....Neil emerges from a cloud of dust left by a hell-bent for leather Mercury careening off into a September late afternoon dissolving and fading into early evening. Disoriented, he stumbles through the door of the Tavern, and pauses momentarily as he assesses the scene unfolding before his eyes. To no one in particular he offers, "The original owner, in true free-spirit, peace-and-love fashion, opened this place and presided over it, nurtured it, watched it grow beyond his fondest imagination, then set it free to become what it was destined to be: a virtual mosh pit for jello-crazed, velcro-hanging, hot-tubbed, barbecue-massaged, thong- attired, potato stuffing, possum-talking, ghost-imagining, blues-adorned denizens of folk life and summary depravity. And I thought I was weird."

He glances at the table near the window, abandoned save for a few dead soldiers lying strewn about the floor, holding various ranks from Kentucky's Finest to Mad Dog to French Absinthe.

"Been away, yes," says Neil, as if he'd been asked for an explanation. "Sewing up holes in my normalcy suit, acquired for a sawski at the local St. Vincent de Paul's. Blake would be proud. But I feel a new rent in the works, another tear in the reality fabric....I just stopped in to unravel a while," and he begins pulling at a thread dangling from his pocket. Neil feigns an air of importance. "bbc, if you please, the usual." No response. "bbc? Is she gone? Moved on to bigger and better things? Maybe got a paying job? Can't hold it against her. And Roger," he inquires, "still making the jello deliveries? No? That seemed to be one of the few things you could count on. Oh well, seasons change, life goes on."

Neil seats himself at the end of the bar. "Here I sit,
brain departed,
saw the beginnings
of cross-threading started."
Neil's brow wrinkles as he tallies. "Blake wanders out of his thread and into the Tavern. The Beat ghosts fire up Neal's old Merc and high-tail it to the Madison thread. Hmmmm...." He makes the Vulcan 'Live long and prosper' sign and mimics Mr. Spock. "Fascinating. This place is definitely ripe for an upgrade to virtual reality. 'Cyberville.' Note to self," Neil says into a ball point pen he removes from his shirt pocket, which, in fact, is nothing more than a ball point pen. "Peruse library for available material on virtual reality."

He wheels around on his bar stool to face the table by the window again. "No TV," he observes. "None that I've seen, at least. No big screen. Accidentally or on purpose? In my house, no cable. One local channel. You have two choices: what's on or 'Off.'" A laminated, simulated wood grain frame appears around the table and the lights come up to reveal a virtually imaginary Neil sitting at the table alone, hunched over a glass tinkling with ice and filled with yellow liquid. "Caught in the synaptic crossfire again," the virtual Neil manages to say out loud through clenched teeth. Mustn't... go there." He screws his eyes closed. Rod Serling steps into the frame wearing his signature somber suit, wisps of cigarette smoke weaving threads of intrigue around his head.

"Submitted for your consideration," he begins. "A man, and his tenuous hold on reality, just another cyber-citizen reduced to talking to ghosts representative of a generational attitude that went the way of beads, bells, crash pads and light shows. There's a signpost up ahead....you've entered the LateNight Zone." Rod steps out of the frame. The virtually imaginary Neil comes to life and begins gesticulating to the unseen patrons at the table.

"Uncle Ron went to 'Nam," said Neil. "Came home early...got just a little too friendly with the indigenous peoples there. Sat down and ate dog with them at table one evening and the CO got wind and shipped him home most ricky-tic. Now he sits and watches TV. Says TV is responsible for the 'homogenization' of America. Used to be, he says, the good old U. S. of A was a country of regions, the South being distinctly different from the North, being distinctly different from the West, you see. These days, what the kids are wearing in the Bronx, they're also wearing in Biloxi and Butte. Madison Avenue foisting the winds of change upon an unsuspecting public through their all-invasive electronic tentacles. Now we are all the same, all part of a consumer collective that exists only to be 'hustled.' And all the violence? He says it's part of a calculated plot to desensitize the citizens to murder and mayhem when the eventual collapse of society occurs. That way no one will be overly appalled when Dirty Harry types level a cannon at a 'suspect' fleeing with a TV set, and fire until the clip is empty. They will have seen it a thousand times already, electronic images burned into their collective minds. Makes way for the police state to follow.

"He says that all the images of divorced and decidedly single people piped into the homes each night is not by accident either. Viewers get acccustomed to the image of people living singly, and subconsciously apply it to their own lives (witness the rise in the divorce rate), and that increases the possibility of selling more refrigerators and microwaves. A student of economics came up with that one, had to be.

"Not to mention the mores and values transmitted to kids and teenagers. The casual attitude toward sex, for instance. Now what could be the sinister plot behind that? Population explosion, making more consumers to buy stuff. Increasing the market size the good old fashioned way: literally."

The virtual Neil opened his eyes. The hallucination was gone. All the patrons at the Beat table had left to solve the mystery in the adjacent Madison thread. And the regulars had themselves retired to the solace and rejuvenation that Dreamland advertised. "So it's said we only use ten percent of our brains," Neil said to no one. "What is the other ninety percent doing? Working overtime maintaining our reality constructs, this reality being only one out of an infinite number to believe in. Or contemplating belly button lint."

"We've had the Industrial revolution, and now the Technology Revolution, which hasn't completely played itself out. The next real revolution will be the Perceptual Revolution. Physically, we can go only so far. But if you can imagine it, well, you can travel the ends of the Universe in the time it takes to form the thought."

Neil stood up from the bar, ready to leave. He would weave himself into more threads at a later date. As he passed by the window by the table, he caught a glimpse of his own reflection, looking like forty miles of bad road. He felt like it too. Something he had been fingering absently in his pocket took shape in his hand. He withdrew a small bolt with a nut threaded askew and laid it gently on the table.

It had been a great year for Suburbans, he thought, as he passed through the door. Farmers should have a bumper crop of them this year.