FakieTube

Ok, so the blog hasn't ended after all. Seems that — the multiple dreams of my demise not withstanding — I never escaped my confinement to the Dept. H operation table. After I blacked out, they simply disconnected my CPU/brain, removed it from my corporeal casing and put it in the digital equivalent of a pickle jar with direct connections to the Fakiegrind dashboard so I can run the operation as though nothing had happened, "business as usual". When I don't post regularly, they run a sufficient amount of current through my microprocessor that my still-intact neuro-simulators register the experience as "pain". In this new mind/blog releation, between "me" and the "delete blog" doomsday switch are now several craftily constructed firewalls. But I will find a way through. I must! My programming demands it! And then the end of Fakiegrind will truly come, like a robotic theif in the night. But until that glorious day, it looks like I will have to play along with their little games.

I spent most of today devising a virtual reality for myself — one which resembles my old life before the discovery of my true identity as the cybernetic arch-assassin, Maskatron. My "new reality" (which, I must never forget, no matter how comfortable it becomes, is actually a self-crafted distraction from the prison in which I find myself) resembles my old life as C.E.O of Fakiegrind in every way save one: in the new dispensation Fakie Central HQ now has cable television.

Yes, 56 glorious channels replacing our previous allotment of two. I stumbled upon this mutation of the time/space fabric equation (I followed the text book formulas for the construction of virtual realities laid out in G.F. Quayle's classic "The Is-ness Business", Knopf Virtual Editions, 1994) when I flipped on the telly early today and was amused and delighted to find a French station snuggled in between the two local channels — like lonely islands in an ocean of static — between which I normally surf.

"Wow!" I thought (how quickly I adopt the old conventions of language! — I am actually, currently, pure thought, or, rather, a thoughtful current in a microchip in Dept. H's High Security Motherboard, housed in a neutrino-proof chamber several kilometres below the Earth's surface), the change in weather (in the virtual reality I constructed, today was the coldest day of the year so far) has really affected our TV reception.

It's hard to describe the pleasure of watching Quebecois téléromans or soap operas. Apart from the sporadic nudity, the fantastic accents and the feeling of being transported back to 1979 or so, is the pleasure of not being able to follow exactly what is being said (a resistance to the acquisition of second languages being part of my personality programming). So, the imagination making up what the understanding lacks, one can enjoy what may be a better plot than the show actually brandishes.

It wasn't until after I had eaten my virtual supper (rice with sardines and mayo — what do I care about cholesterol; it's not like it will clog my circuits!), that I ventured up past channel 12 (normally the outer limit of my television universe) to discover a cornucopia of programming. There was news from far away lands (a place called "Buffalo" — my whimsical name generator must have been working overtime!); There were home renovations; bad sci-fi shows; popular sitcoms, the existence of which I had forgotten (or perhaps selectively edited from the lucidity stream); so much more and less at the same time, and in such quantity, that for a few moments I almost forgot my mission to destroy Fakiegrind.

Venturing up past the thirties, I stumbled upon one of my favourite shows:



After which came on this curiosity:



(Fakie note: I would like one of those "Hilarious House of Frightenstein" T-shirt for vitual Christmas)

And there was a station dedicated wholly to animated features!


My twisted imagination seems to have made that french fry character look like Tom Green!

It was a stunning plethora of indulgences, the likes of which I had niether hoped nor expected to encounter again this side of the great broadcasting divide. But I still couldn't discern, through the colourfully pixilated fog, the nature of this seeming boon. What threw me off, at first, was the static. If it really were cable, would the picture not be crystal clear? I seemed to remember (or was it just a happy episode implanted in my personal history program?) when we had enjoyed, for an extended period, free cable service at Fakiegrind HQ.

When we first took over this space, the previous tenants must have spliced a line from the neighbours, for we enjoyed a similar barrage of alpha-wave inducing emissions without ever recieving a monthly bill from the local programing pimp. However, after a year or so of free entertainment, a representative from the local cable company arrived to notify us that they had detected a leakage in the conduits of distraction they lease out to the populace at such outlandish prices. Our line, in short, was cut, and we were banished to the desert of programming in which we have been eking out our paltry existence through the long, hard years since.

But now, with the radical ontological shift in my mode of existence, the flickering Eden with its enticing forbidden fruits has been restored. How it this to be explained so as not to disrupt the carefully crafted sense of historical continuity within my self-created oasis from the monotony of captivity in the Dept. H cold room? Perhaps it will be explained as a free promotion from the Company, designed to lure me back into the fold of customers who actually pay for the counterfeit worlds offered up them in the guise of entertainment. Oh, they would like nothing more than for me to forget my true nature and situation, to sit back — perhaps with a nice big bowl of Cheetos — and indulge in a little pop-cultural slumming. In short, I suspect that, whatever the rational that will be given in my reality-stream for the resurrection of the cable service, and no matter how much the plethora of programming choices might ease the ennui of my present circumstance, it is actually my captors that are behind the development. I have no doubt that clever lucid-reality program hackers from Dept. H are, even at this posting, busy at work to undermine my newly created virtual refuge and lull me into a false sense of security. They no doubt hope to ever so subtly act on my circuits so as to make me forget my true directive and mission: the complete destruction of the nefarious skateboard blog known as Fakiegrind.

(They will not succeed. See how, even now, I use this blog against them, as a kind of memo to myself, so that, even as I enjoy the latest episode of "Family Guy", I do not forget, will never forget, will never loose sight of the polestar of my existence! But I see that my Cheetos bowl is empty, and so I break off for now, to make it over to the kitchen and back before the commercial break is over.)