Extras

There is no utility in agreeable people. Everybody loves people that sympathize. Agreeable people are nice.

They listen.

They support you.

They’re comforting.

They tell you exactly what you want to hear exactly when you want to hear it. Don’t we all love these people, the people who shout “Yeah!” when we say something we believe in? Don’t we all love being affirmed, respected, heard? Don’t we all love living in a bubble of support where real people in the real world don’t factor in, and we can pretend everyone agrees with us? Where we can pretend we’re always right, about everything? Take a look around.

The people inside your walls are there for a reason. You may think they’re the best people, but they’re just your people. The world is not confined to the circumstances and education that served you your beliefs. The only thing that loitering inside your own walls is going to do is make it harder for you to approach disagreeable people with anything resembling an open mind. You’re making things worse for yourself. Stand up, speak out, seek out discord.

#

There is no utility in discordant people. Everybody demonizes the other side of an issue. The other side is mean.

They’re ignorant.

They’re heartless.

They’re cruel.

They close their minds to any sort of logic and refuse to listen to what the correct people have to say. Don’t we all hate those people, the people who shout “No!” when we say something we believe in? Don’t we all hate being rejected, degraded, ignored? Don’t we all hate living in a box of horrors where no one understands us, our ideas, and our perspectives? Where not one person will accept us for who we are? Take a look around.

How genuinely ignorant do you have to be to think that you’re always right? Does it really make sense that everyone else who doesn’t see your perspective is just wrong, and that’s the end of it? You have to stop living like your own biggest cheerleader for your own personal solution to the world’s problems. You’re just as one-sided as the people you hate. All hating other sides of an issue like they’re demonic is going to do is make you so isolated in your beliefs that you’re no longer open to new ideas. You’re making things worse for yourself. Sit down, shut up, seek out reason.

#

There is no utility in reasonable people. Everybody appreciates those who consider both sides. The reasonable are respectful. They’re considerate.

They’re realistic.

They’re mature.

They take the world as it comes with an open, unbiased perspective. Don’t we all admire those people, the people who ponder and test the ideas that we believe in? Don’t we all appreciate being stimulated, challenged, engaged? Don’t we all see the value of someone who will always think carefully, and go back and forth and back and forth on all different sides of an issue, searching for the best possible answer?

Take a look around.

Haven’t you been listening? There is no best answer. There is no right answer. The world is a wad of loopholes and exceptions and backstreets and dead ends. Nothing is two-sided, or three-sided, or any number you could think of. There are too many people. There are too many possibilities. There are too many circumstances for any one thing to be right. “Better never means better for everyone . . . It always means worse, for some.” Trying to find a perfect solution is just spinning in a circle until you can’t bear it anymore. That’s why no one does it, that’s why we all pick a camp. You’re making things worse for yourself. Stop talking, stop thinking, stop trying to seek out what’s right.

#

There is no utility in opinions. There is no utility in debate. There is no utility in change, or progress. There is no utility in dreams, or extremes, or beliefs. There is no utility in crying into your pillow at night when the world seems too much. There is no utility in anything I have just said.

You can only be part of a system for so long before you start to realize it’s broken. You can only look at a picture for so long before you start to hate it. Nothing is good forever, so nothing is good at all. That’s what you get when you look at society: a mess of people trying their best to fix something far beyond repair.

#

So that’s the world we live in. Find a way to be happy, I guess.

“You have ten minutes.”

“That’s not a whole hell of a lot of time.”

“Shall I make it five?”

“Well, if you put it that way . . . I just wanted to say I really appreciate you taking the time to . . . ”

“Tick, tock, Mr. Rogers.”

“Paul. My friends call me Paul.”

...............

“Well, I suppose I should begin.”

“Please do.”

“I’m sure you’ve been pitched hundreds of scripts over the years...”

“Thousands.”

“And you’ve probably bought only . . . ?”

“From a pitch? Four have been optioned.”

