Sex, Drugs, and Irony - Chapter 3

By Vladimir O'Reilly

Ruby chose a different path to the same oblivion. She had taken several Advanced Placement classes in high school, and received great marks in every subject. She was first chair clarinet in the band. She was vice-president of the Student Action Committee. She ran for the Varsity track team. She volunteered at her church's food drive every month with her mom, and never lacked for praise in the company of her mom's friends. In short, Ruby sucked at everything that's important in high school.

Fortunately, all that paid off when she earned a really terrific scholarship to a top-tier pre-med program.

Unfortunately, all that went to hell when she discovered the vast personal rewards of saturating your body with alcohol and synthetic chemicals and eroding your genitals on strangers' jeans until one of them gets impatient enough to gorilla-fuck you in his squalid dorm room amidst makeshift cardboard plates of discarded pizza crusts, and other sensual decor. It's not uncommon for girls like Ruby to realize that they possess a range of attributes which go woefully unappreciated in academia; a spectacular rack, for example. Why limit yourself?

Opal and Ruby first met at a house party on West 46th. Ruby was dressed as a hooker. Opal was also dressed as a hooker. The theme of the party was "Hoes on hoes on hoes". It was the second most successful party of the season, after Delta Phi's puppy party. Bitches love puppies.

Opal was playing strip poker with a gaggle of giggling geese in varying stages of undress and two charming young lads named Hank and Theo. One risk of doing what you love is that you may become burned out on something you once felt passionate about. Opal never wanted to feel that way about stripping, so she wisely got naked in front of strangers on her own personal time, which reminded her why she got into stripping in the first place. 

The people.

"I've only seen tits like that once in my life, bro. You know who else has tits like that," Hank probed.

Theo didn't know anyone else with tits like Opal's.

"Your mom," sneered Hank.

Opal chuckled approvingly, impressed that this handsome young man's appearance was matched by his sizzling wit. Her hand found a new resting place on the inside of his thigh. He leaned back with a visible smirk, radiating confidence, and tossed three Queens on to scarred oak.

Another Dark Age

By Raven Sheed

Orbiting around the Earth is an object of ominous properties slowly affecting all forms of life on the planet. Over the past 26 months human culture has disappeared with only physical remnants left behind like a ghostly shadow of what once was. The Mona Lisa still hangs, but in an empty Louvre; The Mexican temples of Chichen Itza stand as abandoned as the time of their civilization’s vanishing- no longer drawing guests seeking answers from the past nor simple tourists hoping for an exotic photo from one of the steps to hang in their suburban American homes; Centuries-old parchments continue once again to collect dust no longer being studied; And the Holocaust museum and other war memorials are no longer frequented by poignant-faced visitors, leaving the memory of the departed forgotten as those very memorials sought to prevent. Development or enlightenment of any kind has come to a slow halt like molten lava flowing down the side of a volcano cooling as it descends. The proverbial eruption has already occurred here. Left now are the effects of the aftermath until the human race’s eventual extinction. You see, The human race cannot survive without intellect; without progress towards something greater; without hope that things can always be better.

On August 20, 2015 NASA detected an unidentifiable object orbiting Earth. There were no clues as to how it got there. There was no indication as to what it was. Just a dark orb slowly rotating with no signs of change. The president of The United States went on television to assure the nation and the world that there was no need for immediate anxiety or panic over what this “entity” was. A state of emergency was declared for the country until more information could be collected or until citizens settled down and went back to their normal lives. This was when strange things started happening. It was so subtly that this “thing” came to hover around human lives, slowly consuming them from the inside out that no one could have predicted that this is how the world could end.

The first sign of abnormality in society was the fact that it did not need this state of emergency. It was only the first week that there were any cases of looting, and oddly most instances of theft were reported from small towns in the Midwest and Southern regions. No major cities experienced any heightened reports of theft or murder. In fact, urban crime overall that first week was down by 10% throughout the country. Reports from other parts of the globe were almost mirror images of America’s. Following this small phenomenon, the news reported congratulations on having national pride and a sense of community in these uncertain times. Morale was high, at least on paper. On the streets it was business as usual. The state of emergency was lifted after two weeks and people went about their daily lives going to work and caring for their families as if nothing were out of place.

