I was very confused by the response to my last review. The Sentenced LA and Manhattan offices were disrespectful and libelous towards me, and they briefly fired me from my position as the editor of the publication. They also said that I had never been the editor for the publication, which I found strange.

Even more confusing was a response from the Muumuu House Twitter account, which said my review of Ghostbusters for the NES was not really written by me. They also said that I am not associated with Sentenced Lit. This statement was worrying, because I was the founder and editor of Muumuu House. There had never been anyone else working for Muumuu House’s editorial board, and I was the one who ran their social media. When I tried to log into the Muumuu House Twitter, I was told the password had been changed six days prior.

My agent, Bill Clegg, got in contact with the Muumuu House Twitter account. He was told that I had been removed from the editing board of Muumuu House. Unless I had taken a massive dose of roofies and fired myself again, something was wrong.

I can understand the reaction that my review received regarding its authenticity. It was not my best work, and I know why it failed. I believe people thought the review was fake because I did not use third-person perspective to refer to myself.

In my writing, instead of using the first person pronoun “I”, I will usually use a name similar to my own in order to make it seem as if I am writing about someone other than myself. The distance allows me to poke fun at myself and is a part of my prose style.

I decided not to use this style in my last piece because I did not want anyone to laugh at it. My experiences with the Ghostbusters NES game were very serious. The game made me wonder if it wouldn’t be better to put my balls into a crocodile’s mouth while shoving my head up a unicorn’s asshole, so I wanted to portray my emotions sincerely.


I think this effort was too successful. The article made everyone feel bad and worry about their relationship to literature and review content. My intention was not to make something that did this.

I was worried that my reputation would be tarnished forever due to my article. Thankfully, because of the Austin Office’s promotion of my work within the Comedy Mothership scene, the reception to my article has been good in the eyes of the public. I received a lot of positive comments and video reactions, as well as vlogs and blogs. I received an accommodation from my good friend Justin Carmichael, which I found particularly encouraging.

After this public praise, I was re-instated as the editor of Sentenced Lit. They also promised to publish the review that you are reading right now. I wish I could say it was that easy of a return to editing at Muumuu House. Many things made that process hard. As a result of my estrangement I lost my ability to confidently write because I felt like I did not have a home for my work, even though I had a deal for my upcoming book Self Heal with Vintage Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

My life was very complicated after I was fired from both of the publications I edited. I was left with more free-time, but I still had a lot of things to solve on a daily basis because life is filled with different mysteries. I had chores, also. I had to whip my pigs, which they like, and think about the lines in my hands while I vacuumed underneath the couch. I also had to research different theories about the things that were going on in the world and determine which theories might have an effect on the human body.

I kept pondering a theory or rumor which I had heard for a very long time but never had the chance to test out for myself. It is often said that the ET video game tie-in for the Atari was the biggest commercial failure in the video games industry of all time. As a result, it is said that they had to take excess cartridges and bury them at a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. 

This is only a rumor, but it is a convincing one. Many corporations are well known for offloading waste into municipal ground. The quality of groundwater is often affected by actions like these.

For a few hours I obsessed over this theory that the cartridges were buried in a landfill in Alamogordo. For the next two weeks it consumed my thoughts. It seemed like the cultural effect of this rumor was the most important thing in our culture. I used Google Maps to look at the place in the desert where they said the cartridges were buried and found that they were eleven miles from the Area 51 US military base.

I remember the ET video game very well because when I was a child I received it from my parents for Christmas. They had unwittingly traumatized me as they have done many times. It’s unfortunate, but as with a lot of things they did that traumatized me, it was not on purpose.

I believe in the existence of souls and reincarnation. I was aware of the fact that the trauma of playing ET on Christmas day was most likely one of the traumas which would trouble me in the next life, so it was important to heal it before my spirit passed on and entered a new vessel. I thought it was possible that learning the secret of the hidden cartridges might heal this trauma.

After being fired from Sentenced and Muumuu House I needed a job. The advance for Self Heal had run out due to my drug use, and because I gave significant amounts of it to my father so that he could pay off some of his high-interest loans. As a result, I had only four-thousand dollars in my bank account. I got a retail job at GameCops, a popular video game selling franchise. It was easy work but I had difficulty selling games that were bad.  I knew the pain of playing games that were bad.