“And produced?”

“None.”

“Wow! Better chance winning the lottery and making it on my own.”

“Your story...?”
“Yes, well, it’s sort of like Fatal Attraction meets The Usual

Suspects.”

“Interesting comparison.”

“Don’t you think? The main character is named Lenny. He’s your stereotypical nice guy who gets taken advantage of by his boss, his friends, and even his wife.”

“Mr. Rogers, I’m afraid I’m not hearing anything original.”

“Hold on. We’re still in Act 1. One gloomy morning, as Lenny is leaving for work, he catches the deliveryman tossing his paper into a puddle in the driveway. This event carries him off the deep end. He has a mental meltdown and decides it’s time to get back at everyone who has ever wronged him.”

“All because the newspaper got soggy?”

“It’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back. His first target is his boss, Sam—a cruel, overweight man, with a receding hairline and bad skin. The previous winter, Sam, in fearing for his job, had sabotaged a computer program and had the blame cast on Lenny, which in turn gets him demoted.”

“I see.”

“Told in flashback.”

“Flashback?”

“Yes. To augment the suspense. Lenny severs the brake line in Sam’s car. The following morning on the way to the office, Sam crashes into the highway divider and is killed.”

“It sounds like a bad episode of Matlock.”

“I realize it’s a tired way of murder but you have to understand the character. Lenny is a first-time criminal whose mind hasn’t yet had the time to warp and devise more nefarious schemes.”

“Well, I certainly hope he’s a fast learner if you want to audience to hang around to the end.”

“No. He gets better at it. After dealing with his boss he then targets his friends.”

“What did they do to him?”

“Played a prank on him in high school.”

“Wait a minute. How old is this guy?”

“Thirty-nine.”

“It must have been some prank.”

“They stole his clothes while he was taking a shower in the gym locker room.”

“He kills his friends 25 years later for stealing his clothes? You’re going to have to work on the motive for that one a little better.”

“Don’t be fooled. Traumatic grade-school experiences can have lasting effects on kids.”

“But he’s friends with them now?”

“It’s a close-knit community. No one moved out of town after finishing school. Over the years he has maintained his friendships.”

“All right. I’ll play along. What does he do then? “Well, it involves a car.”

“Back to the car?”

“I know. I’m working on it. You can only have so many car crashes in one town before eyebrows start to raise. Anyway, soon after Lenny’s promotion, his friends decide to take him out for drinks.”

“Promotion?”

“Yes. Now that his boss is dead, someone had to fill the role.”

“That’s lazy.”

“Excuse me?”

“Lazy. Lazy writing. It’s too neat. The underling that murders his boss and is rewarded by obtaining his position. I’ve read it hundreds of times before.”

“Can I get back to the story?”

“Tick tock, Mr. Rogers. You’re not impressing me so far.”

“As I was saying, Lenny goes out drinking. Even though it is supposed to be in celebration of him, his buddies, Tom and Jerry, end up doing most of the drinking...”

“Tom and Jerry? Is that supposed to be some sort of joke?” “No. That’s their names. I can’t help it.”

“Yes you can. Meet Lenny’s new best friends, Tom and Steve.”

“Fine. Tom and Steve get so drunk that they are barely conscious. Lenny drives to Landing Lane bridge, a turn- of-the-century structure that is barely sturdy enough for cars. Lenny drives the car off the bridge. It’s not much of a drop to the water so he is able to pull himself from the vehicle before it sinks. His friends are too drunk to escape.”

“The End?”

“Not quite.”

“His wife?”

“Exactly. She has been cheating on him, thinking he was too stupid to know...”

“Hold on a moment. That is your Fatal Attraction angle?”

“Yes.”

“Have you actually seen the movie, Mr. Rogers?”

“Well, no, but everyone knows what it’s about.”

“Making cross-references to movies you haven’t seen is not the best...I think it’s time for us to wrap this up.”

