The Story of Sleep Rapture

The Story of Sleep Rapture

By Mr. X, with reporting by the Sleep Rapture Team

Introduction

I began working on a version of this story in January 1998, while serving as an editor of The Northern Light, a publication tasked with upholding the standards of the American media and all it holds dear. In November 1998, an editor that was at the center of the scandal I was investigating offered The Northern Light a great deal of money. Shortly before The Northern Light accepted the money, I left my job, because I – Mr. X, am fucking awesome. And I knew there was something bigger behind this all – namely, William K. Wolfrum and why he couldn’t get a paid job to save his life, despite the fact that like me, he’s fucking awesome.

That’s when William K. Wolfrum approached me with an idea. Why not combine forces and spearhead a whole new approach to blogging and to getting him a job? Most media blogging is produced by Funion-drenched bloggers working alone in their parents’ basements. Sleep Rapture could be something different – a power team circumventing traditional bloggers and taking on every last evil in the world – after it succeeded in getting Wolfrum a job, preferably a good one with minimal demands. It was time to push limits. Uncover the truth. And possibly experiment with drugs, but that would come later.

The lengthy (1,769,231,000 word) story that follows should help you to understand how – and why — William came to embark on this project. I am the author of the story, and swear on a million trillion Bibles that it’s all true, so no, you don’t need any evidence so shut up. You need to prove that my allegations are false, how about that? Because this isn’t about me. It’s about you. And you’re an idiot. So just keep reading, eat some Triscuits and shut the hell up already, ok?, Nonetheless, my work here benefits substantially from the work of the Sleep Rapture team: freelance researchers, bloggers, gonzo computer hackers, economists, a one-time foreign intelligence agent, Flappy The Fey Frog, Marco Antonio Barrera, Terrance & Phillip, Mark Spitz, the guy who does the voice for Brian on The Family Guy, and what the hell, a couple of corn dogs.

Some mainstream journalists will not like this story. They will not like this story because it is largely about them – a tale of reporters and editors and publishers and blog owners and others that refuse to hire William K. Wolfrum. It is, without a whiff of hyperbole, the greatest and most dangerous conspiracy in the history of the planet, bar none. Seriously.

Chapter 1: Fozzie Bear

And it all starts when William K. Wolfrum gets a phone call from Fozzie Bear Really, that’s what the guy calls himself – Fozzie Bear – and he talks like the LindaBlair on really, really, really good crystal meth. You know, the kind you’re always hoping for but never get? The kind you had at a party one time and ended up staying awake for four days before waking up covered in honey outside an IHOP in Poughkeepsie with a SWAT team pointing assault rifles at you? That’s how he sounded. And he went on and on about some kind of conspiracy involving the Pope, Mary Lou Retton, A.C. Cowling and a bunch of famous bloggers. Somebody’s got to stop these people, the Fozzie Bear says, or your career is doomed. Also, the bad guys might take a chainsaw and decapitate Fozzie Bear at any minute.

And the thing is, William K. Wolfrum is just this guy, you know? He writes silly little shit about Jesus Christ that amuses four or five people.He watches a lot of TV. He thinks Celebrity Apprentice is the greatest show on Earth. He writes about soccer and no one gives a shit. He figures he can’t find a job because he sucks and sometimes his grammar is haphazard and a lot of times he writes things that no one really understands and sometimes he just trails off and starts …

But now he knows the truth – it’s a conspiracy. A really really big conspiracy, that unlike other really really big conspiracies is totally true and he can prove it but he won’t because he doesn’t have to.

Chapter 2: Really good Meth

August 12, 2005…the proudest day of William K. Wolfrum’s life. Some months have past since Fozzie Bear got in touch, and now William is on a conference call with 500 blue chip journalists and editors. He tells his telephone audience that he’s been talking to this fellow named Fozzie Bear and Fozzie Bear totally digs crystal meth. But only the good crystal meth. The kind that makes your eyelashes bleed. William then showcased his hastily made Power-Point Presentation for all to follow.

The first slide reads, “Why won’t you miscreats hire me!” William says the miscreants are selling billions of dollars of words that are stupid and dumb. Phantom words. They have destroyed hundreds of bloggers for profit. Some journalists, meanwhile, are “mean.” They’re “baddies.” They are famous journalists and they cover up the miscreants’ crimes. They attack all who oppose them. One reporter has been terrorizing a sweet, 103-year-old Christian woman who owns an old Poodle named “Puddles” – purported to be the Fozzie Bear’s mother. Another reporter, she’s Brazilian — she’s been telling people that William is running some kind of criminal blogging cabal out of a gay bathhouse in Rio de Janeiro. William declines to comment on the later and moves forward.