One morning at my job at GameCops, my boss yelled at me. My boss was gross and repeatedly called me “Leaf” because he did not like my name, Tao Lin. He wanted me to sell the newest first-person shooter to our customers. He tried to convince me that it was important to sell the newest first-person shooter game, but it didn’t seem like this was true.

The business model of GameCops was not working. It was not my fault that no one was buying the newest first-person shooter game. The clientele were only there to ask me to review the ET video game, not to purchase games. My fans came to harass me every day. On multiple occasions, dozens of people led by Andre The Black Nerd of Black Nerd Comedy entered the store and do a Conga line while chanting: “ET! ET! ET!”.

My boss was ignorant to this fact. He stayed on the phone in his office and screamed expletives. It served as a reminder of the fact that the pharmaceutical industry had caused modern America to be a society of anger and hatred.

I did not understand why it was that people wanted me to review the ET video game. I asked my friend Cooper, who was sixteen. My friend Cooper said: “When the game was buried in that landfill, it forever became buried in our conscious minds.”

In response, I told him that I was abstinent. My abstinence is an important part of my spiritual experience as a human being living on Earth. It has also led me to the creation of a certain motto, which is “Nerds before birds.” Bird is a British slang word for women. I often say this motto before going to bars. Me and Cooper were headed to a bar, and so I said it. I abide by the motto at all times. At the bar that night, I refused to have a conversation with a sexy woman. In the past, I might have had sex with her two to six times over the course of an hour and forty-five minutes, but I did not do so then.

Shortly after we got to the bar, a woman arrived from a company called Cockburn Industries. She sat down with us without asking. Her name was Mandi. She was creating a sequel to the ET video game and she showed me it on an iPad that she brought with her.

It seemed that everything in my life was coordinating itself around the ET video game, and I was interested in what seemed like a coincidence to me at first but became something else on closer inspection. The ET video game was becoming more and more important the more I looked at it. This confirmed a theory I have, which is that the things we perceive determine future events in our life.

I looked at the ET 2 game demo on the iPad. Upon seeing the three-dimensional ET fall into the hole, I vomited a lot of green liquid onto the laptop and the game designer. I am no stranger to vomiting liquid, but I had not vomited green liquid before that, and not that forcefully.

When I went home that night, I took an inventory on my food and drug intake for the day. I had no genetically modified food or pasteurized dairy, so it did not make sense for the content of the vomit to have been the reason for vomiting. The twenty-tab (3000 μg) dose of LSD that afternoon was the same dose I had taken the afternoon before. The vomiting could not have been linked to drug use.

I determined that the one Rolling Rock beer I was drinking was the root cause for the green vomit, triggered by the fact that the game looked like a gorilla turd covered in flaming rat’s piss.

After I dropped Cooper off at his mother’s rent-controlled apartment two and a half blocks from the Southwest corner of Avenue C and East Houston Street, I went home and slept at 10PM.

While sleeping, I had a dream. I fell into a hole over and over and my jaw stretched upwards and caused me to fly, just like in the ET video game. I struggled to get out of it, which was a problem. I felt some amount of terror. I woke up screaming. Upon waking, a green ET head burst through my window, which revealed that I was actually still asleep.

When I woke up again, I was in a field. Exactly two-hundred feet away there was a Tao Lin themed County Fair. There were rides based on my life and all of my accomplishments. Zombies attacked me so I entered a hall of mirrors and did not know where I was. I was being chased by my father and my mother. I finally woke up when I was bitten by Cooper.

I realized I was not dreaming at all. I had done a large combined dose of salvia and psilocybin mushrooms in order to read the book “Brick by Brick” by Bob Chipman.

I booted up my very old computer, which still uses dial-up technology to connect to the internet. This was the same computer I wrote my books Trip and Leave Society on. My penchant for technologies that were around when I was a child is one that has stuck with me since childhood. My child friend Cooper has made me the subject of ridicule for using a vinyl record player while in the car, which skips. I have to admit that he has a point, as the record player was not created with automobiles in mind.

