Mark Leyner - The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

What shape does one’s mind need to assume in order to get around (i.e., “apprehend”—with both its meanings of “capture” and “understand”) XOXO?

It’s impossible to know where XOXOends and you begin.

XOXOcalls into question the provenance and chain of custody of every single thought in your head.

XOXOis the inside and the outside.

Sometimes it actually appears as if T.S.F.N. is holding its own against XOXO. Maybe, with an invulnerability conferred by its morbid ingestion of everything extrinsic to it, T.S.F.N. simply cannot be killed, like Jason Voorheesor Freddy Kruegeror Michael Myers. So powerful is the human tropism toward boldface signifiers that whenever the severed bard-heads manage, even momentarily, to wrest control of the epic from XOXOand return to the basic story of Ikeand Ruthieand Vance, the audience (which has glazed over, staring torpidly at their feet during the interminable and frequently incoherent exegetical Seasons) perks up, looking alive and avidly interested. But these moments are far and few between, and given the overwhelming perception that XOXOhas carte blanche access to the bards’ brains and to your brain (via public recitation, book, Kindle, Nook, iPad, iTunes, etc.), it’s reasonable to ask: Why hasn’t XOXOjust killed T.S.F.N. by now? And the answer is, according to the experts, because XOXOis content to simply toy with the epic, to just keep fucking with it forever.

XOXO, who sometimes likes to pose as “an innocent Canadian tourist,” once boasted — not realizing that his microphone was still on — that when he kidnaps someone’s soul and brings it to his hyperborean hermitage, he likes to fillip the soul’s mind with his index finger so that it oscillates back and forth trillions of times a second between, what he called, “its regular state and its antimatter state.” This hyperoscillation, XOXOexplained, is that state of mind called “going into the forest to gather wild garlic.”

Of course, one could reasonably say (along with the CALLER) that there’s “too much” sex in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, that it’s punishingly repetitive. But whether that’s a function of Ike Karton’s fixations and fetishes and his compulsion to be punished or whether it’s the result of the impish perversity and malice of XOXO, we can’t possibly know. Nor can we know ultimately — because of XOXO—whether what you’re hearing or reading is what was originally intended. We can’t know — thanks to the legerdemain of the God XOXO—whether what you’re reading is what was written. Mogul Magoo V$ El Brazo

In Season Seventeen, a protracted battle begins between El Brazoand Mogul Magooover who owns the rights to T.S.F.N. Mogul Magoo(who was originally the God of Bubbles) had asserted himself as God of the Nutsack. He’d dutifully submitted his boilerplate rationale: Anything Enveloping Something Else. Just as a bubble is a globule of water that contains air, the scrotum is a pouch of skin and muscle that contains the testicles. Ergo, it’s perfectly logical and reasonable to conclude it falls within his purview. Thus, he reasoned, he owns exclusive worldwide rights (including all derivative works) to T.S.F.N. This completely infuriated El Brazo, also known as Das Unheimlichste des Unheimlichen (“The Strangest of the Strange”), who, as the God of Urology and the God of Pornography, considered the nutsack his inviolable domain and thus claimed ownership of exclusive worldwide rights (including all derivative works) to T.S.F.N. The antipathy that developed between these two Gods (and, subsequently, between Magooand the Goddess La Felina) would have significant consequences. El Brazothreatened Magooand his cohorts with liquidation in a “Night of the Long Knives.” In response, Magoobeefed up his posse of “ Pistoleras”—the divine, ax-wielding mercenary vixens who are total fitness freaks with rock-hard bodies, each of whom has a venomous black mamba snake growing out of the back of her head, which she pulls through the size-adjustment cutout on the back of her baseball cap. Neither of them could care less about the literal or the allegorical and mystical implications of the epic, or that many fashion critics are saying “Finally, a drug-induced epic that celebrates real women’s contours and silhouettes.” This is just a heavyweight dick-swinging contest between two Gods. Even though most legal experts conclude that Mogul Magoocan make the more compelling case for ownership of T.S.F.N. — its tail-chasing, vortical form is clearly consistent with his proprietary concept of “enveloping,” and there’s no question that severed bard-heads (aka “scrubbing bubbles”) fall within his realm — he is, characteristically, playing several moves ahead of everyone else. After tense marathon negotiations conducted at the 160-story, rocket-shaped Burj Khalifa in Dubai, this shrewd, uncannily prescient, and relentlessly enterprising businessman — who already owns the entire Rodgers and Hammersteinmusic catalogue, as well as the rights to such all-time favorites as “The Mister Softee Jingle,” “Under My Thumb,” “Tears of a Clown,” “White Wedding,” “What Have I Done to Deserve This,” “Party in the U.S.A.,” Billy Joel’s “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song),” “The Shadow of Your Smile,” Foreigner’s “Waiting for a Girl Like You,” Richard Wagner’s “O Sink Hernieder, Nacht Der Liebe,” and “The Ballad of the Severed Bard-Head”—shocks everyone by suddenly conceding ownership of T.S.F.N. to El Brazoin return for acquisition of the ringtone rights to the narcocorrido “That’s Me ( Ike’s Song)” (“Do you hear that mosquito, / that toilet flushing upstairs, / that glockenspiel out in the briar patch? / That’s me, Unwanted One, Filthy One, Despised / Whore, Lonely Nut Job…”).

Whether Magoo’s wager that he can make more money from the ringtone rights to a single neo-pagan narcocorrido than from the public performance royalties that would accrue to him from thousands of years of spaced-out blind bards chanting a mind-numbingly repetitive fugue-like epic while swilling from jerrycans of orange soda remains to be seen. But financial history has shown that it doesn’t pay to bet against the chubby, pockmarked God of Bubbles. Ike’s New Horoscope (SPOILER ALERT)

The A&P will start carrying that Kozy Shack butterscotch pudding you like so much. Your anal fissure will start bleeding again (so don’t wear the tight white jeans, in case you start spotting). Your daughter will get pregnant. You’re going to have dinner with your father to try to persuade him to change his will, and you’re going to get into a really nasty fight with him, and you’re going to say, “You know how they say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree? Well, I’m like an apple that Vladimir Guerreropicked up and threw as far as he could. That’s how far from your fucking tree I fell.” What Is the Mystical Significance of Bold v. Italics?

This is the innermost secret of the epic.