The World Turned Upside (Again) – Fiction

The World Turned Upside (Again)

by Kerry Joyce
illustration by Tom Powers

Associate Publishers Note: The writer’s deadline for the January issue came prior to the New Year, while the actual printing of it was in early January. Therefore, the following is essentially a pre-millennial address to a post-millennial readership. Some of the information contained herein is based on conjecture and did not undergo the usual stringent fact-checking.

“My greatest fear in life is that no-one will remember me after I’m dead.”
-some dead guy

First of all, I want to say how very proud I am of the entire Lollipop staff, as well as our stalwart and plucky vendors, who’ve helped make this issue fully Y2K compliant. While those devil-may-care whippersnappers over at the Economist and The Wall Street Journal wonder “Where oh where did we go wrong?,” you have in your hands the proof of our commitment and dedication.

Your own Y2K planning might well’ve been a bit more slipshod than our own. We admittedly have to credit “Just Nigel,” an otherwise unremarkable and anal-retentive Y2K zealot of an intern we had who didn’t shut up until we hacked off one of his limbs and used it as a starter log for our wood-fueled power generator during the second big black out.

“Just Nigel” carried the day, to be sure. And he can have his four-CD a week job back if he really wants it. Thanks to his incessant nagging, while others founder, Lollipop and her loyal crew remain on course.

Let me say, however (and it may seem self-righteous coming from a man with a palate still coated with the delectable sheen of mystery grease, the result of having just scored and quickly devoured a black market sausage McMuffin with cheese for $14), that family pets, even if they’re not your family pets, are beyond the pale. Not just dogs and cats either. Even down to and including aquarium fish. There are standards that decent, civilized folk must uphold even in these (for you) dark hours.

I’m no Martha Stewart, but I did hear her on a special government radio broadcast from her plantation in Maine. Her advice was to remain calm and that household dust is mostly made from human skin – an excellent source of protein. Eureka! Our market niche may not have as much disposable income as readers of Better Homes and Gardens, but from the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream Waters, our dear Lollipop readers, God bless ’em, have more dust bunnies than just about any demographic alive. And if you happen to be the kind of Lollipop reader who’s running a bit short on dust bunnies, well, you were a poseur anyway and will have to make your own way.

Beyond a full stomach, another thing that might help ease the tension would be some scapegoats. I’m thinking the Germans. I mean, all that stuff we’ve had to listen to, on and on, about Gerrrrman Engineering and Farfinfuckingnugen. What’s it buy us now? A skin sandwich, that’s what.

They know they’re vulnerable, too. Look: Right before the new millennium, there they were, the Lutherans in Germany, sucking up to the Pope-o-Rome. They signed a declaration with the Catholics ending a dispute over salvation that’d lasted 500 years. The Protestant Reformation? Just a misunderstanding. The Thirty Years War? Oops, our fault, really.

As one who was raised Catholic, we were always taught that those narrow-shouldered Protestants would come begging for mercy eventually. I just never thought we’d show them any. I always assumed that, at the very least, we’d make them all get a carelessly-applied mark-of-the-beast tattoo on their rumps. For a couple of generations, minimum.

But I guess that’s why I’m a lay-Catholic. That and the fact that the whole time you’re a priest, you’re not allowed under any circumstances to have sex with the nuns, like anyone would want to. They don’t even wear those sexy black outfits anymore.

I’ve decided to handle my own immortality, thank you, while proselytizing to a few select friends. Like Bill Ham, for instance – one who discerning readers will remember wrote a whole big hilarious chunk of this magazine until a few issues ago. Here’s a man who could script dialogue like: “I am ignoring you now,” with nothing but a handful of over-the-counter medications to inspire him. Yet also one who’d grown so circumspect that by issue 27, he confessed to readers that he “finds it difficult to have a wet dream about someone without taking them out for at least three dreams beforehand.”

Now. This issue was THE time, I told him, to come back and have his say. That the Lollipop Y2K issue was (his) our chance at immortality. Or at least a way to keep the ol’ byline in some confused kids’ face once in a while for another few hundred years.

Frankly, I think our century’s only lasting cultural legacy in the year 3000 will be the television program, The Antiques Roadshow. And I imagine some batty old dowager, standing in line with a bunch of other flea-bitten flea-marketeers, showing up with a dog-eared copy of this very issue of Lollipop. Then, this talking sheep clone antique expert tells her how the issue is worth a whole planet or something, and that it should really be in a museum.

It’s possible, then, that people in the year 3K might look back and say, “You know, those people back in the year 2000 were a bunch of fuckin’ douche bags, but look at this article here. This guy Ham seemed to’ve evolved himself into a sort of non-ape.”

Well, maybe Bill has evolved. Beyond a hundred years or so, the survival instinct gets pretty primitive, at least on the individual level. And there ain’t much point in marking your territory when some other guy with an actual pulse is going to get the coos.

But I’m sure my friend Bill Ham, if he weren’t so fucking evolved and busy teaching his toddler son Monty Python’s* “The Knights of the Round Table” song, would join me in wishing all of you out there in Y3K land a big hello from the grave, you lucky bastards. Now please take a moment to despair that you couldn’t’ve lived what were, for a while, our incredibly funny, care-free lives.

    *Monty Python was a popular film and television comedy troupe during the latter half of the 20th century, one that enjoyed a resurgence, along with everything else, during re-electrification.