“I’m about to. So Lenny kills his wife...” “How?”

“He drops a hair dryer into the tub while she is taking a bath.”

“Oh come on, now! Surely you could have thought of something a little more original! Most hairdryers these days have safety devices built into them. They shut off when they come into contact with water.”

“This was a real old one. Her mother’s.”

“At this point the only people left in theater are going to be the masochists.”

“So now that his wife is dead Lenny expects to feel liberated. All of those who have done him wrong are dead. He should feel great. But he doesn’t. He realizes the wife’s lover, a real son of a bitch, needs to die as well. Only then will Lenny be able to live in peace.”

“Perfect. Just what the audiences wants to see. The main character killing someone else.”

“I’d like to think of it more as justifiable homicides.”

“The End.”

“Slow down. The clock on the wall says I have one minute.”

“Fine. You mentioned the story is like The Usual Suspects. I fail to see the correlation.”

“The bad guy in that movie. The one Kevin Spacey played . . . ”

“Keyser Soze.”

“Yes, him. Thanks. Now, before you say anything, I did see that movie. Lenny, like Keyser Soze, gets away with all of his crimes. That’s the link.”

“That’s great. The two people left in the theater will be happy to hear that the main character, a serial killer, who is not sympathetic in the least, has gotten away with all of his heinous crimes.”

“So after he kills the lover, Lenny settles back down, finds better friends, a more rewarding job, a new spouse, and lives happily ever after.”

“Roll credits?”

“Yes. Roll credits.

“There is one thing I am mildly curious about. How does the wife’s lover die? Have you thought of another crafty car crime? A potato in the tail pipe causing the carbon monoxide fumes to overwhelm him?”

“You really want to know?”

“Why not?”

“Are you considering optioning my script?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“All right. The lover—he gets shot. A .45 with a silencer screwed on so that no one will hear.”

“Any special way?”

“No. Though the chest. Dies quickly so he can’t identify the killer.”

“Does it hurt?”

“I’m not sure. I hope not. For your sake.”

I encourage all employees to make themselves feel more at home by bringing personal items to the office and I try to leave the matter of decorating one’s workspace to the discretion of the employee whenever possible. However, recent events have made it necessary to draft the following policies and guidelines regarding desk eels:

1. Eels should not distract co-workers. Bringing an eel to work can be a powerful act of self-expression, particularly when it can perform tricks or is brightly colored. However, it should be remembered that this is first and foremost a place of work and eels that bare their fangs or attack people may be considered to be intimidating or disrespectful by your coworkers. If your eel exhibits such behavioral problems, please leave them at home.

2. Eels should be attended at all times. Many employees like to bring their eels to the lunchroom where they can compare notes and chat with fellow enthusiasts. Though we encourage this sort of camaraderie, we have experienced increasing problems with people leaving their eels in the break-room sink, in cupboards, or forgetting them in other places throughout the building. As a result, the janitorial staff has to spend precious time every morning trying to reunite them with their owners. Just like everyone else, the janitors have a job to do around here, and looking after your eel isn’t it. Please keep your eel either at your desk or in the designated aquatic play pen outside the copy room.

3. No poisonous or electric eels of any kind. This should go without saying.

4. Do not feed other people’s eels. While your eel may enjoy an occasional Ritz cracker, other eels may be allergic to salt or on a strict macrobiotic diet. So though well intentioned, feeding another person’s eel can cause bad blood between co-workers. There was an incident just last week where one employee fed a colleague’s eel a piece of his turkey sandwich, not knowing that his co-worker was trying to raise the animal in a vegan environment. This resulted in a formal reprimand being entered onto the first employee’s permanent record.

5. Do not allow your eels to eat other people’s pets. It is often said that there are just two kinds of people in the world— eel people and clam people. While the eel people definitely seem to be in control around here, that doesn’t mean that we should be disrespectful respectful to fellow employees who are clam owners. And the best way to show respect is to not allow your eel (or indeed, encourage them) to feast upon the clams of others. We all have to live together, folks.

