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More words from Rob:

Images are Dangerous

How I Got Started in the Horoscope Writing Business

Repeat a thousand times a day for the next thirty years. Get tattooed on the inside of my eyelids. Tell everyone I know to greet me with the chant "You are not a rockstar. You have never been a rockstar. You will never be a rockstar."

But now I return to the present. Release the weight of the past. Spiral back here to the dressing room bathroom at the Catalyst, and prepare to hit the stage for our big show.

In a few minutes I will stand under hot lights, amidst deafening sound, before nine hundred people. I will do this gladly. I will do this with devotion and gratitude, understanding that it is why I have come to Earth. I will not be a brooding, intellectual introvert but an animated, bright-faced extrovert brimming over with joy and exuberance. So help me Goddess. Amen.

I check my face in the mirror to ensure I've wiped away all signs of self-pity. Then I bound out of the bathroom, announcing "Time for the group hug."

George and Amy and Squint and Daniel and Darby gather. We form a circle, like in my old Little League pre-game rituals, and drape our arms around each other.

"What's the secret password?"

"WEW."

"And what's that mean?!" I bark.

"World Entertainment War!" the others chant.

"What's that mean?" I press on.

"Weave Extravagant Wobbles!" they cry.

"What's that mean?"

"Wild Epic Weddings!"

"And what's our ally?"

"Witches' Elegant Webs!"

"What's our war cry?"

"Wish Evolution Well!"

"What's our job?"

"Wash Every Window!"

"How do we get in?"

"Weird Entry Ways!"

As we perform our pep rally, we bend our heads down so that eventually the tops of all of them are touching. Meanwhile, our voices rise in volume until the final reply, when the force of the group sound flings our heads back and causes us to erupt in laughter. The rule is, everyone has to achieve an extended bellylaugh whether or not they're genuinely amused. Tonight, though, no one has to strain to reach the hallowed goal of total hilarity. All of us are feeling some version of the painful deflation and happy release that I feel, the result of declaring our independence from CBS and Will Boehm Management and returning to our scraggly roots.

"OK," I say, "let's go strap me in." All of us leave the dressing room. Amy and Darby head directly for the stage, while Daniel, Squint, George, Marijka, and I take the back way from the dressing room to the lighting booth, which is high above the back of the dance floor. Leaning against the wall outside the booth is an eight-foot black wooden crucifix: another exquisite piece of work by the multi-talented Marijka.

George informs our lighting director Manny and our video projectionist Gray that we're about to launch the show. Gray heads backstage to flick the switches that'll unleash the flood of images which will flow across the big-screen TV we've mounted behind the drums, as well as the other videos that'll appear on the five smaller on-stage TVs.

Marijka goes to the sound technician's booth, where she informs him we'll soon be ready, meaning that in a couple of minutes he'll turn down the taped music that has been playing over the house speakers since the opening band finished a half hour ago. Marijka also grabs my cordless headset microphone and returns to wrap it around my head without interfering with my Pan horns.

Glancing at the stage, I see Gray has already done his job. The giant TV screen is ablaze, through the magic of computer animation, with a scene of Eleanor Roosevelt being crucified on a cross composed entirely of thousands of Barbie dolls that have been glued together into a gnarled mass. Hundreds of pink Cadillac convertibles are parked around the cross, as if at a drive-in movie. Inside each car are moving human skeletons with televisions for heads. Most are talking on cellular phones while they engage in a variety of sex acts.

Daniel, Squint, George, Marijka, and I lug our crucifix down the stairway to the anteroom at the back of the dance floor. There we part the crowd and set the cross horizontally down on the ground. Ceremoniously, I lie on top of it. George secures my wrists to the horizontal arms of the cross with expertly knotted rope.

A gang of onlookers gathers to admire our spectacle. Though I make it a point to remain almost totally in character, keeping a serious, trance-like expression, at the last moment I wink at a cute girljock wearing a yellow jogging bra and mini-skirt.

