Ike—unfailingly self-abnegating, a hero cast into the maelstrom of life — of course, violently abhors the exaltation of rich, privileged celebrities, for whom he prefers the gulag and the guillotine. (This is the central reason he’s so beloved by La Felina and Fast-Cooking Ali.) Shanice’s vindictive utilization of XOXO against Ike is tacitly abetted by Mogul Magoo, because it avails the plutocratic God of Bubbles yet another way of vexing, by proxy, his eternal nemesis La Felina, who champions the lumpen, the subproletarian, the unsung, the village idiot with his half-witted smile and tear-filled eyes, the anomic, the disaffected and misshapen, the disinherited, the lame and crippled, the unheralded; who loves everything that’s defiled and damned; who loves everyone who’s pockmarked and putrid; who exalts the physically deformed and the mentally unbalanced and the sans-culottes and the scum of the earth; and who wet her pants during the September Massacres of 1792.
XOXO attacks The Sugar Frosted Nutsack where it’s most vulnerable, when it’s most “keyed up,” most “hyperesthetic.” In the face of mounting criticism for his indiscriminant use of military-grade ass-cheese, XOXO simply shrugs. “I’m a legitimate businessman,” he’ll say, slyly assuming the role of one whose motives are eternally misinterpreted.
In the spring of 2013, a group of experts, including former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, Dog the Bounty Hunter, and controversial Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Dr. Giancarlo Capella, make a startling assertion. After conducting what they describe as “an insane amount of research,” based on new information made available through “totally unprecedented access to the Myanmar military junta’s secret archives,” they reach the conclusion that the actual title of the epic is not — nor has it ever been—The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, but is instead — and has always been—What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Although, that summer, Dr. Capella and Dog the Bounty Hunter (who are both in Lithuania to promote a chain of vaginal rejuvenation clinics) recant their assertion, claiming that XOXO had plied their souls with drugged sherbet, Greenspan continues to defend his findings. Greenspan admits that, yes, his soul was plied with drugged sherbet, kidnapped, and taken to XOXO’s garish hyperborean hermitage miles beneath the earth’s surface in Antarctica, where it was kept captive for five and a half God-years, and, yes, there was a suffocatingly sweet smell at the hermitage, as if Eggnog Febreze was being continuously pumped in through the ventilation system, and, yes, every so often XOXO would chastely kiss his soul on the mouth, and that, at some point, XOXO shampooed and cornrowed his soul’s hair, and that, using a sharp periodontal curette, he carved secret wisdom into Greenspan’s soul’s mind. This wisdom includes, according to Greenspan, the curious notion that The Sugar Frosted Nutsack isn’t — and never was — really about Ike Karton at all, but is — and always has been — about the war between XOXO and the epic itself, i.e., the war between the boldfaced and the italicized. Why Is It SO FUCKING EASY for XOXO to Hack into T.S.F.N.?
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.
Having access to the original programmer’s instructions — or source code — provided XOXO with knowledge about subtle security vulnerabilities in T.S.F.N.
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. You’re Gonna Love This