Chips & Dips, Part Deux

(See the beginning of Part 1, below, for some exciting disclaimers! They apply to this entry as well!!!)

OK...So where were we? Chips. Brains. Entertainment. Right...

Look at how entertaining that episode of Sliders had been! Just imagine if you brought those pulse-pounding thrills to real life stuff, like the Blue Angels? Or, even better, to NASCAR! And NASCAR is really perfect, because if you had to find a real-life-fake-Kari to replace fake-life-real-Kari, who would you get? Danica Patrick, obviously. She’s a real hotshot, just like Kari was a fake hotshot in “Slide by Wire.” 

And while I have to confess that I’ve never found Danica hot—no matter how many provocative commercials with lesbian-dominatrix cops they stick her in, nor how much more they keep tarting her up with sleeker makeup and/or bodysuits. But see, here’s where implants come in. Take a look at Danica. Cosmetically speaking, she could probably benefit from the cold caress of science…but then it hit me that maybe she already has! She’s in NASCAR (or whatever). She’s a real athlete (heh heh)… Athletes use whatever edge they can get to get over the top. And while Danica’s rack isn’t anywhere near as spectacular as real-Kari’s, she certainly can pilot her hot rod as well as fake-Kari could pilot her plane… after she got implants!

That’s right. While lawmakers and various regulatory agencies have been writhing their hands over performance-enhancing chemicals, maybe they should have been worried about performance-enhancing implants. Here’s a means of really altering your body’s ability to compete: restructuring it! Feeling a little mediocre? Try an implant! How about grafting a star discus thrower’s arm onto a bullpen pitcher’s body? Or shark’s teeth into the gums of some hotshot pool player?

I’m sure you can see that the possibilities are limitless, and once you start looking at Danica and thinking about Kari, (in Sliders,) and if you consider how women never excelled at being race car drivers, (or as just plain drivers…sorry, ladies…) you start to get suspicious, don’t you? Like, just how does Danica make all those spiffy hairpin turns whilst pulling 50 Gs at 400mph? (Or whatever race car drivers do?) Nomenclature aside, I don’t think it’s her hairpins. 

You know how really great athletes always seem to have those tyrannical fathers? The ones that tirelessly dog their children all through their joyless childhoods to grasp some athletic brass ring or other? (Woods, Jeter, et. al.) Well, since all of society has agreed to consider race car driving a sport, for some reason, doesn’t it seem possible that maybe Danica Patrick has one of those imperious fathers as well?

Here’s how obsessed I became with the pattern I saw forming in front of me: I actually looked up Danica Patrick and her father! And it’s a good thing that I did, because otherwise, I wouldn’t know that her paw drives all her rigs around for her—when she’s not racing in them, I mean. That’s what he does for a living! Is that what you’d do with your time, if she were your kid? No matter how close you are, it’d be fucking embarrassing. Everyone can see that your sum total worth is wrapped up in the identity of your progeny…like some ontological mummy. Proud of your kid? You wouldn’t dream of leeching off another human being like that, unless you had no pride at all…or were one of those monomaniacal athletic dads!

(The distaff version of these guys is the showbiz mom, obviously, which I bring up because Danica has one of those too. Her mother handles her business affairs full time. What luck! Not every mother can find her child a spot in a commercial where they get to make out with a stripper/cop…)

So say you are one of those obsessive dad’s, and you have a dint of simple intelligence… you can see that the climb to the top of the heap is treacherous. Arms and legs wave out of a cluster of competitors, who are also climbing, and you have to grasp and clutch them and scramble over everyone else. You become part of that ugly writhing mass, like some nightmare out of Dante. Most of the climbers never see Purgatory—forget the Divine Apex of sooper stardom. To reach that next, highest level, you might need a little boost.

An elite sports dad, can see that need for a helpful push—however dim he may be otherwise. Presumably, Danica’s dad is one of these guys, so it’s likely he found out that destroying his child’s ego just wasn’t enough. It was time for some outside help—outside of nature even.

But let’s credit him with a little more intelligence than the average sports dad. After all, Danica made it all the way. (Close enough to be famous anyway—I don’t know or care what the top of the race car biz is, exactly.) So he must be one of the elite sports dads, right? Savvy enough to know that the powers that be have become pretty savvy as well. They’ve tightened the PED net so that it downright smothers fakers and juicers. So what’s a dad to do?