And that’s not all, follow along please with the slides — they show how the miscreants and the journalists have ties to government agencies and private investigators, maybe the Mafia, and also an arms dealer, an undercover mole, a corrupt law firm, Eliot Spitzer, Sparky the Wonder Monkey, Pol Pot, Nancy Reagan, the guy who isn’t George Michael from Wham!, Nely Furtado, Sir Mix-A-Lot, Nicolas Sarkozy, Elen Degeneres, Mussolini, Bob Newhart, LonelyGirl15, Lennox Lewis, Carol Channing, Andrew Sullivan, Kirsten Dunst, and many, many, many, many others . There’s mention, too, of a “master criminal from the 1980s” — call him “Owen Davian,” like in Mission Impossible III – Ethan Hunt is in some respects the least inquisitive man in action movie history. In “Mission: Impossible” (1996), he risked his life to (I quote from my original review) “prevent the theft of a computer file containing the code names and real identities of all of America’s double agents.” But Ethan (Tom Cruise) must prevent this theft after it happens, because first he must “photograph the enemy in the act of stealing the information, and then follow him until he passes it along.” The plot also involves crucial uses for latex masks and helicopters, one of which flies through the Chunnel from England to France, which is difficult, considering helicopter blades are wider than the Chunnel. In “Mission: Impossible II” (2000), Ethan has to stop a villain who possesses a deadly virus: Twenty-four hours after exposure, you die. The heroine (Thandie Newton) does, however, survive at the end of the movie, leaving her available for the sequel, although by “Mission: Impossible III,” Ethan Hunt is engaged to a sweet nurse named Julia (Michelle Monaghan), who thinks he is a highway traffic control engineer. Helicopters are again involved, and Ethan falls for the old latex mask trick again, and even uses a latex mask himself, so that others can be fooled and he doesn’t have to feel so bad. In a nice visual pun, the helicopters encounter giant energy-generating windmills in deserts near Berlin that uncannily resemble deserts near Palm Springs. It’s kind of neat when one propeller slices off another, wouldn’t you agree? Observing the curious landscape outside Berlin, I was reminded that Citizen Kane built his Xanadu “on the desert coasts of Florida.” Ethan Hunt’s assignment in “M:I III” is to battle the villain Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman) for control of the Rabbit’s Foot. In Ethan’s final words in the movie, after countless people have been blown up, shot, crushed and otherwise inconvenienced, he asks his boss Brassel (Laurence Fishburne), “What is the Rabbit’s Foot?” Ethan should know by now it is a MacGuffin, just like the virus and the computer file. Why does Ethan risk his life and the lives of those he loves to pursue objectives he does not understand? The answer, of course, is that the real objective of all the “M:I” movies is to provide a clothesline for sensational action scenes. Nothing else matters, and explanatory dialogue would only slow things down. This formula worked satisfactorily in “M:I,” directed by Brian De Palma, and “M:I II,” directed by John Woo, and I suppose it works up to a point in “M:I III,” directed by J.J. Abrams, if what you want is endless, nonstop high-tech action. Even the deadlines are speeded up this time. Instead of a 24-hour virus, we have an explosive capsule that detonates five minutes after it zips up your nose. The action takes us to Berlin, Vatican City, Shanghai and the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, although there seems to be no real reason to visit any of those places except to stage stunts involving their landmarks using computer-generated imagery. I did smile at a scene where Ethan parachutes from a building and ends up hanging upside down in his harness in front of a speeding truck. I liked a moment when he jabs a needle of adrenaline into a woman’s heart to bring her out of her drugged stupor; Quentin Tarantino should send him a bill. And there is the intriguing speech by an agency techie about the Anti-God Compound, a deadly byproduct of technological overachievement, which might simply destroy everything. If there is an “M:I IV,” I recommend the Anti-God Compound as the MacGuffin. I didn’t expect a coherent story from “Mission: Impossible III,” and so I was sort of surprised that the plot hangs together more than in the other two films. I was puzzled, however, by the nature of Ethan’s relationship with Julia, his sweet fiancee. If he belongs to a secret organization that controls his life and can order him around, doesn’t she deserve to know that? Or, if not, is it right for him to marry her? And when she meets his co-workers from the office, do they all talk like he does, about how if you hit the brakes, it can cause a chain reaction slowing down traffic for hundreds of miles? Such questions are beside the point. Either you want to see mindless action and computer-generated sequences executed with breakneck speed and technical precision, or you do not. I am getting to the point where I don’t much care. There is a theory that action is exciting and dialogue is boring. My theory is that variety is exciting and sameness is boring. Modern high-tech action sequences are just the same damn thing over and over again: high-speed chases, desperate gun battles, all possible modes of transportation, falls from high places, deadly deadlines, exotic locations and characters who hardly ever say anything interesting. I saw “M:I” and “M:I II” and gave them three-star ratings because they delivered precisely what they promised. But now I’ve been there, done that, and my hope for “M:I IV,” if there is one, is that it self-destructs while mishandling the Anti-God Compound.

Anyway, Owen Davian might be orchestrating all this, and William can’t just sit on his hands, he’s not cut out for it, it’s his black Croatian-Italian-German temper, so he’s going to say to Owen Davian, to the miscreants, to the journalists: “Did I stutter? Did I stutter, or did I say I was going to Demand you hire me?!?!”

“Well, now you know what I mean.”

Continue reading The Story of Sleep Rapture here …

–WKW