While playing a popular MMORPG with my friend Cooper, who is sixteen years old, I came up with the idea of going to Alamogordo, New Mexico, in order to find the ET video game cartridges underneath the sand. Cooper arranged this trip. Unfortunately, due to financial constraints, we had to partner with Cockburn Industries. As a part of my contract with Cockburn Industries, I had to review their ET 2 video game. I would have funded the project with money from my father’s inheritance if it weren’twere’t for the fact that it was destroyed by scamming and gambling, which means that my father is in severe, increasing debt. The amount of money he owes to scammers and creditors currently amounts to over three million dollars in US currency. I asked for and received his permission to write about this.

Due to being in a van owned by Cockburn Industries and using the equipment and money of Cockburn Industries to go on our journey to Alamogordo, New Mexico, me and my sixteen year-old friend Cooper were required to cohabitate the van with the developer of the ET 2 video game, who might have been of age. I thought she was not committed to the cause  of gaming culture and was a sell-out, but I changed my mind when I realized she was playing old video games in the backseat while my friend Cooper was driving. He doesn’t yet have his full license, only a permit, and so he needs supervision when on the road. This trip counted for the four final hours of driving required to take the written test.

We arrived at the site where the ET video game is supposed to be buried in the desert and stopped our van. I started to record my thoughts on the tape recorder that I carry with me.

We did not see anything for a while. Soon we started talking about many complicated topics. Through inquiry and deep conversation about the nature of the universe, I discovered that my underaged friend and manager Cooper believes in the existence of Santa Claus and in the Flat Earth Theory. I listened to his theories and understood the validity of all of his arguments with regards to the way that photographs are taken from space. Though I was unshaken on the existence of a round Earth, as all of the evidence points towards a curvature to the planet, he ultimately convinced me that Santa Claus is real. A few weeks ago I became uninterested in this theory and changed my mind. I do not believe Santa Claus is real anymore.

More important than any of his theories about Santa Claus was his belief that there was a presence underneath the Japanese mountain Mount Fuji called Death Mwauthzyx. I had never heard of this particular theory and was excited to learn about it. According to Cooper, Death Mwauthzx was an entity who could destroy all of the multiverse if he turned the satellite dish on its head three hundred and sixty degrees.

Our discussion did not have an emotional effect on me to this point, but hearing the words did make me think about the concept of non-existence, which was troubling. Me and Cooper agreed on the fact that if nothing existed, then nothing would have ever existed. However, the theory about Death Mwauthzx did not end at non-existence. Cooper said that “all that would remain was a bologna sandwich.” Because of the fact that it would be the only thing left in the universe, it would be unclear if the sandwich was small or large.

The existence of this concept itself reaffirmed my belief that our existence is one of pure speculation. If non-existence was only a sandwich, unmeasurable, then it must stand to reason that in the state of existence we lived in there was no way to know anything other than what you ate for lunch, what time certain packages arrived, and the exact words you said to your father and your mother. My lifestyle was yet again reaffirmed as the ideal one.

Suddenly something advanced over the ridge of the mountain. I squinted at it in the distance and saw that it was a car carrying a small tank. There was a man imbedded into the tank, and the man did not have legs. The tank did not have a top, but only the torso of a man. I had never seen anything like this before and did not know that it was possible.

The man who was a tank identified himself as General Dark Onward. He had a woman soldier with him who was named Sergeant McButter. They questioned us very briefly about why we were where we were. We did not have answers that were satisfactory to General Onward, and he pulled a grenade out of his pocket. “This will put a second anus where your head used to be,” he said. “You fuck with the USA, you fuck with Dark Onward.”

We ran to the van. I am not afraid to die because of my research into the afterlife and reincarnation, but I could tell that Cooper and Mandi were scared. Captain Onward dropped his grenade on the ground and it exploded his arm off, leaving nothing but a red wound. This was disturbing, but I did not think much of it.

Mandi drove us away. When the military was no longer following us due to crashing into a thick pane of glass that caused their car to explode into flames, we decided to try to find the designer of the original ET video game. He was supposed to have lived in the area so we went to his last known address.

We arrived at the house we were looking for. It was in the middle of the desert and nothing was around us. When we exited our car to knock on the door, a window opened and a man inside of the house shot at my feet with an assault rifle. He believed that we were FBI agents. I leapt up and down to avoid the bullets while telling the man that we were not there to arrest him. When I told him that we were not FBI agents but only gamers, he relaxed. He said that we could enter his house if we wanted to.