I bet I know what Danica’s dad did, and I bet I know just how he got the idea. I bet. 

In 1999, the episode “Slide by Wire” aired for the very first time. Danica would’ve been around 17. (She’s 35 now.) And that’s probably right around the time when a kid’s competitive potential has peaked. For Danica, the writing was on the wall, and maybe it wasn’t not quite spelling out what her dad wanted. He’s been cajoling her to race around since she was in swaddling cloths. Maybe it was Big Wheels first, when she was so little that her legs could barely move the pedals. (He probably strapped little motors to one of those silly plastic trikes…Hang on tight, Dani! VROOM! Off she goes! Wave bye-bye!)  Then when she reached her toddler years, he probably moved her to motor scooters. She’d wear Xtra Tall pimp platform shoes, so she could work the pedals. In grade school, she’d get a ’73 Buick LeSabre, and then, finally, her very own stock car when she graduated to adolescence!

By now, she’s good! But her reflexes are a little dull here and there. Once in a while, her courage wanes, when it should be hot waxin’. And worst of all, somehow, she’s just not fast enough! Sure, she wins every single race she’s in, but she’s got to be ready to face the Big Boys now…The Gordons! The Andrettis! The Speed Racers! And her time is just not good enough!!!

And Danica’s pa can only work elite sports dad magic on her so for so long. He’s already yelled at and humiliated her for her entire childhood. He’s already denied her friends, romance music, television (except racing programs)… He doesn’t even let her finish high school! (She did eventually get her GED. True fact.) He’s running out of ideas!

Then one night, he’s watching SyFy. (which had a much less idiotic name back then: “The Sci-Fi Channel.”) And it comes to him…an erection…because he’s watching Sliders, and Jerry O’Connell’s looking mighty fine. (What is with people and their inexplicable attractions to frogs and race car drivers?) But he watches a little longer, and he actually gets caught up in the inane story line…And sure enough the featured episode is “Slide by Wire” with all of its muddled meanderings on the subject of sticking chips in chicks craniums to turn them into super-pilots, and well…

He starts whacking off to Jerry O’Connell…

But then it hits him! Chips! Not the potato or nacho kind, but computer chips! Danica! Her head! It’s perfect!

So he runs out to the garage, where all his race car tools are, and starts soldering together some sort of primitive circuit board-type thing, but it comes out looking less like the chip on Sliders than it does like a transformer for a toy train set. (It’s actually from a Hot Wheels set that he got Danica when she was a kid, and it’s now badly melted from all that soldering.) But hey, you have to start somewhere. So he’s all ready to saunter into Danica’s bedroom, knock a wedge-shaped hole in her head with maybe an XL flathead screwdriver or something, slip the chip into her, and then watch the magic take place. But then it occurs to him that proper scientific procedure requires torturing animals before you try something on a human being. (Even when the tests you perform on the animal are manifestly idiotic and just confirm something you already know, e.g. squirting oven cleaner into the eyes of rabbits.) 

So there’s Mr. Patrick. With a hardon. Because he’s thinking about Jerry O’Connell. But then he remembers what he was doing with his chip. And with Danica. And with the family cat.

So he goes to where the cat sleeping on a pile of dirty laundry. He pounces on  the unsuspecting critter, and it rightfully bites him on the hand. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, he’s had the foresight to don garden gloves. So he’s able to drag the animal out to the garage and dope it up with some spare Rohypnol he has lying around somewhere. He yanks out a hammer and chisel, makes a wedge-shaped slot in the cat’s head, and plops the microchip in.

Right away, he can tell he’s onto something, because the cat dies. He starts calling pest control corporations, trying to interest them in a new “stray cat removal device,” but no one will even talk to him, so it’s back to the drawing board.

So it’s trial and error. And more error. And more dead pets. And winos. And he still can’t figure it out. Guess he should’ve got that GED, like Danica did.

