NEWER! IMPROVEDER! map of Ciudad Vleeptron Underway

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Work in Progress

I think I mentioned that (when the Zeta Beam is working) I have a small apartment around the corner from the Shoe Mirrors station, just a short walk from the Poortown Parva shopping, restaurant and music club district (where Cafe Drek is).

If you can visit Ciudad Vleeptron, please let me take you to The Very Big Hole in the Ground. You can either just stand at the edge and look down with a flashlight or a keychain laser pointer, or you can pay ¤3.5 to climb down and up. (If you want the motor rope to get back up, that costs ¤7.2).

The Red Line is Adults Only, except during school hours. While schoolkids ride, they drape patriotic bunting (the beloved peche, fuchsia and ochre) over most of the subway car and platform ads.

The Garlic Memorial commemorates The Fourth Garlic War, Vleeptron, Hoon and Yobbo's last war. (There aren't going to be any more wars.) An estimated 52k men, szzr and women lost their lives during Garlic War IV. But that was very long ago, not quite beyond living memory, but a long time ago.

The Agence-Vleeptron Presse offices are in Tower 3 of the Tri-Sky-Hi Tower. You take the Blue Line all the way to the Akira Kurosawa Zeta Beam Drome and take the free jitney service to the 3SHT. Just drop in anytime and say hi. A-VP never closes. On Ramadan, the Jewish guys work an extra shift, on Yom Kippur the Muslim people work an extra shift, and on Christmas the people from the other two major monotheistic faiths etc., so everybody can be with their families. Hindus also, I'm not too familiar with their holidays, but when Rajiv (sports) or Arjun (the TV listings) needs a day off for religious purposes, one of us pulls his shift.

Ciudad Vleeptron has 28 Mosques and 28 Synagogues. By law, you have to build a pair of them next door to or across the street from the other. The place is lousy with Christian churches, too. The Swedenborgian place is in Half Smoke, and the Peanut Butter Worshipers live out around Lotteryland and Hohe.

You might want to visit Funkytown. That's where all the Sinhalese-Vleeptroids live and all the Tamil-Vleeptroids, too. What you'll see in their restaurants and shops and markets, they're all living in peace and respect and scrupulous non-violence, though maybe you'll feel a little chill between the two communities. Uhh, actually, when all the rents have gone upstairs to sleep, the Sinhalese teenagers sneak down to the Tamil teenagers' basement rec rooms on weekend nights and everybody just parties and necks and fucks, in that teenage unprotected way they sometimes do, and later they get pregnant, and then they get married, and when the baby comes, both sets of parents are grandparents now, and they learn to deal with each other and even get close as an extended family, they learn to depend on each other to bring good things to the grandkids. You'd be shocked if I told you how many mixed Sinhalese-Tamil marriages there are in CD, so I won't tell you. (HINT: Fewer than mixed Muslim-Jewish marriages in Israel.)

I'm not all that crazy about it, but if you want to go to the All-Nite Drag Races down Beyonce Boulevard, I'll take you there. There's a woman named Øøøøøøø who sells corn dogs and cannabis by the joint.

Maybe if you check out this map of CV and its Underway, you'll think it's a terrible place and you won't want to visit. Okay, different strokes for different folks. I read this long newspaper travel story by an American guy who spent a week in Amsterdam and really hated it. And I know somebody who really loves Salt Lake City and dreams about moving back there.

But I love Vleeptron and Ciudad Vleeptron, and I love Shoe Mirrors and Poortown Parva, and I can't begin to tell you how much fun I've had at Mollyringwald Centre, and how much I've learned about Natural Selection from the gorgeous nature documentaries at the IMAX. I know the lady -- she has a master's degree in exobiology from VIT -- who books the nature movies, and she just goes ripshit when Intelligent Design fundieschmucks make trouble for IMAX science movies up the Finance & Production chain on Earth and mess with young kids' science education.

When I'm feeling blue very late at night I hop the Red Line to Porn Mall, change for the Purple, and go to Zoostation, and there's always lots of people -- it's the downtown bus terminal and train station, too -- and there's always a couple of food vendors open and there's always a big-ass steaming frying mess of different sausages and fresh onions and garlic, and sometimes when shallots are cheap, they saute them up with shallots. (Some people say shallots have too delicate a taste and they'll be overwhelmed by sausages, but that's crap.) So I buy a big-ass sausage right off the griddle, and wash it down with a Doctor Pepper or a root beer, and I watch the interesting people coming and going through the transport terminal -- the big-ass city Zoo's next door, and you can hear the big cats, the panthers, the hyenas, the crazy jungle birds, the monkeys screaming and roaring and howling while you eat your sausage -- and I'm not blue anymore. My mother grew up listening to wild jungle animals screaming all night, you'll never guess where.

H.M. Strangeways is very small -- it has about 11 or 12 cells, two men to a cell -- and they only put really violent, dangerous men into it, and really Vleeptron has very few of them. The Co-Ed Honor Prison is only open from October to March. We don't put drug addicts in jail, no matter what crazy crap they're shooting into which orafice (and there are nine recognized orafices among the residents of the 3-Planet Zone). If it occurs in an adult consentual context, we just don't send you to jail for that. If you won't stop shooting Krazy Glue into your testicles, the Ministry of Public Health will send a team of Professional Jewish Mothers to bother the crap out of you for the rest of time until you agree to check yourself into the Hospital for Disorders, where we run the Free Drug Treatment On Demand clinic. Ditto if you get a little too fucked up on our excellent Vleeptron Absinthe. Let me take you on the tour of the Absinthe Factory, and I'll bet you can guess how the tour ends.

Did I mention our wonderful music? Iggy & the Stooges, Sun Ra, Hoyt Axton, George Harrison, Enrico Caruso, Captain Beeheart, Glenn Gould, Emmylou Harris harmonizing with Gram Parsons, Blondie, George Gershwin, Richard Thompson (sometimes harmonizing with Linda), Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Kurt Weill, Son House, Teresa Stratas play in our little clubs like the Cramped Basement all the time. Our most beloved local musician is il Professore Roberto, Maestro di Theremin. You should see him wail on that thing in his big black cape and his red fez.

I have to go buy some chicken now. Oh, did I mention the postcards and the souvenirs in Ciudad Vleeptron? Oh shit, you will go apeshit for the snow globes and the little engraved souvenir spoons and the thimbles and the ashtrays and the beverage coasters and the stuffy animals and the little painted ceramic miniature houses like the old ones like mine in Poortown Parva, t-shirts and the ...