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Hello, hello, hello, Show 41!
And to you, our distinguished guests. And fellow Rageaholics. Welcome to the Alien Night Club. I am your host, the nonadjectival Captain Blank.
Check out this short story. It’s called Cobalt of Lightning, A retrospective of power.
Following the presence of cobalt in an executive's phone as they invest in cobalt mining companies while enjoying their hedonistic lifestyle.
Each chapter goes back in time to reveal the step before it. Tracing from the top down, from a penthouse orgy to a child with their hands in the soil, much like a bolt of lightning travels from the sky to the Earth.
That child escapes the mine and through much insanity ends up in Miami where he comes face to face with the person literally holding the phone containing the actual cobalt he himself dug out of the ground with his own 2 hands.
Of course, they have no idea that this relationship exists, as each hides their past for fear of being forced to go back to it.
The kid finds a phone. He finds a photo of a man and assumes maybe it's the owner. So the kid waits and waits and waits and eventually sees this man. He runs to him and gives him the phone. But the man assumes the kid picked his pocket and is now trying to extort him for a reward. So he finds a cop and has the kid arrested. And as the kid is sitting in the back of the police car, which is an EV that has a battery containing cobalt, he picks at his blue cobalt-stained fingernails while the man uses his phone to check his cobalt mining company stock investment and discovers he's gotten very wealthy. He goes into his building and up to his penthouse. He walks out onto the balcony to smoke a cigar, stare at the cobalt blue sea, and get a blow job. Downstairs on the street, he is completely unaware as the cops drive away with the boy in the back. His fate once more dictated to him.
No happy ending.
Because the goal is to deprive you of resolution. Resolution abdicates our conscience. Which allows tragedy to continue.
Cobalt is to smart phones and EVs as dolphins were to tuna producers as rubber trees were to Africa in the time of King Leopold. As the cheddar is to the Na’vi on Pandora.
Are you reading this on your phone?
And so on grinds the juggernaut of industry. Cobalt mines collapse, burying alive the human beings inside them. But at least I can stand in line at the DMV, phone in hand, mindlessly scrolling socials, complaining about my life.
Do you loofah in the shower?
Either way, are you aware of dust mites?
If you are, you’re probably all like, Oh, fuck. Is he really going to talk about dust mites?
Answer: Yes. I am.
And here’s why: Do an experiment: Stop loofahing. Or don’t start if you currently already don’t. Like me. I pretty much never loofah.
Here’s why: loofahing scrubs off dead skin cells. Along with dust mites. Other stuff, too, but for the timebeing let’s focus on skin cells and dust mites.
Now, here’s the experiment. It’s going to take 10 years, by the way, so strap in. Go buy a new mattress. Bring it home and stand it up on its side against a wall. Put a scale on the floor in front of it. Weigh yourself. Now pick up the mattress and read the scale again. If you can even pick it up. You may not be able to. A decent mattress these days is fairly heavy.
The point of the experiment, however, is not to test your ability to pick up mattresses.
The point is to weigh the mattress.
And then wait 5 years. Sleep on it, of course. Don’t simply leave it there leaning against the wall while you sleep on the sofa or on your old mattress. Yes, of course, by all means, sleep on it. Enjoy it.
5 years later…
Repeat the weighing process.
And here’s why: it will be heavier.
Do you know why?
Here’s why:
Dust mites.
Seriously.
Dust mites eat our sloughed-off skin cells. That’s spelled with a O-U-G-H, by the way. Which rhymes with ruff. The sound a cartoon dog makes. It’s not slood, with a long O sound. Same spelling and pronunciation as cough.
Point being — AHHHHH!!!! — that was fast. Point being NO don’t do it again, that the dust mites are all around us. Particularly in our mattress. Because it makes a good home for them. It’s stable. We’re in it 3 to 14 hours a day, depending on what’s going on in our lives. 3 when you’re busy as fuck. 14 when you get done being busy as fuck. And need to catch up. By the way, if you’re ever feeling kinda tired and or hungry and or run down and you begin to feel that funny dry sensation in your nose or sinuses or throat that you eventually recognize as the symptoms of an oncoming cold, declare an emergency in your life so all your family and friends and whomever you live with know that you’re deviating from your normal routine in order to sleep 10 or 11 hours and you seriously need their understanding and support so they’ll be quiet and leave you alone so that you can actually sleep. Because they’ll probably be awake and may need to use the kitchen or the bathroom or do laundry or their phone might ring. There may be things going on that cause noise and can wake you up. So figure out a way to mitigate those disturbances. Use earplugs. And an eye mask. Take a melatonin. Or some Nyquil. A half a glass of wine. Not all together, by the way. Probably pick one. Lest you become a fuckin valium junky and try to blame it on a guy on a spaceship who got internet almost but actually not even close famous for shooting spaghetti up his ass on his channel called American Enema.
