I'm back. It's me, Rapunzel. The chick with the seven mommies and the invisible twin brother and the forehead that used to have a blotch and the impossibly grandiose reputation to live up to. I'm coming to you now from a new, improved version of my life. The Pomegranate Grail has married The Eater of Cruelty and brought forth an offspring called the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail. The rigorous schooling of my mothers has blended seamlessly with the tantric trickery of my freaky consort Jumbler and the uproarious training I've received at Drivetime University. And the old schism between my outer and inner worlds has been healed.

In this new life of mine, five years after I kidnapped myself and erased my blotch, I have become the avatar of the ancient mystery school on my own terms. Sacred fun and erotic prayer are the esthetic ethics at the heart of my reign. My mothers' love steadies and nurtures me as my freaky consort's love challenges and inspires. I have figured out how to have my cake and eat it too.

How did I pull it off? The better question would be, how could I not have pulled it off given how much help I've had: an eternal yet earthy secretary who keeps track of the master plan I've been working out over the course of countless incarnations during sixty-six million years; a soul twin-shaman brother-doppelganger muse who has lubricated my travels to the other side of the veil since I was six years old; a lover and best friend who is an unpredictable, multi-gendered genius with tantric training and an inexhaustible supply of brainstorms; and the Televisionary Oracle itself, the sacred "machine" that always reveals to me exactly what I need to know exactly when I need to know it.

There was a rough patch back when Jumbler and I first returned to the Pomegranate Grail six months after I'd run away. My mothers wanted to blame all my crazy new notions on her bad influence. Besides, they had long ago decreed, drawing their authority from the Pomegranate Grail's prophetic tradition, that I would never marry, and they had difficulty accepting how thoroughly Jumbler and I had already woven our fates together.

But the Televisionary Oracle guided me every step of the way through the crisis. I had already seen in abundance how practical its wise and often wacky revelations could be, but that was the first of many times it helped me come up with creative solutions in the face of intense conflict with people I loved.

The breakthrough was, of course, when my mothers agreed to become my students so that I might teach them how to personally access the wonders of the Televisionary Oracle. Once Vimala, especially, began accessing the secret identity of her own "holy guardian angel," my battle was won.

For more than four years now, not only my mommies but the entire worldwide membership of our ancient mystery school have fed on the funny medicine of the Drivetime. As a result, their individual evolutions have sped up just as mine and Jumbler's began to during the First Seven Days of Creation back in the tear-stained bed at the Villa Inn. Yesterday Vimala confided in me that she has become more herself in the last four years than she did in her previous forty years.

And yet in a sense, the last five years have all been prelude for what is to come. Since Jumbler and I first discovered the tantric practices that allowed us to milk the Drivetime for all it's worth, we have been preparing for today's coming-out party.

It was all spelled out near the beginning. Day Four of the First Seven Days of Creation brought the revelation that the Menstrual Temple's inaugural blast into the wider world would materialize right here and now, a little after noon on the first day of May, known by us funky pagan tantrics as the holiday of Beltane.

Strange but true. Jumbler and I divined way back then -- are living out the divination in actual waking life and broadcasting it to wherever you are -- that the most profanely holy spot on the planet, the grossly sublime vortex where beatific splendor is most thoroughly interwoven with trivial squalor, resides in a women's lavatory in a nightclub on the main street of a small California beachside town called Santa Cruz. That's where the vision of the Menstrual Millennium is hatched. That's where we're staging the "Kill the Apocalypse" festival, which is also the official public launch of the Televisionary Oracle.

In the initial scene of that original Drivetime University revelation, which is being fully materialized in physical reality right now, Jumbler and I are in that grubby little lavatory, getting ready with a private ritual.

To an untrained observer, the ambiance here may seem less than ideal for such a pregnant moment. The place stinks, and it's ugly. The dingy yellow-white walls are marred by idiotic grafitti, and the mirror is cracked. Our nostrils twinge with the fragrance of stale bleach and the fresh droppings of our prized pet vulture, Yo Mama Death, who's perched on the top of the stall.

Only a precious few thousand initiates truly understand why this is the epicenter for the most intimate revolution in history. May that all change in the prankishly reverent future that awaits us. In a few minutes Jumbler and I will go outside to the street in front of the Catalyst to meet my public, which has gathered for the joyous funeral procession I will lead down Pacific Avenue to the Evergreen Cemetery in Harvey West Park. But right now we are building a guerrilla shrine next to the sink to summon forth the divine allies whom we want to bless our event.

Next to the sink, there's a bouquet of chrysanthemums, flowers for the dead, and a large silver chalice filled with what we like to call dragon's blood. Around them we've arranged these items: a miniature Mexican candy sculpture of a pink-hatted skeleton pushing an ice cream cart; an inkpad and rubber stamp that says "GENIUS"; an unopened package of freeze-dried "Astronaut Strawberries"; a small oil painting of the Goddess Persephone wielding handpuppets resembling me and Jumbler; a bowl of pumpkin seeds that I saved from the first jack-o-lantern I carved when I was five years old; a hammer painted lavender and decorated with drawings of bees and unicorns and snakes and bull skulls; a fossilized vulture egg; and the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail Tarot deck, in which all the human figures are wearing menstrual lingerie.

To be honest, I'm already crying. Not continuously, but in short bursts, which is a good sign. It means I'm tapping into the sexiest zones of the Drivetime, but not with such overwrought intensity that I'll be a blubbering mess for the duration of today's event.

Jumbler is sniffling a stream, if not a raging river, herself. I wouldn't be surprised to see it swell as the day goes on. She has never had to share me so wildly; never had to witness, let alone assist in, me giving others the riches I give her. It's not that she's resisting this breakthrough. I'm in awe, in fact, of how generous she has made herself in the face of this new phase of my work. Still, I can't help but be aware that her heart is breaking, too.

My own heart is not exactly a stronghold of serene stability. I'm at the threshold of harvesting the fruits of my menarche. I mean my real menarche -- not the literal spilling of virgin menstrual blood that was induced by my mothers -- but the self-abduction I plotted and carried out by myself.

"Remember back at the Villa Inn when you first started telling me all the contradictory stories of how you grew up and where you came from?" I ask Jumbler, wanting to take the edge off the portentousness of this, the party we've been planning for so long.

