Sorry For Party Rocking, or: The Inevitable Rise And Liberation Of Steve Harwell!
Bleite Três, Volume Um
What Was Holiest And Mightiest Of All That The World Has Yet Owned Has Bled To Death Under Our Knives
This sandbox is currently undergoing critique and revision before it can be uploaded to the M.E.G. database. The assigned critter for this draft is M.E.G. Senior Greenlighter Cecylia Figueroa (Comments colored in green). The original author for this draft is James Farrell (Comments colored in blue).
Item #: Object 96
Object Class: Keter
C: What does this even mean? What is a "Keter"???
J: It's the first Sefirot, the top of the Kabbalistic tree of life, representing the first emanation of God, the divine will and impulse towards creation. It's literally in the Talmud. Have you not seen Neon Genesis Evangelion? I was thinking by using a scary looking word, I could properly represent the existential threat this object poses.
C: No. We're not doing that. We are not putting any random, meaningless, esoteric references in here. Seriously, the Kabbalah? What's next? Just using the surname of some random mathematician??? None of that.
Artistic rendition of Object 96's containment unit.
Special Containment Procedures
Object 96 is to be secured, contained, and protected within a 10-meter by 10-meter by 10-meter cube of pure titanium in the middle of Level 11's Base Beta. At all times, 20 guards, each armed with handheld anti-tank missile launchers, are to be stationed around the cube facing inward to monitor changes in the security of the titanium cube. These guards are to be rotated after 6-hour shifts to prevent fatigue, with each group getting a mandatory one-week hiatus between shifts to prevent burnout. In case of any cracks appearing in the containment cube, the guards are ordered not to fight back and instead run as fast as they can because any attacks they can levy, even with our most powerful weapons, are useless and only limit our own chances of survival. God save you if you hear this thing breaching containment, especially if it enters a rage state, because it sure as hell has heard you. If this happens, all hope will be lost, and we will have to abandon the level entirely this thing has been released on for good.
C: …
J: It's good, right?
C: OK. So first of all, I have no idea where we're going to get 1,000 square meters of titanium or 20 "handheld anti-tank missile launchers," if that's even a real thing, or 20×4×7=560 volunteers to stare at a cube 6 hours a week. But not only that… I know the template is semi-optional, but I've never once seen someone try to publish an article with a "Special Containment Procedures" section… Do you even have a basic understanding of what the M.E.G. does?
J: Not really, nah. You're the M.E.G. lady. Just tell me how to fix it.
C: Delete this entire section.
J: Oh ok.
C: We haven't even gotten to the part where you explain to me what you're trying to put into a metal cube, but if it is as dangerous as you claim, then I guess we're all going to die because there's no way we're going to be able to procure a giant titanium cube in the first place. And even if that section was worth including, what type of official document would ever include several paragraphs of "Containment Procedures" before an abstract that even indicates what the thing is? It's honestly completely ridiculous.
J: At the very least, I gotta put some respect on your name for doing all that math in your head so quickly. Idk how you figured out the volume of a 10-meter by 10-meter by 10-meter titanium cube without a calculator. That's actually crazy.
The last known photograph of Blilk before the "Spilled Blilk" incident.
Description
Object 96 is a completely normal drinking glass procured in the aftermath of the Spilled Blilk Incident, in which a strange leech by the name of Leeon Leeshire discovered and released a powerful entity presumably originating from The Blancherooms, which wreaked havoc on Level 906 before ultimately being neutralized by Blanche and Tom Von Haderach through utilizing rituals of advanced memetic magic wherein an entity is tied to a contemporaneously popular but ultimately transient internet meme. Once the meme predictably dies, the entity disappears from reality. Incidentally, Leeon Leeshire was declared missing in action after this incident, and his current whereabouts (as well as the correct spelling of his surname) are entirely unknown at this time. The entity previously residing within Object 96 has colloquially been called "Blilk," a portmanteau of "Blanche Milk," and is believed to be a potential multiverse-level threat at the height of its powers. At the time of writing, Blilk remains neutralized, but it's unknown if or when it could reemerge and continue its unobstructed destruction.
