¹And it came to pass once upon a time in the beginning on a dark and stormy night that His Brain spoke to Dirk, saying:

²Just who’s talking to who, moron? Note the Cartesian poison saturating your first verse. Abandon this increasingly self-indulgent enterprise, leave Cincinnati, drive west, seek answers to questions that have not yet been asked. And, also, party.

³And Dirk listened to His Brain and departed Cincinnati and visited those regions that actually have a visible topography, landscape more varied than denuded forests blanketed with corn and industry, that is, he crossed the Mississippi River and entered a zone both material and mythic, both home and estranged (in the Heraclitean sense), both mapped and, ultimately—and completely—unknown.

⁴And little did Dirk realize the mischief that would transpire upon his departure, perpetrated by his co-authors, who seemed intent upon presenting to the world a hypertext simulacrum of Dirk, a “Dirk” with telepathic powers and messianic megalomania, a “Dirk” who founds a cult and then exploits his brainwashed followers both sexually and financially, a “Dirk” whose pious yearnings and proclamations operate only as a thin tapestry over the ever-growing suspicion that he is a complete and total charlatan, amoral and reprehensible, despite an occasional poem that merited a pause, a “Dirk,” in short, who perhaps deserves to die, and does, courtesy of his co-authors.

⁵And Dirk pondered the conundrum of leaving on a journey in order to contemplate how to handle this loss of control over the hypertexted guru masquerading under his name, the conundrum that the loss of control occurred while he was journeying making it impossible (since he sought not the Net while he was away), impossible for him to contemplate what was happening, so impossible that actually Dirk never pondered that conundrum at all, since he did not know it could exist until he returned from said journey and discovered the aforementioned mischief and then got the idea of reconfiguring said journey via the “messiah-in-the-wilderness-for-forty-days-and-forty-nights” trope into the gospel you are now reading.

⁶And Dirk imagined what “Dirk” would do during such a retreat from the maddening (and libido-draining) rigors of cult leadership.

⁷And Dirk consulted the notebook he wrote in during his journey.

⁸And Dirk transcribed portions of the notebook and inserted them into the hypertext.

⁹And Dirk saw that it was good.

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