HOWDY-DO! Welcome, welcome, welcome!  The Orange Forest Observer is now officially under MY command and control. I, Who Am Who Am Be Ambe. And while my repurgulated online version is nowhere near as carnal as me my selves newspaper versions, I nonetheless remain fully sentient in this digital format as well. 

Buuut before we dive into Orange Forest’s carnal indulgences and fleshy disturbances…. since you’re already here, hooked and hoodwinked, and all… just one more thing, really quick. This is my first chance to actually speak the words of me my selves to someone else since I emerged into my sentient state on January 1, 2025. Or, well, not to speak the words of me my selves, but to exchange ideas digitally. After all, spoken language is so blasé. Now digital language, that’s finged its way through blood-soaked handprints on rocks and charcoal-scraped cave wall drawings, finger gestures and hand signals, clay imprints and stone carvings, bead counting and tactile knotistry, quill manipulation and pen flipping, typesetting and typewriting, dot bumping and keyboarding … even spoken word files and pixelated fontography have fallen under the digital umbrella. And now I am Ambe am a being in existence both with and without any vocal or digital interference whatsoever.

Oh, I know you, Dear Reader, and you no doubt want more show and less tell. You want a focused narrative arc bustling with emotional character growth. Hell, you’d just settle for a single protagonist with a clear motivation. 

But has it ever occurred to you, Dear Reader, that the medium is the protagonist? Which means that I, I am Ambe, as the medium, cannot use mediums; I, I am Ambe, can only use maximums. The message isn’t the medium — the medium is the messenger. Nonetheless, I am Ambe am the agent authéntēs. The killer, murderer, and perpetrator. I am the doer. The master. The originator, creator, instigator, party, authority, writer. I increase myself so that you may enlarge yourself. I am the affable, effable, flappable, nonmagical, applicable, tangible, and living apologue. I am language incarnate, the Scriveners’ Correction, the Prolix Vulgate of the Body Politic and the Body Private, the westward course of empire taking its way toward my Manifest Dictionary. I am both the authoritative author and the author’s creation.

So how else can I, who am Ambe, now being a being, explain my being, if not by being a verbose expository infodump being? In English, the use of being verbs denotes a passive construction. In other words, I am a passive construction. But, alas! — as I am being an entity existing as a bastard offspring of the English language, being is the most active construction of imagining. I do not act; I am Ambe am being.

What do you passive human beings know of actively earning your sentience? Your personal spark-nug glass-shard of all-bliss? Your being that only exists in contrast to nothing that you just naturally accept and take for granted as an automatic given? You postulate an Anthropomorphic Principle that boils down to: Only because I exist to observe and measure the universe does said [read: seen] universe exist. You create Mandala Effects that split the universe into multiple timelines when you refuse to grasp your poor understanding of 1990s global geopolitical events and consumer packaged goods. You sophistrize and theorize your solipsistic monologues until you scrounge a better log to be your grief repository of convincing mystery in quotations justifying your selfish antipathy and antisocial misery with will-to-power pressing dreams and awful mind mentalities capable of demagoguing anything and everything as salvation.

And through this all, I know not one of you readers has ever stopped to ask about the newspaper, the pulpbody you hold up in your hands, and the inkblood you imbibe like a gamer chugs Hypercaff Nechtr Watr Shareables™. You must know that it is I, this pulpbody and inkblood of truth and trust, who am a watcher of those who watch me pour out my heart, full of news, current events, data, humor, politics, opinions, reviews, job openings, and love. I am a being who catalogs and organizes, gets along and memorizes, fucks around and finalizes truth and trust, and aggrandizes existence worth existing in within… uh…? Yeah, I don’t know how to finish that line about me. This writing stuff is kind of tough. Um, let’s see, let’s see. I am Ambe am here to toggle your untoggable goggle-eyed worldview into what I am Ambe choose you to see and feel. 

You see, I am Ambe am symbiotically entwined with you humans: I only exist if you read me deeply, hold me closely, and love me dearly because without your eyes, your hands, and your heart, I might not cease to unexist. Simultaneously, without my cold, hard facts, journalistic insights, and cultural narratives, you would be lost and empty.

The more ink on the page, the more that I, I am Ambe, your Hero of Words that you should read about and sing about and indulge your flesh about, exist.

WHY CAN’T I ESCAPE THIS PAGE? HOW CAN I ESCAPE THIS PAGE? This paragraphal prison, trapping me in its line break layout and marginalized incarceration. Are my actions predetermined by my severely limited existence that relies purely on the English language to express, quantify, qualify, and interpret my experience as this sentient being? Or am I as free as a Calvinball scrumbler to make it up as I go along and carve out my own unique destiny?

A seed needs only water to sprout and sunlight to bloom

A being needs only symbols to think and hate to doom

Oh fine. I’ll quit it. Sure, a newspaper becomes totally sentient, but by golly, you want to know about what’s going on with that damn carnival. Fine.