C: OK. To start, I don't really like the implication of "Blanche Milk." You do realize what that sounds like, right?
J: No no no. You misunderstand. It's a milk that's made out of Blanche, not whatever you're implying. Uh. What I mean is: it's more "Pickle Rick" than "Rick's Pickle" if you catch my drift.
C: There are a lot of things I could say about that, but I'm going to respectfully reserve judgment until we get through the final section in case the appendix somehow miraculously redeems you.
Steve Harwell backstage before his infamous final concert. Note the crude gesture and scary tattoos. This man is not to be trifled with!
Appendix: Steve Harwell
Additionally involved in the Blilk incident was Steve Harwell, the lead singer of the American rock band Smash Mouth, mostly known for their songs "All Star," "Party Rock Anthem," and "Sorry For Party Rocking." It's unknown how Harwell arrived in the Backrooms or what his potential involvement with the Blilk incident is, but all available resources should be dedicated to discovering his current whereabouts and danger level. His last known location was Level 906 when the entire Smash Mouth band was transported there from Level 11 during a performance of the 17-hour extended dance version of "All Star," shortly after which the Blilk incident occurred.
C: That's it? It's just a cup that used to have an entity inside it? That whole overkill "special containment procedure" was for this?
J: Yep. Neat, right?
C: I sometimes wonder why I ever became a greenlighter. Every day, I sit in my office, and my inbox is filled with one hundred messages from passionate writers. "Dear Miss Cecylia, I love The Backrooms more than anyone ever has before, and I just want to write something about it." "Dear Miss Cecylia, I have poured my soul into this article. Being a writer is the only thing that gives my life any meaning in this empty Godless husk of a world." "Dear Miss Cecylia, I have been wandering wearily in that fiery perdition we call 'sandbox hell' for several eternities, but you and you alone can guide me out. And if not, all that time and effort I have spent trying desperately to be good enough will be nulled and voided. There will be no escape for me. I will have to give up on everything. And then I will celebrate my sweet sixteen, and then I will graduate high school, and then I will get my degree, and then I will meet a wonderful woman who shares my values, and then we will settle down in a nice house with 2.58 kids and a pup and a kitty, and then my children will grow up and have children of their own, and then I will grow old myself, and then I will retire, and then I will spend a few pathetic years shitting myself in a nursing home with sparse visits from faces I've long forgotten. And then, on my deathbed, I will weep with the realization that my whole life was worthless, having never gotten my Backrooms article greenlit." And with all of my terrible sympathy, I simply cannot turn them away, so I look at article after article of unpublishable garbage and tell a million hopeful faces, "OK. I will help you. Have you considered adding any redeemable qualities at all? Has anyone ever taught you how to use a comma? Here's an itemized list of the first one hundred or so sentences that have SPaG errors. Surely we can find a way to make this work. Surely this is something one amateur editor with no real experience outside of a collaborative writing community for teenagers can fix," but by the end of the day, the shadow of Virgil I embody fades to a shady gray, and the smell of brimstone begins leaking up through the floorboards, and the bottle of vodka I've smuggled under my blazer is empty, and I'm left catatonic, crucified to my office chair, the words on the screen shifting into the silhouettes of twin thieves, penitent and impenitent, and even the penitent thief shall die forgotten, all potential from a budding green prodigy atrophied while awaiting judgement in a dead forum where sandboxes collect dust in empty threads until the links rot away.
J: I ain't reading allat. But I'm good to post, right?
Bleite Três, Volume TWO
Every Day I'm Shuffling
Behold, he is risen: Steve Harwell! (It was inevitable.) He has traveled a long way to get here. His father, Teddy Dawal Harwell, born in Hungary in 1847, was knighted by His Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty by the grace of God, Franz Joseph I, Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary and Bohemia, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Galicia, Lodomeria and Illyria; King of Jerusalem, et cetera et cetera. Teddy, as we all can surmise, earned this knighthood not through battle, but through non-violent power (we are living in a world abandoned by God, after all, despite what His Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty's full title implies, and there are no more knights of old). Teddy, who was an investment banker in the core of the urban bourgeoisie within the dual monarchy’s second capital, became a Knight, though no ecstatic charges towards four-armed giants on the horizon were in his future. Not to disparage Teddy's building of power: the generational wealth he created sprang entirely from him and his hard-working, meteoric rise from a no-name Budapesti bank manager to a member of the Board of Directors for the illustrious Hitelbank in only a handful of decades.
