ILLUSION JUNCTION, AMERICA -- Hours after the explosions turned to silence, turned to shock, turned to resolve, he picked up his bags, grabbed his horn, forgot about the miscues and headed north into a scattered wasteland of burned-out pine, worthless sage and infinite turquoise, in the rock, in the sky, upon the sheer veneer of pathetic prairie enveloping the view from his impoverished perspective.

Standing alone if not surrounded by the basic elements, lust, envy and plagiarism, he collected his thoughts, his memories, his entire sense of what is real as opposed to what was Israel and determined to forge ahead as opposed to slipping away. Knowing he would never know, not in a real sense, that is, he couldn't help but notice his brain had other plans for the afternoon. His brain was determined to exercise its prerogative.

My brain is an active organ, he said to himself. It's only a small part of my overall makeup. But it drives my life. I cannot do anything about it. Son of a bitch never shuts down. The harder I try to blot out its messages, the louder they become. Even sleep fails to mute its imperative, its penetrating incisiveness. Life is a mental ride. I'm a passenger. Someone else is driving. I want to stretch out on the back seat and wake up when we get to Oaxaca.

An obtuse stranger at the library earlier that morning had summed-up the human condition with such perfection it was as much as he could do to think about just about anything other than what the man had said. At least he was pretty sure it had been a man. Gender distinctions aside, he knew the person knew what he or she was talking about, in a voice so gruff yet so lilting you could scarcely determine sexual disposition, let alone astrological preference.

"The more you know the less you know you know, you know?" the voice said, just about summarizing Russian history in a single extended phrase, a virulently vapid yet precise monologue within a sentence. "You know I know, you know?," he answered.

Saying "you know" too frequently was practically impossible in the early days of the new millennium, you know? Years later anthropologists could discern a pattern. Society, they determined, had gone basically nuts.

Speakers shared a general lack of confidence that they were being understood. All expression began to include requests for immediate affirmation. Eventually even speakers themselves soon forgot what they had said before they had even finished saying it, such was the devastating effect of the general malaise and the specific nature of sprouts.

One other amazing trend soon began running parallel with the poor confidence issue. Many of you knew about it and did nothing to stop it. In The Bible, it says the guilt you carry now is sufficient punishment for the wrongs you committed then. Still, shame on you. In other words, who gives a shit?

Still, and this truly pisses me off, you sat idly by as an entire generation began using the word "like" between every other word they uttered, literally destroying the language in less time than it takes for moss to form in a drought. In terms of semantics, it was gross. In terms of anyone being able to separate from the cultural pack, forget about it.

"Like, like, I was driving and, like, this lady next to me was talking on her cell phone, and like, I said, like, 'Heh, lady,' get off your phone and, like, drive, OK?', and she, like looked over at me like she maybe, like, liked me or something and the next thing I knew, like, we were both going off the, like road or something and I had like this huge fear this really wasn't like a friggin' dream or something and then like we both, I guess, like, woke up and like, realized we didn't like lichen, like I said, you know?"

My brain is an active organ, he recalled. It may never shut down completely. But at least it can distinguish standard communication from Contemporary American Dialogue -- Teenager-Style. It wasn't his fault everyone sounded like everyone else, everyone looked like everyone else and everyone thought like everyone else.

Boy, he thought, what a crazy-assed life this is. He knew he could do anything he wanted, short of really understanding the story behind the story, so to speak, so to write, so to conclude.