We entered the house and it was very dark. There was a pool of lava at the end of the first room and our only way forwards was to go over the lava. It was too large of a gap to jump over so we figured that there was a trick. We determined that the situation seemed to be something out of a shitty-ass video game. I was encouraged by Mandi to think about what I might do if I was playing a shitty-ass video game.

I jumped up and a hidden coin block appeared above my head. A turtle shell fell from it and I immediately kicked it because I have played Super Mario Brothers. In that game, you use turtle shells as a weapon by kicking them. A platform appeared above the lava when the shell went into the lava. Fireballs were still flying out of it on occasion, but all three of us were still able to use the platform to go to the end of the hallway.

We entered a room with wood paneling and saw a man who looked like a crazy scientist from a movie. We asked him if he was Howard Scott Warshaw, the designer of the ET video game, and he told us that he was not. He told us that his name was Dr. Zandor and he had constructed the previous room to make sure that we had played Super Mario Bros before.

He wanted to keep talking to us but he was worried about government listening devices. It is well known that putting your head into a refrigerator will make it impossible for the government to overhear what you are saying. I do not fear the government, but I am still aware that you can do this to not be overheard. We all put our heads into the refrigerator in order to evade government listening devices.

There are two additional benefits to putting your head in a fridge. The first is that you will sometimes find a cold bottle of Rolling Rock beer, as I did. I began drinking the beer as soon as I opened it.

The second benefit to putting your head in the refrigerator is that making your head cold promotes the development of new blood vessels and lessens tinnitus over time. I used this method as a part of my recovery from Autism. Blood vessels improve oxygen’s flow to the brain. Having more blood vessels is best.

The story Dr. Zandor told us had to do with the Roswell UFO crash, a well documented historical event which has been the subject of multiple YouTube videos that I have seen. Dr. Zandor said things that I had not seen in any extant Roswell UFO crash YouTube video. He said that he was tasked with reverse-engineering the spacecraft that the Roswell alien came down in but decided that this job was disrespectful to the alien. He added many layers of tinfoil onto a single point of crumpled up tinfoil in order to create a fake version of the crashed alien spacecraft. He then used the ET video game to create a map of Area 51 as a way to subvert the US Army. Mandi asked to move our heads out of the refrigerator and we did.

While still in this room I checked my phone and saw that Robert Kennedy Junior released information on the source of autism, with the conclusion that it is caused by Tylenol. I called my mother and asked if she had ever taken Tylenol when my body was inside of hers waiting to be given a soul, and I was told that she did not. She will often lie, so I asked her again and again if it was true that she did not take Tylenol when my body did not yet have a soul and was inside of her womb. She broke down in tears and said that she did not. I still do not believe her.

On the other side of the room, Dr. Zandor explained the way he concealed his house from the government, using a randomly generated map from the ET video game. I was uninterested in this.

That night, Mandi and I played a video game which involved running on a mat in order to press a button that made you run in the video game. We were running very loudly and moaning until she eventually won and we both collapsed onto the ground and drank Rolling Rock beer. I had fun playing this game. Then, she asked me a question: “Did you really do all of that stuff in Richard Yates?”

“It is not a crime to have sex with a girl in Pennsylvania in her parents’ bed if you are twenty-two and the girl is sixteen,” I said. “That is not statutory rape, let alone rape, in the state of Pennsylvania.”

We went to bed separately. In the morning, Mandi had disappeared.  Cooper showed me a cease and desist letter which had been sent to Sentenced’s email from Muumuu House’s lawyers. Muumuu House had threatened legal action if Sentenced did not change their web design. This was baffling.

Cooper reached the conclusion that Mandi had double crossed us by taking Dr. Zandor’s secrets to the US Army. He also said that she had most likely seized control of Muumuu House and given it over to the US Army as well. It was plausible, but I was unsure. I did not tell him about my conversation with Mandi about my novel Richard Yates.

Mandi’s absence made me think about Cooper’s belief in Death Mwauthzx. It made me think about nothing and it made me think about everything.

I thought about Timothy Lee. Timothy Lee, graduate of Rutger’s University. I was not Timothy Lee, but I had been mistaken for him. When I looked at Timothy’s life, a communications and business management major, I looked at my own life as well.

