 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

            $$$$$$ $$$$$$                                doomed to obscurity
            $'   $ $    $sssssssss  .s%&$$$""$$&%s.      the thirtieth issue
  .s%&$$$$""$....$ $....$           $'    $  $    `$       december 31, 1999
  $......$  $::::$ $::::$  $$$$$$$$ $.....$  $.....$
  $::::::$  $::::$ $::::$  $......$ $:::::$  $:::::$    "how can she love me
  $||||||$  $||||$ $||||$  $::::::$ $|||||$  $|||||$     if she doesn't even
  $iiiiii$  $iiii$ $iiii$  $||||||$ $iiiii$  $iiiii$     love the cinema
  $$$$$$$$  $!!!!$ $!!!!$  $iiiiii$ $!!!!!$  $!!!!!$     that i love?"
  `"Y$$$$$ss$$$$$$ `"Y$$$ss$$$$$Y"' `"Y$$$$ss$$$$Y"'                - hefner

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 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

 "Introduction"
 by Murmur

        Long hiatus.  Long-delayed release.  Issue finally comes out.

        And nobody cares!

        So it goes, I suppose.  The time seemed ripe.  The time still seems
 ripe, in a certain sense, but the times, they are a' changin'.  And maybe we
 need to change a lot more than we thought to remain viable.  Whatever.

        Instead of rambling on in the introduction, you'll see that this
 issue has somewhat of an oddity - a conclusion.  It just made more sense to
 vent there than here.

        In the meantime, we're very happy to have two new people submit
 pieces to us this month - Mike Flynn and Charming Stephanie - and hope
 you'll enjoy their pieces as much as those of our "old school regulars".
 We've also been blessed by a rare writing performance from Cheesus, who
 inexplicably decided to write about killer robot clowns.  You'd never know
 it based on his wardrobe.

        We also feature a couple of letters to the editor this month with
 comments.  The fact is, you can't get TOO interactive in a text environment,
 and including letters to the editor is an easy and simple way to do it -
 especially if you do what we do with those letters when you/we get them.

        This issue has been hell to get out - but, you know, I'll get to that
 in the conclusion.  You can put it on the board - yes!  Let me just put it
 like this up front - it might be a long time before you see another issue of
 dto.  I borrow from mogel's introduction in dto #5 when I say:

        so, please, enjoy the fucking issue.

                                     ____
                                  ___|  |_ _
                               ___|  |  _______
                               |     |  |     |
 dto #30 table of contents     |  |  |  |  |  |     dto #30 table of contents
 ----------------------------- |  |  |  |  |  | -----------------------------
 ----------------------------- |  |  |  |  |  | -----------------------------
                               |  |  |  |  |  |
                               |  |  |  |  |  |
                               |_____|  |_____|
                                     |___ _

 "Introduction"                                 by Murmur
 dto #30 table of contents

 Letters to the Editor
                        with Commentary         by Murmur
 "Eight"                                        by Killarney
 "June 9"                                       by Charming Stephanie
 "Watery Martyrdom"                             by Sweeney Erect
 "Baked, But I am Appetite"                     by Mike Flynn
 "And The Water Shall Carry It Away"            by Oregano
 "Bloody Pie In Your Eye (Part One)"            by Cheesus
 "Bloody Pie In Your Eye (Part Two)"            by Cheesus

 "Conclusion"                                   by Murmur

 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Letters to the Editor
 with Commentary by Murmur

        Traditionally, we haven't printed many letters to the editor for one
 reason or another.  Once upon a time, dto actually released a monthly
 writers-only newsletter where we critiqued each other and in the newsletter
 some "letters" might be included.  Although the newsletter hasn't been
 around for a very long time, we still very rarely included many letters - I
 suppose we just figured they weren't all that relevant.

        Even while on a long hiatus, though, letters to the editor kept
 coming in, and we had a bump of letters come in in the last couple of
 months, many pertaining to old pieces in dto.  We've decided this month to
 go ahead and run a pair of letters to the editor with comments - call it an
 experiment in interactivity.  The letters have not been edited and have only
 been formatted for this text 'zine.

 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

 From: anonymous
 To: dto@dto.net
 Subject: Comments Entry on dto.net

 Murmur-
 perhaps youre need for an audiance is not that odd after all. I mean this,
 all of the super-popular people do everything they do for the simple fact
 that other people laugh. which of course implies that ones audiance is the
 most important aspect of anything you do. in this respect, i believe you
 have stumbled unwittingly into a major revelation. you should also know that
 indeed you are far superior a person intelectually to anybody I think I
 know. since this is so, perhaps all those years of believing that you were
 better than others in fact you did not believe yourself, but you should
 have. most people that truely believe that they are better than others are,
 not because of genetic composition, or the place of influence that they were
 born to, but because thier belief in themselves propells them to be better.
 I am a firm believer in the power of the human spirit, and as such I think
 that anyone who blieves something can have it. consider this, when you are
 happy, you pobably seem more likable and, in fact, you probably have a
 better time than when you are in a bad mood.

 so when writing, perhaps you should think about anything that makes you feel
 good and peaceful, and then your audiance will feel this spirit flowing
 through your words. just because you feel good. and as for direction, I
 think that you have direction, and are just too caught up in your life to
 realize it. hope I didnt bore you too much.

 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

        It's really very nice to receive letters to the editor like this, in
 part because of the ego stroke, but mostly just because it's clear that
 somebody actually read what you wrote and formed a cogent opinion about it.
 Maybe that's still ego stroke, though.

        The following is actually a response to "why everyone should smoke
 pot", written by Styx for dto #10.  It's one of the very few pieces we still
 seem to get feedback about every month - the only one that seems to generate
 more feedback is my own "rollerblades are gay" from dto #20.  Potheads are
 friendlier than rollerbladers, I guess.  Still, this was one of the more
 intriguing emails we got from a (presumed) pothead:

 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

 From: BoBEStillZ@webtv.net (BoB E StillZ)
 To: dto@dto.net

 yo i smoke to but atleast i can spell though

                         THUG LIFE...WE STILL LIVING IT

                                   youp youp

                                  youp youp 2

 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

        Now, before we go any further, I'll note that "youp youp" and "youp
 youp 2" are actually HYPERTEXT LINKS!  And since we're so happy that Mr.
 StillZ wrote us, we'll even include the URLs:

 youp youp:    http://community.webtv.net/BoBEStillZ/youpyoup
 youp youp 2:  http://community.webtv.net/BoBEStillZ/youpyoup2

        Unfortunately, the link to "youp youp" does not work, but the link to
 "youp youp 2" most certainly does.  In fact, we'll even reprint what the
 main page at youp youp 2 says!

 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

 youp youp 2

 our thoughts on playa haters

 yo check this out me and my nigga rob and the rest of the YOUPA SQUAD are
 here to represent and to all yall haters f@@k you we dont need yall you no
 what im saying yall fake @ss wanna be a$s bi@c^es fu+- you yall fake beverly
 hills mama boy hoes take it up the @$$ we dont need yall !U*K YALL dont
 playa hate and if yall aint one of them then f$#k you too YOUP YOUP


 yo youpa squad is #1 and we will represent rochester new york so dont playa
 hate participate




 gimme tha loot!





