Pigs locate priceless truffles by means of a refined sense of smell which has evolved to tune out the pig's own odor. Hidden truffles are rooted out of the fruitful earth through the diligence of these swine, but before the pig can swallow, the precious truffles are taken away from their porcine discoverers and fed to other portly snuffling beings called gourmets.
Reluctant Genies, those wish granting Spirits of the Arabian Nights and other middle eastern legends, should be unearthable like truffles. Genies can be very helpful for those who lack any interest in personal diligence and wish to acquire the fruits of other's labors without any effort on their own part. If you wish to obtain a monetary Genie one might be found in a state run lottery, or on the stock market, but it is best to find a more personal magic servant while strolling along the beach, digging out of the salt washed sand each ornate brass jar or lamp and rubbing it fiercely. Those who do not live near the sea must fall back on polishing brass containers at garage sales in the hope of gaining control over a supernatural provider.
This biography is of one such Genie named Llew d' Lio (Loo duh LYE-owe), the Profligate Genie of the Well, an unbottled Spirit, first found by a well driller who called himself "Colonel" Drake (whose actual past was non-military, nor even Salvation Army rank, but was merely a hotel clerk with pretensions).
Previously trapped in the earth, the liquefied Genii was released when a hole was by chance drilled near a subterranean prison of rock, where the Genie had been entombed for upwards of two hundred million years. When Genii Lio first appeared, escaping from the well, the smell was awful....Lio was a dirty, filthy ooze of no apparent value, fouling everything Lio touched. Lio spoiled drinking water, destroyed clothing, poisoned plants in the fields and caused animals to flee in terror. Lio smelled absolutely awful, bad enough to become children's medicine, and so it was.
But on being freed, Lio has been a most generous Genie, bearing no one ill will, exceedingly grateful, extravagant actually, almost promiscuous, nymphomanically squandering, granting a billion wishes to anyone and everyone. A Genie of "Easy Virtue".
"As you wish, Master", saith our compliant Lio.
For example, if we choose to travel, Lio will help. Rather than taking a traditional year's journey trudging behind oxen across the Great Plains toward California as our forefathers and foremothers once so painfully plodded, Lio will this very day lift us up into the sky, and racing with the sun, transport us from the shores at Boston on one sea and place us gently on the sands of LA at the other, carrying us in a shimmering cylindrical tube equipped with a tightly packed multiplicity of sedan chairs, en route serving us a politically correct light lunch from which any flavor, offensive or otherwise, had been meticulously expunged. Lio can do this trip in just a few hours during the forenoon... easily covering the vast distances once trudged in several seasons alongside our progenitor's ancestral dusty Conestoga wagons wherein a good part of the newly interesting scenery along the way was obscured by the close up blocking view of flagellated and casually flatulizing hindquarters of draft animals.
Here we are now in what we call "today". Luxury abounds. In place of a personal camel, Lio has given us each one or more magic carpet pavement hugging plastic lined boxes of iron and glass bearing animal names or nearly exact sounding variants of Swedish female sex parts, with sensually rounded corners of jewelry quality waxable metals, divans with airbags on strong wind filled hard black rubber rollers, a traveling machine endowed with great power, generously motored, strong as several hundred steeds all running in the same direction, this to convey ourselves very quickly wherever we wish to go. In our pockets we carry little things that buzz or talk so that we never need to be very far from the places we are fleeing. There is no silence anywhere. The asphalt tracks along which these shuttles shuttle are also made possible by the bodily substance of Lio, hardened black liquids, and will not turn to mud when it rains nor sand when it scorches.
To some of the more adventurous of us, portly ones with pendulous bellies, once youthful but now overtaken by mid-life, who trend toward single ear ornaments, scraggly facial hairs, greasy studded black leather jackets and Greek fishermen's caps, multiple tattoos, Lio has given a magic smallish terribly flatulent swaybacked metal riding goat with widespread horns to grasp for steering purposes, and to these horns we may attach the detached tails of decorative foxes. We put Lio potion into a cavity on the back of the goat and it runs away smoking and squealing, blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaating like thunder rather than bleating.
Lio has made for us heavily mortgaged small palaces so that we can sleep far from our place of work, palaces made of wondrous magical materials encased in mystic "vinyl siding". The night couches on which we lie are stuffed with Foam d' Lio.
tends to our every need, heating us, cooling us, watching over whatever exotic foods we have selected to be brought from great distances, and making the day into night and the night into day if we so demand, feeding us, allowing us to talk with people we have never seen who are so far away that even by tens of thousands of our people shouting all at the same time, the message could not reach them, except for the power of Lio. If we but ask, Lio can help us to hear the impact of a single grain of sand dropping in vacuum onto the face of the distant Moon.