My four helpers lift me and the cross up to their shoulder level, then carry their load like a coffin across the dance floor towards the stage. The spotlight is on us as we travel.

The titter and laughter of the audience subsides as soon as I declaim through my microphone:

Performance is life! Entertainment is death! Long live the guerrilla therapy of our top-secret revolution! We will succeed where the paranoids have failed! We will take back the airwaves from the entertainment criminals! When you're too well-entertained to move, screaming is good exercise, so please scream along with me on the count of three. Are you ready? 1... 2... 3...

I unleash a giddy yowl, attempting to imitate the ecstatic exclamation I once heard a six-year-old girl named Allegra make as she leaped into a plastic swimming pool on a ninety-five-degree afternoon. The crowd is slow to join me, but eventually the shriek spreads. Finally, hundreds of different styles of scream coalesce in an apocalyptic caterwaul that raises goosebumps and makes me feel like I'm about to levitate through the sheer force of the room's vibration.

My butterflies have given way to endorphins. I'm feeling beatifically electrified and preternaturally relaxed. All eyes and ears in the place, maybe nine hundred people, are turned towards me, and I'm so excitedly at peace with what I'm going to do that I feel no pressure at all. A Buddhist might say I'm aligned with my dharma. An athlete would recognize that I'm in the Zone. In this state I can do no wrong, and yet it's the exact opposite of arrogant confidence. On the contrary, I'm empty. Humble. A big fat zero poised to do nothing more than what I was made to do. All the skills I've been programmed to develop since childhood -- poetry, dance, song, jokes, making people love me -- conspire now to weave themselves together into a single event.

Soon I'll be in the heart of a fuming maelstrom. The martial surge of one hundred decibels of electronically amplified music will be scouring away the accumulated dross of my monkey mind's infernal conversations like a month's worth of zen meditation. I'll be so happily given to the enormity of my assignment that I'll almost forget to breathe, yet I won't be able to afford that luxury because in the heat of the ritual, breath is the most crucial fuel.

Best of all, I'll be executing the appallingly arduous yet fun task of summoning for public consumption the same libidinous blasts I unveil in the private act of making love. It will embarrass and invigorate me at the same time. The expectations and longings of my nine hundred companions will swarm in upon me like a forest fire in a hurricane, commanding, "Be the million-year-old snakegod!" And I will obey. For two hours and forty-five minutes my collaborators will feed me squeals and shouts from their jiggle centers, operating me like a magic puppet, rousing me to dance across the stage in gestures I've never felt myself make before and may never feel again.

In one way I'll be the center of attention, and in another I'll be in a perfect position to be the biggest voyeur of all. No one would ever suspect that I'd have enough attention left over from my duties to spy on the people staring at me. But the forcefully expansive blessing of the revelry forces me to hold a hundred times more perceptions in my organism than usual.

I adore peering down from the stage, my entire body glazed from the exertion and the searing lights, and watching the uncensored faces of the crowd as they use the excuse of the spectacle to unshackle every repressed thought, every tortured question in their hearts. Bursts of telepathy spurt my way, as from a downed power line, and I love it. Right there in the midst of the pandemonium, a wide swath of raw data pouring into and out of me, I will sometimes home in on a specific broadcast radiating from a specific creature in the audience.

"I am the lowest of the low," I swear I telepathically "heard" during our last gig from a forty-ish hippie dancing near the front of the stage. "I abandoned my childhood friend on her deathbed," he beamed towards me. "Let this be my dance of atonement."

Meanwhile, back at ground zero, I'll be stretched as far as I can go: at the limits of what I can do with my muscles, my stamina, my concentration, my creativity, my precision, my everything. As each song demands, I'll sing beautifully or archly or with the savage power of a warrior in the heat of hand-to-hand combat, straining to remember to feel -- not just pretend to feel -- the meaning of the lyrics I'm channeling (even if they belong to imaginary characters portrayed in the songs rather than to myself) and to coordinate them wit off the stage, I'll sigh to myself again, as I have so many other times, that this is the feeling I most want to remember about my stay here on Earth; that when my body dies and my will-o'-the-wisp soul is negotiating its way through the Bardo planes, I will treasure most the exquisite blown-out sensation that comes from blending kamikaze release with practiced discipline.