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                                                                    next page

 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

        There's some graphics on the page, too, but, uh, well, you know...

        THAT'S NOT THE POINT.

        And I think I'll just leave it at that.

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 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

 "Eight" (or "A Fable Of How He Kissed Insomnia Hello")
 by Killarney

        He kept hitting the snooze button because the dreams were horrifying.
 He wanted to see how they ended.  They were horrifying throughout the whole
 eight minutes of that deep rapid eye movement sleep and then they got
 delicious three seconds before the alarm, the three seconds that were always
 his most cognizant, that time when he knew that the alarm was going to go
 off and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

        After that, it was racing the next alarm, settling for a finger on
 the snooze button in order to prolong the dream.

        He'd gotten pretty good at being able to fall right back to sleep
 with only a tiny bit of dream-memory loss; it only took about three quarters
 of a second to get back to where he was.  He believed that this was due to
 the fact that he could do very much the same thing with reading.  Ever since
 he was a child he'd been able to put down a book for anywhere from a minute
 to an hour or even an hour to three days, crack it open again to exactly the
 same word, and get right back into the story.  This was simply because he
 needed the retreat of fiction in order to live, in order to get away from
 whatever it was that told him he couldn't survive.  He'd even honed that
 skill; he could stop at any word, not even at the end of a paragraph or an
 obvious page break, and impress himself by only doubly reading the preceding
 sentence upon his return to the book in order to wake his memory.

        The man was afraid, though, because books bored him now.  He had
 started going to bed earlier every night to catch more sleep because the
 dreams excited him, killed him, hurt him, filled him with passion and then
 sucked it out - and he had finally learned the snooze trick.  But damn them,
 they only happened in the eight minutes preceding his initial waking, and
 after that they were like carbon copies of what should have been the rest of
 the dream, growing lighter and lighter with each protest of the alarm.
 There were also other little things superimposed on the dreams, too, like
 when a triplicate form has been written upon indirectly.  There was always
 the faint mark on this carbon of her hand on his body, the earthly hand of
 his lover there on the second page; the first alarm would wake his lover and
 she would turn from her normal sleeping stance to ride this copy of what
 would have been the rest of the dream.  He had accused her once of
 lightening his recollection by placing her hand on him.  He was sure that
 some of the energy was going into her and she was stealing the dream from
 him.  She could never remember her own dreams and this made him even
 angrier, because he lusted for the completion of his, and hers were useless
 to her.

        Of course, because of this, there was never any proof that she'd
 stolen them in the first place.

        He had never had a single dream by the time he left her the first
 time.  It was only with her return that he was able to dream at all.  He
 hadn't ever been able to dream before her second coming, not when he was a
 child, not even when he'd played at being with her two years before.  And
 when they finally started, the images were in sepia at first, painfully
 beautiful and familiar but very faded and poorly sketched.

        Every time she protested his accusations, he punished her with
 silence.  He kept trying to fall back into that deep sleep that he craved,
 searching for his unconscious drug; also hoping that he would see somewhere
 in a dream, involving his lover, her method for stealing his escapes with
 her hand on his skin.

        He slept more.  He wrapped himself in a box that closed itself with
 the veins in his eyelids.  He soon memorized their paths and started wanting
 new roads for them to travel.  The eyelids bored him.  They taunted him by
 reminding him whenever he prepared for his nightly journey that they were
 unexciting, that they'd never make anything of themselves, that they'd never
 travel down any other roads.

        But he, he travelled new roads every night, never leaving his
 mattress.

        His mission unaccomplished, he continued.  He slept fifteen hours out
 of every twenty-four and did not realize that his lover had stopped placing
 her hand on him in the morning.  He cried when he woke because no matter how
 much he slept there only seemed to be eight minutes of dream.  Nothing
 mattered anymore outside of those insensitive nightmare eyelids, nothing
 above the white-red lid of his box.

        And the day that he stepped out of his dream, out of himself, to
 count ten minutes of time away from his world, he woke up to discover that
 she'd turned off the alarm.  And then, she'd gone.

        It wasn't until years later, long after she'd gone away and tried to
 forget about him, that he realized that she'd never stolen his stories.
 He'd always given them to her.  But he punished her for knowing so much of
 him, for not knowing enough.

        Since then, it's been difficult for him to sleep.  He keeps begging
 the moon to give him back the girl.  He keeps promising the navy sky that
 he'll never dream again if it will bring her back, but he has no bargaining
 chips left.  He hasn't dreamed in years.  The eyelids don't taunt him
 anymore.  They've opened to give him a charming view of the ceiling.
 Permanently.

        He kisses the pillow good night and spends eight hours staring
 patterns into the cracking, yellowish lid of his new box.

 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

 "June 9"
 by Charming Stephanie

        I'm sitting outside the Chili Bowl, smelling exhaust, listening to
 the cars, watching people walk by and wondering what they are thinking
 about.  Some of my best people-watching expeditions or Human Safaris have
 taken place in amusement parks across California.  Watching people who have
 to pay unbelievable amounts of money to 'have fun', actually try to do it,
 is always interesting.  But it's an expensive place to watch people because
 I of course have to pay too.  Other great locales are airports, bus
 stations, train stations, and some malls.  The worst places to watch people
 are carnivals, state or county fairs, BART stations, baseball games (or any
 organized sport except hockey, because I like hockey) and gas stations.  If
 you want to be amazed and slightly amused by human nature, check out the
 first few that I've listed.  If you want to be disgusted and appalled by
 human nature, go to the last few I've listed.  Back to the point:  sitting
 outside the Chili Bowl I've managed to glimpse into the secret lives of the
 human animal quite a few times, like today.

        A man comes into the diner - he's a "suit", nice watch, fancy
 sunglasses, slicked back hair, and a tie that probably cost more than my
 entire outfit.  He orders a coffee and tells us that he's sitting outside to
 wait for his girlfriend who is getting her nails done next door.  I
 automatically hate him for dating someone that dumb, and for most likely
 paying for her to look like a total slut.

        After having the nerve to ask if we have NON-FAT MILK - "Just a diner
 we are running here, sir" - he proceeds to drink something that is one part
 sugar and two parts cream; I'm sure there was some coffee involved somewhere
 in there, I just don't know where.  He spills the coffee all over the table
 and himself, tidies up, and walks next door to the nail shop.

        At the same moment a middle aged "loppish" couple approaches the
 corner.  "Loppish" of course means "sloppish" without the "s".  The man
 stands next to his wife and they both face the WALK/DONT WALK sign across
 the street.  Now the "suit" and his girlfriend exit the nail shop.  She's
 actually more of a hooker than a girlfriend.  Gigantic bleached blonde hair,
 a fake tan, a sleeveless shirt on a cold day, pants tight enough to make it
 obvious she's not wearing any underwear, and breasts that her boyfriend
 spent a few paychecks on.

        The "suit" and his "girlfriend" (now in quotes because I'm leaving it
 to you to decide if she's a girlfriend or a hooker) walk toward the corner
 which is occupied by the "(s)loppish" couple.  They turn the corner, leaving
 their overfed and underdressed human counterparts behind.  The female half
 of "Mr. and Mrs. Lop" does not notice; the male half does.