But something was. New York City was alarmingly quiet, regardless of there being the same number of people out and about, yet no one seemed to take notice. A month later Times Square turned off the intersection monitors and electronic billboards. No longer were there enthusiastic advertisements for the upcoming Tony Award nominated Broadway shows. News reported that this was due to recent results from focus groups that showed very little economic effect from the advertisements on ticket sales, which had been steadily declining for the past month. Therefore, money was no longer going to be spent on this inadequate mode of advertisement. The peculiar thing being that no one questioned the fact that this particular mode of advertisement, commercials and billboards, had been the most successful way of increasing the sale of a product since their invention. The appropriate experts never appeared on news networks to share their nuggets of wisdom or expertise with the general public. Everyone, it seemed, was being slowly categorized into the general public realm. Even the branches of government, including the president of The United States were immobile in their running of the country, acting like benched high school football players who had flunked out of school and no longer had a place in the game. The president was now spending all his time in leisure, almost as though he didn’t know what else to do. Once again no one noticed this as an outrageous abandoning of his duties. And there were no more late night show hosts to joke about this president taking more vacation time at Camp David than George W. Bush.

Six weeks later language was disappearing. Long distance travel was no longer possible. In short, humans were losing their minds, their abilities to think and move forward. Technology was at a stand-still with many parts of it no longer in use. Television had become a few channels of simple news with no differing viewpoints. iPhone app downloads dropped to 0%. Automobile sales of anything other than standard feature vehicles disappeared entirely. And then the blackouts came.

Now the Earth looks like a larger version of the black orb that encircles it. Humans have become vegetables. Vegetables that will eventually rot into extinction…unless…

Unless I take this vessel of mine and leave this solar system. It is not my place to destroy a species whether accidental or not. This was supposed to be a simple follow-up mission 700 Earth years after our initial scouting mission to explore the planets orbiting closer to the sun. This was the first one with signs of intelligent life and we could not have known how our simple presence in their orbit could have affected their very existence. There is much to investigate, but I will sacrifice my studies in order that these beings can once again live and be players in the universe.

I am profoundly sorry for my interference. End transmission.

Sex, Drugs, and Irony - Chapter 2

By Vladimir O'Reilly

This chapter is about Opal, not Tim Pullman and his erotic misadventures. Opal's parents gave her a stupid name, but it's not her fault so try to cut her some slack. No, Opal and Tim are not going to fall madly in love later on, don't worry.

If I could summarize Opal's life in one word, it would be "a dazzling montage of human achievement". She just got fired from her waitressing gig when she snatched a cigarette out of a stubborn customer's mouth and took a few drags to relieve the stress she had built up trying to get him to stop smoking in the patio area. She's taking business courses at a community college. Because she wants to run a business.

That's why Opal was electrified to get in on the ground floor of the new McDonald's they just built on the corner of Harbor and Danish. Opal was the best damn drive-thru girl them McDonald's boys had ever seen; to their dismay, Opal quit after just four shifts. Fat Agnes the night shift manager was delighted, but she was a real bitch. One time she told Opal to "lick her ass" when Opal came in two minutes late from an impromptu lunch break because she was getting nailed by Rick Terrence behind the dumpster. Ricky was renowned for his proficiency at picking up chicks through the drive-thru window; what's an honest girl to do? Slick son of a bitch invents some brilliant innuendo concerning pickles, thirty seconds later a man and a woman discover that they love each other very much on a sticky patch of pavement behind a trash bin at a fast food joint and knock ankles. In some circles they call that the "magic of lovemaking". Beautiful, isn't it?

Her parents were furious. "What have we always told you, Opal," they cried, "no matter what you do, be the best at it! Even if it's flipping burgers, you go out there and be the best flippin' burger flipper out there!" This gave Opal pause. "What if it's being a stripper," she replied thoughtfully.