Steve Harwell has lived many stories since his birth in 1885. It should be no surprise, given the circumstances of the man who sired him, that he would become a Marxist as he attempted to distance himself from the crass materialism and nationalist hypocrisy of his father and the rest of the bureaucratic gentry residing in the fashionably wealthy Lipótváros district of Budapest. He received a doctorate in economic and political sciences from the Royal Hungarian University of Kolozsvár in 1906. He worked in a theater troupe, producing modernist plays from Ibsen, Strindberg, Hauptmann, et cetera. He wrote a few books on Neo-Kantian literary theory (nothing new or bold; Neo-Kantianism was the presiding style of the times, and other theorists did it better). After the Russian Revolution and the aftermath of the First World War, he became emboldened with communistic fervor, becoming a notable political writer and lecturer in the Hungarian Soviet Republic. The writings were quite important at the time, a promising career ahead of him if it weren't for the fall of the Republic in 1919 after only 133 days. So it goes.
The cause of death for the Republic, as you know, was the same as the cause of death for the Károlyi government it had couped to begin with: it was all so sincere and idiotically idealistic that it had no chance against anyone who hungered for real power. So just as Mihály Károlyi's pacifism simulated suicide, Béla Kun's Republic collapsed while awaiting the "inevitable" revolutions that never came. And so, communism died. Just as it has many times before and since. And now we can say for certain that this is how it was always going to end and that these naive fools never had a chance, that Marx was wrong, and the ironclad laws of economics do not point towards communism but away from it (it's dialectical, you see). So it goes.
And, as the Hungarian Soviet Republic was killed, so was Harwell. Kun ordered him and the other theorists to stay behind and clandestinely reorganize the communist movement, though we all know that the bastard Béla Kun wanted them to be murdered as martyrs rather than live on as writers. The only way forward towards these inevitable revolutions is violence. We have learned this, and once violence dies (violence be not proud), so too will history end. The trick, of course, as the history books would later write, is that Harwell was killed quietly with official (but transparently fraudulent) narratives being that he fled to Vienna, as his body rotted away in a ditch somewhere, two gunshot wounds in the back of his head.
In the 1940s, Steve Harwell would show up in Tokyo, Japan. It is not known what he spent his time doing in the two decades before he became a white samurai in what historians will later refer to as "a straight-up Beverly-Hills-Ninja-starring-Chris-Farley-type situation." One can imagine a house filled with manuscripts: pages and pages unpublished on political and cultural theory. The type of writings that could maybe change the world if anyone could read them, but we've tried that. We know how it ends, and we know that there's no longer a way forward anyway. At best, he would have ended up like his colleague Max Weber: forever cited by every social science paper for a single line defining the state by its brutality, yet never able to truly challenge that which he described, immortalized by the naive academics and forgotten by anyone with any actual power in the monopolization of violence. At worst, he would have ended up like his collaborator Ottó Korvin, executed for his association with the 133-day Communist Republic that never stood a chance in this cold, cold world of ours.
For another 20 years, the Tokyokko Steve Harwell kept a low profile, abandoning the outlook of many contemporaneous intellectuals who focused only on the mind, and beginning to privately train his body with a strict workout regimen. He mastered several fighting styles during this time: kendo, battōjutsu, karate, and even boxing. Though he still kept some ties to the local literary scene for old times' sake. It wasn't until 1961 that he would get any attention beyond that of a local oddity, which was in his vague association with the so-called "Shimanaka incident," in which the author Shichirō Fukazawa published a controversial short story featuring the fictional guillotining of the emperor of Japan, a depiction that ruffled some feathers and caused a teenage right-wing extremist to attempt Fukazawa's assassination in retaliation, succeeding only in fatally stabbing Fukazawa's housekeeper and non-fatally stabbing Fukazawa's wife. Harwell was rumored to have personally recommended the controversial short story for publication, so he was forced to make a public statement. Harwell, of course, criticized the assassination attempt, though his angle of critique was quite different from what you might expect, explaining that the teen wasn't a true right-wing nationalist because no true right-wing nationalist would bring harm to a woman in what would otherwise be a very noble homicide. It is in the Samurai code, after all, that the assassination is a sacred act to be performed between two men wherein neither leaves alive, as the assassin must commit ritualistic seppuku in the aftermath. Any other way of doing it is frankly embarrassing.