I am a New York University journalism graduate. In a lot of ways, I was exactly the kind of person who would get a bachelors degree from New York University. Everything in my life had been set up for me by my parents. Though I love my parents, I could always see how my personality developed as a way to rebel against them. I see my behavior and detached manner of speech shared by many other New York University students and alumni.

In the late 00s I was praised for my willingness to laugh alongside the people who were laughing at me, but this year I met a lot of fifteen to seventeen year old boys who would say or do the same things given the circumstances I was in. What was my identity? Was I any better than the unremarkable Timothy Lee, or was I just one nerd in a line of other nerds whose experiences with early social media made me a figurehead of alternative literature?

I became depressed. I began to think that there was a chance I was not special, but rather the only New York University journalism student who was willing to write poems and fiction about shoplifting and using the internet following my graduation, at a time when blogging was considered important by other bloggers.

For years I have held onto the fact that I was called the first great male Asian author of American descent by n+1 magazine. This was a part of my soothing process for a long time. After n+1 published that I was the first great male Asian author of American descent in 2014, two months prior to it becoming known that I had non-illegal sex with a sixteen year old girl in Pennsylvania, I used the fact to ease any anxieties caused by my psychedelic drug use.

I would feel thankful that the publishing industry had only been able to sell literary fiction by great female Asian authors of American descent prior to the simultaneous launch of my two debut books Eeeee Eee Eeee and Bed. I would feel thankful that I could be categorized differently from those great female Asian authors of American descent based on gender. I would also feel thankful that many great male Asian American authors that you might think of were in-fact great male American authors of Asian descent, and not great male Asian authors of American descent.

I would always feel thankful that I was the first of the very specific category that I was. It was as if the category had been created just for me. But during the drive from Dr. Zandor’s house to the landfill, for the first time since n+1 magazine named me the first great male Asian author of American descent, I was starting to question my worth.

When Cooper and I arrived back at the place where we were going to dig the games up we found a massive encampment of my fans waiting for us. I snapped out of my depression and returned to normalcy. I remembered that people really did love my work, and that thousands across the world had based their entire understanding of their emotional experiences on it. Dismissing my work means dismissing that I am deeply smart and funny. My fans affirmed this when I spoke to them, and requested that I give a speech about the video games in the desert.

I had forgotten by then if the buried games were real or not. I still cannot remember what Dr. Zandor said when our heads were in the refrigerator. I wanted to pull out my tape recorder so I could listen back, but we had our heads in the refrigerator so I had nothing on the tape. I had to come up with an opinion and speech from scratch.

“Hello, everyone,” I said. “I know you have all come here because you are such big fans of my work. I am very glad that you have done this. I would like you to read my next book ‘Self Heal’, which is going to have a word-count of over seventy-thousand. But, there are no games in the desert. The rumor is just a rumor. It’s bullshit.”

The crowd did not know how to react. “It’s Tao,” a bearded man said, turning to his friends. “I learned about what MRNA really is from this guy. If he says it’s bullshit, it’s bullshit.”

The crowd was convinced, but Cooper looked at me as if I was acting strangely. He pointed to a middle-aged man in the crowd who was walking towards us. I allowed the man to take my megaphone and asked him to tell them it was bullshit. He hesitated for a moment, then identified himself as Howard Scott Warshaw, the designer of the ET video game. “The story about the cartridges,” he said, “is real. It’s all real.”

I was very confused. I took out my tape recorder in order to listen back to what I had done earlier that day and learned that when I had taken the maximum dose of DMT that morning I had not been talking to my own consciousness but to Howard Scott Warshaw, the designer of the original ET video game.

During my conversation with Howard Scott Warshaw, I learned about my fans gathering at the landfill, and Cooper and I had arranged for him to come to the landfill to tell my fans that there were ET games buried in the desert. The Howard on the tape recorder and the Howard in real life spoke in almost perfect unison as they said that the ET video game was a map for exploring Area 51. 

I became upset. “What Howard is saying is bullshit. It is eleven thirty-six AM and I am going to prove that the ET video game is not a map for exploring Area 51,” I announced. “I will test the theory by going to Area 51 to see if the game lines up with reality.” I marched into the desert.