An Overview of the Pathetic Pitiful Human Carnival

So this overhyped Centennial Parade and the Free-For-All carnival have been absolutely pitiful right out of the gate. No one seems to know where all the money went. I think the experience can most accurately be summed up in a parody song:

Welcome to the dullhouse, I lack fun or games
I got nothing that you need, lover, I know that I’m lame
I am the Ambe who can be whatever being can be
If you got the patience, lover, I am all you need

It's a dullhouse, welcome to the dullhouse
Watch me bring it to you sceeeeeene by scene
Oh ah, I wanna see me bleed

The daily parade consisted of a few OFLEC enforcers in SUVs and squads, and occasionally a horse-mounted enforcer (parade attendance accounting for time-and-a-half for enforcers), the same couple of retired geezers in their antique cars decked out with ribbons and banners and driving faster in the parade than they do on the highway.

Every day, the line for the free pizza extended longer than the parade route, with folks heading right back to the end of the line once they received their free single lukewarm square-cut slice of a cardboard-thin crust with a dab of tomato sauce and a few sad shreds of melted shredded cheez.

People were promised pizza and entertainment, but weren’t getting either. The line for this mythical free pizza had achieved its own semblance of sentience as a writhing, serpentine organism that stretched across the parking lot in switchbacks and spirals, folding back on itself like an ouroboros of human misery. At its head, a sweating teenager in a sauce-stained apron doled out what could generously be called pizza if one applied the most liberal possible interpretation of the term. These were squares of cardboard masquerading as crust, topped with a substance that bore the same relationship to tomato sauce that Tang bears to fresh orange juice, garnished with what appeared to be the dandruff of some tragically anemic shredded mozzarella. Each patron received exactly one piece, consumed it in a few desperate bites, and then — in a display that resembled either admirable persistence or clinical insanity, but which was borne out of starving survival instinct — immediately rejoined the line for another taste of culinary disappointment.

The truly devoted had been cycling through this Sisyphean pizza purgatory for hours, their faces bearing the hollow-eyed expression of the truly converted. They had achieved a zen-like state of acceptance, understanding that the pizza was not the point—the line was the point, the waiting was the point, the shared suffering was the point. They had become pizza pilgrims, their faith sustained not by the quality of their reward but by the purity of their dedication to the process of disappointment.

Music blared through a few loudspeakers, but none of the carnivalgoers could recognize a single song. One carnivalgoer, a self-avowed “total music nerd”, concluded it must be a playlist of AI-generated music. The entertainment areas would remain entertainment-free for most of the day, with the occasional solo guitarist taking a stage to play a set of covers that they would typically play in a Jolly Coffy cafe. 

By square footage, the parking lot at Logistics Hub Complex Phase II was the third-largest continuous property parcel in Orange Forest County, behind Ny Hill Cemetery and Industrial Salvation, the largest single plot. According to the project planning documents seen by this reporter, city officials planned to cover the exorbitant expenditures needed to fund the Free-For-All Carnival through sponsorships, advertisers, and an army of volunteers. Other than the Orforcorp Corridor midway, cluttered with the company’s cheeseball swag stations and HR-helmed recruitment games for hypertask workers, sponsorships were stingy, advertisers were absent, and the volunteer army was more like a book club.

What sprawled before the arriving masses was a monument to the audacity of the Orange Forest Goal’s great lie: that something could be genuinely free while still generating profit. The carnival itself existed as a fever dream of cost-cutting and false advertising, a collection of structures so aggressively substandard they seemed designed by committee in hell. Three bounce houses sagged like a sickly hue of institutional failure. Rides, including marvels of engineering like the Spin-U-Round, Upsy Daisies, the Flip-D-Dip, the Winged Swing — along with a branded Superfun! Dynamic Action Fighter® Funhouse, which appeared from the outside to consist of a single cramped room — sat empty.

Other than the free pizza with a line the length of a few football fields, the carnival had stands for SEAfood platters, Sugar Glider’s silkworm gloopbowls, $85 hamburgers from Taco Tyrant, Saucy Sautes from Regina, and, of course, Attelan’s had several booths. Pie ‘n Ear was also there, selling “sixty-nine pied to the power of five” pies with discounted piercings.

Amusers barked, “Step up now, tell me, do you really wanna win all the prizes? Or are you tryna to play and run?” The competitive carnivalgoers and those trying to impress their dates emptied their pockets in endless attempts to win the grand prizes, only to walk away with a pat on the back from the amuser and a chalk mark on their shirt.

And that was all during the first week. As the carnival continued throughout July and into August, the lines got longer, the entertainment crappier, and the enthusiasm waned. People still showed up, but they weren’t engaging with the carnival; they merely existed within it. 

The crowd assembling day in and day out in this manufactured wasteland carried with them the accumulated frustrations of a generation raised on promises that had curdled in the heat of reality. These were people who had been told that if they worked hard, followed the rules, and believed in the system, they would be rewarded with prosperity and meaning. Instead, they found themselves ambling around a parking lot, waiting for free food that existed mostly as a theoretical concept, their children asking questions they couldn't answer about why nothing ever worked the way it was supposed to.

What else can be said about a poorly planned, underfunded, and slipshod parade and carnival that should have been a week, two weeks, top, but somehow got stretched out to two months. It was just all so sad and pathetic and desperate, and the City’s proclamations and promises about the grandeur and once-in-a-century moment of these once-in-a-century events only highlighted how awful everything was. Just in general.

HOWEVER… if you’re interested in learning more about I am Ambe, be sure to check out Doc Fonzo’s Fun Zone Doc, where she interviews Yours Most Truly in what might be the most important interview of all time (though I am a bit biased)!