American Enema.
What more do you need to know?
This guy is obviously fucked in the head.
So, no, for God stroke Gawd’s sake, do not take medical advice from him. Do not listen to anything he says. He clearly has not one but multiple screws loose.
The point is that sleeping 10 hours often cures that oncoming illness. It gives your body time to marshal its defenses and kill the fuck out of those invasive, marauding virus motherfuckers hell bent on sneaking into your cells and replicating like mad. Like a virus. For about a week. At which point, your body is fucked. It becomes overwhelmed and the virus exerts control.
You get sick.
And you’re sick for several days. During which time you come into contact with other people.
And you give the virus to them.
The virus thereby jumps from one organism to another, where it can do the same thing to them that it did to you: sneak in, multiply, and infect you in the hopes that you’ll give it to someone else, helping it to replicate itself.
For this is how viruses reproduce. They make lots of little virus babies. Literally Jeremy Clarkson little. Tiny. Too small to see with the naked eye. You need a microscope. A good one. Probably university-level.
So, if you think about it, Earth is like one organism and each of us is a component of that organism, a cell. And inside each cell is a virus trying to get out. And the goal of every virus is to dominate the planet. They’re nature’s little ecoterrorists. They run around and Trojan Horse their way into living organisms in which they can reproduce. In the hopes that you will wipe your nose while you’re in line at Trader Joe’s, talking with the people working there how gay it is that the company got sued over metal in the chocolate. It wasn’t their fault. They didn’t put it there. So stupid. Anyway, while you’re hovering your credit card or phone or watch over the payment computer box thing, the checker wipes their nose. Because their nose was itchy. Because it has snot coming out of it. And they’re not sure why. They didn’t eat anything spicy.
But now they have snot on their finger.
They pull the receipt out of the printer and hand it to you with a smile and a thanks!
You take the receipt with a smile and a thank YOU! Because you feel bad every time you watch them bag your groceries.
You fold up the receipt and drop it into one of the shopping bags, on top of your stuff.
You drive home.
You carry everything into the kitchen. You put everything away. You grab the receipt and crumple it up and throw it away. You immediately wash your hands.
Later, you come into the kitchen because that’s where the food is. You bust out a whole bunch of that yummy stuff you just bought at TJs. Cocoa Batons. A box of soup. A bottle of wine. A black and white cookie. You enjoy the food and return to the kitchen to clean up.
You wash your hands.
On your way out of the kitchen, you see a piece of wrapper or a napkin you missed. You grab it and throw it away and go back to the sofa or your office or the bedroom; wherever you need to go now based upon what time it is and what you haff to do now that you’ve eaten and aren’t going to lose your shit.
Your nose is itchy, maybe because you ate wheat or maybe because it’s just itchy. So you rub it with your finger. The same finger that just touched the handle or knob on the cupboard inside which you keep the garbage can. The knob you touched after you threw away the receipt. The one with the snot on it. The snot in which millions — yes, millions — of virus babies were lurking and waiting until they found themselves in a new host.
Which they do as soon as you wipe your nose.
Immediately they go to work. You inhale and breathe them deeper up your nose. Deeper inside you. It’s warmer and moister now. Viruses love that. They don’t like cold. They can live and survive, even when frozen, but their ability to replicate is severely hindered. Which is one reason why hospitals and doctor’s offices are always fucking freezing. They keep the air conditioner on or the heater off in order to make sure it’s always cold in there. Because a lot of sick people come into those places and those places are therefore teeming with viruses.
All of which are looking for a host.
Did you guys read The Host by Stephanie Meyer? It came out after Twilight. It was good. A lot more complex than Twilight so the risk reward wasn’t quite as clear or strong somehow. The problem was that she came in too late. There wasn’t enough time spent with our main characters prior to the inciting incident. So when the incident was incited, I didn’t really give a fuck. Yes, it was compelling in and of itself and the writing was totally fine. The story shone through well. I’m not knocking that. I’m just saying I didn’t have time to get to know the characters. I therefore did not give a shit about what they were dealing with. Which caused me to enjoy the book much, much less. Far, far less. Not way, way less, by the way. Way more is wrong. Stop saying it. And for the love of fuckin bees, if you LOVE bees, STOP saying aircrafts. Jesus. I’ve encountered it twice in the past 24 hours. Same with anyways. There’s no S! I saw that on a comment written by someone in a different country whose English was really good. But they still said Anyways. So Anyways is a virus of its own. It is an informational mind virus. And the same ingroup outgroup dynamics that make people wear those ugly pointed nails, want giant deformed lips and asses, and wear a fanny pack like a Miss America sash are now causing people to be desperate to say the right thing, to be able to know the American vernacular in order to participate in the global conversation. So when they see hear and read Americans saying Anyways, that’s what they learn. Even though it’s fuckin wrong.
