to sooth his partner. “And hey, do you want the first hit? It’s the freshest,” he said, smiling, while holding the bong in one hand and a camouflaged lighter in the other, trying to look like a cheery pitch man for deodorant or floor wax.

“You’re fucked,” Kite repeated, but much more calmly as he took the bong.

As he inhaled and encouraged the water in the bong to a healthy gargle, he started talking again, clouds of smoke wafting from his mouth and nose like a KISS concert intro.

“Where was I …” he said, the THC fog instantly setting in. “Oh yeah. Partying. Before capitalism came along – just a few hundred years ago, I might add,” he said waggling his finger like it was a critical point that they had to pay attention to, “we were all extremely dependent on the earth and sun, so we became obsessed with the sun’s movements and the movement of the stars and ultimately, everything related to astrology because they helped us predict the seasons, weather and even directions. We have a history of adoring the Sun. Even today, some of the biggest companies in the world use the sun with their logos … Look!” he shouted and pointed as they drove past a BP gas sign poking out above the trees, like Sol itself jammed on a 40-foot post. It’s in our DNA and they know it. Look up ‘Eye of Horus’ on the web and you’ll find all kinds of examples of how this imagery has been used in our culture.”

“APM is all about personifying the stars and all comes from telling stories around the campfire. These stories would keep us comfy until the morning came, the sun returned and we all rejoiced because the saviour of humankind had returned another day to help our crops and keep us alive.”

He continued, not giving his friends a chance to tease, as he knew they would. “Sun rise. Sun set. Light. Dark. Good. Evil. Jedi. Sith. These are deeply engrained motifs that guide our writings, our sense of morality, our sense of right and wrong.”

He paused to take another hit from the bong. Holding his breath gave Hummus a chance to add a few thoughts.

“So you’re in the camp of folks who don’t believe in a boogeyman, but how do you fight dogma that’s thousands of years old and that 95-percent of the world’s population believes in, be it the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Koran or the Bible?”

“Look. I’m not gonna tell people that they can’t do something, especially if it gives them a little hope here and there or causes them to think there’s a point to the way in Iraq – besides just making gobs of money.”

“I just question their judgement with the future of the planet when people in charge also believe in talking donkeys, someone that has superpowers from his own hair, people turning into salt and that a couple of old dudes can actually turn sticks into snakes. And that’s just from the Bible.”

“I mean, it’s ludicrous. I appreciate that these books offer great insight into the human condition, but so do books like Grapes of Wrath or Madame Bovary or The World According to Garp . If I were to come to you and say I’ve formed a Justice League of America fan club and that the combined powers of Superman, Batman, Green Lantern and Wonder Woman can save the world, because I told you I believe they really exist , you’d think I was a nut job.”

“You are a nut job,” Chaos interjected quickly, while wrestling with the bong. “Hold this for me, will ya’?” he said, motioning to Kite to hold the steering wheel.

Kite obliged and continued, grabbing the wheel so that Chaos could free his to focus on re-lighting the bong. “Seriously. In a couple of thousand years that little group that I formed would be mainstream religion and there’d be a dude in charge wearing a cape or something collecting billions a year in ‘donations’.”

“Yeah. They’re called ‘royalties’,” Chaos said as smoke seethed from his mouth.

“Sure. That’s one way of putting it, for sure. The corporate world as religion. That’s just great!”

Hummus piped in from the back, “We won’t have a couple of thousand years if Al Gore’s right,” and then he paused for a moment and added, “geez, we’d have a pretty creepy world if he was the one that everyone put on a pedestal like they did with the Man from Nazareth.”

Hummus continued: “And you don’t even have to be a part of the story to make a boat-load of cash from it. Look at those slick creeps like Benny Hinn or that guy Pastor Hagee. I hear both of them live in houses that would make the Pope blush, most likely from the cash raised by all of the ‘non-profit’ charities,” his indignation slowly revealing itself.

“Hey, I’ve heard of that Hagee guy. My parents gave money to his church and now all he does is talk about bombing Iran back to the stone age.”

Kite tried to sum up their thoughts with the following quote: “What profit has not the fable of Christ brought us!”

“Who said that?” Chaos asked.

“A fucking Pope, Pope Leo the Tenth,” Kite answered quickly.

