23.
   Wonderful. A stone sphinx animates into a giant man lion like a genie out of the sand. I couldn’t believe it. But the sand under my bare feet felt real. The sun on my bare ass felt real, and I was backing away from another thug, this one forty feet tall and pissed off, with a couple of flying dogs who apparently forgot how to fly.

   “Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor!”, it bellowed.
    “What the hell?”, I said as I looked up at it.
    “For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for America, it is just beyond the horizon!”, shouted the Sphinx.
    “This thing is a bore.”, I whispered to the dogs.
    “Nobody will ever win the war of the sexes. There is too much fraternizing with the enemy!”
    “This thing bombed the hell out of Cambodia in secret. The result was civil war and genocide.”, said a dog.
    “This thing will bore you with platitudes then snap off your head.”, said the other dog. “Run!”
    It rushed at us. We ran into a thicket of tall reeds. If we could keep far enough ahead of it, we might lose it before it crushed us under its huge paws. As we dashed through the undergrowth, it stomped right behind us smashing and scattering the vegetation. “We must distinguish morality from moralizing!”, it boomed.
   I threw my hands over my ears. “This thing is going to make me puke!”