"That was, I believe, on Day Three of the Creation," Jumbler says sweetly. "When we branched out from Ritz Crackers, string cheese, and celery, and also got some corn chips for our only meal of the day. You were so cute, the way you wanted so much to believe every last crazy thing I said."

"But remember how pissed off I was at you when I finally realized you were dumping a heap of pretty lies on me? Rat-bastard." I speak this last curse with a honey tone and loving grin. "Condescending to me like I was a gullible child."

"But you suspected even then that it was for your own good, freaky. And as you know now, it wasn't all pretty lies. Quite a bit of raw truth mixed in there."

"First you said you were motherless. Said your father was a born-again Christian satanist general at the Pentagon who kept you locked in a cage your entire childhood. Fed you nothing but grits and chicken gizzards and black-eyed peas. Made you perform ridiculous assignments in order to get permission to go to the bathroom, like reciting the Periodic Table of Elements."

"Which is why I'm such an idiot-savant to this day. Want to know the atomic mass of tungsten? It's 183.85." She arches her left eyebrow like a mad scientist but somehow makes the rest of her face go blank.

"Ten minutes later, totally straight-faced, you were telling me you were a coddled child genius whose mom and dad gave up their careers so they could devote themselves to your education. You enrolled in Duke University when you were ten years old."

"Hmmm. Doesn't that have a certain resemblance to the biography of someone we both know and love, initials R.B.?"

"Yes it does, goddamn you," I say as I take the "Genius" rubber stamp and decorate Jumbler's right arm. "How dare you claim the right to be more megalomaniac than I?"

"I would have done anything to help you, my darling. Anything to liberate you from your enslavement to excessive factuality. It was choking off the growth of your myth-making skills, therefore preventing your full flowering as the avatar of feminismo."

"And then there was the tale about how you were brought up by deathologists. Your mom ran a hospice and a graveyard and collected black-market skulls and black-market orchids. She taught Kubler-Ross everything she knew. Your dad specialized in guiding dead souls through the Bardo realms during the first forty-nine days after they departed their bodies."

"Every bit of every one of those stories was an absolutely true hallucination," she says as she dips her finger into the dragon's blood and creates a simulation of my old birthmark on my forehead. I don't resist. These days I'm no longer sensitive about the blotch that was once upon a time my worst curse. Besides, I'm pleased she wants to have fun.

"My favorite version of your life story is one you didn't even tell me until Day Five," I murmur, feeling almost romantic. "About how you were a so-called 'magickal child,' conceived by four men and four women on a tantric commune. How they meditated their four sperms and four ova into the womb of one woman who was only really one-quarter your mom but they never told you which one she was." "Though later I was blessed to learn your diabolically precise anamnesis technique, my dear," Jumbler says, "so I was able to recover all my preverbal memories. Jacinto was the mom who physically birthed me."

"You're welcome," I say, creating two streaks of dragon's blood warpaint on each of Jumbler's cheeks. I also break open the Astronaut Strawberries and offer a few to Yo Mama Death. "And I'm very grateful for your service on my behalf, how you disabused me of the curse of literalism. 'Hello, I'm Rapunzel Blavatsky, international spokesmodel for Heroically Unified Multiple Personalities, also known as HUMP. We're dedicated to overcoming negative stereotypes about people who live too many different lives to be contained within a single personality.'"

"The universe is not made of molecules; it's made of stories, my dear," Jumbler singsongs, repeating her favorite mantra. "But shouldn't we be finishing up? The masses are awaiting our arrival, and here we are chatting about old times."

"Ever since then," I press on, not quite ready to leave the intimate space for the spectacle brewing outside. "I've been in love with your idea of how two people who are standing next to each other can have such wildly clashing internal schemes of reality that for all intents and purposes they live on different planets."

"Yes, and who would have thought that a breeder chick like you and a hermaphrodite queer like me could ever have ended up inhabiting Znipwof Arksty together. Or I forget, what's the name of our planet again? Zwofpin Starkty? Pozwinps Traksty? It seems to keep changing."

"It hurts my feelings when you call yourself a queer hermaphrodite," I complain, truly perturbed. "That's just so damn reductionist." I'm wondering if this is a passive-aggressive leakage of the sadness Jumbler promised me she would suppress tonight.

"Just a temporary, extremely relative truth," she says, "provoked by the reckless emotions of tonight's historical turning point."

"Well, OK," I pout, looking in the mirror to wipe away the dragon's blood Jumbler anointed me with. I survey her face for any signs of grief writhing just under the skin. "But before we go, address this question for me, please, Jumbler darling. I know we've discussed this to death, but it's my ritual duty to ask what you have to say about it here in the heat of the moment, when the flip is about to flop."

I push my shoulders back, stomach in, and chest out, simulating the formal posture my mothers used to make me assume during the "Confront the Guardian of the Threshold" portions of my childhood rituals of initiation. "Is it really one-hundred-percent ethical," I say with mock solemnity, "for me to use our sacred tricks to get people to come live with us on our planet? What gives us the right to invoke the full power of the Televisionary Oracle to seduce anyone at all into imagining that our confabulation is truer than all the other half-truths out there?"

"Because we're the only soldiers in the world entertainment war," Jumbler sighs with a soupgon of boredom, "that blaspheme our own deities. Now come on, let's wrap this up and go meet our blind date with destiny. Pray with me."

I follow Jumbler down as she kneels and prostrates her forehead on the scummy floor. As if aware she's a participant, Yo Mama Death unleashes a nicely timed raucous shriek.

"O Persephone, Great Cackling Goddess," Jumbler intones, her voice muffled by the proximity of her lips to the concrete, "You Buzzard-Lipped, Bottom-Feeding, Garbage-Gobbling, Puke-Drooling, Beady-Eyed Slimebag: We pray that you give us the wisdom to always pretend we mean the opposite of what we say as well as what we say."

"O Musty Queen of the Dead," I continue, "You Overseer of the Underworld's Grotesque Cornucopia, You Weirdo Purveyor of Lipstick and Bullets and Glamour and Poop, You Creator of the Stagnant Water and the Funny Words We Thought of While We Were Standing Knee-Deep: We dare not claim the hubris to burn anyone else's flags or spit on their fetishes unless we're willing to burn and spit on our own."

