It’s easy for the newcomers to get lost, or if not lost, a little confused. It’s rather like walking along a familiar trail in the woods you’ve followed for years when, suddenly, a giant pit is in your way, and inside that pit is a couple hundred scorpions feasting upon the remains of a wooly mammoth, which had recently come alive and walked the earth for a good hour, hour and a half before succumbing to cancer and the aforementioned scorpions. It’s a fascinating sight, entertaining, gruesome, but rather likely to put a hesitation in your step, a jolt in your day.
 So keep in mind, when you gaze upon the multi-headed, faceless beast of the new age, that when you do meet your maker, you can always look at these guys and say At least I was better than them, yeah? And although you may not ever call your woman friend a cumdumpster and your gay friend a gayfag, or spend three hours at a time involved in an active conversation about the merits of pedophilia and whether or not dogs enjoy sex, you’d be completely wrong.
 Time to dissect the metaphor a bit, though, so let’s go back to the pit- not everything about this is bad. Maybe there’re some nice flowers along the edges. In fact, let’s say the corpse is of a rapist, who recently killed three hundred schoolchildren in a bombing. Would that make it better? He’s still being raped by scorpions, but I mean, rapists, those are bad people, right? Criminals and the such. So there’s a pit full of flowers and rosebushes and a rapist getting raped by scorpions. But… that doesn’t really work either. So, pit, flowers, rosebushes, rapist, scorpions, but these are all sitting atop a pile of corpses three hundred feet high, but those corpses are all the Nazis responsible for orchestrating the Holocaust. Which, really, leads up to Alois Hitler, and to stop him, you’d have to stop his father, and so on, until all of humanity is wiped off. Or we could just stop at Alois, but that’s like stopping at Philosophy, right? 97% of all Wikipedia pages may lead to Philosophy, but what page does Philosophy lead to? Masters behind masters, that’s what we’re getting at here. So to properly represent, this image, you’ve got to have a nice, pleasant scene (that includes a dead rapist being raped by scorpions) on top of some gruesome, but good scene.
 By now, this shoop is getting a bit crowded, and I think I may have overshot my reach here; let’s backspace. Not actual backspace, though, the correct keys would be ctrl+z, or you can click Edit and then Backspace. Let’s try- this is a portrait. A portrait of a concept you need to describe, alright? Metaphorical and shit. You’ve got the terrible, terrible things everyone hears about- the hacktivists, the child pornography, the death threats, pictures of corpses being raped and plain old rape scenes and all the Guy Fawkes masks, but then you’ve got the good in it. You’ve got the homeless man who was beaten to death by the cops, and people are protesting it. And you’ve got the decent advice board, not to mention all the information flowing through the clogged tubes- it’s not just a den of opium, it’s music and cartoons and social interaction. It’s otaku, really, although if you’re a westerner that concept makes as much sense to you as the above four paragraphs. It’s the life you have when you don’t have a life, except, it’s only one of the many, many sub-lives you can define yourself by. And you can plop your ass down in front of that screen and stare and type and imply and look at pictures of cats, or you can comment on YouTube videos and use MSN and AIM or you can look at Facebook and go on Reddit and look at blogs on Tumblr, and you can fit comfortably into these things. You can feel these things, almost physically, and you can be defined by these sets of actions. That’s what this is, yeah. This is a subtype of many subtypes, this is where you try and dive in without any guides to help you navigate this way. You don’t know why the text is green, you don’t know what I mean, you’re not sure of anything, really, but this is about identity. And this is about poorly written words, and the past twenty, twenty five years, and this is about wasted lives and wasteful lives and beta males and, as always, pedophilia. There’s a point when something becomes too meta, and we passed that about twenty minutes ago, right before we passed the Tennessee state line, and after we passed three dead immigrants in the grass next to a police cruisers- resisting arrest and all that.
 Eventually we’re going to hit Canada, or a highway barrier, and this tape recorder will keep on recording as we fly into the air and I scream and curse those beatnik gods that told us you could discover yourself on the road, but seeing as how there’s eight, nine of us cramped into these two cars, I figure there’s enough good stories sitting in this party van to satisfy the most curious of journalists, before we can disappear somewhere with Wi Fi and a concert area that hosts enough Radiohead concerts to soothe corgis. And that’s corgis, a person, not corgis, the pet breed, although corgis has a fond love of corgis, despite never having one. I guess if we’re going to be forging ahead with this whole identity thing, we’d be calling him corgis!3FoouW4vto, plus it would help the whole Three Stooges name confusion thing. corgis!3Foo goes on /mu/ and the chans and thus has developed a startling hatred of popular music, people who can’t name all the albums of their favorite musician, and homosexuality. He maintains that 4chan is what caused him to become so dick-friendly, and his boyfriend supports him. They both curse themselves for ever going there, but they seem pretty happy together and I’m not one to judge hypocrites, and you’ll see why later, because I’m running on about three grams of medicinal grade cocaine and I feel like I could clean and jerk a Volkswagen, and there’s no voice to tell me I can’t. There’s a couple of voices in my head though, and that’s what leads me to narrate this story, because the atmosphere in here is about fifty percent THC and Streifel doesn’t look like he’s going to be putting the bong down any time soon, so in a couple of hours I’ll be desperately trying to convince the other people in this van that the cars following us are FBI informants trying to steal my teeth. This is the thing that people tell me is a sickness, this is what makes me ramble and talk and this is the voice you’ll be hearing for the remainder of this story, and there’s shit I can do about it but talk. We’re in a rent-a-van we picked up in Tampa and immediately afterwards voided the warranty, and we’re crazy as fuck and socially dead and we’ve got hearts of steel and brains of mush, we’re the mistake kids and we’re riding a car to our death or California or Canada, wherever we feel like getting off, and there’s not a single fedora amongst us.

