Fear of a Tad Planet
by Tad Kepley

A Tad Planet practices selective breeding via forced miscegenation.
Its businessmen mind their own business, its feminists are.  Anyone
who fucks with anyone else gets blown away on a Tad Planet, but only
kids are allowed to carry guns, and we expect the brats to obey that
order.  No porn on a T.P., everyone has easy access to the real deal.
Constant travel--no bullshit *stationary* "community" here, everyone
is a nomad; bad-assed traler-court Bedouins in methane-driven Broncos
thrumming and caroming from parallel to parallel across cracked and
bubbling asphalt.  Here is there here--movement a communal abuse of
speed for its own sake.  Anything that anyone ever paid for is
redeemed only through fire...non-liberatory commodities are trashed
in spontaneous bursts of arbitrary flame, not to assuage guilt but to
celebrate and commemorate the supercession of their usefulness.  Theft
has become the preferred mode of exchange--no property is held
comunally here for no property is *held*--when immediate use of an
object has ceased, it's up for grabs.  You never know where you'll be
tomorrow here, and you're glad.  Everyone is socially responsible for
being *equally* socially *ir*responsible.  We specialize in
*de*specialization, we're centrally *de*centralized...we take freshman
philosophical paradox as the maximal tenet of our lack of ideology.
"Art" (with a capital A) doesn't exist because it implies the
stationary; sand paintings sprout on the overgrown roadsides as
grafitti's exquisite corpses adorned the crumbling city walls...The
only way one communes with the land on a Tad Planet is by crossing it.
No one tells you what to do because *no one cares* what you do.  On a
Tad Planet you get high on life by doing drugs (ritual abuse replaced
ritual use), you imprison yourself with freedom.  Everyone is a
potential lover and always a potential enemy--both if you're lucky.
Stapled by gravity to the side of a Tad Planet we disobey our own
orders, we contradict ourselves and tell you we didn't, all rules are
made to be broken.  A Tad Planet has compassion without condescension,
"rebellion without guile."  The slinking, snickering coyote is our
familiar.  Our global emblem is the horseshoe crab--like our species,
a resilient evolutionary anomaly.  Our colors, never worn, are rust
and the green of the aurora; the farewell flash of the sun.  The
nose-breaking, septum-searing stink of creosote and rose-pink diesel
our decorative stenches.  The tornado is our totem, convection's
consumate creation; atmospheric thermodynamics our only exact science.
Our endless summers are spent trailing interesting meteorological
phenomena--we summer chasing thunderstorms from rockies to
mississippi, we ice drinks with our hail.  We worship only ourselves
and each other on a Tad Planet, we all have U.V.-sevsitive tattoos on
this ball--visible only under the black lites that illuminate our
shanties and teepees.  Brutality is beautiful here: the most direct
form of communication, it punctuates our appreciation of life...The
only contests here are won by concoction of the gel explosive with the
highest foot-per-second dispersal rate, marathon spinning on a tilt-a-
whirl, achieving orgasm the most times and with the most partners in
one swing of the sun.  Sex has nothing to do with "intimacy" and
everything to do with selfish pleasure, our genitals don't have scabs,
they've got battle-scars.  We measure our body temperatures in degrees
Kelvin...we party in rooms sealed full of nitrous oxide and helium.  A
Tad Planet's music is the warm warble of high tension wire in a stiff
wind, the infrasound throb stirred by harmonic tectonics, accompanied
by harmonica, mouth-harp and didjeridoo, with a snot-nosed percussion
section of several calibres (rapid fire .223 and .308 snare, 10 and 12
guage bass, .22 and .25 hi-hat at a distance--the lilting cracks and
booms best appreciated through a half-mile of thick air).  On this
tilting terra-infirma, the manipulative die of inertia.  We revel in
flauting the "laws" of nature--defying and decrying cruel gravity as
sizeist, converting energy from useless states into useful ones,
shucking fucking edenic entropy as silly, burning both ends of a
parafin ouroboros, daring ourselves to die as a celebration of life.
The surety (on this viral more of an orb) is that nothing is *ever*
easy, nothing is *ever* done for you--all is challenging and vibrant,
a corruscating lacy latticework of carnivorous chaos ponderously
pickle-eating pregnant with prurient possibility.  Caveat emptor.

Originally published in the anarchist zine Black Eye (among others).  
Please reproduce and distribute freely.