Cooper and I quickly created a fake alien costume and UFO. I entered into the UFO and Cooper slid it down a rock so that it would propel very quickly and land onto the ground in Area 51. When it did so, it felt very fast, and then I hit the ground. Soldiers approached my craft. “Take me to your leader,” I said. One of the soldiers hit me in the head with the butt of his rifle and I lost consciousness.

When I woke up, an autopsy was being performed on me. The mask over my face was split in half by a scalpel, revealing my angry face to the government scientist. I assaulted both of the scientists and either knocked them unconscious or killed them. Most security doors on futuristic military bases have retinal scanners, but I saw that the door to the hallway had a rectal scanner, so I picked up one of the scientists and used his rectum in order to unlock it.

When I walked through the door I entered a room which was reminiscent of a room from the ET video game. Two enemies from the ET video game attacked me, and I was shot by one. I lost consciousness from the bullet wound.

When I woke up, I was tied to a chair in a room with General Dark Onward. My wounds were minor. General Dark Onward threatened to kill me if I did not work for him and help him destroy all copies of the ET video game. “Think about it, Tao,” he said. “You’re just like me. You want to destroy the game just as much as I do.”

“We are only alike in that we share a soul and perform the same actions to keep ourselves alive as human vessels,” I said. “Now let me free, you bitch-ass piece of shit.”

“Ah, you gamers,” he replied. “I’m going to blow up that stupid Atari monument.” He used a computer screen to move a target across a map of the world and sent a nuclear missile flying towards Mount Fuji, in Japan. 

He believed that Mount Fuji was a manmade object which had been erected as a tribute to the Atari Company because he did not know that Atari had based their logo off of Mount Fuji.

A countdown began and he shot out of the room into the elevator. When the doors closed, the one arm he still had was severed from his torso, which had a gruesome effect.

It seemed as if the end of the countdown corresponded to the detonation of a bomb that would destroy the room I was inside of. I was still tied up by rope so I prepared for death instead of struggling. I reminded myself that there was no point in feeling emotional about death. No need to get “crazy.” The only sad thing about the situation is that I did not know what time of day it was and would therefore not be able to write down my experience with accuracy when I entered the Bardo.

However, I did not die as expected because an alien resembling the sprite for ET in the ET video game emerged and flew me into the air using its long neck’s ability to fly. We entered a vent above our heads and escaped the explosion. I asked what time it was and he told me that it was five twenty-two PM.

The alien guided me through Area 51 as we were chased by monsters resembling the ones in the ET video game. I fired lasers at them and took a few down. I heard Cooper over my walkie talkie and learned that Death Mwauthzx had been unleashed due to the nuclear strike on Mount Fuji. He had already destroyed a lot of Tokyo and then walked over the Pacific Ocean in order to reach Nevada. He was in Las Vegas destroying the famous recreations of world landmarks at that time. Cooper was very worried that he would turn the satellite dish on his head three-hundred and sixty degrees in order to destroy the multiverse. We made it our goal to stop this from happening.

ET and I got into a fighter jet and sipped cocktails until we were close to the site of the landfill. I considered trying to land the plane, but I had many negative experiences with landing planes when playing the Top Gun game for NES. We ejected from the plane instead, and landed at the landfill.  The military was harassing my fans at the landfill in order to find Dr. Zandor. They still wanted to find the spaceship and destroy all copies of ET and had no interest in stopping Death Mwauthzx. I was surprised by their priorities.

Zandor told us where the spaceship parts had been put inside of every ET video game cartridge. ET told us that he could use his energy to pull every copy into the air and form his spaceship again.

I had a realization. The reason that people played the ET video game was not because it was really the worst game of all time but because it was a way to participate in a community of people who had the same experiences with the ET video game.

I watched as General Dark Onward accidentally fell into a hole and his body exploded, killing him. The spaceship finished reassembling and we were beamed up into it.

We participated in a dog-fight with Death Mwauthzx. ET revealed that he was Death Mwauthzx’s son. He said that Death Mwauthzx was bored because he was omnipotent. He said that the only way he could think of to beat Death Mwauthzx was to cure his boredom. I related to Death Mwauthzx. I also related to ET because we both had parents.