"O Sacred Gargoyle of Beauty and Truth," Jumbler chimes in, "You Dumb Fast Infinitely Plump River of Electricity, You Sluggish Smoldering Lump of Angel Fat Left Over from the Big Bang, You Ingeniously Seductive Maggot Who Loves Inventive Tragedy and Sophisticated Superstition, You Cool Furnace That Incinerates the Props of Our Nightmares Much Too Slowly: We pray that You will always break us open with juicy secrets about how to die a little now so we don't have to die a lot later. Shatter us with moist clues, Goddess, about how to slough off what worked for us yesterday so that we may conjure what'll work best for us tomorrow. Turn us inside-out with terrifying opportunities to kill the phallocratic model of death and foment the menstrual model."

"Halle-fucking-lujah, comrade," I say, lifting myself from the floor. "Let's go careen."

Carrying Yo Mama Death and our grail of dragon's blood, Jumbler and I slink out of the bathroom into the atrium of the Catalyst -- just as we did in the Drivetime University class five years ago. Out here, recreating that prophetic adventure perfectly, are hordes of revelers packed wall to wall, spilling out into the street, waiting to join us in the celebration.

We push our way outside, then boost ourselves up on the lead float of the funeral parade. Stretched between two maypoles on the back end of the float is a clothesline from which hang many pieces of freshly consecrated sacred lingerie and a banner that reads "Kill the Apocalypse with Love."

Two richly adorned beds surround a gold casket, which is open, revealing the contents: a replica of "Little Boy," the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima; a loose-leaf notebook which contains xeroxed copies of the prophecies of Nostradamus and the Bible's Book of Revelations; a television with a giant band-aid on it; a bumpersticker with a quote from Jung, "The present world situation is calculated as never before to arouse expectation of a redeeming supernatural event"; a foot-tall sculpture of Jesus crucified on the cross, blood dripping down his face; the "Armageddon Bra," a lingerie item which has built-in sensors to warn of fiery objects falling from the skies (missiles, asteroids, UFOs); and a totem pole featuring the faces of Julius Caesar, Columbus, Napoleon, Stalin, Charles Darwin, and Dan Rather.

Lingerie-clad female models are lounging on the beds. Though a couple of them are voluptuous young things, most have rather ample asses and abundant body hair and less-than-perky breasts. I know and love all of these beauties well. Every one is a member of the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail.

My favorite model, of course, is my ancient mother Vimala, face as old as the Mona Lisa's great-grandma. She's wearing purple cowgirl boots, a lacy red bra, and a purple leather mini-skirt. Over her shoulder-length grey dreadlocks, there's a tall crown of inflated pink and purple balloons tied together in the shape of a vulture.

"Hi, mommy," I beam, patting her on her crown. "How's your bad self?"

"My bad self is positively sparkle-dark," she replies. "And by the way, I love your latest creation."

She's pointing towards the giant Televisionary Oracle screen which is set up on one side of the float. It reveals a panorama I finished programming only yesterday.

The view is from a flock of vultures, as if the camera were mounted on the belly of one of the birds. For a while they fly uneventfully over an eight-lane highway on which no traffic moves, though there are numerous abandoned vehicles everywhere, including cars, ox carts, tow trucks, baby buggies, catapults, fairy godmother coaches, chariots, milk wagons, and even a Trojan Horse. Winding as far as the eye can see, always remaining inside the "walls" formed by the wreckage, is a thick train of men trudging doggedly towards the setting sun. Each is pushing in front of him a wheeled version of the golden casket that appears on the lead float of our parade.

The vultures veer away from their path over the highway and spiral down towards a field just to the north. Now we see a labyrinth cut out of a vast field of waist-high grass, at the center of which is a stupendous oak tree with a door in its trunk. The birds maintain a holding pattern just above the top of the grass and beyond the reach of the tree's longest branches, wheeling clockwise.

As they pass the door, we can see a sign on the front which reads:

Menstrual Hut of the Cackling Goddess

Formerly Pizza Hut of the Corporate God

Under New Management

The labyrinth is constructed in the fashion of the sacred labyrinths of old. That is to say, it's not a maze rife with dead ends and confusing turns. Rather there is just one unambiguous though convoluted path to the center. Everyone who enters will eventually reach the center if they walk patiently onward.

Now here's my favorite part: I've designed this Televisionary Oracle in such a way that anyone who beholds it sees a likeness of himself or herself meandering through the labyrinth.

As this part of the program comes around, there are a few gasps from audience members who've been watching attentively.

"Whoa. How can that be?" someone calls out.

"Fucking amazing. How do they do that?" another voice mutters.

This is a tease. The scene stops here and begins again with the vultures soaring over the marching men. Later, when the funeral parade reaches the graveyard, I'll let this sequence continue with the rest of the story.

I turn away from the scene, gratified at its craftsmanship. I like to think it's entertaining despite the fact that its message is covertly sacred--and covertly sacred despite the fact that it's entertaining. In other words, it embodies the esthetic ethic that has been my obsession these last five years. Standing up and stretching, I grab my cordless microphone from a mike stand. I'm ready to get this show on the road.

"How are your bad selves today, beauty and truth fans?" I bellow. The response is more a swell than an explosion, so I try it again, gazing up into the azure sky and beckoning to the crowd.

"I said, how are your underworld selves today, beauty and truth and garbage and death fans?" This time a pleasing roar billows up.

The sea of faces is not yet as vast as I'd hoped, though. While there are growing numbers along the procession route ahead of us, I see very few people back along the line of vehicles that snakes down Pacific Avenue towards the beach.

"You ready for the immortality cheer, everyone? Ready to chant the mantra that gets you in the mood to live forever? Let me hear you say, 'I die daily.' Shout it with me now, sex and death fans. Celebrate it with me. I die daily. I die daily. I die daily. I die daily."

The hair on the back of my neck sprouts as hundreds of voices join me in intoning the prayer I've only heard in the privacy of my meditation chamber or the bed I share with Jumbler.

I wait a moment after the last echoes die away, then resume my address.

"Welcome to the party that will launch the murder of the apocalypse!" I shout as I slowly turn three hundred sixty degrees. "Today, we begin imagining the canny actions that'll crush the pandemic of pop-nihilism. Today we start creating a world in which prophecies of boom and zoom will be more fun and interesting than conspiracies of doom and gloom."

People are looking at me quizzically. What I just said was not perhaps the most entertaining way I could have conveyed what I meant.

"We bring you glad tidings, beauty and truth fans," I continue, still half-improvising. "The archetypes are mutating. All the flips are about to flop. Very soon, YA YA will actually be YA YA. YA YA will no longer be NYAA NYAA. Very soon, you'll know exactly how to ask the Greatest Mystery of All what the fuck it wants from you--and you'll really get an answer."

