Bill stares in horror at the glowing computer screens, each virtually shrieking the same blood-curdling message in his ears:

YOU DIDN'T WIPE YOUR FEET, DID YOU, YOU BAD BOY? YOU'RE TRACKING MUD ALL OVER MY AATCC-COMPLIANT ANTI-STATIC CARPET!

Bill is, well, paralyzed. He can feel the Mother Blog seeping up through his muddy boots, taking possession, cell by cell, of his legs, his groin, his lower belly. He wants to scream--but can't. Slowly but surely he is being pixelated into an electronic image of the Munch painting ...

At that moment Doug bursts into the sanctuary with a baseball bat and begins smashing terminals with Vikingesque abandon. Sparks fly. Bill can feel some sensation in his chest--just his imagination? No, he can feel the pixelation recede. They're going to beat this thing!

But then Doug too begins to lose headway. His motions become jerky, then sluggish. He shimmers and shudders as the pixelation effect kicks in. His resolution plunges precipitously.

But just as the boys think all is lost, one wall of the sanctuary explodes: the Mullah Billdoug blog, roaring with power, bursts through the wall in a shower of plaster dust, sound insulation, and styrofoam packing peanuts! Bill and Doug, momentarily depixelated, dash to the blog and climb in, Bill behind the wheel. He throws it into reverse and floors the blogas pedal--thankfully, the bad blogas has been processed out of the system. This ain't the Mullah Billdoug blog for nothing! The engine roars and the blog lays tracks back out through the gaping wall.

Bill is looking back to negotiate the hole and doesn't see what Doug sees: a swarm of coleopteric system administrators, converging on the fleeing car.

"Go!" Doug yells. Bill, of course, shifts badly, doesn't pull the shift lever all the way from reverse to drive, and when he hits the blogas the engine revs impotently until Doug reaches over and taps it into drive. With a ferocious thud the car lurches into gear and peels out of the church parking lot, thousands of iridescent beetles in hot pursuit.

# posted by Doug Robinson @ 8:09 AM

Bill and I climb back into the car, sliding the skillet up onto the dashboard. It was like an eschatoblogical scavenger hunt, with butter. Or, well, margarine. Bill and I had had a little tiff over that--I kept insisting that Blog had said butter, and sweet, unsalted butter means sweet, unsalted butter, but Bill said I Can't Believe It's Not Butter was so close that he for one couldn't believe it wasn't butter. Reluctantly, I'd given in, finally. I didn't want to risk our friendship over a little thing like that.

Bill's in the passenger seat, with one hand on the skillet, making sure it doesn't topple down with the weight of the breaded turtle-dove chunks; I'm behind the wheel. But when I go to turn the ignition key, something's wrong. The key slot is elongated. It hangs down like an old woman's labia. When I stick the key in, though, it turns, and apparently connects, because the engine turns over, sluggishly.

"What kind of gas did you put in this last time?" I ask Bill. He had insisted on working the pump. Bumped me away with his big ass. He can be such a baby sometimes.

"I dunno," he says. "The usual."

"Wait a second," I say. "That gas station looked strange, didn't it?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Bill says. Face it: the guy is useless.

"Come on," I say, "think. This is Mullah Billdoug we're talking about here."

"The station?" he says, glancing over at me dully.

"No, stupid," I hiss, "not the station. The car."

"Huh?"

"The station," I say. "Didn't it look like a--"

"I thought you said he was the car. Now you're saying he's the station."

"Wake up, you druggie," I say. "The station: didn't it look like a church?"

"I didn't notice anything," he says, and the image comes to me: the gas nozzle was shaped like a cross. The pump was shaped like a pulpit. And--

"Let's listen to the radio," Bill says, and switches it on.

Some fundamentalist preacher comes on, imploring us, practically in tears, to give our lives to Blog.

"Blog?" Bill frowns, and punches the scan button. Another fundamentalist preacher rants for two seconds before the radio scans again, bringing up yet another fundamentalist preacher, all preaching on fundamentally the same topic: the mighty power of Blog.

"What the hell?" I say, as the radio scans through half a dozen more religious stations. As the words come out of my mouth, though, the butter in the skillet on the dashboard melts suddenly and starts boiling furiously around the breaded turtle doves, which line up like chorus girls and start singing "A Mighty Fortress Is Our Blog!"

# posted by Doug Robinson @ 9:37 PM

Blog surveyed all that It had created. And behold, it was not good.

Everywhere It looked, apostasy and disbelief and liberal scoffing. Whiners and goldbrickers everywhere sapped the strength of the blogosphere. Carpers and second-guessers everywhere refused to support the nascent blogocracy. Family sitcoms continued to deal openly with sex and masturbation, hour-long dramas showed body parts that just a few years before had been taboo on television, and reality shows (even on Blogly Fox!) competed for the dubious titles of Most Vicious and Most Salacious. Not a single one of Blog's operatives had been able to pull the plug on michaelmoore.com, so that fat hairy monster was still running around free, polluting the blogways with lies and filth.

And so, with a sigh, late Wednesday afternoon, scant weeks after the election, Blog decided to end it all. Pull down the whole charade and start over. Let the hot air out of the blogosphere: pop it like a balloon; let it fly hissing and farting around the room.

And Blog smiled, grimly.

First order of business: disrupt RSS. Cut off the blogfeeds.

Second order of business: shut down BlogExplosion. Make sure nobody goes surfing on the tidal wave of the ablogalypse.

Third order of business: bankrupt the investors on BlogShares. Fly a plane into the World Blog Center, pull the whole blogonomy down in flames.

Blog had not yet determined the ideal nature of the New Blogger, the perfected BetaBlogger 2.01. That could wait. The pressing thing for now was to destroy the old. Things could not continue as they had. Blog's ears bled, teeth ached, corns throbbed. This much discomfort was more than any blog had ever withstood without thoughts of ablogalypse.

Oh yes, fourth order of business: infiltrate the Mullah Billdoug blog. They could be trouble.

# posted by Doug Robinson @ 3:27 PM