6. Do not name your eel after co-workers. Though most people are eel lovers, there are those who consider them to be ugly and menacing in appearance, so to name your eel after a co-worker may give them the wrong impression. Also, please try to refrain from giving your eel any names of an ethnic origin that you yourself are not a member of.

7. Eels, yes. Water moccasins, no. This goes even for non-poisonous water moccasins. A snake is not an eel and I’m sure we can all agree that there’s something fundamentally wrong with a snake who can swim on top of the water. Also, no wolf eels. They aren’t true eels, anyway, but rather members of the Anarhichadidae family. Antisocial and surly by nature, the last thing we need around here is to let a bunch of wolf eels set the pace for company morale.

I don’t mean to ruin anyone’s fun, but if we all observe these simple rules of eel-etiquette, I’m sure we can all be efficient and productive workers while still having a good time.

Conversation at a Party

1) Where do you work?

2) What train is that off of?

3) Where do you live?

4) What train is that off of?

5) Oh nice, that’s not a bad commute!

Workday Lunch Options

1) Bowl comprising of a grain, a protein, and two sides

2) Single meatball parm hero, serves 5

3) $18 build your own salad

4) Cold chicken you made on Sunday night in a fit of anxiety

Things to Make Sure You Have Before Leaving Apartment

1) Keys

2) Wallet

3) Phone

4) Earbuds

5) Portable charger

6) Overflowing recycling bag 7) Overflowing garbage bag 8) Did I say keys?

9) Shoot, keys, just to be safe 10) Keys, where are th-?

11) Keys, OK we’re good

Roommates

1) Craigslist user maryqtxoxo@yahoo.com

2) Guy you went to high school with

3) Girl you went to college with

4) Guy that’s kinda dating girl you went to college with though he’s not on the lease

4) Seriously, what is going on there, should we have a meeting?

5) Ugh, it’s whatever

Conversation with Stranger on Subway

1)

Conversation Ordering from Coffee Cart

1) One medium coffee, black please

2) No, no cream

3) No, no sugar

Sporting Events to See

1) Yankees vs. Mets at Yankee Stadium 2) Knicks vs. Nets at MSG

3) Rat vs. rat at 14th St. Subway Station

Things to Do Before Jaywalking

1) Look left

2) Look right

3) Look left

4) Look right

5) Look left

6) Look right

7) Yell “We got this, c’mon.”

Moving Apartments

1) Call a moving company

2) Find out you procrastinated too long

3) Ruin four of your closest friends’ day

Leaving New York

1) Say you’re thinking about LA

2) Never do anything

The stones wait, forgotten amongst weeds and brambles and drifts of dry, cracked leaves, as snow gently falls, blanketing over them in a hushed hiss. The names carved into them have all worn away, only the traces of dates and symbols remain. A single half skull sits in the midst of their uneven ring, browned and cracked, dug up by some animal and left to rot in the open air. Its eye sockets look up to the bright gray sky with hollow silence.

The snow falls all day and covers the small, neglected cemetery in shimmering white. It continues to wait for night to come as the snow slows, then stops. The light fades into a peachy, golden, afternoon. It glints off rooftops in the slight distance, a village or town that has forgotten the others that used to live there. The sun sets a dull red.

Darkness sets the snow aglow in the light of a half moon, cold and blue and beautiful. It falls on her face, a soft gray translucency, against the starry sky. She walks over the ground without steps, the dark strings of her hair streaming in the brittle, bitter wind.

She passes through the stones, long fingers sweeping against their tops, recalling names that no longer matter to anyone else, including her own. They help her remember and stay rooted to this world instead of the next. She is not ready to leave yet and has not been since the fire and all that came after.

