18.
   The idiots were all naked now. They stripped me and pushed me up against some kind of wooden yoke on a wall. Below me a jungle stretched to dark mountains beyond. They forced my arms up to the yoke and tied them with leather straps. The whole thing looked like some sort of trite Hollywood set. They started dancing like Josephine Baker and chanting “Dub Ya! Dub Ya! Dub Ya!” It was a Berchtesgarten Bierfest, a Crawford Ranch barbecue. I kicked and struggled and spat at them, then my eyes focused and I looked down. It must have been fifty feet to the floor of the forest. OK, I thought. It’s a dream, a pizza and late night movie. This was so ridiculous I would have burst out laughing if I weren’t scared shitless.

   The trees in the jungle below started bobbing and flailing. An ungodly roar echoed out of the jungle. I struggled and slammed against the wooden yoke. This was not going to happen. I was not going to be the victim of these insane idiots. I didn’t care how unreal the whole thing was, it wasn’t going to get any worse. I was going to escape. I was going to throw all these rich, naked jerks off the wall. I was going to find a gun and blow the head off whatever the hell was in that God damned jungle below me.

19.
   The morons fell to the ground in terrified reverence. Their naked butts quivered and shook. What the hell was I going to do? I ordered myself to wake up. I twisted and turned trying to make myself fall out of bed. I yelled at the top of my lungs. I reached down to the bottom of my guts and let out a burst of energy. Nothing. I was strapped to a wooden yoke surrounded by a bunch of cooing, moaning halfwit shit for brains and hanging above a jungle that was about to eject God knows what with the real possibility that I wasn’t dreaming just beginning to dawn on me.

   Suddenly I felt something land on me. I turned to find those damned dogs were trying to chew me loose. They jumped on the wooden yoke and gnawed at the leather straps around my wrists. They snarled and growled. Their hackles bristled. Another roar blasted below. One of them looked me in the eyes and said, “It’s not the monkey, you moron.”

20.
   The monkey was back and thirty feet tall. It burst out of the jungle with eyes ablaze. Its creamy, white skin flapped and jiggled. Its gaping maw was full of broken yellow teeth. It stunk of cheap beer, cheap cologne and hairspray. It was Fay Ray time. It was naked, should have stayed home, lefty, commie, pinko for lunch time.

   The jungle shook and the monkey lurched. A huge, sweaty paw reached for my head just as I felt the bonds around my wrists fall free. I turned to run but before I could, the dogs grabbed my hands and lifted me into the air. “You have much to learn.”, said one.
   The monkey reached for my ankles but it was too late. I looked back over my shoulder to see the prostrate sycophants pulling themselves to their feet. The angry looks on their faces were replaced by abject terror. The monkey turned on them and pounced.
   We drifted high above the cartoon horror. The blood curdling screams faded away. A volcano loomed on the horizon. A shimmering sea stretched under a brilliant orange sunset. I looked up at the dogs clinging to my wrists. They were determined, saying nothing as they looked into the distance. This is a hell of a ride, I thought. Wow, flying dogs. Not bad.

21.
   As we flew into the clouds leaving my nightmare behind, one of the dogs said, “It’s time to put things in perspective. All of this pestilence didn’t burst its ugly boil overnight. It’s been festering for a long time.”

   The clouds parted over a desert. The dogs dropped me in front of some god-awful sphinx wannabe wearing an oversized pair of horn-rimmed glasses. “Let’s start with the Doctor. It’s been at the center of every power grab since Rockefeller put a leash on Nixon and handed it to him. This is the only Nobel Peace Prize laureate that’s wanted by the authorities all over the world. It’s wanted by the French for it's role in Operation Condor, by the Spanish and the Chileans for the CIA coup in Chile and by the Indonesians for the Indonesian genocide yet it’s worshiped as the grand Pooh-Bah of corporate global dominance. It wanders through the halls of power stinking of stale flesh and sulfur: The Bilderberg Group, The Council on Foreign Relations, The Trilateral Commission, The Heritage Foundation, The Cato Institute, The International Institute of Strategic Studies, The Hoover Institution. It's words come slowly for the true believers as it ponders how many more it can drag with it to hell.”

22.
   “This toad never goes away. It just gets more and more poisonous with age.”, said the other dog, shaking its head. “It’s responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands and the oppression of millions yet it has been elevated to avatar, to a great and mysterious Sphinx that gazes down on a bloody reign of tyranny. It is more aging, withered spider than Sphinx. It squats on its mountaintop waiting for the princes of Empire to climb up and pay homage. When they come, the frigid plutocrats are sucked even drier until they drift to the spider’s feet like dead leaves.” He waved at a carved inscription below the Sphinx. “Here’s a proud quote from decades ago when it first crawled onto the stage: ‘Who controls the food supply controls people, who controls the energy can control whole continents, who controls money can control the world.’ You see, this megalomania is not new at all. Whether it is a valley with a couple of tribes, a transcontinental empire, or one little blue world, someone always and everywhere wants to control it, twist it, squeeze it rape it into an agonized ecstasy of domination and death.”

   Suddenly the huge pile of stones began to quiver and come alive right in front of us. It raised itself up and glared down at us. A growl emanated from its throat. Its claws scraped the sand at our feet. The lesson was cut short.

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!”

 

  

24.
   We raced through the reeds ducking and dodging the butt ugly beast until we stumbled upon a riverbank. I pushed the reeds aside and found a very large, very ugly baby floating in a basket. “My God! What the hell is this freak doing here?”, I asked out loud. Cracked yellow teeth jutted out of its mouth. It swayed and bounced as the current rocked and bobbed it against the shore. It looked back at me with hungry eyes. A sneer crossed its face. It let loose the low growl of an angry cat. “I think you are somewhere where you do not belong.”

   “It speaks!”, I blurted. “Is this how religion is going to elbow its way into this hallucination?”
   The dogs stared at it in astonishment. “Doesn’t religion elbow its way into everything?”, muttered one.
   The baby’s voice was deep and menacing. “Three heretics standing before me without the good sense to bow down before a Prophet. Three savages who will never see the light of God and are about to be sent back to hell from whence they came. You look tasty. Have you any last words”?
   With an angry fifty-ton lion on our tails, I had to do something quick before we were all stomped into the mud. Then it came to me. There was only one thing to do.