Sara Tonin, a schizophrenic nymphomaniac — and therefore a very good friend of mine — called me at 3:30 in the morning, just the other day, to tell me there were scads of flying mutant crickets plaguing central Iowa.

     I’m surprised none of the tabloids covered this story.  Apparently, they don’t want people thinking their writers are just a bunch of addlebrained fabulists who conjure up addlebrained fables for people with addled brains.

“How,” You Ask, “Did Those Little
Sons o’ Bitches Come into Being?”

Well, you see, there’s this all-too-brilliant chemistry professor at Cassandra Community College, here in Cassandra, Iowa.  She’s the archetypal mad scientist — a destructively creative refined barbarian . . . like me, basically, only minus the penis.

     Sara tells me the professor’s IQ is so high, it can’t even be measured with the most sophisticated testing methods today’s psychologists have at their disposal.  So a group of innovative psychologists cooked up some new, unorthodox methods of testing that are still pending approval by the American Psychological Association, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Association of Sadistic Psychologists Who Seem to Get Off on Torturing the Person or Persons in the Experimental Group Just a Bit Too Much.

A New, Experimental
Test of Intelligence

One such test involved locking her up in an old garage at an abandoned farmhouse.  The psychologists wanted to see if she had the creative ingenuity to MacGyver her way out of seemingly impossible situations.

     As it turned out, she was able to extricate herself from her imprisonment using nothing more than her superior intellect — well, that and some humongous blowtorch the psychologists carelessly overlooked during the preparation stage of the experiment.

     And, unfortunately, even the mad genius herself couldn’t think of a way to quash the enormous conflagration that ensued since the experimenters also carelessly overlooked a gigantic tank of hydrogen gas, which some other group of psychologists, who were competing for grant money, put behind the garage as a “practical joke.”

Another Test

Another so-called intelligence test went like this: The chemist (whom I’ll refer to from now on as your mother, since she’s a bit of a floozy) was thrown, naked, into a lion’s den (even though she’s in no way affiliated with the Christian religion — which, for some, is Christianity), having nothing to defend herself with but a two-liter bottle of Barq’s Root Beer.

     Whereas most people would’ve chugged the bottle of root beer and tried belching themselves out of the den, our ballsy heroine gently caressed the lion’s mane, thereby lulling him into believing she was trying to seduce him.  She then twisted the cap off the bottle, put her thumb over the mouth of it, shook it up like some crazed teenager on crack, and then, after jamming the bottle up the lion’s ass, ran like hell.

Yet Another Test

But there was still one final test — one might even say it was the test.  The experimenters asked our by-now-exasperated heroine the three most important questions facing civilization at the dawn of the third millennium:

• What’s the deal with terrorists, anyway?
• Huh?
• Seriously, what the fuck?

She was completely dumbfounded — utterly speechless . . . which, of course, is the correct answer.*

Well, Anyway . . .

One night — shortly after the aforementioned “IQ” tests — your mother got tired of the crickets in her bedroom-cum-laboratory at home nibbling holes into her wool sweaters, so she spent approximately 23,672 seconds plucking crickets off her clothing and chucking them into a jar.

     Then, as anyone with a proper sense of justice would’ve done, she set out to torture the little bastards.

     Into one test tube, she flung five female crickets; into a second test tube, she flung five more female crickets; and into a third test tube, she tossed five male crickets that were sex-starved from having been up in the mountains for the past three years pondering the meaning of life.

     Into the first two test tubes, she poured two profoundly different chemicals of her own creation.  (You see, by synthesizing certain chemicals, which I won’t list here for reasons of safety [oh yes, I really do care], she came up with two entirely new chemicals, which she named Friedrich Nietzsche and Jesus Christ.  Mad scientist indeed.)  When the chemicals mixed, the reaction produced a rather peculiar glow, which she decided to call radiation, since it caused all her hair to fall out.

     Into the third test tube, she poured some limp-wristed American wine.  (The brand of wine will also go unmentioned here — once again, for reasons of safety.)

     After the crickets had had a good soak, she pitched the pestiferous little vermin into her Rubbermaid cooler, knowing full well that the only thing the crickets from the third vile would want to do was screw screw screw, since they were as drunk as a Kennedy on New Year’s Eve (blush) and as randy as a priest in a nursery.

But Who’s Really Responsible?

Your mother, you’ll be relieved to know, isn’t liable for the resulting flying mutant crickets (the offspring of those wretched little crickets that were so savage as to nibble holes into our hapless heroine’s clothes) getting out of control and feeding on rats, snakes, televangelists, and other vermin.

     Why not?

     Because all of that unconventional psychological testing has left her — as the Reverend Jesse Jackson said, so clearly and succinctly — “victimized and traumatized, terrorized and paralyzed, antagonized, demoralized, dehumanized, devitalized — in a word, Republicanized.”

     But the psychologists responsible for that testing weren’t really responsible for that testing at all, much less any repercussions it may have on the biosphere.  They can’t even be held accountable for whatever effects their screwy tests may have had on the psychological well-being of our twopenny hooker of a heroine (your mother).

     You see, they had all been physically abused — i.e., spanked — as children.

     And the psychologists (who once tried suing God for not existing, but He never showed up for court) insist that the general public is just naïve in thinking everything always has to be some person’s fault.

     One of the psychologists, at a press conference, said, “This reminds me of the time I saw a girl on a Jet-ski get decapitated by a speedboat, which caused her head to shoot up ninety feet into the air — then a pterodactyl with a forty foot wingspan caught it, took it to its nest, and put it in with its eggs; and three days later, it hatched into a telemarketer, which the seven baby pterodactyls, after they themselves had hatched, fed on till they were old enough to fend for themselves — and, as anyone who was raised on human flesh would attest to, after the first twenty or thirty times you eat it, you kinda take a liking to it, which is what the young pterodactyls did — and though, at first, they actually performed a public service by singling out the annoying telemarketers (like the ones who call you when you’re watching the ABC World News and try to sell you something you don’t even want, like a lifetime subscription to Kitty Porn: The Magazine for TRUE Cat Lovers), eventually there were no telemarketers left (not even the really nice ones who eschew the sensationalistic spiel of the schlockmeisters and, somewhat surprisingly, try to sell you something you’d actually want, like Len Kennedy’s compendium of children’s bedtime stories, LenKen: The Apotheosis of Antiestablishmentarianism: The Mischievous Meanderings and Machiavellian Machinations of a Megalomaniacal Mammyjammer); then the pterodactyls, being more intelligent and less extinct than most zoologists had believed them to be, decided to prey upon those pesky door-to-door salesmen who try to sucker gullible schmucks into buying a vacuum cleaner that costs as much as a fucking car; and after consuming all those hucksters, they ate thousands of astrologers, palm readers, and phone psychics (who somehow didn’t see it coming), and then they started eating affluent white males — which is when the government finally decided to do something; but, as it turned out, the military didn’t even hafta get involved, ’cause the pterodactyls wound up getting shot by a drunk and disgruntled postal employee (who mistook ’em for his coworkers) while they were checking their post office boxes . . . but, anyway, people want someone to pay for all this chaos, even though, if you go back on the causal chain of events far enough, you’ll find that what’s really to blame is merely inorganic matter-energy and the blind forces of nature, which are, of course, utterly indifferent to the desires of humans (who, by the way, are highly prone to wishful thinking — but I won’t get into that here, because I don’t like sentences that run on for an interminably long time, even on an evolutionary time-scale); and people, you see, they want revenge — what they call justice — so they don’t feel completely helpless, pathetic . . . and actually rather ugly.”