 This is important, so let me emphasize. Let me explain Jones’s Law. Jones’s Law is named after Indiana Jones, and is very simple. It states this:
Every time a group of socially awkward people meets (4channers, bronies, internet friends), there will be exactly ONE (1) fedora per TEN (10) people.
 That’s it, and it’s entirely correct. There is only one exception to this list, and it’s /fa/ meetups, because /fa/ is 4chan’s fashion board and the people there carry deep, burning hatreds for fedoras and all those who wear them, which will ultimately culminate in a /fa/ir lady being elected President, leading to a national Hatocaust.
 In the party van, at least the one that I’m in, there are no fedoras on any of the six of us. There’s Max, who’s too old for a fedora, Shaun, who had one but got it stolen, Striefel, who doesn’t need a hat to get laid, me, corgis!3Foo, and corgis’s boyfriend. I don’t know the story of corgis!3Foo and co., because we just picked them up in Tampa from a couple of park benches and I haven’t had time to interview them yet. I suspect one of them might have a fedora stashed somewhere, but doubt it, because corgis!3Foo’s doesn’t look like he could pull it off and his boyfriend looks like a hipster, and hipsters wear trucker hats, not fedoras. But then again, not being able to pull off a fedora is the entire reason why Jones’s Law exists, and why nerds keep wearing them, so I’ll have to keep an eye on corgis!3Foo’s head and make sure he doesn’t pull any funny business.
 Voice recorders are a tricky business- since my hands are shaking so hard, I can’t write or type worth shit, so I have to talk out loud to tell any kind of story. And since I’m talking aloud, everyone in the car can hear me, and corgis!3Foo is giving me a dirty look, I think because of the fedora comment. And I need some kind of material to hand to some kind of publisher so I can get some kind of book deal so I can get some amount of money so I can get some kind of hotel room in some kind of town where there’s a bustling black market and a lack of fedoras. A total, complete lack of fedoras. I’ve had enough fedoras.
 So… Shall we begin? Because I promise that when you get down and dirty and trawl the tubes and understand the kind of shit we put up with, not Afghan-child-dirty-water kind of shit, but pretentious, entitled, societal bullshit, maybe you’ll understand where we come from and why we’re going and what I’m saying, or maybe you’ll just put it down because it’s too confusing, or you’ll abandon all hope because you really didn’t think average people were capable of these things, and you’ll hop off a thirteen story building like my friend Ethan did after he gave me his dog to take care of, and all we’ll have to remember you by is a chalk outline on the ground and an unpleasant smell in the air.


 Part 1
 Van – EFG
 Name- Max (Maximillian Cacavale(Ed.’s note: HAH))
 Aliases: Mr. Listen, Edward Elric, Megaman X

 There are six billion people in the world, you know that? Nearly seven billion now, I guess. Seven billion, and we’re all told we’re special and unique. I mean, you’d think, seven billion souls, more all the time, they’re all coming into this world, they’re all their own person, their own mind, their own personality, that’s a lot of people. That’s a lot of possibility. So it makes you wonder if everyone is really unique.  I mean, humans aren’t especially bright. We’re not very varied. You get a group of a couple hundred people, a good majority of them will be similar. So we get seven billion people- how do we know if we’re a unique person? How do we know we’re not just some kind of archetype? You grow up, and you like football, you like girls, you go to work 8-5, you feed your family, you feel like a man- you’re not you. You’re some other guy. You’re a hole, a cutout in the world, and through you shines the dull light of some overbearing personality. All you are is a projection of this, you’re just the hollow shell that holds some generic thing.
 But why is being generic bad? We’re taught to be special, not to be just like everyone else. So we like to believe we’re special, not just cutouts of one of the seven or eight hundred different personalities, and we take pride in that. But someday you come to terms with how plain you are, and you’re repulsed by yourself and society and people in general, because we’re just a big factory of identical products shouting ‘I’m different!’ and actually believing that. We’re repulsed because we’re so generic, but why is generic bad? Generic is bad because everyone is supposed to be special. Because being generic is bad.
 I was generic, once. I still am, you don’t grow out of it, you don’t escape it, it reaches out its grey, dull tentacles to you and sucks you into its void again, over and over, but I’m less generic. Because you scatter a limited amount of personalities through seven billion people, you get a couple outliers. I know about outliers. I used to work with outliers, I used to work with numbers, but then I realized about the factory. It went like this, and this story is entirely personal, so I expect it to be stricken from this tape if you actually do manage to get some kind of book deal.
