His friend's just sitting there, twisting in the wind. It was the wind that brought that girl down.

I remember flames. Lots of flames. And friends. The same ones, and their lives messed and complemented each others like they were staging elaborate pranks with surprise birthday parties at the end, except that these pranks involved launching the statue of liberty in a race to the sky against the empire state building, and you were strapped above them experiencing Extreme Vertigo.

You'd have to see the movie to understand what I mean. You'd feel sick and exhilarated. That's all.

Of course, you get laid in the end, by some halfway decent looking waitress who says "You can use a condom if you like, but I'm taking all sorts of pills to kill those sex mites." She had a bit of a curl in her lip. Sorta sexy, sorta hare-lipped. [whats the scientific name for that]

I wish I could tell you how it started, but all I remember is how it ended, so lets work back from there.

When we first entered the building, it was filled with nasty looking creatures. Green and black, sad and mean. But the more you looked at them the more you could see how they felt. There were a couple slabs with blubbering holes in them: babies. The mother, big and ugly but you felt sorry for her - she was being taken away, and that's when I realised they were gonna torture her in front of her children. And my friend was gonna have to watch. Gonna want to stop it, but he'd have to fight his friends to do it. Evidently, this was the same torture I had gone through before I started remembering things. It was a rite of passage.

"Tricked us from fences;" he howled, like when Luke Skywalker had his hand chopped off and Darth Vader told him he was his father, "they've tricked us from fences to do their work!" And that, it seems, was the battle cry. The torturing began, the killing began, the defending began, and these violent sad emoting creatures hacked and cowered while so clearly feeling all of it that it was hard to watch, let alone participate in the carnage. A woman gathered her fear and love into her ovaries in pouches on her hips, pierced them with the needle from a local village rocket with a tracking device, and sent it headed for Mt. Korobaba. "In other words, fucked", she told me, as she wound up and smashed it all to pieces with a sledge.

But that's how life was back then. It was only recently that they lowered me into that hole on that twisting rope, through the ground wrapped in canvas to my memories below. I don't mean it so sound evocative; it's just how it was.

A thread ran through it, and shit blew up.

But goddamn, it was a lot of fun.

I do remember that the kid from Austin Powers was there. The one who lost his hair and became Dr Evil's son. And there were shiny cars. And explosions. And partying and laughing and fear and living it up outside any rule we could think of. But I'm just describing it all. How about we get into what actually happened.