[Freck turns on the radio]
Freck Suicide Narrator:
Charles Freck, becoming progressively more and more depressed by what was happening around him, decided, finally, to off himself. There was no problem in the circles where he hung out in putting an end to yourself. You just bought a large quantity of downers and took them with some cheap wine. The planning part had to do with the artifacts he wanted found on him by later archeologists. He had spent several days deciding, much longer than he had spent deciding to kill himself. He would be found lying on his back, on his bed, with a copy of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and an unfinished letter to Exxon, protesting the cancellation of his gas credit card. That way, he would indite the system, and achieve something by his death, over and above what the death itself achieved. At the last moment, he changed his mind on a decisive issue and decided to drink the pills with a connoisseur wine, instead of Ripple or Thunderbird. So he set off on one last drive, over to Tiny's Liquors, which specialized in fine wines, and bought a bottle of 2001 Azalea Springs Merlot, which set him back almost seventy dollars. Back home again, he uncorked the wine, let it breathe, drank a few glasses of it, tried to think of something meaningful but could not, and then, with a glass of Merlot, gulped down all the pills at once. However, he had been burned. Instead of quietly suffocating, Charles Freck began to hallucinate. The next thing he knew, a creature from between dimensions was standing beside his bed, looking down at him disapprovingly.
Freck:
You gonna read me my sins? [Creature nods]
Freck:
Eh, it's gonna take a hundred thousand hours.
Creature:
Your sins will be read to you ceaselessly, in shifts, throughout eternity. The list will never end.
Creature:
[starts reading] "The Sins of Freck"
Freck Suicide Narrator:
Charles Freck wished he could take back the last half hour of his life.
Creature:
[Creature continues to read] "... theft of fingernail clippers...” "... you did knowingly and with malice...” "... punched your baby sister, Evelyn...” "... December, theft of Christmas presents...” "... one billion lies...”
Freck Suicide Narrator:
One thousand years later, they had reached the sixth grade, the year he had discovered masturbation.
Creature:
[Creature continues to read] "... November fourteenth, Percodan... Vicodin... Cocaine...”
Freck Suicide Narrator:
Charles Freck thought, "At least I got a good wine."
Thomas Devoe:
Doctor, you can run your charts and your theories all you want. In the field, this is how it works: the good guys, that's us, we chase the bad guys. And they don't wear black hats. They are, however, all alike: they demand power, and respect, and they're willing to pay top dollar to get it. And that is our highly motivated buyer.
Julia Kelly:
What about other motivations?
Thomas Devoe:
Not important to me.
Julia Kelly:
Whether it's important to you or not, there are people out there who don't care about money, who don't give a damn about respect. People who believe the killing of innocent men and women is justified. For them it is about rage, frustration, hatred... they feel pain and they're determined to share it with the world.
Thomas Devoe:
Okay, that does me no good. Now let's deal with the facts at hand. 23 hours ago, General Alexander Kodoroff stole ten nuclear warheads.
Julia Kelly:
He's just a delivery boy. I'm not afraid of the man who wants ten nuclear weapons, Colonel. I'm terrified of the man who only wants one.
Caryl Kellogg:
What's with the balloons? It's not one of my kids' birthday is it?
Barb Ballantine:
No, time to roll out the cul-de-sac welcome wagon. We have new neighbors moving into the old Wagner house.
Marilyn Larson:
Oh, man, the Wagners! Now that was a great divorce.
Caryl Kellogg:
You knew the end was near when he and his secretary started taking Lamaze classes together.
Marilyn Larson:
Well, his wife was no angel herself. Remember every Friday the pool man would come over exactly at 3:00?
Caryl Kellogg:
that's right! In those tight, tight shorts on that even tighter butt? What ever happened to him?
Marilyn Larson:
He hurt his back giving her horsey rides in the deep end.
Marilyn Larson:
See, you're lucky. Your kitchen window faces north. Me, all I ever get to see is old man Kelly hiding whiskey bottles in his koi pond.
Barb Ballantine:
Ladies, ladies, must you diminish yourselves with idle gossip?
Marilyn Larson:
Sure!
Caryl Kellogg:
It's fun.
Barb Ballantine:
It's an invasion of privacy. And so often the facts are wrong. For instance, Mr. Kelly isn't hiding whiskey bottles, it's vodka. And they're not koi, they're goldfish. It's a common mistake. And as for the Wagners, he wasn't having an affair with his secretary, it was his receptionist. And as far as Mrs. Wagner and the pool man, yes, she was doing him.
Formerly...when he tried to do anything for the good of everybody, for humanity...for the whole village, he had noticed that the thoughts of it were agreeable, but the activity itself was always unsatisfactory; there was no full assurance that the work was really necessary, and the activity itself, which at first seemed so great, ever lessened and lessened till it vanished. But now...when he began to confine himself more and more to living for himself, though he no longer felt any joy at the thought of his activity, he felt confident that his work was necessary, saw that it progressed far better than formerly, and that it was always growing more and more.
We modern human beings are looking at life, trying to make some sense of it; observing a 'reality' that often seems to be unfolding in a foreign tongue--only we've all been issued the wrong librettos. For a text, we're given the Bible. Or the Talmud or the Koran. We're given Time magazine, and Reader's Digest, daily papers, and the six o'clock news; we're given schoolbooks, sitcoms, and revisionist histories; we're given psychological counseling, cults, workshops, advertisements, sales pitches, and authoritative pronouncements by pundits, sold-out scientists, political activists, and heads of state. Unfortunately, none of these translations bears more than a faint resemblance to what is transpiring in the true theater of existence, and most of them are dangerously misleading. We're attempting to comprehend the spiraling intricacies of a magnificently complex tragicomedy with librettos that describe the barrom melodramas or kindergarten skits. And when's the last time you heard anybody bitch about it to the management?