“Hallelujah!” the other two shouted, trying to control their laughter.

“If you ask me, religion is an essential tool used by the powers to be to keep people poor, but to also keep them wandering in a state of endless stupidity. And the Univists – the people that own this radio station – are the worst. Hands down!” Kite was speaking in a sermon-like mode now, not realizing the irony of his delivery.

“That’s a little harsh, don’t you think?” Hummus asked.

“No way. Let’s listen for a sec,” Kite said, hoping to prove his point, as he reached over to the radio button to turn it back on.

… and the land of Iran, the Beast of the East, is daring us. Tempting is into World War Three by building nukular weapons while their friends at the UN sit with their thumbs up their behinds …

“See,” Kite said as he nodded to the radio.

“Heck, bud, maybe it’s an ad for an oil company or something.” Chaos was trying, but knew defending this spew was a waste of time. He loathed organized religion more than the other two because his parents, in a God-fogged state of mind at the end of their days, bequeathed everything that they had to their church, leaving him with nothing but the funeral bill when he was starting a physics program at MIT. It was this single moment that pushed him on the street and made him what he was today, potentially very angry at times and definitely an outsider.

“Yeah, that’s what it is …” Kite said, trying to mock a level of thoughtfulness. “Let’s keep listening,” he prompted.

… The only solution to these and other threats to Godliness around the world like China and India the Russians is to build a powerful army and fight and work in the name of God …

“Now that’s some crazy shit,” Hummus said slowly, the newscast setting in.

“See man! When the world is talking about reducing the population by having just one or two kids, here are these nut jobs talking about pumping out ten or twelve kids like a fucking litter! You know why?” Kite said, not waiting for an answer.

It was Chaos’ turn to humour him: “Why?”

“Votes and a never-ending source of loyal and cheap labour. We’re talking about fundamentalists, which in my book sounds like fund a mental illness.”

“Whatever. Nobody ever said my grandparents were just breeders for the church when they had 7 or 8 kids,” Hummus suggested.

“Yeah, but we were also living in a different age. And yes, they were breeding Catholics or Protestants or Muslims or Jews. They just weren’t as overt about it as they are with the Univists. Until a state system came along we were all cut adrift to fend for ourselves and our tiny little futures. There was no opportunity until someone decided it was time to have some basic guidelines to protect individuals.”

“Like what?” Hummus asked innocently.

“Pchaw,” Kite said, spitting in mockery of the question, “Like an unbiased justice system. Or roads. Or public utilities. Or a public stock market. But those are all changing. If public institutions aren’t being sold off to the highest bidder, they’re lobbied, and if they’re ‘untouchable’,” doing the double quotes again, “they’re ridiculed. And if that doesn’t happen, politicians who are bought by the religious wingnuts and the Fortune 500 just become auctioneers, only instead of selling to the highest bidder, the giving to the lowest bidders, who also happen to be their buddies. Or they just change the rules so that their makers can generate more money, buy more votes, and have more shit sold off. We’re in a very evil state these days, where everything is up for sale and the public has no control over what’s happening because the Democrats or Liberals are just as shitty as the Republicans.”

“Disaster capitalism has taken root in the US, Canada and the rest of the world and people can’t even profit from it if they wanted to. More money is raised and spent by private companies than ever before. Feudal lords would be proud of what our leaders have pushed on us. Voting doesn’t work because Diebold controls the final tally. Rebellions are out of the question because we’ll get tasered to death and authorities will call it ‘excited delirium’ like the victim was high on peyote and having a sweet ass ride as opposed to watching and feeling his nuts fry up like dog turds in an incinerator.”

One of them had to stop Kite. He was on a full-blown rant. Besides, despite their gestures to the opposite, they were the converted and he was preaching.

“So to summarize,” Hummus interrupted, “we’re on the steep slant of that old slippery slope to serfdom and the religious and corporate dudes are greasing the hill.”

“Exactly!” Kite shouted as he twisted around pointing at his friend in the back. “Nice alliteration, by the way,” he said as he winked.

“Sounds pretty fucking hopeless man,” Chaos said, “everyone’s against us and all that shit. What do we do?”

“We stop shopping,” Kite quickly interjected.