        As the horrifically energetic tramp, or hooker, and her "boyfriend"
 walk by "Mr. Lop" turns his head once to catch a glimpse of her ass, or
 maybe her hair, but I'll bet it's her ass.  He turns back to the
 street light.  But once is never enough, so he looks again, this time for
 about five seconds.  Once more he turns back to face the light.  His wife,
 "Mrs. Lop", having no idea what is going on, looks innocently ahead, most
 likely wondering when the light will change.

        "Awww, one more time," must be what "Ol' Loppy" is thinkin' cause he
 looks in the hooker's direction again.  This time you can see it in his
 eyes:  "Never."

        All Human Safaris end with a twist, I'm guessing its human nature...
 it must be.  This one won't let you down.  As "Mr. Lop" turns back to face
 the street, re-entering the world of his wife, their car payment, mortgages,
 possibly a few children, and a less than zesty life, he raises his arm to
 pat his wife's back, giving her a gentle "It's gonna be alright" kind of
 rub.

        "Mrs. Lop" still didn't know what had happened.  Neither did the
 "hooker", or her "boyfriend" the "suit".  They were still breathing and
 thinking normally - their last minute had gone by uneventfully.  But for
 "mr. Lop", a million minutes had gone by, he remembered everything that was
 sour about his life, and all it took was a strange woman's ass.

        Minutes later, I sat outside the Chili Bowl and recounted the whole
 scene to my father.

        "Men are pigs," he said.

 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

 "Watery Martyrdom"
 by Sweeney Erect

        Once, right after Lester Pratt left the room, a friend of his made
 the joke "Lester is so uptight his pubic hairs are curly" and everybody
 laughed.  Later, nobody could explain what was so funny about the comment
 except that it was crass, and that it just seemed somehow intuitively right
 that Lester's pubic hairs be curly due to stress.

        Lester was 25 and worked for UPS, which was not an especially
 stressful job.  In fact, his life was fairly low maintenance.  When people
 asked him what he did, he always said he was a writer.  Everybody 25 years
 old or younger Lester knew, no matter what they actually did to put food and
 vodka into their tummies, said they were either an artist or a musician.
 Nobody he knew actually supported themselves through either of these
 professions.

        So one source of stress for Lester was his writing career, or the
 fact that he didn't really have a writing career.  This always seemed to
 bother Lester far more than it bothered his peers, in part because Lester
 did have some aptitude for the task.

        In fact, Lester had a remarkable aptitude for thinking up brilliant
 ideas for stories and movies.  But this aptitude came with a curse, and that
 was a real source for his stress.  Every now and then, Lester would get a
 truly great idea for a book or screenplay, an idea so dead-on that it
 couldn't possibly miss.  He would tell his friends, and they would all agree
 it couldn't possibly miss.  And then, the next day, or sometimes the very
 same night, there would be a commercial or a preview for the very same idea
 he had just had.

        At first, people assumed he had just seen or heard something about
 the ideas beforehand and forgotten about it and so convinced himself that
 the idea was his to begin with.  But as time went on, it became obvious that
 Lester really was having these ideas days or hours before they were marketed
 on a huge scale. Some of his friends found it hilarious, some found it
 eerie.  All agreed it was most unusual.

        Another thing that was most unusual about Lester was his pet.  Lester
 had a ring-tailed lemur he kept in a cage in his living room.  Here is how
 that happened:

        One night, a few nights after his 23rd birthday, a girl had come up
 to Lester in a bar.  She was wearing leather pants, which he always found
 irresistibly sexy, and so he had listened attentively to everything she had
 to say.  She told him her name was Starr, and that she was coming off of a
 bad break-up with her boyfriend of 2 years, and she was moving out West to
 get away for awhile, but she had to find somebody to take care of her pet,
 which was a lemur.  Most people, she said, were scared of lemurs as pets,
 but really they were no problem to take care of.

        "Look," she said, "you're pretty cute, and if I weren't still so
 broken up over my ex I would probably want you.  Would you consider taking
 care of my lemur for me while I am away?"

        "Hmm..." Lester had reasoned, "if I keep her lemur for her, surely
 when she gets back from Out West she will have to call me to get it back,
 which is as good as assuring myself a date with a girl who has leather
 pants.  And so, thinking himself very shrewd, Lester agreed to take care of
 the lemur, who was named Frank the Lemur.

        They went out to Starr's VW, where she had a cage with a furry little
 lemur in it, which she handed to Lester, along with a small, worn paperback
 book called "Caring for Your Lemur".  "Everything you need to take care of
 Frank will be in this book," she said, and gave Lester a peck on the cheek
 and got in her car and drove off.

        Now Frank was not really stressful for Lester, in fact he was much
 easier to take care of than people generally imagine lemurs to be.  All he
 needed to do was remember to change his food and water once a day, clean the
 cage out periodically, and let Frank run around for 3 or 4 hours a week in
 the living room.  Even these exercise sessions were fairly easy to deal
 with - Frank just sort of ran happily in a big circle around and around and
 then went voluntarily back into the cage.

        Still, Lester couldn't help feeling a tiny bit odd about his
 pet - kittens, puppies, fish, snakes, scorpions, even monkeys were all
 common enough among his ilk, but a pet lemur was a whole new thing
 altogether.  So far as he knew, there was absolutely no precedent for it.
 This caused a vaguely unsettled feeling in his tummy a lot, especially as he
 was going to sleep.

        Lester's nightly ritual was to catalogue all the things in his life
 that were worrying him just as he was trying to fall to sleep, which was
 probably one reason he didn't sleep very well.  Another was the disturbingly
 large number of dreams he had about Frank the Lemur.  He never quite
 recalled any of these dreams anymore than to remember that somehow the Lemur
 was getting the better of him.

        It seemed odd that after two years Starr still hadn't returned from
 Out West.  After time, though, Lester had begun to think of Frank less as a
 ticket to a date with a girl in leather pants than as a part of his family.
 In fact, as the only other member of his family.

        Girls came and went in Lester's life, going more often than coming,
 and even when coming never coming if you sense my meaning, which may be why
 they tended to go so quickly.  The constants were his friends, who
 aggravated him; his pet, who made him feel vaguely off; and his curse, which
 weighed on him.

        Finally, one week in November, it all got to be too much.  Listen to
 this.

        Sunday night, Lester had a brilliant idea for a movie about a group
 of young men who start a reading circle, determined to get all the way
 through all the classics before they die.  They each are assigned 30 books
 to read and report on throughout the years, and the story traces the lives
 and loves of 8 young men and one reading circle.  Monday morning, right
 before work, he saw a commercial for that very movie, starring Ben Affleck
 and called _The Halstead Reading Society_. At work, Lester spent the entire
 day grumbling viciously to himself, unable to concentrate.  He accidentally
 delivered a shipment of Gideon's Bibles to a local porn shop called Medusa's
 Adult World, which brought a hearty round of laughter from the patrons and
 proprietor.  The woman working the counter, presumably Medusa herself, was
 so amused she gave him a $10 coupon, which he taped to the top of the box
 before dropping it off at the Gideon's downtown offices.  Somebody at the
 office, presumably old man Gideon, was unamused and called to complain to
 Lester's supervisor, who was amused but still asked Lester not to do it
 again.

