The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (12 page)

1. 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.
   
2. Having access to the original programmer’s instructions—or source code—provided
   XOXO
   with knowledge about subtle security vulnerabilities in
   T.S.F.N.
   
3. 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.

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.”

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
?

1. It’s impossible to know where
   XOXO
   ends and you begin.
   
2. XOXO
   calls into question the provenance and chain of custody of every single thought in your head.
   
3. 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.

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…”).