Mark Leyner - The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

a flourish of calligraphy:

Eleventh-Century Poem by Su Tung-p’oEntitled

“Re: Ike Karton”

Ikeis known to sometimes walk backward

To leave misleading footprints.

Or to wade through puddles,

Leaving no tracks at all…

P.S. Ikealso walks backward to hide his face from security cameras.

Backward, Ikeenters the Miss America Diner. With the exception of a Chloë Sevignydoppelgänger who frets over cold pancakes in the corner, all the other patrons are the ostentatiously generic people whose photos are already in the picture frames you buy at the store. They are the world’s most famous nobodies: Joe Shmoeand John Q. Publicsit at the counter drinking coffee and eating buttered rolls; Every Tom, Dick, and Harryare squeezed into a banquette across from Mr. and Mrs. Consumer, tucking into large breakfasts of eggs, sausage, and toast; Jane Doeand Your Average American Sports Fanclasp hands across unopened menus on a table. They all fall silent as Ike, dear to the Gods, Warlord of His Stoop, the world’s most anonymous somebody (“illustrious and unknown”), enters, backward. How Can T.S.F.N. Defeat XOXO?

The Fifteenth Season is rough going. Many people find sitting through a public recitation of the Fifteenth Season almost unbearably harrowing. It features some of XOXO’s most vicious and cunning assaults on The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, and includes attacks on the itinerant bards themselves, attacks that leave hundreds massacred, maimed, and mutilated. It is also the first time that XOXOresorts to such “asymmetric tactics” as deploying what’s referred to as “military-grade ass-cheese” and momentarily effacing the world and scrawling across its white emptiness in his elegantly insouciant calligraphy. (In a recent poll, 59 percent said XOXOwas winning, only 21 percent thought T.S.F.N. was making progress.) Also, in a ruthless effort to humiliate Ike, at the behest of the Goddess Shanicewho remains (and will forever remain) implacably hostile to Ikefor omitting her from his list, “Ten Gods I’d Fuck (T.G.I.F.),” XOXOsteals ideas from the minds of exceptionally brilliant scientists, cultural theorists, and scholars and transplants them into the minds of dim-witted celebrities, enabling them to write erudite and abstruse books, which are released by prestigious publishing houses to tumultuous critical acclaim. Within the same three-month period, reality-TV star Heidi Montagcomes out with Capitalism and the Florentine Renaissance (Hill & Wang), Kate Gosselinquickly follows with Mirror Neurons: The Bio-Epistemology of Countertransference (W. W. Norton & Company), and Abercrombie & Fitch model and 90210 star Trevor Donovanweighs in with two prodigious tomes, The Jade(d) G(l)aze: Twelfth-Century Goryeo Celadon Pottery and Ceramics (Abrams) and Proust, Mallarmé, Racine: The Intersexuality of the Text / The Intertextuality of Sex (Yale University Press).

Ike—unfailingly self-abnegating, a hero cast into the maelstrom of life — of course, violently abhors the exaltation of rich, privileged celebrities, for whom he prefers the gulag and the guillotine. (This is the central reason he’s so beloved by La Felinaand Fast-Cooking Ali.) Shanice’s vindictive utilization of XOXOagainst Ikeis tacitly abetted by Mogul Magoo, because it avails the plutocratic God of Bubbles yet another way of vexing, by proxy, his eternal nemesis La Felina, who champions the lumpen, the subproletarian, the unsung, the village idiot with his half-witted smile and tear-filled eyes, the anomic, the disaffected and misshapen, the disinherited, the lame and crippled, the unheralded; who loves everything that’s defiled and damned; who loves everyone who’s pockmarked and putrid; who exalts the physically deformed and the mentally unbalanced and the sans-​culottes and the scum of the earth; and who wet her pants during the September Massacres of 1792.

XOXOattacks The Sugar Frosted Nutsack where it’s most vulnerable, when it’s most “keyed up,” most “hyperesthetic.” In the face of mounting criticism for his indiscriminant use of military-grade ass-cheese, XOXOsimply shrugs. “I’m a legitimate businessman,” he’ll say, slyly assuming the role of one whose motives are eternally misinterpreted.

In the spring of 2013, a group of experts, including former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, Dog the Bounty Hunter, and controversial Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Dr. Giancarlo Capella, make a startling assertion. After conducting what they describe as “an insane amount of research,” based on new information made available through “totally unprecedented access to the Myanmar military junta’s secret archives,” they reach the conclusion that the actual title of the epic is not — nor has it ever been— The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, but is instead — and has always been— What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Although, that summer, Dr. Capellaand Dog the Bounty Hunter(who are both in Lithuania to promote a chain of vaginal rejuvenation clinics) recant their assertion, claiming that XOXOhad plied their souls with drugged sherbet, Greenspancontinues to defend his findings. Greenspanadmits that, yes, his soul was plied with drugged sherbet, kidnapped, and taken to XOXO’s garish hyperborean hermitage miles beneath the earth’s surface in Antarctica, where it was kept captive for five and a half God-years, and, yes, there was a suffocatingly sweet smell at the hermitage, as if Eggnog Febreze was being continuously pumped in through the ventilation system, and, yes, every so often XOXOwould chastely kiss his soul on the mouth, and that, at some point, XOXOshampooed and cornrowed his soul’s hair, and that, using a sharp periodontal curette, he carved secret wisdom into Greenspan’s soul’s mind. This wisdom includes, according to Greenspan, the curious notion that The Sugar Frosted Nutsack isn’t — and never was — really about Ike Kartonat all, but is — and always has been — about the war between XOXOand the epic itself, i.e., the war between the boldfaced and the italicized. Why Is It SO FUCKING EASY for XOXO to Hack into T.S.F.N. ?

By clicking on a link and connecting to a “poisoned” website, a T.S.F.N. employee inadvertently permitted XOXOto gain access to T.S.F.N.

Having access to the original programmer’s instructions — or source code — provided XOXOwith knowledge about subtle security vulnerabilities in T.S.F.N.

Understanding the algorithms on which T.S.F.N. is based enables XOXOto identify and locate weak points in the system.

Then Greenspanadmitted — not realizing that his microphone was still on — that XOXOmight be a cluster of multivariate, random variables, or possibly entropic vectors…