Lio has provided us with great floating leisure pleasure palaces moving over the warm seas, in which thousands of people vacation, many ladies blessed with magical gravity defying artfully semi-revealed social marketing devices called breasts which we are invited to surreptitiously ogle but not blatantly notice, too much ogling of the ogelees may be a criminal offense. Strangers who mingle in a marine multitude of diverse sexes, freed from over-sight by priests and pastors or family and fellow workers back home, can indulge, to over eat, over drink and loosely cohabitate at midnight with other strangers, then in the morning regretfully swallow fizzing potions while sitting in chairs observing the queasy sea and trying to remember about condoms or not.
Lio accedes to our every wish, regardless of its rightness or wrongness. If we ask Lio to burn, kill or mutilate people a long way away, even on the other side of the world, people we don't know and have never seen but who outrage us by being nastily identifiable as not residential in our own type of pigeon-hole, subject to contrariness of thought, deed, color, religion or politics, or even identified only by their choice of headgear, (the yarmulke vs. the burnoose vs. the fez vs. the turban vs. the baseball cap), or whose version of God bears an ill chosen eccentric Name, Lio will do slaughter upon them for us.
Lio empowers us by labor saving War devices, virtual or real.
Lio pushes our great steel sea castles, warships designed and fashioned out of our worst nightmares, ships which ten thousand men at the oars could hardly row, and Lio moves them so fast that the whales of the sea, themselves no slouches at swimming, watch the ships passing in slack jawed amazement.
Lio casually moves thick iron boxes which carry cannons, bouncing them across the battlefields effortlessly, faster than the fastest camel can gallop, yet were we to move just one of these machines without Lio's help, it would be at a creeping pace, it would take five hundred sweating soldiers out front pulling on stout ropes or a mob of a thousand understanding cowering behind pushing with sticks to do it, and it would go ever so painfully slow.
Lio, at our command, speeds great tin birds weighing many tons up into and across the sky, so high up we can only see a thin inscribed line of cloudy exudations they scratch across the firmament, and from the bellies of the machines, drops down thunderclaps which instantly destroy buildings and unknown people along with their grandmothers and grandchildren, yet should we try to launch these dagger shaped winged tin boxes into the skies without the help of Lio, even a half mile stretching of truck inner tubes would not make a slingshot capable of throwing the air dart to the far end of the field.
Let us needfully be disgustingly frank. Lio "passes gas" (farts) a lot.
Wherever Lio is the air is gray-orange-brown and smells awful. Some of Lio's blackest farts are so bad they peel the leaves right off the trees. Buildings made of stone cannot withstand the etching away brought on by Lio's acid ill wind. But, what the Hell...nobody's perfect!
In the days before Lio was emancipated from the earth, three quarters of our countrymen lived and worked on farms as slaves to themselves or others, tilling the soil and growing plants to eat, breeding animals and stealing their milk to drink, then selectively killing their bleating or clucking progeny, cooking and eating them for dinner, along with potatoes, corn, squash and beans. Each farm family often had almost enough food for itself and they seldom traveled more than ten miles from home in their whole lifetimes. "What's to see?" they would inquire.
Today Lio's power has made possible a magic glass picture box in every room which could show us the whole world. Little ephemeral highly painted androids called Tom and Dan (now without the Late Connie) and Peter and Larry appear inside the glass boxes, possibly Anchorites or some similar sect capable of blandly bearing artful disingenuousnesses, but they are poorly made and assembled crudely, so that sometimes one can notice carelessly loose control wires coiled, unhidden at the napes of their necks, connected to pearls which seem constantly to fall out of their ears, at which time they betray both panic and puzzlement. The Anchor People are usually fearless, even their ladies also, and will confront the Most Powerful in the Land with impertinences, authored by anonymous devils in dark booths and whispered like the Serpent to Eve into Anchorpeople ears, voices out of the darkness by means of wires and the aforementioned ear pearls.