        Monday night, Lester had a very clever idea for a movie about a guy
 who meets a girl he likes who thinks he is gay, and is attracted to him
 because she thinks he is gay, and he has to try to keep seeming gay while
 also figuring out how to get her, if he has to pretend to be gay and if she
 might stop liking him if he isn't.  He vowed to start writing the screenplay
 as soon as he got home from work on Tuesday.

        Wednesday afternoon, 15 pages into the screenplay, he sees a
 commercial on TV for that very movie, called _The Importance of Being Sly_,
 prompting him to, at last, in a fit of rage, throw his television set out
 his first floor window.  As it broke and exploded on the pavement outside,
 he felt no real regret at all.

        That night, a lovely idea for a book came to him.  He would write, he
 decided, about a gay U.S. President, and how he tried to hide his
 homosexuality.

        Friday night he had a date with a nice and very pretty girl named
 Leslie, who seemed like a good bet to own some leather pants.  Perhaps even
 handcuffs.  With or without leather pants and handcuffs, Leslie was an
 undeniably attractive girl.  Which is why what happened at the theatre was
 all the more unfortunate.

         After a nice dinner at a moderately priced restaurant, Leslie and
 Lester went to the theatre to see the new Harrison Ford movie, a movie with
 enough tears for her and enough explosions to make her think he was into
 action movies and, therefore, a potentially rugged man.

        The second preview, however, was for a movie about a closeted
 homosexual President of the United States and how he tried to cover up his
 homosexuality and the ensuing hilarity.  Lester grew very angry and began
 shouting at the screen, shouting that they just had to be reading his
 thoughts.

        The "mindreading hypothesis" was an idea that had been building up in
 his mind throughout the whole week, just waiting to come out in full force.
 He hadn't decided how they were doing it - initially he had thought
 television rays, but he had destroyed his TV and they were still reading his
 minds.

        "OF COURSE!" he shouted at the screen, "IT MUST BE THE LEMUR."

        He turned to Leslie, hugged her tightly and yelled "The lemur, you
 see, he has been here since the trouble started.  Now, I must go kill the
 lemur!"

        Leslie, to her credit, said "Yes, that is a good idea, I'll just wait
 here," and then sat down to see the movie.  She was disappointed, but not
 shocked, that her date had turned out to be a lunatic.  His was not an
 uncommon case among the men she had recently been out with.

        Lester drove home at breakneck speeds and burst into his apartment,
 only to find Starr waiting there, sitting by the cage and holding a pistol.

        "AHA!" he said.  "I might have known a woman was behind this!"

        "Actually, I work for a man."

        "I might have known a woman would never be clever enough to
 orchestrate this."

        "Yes.  Well, I suppose you'd like to know what happened to you the
 past couple years."

        "And I suppose you are going to kill me after you tell me."

        "Yeah."

        "Hmm... I was only being melodramatic."

        "Oh - I'm sorry - in this case you were right to fear the worst.
 Melodramatics always meet melodramatic fates, and they can never believe
 they had really been right all along."

        "Pithy."

        "It's easy to be pithy when you have a gun."

        "At least you're wearing leather pants."

        "Yes, if I have time I may kill you slowly, if you like."

        "Asphyxiation might be nice."

        "I will see what I can do.  At any rate, this 'lemur', as a cleverer
 man might have noticed, is not a lemur at all but a cunningly crafted
 machine.  The machine, using algorithms I would only be wasting my time were
 I to try to explain them to you, fuses with the brain of a representative
 member of a key demographic, and pushes them along to see what sorts of
 stories they would like us to tell them.  The longer the owner has the
 machine, the more representative his mind becomes, the more he assimilates
 with others of his generation.  The thought patterns are sent to us, and we
 sell them, at great profit, to Hollywood studios and New York publishing
 houses.  Inevitably, the ideas come to fruition in your own mind months
 after they come to fruition for the machine, thus meaning that you always
 have an idea just as it is being marketed."

        "Diabolical!"

        "Well, look at it this way - you were a sort of cult hero among your
 friends, and you inadvertently helped to make some very profitable movies."

        "So I was just chosen..."

        "Yes, at random.  Do you have more questions?  If so I'm going to
 have to shoot you instead of asphyxiating you."

        "Hmm... I have always wanted to be asphyxiated by a hot girl."

        "I know - you also accidentally contributed to some of the more
 successful S and M porns of the past few years.  Inside of 85% of men in
 your demographic is the heart of a devoted masochist - *that* should be
 hitting mainstream theatres, in subtle ways, by Christmas."

        Lester looked awkward.

        "Sit down," she said, still aiming the gun at him.

        He did, and she tied his hands behind him with rope.

        "I'm not sure how I feel about this."

        "You like it," she said, putting a plastic bag over his head.  "It's
 the best way to die, even if you aren't a masochist."

        "True."

        She giggled a little, and tied the bag tightly around his neck.  Then
 she lit a cigarette and watched as the bag expanded less and less with each
 breath out and clung more and more to his face.  She sat on a chair next to
 him and crossed her legs, which he noted and found sexy as he was thrashing
 about.

        As he was dying he thought back on his life and none of it, not even
 the plot points, made the least bit of sense.  Everything had been a failure
 and a fantasy at the same time.  In the end, his melodramatic paranoia had
 been justified and his deepest masochistic fantasies fulfilled, but his
 life's ambitions went unrealized.  He had no idea, as he finally went black,
 if he had won or lost.

 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

 "Baked, But I am Appetite"
 by Mike Flynn

        Let's go get baked, just kids on a wheelie.  Shelled sorrow cut
 carrots, doughnuts in space and good, not understanding but not wanting to.
 On beds, boards with mass and bras, snow-wheel, get stuck with force out.
 The button has a red door.  Single grass, so crass, boulders and snails in
 pairs.  What are you doing with the pond these days? Too much blue circular
 tree dark.  Lemonade, queen of the eye throat disease, with melon.  No one
 can know with what they've been through that nothing gives moths to oval
 browning syrup. She walks, she walks like this.  Dear material, drain and
 blow dry rectangle ties entwined across which is black behind.  Black
 licorice, frogs drop to the ground in motionless motion unison.  Beware the
 bluejay moustache as it grows into wall-breaking boxes with may.  One wax,
 another wax tree.  Drawing passages of unearthed and mowing egrets.  They
 digsee.  Plastic wind swirls from Burgrundy to mount pleasant with those
 below, the ones without food-fire.  Watch me devour, watch me dye, I am a
 bit contrite, but I am appetite.

 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

 "And The Water Shall Carry It Away"
 by Oregano

        This would be the first time.  Charles Waddleton was nervous but
 excited; in all the years, over all the centuries, finally this would happen
 to a Waddleton.

        Charles Waddleton and his wife Kathy brought their three-day old
 child through the doors of the church.  The organ played in the grand
 cathedral and the priest was almost blinding in his robes; he gave off an
 aura of perfect peace.  Charles Waddleton beamed with pride as he and his
 wife walked down the aisle, past the rest of the family gathered for the
 blessed event, to the baptismal fount.