Eventually he puts 2 and 2 together—figuratively speaking anyway. He’s thinking about computer chips, and it occurs to him that maybe this Silicon Valley place he’s been hearing could help him. Like many industry-based towns, it derives its name from the #1 local commodity—the stuff they build computer chips out of! And maybe his soldering iron and workbench just aren’t going to cut it, so long as he can’t get his hands on some of that stuff they have out there in Silicon Valley! Why didn’t he think of it before? He wants a computer chip that’s also a human implant, and both things are made out of the same material! Silicon!

A sound idea, I’m sure we can all agree. Unfortunately, it’s derived from a not-so-sound sense of spelling. (Again we witness the blessings of a GED.) Nevertheless, he grabs Danica by the wrists, yanks her out of her practice Spitfire or whatever, and pretty soon he’s hauling her to the local plastic surgery emporium so they can look into some specialty implants.

And the implant people are all like, well where should we start? And he’s like, can you get me something in a microchip? And they go, um what? And he goes, you know like the chips from Silicone Valley? And they go, oh! you mean a computer chip made out sil-icon! And he’s all like, huh? And they’re like, sorry dude, we do silicone implants, like, you know, tits and asses and things. And you know, if your daughter needs help with that, we’re totally here for you, but like all those other “implants” made out of silicon don’t really happen in real life, except but in the movies and stuff. And Danica’s dad goes, yeah it does, ‘cuz I saw it on Sliders once. And they go, dude Sliders is just a show. And he goes, yeah but Kari Wuhrer’s real and she’s got real implants and a slot in her head for them on the TV show. And they nod sagely and go, mmmhhmmm…true. And he's all like, see in this one episode of Sliders, she has this chip in her head and it makes her fly a fighter jet really good, and I want my daughter to win Nascar, so can you whip up an implant that we can shove in her head, please, pretty please? And they go, oooohhhh, well now that makes sense!

So pretty soon, PETA activists start turning up dead all over the country—their bodies missing various glands and organs an stuff. They’d all been last seen headed for demonstrations at some plastic surgery “clinic” called “A Better Vue of Yew,” located in Pimsqwat, West Indiana (or wherever Danica’s from). The place has been consuming vast numbers of test animals, only to barf them back out with microchip-sized slots in their heads. Truckloads of furry little critter corpses roll away from the place, which now has dark clouds boiling over it. Distant thunder rumbles. Eerie lights spill from the shuttered windows—all coral pink, laced with ochers and greens. The local townsfolk tremble and mumble. They sharpen their pitchforks and oil their torches and then turn back to another episode of Dancing with the Stars.

Then a commercial comes on, and they remember there’s something unnatural happening at the plastic surgery place—like, something involving the simulation of reality. So they get outraged, turn off Dancing with the Stars, and rush off to the “clinic,” which just happens to be located on this jagged, towering rock formation just outside of town.

But when they get there, it’s too late. The giant oaken doors of the plastic surgery place burst open, revealing its sleek, mod interior. (As sleek and mod as interiors get in burnt out, blighted mid-Western suburbs anyway, which basically means that there are potted plastic ferns and M.C. Escher prints scattered about. On a cheap end table, there are handfuls of outdated gossip, travel, and interior design magazines—the latter of which have nothing to do with the room in which they rest. And there’s spiffy linoleum tile in a pale, lime shade everywhere. It’s stained and dingy from years of use and negligence, and it doesn’t match the dismal manilla paint on the walls.)

So the doors burst open, as I said, and out shambles Danica—pretty much in the form you know her today. Her stare is a little bit more glassy. She’s a little more obviously in need of a drool cup. For Danica, a living state—in the traditional sense—has given way to highly attenuated bondage to the brand new implant that rattles around the slot in her skull. This transition challenges the very reptile stem of her mind. A synethesiac funnel cloud spins over the bedrock of her brain pan, twisting scents into shades into whispers and then back again. Satellite radio signals latch on to her chip and then toss 2 Live Crew’s “Me So Horny” into her ear canals, where the song’s bass lines fall like rocks down a bottomless well.

Danica lets out a tittering cry that none of the townspeople will ever forget. They recoil from the fathomless despair that flashes from her eyes, there, in the torchlight. And then they bolt out into the night—the persecutors now persecuted by a recognition of something much larger than themselves—something more ineffable than their own sense of righteousness.

TO BE CONTINUED IN ANOTHER EXCITING ENTRY SHORTLY!!!