"Why am I so handsome and talented but I can't get a girlfriend or a job?" some male voice heckles loudly, enough to rouse ripples of laughter from those close enough to hear him.

"Have faith, love and justice fans," I continue. "Have delirious, orgiastic, perverse faith. I promise you that compassion will become an aphrodisiac. There'll be feminist supercomputers that can talk to the Goddess. Your daily wage will be directly tied to how much beauty and truth you bring into the world. Best of all, there'll be a global network of menstrual huts and dreamwork salons for that cranky time every month when you know you'll just die if you can't go blissfully mad."

This last spiel goes over much better. Confusion has given way to amusement in the faces I can see.

I congratulate myself for being so sensitive to the mood of the crowd. The meditation exercises I've done with my acting teacher Gail have slowly but surely fine-tuned my raw charisma. (I like her definition: A charismatic person is not just someone who has personal charm, star quality, and animal magnetism, but who also is interested in other people and makes them feel good when they're around her.) My Drivetime University lessons with the showman shaman Madame Blavatsky have had a lot to do with my growing skill in playing with group energy, of course, as have the performance art shows I've been doing in the Waketime under various disguises.

There has been another influence in recent months as well. I've had the benefit of studying the live shows of a certain local rockstar, the chief boohoo of the World Entertainment War band. Whether he's the best entertainer in the world, I don't know -- probably not, since he's not monumentally rich and famous -- but his techniques for captivating the imagination of an audience resonate with those I aspire to master.

"Kill your own death!" someone shouts brightly from the crowd, providing me with the gratification of hearing one of my own slogans mirrored back. I imagine that she is among those who read the two newspaper articles about the Menstrual Temple that appeared in the days before the event.

"Exterminate the apocalypse with unconditional love!" screams a male voice, offering a variation on the theme that I couldn't have said better myself.

I signal to my driver Sonia, and our float begins to creep slowly forward. The crowd's hubbub swells in response.

"I'm your host, Rapunzel Blavatsky," I say to the crowd, "and I'm proud to announce that this is a perfect moment. At this perfect moment, one hundred trillion lascivious feminist vibrations are beginning to pour through each and every one of you like a permanent orgasm, annihilating all blockages to your divine charisma and jostling loose an abundant flow of creative ideas. Sooner than you think, your unique genius will be unleashed, allowing you to express all of your true potential!"

An electric wave of gleeful cheers erupts. Five floats back in the parade, the Menstrual Temple's house band, Feminist Orgy Network, begins the opening strains of "Soundtrack for the End of the End of the World."

I should confess that I stole one -- well, actually two -- of the lines in my last spiel from the guy in World Entertainment War.

I gleam over at Jumbler as I draw the mike away from my mouth. Then, grabbing her hand, I initiate our famous "water-buffaloes-making-love" rhythmic grunt, which she takes up too after a moment's hesitation.

I can't imagine even being alive today, let alone presiding over this grand opening, without the presence of Jumbler in my life.

She's the only one who busts me in the ways I need to be busted. Everyone else is a little too enslaved to their belief that I'm a divinely inspired superstar to be of much use to my project of continual self-dismantling.

Ever since I returned from exile four and a half years ago, my mothers have done a great job shedding their fixations about me. But it's just not within their power, I'm afraid, to critique me with the fierce ingenuity I need in order to die every day. It really helps to have a collaborator who's adept at homing in on the exact deaths I need.

Not that Jumbler is a non-stop debunker of all things Rapunzel. What makes her so credible in purging my bullshit is that she's equally adept at recognizing and drawing out my idiosyncratic brilliance. These seemingly contradictory skills, which I have never known any other person be able to wield, have been my privilege to enjoy from the first days of our relationship. And they have been crucial in my ability to become myself -- to fulfill the promise of my self-abduction.

But it's not as if I have merely sucked up Jumbler's contributions with regal narcissism. One of her great gifts to me has been her ability to arouse my passionate, reverent attention to her needs. I'm devoted to serving her devotion to herself, just as she is to mine. In this way, I've overcome an imbalance in my psyche that made it easy for me to be the beloved one but hard to treat another flesh-and-blood human as the beloved. (I've always been a master of paying homage to Persephone.)

I'm grateful, too, for the psychological skills Jumbler has helped me cultivate. Dealing with difficult feelings has been at the heart of our "radical intimacy" all these years. Not only do we not hide or manipulate; we grow closer through our difficult honesty. I tell her the godawful truth about my dark toxins and she listens with equanimity. It's the same going the other way. Shadow-stalking, we call it. We've toyed with collaborating on a book by that very name.

But Jumbler's gifts go beyond even all these wonders. As Madame Blavatsky prophesied on the First Day of Creation, Jumbler's "The Eater of Cruelty" has been the "father" of my revisioned mystery school, just as the Pomegranate Grail is the mother. Jumbler has been my collaborator. We've extensively explored the Drivetime through the power of our tantric meditations; we've stalked revelation there, gathering raw materials to use in building the new covenant; back in the Waketime, we've exhaustively discussed the meaning of our visions and put in motion the plans to translate them into material reality.

I'll list just a few examples. The idea that the sacred could and should be playful: It originated with Jumbler but came natural to me, and I helped take it places Jumbler couldn't imagine by herself. The theory that menstruation is a central metaphor for an understanding of death that could save the world from extinction: It was implicit in the teachings of the Pomegranate Grail, but I couldn't have brought it to fruition without having my brainpower supercharged by Jumbler's brilliant, sensual devotion. The notion that spiritual women should find a way to aggressively celebrate sex, thereby seizing the authority to redefine its cultural expression: the Menstrual Temple's strategy for doing this grew directly out of my response to Jumbler's tantric mastery.

It's no surprise, then, that a part of me feels desolate, even a little guilty, as I contemplate the hurt I must unleash on my beautiful companion. But most of me is completely united with my fate. From the time its contours were first revealed during the First Seven Days of Creation, there has never been a single contradictory omen to call it into question. Jumbler herself, the one person with most to lose, has steadfastly counseled me to carry out the mandate.

Beginning tonight, I am linked to the whole world with the same intimate connection I've previously shared only with Jumbler. It may be a poetic exaggeration to say that from this day forward I am officially the Global Love Slave; nonetheless, there is a huge grain of truth in that title.

