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Assault with Deadly Grammar

By Jason Trask

About our research: it is ongoing. Even as you move your eyes across this page, you are contributing to our understanding of the human mind, the way it works, the way it is substitutes words for their meanings.

Our ability to track your eyes across the page is newly acquired: one of our scientists here at the Grammar Group has discovered that the retina of all higher mammals contains a microscopically sized light magnet, and this magnet actually attracts light, and though its purpose remains as yet a mystery, we suspect it enhances the night vision capabilities of higher mammals: what we are sure of is that each object viewed by a higher mammal is slightly darkened, enabling us-with the help of the photo sensitive letters that you are now reading-to track the path of darkening words and thereby deduce your whereabouts on the page, making it incredibly useful for research of this nature as well as some we did a while back, namely, a regiment of tests that led to BASE, which is what first attracted the attention of the CIA, and which we will be telling you more about before this sentence closes, an event you shouldn't hold your breath waiting for because you'd never take another breath, by which I mean that this sentence doesn't have an end, and once it is entered into, it is impossible to exit, the idea being that since in the past when the CIA has tried to jail people and kill people who were politically-shall we say unwieldy?-the CIA has in the end been the ones to suffer in that such actions reflected badly upon them, and naturally when they heard about our BASE and saw its possibilities for deactivating activists, they became intrigued and approached us and we explained to them that BASE works in several phases, the first being conditioning everyone to finish all sentences they begin reading, and then providing certain target subjects with a sentence which never ends,

an idea which no doubt amuses you because it would seem impossible to condition
people to feel compelled to finish sentences, but let me point out that this sentence has been going on for quite some time, yet you continue to read it, though it's not a particularly entertaining sentence, and I assure you, as it continues it will be less so, unless you find it entertaining to slowly realize that you are in someone else's power, that you are experiencing what at the Company is called "grammatical assault," which has been achieved by BASE (Binding American Syntax Education), a method of teaching English we developed in the 60s and disseminated to nearly every English department, from grammar schools to graduate schools, in an effort to place a collar around every American citizen, by which we could later, if need arose, tie that person up, and to enhance and enforce that education, we began changing the sirens on emergency vehicles from the old moaning type to the present RAF (rapidly alternating frequency), and by designing the frequency to stimulate the hairs of the basilar membrane in a certain order, we have found that for seventy-two hours we can actually reduce the libidinal energy of every individual within earshot of the siren, rendering him or her less apt to adopt new ideas, a necessary measure because new ideas tend to cause retroactive inhibition which could theoretically reduce the effects of BASE, and so far this audial correlative-the sirens you hear on the street-in conjunction with BASE and this sentence, have made it possible for us to assist the CIA in preventing the embarrassing details that sometimes arise during arrest and elimination situations, and as the result of our writings, many who might otherwise be engaged in revolutionary pursuits, are peacefully reading this sentence, which reminds me of the days when we didn't take enough precautions to ensure this sentence didn't get into the wrong hands, and on several occasions, people whom we had no desire to detain, spent and are spending the rest of their lives reading this sentence, and it was as a result of those accidents, that we wrote the opening paragraph in a subliminal code that causes politically safe people to feel so anxious that they stop reading before ever reaching this sentence, and though occasionally it happens that a person doesn't start at the beginning of the document and thus is ensnared by this sentence-which is apparently what happened with Ronald Reagan-such cases are rare, and we are at this time adjusting BASE so that no one will begin reading a document except from the very beginning, and hopefully this added precaution will solve the problem, a problem I wouldn't worry about if I were you, rather if I were you,