 Imagine, if you will, being a white male, born in the United States in 1971. Horrific, I know. Terrible. The worst fate imaginable. But imagine growing up, the situation you’re in. The best economy anyone’s seen in decades. Cocaine abuse rampant, Wall Street reinvented with the suave businessman image, the development of computers, the Gulf War. Pop music and the inventing of the Internet and all those cool things you kids have no idea about. Imagine you grow up with a nice Christian family, doing nice Christian things, with nice Christian values, and you grow up into a nice Christian yourself, and you’ve got a wife and a couple of kids and a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence and a dog named Spot. And your wife is a lovely dull lady by the name of Meredith who stays around the house because, you know, women aren’t supposed to work, really, the men should take care of everything. And to support this wife and these kids and this house and the fence, you get a job doing numbers in a big investment firm, you check the books, you write some checks. You’ve got a comfy life. Comfy, I guess, that’s the word. For a while, I had to struggle to find a word for that kind of life. Because I always felt a little off. I felt three yards away from my mental destination. I felt like I was working hard on an account but I just couldn’t come up with the right thing, even though I knew what to do with it, my fingers wanted to move, were bursting with energy, but I just couldn’t think of it, and everything that came out was stained with wrongness.
 It’s comfy, then, I guess. It’s comfy when you wake up at seven and feed the dog and come to the kitchen to see your wife pack the kids off to the school bus with a kiss and a smile and do some dishes with that same smile still on her face, frozen like stone, and she’d stay like that all day, washing dishes until her hands bled, unless you give her a peck on the cheek, tell her you’re leaving, and she’ll get happier and wish you a good day and go to the living room, put on a soap opera. It’s comfy when you leave and come back nine hours later with her still sitting on the couch, that faint smile still lingering on her face, Oprah or Dr. Phil or some kind of talk show on the screen in front of her. It’s comfy when you stand in the doorway of your nice two-story suburban home and just stare at her, this woman you married made of stone, content to sit in a chair all day and watch TV, content with her role in life as dish washer and TV watcher. When you struggle to remember why you married her, when you first met her, what shone in her to you, I guess that’s a comfy life, too. When you’re sitting in your bedroom, hearing the kids traipse around downstairs, and you loosen your nice tie and put your head in your hands and feel tears leaking out of your eyes for no reason, that’s what comes with a comfy life, I suppose. And when you pull into the driveway the next day, in your suburban vehicle, the dinged up garage door and impeccable lawn and nice curtains all shining in the setting sun behind you, that feeling you get when you just wonder about what it’d be like to pull out and drive off, forever, not looking back, I guess that’s comfy.
 Everyone tells themselves they’re happy with the lives they’ve got, because the alternative is admitting your life is shitty, and we’ve all got egos. We deal with our lack of families or our nice comfy families and we tell ourselves, this is how we deal, this is how we get by. This is what we do, who we are, and if you leave, you’ll never get anything as good again, you know? That’s the voice in our heads. Because we’re all similar.
 So imagine a day at the end of a three week long heat wave. Temperatures hover at a hundred and three, the sidewalks are hot enough to bake cookies on, and the grass is wilting and brown. You wake up this morning, and the air conditionings out. After two hours of wrangling with the A/C company, you hang up the phone to turn around and find your wife, but she’s not your wife, she’s this old, wrinkled lady, with makeup slathered on her face, running in the heat, and she’s sitting on the couch fanning herself with take-out menus. You go to give her a peck on the check, but you literally cannot step past the boundary between the kitchen and the living room. You stand there and stare at this monstrous heap of a person sitting on your couch, smiling, watching TV, in this heat, and you just turn around and walk out. Head out to your car, put it in gear, drive out to your office across town, where you’re greeted by the chalk outline of one of your nicer coworkers on the sidewalk outside, where he fell thirteen stories to his death. And when you get inside, you’re told that the stock market  crashed overnight, and you’re no longer needed at this company. They let you collect the few pictures you had at your cubicle before armed security guards nearly pick you up and haul you outside, where you’re sitting on your ass inside your car with cops walking around and your former coworkers staring at the sidewalk and gossiping. You put the car in gear, and drive back to your house across town. You park in the driveway. You stare at the garage, the windows, the lawn. You imagine your wife sitting on the couch, dehydrated, watching Oprah, fanning herself with those menus, smiling a meaningless smile. Content with life. You sit in that hundred degree heat and stare at the house until your vision blurs and your chest tightens and you’re having a fucking heart attack, in your car, in the heat, and you curl up in the driver’s seat and you’re there for six hours. You finally come to, sitting in your garage with the car off, and you unstick yourself from the leather, you open the door and step outside. You walk in, grab the dog from his spot by the living room couch, and walk out. Put him the back seat. You get in the car, put it in gear, and drive away.
 Three months later you’re getting hotboxed in a rent-a-van with a bunch of teenagers you met on the internet, and you realize, most people are the same. And I’m not content with being most people.