“But that’s not gonna stop the Bushies and the Harpies from lining the pockets of companies like Greyrock so they can continue their way on Muslims, I mean terror,” Hummus said.

“I know … but it’d be a start. And we have to get active, politically, I mean. As long as people demand a shift away from corporate welfare, and more towards co-ops and small farms and non-profits, there’s a chance. But people have to be educated. They have to know that there are opportunities to do things differently. They’ve already picked up on the media thing by using the web to create their own news or bypass all the labels for their music, so they can learn about bypassing the corporation the same way.”

“And we’ve got to get rid of charities,” he continued, on full rant now, “especially those that support clowns like Benny Hinn who has more cash than the Bank of America, although I’m not sure if that’s saying much anymore. And we punish corporations like we punish people, at least in the States. We try them, we find them guilty of a crime, and EVERYONE working for that company will be guilty of that crime, by rationale that they are aiding and abetting that crime. And we get rid of corporate welfare. So much is spent by the state in direct subsidies to companies, particularly those that exist with the sole intent of killing people, which reinforces the whole ‘putting corporations on trial’ concept. You know when you think of it, I might not be so down on capitalism if we actually gave it a try! If we don’t, society will suffer.”

“Aw, shit dude … you said it,” Chaos said.

Kite instantly realized his mistake and acknowledged the rule. You see, whenever they smoked, they had one rule that they followed absolutely: if someone mentions the work ‘society’ while high, they had to change the topic. Incorporating the word ‘society’ meant that they were getting too serious. It also meant that you were talking in a broad-sweeping aspect that no one could really control, so the arguments started getting more and more vague.

“Ok … Ok,” Kite said, “let’s talk about something else. But before we change topics, let me know say this: even though I’ve got a beef with religion, I at least haven’t thrown myself to consumerism as lead by the great corporation. At least the church has a moral compass. All the corporation has is the bottom line.”

“Sure. We understand. But you’re done. Let’s talk about something else for a bit,” Chaos said, keeping a tight control on their rule.

Instead of starting a new topic, they each fell into their own quiet thoughtfulness while Underneath the Sky played by Oasis.

Kite turned to look out the window wondering what his anwers would be to questions like “Do you believe in religion? Or a god?” and how they were all linked to the corporation, because he knew there was a link; he just wasn’t very good at explaining it.

For religion, Kite’s favourite answers were that he was void of religion, but not void of spirituality. It always felt like a bit of a cop-out, particularly given that he was striving for the idea that we should be living every single moment like it’s the only one, rather than constantly planning for the future or living in the past. Generally, he was very interested in Eastern philosophy, mainly because of the central repeated idea that the individual is a part of all things and not a controller of those things. There is harmony in being as opposed to competition in getting. We’re all in this together and we’re all part of a single organism, kind of stuff. God didn’t plant the Boreal Forest for us to hack down for McMansions, it’s just there and it’s part of a vital ecosystem that keeps all of us alive.

He knew that most people don’t like this difference because at first blush, it instills a sense of hopelessness, or a lack of control. It also requires a sense of humility instead of hubris as the core value system for guiding the planet. If we see a mountain, we should just see a mountain, and not the veins of gold or lead underneath.

In fact, he thought, our desire to emulate the gods we manufacture has an absolute correlation to our handing our lives over to corporatism, and he felt that the people that run the financial affairs of the world know this.

Because of our misguided faith in angels and saints and devils and the creation of the universe in six days, our faith in corporations is equally misguided, if only because the corporate mentality has latched on to practitioners in the West. When philosophical had declared God dead in the 20s and 30s, a shaken and nervous secular public embraced commerce as a pale and unfortunate substitute. Money became the knew god and commerce was the knew church keeping us all humming along.

If pushed for an answer, Kite would probably say some form of social democratic system is the way to go, with ‘Power to the People’ as the core slogan. Power in the sense that voting would be based on proportional representation. Power in the sense that people would create energy with new homes being completely off-grid. Power in the sense that individuals would have the capacity to blow the whistle on companies that were ripping them off. People in the sense that people come first, not profits. People would own the means of production, not companies. The elite wouldn’t like his model, but that would be too bad.

