Free King Dork Approximately by Frank Portman Page B

earth’s population. Soon mutant creatures roamed the land, most notably a gigantic fire-breathing lizard and an enormous angry moth: together they laid waste to cities, brushing humans aside like they were so many ants. Now we, the surviving remnant of humanity, live a harsh existence in underground caves, enslaved by a mutant race of superintelligent cats and forced to labor for the entirety of our short lives under the brutal conditions of the North American kibble mines. Only the few among us, the Resistance, continue the struggle to preserve our race, quietly gathering the components with which to assemble a giant laser pointer, a vacuum cleaner, and a spray bottle to distract and drive off our feline overlords and reclaim our ruined planet.
    Yeah, no: that didn’t actually happen. Too bad, Hellerman. We’ll get ’em next millennium.
    Not that the real, actual Y2K was any picnic. New Year’s Eve was spent at a gruesome party at Shinefield’s house where I was the only person not drunk and/or stoned.
    Now, there was a time, I believe, long, long ago, when stoner music, or rather, the music stoners liked to listen to,tended to be heavy, bluesy, rock and roll, like Sabbath, Rush, Hendrix, Zeppelin, that kind of thing, plus Pink Floyd for the part at the end where they lay back on the floor looking at the ceiling and talking about how bedrooms were like suitcases for people or how if you had a map that was the same size as the world you could move there and live on it instead, thus solving pollution and overpopulation. But aside from a little Led Zeppelin the music at this party was uniformly terrible, endless formless musician-y “jams” with songs that went nowhere, lasted forever, and were so busy and arrhythmic that it made me kind of hate Thomas Edison for having invented the recording technology that would eventually allow them to be put on their stupid CDs and unleashed on an innocent public.
    I guess the problem was that Shinefield and his friends were more like skater hippie stoners than regular stoners. You can tell them by their knit caps and stinky white-boy dreads, and the Grateful Dead skulls on their skateboards. Actually, though, the real problem is just that all things nowadays suck so much more than they used to. The only suspense lies in trying to guess the precise ways in which they will suck more, and to what degree. But you could sure see where Shinefield’s busy drumming problem came from: the guys on the CDs were all over the map too, though at least they tended to stay at a steady tempo. And unlike Rush, who have the “too much drums” problem too, they were not redeemed by a cartoon-character-sounding vocalist trying to be Ayn Rand. As for what they
were
trying to be, well, if you put a gun to my head I couldn’t tell you, nor could I make even an informed guess as to what the songs were supposed to be about.
    What I’m saying is, I suppose, that I’d have preferred the kibble mines.
    Sam Hellerman was in a state of blissful oblivion throughmost of it, courtesy of two Valium with a vodka chaser, so he was spared the terrible music as well as the grim spectacle of Celeste Fletcher grinding all over Shinefield, making out with him like it really was the end of the world and this was her last chance for all eternity to have the opportunity to lick another person’s face. Then, when they led each other upstairs, presumably for some apocalyptic ramoning in the bathroom or something along those lines, it really felt like something was breaking inside me, in spite of my most strenuous efforts not to care. The song on at that moment seemed to be about tweezers or some damn thing, but between the lines all I could hear was: worst year ever, coming right up.
    Then, when the countdown thing happened on TV, and the jam hippie girls kissed the jam hippie boys happy new year, Celeste Fletcher came up to me.
    “Happy New Year, Elvis,” she said.
    “Fiona,” I said, for obvious reasons.
    She