Even more problematical for Jumbler, tonight will bring my first literal sexual encounter with a human being other than her. As Madame Blavatsky put it on Day One of the First Seven Days of Creation, I will begin "administering the tantric yoni juju directly to one of the elite contagious agents among the beloved enemy." I will set the healing infection in motion.

The funeral parade has been continuing to proceed slowly up Pacific Avenue. I gaze back to take in the spectacle. On the float directly behind us, Sibyl, the oldest member of the Menstrual Temple, is filling a large iron cauldron with paper and objects that she is gathering from people along the route. "Give me a written statement or symbol of your most heart-rending anguish," she's saying over her microphone, "and I will conduct a ritual of purification during which I will burn that statement or symbol to ash as I pray for your deliverance. This may not extinguish your pain completely, but it will conjure a healing that you will be able to feel the benefits of within days. Guaranteed by the Televisionary Oracle!"

Behind Sibyl is our one and only Cadillac convertible. Three of the Menstrual Temple's beefiest babes, Tara, Wendy, and Alana, are sitting on the back of the car wearing, aptly enough, bikinis made from round slabs of baloney sewn carefully together by our excellent seamstress Dagmar. Given the fact that each of them tips the scales at over two hundred twenty, a lot of lunchmeat has been sacrificed.

The three bathing beauties are handing out party favors to the crowd, among which are "Owl Pellet Dissection Kits" (includes actual owl pellets, plastic forceps, magnifying glass, and bone sorting chart) and bumperstickers that read "Daily Dream Work Prevents Genocide of the Imagination" and "Own Your Shadow Or It Will Own You." Every now and then they're also sneaking in a select few "Unconditional Love Certificates." These precious documents assure their owners that the Menstrual Temple's Prayer Warriors will conjure a flurry of fierce petitions to the Goddess Herself in their behalf for a given hour in the near future.

Dancing women, faces hidden by skull masks, are weaving around the floats. They're clothed in black body suits with the image of a skeleton on both the front and back. Over this foundation, they wear red satin merrywidows, silver lace bras and panties, crotchless emerald silk leotards, and other lingerie. Jingle bell bracelets adorn their ankles and wrists. Now and then some of them sing a chant I heard in the first vision of Madame Blavatsky:

If I be dead

or seem to be

It means that death

can't come for me

And so I bleed

Pretend to die

And live again

to kiss the sky

After the bathing beauties, the next float back in the procession is the home of "Shotgun Marriages of You to Yourself." It features a garlanded gazebo and life-sized papier-mbchi figures of a tiger bride and wolf groom. Indigo, the Menstrual Temple's only ordained Unitarian minister, is offering to officiate the wedding of any audience member who is brave enough to tie the knot with his or her own "bad self."

I can make out a heavy-set man standing next to Indigo on the float, presumably undertaking the ceremony that she and I created for the occasion. I imagine with satisfaction how she's prompting him to repeat the vows that will bind him to the magic of self-respect. "I will never forsake you," he'll promise himself. "I will unfailingly bless you with all the love I am capable of summoning." And at the climax of the rite, Indigo will say to him, "I now pronounce you Husband and Wife."

As I've been contemplating the wedding float, an amusing fantasy has sneaked up from my subconscious mind. In the parlance of the tantric code Jumbler and I have developed, I am seeing in my mind's eye a vision of myself shepherding a tender thunderbolt. From the perspective of the English language, though, I am holding a hard cock. It vaguely belongs to a specific male who will soon be playing an interesting role in my master plan.

This is, I reiterate, happening in my imagination. I have never actually done such a thing in waking reality. My dear disembodied Rumbler and I messed around a lot in the Televisionarium when I was a teenager, although even there I never partook in what Rumbler has recently become fond of calling "wang dang doodle."

It's also true that Jumbler is not just a woman. With her amorphous gender -- testicular tissue mixed in with a uterus and ovaries, plus a rather sizable pearly root (tantric code for clitoris) -- she's a little bit of a man herself. And I have enjoyed thousands of erotic exchanges with her: marathon eyegasms, shamanic bellylaugh climaxes, crown chakra fluttergasms, and so many other varieties of bliss it would take eons to catalogue them with the detail they deserve.

Still, by most standards, I am a virgin in the realm of heterosexual sex.

And I have most definitely never held an actual erect penis in my hand.

In a few hours, that changes. Later tonight, to celebrate the ancient feast of Beltane, the May Queen will consort for the first time with a May King. The Chief Shamanatrix of the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail will take as her temporary husband a man who has been initiated into the mysteries of menstruation. I emphasize the word temporary. In my role as Global Initiatrix of the Fuckissimus, I plan to draft quite a number of temporary husbands in the coming years. Through it all, however, Jumbler will remain my freaky consort.

I should be clear, though, that I do not intend to be merely a nirvanic vessel of the Great Goddess during my direct engagements with tender thunderbolts. I will not be motivated purely out of duty to the noble goal of killing the bad apocalypse and resurrecting the good one. Carnal curiosity is a feeling I am most definitely not ashamed of.

I gaze with pride and joy back at the funeral parade snaking behind me. Almost everything I dreamed of has come to fruition. All the floats seethe with spooky but uplifting rituals which the crowd can't help but yearn to participate in. In addition to the themes I've already named, there's the display representing the "Proud to Be Humble" contingent of the Menstrual Temple, a group which for one dollar will kiss volunteers' naked butts (or fully clothed if they're too modest) while listening intently to them brag about anything their heart desires and asking them good questions to spur them on.

Behind that one is the "Videomancy" booth, where Burgundy, our resident oracle, is responding to seekers' requests for divinatory advice by flicking on a good old-fashioned (battery-operated) television (not a Televisionary Oracle) at just the right cosmic moment to capture the random phrase on a random channel that will supply the necessary guidance.

There are two roving Menstrual Temple therapists who aren't confined to a float. Anna and Firenze are wearing T-shirts that advertise their special services to anyone in the crowd who asks: "Casting Love Spells on Yourself" and "How to Read Your Own Mind." Now and then they also sneak in stage-whispered promos for "How To Stop Thinking About Yourself All the Time."

Krista, five floats back, is giving "Emergency Dance Lessons for the Ecstatically Challenged." The rhythmic, writhing strains of Feminist Orgy Network provide her soundtrack.

