"i sometimes feel like i have missed my call: ya know? christ, i would have given anything to be there. ya know, on that lonely strip of highway leading to that square where all those great star-crossed lovers were massacred. god, to stand in deviance with that lone man--to stand on the side of justice--to give him comfort! to give comfort! and to say 'you're not alone friend, i stand with you' even though i do not speak any chinese and i am sure he did not speak any english. where is our great battle? where is our tiananmen square? have we been reduced to this? i suppose things are different now. that is, the war is no longer as explicit as it was before. we have been cooed to a silent slumber by our parents. our parents: the great generation that failed and they had so much to work with. we sit in our stupor and increasingly become more and more brain-dead all to comfort of 300 plus channels. people gather round the water cooler to engage in our great dialogues that enrich human life, but they all say the same thing: 'hey did you see how simon ripped that guy apart?' dr. king basically marched and died on the television screen and now the machine took the television screen. oh, they took the television screen and now use it in their newest campaigns to denigrate human beings. the machine took the technology dr king used to change the world and transformed it into our great opium. the war is still waged on the television, ya know, but the trick is that you have to flip through the channels fast enough to catch a glimpse of it. we must give birth to a new paradigm. jesus have mercy on us and deliver us to the elysian fields."

i built a dastardly device--an antennae to heaven--to transmit and receive signals, but all i could pick up were the faint echoes of kosmonauts long since dead or at the very least forgotten. their faint echoes made me wonder about icarus, the one who flew to close to the sun: do we fly too close out of our own hubris? or do we fly too close on the off chance that we might be consumed by some beneficent being? here is to you comrade kosmonaut--our daring post-modern pied piper!

you know what? i miss pinky and the brain. what are we going to do tonight? the same thing we do every night...