As long as profits are more important than people, economic shock therapy would continue to guide the governments of the world and wars, poverty, crime, drug trade, and racism would exist because there are massive profits to be made from conflict and they get consolidated upwards to a theocratic class of citizens that couldn’t care less about the life of the ‘man on the street’.

What exists today is a farcical state of corporate welfare and his answer was simple: nibble away at this infrastructure and try to expose its rot to the public and ultimately, try to get people pissed off enough so they actually do something for themselves and not some dude in the latest highest tower in Manhattan.

He would be the first to admit that motivating the sedated is a challenge, but he knows it will happen. At some point, the lines between religion and military and corruption and sheet theft will be recognized by the public and eventually people react, as they always have. Ultimately, Kite knew that his pupose would be to accelerate that seething sense of indignation that he knew everyone in the world had.

Hummus too had thoughts about the future, and they were rooted in our deep dark past. He didn’t believe that we had dominion over our planet as taught by all Occidental mythologies, because that motivates our sense of entitlement. We have because it’s our divine right to have. We take without limit because it’s ours to take. Today, the world is in a massive deficit of resources, love and caring and consideration and every step of the way, people that try to make a difference are being abused by people who are indifferent. The earth as a giant organic being cannot survive as long as people who believe in entitlement run the planet. Every car on the road is a long-term liability, draining the earth’s life-blood. We’re all like junkies seeking transfusions, but we’re not restoring the source material.

If we reverted to a culture of tending and nurturing, he thought, we’d make it. He didn’t know when, but our current way of living – burning, processing, toxifying and discarding – would lead to one thing: a lifeless ball drifting around a sun that would have fed us with all the energy that we could ever hope for. Collecting and harvesting are concepts associated with solar power. Burning and thrashing are associated with our blood-lust for oil and other natural resources.

He knew that when we went from an agrarian society to a war-like mechanical age, we pushed ourselves close to the brink.

Chaos has a simple answer to the questions of religion, which he heard from Stephan Jones, the son of Jim Jones of purple kool-aid fame: Religion is for people who are afraid of hell; spirituality is for people who have been there.

For corporations, he always has a simple response: get rid of them.

A Quick Speed by Oasis played in the background and Kite nodded to Chaos that he should slow down a little. No need to attract the brown shirts who will taser them all to death if they farted the wrong way, let along discover that they were driving under the influence. It was still pretty early (they went through the border at 4AM), but why draw unnecessary attention?

Within a short time, they approached Syracuse. This town was once an important hub in the Erie Canal network, which went all the way through New York to Manhattan until the Canadians got smart and put in the Welland Canal. As a result of the latter system, which was much more practical, the cities in New York that grew alongside the Erie Canal exploded in population and then faded as the wealth came and went.

The train industry brought some success to Syracuse for a time, but again, this industry was doomed to a fate decreed by public subsidy of massive interstate highways that encouraged enormous volumes of truck haulers as opposed to single train units. It seems inefficient, but with the state subsidizing transport on that scale, why not decentralize the cost of transportation?

So fame and fortune had come and gone with Syracuse a number of times, as it did with thousands of other American and Canadian towns. People at the centre of a great social experiment that at best was whimsical in its outlook.

It was now a burned out shell that should have been a warning to the US thirty years ago; a model of what not to do in business and commercial planning.

Kite pointed to some of the old bridges and dilapidated infrastructure and mused “I guess real estate comes at a discount in these parts.”

“Did you know,” Hummus started, “this is where Gustav Stickley got his start?”

“Gustav Sticky?” Chaos mimicked child-like.

“Sitckley,” Kite and Hummus piped in immediately.

“Stickley was one of the grand-daddies of the Arts and Crafts movement,” Hummus said. “He had a massive influence on people like Frank Lloyd Wright and even the Sears company, which began producing Craftsman homes in the twenties and thirties. The bungalow was an affordable and attractive home for people that couldn’t afford or that didn’t need anything bigger than a single story, two or three bedroom place to lay down at the end of a hard day’s work.”

“Arts and Crafts was a complete rebellion against the birth of mass production. The people behind the movement believed in people producing for people, not slaves making cheap shit for owners, like we have now,” Kite added.

“They believed in simplicity and harmony. There was also a communal aspect to a lot of the work because they would source materials locally and many of the operations were put together as co-ops, which meant all of the profits went back to the employees, rather than a single owner.”