        The Waddleton family had never been known for its goodness. Look back
 as far as you can into the past and you find gambling and drunkenness.  Look
 ahead from there and you find horse thieves and owners of houses of
 ill-repute.  Up 'til Charles you found convicts in every generation.  But
 Charles was lucky, he found Kathy.  She was a woman who saw the good in
 Charles Waddleton.  She showed him that there was hope in goodness - a way
 to live, rather than just survive.

        Charles fell deeply in love and before they married, Charles joined
 the Catholic Church and had never been happier.  Now here he was in the
 grand cathedral with his child about to be baptized; born into the Catholic
 Church, the child would have a chance.

        Charles and Kathy Waddleton handed the child to its godfather, who
 then stepped to the fount where the priest was ready.  He anointed the
 child's forehead with holy water and said, "I baptize thee in the name of
 the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost."  All the sins of the
 family washed away - a fresh start.

        The godfather handed the baby to the loving arms of Kathy who kissed
 her new baby and then handed him to Charles.  Charles kissed the baby and
 said, "You will be the first."  He grabbed the baby by the throat and
 squeezed shut the baby's airway with as much force as he could.

        After a few long minutes the baby stopped kicking.  Kathy came up and
 hugged Charles lovingly.  They both were smiling proudly.  The priest came
 over and offered his congratulations.

        "He is the first," Charles cried out, his voice echoing back from
 every surface of the great cathedral.  "This family has seen and caused so
 much pain over the years, but now my baby is the first Waddleton to go to
 Heaven."

 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

 "Bloody Pie In Your Eye (Part One)"
 by Cheesus

        It isn't every day that you see a human hand laying on the side of
 the road.  For the most part, human hands are attached to people, and people
 do not generally like laying on the side of the road.  This particular hand
 wasn't attached to much more than an old wet bit of yellowing newsprint.

        Just keep walking, I said to myself.  As a general rule it's best not
 to get involved in this sort of thing.  There would most certainly be a
 lengthy questioning session - I could only imagine a Columbo-esque
 disheveled detective making implications that I had killed whoever the rest
 of the body happened to be.  Goddamn my conscience - I just couldn't leave
 it well enough alone, could I?  Hell no.  Can't just live my own life and
 avoid the inevitable coroner's inquest and legal proceedings and associated
 bullshit.  Of course not.

        How could anyone in my position help but think of that old Oliver
 Stone movie with Michael Caine where his severed hand haunts him, creeping
 around in his yard like mass transit for insects.  It played on the "phantom
 limb" effect, the sensation that a lost limb is still connected, and the
 spooky possibility of a psychic link between a man and his estranged
 extremity.  It was a horrible movie.  Basically little more than another
 opportunity for Caine to painfully overact and Stone to generate funding for
 his all-too-obvious drug habit (Natural Born Killers - case closed).  That
 criticism aside, I saw the movie for the first time when I was about 8 years
 old, and it was pretty damn scary to me then.  I'm no psychologist, but
 there must have been some latent fear-of-severed-hand-effects, because I was
 slowly becoming convinced that the hand was actually moving.

        Since I am obviously more stupid than any teenager in a slasher
 movie, I moved in for a closer look.  A sigh of relief escaped my lips as I
 noticed that it was not actually a HUMAN hand, but that of some sort of
 automaton, robot, or android.  Thankfully discarding all those nasty organic
 thoughts of rotting flesh, I carefully peeled the rainsoaked bits of litter
 from the smallest of the mechanical fingers.  The hand was covered with some
 sort of rubberized flesh-tone material that looked eerily like the real
 thing.  If it weren't for a thin seam in the material revealing a metallic
 gleam from beneath, I might still have considered it to be Michael Caine's
 lost appendage.

        Discovering a manufacturer's name on the wrist, the wheels of my mind
 began trying to fit the puzzle pieces together.  A maker of robotics?  A
 medical company that specializes in prosthesis?  A university research lab?
 Walt Disney Corporation?  No, these things would have made far too much
 sense.  Inexplicably, the nameplate read BARNUM AND BAILEY.  I was stumped.
 What in the hell could a robotic hand have to do with a circus?  There was
 only one person to ask.

        Unlike most people, I have developed a number of acquaintances with
 what many consider to be "eccentrics" - people who are basically insane but
 have enough money and prestige to avoid being institutionalized.  One of
 these eccentric friends of mine has an unnatural obsession with clowns.
 With Jon it's not anything perverse, mind you, but an all-encompassing fear
 and hatred of all things clownish.  In the course of his life, Jon has
 incorporated various conspiracy theories into a sort of clown-gestalt theory
 of the world.  You might not think that this would make his assessment of my
 discovery particularly credible, but Jon has actually amassed a considerable
 amount of legitimate circus knowledge alongside his conjectures about the
 secret "Clown World Order".

        "Ah, you rat mime bastard, wipe that smile off your face!"  I
 overheard shouting as I approached the back gates of Jon's sizeable estate.
 An unlucky mime had planted himself in the municipal park across the
 boulevard, and if my overagressive friend had anything to say about it, it
 would be a long time before he ventured on this side of town again.  It was
 an unexpectedly amusing sight - a mime running full speed down the center of
 the street, yelling for help in a gruff new york accent.  I must admit that
 I had never considered what a mime might sound like if he were to speak.  I
 imagine that I probably thought all mimes spoke French.

        With the mime properly dispatched, Jon stopped to catch his breath.
 "Dammit, I need to quit smoking.  Would have been able to catch the
 bastard."

        "Jon, you don't smoke.  You have asthma."

        "What are you, the voice of reason?  I didn't see you chasing the
 fucking clown around the fucking park.  What the hell do you want?"  He
 seemed to be rather upset that he didn't get a solid whack at the mime
 before he fled.

        I showed him the hand without uttering another word.  He looked at
 it, then looked up at me again.  I could see the consternation in his eyes -
 he looked troubled, but he was under control.  Thankfully, he had calmed his
 reckless aggression of the mime attack.  It would do no good to ask him
 questions.  His answers would undoubtedly make no sense to anyone other than
 himself - he would explain himself in his own way, in his own time.

        "Come inside," he whispered.  "Bring that... thing with you, but keep
 it under your coat."

        I chuckled softly to myself as we entered what was essentially the
 circus equivalent of the Batcave.  Just the idea that I was standing in a
 state-of-the-art scientific laboratory devoted to the study of clowns was
 enough to make me wonder whether I had actually gotten out of bed that
 morning, or if I was having a ridiculous dream.

        "You don't have any idea what this means, do you?"

        "If I did, I certainly wouldn't be watching you run chemical tests on
 a robotic circus hand."

        "I'm checking for traces of makeup or synthetic hair.  If I'm right,
 this hand is going to confirm what I've suspected all along."

        "You know, I've never been able to make sense of anything you've
 suspected."

        "Shut up.  I'm talking about a conspiracy of global proportions here
 and you sit here making fun of the guy trying to help you?  What an
 asshole."

        "Okay, okay.  Tell me about the hand."