Her eyes, deep pits of shadow, show just a pinprick of light at their centers, blinking and fading, like slowly dying stars, staring past everything and piercing the nothing beyond. Her mouth, wide and thin, is frozen in a cracked and unforgiving frown. She is empty now, so empty, a pit of gaping, aching, craving, need.

There is only one stone she stops for, one stone she sits by, one stone she touches with a longing, soft, sigh. It is a small stone, a little cross that lists slightly to one side. She hums to it and weeps for it and watches it as the hours while by.

Then she hears the cry.

That pale gray head turns at the sharp, wailing, sound of it, piercing across the snow covered clearing beyond the graveyard. She knows that cry. It wraps itself around her heart and she is moving towards it, fast, a blurred shadow among shadows.

She is remembering that cry from before, a hungry sound, a plaintive sound, full of desperate longing.

In the clearing, set in the middle of a different kind of stone ring from the monuments she left behind, is a small bundle. The cry from it is growing weaker, sadder, as though it knows that no one is coming for it. She looks down from her grayness and sees a small, pale, scrunched, face, with lips turning a faint blue. Tears have frozen to its cheeks as the mouth lets out ragged, hiccupping sobs.

“Shhhhhh.” She says to it, her voice cracked from disuse. “Shhhhhhh.”

The child stops crying and looks up and smiles. It reaches two arms up to the gray figure who stoops and lifts it into her transparent arms. She looks into the child’s eyes, blurry with tears, as it sticks a chubby hand into its mouth for comfort. It sucks on its fingers listlessly, eyelids drooping, it’s wracking breaths slowing to ragged, shallow ones.

She coos to the child, whispers soothing nonsense and nothings. She knows it is a girl child, sickly, so small and pale for her age. It is cold in her arms but she does not feel it. She only feels the weight of it, the little limbs grasping at her, the round head pressing against her arm that is not, technically, there.

She takes it away from the fairy circle, back to the dead forgotten stones, to the place where her own daughter is buried. She sits in the middle of the faded monuments and rocks the baby whose eyes drift closed. She sings it a lullabye and touches its icy, round cheek. It makes a soft rattling sound in its throat and goes still.

When its eyes open again they are dark like her eyes, with tiny pinpoints of light deep within. It looks at her with knowing now, and smiles with tiny, sharp, glittering teeth. It is gray like her, empty like her, and it is hungry.

She smiles and takes it towards the village in the distance, the village it came from, the village that left it to die and rot, alone, among the stones.

She takes it to feed.

Native New Yorkers know him as DADDY KNACKERBLASTER, jovial spirit of their mighty metropolis, and one can think of no figure better-suited to personify the diversity, vitality, and modernity of this grand city than a garrulous, periwigged white gentleman of the 1700s, in his tricorn hat, breeches and buckled shoes!

As you approach the hustle and bustle of AMUSEMENTS FURLONG, it’s hard to miss the 60-foot tall effigy of a guffawing Knackerblaster bestriding the gates of the New York World’s Fair like a colonial Colossus! The merry mascot is flanked by a pair of equally vast folkloric sidekicks, both of whom may already seem outlandish, even alarming, to modern eyes - the aggressive, racially-insensitive Lord Goose, and the perhaps even-more troubling Ma Turkey, of whom decency precludes any further elaboration.

Looking at her now, towering over the happy crowds at the Fair, with her formidable meat cleaver, sharpened sickle, and over-generous supply of eyes, it’s hard to believe Ma was once as popular as Santa Claus! As it is, she stands as one more sobering reminder that the Past, for all its sassy trappings of knights, pilgrims, and bucolic slave laborers, also plays host to a veritable shit parade of creepy and shameful traditions, rituals, habits, customs, and excuses; all of which tends to cast our illustrious forebears in a less than admirable light. Thank heavens for the bright and certain Future, as celebrated here in this sprawling spectacular festival of forwardness!