Slicing a path now through the sweaty, smoky, boozy crowd, my four helpers and I are approaching the front of the stage. Gratefully, I drink in the welter of images flailing from the TVs onstage. On the big screen, the huge feminine hand of God, sporting crimson nail polish and a sparkling silver band-aid bearing cartoons of snake priestesses, is reaching down out of the clouds to feed the crucified Eleanor Roosevelt a bite of a gingerbread boy. Meanwhile, the smaller TVs sport a documentary on Kandinsky's paintings, Disney's Fantasia (the scene where the mushrooms dance), the local 11 o'clock news (the funeral of a police dog), an educational video on childbirth, and a looped sequence that keeps repeating the scene of the guy in the film Dr. Strangelove who rides the falling nuclear bomb through the sky like a bucking bronco.

My helpers slide me and the cross to rest horizontally on the stage, which is maybe six feet higher than the dance floor. Then Daniel and George pull themselves up to join me and lift me and the cross to the vertical position. They lean me against a stack of amplifiers and drift out of the spotlight, where they take up their instruments and start playing an almost subliminal drone. I'm not hanging from the cross, though my arms are suspended from it. My feet are firmly on the ground. Pausing to make a panoramic gaze, I address the throng.

As of now, dear audience, you're being entertained by a hostage crisis.

As of now, you're experiencing a ransom note -- a designer ransom note -- which is also a major news story and a healing advertisement and a ticklish manifesto introducing you to the strategies by which you can prevent the global genocide of the imagination.

As of now, we, the peaceful soldiers of the World Entertainment War, have kidnapped ourselves and are holding ourselves hostage until you meet our demands. And we do mean you. We don't mean some friendly tyrant or criminally innocent celebrity. We are holding ourselves hostage until you meet all eight hundred eighty-eight of our demands.

Here are our first demands:

DEMAND #1: We demand an immediate three-week global boycott of all media. Consume no television, Internet, radio, movies, newspapers, or magazines! Return to the primordial silence for three days or else!

DEMAND #2: We demand that the word "asshole" begin to be used as a term of endearment rather than abuse.

DEMAND #3: We demand that the average length of an act of heterosexual intercourse in America -- which is now an appalling four minutes -- be required by law to be a minimum of twenty-two minutes.

DEMAND #4: We demand that all anchormen cry every time they report a tragedy on their nightly TV news shows.

DEMAND #5: We demand that People magazine do a cover story on "The Ten Sexiest Homeless Americans."

We have eight hundred eighty-three more demands, but there's plenty of time for them later. First we want you to know more about who we are and what we offer.

We are the World Entertainment War, sacred saboteurs dedicated to helping you learn the difference between your own thoughts and those of the celebrities who have demonically possessed you. Our purpose is to save your imagination from the poisons of the entertainment criminals.

On their televisions, the televisions of the entertainment criminals, crude storytellers called "journalists" terrorize you with nihilistic yet sentimental myths that seem to prove the lie, "If it isn't ugly, it's dishonest."

But on our televisions, on the televisions we control, aspiring bodhisattvas tell you funny stories about how to go crazy in the name of creation, not destruction. In our movies and websites and radio shows, holographic reruns of your happiest memories repeat continuously on instant replay, freeing up your libidos to become telepathically linked with thousands of psychoactivists who've already learned beyond a doubt that they are geniuses! Just as you are!

DEMAND #6: We demand the production of a major feature film based on our life stories. Also, a best-selling book, a weekly column in USA Today, and an appearance on the David Letterman show.

