The United States of Conspiracy

This guy is insane and he damn well looks happy.For roughly as long as grass has been a greenish hue, give or take a few years, people have been concocting elaborate conspiracy fantasies to transform their mundane lives into extraordinary super bowls of psychosis. The real world may work for some people, as in normal people, but it doesn't work for everybody. So what's left for you if you're a member of the disenfranchised minority? Carry on with the drudgery of a pathetic existence regulated to work and self-loathing, or become the center of a tumultuous maelstrom of egomaniacal paranoia and fantasy? Obviously you do the sound thing and give yourself first billing in the biggest mindfuck to never actually come out of Hollywood. This is the role of a lifetime, and unless you immerse yourself in it and give an Academy Award performance you're going to be the failure of a lifetime. Forging a livable insane conspiracy world isn't easy. It takes a lot of hard work, practice, and intricate planning. The last thing you want to do is disappoint a normal person with your primitive and easily graspable tales, not when you can blow the lid of their skulls with the most cunning and ingenious tapestry of madness this side of Scientology. Then, while their skull lids are displaced, you can observe the tiny alien masterminds controlling them firsthand. My god, don't you see it? You're the only one who can save humanity!

Like all things in life, such as winning the lottery or inheriting a vast untold fortune from a relative you never knew, becoming insane takes a lot of work and sacrifice. More than anything, it's a lifestyle choice. Just as people choose to be obese or gay, people also choose to live a life of madness and dementia. They don't live this life in shifts or get the weekends off. No, they take it all the way, like a porno star or somebody on the way to the bank. Immersing yourself in an imaginary world of conspiracy is a fulltime job that haunts you every waking moment of your life, not to mention while you sleep and probably even after you die. Really, it's an inescapable phenomenon, much like the fanfare that surrounds my hero, The Humungus from "The Road Warrior." In short, craziness is as encompassing as a body bag or a coffin filled with cockroaches and gobs of basement mold.

I'm sure this is a reasonable explanation for this strange picture.You may think this sounds like a massive headache made up of smaller headaches the size of atoms, but it's far from it! If the laws of physics have taught us anything even remotely worth quoting incorrectly at a dinner social, it's that for every action there is a reaction. The upside to being handicapped with madness is that you can't carry on a normal job and have a pretty good chance at either getting free money from the government, or at the very least being too mentally deficient to notice how shitty your life actually is. I don't know about you, but not having a normal job and living oblivious to any actual pain and suffering sounds pretty spiffy. That's not to say the maddening road less traveled is all fun and games, because it too is lined with dangers and sources of stress. Each little conspiracy world comes with one or a handful of obstacles, or occupational hazards as they are commonly called in other careers. Where madness really shines is that these occupational hazards tend to be the singular focus in life. Rather than notice the real reason your life is shitty, you focus on pretend things. Let's face it - you can't be insane without something driving you mad. Being insane has to start somewhere, so, if it's a path you're interested in perusing, read on! Or, to put it a better way, what's driving you mad?

Electromagnetic Fields
The wired age's bedsore is the overwhelming amount of crazy signals cascading through the air hopping from satellite to satellite, antenna to antenna, and wire to wire. These signals are taking shortcuts through your brain just like the General Lee takes all the right shortcuts through Hazard County. This intrusion alters your chemical balance, causing really bad earaches. The only cure for earaches is to clean your ears out, and that requires doctors and therefore incomprehensible medical bills. Naturally you can't work and have no choice but to spend the rest of your life posting messages on the Internet complaining about how everything has gone to hell. The one exception is when you log off to periodically change your homemade tinfoil diaper. In the land of loony, this is considered a cop-out since your fat ass is probably collecting unemployment yet you're still cognizant enough to use the Internet - an Internet that is probably just as guilty of ruining your life as those vile cell phones people use to call for help with right after they get in a cell phone related traffic accident. Don't you worry about the doubters, though, because you'll be wrapped as tight as a Chinese egg role squeezed into Lycra. In other words, too tight to notice.

Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka
There is nothing more sinister than going online with hopes of taking advantage of the great knowledge stream that is the world wide web, only to have your dreams snapped in half like stool legs under the weight of a fat, oil-guzzling American aristocrat like myself. Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka is the filthy drain hole of the virtual universe, sucking everything into a dirty place where even light fears to shine. He routinely annihilates lives with his "awful link feature" dedicated to mercilessly mocking innocent civilians, or as Rich calls them, "the scum of the Earth upon which I do my dirtiest business!" Once wronged by Kyanka, the only recourse is to vow revenge by basing your life around a multi-phase e-mail campaign that loosely translates to slowly waddling your way through the Hotmail.com directory until you've informed everyone that Lowtax is the Osama bin Laden of the webiverse.

Leave it to a chart to put everything into perspective. Government Mind Control
The CIA, with it's nefarious programs "MKULTRA" and "MKULTRA: Tournament Edition for the N64" continues to devastate thousands of lives. Poor, unsuspecting people are being taken hostage by foreign thoughts and instincts that go against their morals and ethics. This type of mental subterfuge is humiliating, debilitating, and, like underwear made out of Velcro, extremely uncomfortable. Who knows, you could be one of them. Chances are you've bought something you didn't need on impulse or done something you didn't want to do. Sure, you could chalk up another victory for human error on your special chalkboard, but that's the easy way out. A renaissance mad man would attribute these lapses in judgment neither to whim nor mental disorder, but to the government! Just as the EMF victims seek support by overburdening the Internet with their problems, so too do the mind controlled masses. Apparently the CIA's invisible hand holding and peer pressuring capabilities are powerful enough to get you to do and say things against your will, but not enough to keep you from blabbering like an idiot about it on the Internet. I guess that's a step up from spilling your spoiled thoughts into the microphone of a Wendy's drive-thru, since it does provide terrorist sites like Something Awful with plenty of stuff to make fun out. If business is good for us, business is also good for the cake industry. We love to enjoy cake.

Aliens
As out of this world as it sounds, many people claim to be victims of an extraterrestrial conspiracy. If advanced intelligence and the ability to travel great distances in space are good for one thing, it's finding new people to molest. The whole alien abduction syndrome is a very affordable conspiracy world to buy a timeshare in, not to mention one of the most inviting. Unlike other plebian conspiracy worlds, this one has a much grander scope, because it exceeds the diameter of this Earth and reaches deep into the blackness of outer space. A fellow could go pretty darn insane living in a world as lush and exciting as this one, what with the aliens and the UFOs and the government cover-ups. You also get to do fun things like role play that your phone is being tapped or that the NSA is reading your cookies in hopes of creating a profile on you based on your Amazon.com shopping habits. The problem with being an alien abductee is that at certain points you'll start to black out and lose track of time. Then of course you'll be so mentally incapacitated that you can't work and you certainly can't answer your phone because you never knew who might be listening in. I guess you just have to decide if being at the epicenter of the most important conspiracy in the world is worth all the hassle of the occasional random anal encounter and total lack of privacy. If you're not getting much action, and chances are you're not, it's probably a step in the right direction.

The Hot Weathergirl on Channel 7
Come on, she's sooooo hot! And the way she practically controls the weather! WOO WOO! She can rain on my parade any day!

The Upcoming Apocalypse
A long time ago God commissioned a group of mysterious men to write his biography in which he gave his tips for clean, healthy living, shared some witty anecdotes about putting people through hell, and described the fate of the human race. This book, the Bible, ended on a down note by more or less predicting absolute doom for everybody living. Sure, it eventually talked of a happy ending, but not until people suffered through a whole bunch of bad things. Lots of plagues, a famine or two, and a giant seven-headed dragon that's not really a dragon but a metaphor for another metaphor for something that may or may not be a mountain or a snake or a dune buggy. The bottom line is that trouble is spelled out in big bold capital letters, although in the vaguest way possible. Since whenever the Bible was written people have been mistaking every upcoming event with the foretold tribulation. Hell, plenty of people even assumed the year 2000 would be the end of the world and that Jesus would come speeding out of Heaven in a solid gold SUV while others figured the sky would open up and rain herpes and canker sores on the doubting masses. Historic landmarks and important events are always on the horizon, and the world needs plenty of people to declare each one to be the end of the world. You could be one of these people!