        Jon proceeded to tell me a story that a rational person would have
 dismissed instantly.  It was a tale of an international plot to infiltrate
 all the nations of the world with mindless android circus and carnival
 troupes.  He showed me stacks of files which elaborated on hundreds of cases
 of murder, fraud, robbery, kidnapping, and every other crime in the book -
 all of which he attributed to clowns.  I couldn't help but feel like I was
 stuck in a bad episode of the X-Files.

        "So when is Agent Scully going to come in and debunk your theory,
 Jon?"

        "If you're going to insist on using that metaphor, you are my Agent
 Scully."

        I wasn't particularly fond of that comparison.  Certainly Gillian
 Anderson is an attractive woman, but I couldn't afford her wardrobe.  I
 would make a shabby Scully at best.

        "No need to go there, if that's OK.  Now, the hand.  You're saying
 that the circus company Barnum and Bailey, the same company that provides
 wholesome entertainment for millions of people each year, is involved in a
 global crime ring?"

        "I agree with all of that except the 'wholesome' part.  I fail to see
 anything wholesome about the existence of circuses."

        "So what do we do?"

        "If these tests come out as I think they will, there's only one thing
 to do.  We have to bring it all down."

        Jesus Christ.  Why the hell didn't I just keep walking?

        "It's all coming down.  All of it.  Their world is coming down."

 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

 "Bloody Pie In Your Eye (Part Two)"
 by Cheesus

        As could be expected with my luck, the tests confirmed Jon's
 suspicions.  He even encouraged me to review his methods, and I'll be damned
 if there was a single flaw.  At this point I was slightly more intrigued
 than I was disgusted with the whole concept, so I decided to go along for a
 while longer.

        "The first step is to find the clown that this came from.  We find
 him, and we'll find the nest."

        I objected to the term "nest".  Whatever these things were, they
 certainly weren't alive.  Jon nodded silently and quickly exited the room.
 When he returned he was wearing his coat.

        "Take me to the exact spot you found it."

        We walked to my car at a brisk pace - I could tell that Jon was
 anxious about what we might find on that corner.  There was no way to tell
 what I might not have noticed as I walked casually down the sidewalk that
 morning.  Jon insisted on hiding in the backseat as I drove; this was his
 first outwardly weird action of the previous few hours.  It put me a bit
 more at ease to know that we were probably only chasing clowns that existed
 only inside Jon's head.  If it weren't for the goddamned robotic hand in the
 passenger seat I could have dropped Jon off at the hospital and gone home.

        I parked on the street about 2 blocks from the original location of
 the hand.  Jon insisted that we approach on foot in order to elude any
 anti-automobile defenses that might be in place.  Not a very comforting
 thought, I said to myself, since my jacket certainly wasn't heavy enough to
 repel an attack that my car could not.  I watched Jon taking careful notes
 as we stealthily approached the corner.  I immediately noticed two things
 that I had overlooked a few hours earlier.

        First, I saw that the bits of litter flying around the sidewalk were
 not just remnants of a random old rain-soaked newspaper.  Instead, stacks of
 circus fliers were being blown around by an old exhaust duct in the alley.
 The second observation was slightly more disturbing - glancing upward I
 could see what appeared to be part of a red wig caught in a 10th floor
 window.  I nudged Jon and pointed skyward.

        "A telltale sign.  We have no choice but to get up there.  I'm going
 up the fire escape on the back side of the building.  I want you to go in
 the front door."

        It was not hard for me to see that I was drawing the short straw in
 this bargain.

        "What!?  I'm not going in the front door.  What am I going to do, ask
 the receptionist what floor the evil clown headquarters is on?"

        "That could work."

        "I can't tell if you're funny or just stupid."

        "Go on, in the front door with you."

        I assented, seeing that there was no point in arguing with a madman
 such as Jon.

        The foyer of the 17 story building was as glorious as any structure I
 have ever seen.  Vaulted ceilings, marble floors, and ornate carved hardwood
 walls nearly left me breathless.  I made note of the tasteful placement of
 hanging art and statuary, and the soothing sounds of some unnamed cello
 concerto emanating from hidden speakers.

        I also made note of the gaudy-haired clown sitting at the
 receptionist's desk.  I barely had time to hit the floor before the clown
 was out of her chair and atop the desk, letting fly with a hail of bullets
 from dual automatic weapons.  I found a safe spot between two large marble
 columns and shielded my eyes; marble chips were falling like rain.  I could
 feel some small fragments lodge themselves in my arm, and I could feel warm
 blood trickling down to my elbow.

        The instant I heard the clown move to reload I knew I had to move.  I
 took a couple of lunging steps and dove for the door just past the front
 desk.  I used the marble floors to my advantage; I slid a good fifteen feet
 before slamming headfirst into the closed elevator doors.  Before I lapsed
 into unconsciousness, I thought that this would never have happened to Bruce
 Willis.

        When I awoke I was laying prone on a dirt floor surrounded by what
 was all too obviously one ring of a three-ring circus.  A half dozen heavily
 armed clowns were in sight.  They seemed to be entertaining themselves with
 traditional clown gags.  Only a robot could find a squirting flower funny.

        I shuddered as I noticed the bullseye painted on my chest.  A burning
 sensation in my eyes brought my attention to my own face.  I was made up in
 clown paint!  It became apparent that I was to be the latest victim of a
 senseless circus accident.  No doubt they would launch something from that
 cannon, crushing me beyond recognition.  A perfect murder.

        I heard a deafening blast, and looked up to see my eccentric
 companion Jon unceremoniously smeared against a brick wall.  The sight of a
 man flying through the air at high velocity is a liberating one, but hardly
 worth the price of having to watch him land.  I expected the worst as two of
 the guard clowns approached.  I understood my own mortality in that moment
 better than any other.  I cursed the cruelty of fate, to put me at my end in
 a three-ring circus.  Perhaps I would be dropped from the high wire, or
 trampled by an elephant.  I had given up hope; all I wished for was a death
 with dignity.

        The clown robots were exceedingly lifelike - I only knew with
 certainty that they were robotic because I noticed the same telltale seam as
 I noticed on the hand.  They untied me and prodded me to walk forward.  My
 thoughts wandered back to the hand.  How could I have forgotten?  The
 robotic hand had a simple twist-off shaft assembly!

        With an unusually graceful motion, I spun around and reached for the
 wrists of my clown escorts.  With a simple snap of my own wrists, I disarmed
 both clowns in an instant.  Within a second I had tossed away their robotic
 hands and opened fire on them.  Sparks flew as the bullets sliced through
 the colorful clothing, then the faux-skin layers and finally found the
 heartless metal torsos.

        Behind me, the other four guard clowns had stopped their idle
 pie-throwing and seltzer spraying and were staring at me in disbelief.  I
 decided to continue moving forward.  The four remaining guards certainly had
 me outgunned at this point, so I thought it best to gain some cover.  I made
 for the corner of a massive set of bleachers in the hope that I might get
 underneath and out of the clowns' line of fire.

        I made the cover moments before they opened fire.  As I cringed
 behind the bleachers, I noticed that I was not really in a big top tent, but
 a massive open space inside a building.  Logic told me that I was probably
 in the same building that I had entered so boldly.  they would not have
 risked moving prisoners to an actual circus.  Besides, there were no
 circuses in town that weekend.