“They were ahead of their time, then,” Chaos said. “Maybe it’s time we saw more of that.”

Within a few moments, they were through Syracuse and on their way to Manhattan, which was still more than six hours away.

As they pulled away, Syracuse in their rear-view mirror, Hummus tried a new topic. “Did you guys know that the word ‘Moors’ was Greek for ‘black’?”

“I guess it makes sense,” Chaos added.

“Yeah … like literally they were just a bunch of black dudes from Africa and the Middle East, but talk about bad PR,” Kite chimed in.

“No kidding. More than a thousand years after they were in Europe, you still think of the name today and images of rape, pillaging and the ruination of Europe come to mind, don’t they? The Dark Ages,” Hummus said, with emphasis on the work dark .

He paused for a moment to collect his thoughts and continued, “when the Moors arrived in Europe, the places they came to like Spain, Italy and part of France were falling apart because people like the Visigoths were just fucking pigs consuming everything in their path. The Moors brought trade and they shared with the locals. Cordoba, which is in Spain, had lights and running water while people in London were living in mud huts.”

“They wanted everyone to be educated and so they built the biggest libraries Europe had ever seen. In fact, it’s because of them, that to this day, libraries offer free services. And while the world library in France boasted a whopping nine-hundred books, just one of the seventy libraries in Cordoba had more than 500,000 books.”

“In fact,” he continued, “if it weren’t for the Arabs and Africans, most of our intellectual capital – Plato, Pythagoras, Homer, Aristotle and others – would have been burned or buried in the vaults of the Vatican, never to be opened by a human again.”

“What are you talking about?” Chaos challenged.

“In the dying days of the Roman Empire, Christianity filled the void of the military imperialists. It offered the elite a way to decentralize control without losing any of it. Fear of being bullied was replaced by fear of God. Pretty much everything outside the Bible was considered blasphemous. Christians were intellectually introspective and juvenile compared to the Muslims. The key promise of the Muslims was education and when the masses learned to think for themselves, they questions the value of having some pork-belly in Rome run – or ruin – their lives. With that, we get the Crusades – several centuries of black listing,” he said, with emphasis on the word black , “the nation of Islam that continues to this day.”

“No kidding,” Kite said. “Mainstream media is today’s equivalent of the fifth-century friar. A walking, talking contradiction. And it’s mainstream media that brainwashes people with retarded TV programming …”

“Hey c’mon,” Chaos interrupted. “That’s a little harsh man. There’s no need to use that word.”

“Sorry, my bad. How about ‘idiotic’?” Kite asked.

“That’ll do just fine,” Chaos said, placated while he drove on.

“So, mainstream media brainwashes people with idiotic programming and supposed information stations like ABCNNBBCBS and INC ram agendas down our throats. If people would just turn off the tube, they’d start thinking for themselves again.

“9/11 was an inside job!” Chaos blurted out, raising his fists in the air. As he did so, the car swerved enough to startle everyone in the car.

“OK … that’s just a minor tweak from using the ‘s’ word,” Hummus said jokingly. “It’s time to change topics. Again.”

“Change indeed,” Kite said. “But let me summarize: The Moors educated, but were blacklisted, Arts and Crafts died a cruel fate to mass production, and 9/11 was an inside job designed to cow us into a new state of fear. Oh yeah … and corporations suck and we should have co-ops.”

“That sounds about right,” Hummus said, with a look of mock satisfaction on his face.

Chaos added his thoughts for a new topic: “What did you guys think of the MBV show?”

The three of them were recently in London on a mission together and decided to take in the reunion concert of My Bloody Valentine, or MBV.

“I thought it was good, but I’m torn about whether or not old bands should keep doing these reunions. They don’t leave any room for the young punks,” Hummus said.

And with that, the three launched into a deeply engaged discussion about how Kevin Shields and the ‘shoe gazing’ sound gave birth to grunge and how grunge spawned the end of the recording industry.

(Note: "Excited Delirium" is a work of fiction. Any person, place or thing depicted in this work of fiction is also a work of fiction. Any relation of these subjects or characters to real locations, people or things are an unintentional coincidence.)

Read more with Chapter 29

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Excited Delirium by Liam Young is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License .
Based on a work at www.exciteddelirium.ca .

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