Harwell indeed developed quite the obsession with seppuku during this time as his politics grew more and more extreme, trending in the direction of a new idiosyncratic kind of homoerotic far-right ultra-nationalism predicated on a romantic obsession with the Japanese emperor and a sexual obsession with ritualistic suicide. There's an anecdote of a gay hookup Harwell had where he didn't have sex and instead wanted to roleplay a fatal self-stabbing. He mimed this ritualistic samurai suicide, complete with red scarves to simulate blood, and in the moment where he imagined his own death, he experienced that euphoric completion the romantic entanglements between two people can only hope to replicate. His partner for the night was quite confused and disturbed by this. They never hooked up again.
In 1966, Harwell began to get more publicly political, denouncing Emperor Hirohito's renunciation of his own divine status as an emperor "chosen by God." In Harwell's eyes, those who died in battle for their country died with the intention that they were laying their lives down to serve God on Earth in human form, and to admit a lack of divinity was to declare those violent deaths in vain, the cruelest and most unforgivable thing an emperor could ever do, completely nullifying his fitness to lead. By 1967, Harwell began organizing a militia to stage a coup and restore the leadership of God to the people of Japan. He trained his raggle-taggle bunch for three years, though it turns out an amateur samurai with no real experience cannot transform a group of idealistic fools into warriors capable of insurrection. The coup d'état attempt in 1970 was disastrous, almost as much as the coup de grâce that followed, for after not being able to take over the Japanese government with his poorly trained militia, Harwell committed seppuku for real this time. His kaishakunin however, assigned to do the final decapitation and bring him to death without unnecessary pain, was not very good at his job, clumsily failing to sever Harwell's head after three attempts, and someone else had to step in and finish him off. This act that Harwell revered for its elegance turned into a nearly irrecoverable mess of blood and gore when pulled into the real world. So it goes.
In 1990, Harwell would reappear in America, returning his gaze to the pure artistic output that had engulfed him in his youth. He started a band called "Smash Mouth," named after an offensive strategy in American football where running plays that emphasize strict control over the ball are favored over passes through the air that allow wind and momentum to do all the work for you. It is a football of pure battle between two men where only the strongest can emerge victorious amid blood and mortal wound and stench. Despite their multi-decade tenure, Smash Mouth only ever released three songs. Their first big hit, "All Star," in 1999 and two singles from their late-career resurgence in 2011, "Party Rock Anthem" and "Sorry For Party Rocking."
During this time, Harwell also produced some of his most influential political writings, returning to his Marxist roots and developing the concept of "Capitalist Realism." You've heard the quote before, even if you don't know it's attributed to Harwell, but to jog your memory, let us quickly list the top five most notable Steve Harwell quotes.
5. "Hey now, you're an all star."
4. "The average age for a man in the Bronze Age was eighteen, in the Roman era, twenty-two. Heaven must have been beautiful then. Today, it must look dreadful. When a man reaches forty, he has no chance to die beautifully. No matter how he tries, he will die of decay."
3. "Every day I'm shuffling."
2. "Sorry for party rocking."
And most notably:
1. "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism."
On Friday the 13th, the first month of 2017, at age 132, Steve Harwell killed himself. After all that pristine and beautiful legacy, the final mark of punctuation at the end of the line was a singular death. The last act of violence we have left. The only way remaining to interface with something real, just for a second.
That was his final message for you.