This picture, in addition to being the reason 3d graphics were invented, helps put a dynamic face on mental illness. GET IT? FACE? That's a 3d modeling joke. LOL!Whatever it is that makes you insane is really irrelevant in the next part of your journey. In a weird twist of irony the sentence I just wrote is more irrelevant, so in actuality whatever it is that makes you insane is still relevant, especially come next sentence. If you buy a house you have to furnish and decorate it, and the same goes for a pet or a child or an insane delusion that puts those around you at risk. Many people think that insanity is a dark and lonely place, and while they're right in the bold, general sense that they're right, it doesn't mean you can't convince yourself otherwise. Succumbing to madness doesn't have to be cold and impersonal. In fact, you can make it quite homely and welcoming. You just have to remember that for every nice thing you imagine for yourself, you have to imagine at least one bad thing. These bad things take on many forms, such as the shadowy conspirators who make your life hell, the invisible radio signals that give you earaches, the aliens who stick things in your ass, or the CIA that forces you to buy drugs to support its vast and illegal overseas operations. These kooky characters are all part of the neighborhood when you live in the town of Delirium. Another way to make your deranged conspiracy world more pleasant is to come up with a fun slogan you can snappily spout whenever somebody has the misfortune of getting stuck in a conversation with you. Go ahead and proudly proclaim, "I'm an abductee, but at least I see!" or "the CIA may pervert what I do, but I still see true!" This slogan is like the "home sweet home" sign and lets others know that you're really settled in and that you're comfortable in your squalid piss hole of a life. You'll want to come up with your own original slogan, because I'm no sloganeer.

The most crucial component to being insane is controlling and directing the flow of your deranged spiel. When you talk, you need to be able to get a lot of information out fast, because people around you are going to quickly move away. It is absolutely important that the information you present to them flows. To clarify, you need to have a Point A, a Point B, and a whole shitload of madness sandwiched in the middle. Point A has to connect to Point B via an inexplicable chain of faulty logic and made up facts. Regardless of its construction, this chain must be solid so that people are strung along through each link. For example:

Did you know the government is phasing out the penny? It's true! The US Mint is under pressure from the heads of a secret cabal of world leaders and alien overseers to begin eliminating the penny so that by the year 2012 none will be left in circulation. Why? Because the penny features Abe Lincoln! Abe Lincoln is responsible for the Emancipation Proclamation, and once he and the penny are gone the government is free to repeal it marking the return of slavery. When that happens we'll all be slaves to the New World Order!

Clearly Point A is the extinction of the penny and Point B is the return of slavery. Both are shocking concepts that are easily connected through the chain of illogic. To truly be considered insane, you must master this art of crazy chaincraft. People are only going to listen if you get in their face and tell them the harsh facts that you carefully plucked out of some malfunctioning crevice of your brain. As a crazy person this is the one thing you have to nail, otherwise no one is going to know what kind of freaking lunatic you really are. The last thing anybody wants to see is someone so pathetic they can't even get being a goddamn nut down.

If you put everything into perspective, living a life of madness isn't that bad a choice. It takes a lot of dedication but also provides ample reward. Consider the snow globe. It's a little dome filled with a picturesque scene, water, and glitter. When you shake it, you get a nice little snowy scene. When you're crazy, it's just like living in a snow globe, except your snow globe is broken and everything pretty is replaced with dread and misery. You're all alone in a broken world choking to death in an inhospitable environment. But hey, you don't have to work and you get to have freaky hallucinations without the aid of drugs so it's all good. In short, GO CRAZY!

Lesbian Vampires. No Clever Title Needed.

Well what do you know, Ben "Frolixo's Husband" Platt has a new movie review up on the good old Internet of A! He "punished" himself by watching a movie called "Vampyros Lesbos", which sounds quite fetching in that the title has both a word commonly associated with sucking and another word sometimes associated with another kind of sucking. Seeing as how I just learned to copy and paste, let's see a sampling of what Ben has to say about it:

There's been a lot of talk lately about this Spanish/German/Turkish movie. While it failed to make waves when it was released in 1970, "Vampyros Lesbos" was rediscovered in the Nineties and has since been enjoying underground success around the world. It ends here. I have the rare opportunity to make a difference with one of my reviews, and I have to take it before anyone else refers to this piece of trash as a cult classic. Yes, cult classics can be campy and low-budget, but they also have to be entertaining. The most entertaining parts of "Vampyros Lesbos" are the totally pointless shots of a kite flying, and in a movie with two relatively attractive women making out with one another, that's saying something. Specifically it's saying that this movie bites.

Ben would very much like it if you read his review, and so would I because I want whats best for poor Ben.

– Josh "Livestock" Boruff (@Livestock)