Before Lio there were no glass faced boxes, nor middle of the night weeping saints praying to us to send them a tenth of all that we earned in order that they might put these alms away in a Swiss Bank so to later build a mighty temple unto themselves. Back before them, in Pre-Geraldo, we were mostly Ruralists, and it had come to pass in those days that the only half decent entertainment we had as relief from unremitting toil was the self-flagellating theater of hellfire in Church on Sunday, the Most Reverend Jonathan Edwards amusing us by correctly insisting our children were, "Little Vipers Dangling Over the Pit of Hell". Afterwards, weather permitting, we gathered outside the sanctuary at the hitching rack, to gossip after services about our neighbors and their minuscule sinfulness...so we made the most of the little gossipage we had, huddling around, cupping it protectively in our hands so as to keep the fickle winds of Truth from extinguishing Gossip's profane flame.
Since the work of farming was so long, difficult and arduous, often the people were too tired to respond like the rabbit to the overdoses of testosterone which Mother Nature had clumsily developed and issued without waiting for Federal Drug testing, twice as strong as it should be, hastened onto the market so that humanity would not have time to die out from reproductive dereliction. There wasn't all that much human farrowing in the days before Lio. Our numbers were then a scant 30,000,000 Americans, one-ninth of our current flock. Furthermore, taking only one bath a week in a shallow iron tub in the kitchen, shared serially, it is no wonder we were reluctant to make physical contact in order to fecundize and were instead stand-offish. Mum and Arid had not yet been invented.
Now that Lio is our servant, we have no need to perspire and can bathe hourly if we wish. We have no odor of our own, except from nervousness in traffic when distracted by an important phone call, we clash into each other's travel boxes. Sweat happens during the Ides of April, when tortured by the Beelzebub IRS, or upon being summoned into the dark lair of the Beastly Bureaucrat, the Great Sub-Gods EPA, OSHA, DEA and FBI. Nonetheless, Lio has made drying potions which we can put underneath our arms where they join to the chest, and now we smell so nice that bees and hummingbirds often get confused and seek for flower nectars in our armpits, now renamed under-arms.
And so with Lio taking care of our food, now it came to pass that only two persons out of each hundred remain to do physical work as food makers. Once called "Farmers", they have changed their names to "Agri-Business" and they ride about their earthen domains, satellite navigated, on great wide ranging high rubber wheeled green and yellow painted machines bearing icons of leaping gazelles, tractors which belch black Lio smoke and leave herringbone tracks in the thinned gray dirt. Our food growers plant and reap from on-high thrones inside little glass houses, laborers who only touch the soils a couple of times a month, and then mostly out of curiosity. From a great subterranean lake underlying the Great Plains we have, with Lio's help, pumped up vast ten thousand year pondings of precious water to irrigate our crops, taken faster than centuries of rains can replace it..
One demijar of Lio's Power Juice does as much work as 118 farms hands working without pause or interruption for an hour each, or one field hand's had labor for twenty-one days of once upon a times farmhand's diligence with muscles. Farmhands have tossed down their hoes and have gone away to the cities, where they hack at boards of many buttons rather than weeds.
Thanks to Lio, each farmer is now a plant specialist and doesn't even need a pigsty nor vegetable garden behind the farm-house (and no privy either, Lio has incredibly moved it inside the house!). Even the farmers who make our daily foods are them-selves getting factory built food out of Lio's box of ice and snow, frozen onto a shiny tray of disposable pearlescent foam which can be quickly heated with Lio's invisible fireless humming heating box. Each "Farmer" now plants only one kind of seed, and that's all the farmer knows, or needs to know. The Farmer is now just an appendage to the stock market. Banks gather together many farms to operate, but almost all the once independent farmer's houses are now empty with many windows broken in..
The now subservient farmer uses a poison potion from Lio to kill anything creeping, crawling or hopping which might attempt to share in the wealth of the fields. Farmer workers wear slippery silken airtight suits of armor out of mortal fear of the very potions which they themselves spread and so they take care to breath through double snouted masks which hide their real faces.
Far distant from the farmlands, Brokers and Bankers, Portly People in shiny silken three piece suits with bulging vests (which were gifts from Lio) sit in penthouse boardrooms high up in the shining towers of the city, where regardless of the season magical summer breezes spurt from tiny holes in the walls. There the Porcine Powerful play with pieces of paper, or billions of electrons carrying messages through Lio powered wires....and these Corpulent Investors are the ones who say what shall be planted, and who shall plant, and who shall reap. Lest they forget, on the wall is a large colored photograph of a quaint "family" farm, the picture made from high up amongst the clouds while peering out of a nest of aluminum, the alchemist's iron, hanging beneath one of Lio's flying Windmills of the Clouds.