Near the end of the parade, though I can't see them right now, Calley and Goolagaya are demonstrating "Laughing Sex Tantra" with the help of the Menstrual Temple's answer to the inflatable doll, our eight-armed, ten-foot-tall scarecrow with a fully functional Televisionary Oracle in her belly. A little later, as we draw closer to the cemetery, the two chortling sexperts will begin initiating audience members into the mysteries of the reverse striptease, the art of playing strip poker with the sacred Menstrual Temple Tarot deck, and many other tantric specialties I've cooked up during my explorations of the Drivetime these last five years.

Among the performance art spectacles here today, I muse with pride, there are no crucifixes bathing in vats of urine. No chocolate-smeared comediennes jamming yams up their butts or tattooed torture experts lancing their chests with sharp steel rods (ho-hum) or midgets with strap-on dildoes smashing piles of televisions with sledgehammers. Ours is mischief after another manner.

Though I should confess that it's not entirely original. There is another artist, the self-proclaimed "demonically compassionate" lead singer of World Entertainment War, who seems to have tapped into the same vein of sacred blasphemy that I have.

I grab the microphone and command the crowd's attention. "I'm ready, beauty and truth fans," I proclaim. "Are you ready? What do you say we start heading towards the crux of this lovely crock of bull. The question behind all our other questions. The holy probing fun that shatters all weak-hearted conceptions. Help me out here, my dears. Lead me unto rosy red temptation. What chant is the Goddess horniest to hear? Where do all our explorations lead tonight?"

"What exactly are you doing to kill the apocalypse?" yells the crowd, spurred on by all the menstrual lingerie models here on the lead float.

"What?" I say. "What artifacts are you using to chill the cops' lips?! What does that mean?"

The cry goes up again, more forceful and precise this time. "What exactly are you doing to kill the apocalypse?"

"Oh, now I understand you. 'What exactly are you doing to kill the apocalypse?' As in, 'What progress are you making in your all-out war against the silliest form of death?' Though to be truthful I hate to even dignify it by calling it death -- it's such an insult to the concept."

I glance over at the Televisionary Oracle screen here on the float. It's the scene of a mushroom cloud sprouting from the end of Jesus Christ's erect penis, as if in an ejaculation, then breaking away from his body and floating skyward, only to morph into a giant psilocybin mushroom, which billows and blooms and bursts into a rain of thousands of smaller mushrooms. They fall to earth, where they are welcomed into the upturned mouths of women of all races wearing lingerie over their khaki soldier uniforms.

"So who's first to testify today?" I call out. "Which of you beauty and truth fans wants to name the murderous love you're invoking to slaughter the goddamn fucking end of the world?"

I'm not worried if there's no one brave enough in the audience to leap up on the slowly-moving float and take a shot. There'll be no dead time. All the menstrual lingerie models lounging on the beds have prepared spiels to deliver.

For a moment it looks like a middle-aged woman carrying a toddler is about to come forward, but she chickens out. I turn around and wink at Monika, the youngest member of the Menstrual Temple, who liked one of my texts so much she agreed to memorize and perform it.

She's a big-boned, handsome dyke. Her menstrual lingerie consists of a velvet burgundy teddy under a see-through yellow tunic and sky-blue suede hotpants. I hand her the microphone.

"There's a German actor named Udo Kier," she begins. "He's a specialist in playing villains. I read an interview with him where he just about jacked himself off bragging and swaggering about his own idiotic nihilism. 'Evil has no limit,' he sneered, as if he were the first genius in the history of the world to arrive at that piercing insight. 'Good has a limit,' he blustered. 'It's not as interesting.' Here's what I have to say about that: What a hackneyed, pompous ass! Though it's true most of the journalists in the world seem to agree with him. And I'm obviously in a minority in my belief that evil is a fucking bore. But how dare Udo Kier or anyone else proclaim that 'good has a limit' when there are so few smart artists and thinkers who are brave and resourceful enough to explore the frontiers of goodness?

"Which is where I come in," Monika raves on, wrapping up her rant. "The way I'm killing the apocalypse is by studying really hard, working every day, to synthesize compassion and lust, irony and sincerity, bright enthusiasm and righteous rage. I've pledged not to automatically assume negative feelings are more profound and interesting and real than positive ones, or that pessimistic opinions are smarter than the optimistic kind. Amen and hallelujah, forever and ever. So mote it be."

As scattered cheers ripple from the crowd, a volunteer comes forward and clambers onto the float. He looks Native American. Dressed in a denim jacket, he wears his long black hair in two braids. "There are two kinds of vision," he says carefully. "Hard eyes and soft eyes. The first is when you have such fixed concepts about a person or thing that you don't truly see it as it stands before you; you only see your own ideas about it. The second is when you strip away all prejudgments and view the person or thing freshly, as if God created it just a moment ago. When you use soft eyes, you're constantly amazed at how different the world is from what everyone says it is. When you use soft eyes, your capacity for killing the apocalypse becomes prodigious."

As quickly as he came up, he disappears. His rap is perhaps too subtle for the crowd to get worked up about. There's no big burst of hoots and applause. Myself, I loved it.

I sneak a peek at Jumbler. Her face is a mess of mixed emotions. Knowing how her mind works, I'm positive she loved the guy's testimony. But I'm also aware of how ambivalent she feels about men right now. It's not a rational thing--she'd be the first to admit. It's a gut reaction to the prospect of her boon companion breaking the alchemical seal to consort with a strange lover.

Among her feelings, I happen to know, is the certainty that the man I have chosen to be my first temporary husband is not good enough for me. He's too loud, too crude, too ... manly. I've actually had the same inklings myself. I'm nobility, for Goddess' sake, and he's a peon. A talented peon, perhaps, but a peon nonetheless. Now and then, in harmony with the thoughts Jumbler carries more fixedly, I feel like I'll demean myself by letting him think he's important enough to touch my body with his own.

I first saw him last December. Though I rarely go out to hear live music, Monika had been bugging me to see the Sacred Sluts of the YaYa GaGa, a five-woman group that plays goth-tinged funk. I accompanied my friend to the Catalyst, where the Sluts were opening the show for another band. I liked them, though they were too unsubtle for my tastes, with giant phallus-shaped candles burning atop their amplifiers and numerous songs with S & M themes, though I did laugh profusely when they played "Bend Over Boyfriend."