I would concentrate on your own problem, and the number one problem at hand is a late period, and it is late for the following reason: there isn't one
nor is there a need for one in the land into which you are now descending, a land where there is nothing but words, words which will slowly lose their meaning, and the proof of the pudding that that's where you're headed is you're still reading this sentence even though your patience is wearing thin with this nonsense, and we freely admit it is nonsense, but we like to say it's irresistible nonsense, nonsense with which you should prepare to make your peace, it being what you have to look forward to for the rest of your days, or another way of saying the same thing is that this is your life sentence, a sentence we are able to prolong because we have an entire team writing it and others who splice it together and then after the project ends, it will be looped back to its beginning and a computer will keep printing it out, and during each successive repeat, the computer will remove one word, and you, the reader, will go through each cycle a little faster, and you won't be aware that you read the sentence before, until you get to this part of it, and then you will remember it because it speaks about itself, and you will keep returning here a little faster, until in the end it will only be a few words, then only one sound-ohm-and that will be it for you forever, my friend-I hope you don't mind if I call you my friend-but that will take years before it gets to that, because first we have arranged to keep printing volumes and volumes of books containing this sentence, and in order to continue reading this sentence, you will go out and buy these books, books which will become increasingly expensive, and this money will go to the CIA, who will turn it over to us at the Grammar Group, so in a sense, the CIA will be funding our project with welfare money, because you and all those like you will soon be declared insane since you will be unable to do anything except read this sentence and buy successive installments of it-even your eating and sleeping will suffer, to say nothing of personal hygiene-and so you, all of you, will become wards of the state spending sizeable proportions of the money that is sent to you on this sentence, helping the CIA win back some of the funds thrown by the liberal congress to welfare programs, and the CIA, as you undoubtedly know and applaud, is under severe budget constraints because of various disagreements with Congress over this that and the other, but now that we have helped make their elimination activities in this country less overt, perhaps their luck with Congress will change, because now, troublemakers such as yourself, will just be happily reading, and though you may think "happily" should be in quotation marks, in the beginning you will be happily reading in comparison to later on when the sentence has been reduced to a few words and you feel this circle, this noose of words tightening about you until you nearly strangle uttering 'ohm,' which is when your friends and family will desert you, having no idea that you were entrapped by a sentence that was made circular by going back to its beginning, which was and is as follows: Our ability to track your eyes across the page is newly-and so on and so forth, but we don't want to go back to the beginning just yet because we have more to tell you, so tell you we will, though the things that we tell you will do you no good, no good because the things that we tell you will slowly destroy you, slowly destroy you by reminding you of things you've long since overcome, things such as the constant high pitched frequency you have lodged in your head, wailing in a tone that will drive you insane if you listen to it and listen to it you must because now you have been once again reminded of it after those difficult moments in your youth when you discovered the tone and feared you would never cease to be conscious of it, and then you DID forget it except on occasions when you would hear it ever so briefly, but now look at yourself, the way your mind is dwelling on it, the way you are at the mercy of the thoughts you see before you, the way you have no sensation of your own independent consciousness, no sensation at all but of this roller coaster sentence that will drag you into tunnels out of which you'll never fully come, poor thing, sitting there, your mind too consumed by this sentence to actually be afraid, but nevertheless the spell is working, as you know only too well, and you can mark my words-you can mark them this time through, or the next time you happen to be in the neighborhood-and whether you m

ark them or not, they'll mark you as you travel along them, along this prison of words, a one-dimensional prison cell extending out into time forever and you pass along it as on a monorail, and what is true of Einstein's universe-that if you travel forever in a straight line, you end up where you started-is true for this sentence, which means, you will be back here, right here at this point, but when you return, you'll look a lot older, but you won't know it, because you won't have had eyes off the text to look in the mirror to see, because even when you turn this, the last page of this book, you'll go straight out to buy the next volume in the set, and as you are buying it you can rest assured that your money is going to support your favorite charity, the CIA, and all the while you will be reading this sentence, a sentence which not only lacks wit, but lacks an ending as well, an ending being what Aristotle defined as that which is preceded by something and followed by nothing, and though this sentence, being preceded by something, does have half an ending, not being followed by nothing, it lacks the other (go now and buy book two)


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