But Ike doesn’t compile his list. And Vance spins the wheel of his BMX bike, faster and faster now, sensing that everything is about to become incredibly messed up.
The highly provocative proximity of the words “balaclava” and “baklava”—the sheer fuck-you impudence of it — is a deliberate and unambiguous signal that XOXO is decisively ratcheting up his sabotage of the epic. And Vance understands, on a completely intuitive level, that the faster he spins the BMX wheel, the faster the epic might reach its conclusion (i.e., the masochistic, hyperviolent death of Ike Karton).
There’s a ticking clock now (i.e., the spokes of the BMX wheel against the empty soda can). XOXO is unraveling the epic faster than the bards can recite it, which results in the bards’ increasingly high-pitched gibberish. The epic might end without Ike dying (and on a Tuesday at 8:00 PM!) or drag on inconclusively for an infinite number of seasons. This is XOXO fucking with everyone’s mind. He’s denying Ike his doom—Ike, so eager for a hero’s martyrdom, virtually cataleptic yet perpetually flinging himself toward his fate, “his spur caught in the bull-rope of his own inexorable destiny.”
XOXO finds it amusing to shit on the integrity of the epic, to leave it in a state of suspended animation, a state of complete unfulfillment and nongratification, a form of eternal Tie and Tease. He wants to leave The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack with an epic case of blue balls. It’s XOXO’s ultimate mind-fuck.
XOXO thinks it’s “cool” to just paralyze the whole looping, recursive epic, with all its excruciating redundancies, heavy-handed, stilted tropes and wearying clichés, its overwrought angst, all its gnomic non sequiturs, all its off-putting adolescent scatology and cringe-inducing smuttiness, all the depraved tableaus and orgies of masturbation with all their bulging, spurting shapes, and all the compulsive repetitions about Freud’s repetition compulsion…
At this point, XOXO is blocking blood flow into the brains of the bards. XOXO is giving the bards TIAs (transient ischemic attacks) which are miniature temporary strokes and which are causing the bards to forget vast sections of the epic and simply spout high-pitched gibberish (i.e., nonlexical vocables). Of course, the fact that XOXO is giving the bards “ministrokes” which are causing the bards to forget vast sections of the epic and spout high-pitched gibberish is a now a crucial part of the epic, which audiences at public recitations expect the bards to “belt out like the cast of some Broadway musical.” The bards are now expected to “belt out” that XOXO is expunging the epic in its entirety from their memories, to “belt out” that the hyperviolent death of Ike Karton might now be endlessly deferred.
Some bards simply start making up phrases suggested by the letters of license plates on passing cars, and attempting to pass that off as “the epic.”
DYS: Dad, you suck
AED: Actress / Egg Donor
ZUP: Zipped-up pussy
BFV: Best fisting video
ITM: Impeccable table manners
VNN: Vaginas Need Nivea
JNU: Jews Never Unite
WNN: Welcome Nude Nigerians
CSC: Cossack Saddle Cabbage
YWB: You Wiggle Beautifully
CUR: Can’t Understand Reality
SRL: Sadist Rapes Limbaugh
MMU: My Mom Ululates
AAJ: Anime Amputee Jamboree
A Volvo wagon (THG-87F), an old Toyota Corolla (IKR-53J), and a little blue Mazda Miata (HAH-19B) drive past.
THG: They’re hot guys.
IKR: I know, right?
HAH: Hot as hell.
Two more cars: TSH-74P, SFH-19N.
TSH: They’re so high.
SFH: So fuckin’ high.
In response to a spate of violent crimes and growing concern that the encampments are breeding grounds for Meir Poznak’s extremist organization, T.S.F.N. — General Command, police today evacuated 1,000 vagrant, drug-addled bards in 251 caravans in southwestern France. More than 40 camps have been dismantled in the last fifteen days, and 700 vagrant, drug-addled bards are being sent back to Jersey City and the Upper Peninsula on chartered flights. Vagrant, drug-addled bards (blindfolded even though they’re already blind) continuously chant The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack on their chartered flight from southwestern France to Jersey City International Airport (on West Side Avenue, at the corner of Culver).
These measures came after bards in southwestern France burned cars and a police station, following the death of a blind, blitzed-out bard who was shot by a husband whose wife had just left him for the bard at a public recitation of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack. The jilted husband almost immediately gouged out his own eyes and became a bard. He continuously chanted The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack (including, of course, this sentence) during his arraignment until the judge threatened him with a laryngectomy.
Bards are also being recalled because of “quality-control problems” (i.e., not blind, vagrant, or drug-addled, lacking chunky chachkas, etc.). Ken Howard, president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), said that he “must reassure disappointed aficionados of the epic and persuade them to once again attend public recitations.” Howard said that The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack owed its first responsibility to the unkempt, hairy, sweaty, heavyset, middle-aged women who’d left their husbands for vagrant, drug-addled bards. The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack has since revamped and centralized its quality-control operations, installing state-of-the-art molybdenum-steel melon ballers for double eye enucleations and a strictly enforced policy of random drug-testing of bards to ensure that they are blind and blitzed-out.
Tuesday: 9:00 PM Eastern
“Vandalizing the Denouement”
XOXO is vandalizing the epic’s denouement, a denouement that’s been foretold and basically guaranteed for thousands of years by blind, blitzed-out bards beating time with their chunky chachkas against jerrycans of orange soda. He’s plying the denouement with drugged sherbet. He’s giving the denouement an enormous military-grade ass-cheese enema.