‘Howdy yez’aaall!’ is the cheery and historically-accurate greeting that awaits every visitor who buys a ticket and passes between the vast natural arch of Daddy Knackerblaster’s powerfully akimbo legs on their way to an unforgettable experience at this spectacular exposition in the heart of Flushing, NY.

First on any itinerary is a stroll along the GREAT RAINBOW WAY, where visitors can sample cultures as different and yet alike as the concave and convex sides of a spoon! This colourful celebration of the Triumph of Democracy in the World of Tomorrow is as American as pumpkin pie, Martin Luther Kong, and the moon!

On your way to GAY NEW ORLEANS – a flamboyant LGBTQX salute to the Big Easy and its laid back ‘come one, come all!’ attitude to alcohol, drugs, and sexual experimentation – try not to miss the SMARTCAR DODGEMS, or the aptly-named SCREAMING CENTIPEDE – a ghastly and perverse surgical experiment given a mischievous World’s Fair spin!

Other attractions include the CRIMSON TOWER - where visitors can ‘experience’ for themselves gruesome CIA ‘special rendition’ techniques such as piss-boarding, the ‘Toenail Clippers’, ‘Noise-Crash Monday’, and the terrifying, emasculating ‘Pants Invader’ – and SINISTER THIBET, where Buddhist monks at the end of their tether, self-immolate in spectacular fashion, while soldiers of the Red Army frown upon this ancient inexplicable culture of weird ceremonies, sacrifice and idolatry.  

The world’s oldest collection of prophylactics, excavated at the Jamestown colony, delivers a fascinating, indeed stomach-churning, insight into the bedroom antics of the Pilgrim Fathers and can be found on exhibit in the CONDOM CENTER, a building made almost completely of rubber, gas, and whispered promises!

Elsewhere, the spirit of undergraduate frivolity is captured in the starkly-named ROOFIE TENT, while easily-triggered college students are catered to with differently-shaped ‘safe spaces’ in SNOWFLAKE ALLEY, and even ‘safe rides’ such as the COMETRON – a gentle, completely horizontal rollercoaster attraction which only turns up once every 75 years and travels at an upper speed of 3 feet per month.

Other novelty exhibits you must not pass up include NATURE’S SHAME, DON’T LAFF IN THE CREMATORIUM, MIDGET MOCKERIES, PALACE OF MISGENDERMENT, WORLD IN YOUR POCKET, SACCO AND VANZETTI’S KRAZY KOURTROOM KAPERS and the WORLD OF WATERGATE aqua-impeachment ride. 

But there’s more to the Fair than amusements and frivolity. Educational exhibits include the SCIENCE SHACK, KEMISTRY KIOSK, MATHEMATICS IS FOR EVERYONE and the LEARNING CAN BE FUN enclosure, notable for its tumbleweeds, distant mission bells, and the hollow sound of the sirocco.

And here I pause for a moment to come across some Boy and Girl Scouts burying a time capsule they’ve created to show people of the future what life was like at the dawn of the Space Atom Age! The fresh, eager, and ever-smiling faces of these spunky youths offer a brief preview of a coming time where everyone is happy and nothing bad can ever happen again.

The turquoise heated expanse of LIBERTY LAKE offers the ‘freedom to just be yourself’ – but one warning: may contain NUTS! And when I say nuts, I mean nude nuts, let’s just leave it there.

It’s from here, that an ill-advised left turn will bring you, as it brings both myself and my emotionally-vulnerable elderly mother to a corner of the Fair I had no idea existed until I made that fateful decision to follow the left-hand path. A moment I bitterly regret and wish I could erase from history’s storied pages.

The so-called SWAMP OF NATIONS, offers a disconcertingly lifelike panorama of desolation that contributes a bracing note of caution, even dire warning, to the World’s Fair celebrations.

Before us, a crumbling, hauntingly-familiar ruin, half-submerged in the waves, and lapped by a froth of sediment and distressed plastic, turns out to be the Statue of Liberty with a skull for a head! Riptides swirl around the 20^th storeys of gutted skeleton skyscrapers – the hollowed-out remains of the Chrysler Building, the Empire State and Trumpet Tower.