DEMAND #7: We demand that brilliant genetic engineers create a mutant bacteria that causes people to hate opinion polls.

DEMAND #8: We demand that you all live up to your full potential.

DEMAND #9: We demand that God be referred to on all future TV shows as a big black lesbian woman. We demand an end to the molestation, exploitation, and torture y.

We, the peaceful soldiers of the World Entertainment War, are supreme patriots! And when in the course of inhuman events you discover as we did that entertainment criminals are pouring trillions of dollars into making the world safe for America's most dangerous images, it becomes necessary to learn very intimately how everyone and everything worth loving -- including our native land -- is an inextricable blend of divine revelation and idiotic bullshit.

Therefore we hold these truths to be self-evident:

that everything we behold with our five senses composes but a tiny percentage of the twenty-six dimensions of ecstatic creation that God and Goddess freshly fuck into being

DEMAND #13: We demand that brilliant American engineers create a machine for measuring emotional pain. We demand that moralists of every stripe use this technology to try to prove that their favorite victims suffer more than the favorite victims of other moralists.

DEMAND #14: We demand that you experience global warming in your pants.

DEMAND #15: We demand that somebody come and cut me down from this cDarby and Amy are singing and chanting:

Your body is bread in a holy war

Change Change Change Change

My body is love in a holy store

Change Change Change Change

Your body is God andoly gesture. By the end, all the band members except Squint join me in illustrating the technique. I'm ecstatic er primordial tongue. Tears that taste like seawater trickle down onto my face from her Neolithic eyes, triggering a reflexive gush of tears from me. I feel the soft prongs of her nipples massaging my chest, and become aware that she wants me to lift my knees so they're clutching her hips. She responds with a flurry of pelvic whirlpools, ratcheting my lingam back and forth from her cervix to her G-spot.

Sweat as thick as pear juice drips down from her neck and makes me glad. I can't stop drinking in the confounding sight of her acute jet pilot eyes drenched with what? -- demonic compassion? savage vulnerability? How can anyone be so tender and so relentless at the same time? Many times I whisper, "My ... body ... is ... yours." As if in acknowledgement, Rapunzel performs the pompoir, rhythmically squeezing my jade stalk with her circumvaginal muscles.

Though I've been privileged with this tantric trick before, I've never experienced mastery like this. Her soaking, rippling, thousand-fold grip oscillates from delicate to firm, from a glissando shimmer to a furious suck, in an impeccably orchestrated rhythm. Warrior vulva. Shaman yoni. Gorgeous cunt that's fully awakened, relentless, and trained in militant playfulness.

Something like an orgasm begins to announce itself at the back of my head. Hers? Or mine? Or both together? My brain is a sky in which sexually excited particles of honey amber and iced rubies are gathering into storm clouds. My eyes are thick swarms of yellowjackets funneling into the heart of the pregnant thunder. Suddenly my legs spring out straight and taut, and every bone in my body stretches as if straining to outgrow itself. For a long time -- ten minutes? -- I am coiled stiff on the verge of a rapturous electrocution. And then I feel the spurt of lightning slam out of that sweet spot in the back of my head, wrap itself like hot oil around my spine, and plummet headfirst into the spongy gel of my scrotum. Instantaneously it swims a million tight spirals then spasms back up my spine like an eel on fire, burying itself in the nest at the back of my brain.

As if on cue, Daniel and George slip into a celebratory dirge, their dark and spangled flourishes pouring through drummer Squint's glistening fountain of cymbals as if to suggest the soul's journey after the death of the body.

Then, as Rapunzel and I trade a secret look utterly free of self-consciousness, and as Amy's flute gently pries open the top of every head in the room, there is for a moment the birth of a new emotion, alien to history yet communal property. No words exist for it in any modern language, though a delicious glimpse of its name emerges from the blend of "compassion" and "lust." It half-materializes, like an angel straining to burst through the dimensional veil.

To find out more about World Entertainment War, the band you just read about, go here

Read Chapter 31