lunch with the freedom fighters
Quinn and Annalee swooped down and spirited me away to lunch at Atlas.
Q: Explain your business to Annalee, and why it’s conducted in a crack alley.
R: Oh, okay. We sell private equity research as a front for our cocaine-importation business.
A: Do you have prostitutes too?
R: Yeah, but we outsource on contract, so if they don’t meet quotas, we can smack those bitches up.
A: Tell me more! I’m very interested in the sex vertical.
At Atlas we met various other cowboys from the Electronic Frontier. Seth had written an article about Rusticatio Californiana for Annalee’s magazine Other.
Danny: I liked how the article was pitched to the magazine’s target audience. Lots of Latinate perversion.
A: It’s so cute, I think Seth sees Latin itself as a sort of alternative sexual identity.
S: I –
D: No, shush. I think we should be able to establish this from a closer textual analysis.
R: Let’s inject dye into his brain and dissect him.
Q: Couldn’t we just do an MRI?
R: No, I think any procedure he can survive will leave us with lingering questions.
D: This is a radical new mode in literary criticism. You could totally get funding and tenure.
R: It’s just the death of the author.
S: That’s the funniest joke about my death that anyone’s made today –
There was a lot more, but this margin is too small to contain the proof. Don’t be surprised, though, if you happen to see a geek cabaret featuring dramatic readings of the preamble of the GPL, or a slash-graphic-novel about Helen Keller and Anne Frank. Because Helen is deaf and blind and Anne is hiding in the closet, there’s no dialogue and the pages are all black –