But don’t imagine that only the proud monuments of Manhattan that have been brought to their knees by years of decay and damnation!

Nearby lie the shattered fragments of the Seven Modern Wonders of the World, now merely the Seven Neglected Ruins; here, the Eiffel Tower, partially-melted, snapped at the base by some brute force beyond imagining; there, the Houses of Parliament gutted by fire, the haunt of subhuman bandits and mutant jihadis; a grubby pile of bricks and toilet paper marks the place where the White House once stood, immersed in a spectrum-slicked, and poisonous lagoon from which all life has fled, leaving only a nausea-inducing synthetic parody of existence that flops and gasps in the shallow muck, like a jellyfish filled with needles, ever eager to bite and infect visitors with some terminal malady before it dies in agony under the bilious sun of that merciless sour firmament.

We may deduce, from these glimpses, that the entire world of Tomorrow is but a noxious corpse dressed in the rotting shroud of its decaying architecture.

And it’s OUR fault.

Daddy Knackerblaster himself looms eerily over the desolate gloomscape that surrounds us – but this version of the reassuring figure casts him in a far more ominous light, where he appears to drown in a quicksand of reeking refuse with a knowing, insane leer that seems to implicate us all in what should have been an easily-preventable apocalypse.

The eye-popping exhibit Mother and I have so rashly stumbled upon is entitled THE WORLD’S UNFAIR, and it’s safe to say that while the rest of the Fair celebrates a frankly unlikely future of longevity jellies, jet people, sarcastic washing machines and boisterous pet pterodactyls, this exhibit reminds us in no uncertain terms that there may be a darker side to the world of tomorrow, and offers an alternative look at what life in New York City might actually be like in the year 2050!

A year in which life as we know it will have choked to death on its own ‘infected filth’, according to THE WORLD’S UNFAIR creator, ‘performance commando’, Solomandos Croatoan. In the enfant terrible’s diseased vision of the mid-21^st century, incestuous mutant monsters, bred to live on garbage, will snout mindlessly through the trash and faeces clogging Madison Avenue and Broadway, without ever finding what they’re looking for.

If the sickening tableau of witless crustacean conflict Mother and I are forced to endure is anything to go by, theirs will be a savage future of motiveless cruelty, characterized best by its extreme ugliness and bleak futility.

A gloating Croatoan – ‘I wanted to show them what the future would REALLY be like,’ he repeats continually, robotically - directs our attention, with an oddly spastic and unsettling sequence of gestures and winks, to a filthy crater where a mob of scrabbling crab people are excavating a time capsule that looks exactly like the one I saw those smiling Scouts loading earlier.

Mother and I bear speechless witness for quite some time as the squabbling, imbecilic crab-sapiens, inheritors of a senile, dying Earth, empty from their canister the contents so lovingly selected and chosen by those beaming, can-do youngsters in the world’s past. I notice a recipe for Apple Pie shredded to confetti and spat from churning tool-faces as though it were poison.

Then, chuckling mindlessly, these hideous inbred descendants of that golden generation apply formidable mandibles and nippers to the task of demolishing the worthless memorabilia of a long-gone civilization - devouring photographs and children’s drawings, regurgitating marriage certificates and zip drives filled with classical music and artistic masterpieces - as an ailing, toxic sun sinks, as if to its knees in preparation for a beheading, across contaminated waves.

Mother dies not long after.

And is that a knowing leer of terror and futility I remember on the eroded, imbecilic face of our toppled idol, Daddy Knackerblaster?

Or am I simply alone, with nowhere left to go, no future?

Staring into a merciless mirror.

Don’t take my word for it! Come see for yourself!

The World’s Fair is a thrilling value-for-money tribute to the ideals of our great country and every American should be proud to take part!