Turns out Opal was a phenomenal stripper just waiting for the chance to unleash her talents on the discerning strip club community. Within three weeks she'd earned enough money to get out of her temporary living arrangement giving free lapdances to this oily older client who always ordered poutine, although it hadn't been a bad setup. He never expected anything more than a lapdance, or at least he didn't say anything if he did. Guy just wanted to eat some gravy fries and watch a plump, attractive young girl bounce her ass around. Good for that guy.

Opal's best friend and roommate was Ruby. Their relationship emerged from the sparkling interpersonal dynamism that occurs when two people discover they both have names inspired by gemstones. Their burgeoning passion for reckless cocaine consumption was the means by which it flourished.

Sex, Drugs, and Irony - Chapter 1

By Vladimir O'Reilly

If there's one class of people I truly loathe in this world, it's the optimists... although I wouldn't call myself a pessimist, and I'm not one of those assholes who smugly calls himself a "realist" and then marinates in the stunning cleverness of plaigarizing exhausted clichés while all of his friends silently resist the urge to break his teeth. No, I would call myself "not an idiot"; it retains all the arrogance of naming oneself a realist, with none of the elementary wordplay. I don't know if this is important, but I also tend to break the asshole's teeth instead of allowing him to marinate. Silently resisting urges gives me a headache. Some people say you're supposed to drink a lot of water when you get a headache. Sometimes I break those peoples' teeth, too. Usually my headache goes away.

It happened at 11:17 PM on May 18, 2000 AD. It wasn't anything of particular importance, but I wanted to use a literary device to draw your attention to something trivial because it made me grin when I did it. Maybe now you'll take care not to gloss over this part and forget it later, thereby depriving yourself of the profound revelations this thrilling literature is bound to produce later on. That would be foolish. This is the second least important part of the book.

I was staring with perverse fixation at the most luscious assembly of human flesh I'd ever feasted eyes upon. Or maybe I was just seventeen years old and super backed up because I hadn't beaten off once in the last forty-two minutes. It's hard to tell with these things. She was idly chatting up some douchebag with an eyebrow piercing on the fringe of an orgiastic throng of suburban white kids demonstrating the volatile chemical collision of drugs, alcohol, and aggressive adolescent hormones.

There was a time when dancing was considered an artform, an elegant physical expression of music and the human soul. I wasn't around then, but it seems boring. It also seems less like the “End of Days” than a pack of ecstasy-riddled teenagers sweating all over each other in one of their parents' basements, but you won't hear me complaining.

Anyways, I didn't really know what to say to this magnificent broad, so I just stood there, looking like I was trying not to piss my pants.

To this day, that's one of my signature moves.

The good thing about these types of gatherings is that no one notices when you're standing alone in a corner because they're way too busy utilizing passable social skills and substance abuse to find someone to slowly erode their genitals with. I wanted that erosion. I needed that erosion. So I flailed out for the nearest thing that felt like a container of alcohol on the table behind me, carelessly toppling seven plastic cups of dirty beer and plastic spheres in the process. I launched into action like the goddamn Batman Himself and managed to rescue four before they spilled, suspending them at various critical angles on the table with my right foot raised eighteen inches off the floor for some reason; balance maybe. I like to think I was making an excellent impression.  

The container that made it into my mouth first carried an invigorating blend of cheap vodka and some gummy worms. Flush with the all the rich swagger that accompanies an exquisitely crafted beverage, I cut across the dance floor towards my target.

"Oh... Hey, Tim."

I wasn't expecting such a warm reception. I still didn't know what to say, so I decided to go with a compliment.

"Nice shoes..." Not off to a great start, "...do you wanna fuck?"

To this day, that's one of my signature moves.

And, in the glorious sexual chaos which defines the aforementioned chemical collision of drugs, alcohol, and aggressive adolescent hormones, it worked. Fuck your eyebrow piercing.

Unfortunately, all that vodka decided to have its way with me right about the same time I was going to clumsily have my way with her, and I passed out with my forehead resting on her pubes. Allegedly.

That's another Tim Pullman signature; and, despite consistent use of the first two manuevers, it was a year before I got an opportunity to try the third one again. High school never forgets.