But it was the headlining band, World Entertainment War, that cracked open my doors of perception. The two women in the ensemble were smart and sexy, with far more soul, I thought, than the Sluts. And the male lead singer, who I found out later has appropriated the (presumably) ironic nickname of "Rockstar," was absolutely, inscrutably worthy of great study. On the one hand he was doing an excellent rendition of the orgiastic god Dionysus. I mean, he truly seemed to be in a matriarchal version of ecstatic trance, dancing and singing not with the typical rockstar's macho-bully squall, but with a graceful abandon that led him through an irresistible quick-change panorama of receptive and inviting moods.

At the same time, Rockstar was making fun of all the ways he seemed to be taking himself so seriously. For instance, during a song called "Thunder in the Earth," he periodically burst out of a yoga-like series of erotic movements to perform goofy flails and stumbles that sort of wrecked the sexy mood, but you didn't mind because it invoked a playful innocence that took the edge off the potentially overwrought mojo.

For another for instance, about halfway through the show, he disappeared from the stage while the band began a song on which the two women sang wordless vocals. Halfway through the piece, Rockstar emerged wearing only a red jockstrap stuffed with ten-dollar bills, then jumped into the crowd and pressed the money against audience members' foreheads. If dancing had made their skin sufficiently sweaty to keep the bills glued on, they got to keep them. Otherwise, he snatched them back. Finally, he leapt back on the stage and proceeded to dance provocatively as he donned, item by item, the uniform of a corporate CEO, down to the red power tie. "I performed the Reverse Strip-Tease Potlatch," he proclaimed after it was over, "in honor of the unsung suffering of the filthy rich."

I liked the way this dude piled up his metaphors in great big heaps. The scent of the Drivetime wafted from him.

Then there were the lyrics. I found almost all of them fascinating--highly unusual for me, being the picky, judgmental critic I am. "Pray to You" was one of my favorites. To the accompaniment of a sinuous rhythm and a Middle Eastern scale, Rockstar and the main female singer (they shared the spotlight equally) sensually intoned these lyrics:

Those were the days when everybody prayed

to the god with the biggest penis

Those were the times when only one word rhymed

with Isis or with Venus

It's a mystery

why history turned out to be a cover-up

We're so sorry

Allow us to offer up a remedy

Pray to Her, Jesus

Pray to Her, Buddha Allah

Pray to her Zeus Jehovah Shiva Horus

The Sacred Sluts, who opened the night, were sacred in name only. They exploited the term without, apparently, knowing much about its meaning. I'm an expert on the subject, so I know.

The members of World Entertainment War, on the other hand, created certifiably sacred space. They were also, for anyone who had the eyes to see, playing with real occult themes that I've never seen any professional entertainer refer to -- let alone in a beer-stained rock and roll nightclub. "As above, so below," one of the core mantras of Western mysticism, was a chorus refrain in one song. Another piece, "Snake Dance," spoke openly about the alchemical and yogic principle of building an immortal "light body" by raising the sex force out of the genitals and up to the crown chakra.

About a third of the way into the "show," Rockstar even pulled off a somewhat disguised, comically mutated, but unmistakable version of a ceremonial magick rite, including all the elements you'd find in any self-respecting hermetic or pagan order. At this point I lost all doubt that he had been trained in a mystery school himself.

I left the Catalyst feeling nonplussed, not the least reason being that I felt a glimmer of attraction to Rockstar. For the first half of my adolescence I'd fantasized about having boyfriends, and I'd had an active relationship with my disembodied soul brother Rumbler, but since I met Jumbler the male gender had become an amorphous mass in which no individual face drew my attention. As I developed the details of my work in the world, I made plans to heal and correct the ravages of men's sickness, in part by taking on the role of "High Priestess of the Global Jiggy Snake." But I never felt any magnetic attraction to an actual guy.

Of course, I questioned my fascination with Rockstar. Wasn't I intrigued, simply, by his art and its implications for my own work? There was no need to imagine seeking a personal connection with him, especially since it was likely that his public persona was nothing like his private self.

When I bought all the recordings he and his various bands had made over the years, and when I began attending every one of his live shows, I told myself I was merely researching the career of an artist who might be able to teach me something. I used the same rationale when I showed up at the library to pore over old publications that might have reviews of his shows and records, or that might contain the little articles he writes. But as I uncovered more and more evidence of how artfully he had integrated his occult ideas into pop culture formats, it became more difficult to resist trying to arrange to meet him.

The front of the funeral parade has just left Pacific Avenue, turning right on Water Street and preparing to make a quick left on River Street. I'm glad to see the crowd has not thinned out. As the afternoon wears on (and maybe because intoxicating substances are taking effect), we're having no trouble getting volunteers to climb up on the float and testify about how they're killing the apocalypse.

"I invented the eleventh commandment," exults a thin woman with a slinky red satin dress on, "and I obey it always: Thou Shalt Not Bore the Goddess!"

"I've taught myself to think with my heart and feel with my head!" says a young man with delicate features and hair down to the middle of his back.

"I'm visualizing and praying that sometime soon we will see a headline on the front page of USA Today that says 'Why Do 95% of the World's Women Never Get Their Orgasm Experience?'" This testimony comes from a rowdy-looking redneck woman in her forties.

A school marm with an introverted-looking face but whose blouse is unbuttoned to her solar plexus says with pride, "I'm teaching eight-year-olds to honor and work with their dreams. Every morning, when their visits to the other side are still fresh, I ask them, 'Where did you go last night? What adventures did you have while you were sleeping? I bet they were better than any movie or TV show you've ever seen.' Together the kids and I remember the other world we live in. We honor the shades which have become so vengeful, so apocalyptic, because of the patriarchs' neglect."

Some rants are just silly, but I'm grateful for them. "I plunged butcher knives into accordions," says a grizzled poetry chick. "I hijacked a UFO and abducted some aliens, sold celebrity sperm on the home shopping channel, strolled around the mall with my sweetie wearing matching nipple rings peeking through our matching see-through plastic S & M blouses, jumped rope while wearing high heels, and spanked the devil with a ping pong paddle. But most of all I avoided thinking about winning the lottery while making love."

One of the most unexpected statements comes from a well-dressed older woman. "I'm celebrating the successes of patriarchy. Because I believe the only way to get rid of it is to love it to death. I'm praising the masculine. Hooray for suspension bridges. How'd they ever figure out how to make those things, anyway? Hooray for chemotherapy; I'd be nothing without it. Actually I'd be lying under six feet of dirt right now. Hooray for all the dead white men who wrote such great books. Kept me from getting bored. That's all I have to say."