The point is that the checker at TJ’s got snot on the receipt and you touched it and rubbed your nose. And now that person’s virus is in you. Multiplying. Trying for the next 7 days to attain critical mass. At which point it overwhelms your immune system. And you. Get. Sick.
Which is why you now need to get high as fuck, hammered drunk, put in your earplugs and put on your eyemask, turn your phone off, and go sleep for at least 10 hours. Give yourself permission to do that. Because while you’re sleeping, your body will repair. That’s what it does when we’re asleep. It has a chance to catch up. To hopefully fix all the stupid shit we did to it during the day. T cells can come out of the factories and go after the viruses. They can kill them and prevent you from getting sick.
You still may.
But you have a much greater likelihood of healing when and after you sleep.
So if you seem to find yourself catching colds a lot, think about a few things: Hygiene – how often do you wash your hands? Sleep – how much do you get on average per night? If it’s less than 6, change that. Nutrition – how good is your diet? If it’s a bowl of cereal in the morning, a donut a couple hours later, burger and fries for lunch, a Snickers around 4, and a huge dinner, followed by popcorn, cookies, chips, and or ice cream a couple hours after that and very few fruits and vegetables, there’s a good chance your immune system looks just like Amy Poehler down in Endo: hanging on by a thread. And when you add in the additional stressor of insufficient sleep, that thread breaks. Your whole immune system takes a hit. And the viruses capitalize on it. And they grow. And they grow. And they grow. They multiply like tiny disgusting little insects who wouldn’t even mind if they killed you. Because even then they know someone will come along and be forced to touch your body. And they’ll wipe their nose. And the whole cycle will repeat itself and they’ll live on, free to mutate at will just to keep everyone on their toes.
And speaking of repeating, after another 5 years, weigh your mattress again.
Its weight will increase. It will weigh more now than it did 10 years ago when it was new.
Because of the dead dust mites inside it.
Dust mites have a life expectancy, too. So, much like the viruses in your nose, the dust mites are on and in your mattress, feasting on your skin cells. It’s a smorgasbord buffet orgy of proportions both microscopic and epic. They’re in there. Right now. Doing what they do: eating and shitting and mating and making babies and dying. And over time, say 5 years, maybe, billions of dead dust mites are now trapped in your mattress like tiny pharaohs in the tomb of a pyramid.
Oh my Gawd, did he just say Egyptians are worse than dust mites?!!!
No.
They’re like little mummies. It’s a dustmite mass grave.
Does the Earth weigh more now because it has more people on it?
Mattress manufacturers actually use this dust mite phenomenon as marketing propaganda to get people to buy a new mattress. Because it is disgusting and compelling.
Similarly, when you’re lounging around on a Sunday, enjoying life, maybe bingeing a new show and the last time you took a shower was yesterday morning and you find yourself itchy for some reason, it’s because each time you feel that pittle liiiitnch, that little pinch, that’s a dust mite biting you. So you scratch it to relieve the pain. You scrape some skin cells and dust mites onto your fingernails. And then you eat more chips and lick your fingers. The dead dust mites are on your tongue now. Most likely on their way harmlessly to the nearest sewage treatment plant sometime tomorrow.
When you don’t shower, and especially when you don’t loofah, the dust mites have time to multiply. Just like the viruses when you don’t sleep enough. Or when you add in too many stressors. Like stress. Cigarettes. Alcohol. Overlylong bouts of intense exercise. Like of the rhabdo variety. And when you don’t eat, or consume in pill format, antioxidants. All the good stuff found in fruits and vegetables.
Why do you think everyone is so fucking obsessed with eating fruits and vegetables? Because they help your immune system keep those damned viruses at bay. Along with sleep. And sufficient calories. Those virus-killing T cells are made from protein. Just like your hair and nails and muscles. You want your hair and nails and muscles to grow and look awesome, right? Make sure you’re eating enough protein to support them in that. Your hair and nails will grow faster when you eat enough protein versus when you don’t. You will haff to shave more often. You will haff to cut your nails more often. But it will make you feel better, physically and psychospiritually. You can perform better in the gym, better at work, better in your relationship or marriage, and in your overall life.