        A gentle chime made a 'ding' from a hallway about 30 feet behind me.
 Instinct told me that it was an elevator, and more evil clowns would soon be
 upon me. I fired my weapons a few times to slow down the clowns in pursuit
 and broke for the elevator hallway.  I slid feet first a few feet short of
 where the dirt floor turned back into tile, opening fire on the dozen clowns
 that had just unpacked themselves from the comically overstuffed elevator.
 Luck had turned in my favor, as the first four clowns sparked and ignited
 the highly flammable polka dot pants and brightly colored polyester hair of
 the others.  I held my breath and leapt for the elevator as the flames
 burned higher.  I was on my way back down to the first floor when I heard a
 series of explosions from the Big Top - the high yield fuel cells of the
 clownbots were exploding.  I supposed that there must have been hundreds of
 clowns elsewhere in the building, and each one would be exploding soon if
 the flames continued to spread.

        Now, in a normal building, the sprinkler circuits would trigger after
 such a blaze, but apparently the clowns' lair was not up to fire code.  I
 can only assume that the robotics in use were prone to short circuit in
 water, but that possible fate could not have been worse than what they
 suffered in reality.

        As I crossed the now clown-less foyer, I made it out the front doors
 just in time to see the top 7 stories of the clown tower explode into an
 inferno of a magnitude unthought of outside of Hollywood.  I took shelter
 under a nearby parked car as debris scattered about the street.

        As the building slowly burned down to the ground, the wicked
 screaming laughter of dying robot clowns could be heard for miles around.
 The bitter odor of melted clown garb filled my nostrils; the acrid fumes
 caused a burning sensation in my lungs, but I savored it as I watched the
 devil clown bots melt into bubbling black pools of sludge.

 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

 "Conclusion"
 by Murmur

        It's 12:31 p.m. EST, Friday, December 31, 1999.  I had intended to
 release this issue in early to mid November, then early to mid December.  So
 much for all that.  Come hell or high water, though, this thing was going to
 be out by the end of the year, so here you have it.  I sit down at the
 computer needing to write about 12k of meandering conclusion that people
 will probably stop reading after this paragraph anyway.  How delicious.  I'm
 all compuncting on the inside.

        As you can tell by what we've offered in dto #29 and dto #30, we've
 kind of been compelled to release anything and everything we've been able to
 get our hands on.  The irony of that, to me, is that the overall quality of
 the writing isn't any lower than what dto has been accustomed to.  We've had
 our peaks and valleys so far as issues come and go, and although this is a
 weird issue, it's not really a shitty one at all.  I especially enjoy this
 month's offerings from Oregano and Sweeney Erect, who both gave us some of
 the best things we've had in a long time.

        But, you know, the whole process right now just pretty much blows
 chunks, and I'm not going to apologize for it.  It was an idea that seemed
 timely back in September when we started genuine work on dto #29.  At this
 point, it seems like an unmitigated failure.  The writing hasn't been
 inferior, but there's a certain edge missing.  Maybe that's my fault.  Maybe
 that's just the way it was destined to be.

        I'm not going to write the eulogy for dto right now, because dto has
 a certain timelessness to it.  It's kind of like cDc - if they don't ever
 release another text file, the old files are still going to be read, and
 there's still going to be these bizarre anonymous letters calling us
 homophobes and telling us we can't rollerblade.  It's not quite like when
 the band breaks up, because music is more unidirectional than what we've
 done, I think.  Although at times it's been hard to tell, dto has always
 sort of been about the discourse, not about the writing itself.  This might
 be a contentious point with some - and we did have legendary arguments about
 "what dto is" - but the interaction was always central to what dto was.  In
 a sense, it might seem ironic that this is the first issue where we've taken
 a couple of letters to the editor and tried to instill some formal sense of
 interactivity.  Whatever, I guess.

        I got on an airplane in July 1995 to go to Philadelphia for the first
 annual dummercon.  At most, dummercon in 1995 was an excuse for a bunch of
 people to get together in a big park - and even to have some people come
 from far away - just for the hell of it.  The e'zine community, whatever
 that means, was the glue, the excuse, the reason this strange assortment of
 15 people converged at FDR Park and smashed a computer system and exchanged
 "dumb stuff".  It was during those few days that we wrote some of the pieces
 for dto #1, which I can actually somewhat honestly say was a hyped-up,
 exciting thing when it was released.

        Whatever latent excitement there was from July 1995 has basically
 gone straight down the shitter by this point.  There would be spikes in
 excitement and activity - and I think through mid '97 at least, the
 excitement level remained fairly high overall - but a lot of crap and a lot
 of change has brought us to this point.  The move to the web was a disaster,
 this revival has failed.  It's genuinely time to move on.

        Like I said, though, this isn't a eulogy.  I guess I'm still lame
 enough to leave the door cracked for something to happen under the auspices
 of the ever-sassy "dto enterprises".  That I don't see this happening right
 now doesn't preclude me from being lame, I suppose.

        I find this whole thing especially sad, because I really thought we
 had something here.  I really thought we had a like-minded group of
 individuals that shared similar goals, similar ideals, and similar
 apprehensions about the world we live in and how we should lead our lives in
 this world.  I still think a lot of that rings true.

        I seriously believed that dto could germinate into something much
 larger, something that could actually lead to, if not become, an actual
 career for a lot of us.  A concept was born that we pompously referred to as
 the "dto mansion".  I've tried to explain what the hell the dto mansion idea
 is dozens of times, never really making a whole lot of sense.  I may as well
 try one last time and then let the dirt be shoveled over it.

        This wasn't a concrete idea so much as was an ideal.  It started with
 a text 'zine - not exactly the most sophisticated implement of media
 control.  But we were all united by the 'zine, by some sort of "dto ethos",
 if you will, and our varying interested could be tied back into it.  We
 talked about publishing essays online.  We talked about having a record
 label.  We talked about designing software.  And all of this would be under
 the same loose "roof" - basically, a collective of individuals whose power
 in numbers would be greater than their individual power.  What exactly the
 mansion would consist of took varying forms in our minds, but there were
 always ideas.  Shadow Tao and I sat in the laundry room of our dorm four
 years ago talking about "the future".  He said he thought the next big thing
 would be "sound warez" - anticipating the mp3 boom well before it really
 took off.  We could anticipate a lot.  We could do a lot.

        At the core, though, the mansion wasn't so much about what we were
 doing as about how we were doing it.  This might be where I've lost so many
 people for so long.

        The fact is, most of us do not feel entirely comfortable sliding
 complacently into mainstream society.  This isn't about being underground or
 elite or anything like that.  This is about growing up in a day and age
 where things like traditional office work just don't seem right.  This is
 about having more eclectic interests, about wanting to do interesting
 things, about wanting to have control over what we're doing.  This is about
 not wanting to become some extension of an overblown corporate society where
 we feel like cogs in the machine.