I thought about my father. I considered the possibility that boredom was the cause of my father’s increasing debt caused by scammers and high-interest loans.

We decided that we would shoot a red beam into Death Mwauthzx’s satellite dish. We did so and the red beam shot into space and travelled galaxies away. When it returned, it hit Death Mwauthzx’s satellite dish. As a result, Death Mwauthzx put on enormous Groucho Marx glasses and flew into the sky.

It is unknown what he saw in that moment but I would like to believe that it had to do with “rods” or “skyfish.” These are phenomena in cryptozoology which suggest that there are creatures which can not be seen with the naked eye and only be caught on camera. 

The threat had been stopped, but there was still a lot to do. I had still been fired from Muumuu House without explanation and I still only had four-thousand dollars in my bank account. I had also signed a contract with Cockburn Industries, which created a financial obligation to review the ET 2 video game. I went down to the ground in order to do this in front of my fans. I began to play the game on a holographic projection provided by ET.

“So this is the new ET 2 video game,” I said. “Hm. It claims to be even worse than the original. Look at it. Yes, it is foul, it is putrid, and it is despicable, as it intentionally tries to be. But true wretchedness is too unique to duplicate. The original stood the test of infamy. Why else would you come out into the middle of the desert? You did not come to the middle of the desert to buy a shameless sequel, but to celebrate the spectacular failure in video gaming history and stand on its unholy ground. That is why you are here today.”

I turned to the pit in which General Dark Onward had fallen and exploded. “There is more room in Hell now, so let us make some new history and throw these fuckers in the pit where they belong.” All of the fans cheered. They threw their ET 2 video game CDs into the pit in which General Dark Onward had fallen and exploded. Mandi and Cooper beamed down to the ground and everyone cheered more.

“Is birds before nerds okay?” Cooper asked immediately.

“Yes,” I said.

Cooper immediately kissed Mandi and she bit her lip and looked very turned on. This was surprising to me because I did not know they had ever talked to each other. Cooper received a phone call from his mother who was asking if he was okay. “I’m okay, mom,” he said. Then, he hung up. “Tao, you’re just like my mom.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You’re overprotective,” Cooper said. “That’s why you got ousted from Muumuu House. You had grown too selective in your editing. You used to publish your friends’ tweets. You used to publish anything! But now you only publish Jordan Castro.”


“That’s interesting,” I said.

“Tao, you decided to make sure everything had a tone of performative, self-referential sincerity, and that’s just not necessary anymore. You already won! Now, everyone uses Twitter to make jokes and update people about their day-to-day experiences. 3:AM Magazine publishes MFA students, and now everyone is honest about their drug use! Realistic dialogue is the standard in published fiction. David Fishkind is sober now. Nothing on Muumuu House is interesting anymore— it’s ‘wack’, and the majority of people dismiss it as right-wing because of your fringe beliefs. Everyone who says they like it is just remembering how it was twenty years ago.”

“Is this true?” I asked.

“Yes,” Cooper said. “And, Tao… you never got fired from Muumuu House. You never got canceled from the world of literature because of being a pedophile, you just…”

“Turned forty,” I said.

“Yes, Tao,” Cooper said. “I knew all along, I just needed you to figure it out for yourself. You need to pass the torch to Sentenced Lit. But, more than that, you need keep writing! You need to keep sharing the things that you think about while reading Wikipedia articles.”

Cooper pointed towards the crowd. “Look, Tao! The world doesn’t need you to protect them from bad literature. They can take care of themselves.”

I hadn’t considered that this might be true, but I had learned a lot in the prior week and my views on many things had shifted.

I removed my phone from my pocket and looked at the Twitter app to find that I was logged back in to the Muumuu House Twitter account. Immediately, I replied to the Sentenced Twitter account and approved the use of Muumuu House’s web design, saying that whoever had sent the cease and desist letter was a rogue third-party. All felt right again.

My interest in reviewing the original ET video game was only increasing, and because all of the cartridges were a spaceship that was about to fly away, I decided to review the game live for all of my fans in the desert.

“Well everybody,” I said. “I said before that I wanted every single cartridge of this game off of the face of the Earth. I think I am going to get my wish. But first, I will review the game.”

I began to play the game in front of everyone, silently. I finished playing the game. Then, I went home and wrote down my experience.