And all because you wanted an ass like Kim’s. Or abs like Brad’s.
Not because you want to increase your odds of staying alive.
Before you begin doing all that — the extra protein and the thorough daily loofahing — go buy a new mattress again. The one you have is 5 years old. It weighs 40% more than it did when you bought it because it’s full of dead dust mites and that’s disgusting. So buy a new one and weigh it. Record that number somewhere.
Wait 5 years.
Enjoy the new mattress. Keep loofahing.
And then weigh the mattress again.
Does it weigh more? How much more relative to the one you bought 10 years ago?
The point is to see if loofahing decreased skin cells and helped control the dust mite population.
By the way, if you’ve been diagnosed with blepharitis, same deal. Tiny little mites are living on your eyelashes and eyelids. They are feasting on your skin and sebum. Sebum is an oil secreted by our skin. It’s like Nutella to them. Nutella for mites. After they eat your skin cell Nutella salad, they shit in your eyes. And that Nutella and skin cell salad mite shit burns the fuck out of your eyes.
The solution is to wash your eyes every day. Wash your eyelids and your eyelashes.
Because you have those mites all over you. They’re all over your skin. Especially in the really ashy parts like above your ankles and on your lower legs, especially if you don’t wear socks very often. Our clothes help rub dead skin cells off of us. And the mites eat the skin cells. They are part of our ecosystem. They perform a function we need. We are the benefactor of their tiny, invisible existence most people are completely unaware of. Yet they do something we need them to do and we give them almost nothing in return. Most people are not even aware of them and don’t know they even exist. They never think about skin cells and they never think about dust mites.
Just like all the people slowly dying through the mining of cobalt.
By the way, if you have really intense orgasms, is it because you have a lot of them? Or is it because you’re naturally predisposed to that? And that is the reason why you have them so often.
In other words, did you discover orgasm a long time ago and start going to town on yourself, thereby strengthening all the muscles involved in reaching and having an orgasm? Kind of like doing lots of pushups or air squats or crunches or glute bridges will make those muscles bigger and stronger and better at those activities. Sex and orgasm are similar in that regard.
It’s called Time Under Tension.
It’s the fundamental premise of hypertrophy and bodybuilding and learning a new skill like how to walk or how to code or how to hide a playing card with someone’s name on it inside an orange.
How many of you with a vagina also enjoy receiving anal sex? Because having your insides stimulated is part of the pleasure. Which makes it easier to understand why anyone enjoys receiving anal sex.
Stephen King wrote about enemas in one of his books. I think it was It. A character asked his friends if they liked enemas. When they recoiled, he agreed. He said his kid brother loves em.
If you’re a parent, or a sibling, and your child or sibling insists on having an enema on a regular basis, like maybe a couple times a week — or a day — at what point do you become sufficiently worried that something sexual is going on and it’s time to stop?
Or do you encourage your child or sibling to go into the bathroom whenever they like and enjoy all the enemas they want?
And 20 years later, they’re in a Chuck Palahniuk novel attending a group therapy session in an old church and they haff to stand up and say, Hi, my name is Tyler Durden the 2nd and I’m an enema addict.
And the novel is called American Enema. It’s based on a YouTube channel of the same name. Because the owner was abducted by a UFO one afternoon and was taken away while the whole world watched. And Chuck Palahniuk saw it live, too. And he soon learned, as did everyone, about the YouTube channel. So he watched some of the videos on it and actually thought they were pretty good. He enjoyed most of it. A little one-note but still entertaining. And he got to thinking about the person who started the channel. About their life. And about when they started having enemas. Or anything, really, up their butt.
So Chuck went on a voyage of discovery, researching anal fetishes. Which didn’t take long because he already did that a long time ago when he wrote Guts. Humans have a long, proud history of putting things up there. Usually for fun. Including things that don’t belong in there. Like bottles of perfume. Which is why the book cover shows an actual X-ray of a person with a bottle of perfume lodged, trapped, in their rectum. And if you read the book, you find out it’s the same guy who shot spaghetti up his ass before he got abducted. But what people fail to realize is that this is a novel. Not a biography. And that the guy with the enema channel is a real person. Meaning he may or may not have ever had to go to the hospital because he got carried away and shoved a bottle of perfume up his butt. Which is what the protagonist of Chuck’s new book does: he puts weird stuff up his butt and then drives to the hospital and sheepishly tells them what he did. And then a team of people haff to work together to figure out how to get it out of him.