        Think about it as a more sophisticated Brave New World if you will -
 not some sort of horribly regimented society where we literally ARE all cogs
 in the machine, but the actual modern world, where so much of what people do
 is so utterly futile and unrewarding in the end.  A society not where people
 are drones but where almost any "peer group" we might find ourselves in just
 isn't going to share interests with us.  Creativity is at a premium now.
 This is an era where increasing opportunities have allowed millions of
 people who wouldn't have otherwise had the chance to try to break into
 "creative" fields like film, writing, and music - and yet we still find
 ourselves outside the norm, not wanting to follow the hip new trends, not
 wanting to become part of the pack.  This isn't about wanting to be
 different.  This is about looking at things differently and hoping we can do
 things differently.

        It is this ethos that has always been at the center of my formulation
 of the "dto mansion", an ideal "place" where like-minded individuals who
 share a common ethos can unite to feed off of one another, to provide
 positive feedback, to forge together in interesting and unique ways.  If you
 think about it, and if you've been reading dto for a long time, you'll
 realize that all of what I'm saying isn't a bunch of horseshit like it might
 at first appear.  Most of the writers *have* had different ways of looking
 at things.  Just because there hasn't been some sort of conscious unified
 front towards "dtoification" doesn't mean that we haven't shared a lot of
 the traits I speak of.

        Now that we've gotten somewhat older and more jaded, it almost seems
 more relevant to think in these terms than ever before.  The reality is that
 I'm swimming my way through a graduate program in a field that I have a hard
 time finding long-term potential in.  I'm not alone.  So many others are
 having a hard time finding themselves.  The structure of society is such
 that academic endeavors often aren't helpful.  The places we live in are
 often so culturally depraved that we can't find anything of interest to us
 until we get out - and when we do get out, we don't have a sufficient
 background in anything to understand what the next step should be.

        We've had argument upon argument over whether dto should be about the
 writing or should be about "the ethos".  In my mind, the answer has always
 been crystal-clear.  The reality is that so many of my friends,
 my acquaintances, my classmates, people on mailing lists I'm on, people who
 have read dto, people who have written for dto, our siblings, even our
 parents - they all - YOU all - understand what I'm talking about.  I know
 I'm not alone in thinking about things like this.  I know there are others
 who really wish they could just talk about these things as less of a rant
 and more of a genuine attempt to make headway in their lives.

        This is what dto has always been about to me.  In the early days this
 wasn't formulated, but the seeds are recognizable.  We've been lashing out
 at the idiocy we see in society since before we were writing for dto.  This
 hasn't stopped, and it's not likely to.

        Oftentimes it just seems like I'm repeating the same damn thing over
 and over again.  The piece I wrote for dto #29 probably doesn't seem a whole
 hell of a lot different from this - similar complaints, same style.  I wish
 I were a good enough writer that I could express myself better than this,
 but this is really the best I can offer.

        Although the idea of the dto mansion has largely waned over the last
 couple of years, the concept is still something I've held onto.  I don't
 know what the hell I want to do with myself, but I've thought up ideas
 before that have appealed to me.  I want to write for alternative
 publications - maybe arts and entertainment weeklies like the Chicago
 Reader.  I want to move to a nice town and open a record store with an
 arcade in the back, a small snack counter in the store, and a legitimate
 concert venue next door.  I want to have all of this at the same time -
 kind of my own little multimedia empire on half of a city block.  It's
 really a very pompous notion - at the heart of it I'd be the ultimate
 purveyor of culture, and I'd feel like I had due cause to purvey away - but
 you know, I really don't give a shit.  It's something I would love doing,
 especially if I had a group of people around me to do it with, like a
 co-owner and some employees that all kind of thought of things the same way
 I did, and customers that would come in and talk to me about music or
 politics or whatever the hell.  That's kind of my little retarded Utopia
 right now.

        Instead what I have to offer is an online record label with a barrage
 of insane and often insipid mp3s, a bunch of history books sitting around
 that need to be read, and this shell of a once-"prosperous" e'zine that's
 the closest I've ever come to writing for an "alternative publication".
 Most of the people associated with dto in the past aren't anymore, and I
 don't even live in the same state as any of the writers.  It just seems kind
 of silly to pretend the carcass still has life.

        I just want people to read this - is that asking too much as is? -
 and when they're done reading it to email me, call me, come up to me,
 whatever the hell, and tell me they fucking understand, and maybe even to
 talk about it.  Because, you know, that's all I've wanted out of this
 goddamn e'zine for a hell of a long time now.  But it's kind of like Mick
 Jagger said:  you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes,
 you must might find, you get what you need.  I guess we'll see about that.

                                     ____
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 ----------------------------- |  |  |  |  |  | -----------------------------
 ----------------------------- |  |  |  |  |  | -----------------------------
                               |  |  |  |  |  |
                               |  |  |  |  |  |
                               |_____|  |_____|
                                     |___ _

    please direct all dto correspondence (and money!) towards: dto@dto.net
            the dto world wide waste homepage - http://www.dto.net
   join the dto subscription list - send email to dto-subscribe@onelist.com

   (c) copyright 1999 doomed to obscurity productions - all rights reserved

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 Oh!

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 "Condiments Chapter 1999:  Murmur"
 by Murmur

        There was this guy - we'll call him Slurpee - and he was kind of a
 clever fellow, but not a very particularly clever fellow - and one day in a
 bout of personal cleverness, he started writing stupid short stories and
 giving them names like "Ketchup" and "Mustard" and he declared "I SHALL CALL
 THEM CONDIMENTS!" and he wrote these "Condiments" for a good six years
 because he was a loser.  Some of the Condiments made people laugh out loud.
 Usually the Condiments just confused people, for they were often abstract
 and forced and even when not they rarely made a whole lot of sense.  This
 was okay with Slurpee, because he was kind of a weird guy who liked
 confusing people, and especially enjoyed confusing himself.  He was so weird
 he even used his calculator to hit on chicks!  And it even worked!  That
 wacky Slurpee.  So he kept writing these Condiments and over time they got
 to be weaker and weaker and Slurpee got to be a more and more dejected boy.
 Except not really, because Slurpee graduated college and moved to Ohio for
 some reason.  Slurpee still wrote Condiments every so often, though.
 Sometimes he'd take a long time off because he was too busy playing Free
 Cell.  Sometimes he'd be lazy and claim to have writer's block.  Then one
 day Slurpee got engaged.  He still wrote a couple of Condiments after that,
 but not too many.  Slurpee started to turn into an especially clumsy and
 spineless freak.  Slurpee wound up engaged and living with his fiancee and
 two beagles.  He still wrote Condiments, but far less frequently.  Then
 Slurpee finally got married.  He was far too busy ironing and mending to
 write Condiments.  His only daily pleasure came from the ice cream truck!
 Of course, Slurpee's wife paid off the ice cream truck driver so that he
 would not let Slurpee buy ice cream any more, because Slurpee got really fat
 after he got married and ice cream made him fart a lot.  Slurpee was sad
 until the day he finally won the lottery, was able to afford liposuction,
 and moved his beautiful wife and their four beagles, two basset hounds, and
 four assorted other dogs into a handsome mansion.  Then he ran for Congress
 and embezzled lots of funds and was a big hero.

 Moral:  I was dressed for success...

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