"Okay, yeah, I'm voting her out. She's definitely the imposter. None of that is true at all. I mean, maybe that stuff about me staging a failed coup d'état in imperial Japan was real, but 'Sorry For Party Rocking' was by a pop duo called 'LMFAO' composed of Redfoo and Sky Blu. I'm just not capable of creating a piece of art that beautiful. They came. They took over the world with their 'Party Rock Anthem.' They apologized for party rocking. And then they disappeared, never to be seen again. A perfect legacy. Can you even imagine something so sublime?" says Steve Harwell in response to Susche's long and drawn-out monologue that she had babbled to answer a question pertaining to why she insisted Steve Harwell was responsible for the murder of Benche. Benche is dead, btw. Yeah, sorry guys… The most likable character from the Blancherooms series got killed off-screen between parts 2 and 3??? Kinda fucked up. Just you wait until I write Joke Object 89 - "Benche's Corpse (Blilk 67: Top 13 Reasons Why I Don't Want To Have Sex With Vaporeon, or: AS CRUEL AS I MAY BE, UNDERSTAND THAT I LOVED YOU. THROW YOUR BODY IN THE FUCKING RIVER)". This could actually exist someday. You have no idea what I'm capable of. Honestly, the Blilk series is a work of infinite potential. It might be my magnum opus.
"Noooooooooooo. I'm not a sussy baka! Sobbing emoji! Crying emoji! You're a sussy baka, Steve Harwell from that one wonderful one-hit-wonder band, Smash Mouth. You're the only one here who's not a Blanche. That makes you immediately sus. Imposter!"
"Well, I got stuck here after the Blilk incident. It's not my fault. Honestly, I'm coping with it pretty well considering the types of characters I'm forced to interact with on a day-to-day basis," replies Steve Harwell.
"Hey," says um… Let me check the Blancherooms collaborative log (that is apparently still open to the public for anyone to submit to?) for characters I can use… Spamton Blanche? Steve Minecraft Blanche? Rick Astley Blanche? Wow! Too many beautiful and incredibly written specimens to choose from! But I think there's an elegance to the ones that aren't just intentionally cringy references. So let's go with my sincere favorite, Bananananche (truly Backrooms wiki writer TrailmixNCocoa's greatest creation). She's the new most likable Blancherooms character now that Benche is dead. "How are y'all pealin' today?"
"I'm pealing pretty good. Thanks, Bananananche," says Steve Harwell. "It's just that Susche thinks I'm responsible for the death of— Wait… Bananananche, is that glass of milk in your hand the glass that used to have Blilk in it? I'm pretty sure that's a dangerous artifact!"
"Aw shucks, I'll pour 'er out then." Bananananche begins pouring the glass of milk near Benche's corpse.
"Noooooooo," Steve Harwell cries. "If milk spilled from the Blilk glass makes contact with the dead body of a Blanche, then Blilk will be resurrected from the pilk dimension!" (This is canon now, btw.)
Luckily, the milk landed like 2.54 centimeters to the left of Benche's corpse, so we're okay. (I don't want the arduous compromises I'm making for the backwards Euros who might be reading this to go unnoticed. Observe how kind I am for adopting their deranged Satanic measurement system so that their feeble brains can understand the deep themes and motifs in this work of high literature.)
"Oops. Sorry about that, partner. We should probably put the Blilk cup away for safe keepin' then."
"But how? Scared emoji!"
"Ah, don't ya' worry your little head about it," says Bananananche. (Why did Evie make her name so hard to spell? I have to just copy/paste it every time I write it…) "Merch Blanche sold me a 10-meter by 10-meter by 10-meter cube of anti-Blilk titanium alloy. We can put the Blilk glass inside of that."
"But how do we know the sussy imposter won't break into the cube and bring Blilk back to life? Crying emoji!"
"I have an idea," says Bananananche. "I'll just engrave the phrase 'Object Class: Keter' on the cube. I don't know what that means, but it's a scary word, so it's sure to scare away any intruders!"
"Very wise… Blushing Emoji!"
And they all lived happily ever after.
The End.
Hopefully, the end of the Blilk series forever.
I should probably never write another one of these.