Because, secretly, there’s nothing more erotic and exciting than having doctors put their hands inside him. Not even a cake bearing a picture of a woman going to the bathroom. He drives around to different hospitals, asking them to remove stuff from his rectum. He eventually gets bored. So he simply goes to the hospital he liked best. Where they had the most fun with it and didn’t humiliate him. He is soon spending a hundred bucks a week in $20 copays. He’s worried his insurance will drop him. He gets to know the doctors and nurses. One day the doctor on duty flirts with him while she’s removing the perfume. She gives his prostate a thorough massage while pretending to struggle to remove the perfume. He comes very quickly. He’s up on his knees, with her gloved fingers up his ass, fishing around in there when he grunts, covers his mouth with his hand, and ejaculates semen all over the paper draped on the examination table. After his anus stops pulsating and squeezing her fingers, she goes, Was that good, baby?
He nods because he’s embarrassed but too vulnerable in the moment to be able to lie.
She leans down close to his face, turning sideways so they’re eye to eye and goes, I thought that was so hot. Now let’s get this perfume out of you, okay? Is it a present for your girlfriend?
He shakes his head no.
A gift for your mom?
His eyes bug out.
I thought not. Can I ask you a question? Every night when I come to work, at some point in my shift you show up with something stuck inside you and it’s my job to retrieve it. Is this your way of asking for my number?
He doesn’t say anything.
She looks down at his face but he seems blank.
She begins massaging his prostate once more.
A month later, they’re at her place and he’s on his hands and knees in front of a romantic fire and she’s got her lubricated arm in his ass up to her elbow. And they’re very much in love.
And then what happens?
You’ll haff to read it to find out.
But prepare yourself. It’s liable to be akin to the cobalt story. No happy ending. Happy endings offer resolution. And a good storyteller wants to take you on a journey that may not deliver you safely home, albeit hopefully wiser. They may want to leave you in a place in which you must confront something. You must take action in order to find the happy ending for yourself.
I can tell you that the doctor with the butt fetish and the guy with the butt fetish continue to push the medical fetish envelope. You should see what they do on their honeymoon to Maui. Let’s just say that they visit the hotel buffet and soon take a drive to the nearest hospital.
And the next day, they rent a jet ski and go out zipping around the ocean together. And then it runs out of gas.
But don’t worry, they get picked up by a passing yacht full of millionaires. It doesn’t become one of those survival at sea stories. The Old Man and the Enema.
The millionaires on the yacht invite them to join them. When they get back to the dock, they invite them to their house the next day for lunch. When they get there, it’s not just a house, it’s a ranch. And they find themselves out in the barn helping to de-worm a horse. Which means giving the horse medication and then helping scoop all the dead worms out of its ass. And the millionaires have their arms up the horse’s butt to their elbows, scooping out piles and piles and piles of long white worms. They splash on the ground and get yellow bits of hay stuck to them.
The newlyweds are horrified.
When it’s all over, everyone goes inside for dinner. Wine is opened, that sweet elixir of courage. Weed is smoked, that sweet elixir of short term memory loss.
Mrs. Millionaire invites them to a grand table. More wine. More courage. Let the feast begin.
Mrs. Millionaire serves spaghetti.
So we’ve got slave labor cobalt mining, dust mites, light anal fisting, and spaghetti.
By the way, the best part of 50 Shades wasn’t the sex. People joked about enjoying a bit of light anal fisting. But the best part of the books was how funny it was. Anastasia’s internal monologue was hilarious. Adorable and hilarious. The sex stuff was interesting, of course. But it was a peeling of the onion that was her Fifty. It was a Beauty and the Beast story. A woman sees a beast and looks past that outer visage. She sees what’s inside him.
With the case of Chuck’s medical fetish newlyweds, that’s actually quite literal.
Do werewolves reproduce as humans or as wolves?
Do they mate in human form or when they’re all wolfed up?
If they mate in wolf form, do they have more kids? Does the birthing person haff to stay in wolf mode to carry the pups and deliver the litter?
If they do it in human form, it’s probably one at a time.
Bella got turned. By Edward. He bit her on her neck and turned her.
What if she’d ended up with Jacob? If they’d gotten married and decided eventually to have kids, would Jacob be okay with that? They’d haff to know their child would be a werewolf. Unless maybe it skips some kids.
Were there any girl werewolves in Jacob’s family or tribe? Or is werewolfism a sexist condition?
Which version of Sympathy for the Devil is your favorite?
Think about that. That’s your homework. Because that’s our show!
You’ve been a delightful audience.
Thank you, and goodnight!
Remember to tip your waitress!
Next episode coming Saturday!