Interspersed between the testimonials of people from the crowd are little speeches from some of the menstrual lingerie models here on the lead float.

Cecily, one of my moms (delivering a text I helped her write): "I work to repudiate the myth that men are more objective than women. In my opinion, a man's opinions are as rooted in his emotional fixations as a woman's are in hers. But men try to hide their irrationality behind a well-rationalized front of 'logical objectivity.' Just because they're so skilled at suppressing their emotions -- or should I say just because they're so unskilled at knowing what they feel? -- doesn't mean their ideas and opinions are any less driven by their emotions."

Artemisia, also one of my moms, delivers the wackiest spiel. "Well, I got sick and tired of all those mass hallucinations," she begins, "excuse me, I mean 'visions' of the Virgin Mary. In the clouds over Lisbon. In the plate glass window of the office building in San Antonio. In the treetops at Medjugorge. Et cetera ad nauseum. It was getting so you couldn't open a copy of the National Enquirer without seeing the so-called Holy Mother's ghostly ghastly smiling face. Which I wouldn't have minded except for the fact that the bitch is extremely fond of issuing death threats. In other words, she's a phallocratic stooge! Behind her mommysweet expression is one hell of a bad-ass Jehovah-like temper.

"'If you do not pray to me more often,' she scolds, 'I will incinerate your cities with fire from the sky! If you do not stop having so much sex, I will murder half the population with AIDS! If you do not stop having abortions, I will send an asteroid plunging into New York City!' Et cetera ad nauseum. Cranky jerk is just another secret weapon in the bad daddies' conspiracy to perpetrate the self-fulfilling prophecy of armageddon.

"So anyway, I took matters into my own hands. Me and my focus group. Started flexing our hex power. Meditated and visualized and shamanically-traveled like crazy. Yea for the Drivetime! 'O Great and Ever-Cackling Goddess Persephone,' we prayed, 'Burn that nasty Virgin Mary's goddamned "heaven" to the ground. Give us more interesting heavens, for anti-Christ's sake.'

"And guess what? It's working. In spades. Visions of Persephone are popping up everywhere! We call it Yo Mama's World Tour. Her ratings are starting to rival the Virgin Bitch's. Our Cackling Lady's been way up in the middle of a cloud in Buenos Aires. Smack in the heart of a billboard pizza in Cincinnati. Shimmering in an oil stain on the floor of a car repair shop's bathroom in Fresno. Everywhere She needs to be to help slaughter the end of the world."

Having made the turn down Coral Street, the parade finally arrives at Evergreen Cemetery. By rough estimate, gazing down the snaky line of floats, I'd say maybe four hundred non-Menstrual Temple people have followed us this far.

"Beauty and truth fans," I cry after waiting for more of the crowd to gather at the front float, "the apocalypse has been our totem. It has been the ultimately powerful and sacred taboo, the most terrible and the most valuable thing, the superhuman profanity on which all life depended and against which all values were tested. Shadowing every one of our personal actions, the apocalypse has been the fascinating blasphemy that wouldn't shut up unless we were all very, very good.

"We've fallen down before it, believing in it more fiercely than any other secret. We've agreed to be possessed by it, to be haunted by its image above all other images. Nothing else has had more deadly life.

"We've loved the apocalypse because it has been the most supernatural nightmare in the world, the only nightmare that has ever threatened to change all life on Earth instantly and forever. It's the dark and precious god, the promise of a revelation that would redefine the meaning of all history.

"And yet how few of us have ever stood next to the magic body of a nuclear bomb or a vial of anthrax, breathed in its smell, touched it, communed with its actual life? How few of us have actually seen any of the hundreds of species that are going extinct at a rate unmatched since the demise of the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago? How few of us have actually measured the shrinking ozone layer or seen the rapidly melting ice of Antarctica as greenhouse gases warm the Earth? The presence of these things is rumor and mystery to most of us, like Christ and flying saucers. We hear stories.

"At night our dreams have turned the apocalypse into the philosopher's stone, the ark of the covenant, the alchemical gold, the magic body of the messiah, the potent drug from the beginning of the world, the ecstatic and shocking moment of religious conversion. In our deepest darkest juices we have been alive to its divinity, as we are alive to any god that offers the brilliant and blinding flash of irreversible illumination. We have believed in the apocalypse because it has seemed to reveal what it is to melt back into the dangerous light that's as pure as the sun.

"Let's call the apocalypse a love that has been too big for us to understand until now. Let's say it has been the raging creative life of a cleansing disease that has wanted to cure us so it didn't have to kill us. Let's say it has been the last judgment that promises not to come true if we can figure out what it means. And we have figured out what it means.

"It's our apocalypse. We're the ones who made it, all of us. We've loved this apocalypse so much we imagined it could happen. We created this apocalypse so hard that it came alive and possessed us. We turned the apocalypse into our bodies; we gave messages to chemicals in our brains to make dangerous images of the apocalypse, messages to nurture and worship and flash those images through our nerves.

"The apocalypse has been the most beloved thing to us, because as we've all together imagined it our brains have been burned with the true hallucination that we are all one body. When we've fantasized the apocalypse returning us all to the primal ooze, we've remembered that you and I are made of the same stuff. The apocalypse has freed us to imagine that we all live and die together. "Until now, we have needed the apocalypse.

"Until now, we have needed the apocalypse because only the tease of the biggest, most original sin could heal us. The apocalypse has been a blind, a fake, a trick memory we're sending ourselves from the future that has shocked us better than all the anti-Christs and AIDS and UFOs.

"So bless the fear, beauty and truth fans. Praise the danger. Let the great ugly power fascinate us all one last time, fix our terror so precisely that we become one potently concentrated ferocious imagination, a single guerrilla meditator casting an irreversible spell to bind the great satan apocalypse.

"There will be no apocalypse."

Monika leads seven Menstrual Temple pallbearers as they hoist the golden casket from the lead float and carry it into the cemetery. I wonder if anyone knows I lifted parts of my elegy from an old piece of writing by Rockstar?

I'll confess to him in person when I see him later. Tonight, this feast of Beltane will be the occasion of the first menarche for a member of the male gender in more than six thousand years. It will also herald a sacred boink between the Divine Avatar of the Cackling Vulture Goddess Persephone and a mildly amusing small-time rock star who may or may not be up to the task of embodying the sixty-six-million-year-old snake god.