With Lio's help we no longer need to have individual acres, so almost all of the people have given up family lands and moved into horizon wide concrete carbuncle cities, or have relocated in broad ringworms of houses circles around cities, all together Urbia, which is really a great machine in disguise (of course, run by Lio wouldn't you know?).
Lio lifts us up and down in great tall public brick anthills where the halls smell of urine but still many of us now reside. Lio brings us water to drink, and wine, and little metal jars which pop open, full of bitterish foam, and brings heat and light and food and the purest of water to take away our poopings for deposit back in our drinking water, or as an offering to gourmet whales. Lio warms or cools the air in our tall termite castles so we can peek out of our windows but never need open them.
Lio brings us a leisurely policeman upon request, and sometimes when we don't. With Lio's intervention Pizza comes the same way but quicker. Bored to tears, we have taken to snuffling what appears to be cornstarch up our noses, turning our brains to gravy. Our young men walk about in sagging breeches reminiscent of their infant years with "loaded" diapers, having first put on their baseball caps in an apparent intent to journey that morning in the opposite direction, hopping about in voluminous unlaced shoes from which the tongues hang loll uselessly out.
If we eat too much of Lio's gifts of food, getting fat and flabby, we can seat ourselves upon Old Naugahyde Paint, an artificial steel and plastic horse which can gallop off toward nowhere, while we wear a helmet of magic glasses pulled down over our eyes, and pretend to jerk on reins and pummel ribs with our heels, doing "simulation" to virtually ride the animal hard, while groaning through a windless virtual countryside which looks much like the real places where once we used to live before Lio. And everything is just about perfect except the simplistic flowers we smell give off the scent of the pungent Socks of Gymnasium.
Legend says that in only three quarters of a score of years, while present babies are still teenagers, Lio will be mostly expended, beginning to weaken and slowly withdraw away from us, having given away too many gifts, and although we expect Lio gifts to go on endlessly, it is likely that soon Lio will begin to sigh and tremble, hollow asthmatic sounds will come from the deep bottom pipes in emptied vaults of rocks under the land, and we will have wished that we had not asked so much so fast, downcast because Lio's stone treasure caverns are drying up.
Nouveau riche camel drivers who tend the pipes from which Lio's wealth flows, concerned that soon they may have little left to sell other than sand for fifty cents a bushel and goat droppings at ten dollars a ton, will demand an increase in gold tribute for every flagon of Lio juice, increasing the value of the tribute geometrically. There will be much bitching and moaning by us about Lio juice rationing, so we will kill a number of the well keepers and feel better about having done so. Nonetheless, the price to be paid for Lio Juice will inch daily upward until the pipes bring up only air, which shall be known thereafter in History as Hubbert's "moot point".
Lio will have totally altered all our lives in scarcely a century and a half, and then will withdraw from us, little by little, while we fight each other for what remains of our once generous servant's gifts. We will have moved from 19th Century log cabin hunter-gatherers to potential cave dwelling hunter-gatherers in only seven generations. We will no longer feel a need for aerobic exercises, being much too tired at the end of the day for that sort of foolishness.
We will divide ourselves into two groups, the Urbanites and the Ruralists in the interest of fostering necessary hatefullness. The Urbanites being three quarters of all our population, fruitlessly awaiting the arrival of food bearing trucks at their cities, will wisely visit themselves upon the homelands of the Ruralists, humbling the humble Amish, who won't be too damned pleased to find a hundred strange people trying to occupy six beds.
Those who live in the Big Apple will peel out down the New Jersey Pedo-Pike as fast as their little feet will allow, seeking the land of perpetual greenery, Florida, which will itself be defended from invasion by an army of the uniformly gray (haired). The Floridians have little to fear as city folks generally are not capable of a two-thousand mile hike down a Trail of Tears. Useless credit cards will thickly litter the ditches for the first few miles south of the Varrazano bridge and beneath the bridge the tides will take away those who only lasted that far.
When Lio's urban living machines falter and slow, we will all need to rush back out into the hinterlands from whence we cometh and get to it putting seeds in the ground and keeping animals to steal the milk of their young for ourselves. There will be much groveling and shoveling and cautious gnashing of irreplaceable dental work. No more virtual sweat. Toilet paper will be in short supply and then vanish. Small smooth stone will have to serve. And the Eskimos will fall back on tundra moss during the melting times, handfuls of snow during the long night.
We are now living on the backside of the most luxurious of all times, the twilight time of Lio.
Possible? see (http://www.ecotopia.com/hubbert/index.html)