Pallet of Awe, Missouri. A fragrant young medicine vendor arrives at the house of Chuck and Prima Mitterand, laved of late in the sweltering Rio del Sol Aniformo, the River of Sun Unfolding. "You must harness your wants and clip your frenetic limbs at the joints," he says, lest they consign themselves to a similar pattern of laving forever. They purchase manuals and hide behind stable doors thinking, thinking, wanting but not appreciating, listing to grandeur, listing to pride, and thinking, thinking, thinking.
Soon they divorce and own up to the random in life, the passacaglia mischief even in lounging, and purchase rewards commensurate with their feelings of envy. Chuck learns to be a boy and befriends other boys and soon they are all achieving stasis by the wayside as Prima drives by enhanced by the surgeries most elegantly propounded by such creatures of dredge-and-suction as the Drs. Guigui Priff-Mews, Lambertine Shrovemanshipt, Panical Beef, and Horseblende Puriah.
Claim To Muffledness, South Dakota. A treasure of molluscs unfolds in the sweet summer twilight, invading the township, grinding against the bumpers of favorite cars and less favorite cars, causing a ruckus to be dismissed only by Red Hatcherado, a fantasy man whose briefs send the molluscs reaching for flags promptly lowered by councilmen wooed by the brightest of no-nonsense gift-shop owners; the molluscs, bright in the stripes, leach themselves into flavor-dust and are sprinkled on Howie Muscularity, who earns such raves in his new, mollusc-flavored form as will definitely shred into asphalt-brick-flesh-concrete strands the town of Claim To Muffledness, South Dakota--tomorrow, when Howie stands up.
Ankh Putsch, California. Eighteen-wheelers sand this reporter classically, dutifully mending his flick-of-an-eyebrow dismemberment with the totallest worm of the muddy season, the annelid Corrigens corporis, a worm you don't, however, want to season by humoring it in a truckstop ribs place, for it will then regale you with its nudity, shucking itself lengthwise into rawest strips which will harm you, downright harm you, in front of your dutiful trucker friends who have only always meant to adorn you, you know. This reporter checks out with a somber wave at his new Asian boyfriend, Toast, and settles in for a ride down the saddening stretches of laid-low canvas vendors who litter the coast like so much argent math.
Disco, Utah. Free beer entails the release of unquestionably false myths of origin into the slick, crime-happy skies full of each other hovering, staid, in those skies, dressed in khaki and wine, absorbing said myths with a puppy-dog look for a long time, intent on the curvature of one another's earth, which one can perceive just barely, in the distance, with the use of seventeenth-century instruments of navigation and perception. Do you see it? When you first saw it, were you surprised or did it glide into your life like a leaflet into Hiroshima, like a flutter of leaflets into Hiroshima? How many of you were there at the time? Were you discrete? How many now? Discrete?