Free Association Of America is a group of like-minded consenting
adults dedicated to the analysis and preservation of those small,
odd, adorable, quirky, bladed, obnoxious heliotrope spheres, the ones
you may remember from last September’s National Geographic Magazine.
I remember it as if it were yesterday, although the article itself
was a update of an issue eighteen months previous, so I should say I
remember it as if it were eighteen months ago, and as if then
yesterday I received an update.  You see there’s this crude
aboriginal society in South-Central America where the women, tall
slender dark-skinned women with muscular legs and things in their
noses, don’t wear any upper body clothing for reasons that are
entirely aboriginal and culturally and climatically appropriate and
non-perverted ... do you remember the article now?  And the men all
wear boots made out of monkeys.  And besides the men and the women
and the monkeys I remember most of all the spheres, the happy little
sphere, busy little creatures who hummed and beeped and wiggled and
were shy but caring, dangerous but kind, who occupied an adorable
niche and were funny and charming and innocent, yet cool, and
heliotrope and perfectly round, and who wouldn’t love them?
       The condition of this culture of men, topless women and spheres, I
believe they call themselves the Asdfghjkl people, was that they
spent a lot of time hunting monkeys.  They ate monkey stew and drank
monkey wine, and they made their clothing out of monkeys and I
believe they also lived in huts built, somehow, out of monkeys.  The
way they used to hunt the monkeys was, they’d send the heliotrope
spheres running ahead of them higgledy-piggledy through the forest
making monkey-baiting sounds, going “Chirp!  Chirp!  Hey,
monkeyfuckyou!  Hey, monkeyfuckyou!” and the monkeys would hear the
spheres insulting them on the forest floor below and they would climb
down from their perches at the tops of the trees, ready to rumble,
while the monkey hunters would climb up those trees using ropes they
made from monkey intestines, and meet the monkeys halfway up the
trees and shoot poison darts at them through blowguns made from the
bones of special hollow-boned blowgun-monkeys and darts carved from
monkey penis-bones and poisoned with a venom taken from the faces of
the rare ground-hugging poison-faced toad-monkey.
       At least that’s how it all used to work, and it was fine, unless of
course you were a monkey.  But then what happened eventually is that
someone came along and introduced harmful Western ideas to the
Asdfghjkl, and by the time the Nat Geo photo-doc team showed up for
an in-depth look, the monkey-hunters of South Central America were
shooting the monkeys not with blowguns but with illegally modified
AK-47 assault rifles, and pulling them out of the trees with large
cherry-picker trucks, the same kind the phone company uses.  Which
was much more efficient, really, but because they now had to spend
money on things like tires and gasoline and repairs and ammunition
and occasionally getting towed out of mud holes, they were having to
hunt many, many more monkeys to make ends meet.  And, also they had
these really outrageously steep Pay TV bills, because nearby cultures
had introduced cable TV but neglected to explain that for certain
prime-time events such as boxing, once you press the “View Now”
button on your remote, you have to eventually pay for that.  The
monkey hunters had so overextended their Pay TV privileges that the
cable company  had cut them off and set some fairly ruthless bill
collectors on them, who were hassling them via cell phone just
constantly.  So they were hunting monkeys like nobody’s business,
sometimes twenty, twenty-two hours a day, and trying to sell them on
the international monkey market, but that market is yet to recover
from the recent Asian economic crisis.  But the spheres, the
beautiful, adorable little heliotrope spheres, with their eye-slits
so coy and their breathing flaps so fuzzy and pink and their two-
meter elastic genitals so ... remarkable, they had unionized and gone
on strike, protesting of course the long hours but also the complete
absence of pay.  Once upon a time the spheres had no use for money,
they didn’t even have the concept, but more recently the long
frustrating work days plus the boredom brought about by the sudden
cutoff of Pay TV had let many of them to begin abusing
methamphetamines, and so they now needed money, real bad.  So they
began staging lockouts and acts of sabotage against the cherry-picker
trucks, and even on those days when they did turn up for work they
weren’t doing quite the job they used to do, because they were so
tired and their voices ... well, the heliotrope spheres, those little
rascals, they don’t actually have vocal chords of their own.  What
they have instead is very interesting.  The way it works is, every
morning at sunrise a sphere rolls on down to the river and hums and
beeps a pretty little song to the fishes assembled there, as if to
say: “little fish, little fish, come play with me.”  And then an
innocent, trusting fish swims up to the riverbed and the sphere grabs
the fish with a specialized mandible and tucks it under an arm flap,
and travels the forest all day long, micturating on the fish to
protect its slime layer, and providing gill-to-breathing-slit
respiration.  In this way the fish gets to check out what life on
land is like, in return for which the fish agrees to speak on behalf
of the sphere for the whole day.  Anthropologists find this symbiotic
relationship absolutely amazing, but what’s been happening lately is
that the fish, who used to find the process very rewarding, don’t
enjoy it as much anymore, because of the longer hours and lack of
pay, but also because the spheres have been turning into creepy drug
addicts who aren’t as much fun as they used to be, becoming paranoid
and twitchy and not so gentle, and occasionally forgetting to
micturate.  So the fish are not turning up at the riverbank in the
morning in sufficient numbers, and those that do turn up to roll
hither and yon across the forest floor call out things like “Chirp!
Chirp!  Hey, monkey-it’s-a-setup!  Hey, monkey-it’s-a-setup!” and
this is affecting the overall monkey yields quite negatively, and the
fish are not as frolicsome as they once were, and neither are the
spheres, and neither are the monkey hunters, and you can of course
forget about the monkeys ever being happy, they always get the shit
end of the stick, only it’s beginning to look like, due to the
drastic increase in hunting, there may soon be no more monkeys left
to grasp the shit end of the stick when it is extended.
       Therefore: we, the Free Association Of America, are dedicated to
rescuing these adorable little spheres, with their curly heliotrope
hairs and their fused molars, and finding them a place in modern
society.  We recognize that this isn’t the best of all possible
solutions for them, but frankly their culture is dying, the monkeys
are mostly eaten, the meth labs are catching on fire and burning down
immense sections of rainforest, we’ve seen it happen dozens of times
before and we don’t have much hope for the future of the Asdfghjkl,
so we’re trying to be proactive here.  And it’s also true that the
spheres do not always want to leave their beautiful home in the
forest ... but they can usually be lured into the rescue vehicle with
promises of methamphetamines or powdered opiates.  Once in the van,
we shoot them with a tranquilizer dart gun, drive them to the nearby
helipad and airlift them to a treatment center established three
hundred miles away in an actual city, funded in part by a generous
grant from the Betty Ford Foundation.  There, we nurse them through
the acute withdrawal stage with the help of encounter groups and
bible study.  Then, once the chemicals are out of their systems, we
provide them educational opportunities.  We teach them English,
mathematics, parallel parking, how to design their own web pages, and
any other skills we can give them to help them compete in the global
economy.  Finally, we work with other aid agencies to place them with
host families worldwide, sometimes as au pairs, sometimes as
housekeepers, sometimes as, you know, pets.  We’ve been very
successful, and although it’s not easy for a three-foot-wide
heliotrope sphere with mandibles and orange tentacles and arm flaps
and overactive musk-glands to find a fulfilling role in modern
capitalism, still, they are just about the cutest darn thing you've
ever seen, and we just love them to death.  Your tax-deductible
donation is deeply appreciated.