Part One: Modern Prometheus
“It’s Alive!  It’s Alive!” – Victor Frankenstein

At first, I carried no sign.  In 2020, I marched with a notebook and a backpack for my first three protests.  The things I carried were extra covid masks, hand sanitizer, baby wipes (which were hard to find those early days), dark glasses, emergency jacket, water, cereal bars, and an assortment of flyers, newsletters and leaflets other protestors handed out and gave to me, but no sign.  I marched “unarmed”.  

Rally leaders told the “armed” protestors “Hold your signs up high!” as the police and media helicopters circled city hall. “And if you don’t have a sign, put your fists up!  This is what America looks like!” And that to me summed it all.  The protest sign as fist.  Or better yet, knuckle duster.

Cardboard resistance, nonvocal annunciation, creative rebellion. Combined with chanting, combined with physical demonstration, protest signs contribute to the full range of ancient performance poetry.  Integrative poetry.  Similar to what graffiti is to the elements of hip hop.  The written word in sync with the spoken and performed word.

Knuckle dusters showed up as diverse as LA.  Some signs had sticks attached to them to be held like a handle.  Some were just poster boards held with hands.  Some were poor man’s signs—simple sheets of notebook paper with a slogan.  Some people wore their signs.  Helmets of varying types—construction hats, football helmets, bicycle helmets all painted with slogans; or white T-shirts with messages on the front and back written with permanent markers.  DIY fashion as protest.  There was even activist cosplay.  One guy dressed up as Pancho Villa and had a sign that said “Poncho Villa”.

One Juneteenth rally held at the south lawn of city hall was dedicated solely to making signs.  Tables were set up for new activists to construct theirs. Cardboard, colored markers, glue, tape, glitter, construction paper, all made accessible—a total arts and crafts day.  Many of the handmade signs I saw were simple but effective.  When I say simple, I mean Sharpie-on-white.  White cardboard with black writing.

BLACK LIVES MATTER; WHITE SILENCE = VIOLENCE; AM I NEXT?  HOW MANY WEREN’T FILMED?  I CAN’T BREATHE.  If signs had pictures, they were usually of George Floyd’s selfie or maybe a picture of Martin or Malcolm with a quote.  One Sharpie-on-white I liked was “I’M SICK AND TIRED OF BEING SICK AND TIRED” a quote made famous by Activist Fannie Lou Hamer.  I wanted more than just sharpie on white, more than just a bumper sticker slogan re-written on cardboard.  There were tens of thousands of protesters in LA.  A sea of signs.  And they all said what needed to be said brilliantly.  And many of them had so much swagger.  I just felt like disrupting the swagger and bringing a nerd element that was uniquely me. 

Black Lives Matter Los Angeles spearheaded the whole Defund the Police chants.  I wanted to ask the question “And then what?” as a response.  My personal belief is that even if cops stopped abusing their power, other forces in power would still be abusing power.  Defund and then what?  I wanted to say that but not in a slogan.  As much as Fox News hated the protests, Fox News still profited.  Pundits like Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Tucker Carlson expressed their discontent but still received high ratings.  They were paid to disagree.  It was revolution for some and business for others.  

Working in higher academia I read and listen to scholars who say smart things, but they say the same things the same way and those who debate them say the same things the same way.  Scholars regurgitating the same old information.  The same old way.  Smart thought isn’t always original thought.  And that is an issue that bugs me.  I would like to think of constructive thinking as being composed of critical thinking, deep thinking, and original thinking.  A critical thinker is going to ask questions.  When the studies show that 6 out of 10 men “prefer (fill in the blank) to (fill in the blank)” or 75% of women are most likely to (“fill in the blank)” a critical thinker is going to ask how old are the men, the women?  What educational background of the men the women?  Etc.  Anything to get to the specifics.  They don’t just take research at face value just because it’s research.  A deep thinker is going to look for principles over details.  Core elements.  While activists and social critics criticize capitalism, the deeper thinker will criticize greed and exploitation.  Greed and exploitation being elements in capitalism but are also elements in other things. Did capitalism exist in 334 BCE when Alexander the Great was invading and conquering lands?  An original thinker brings to the table a subjective element.  They address concepts and ideas in a way that is characteristic of their unique way of thinking. 

Growing up in the church I had to read about Jesus.  I always found him to be a true original thinker.  He came out of left field criticizing both the Scribes and the Pharisees and got his message out through the telling of story.  To this day Christians, atheists, and followers of other faiths use the term “good Samaritan” to describe a person who helps those in distress.  It isn’t that original thinkers are saying anything new.  Nothing is totally new.  But due to the fear of sounding unprofessional or inarticulate or too simplistic many adults hide their original thought, thus limiting their full human effect.  Working in higher academia I have witnessed this trend.  A lot of intelligence, but not a lot of wisdom.  Children, I feel, tend to be the best original thinkers.  Original thinkers tend to be childlike but not childish.  One of my wishes in life is to be a Deep/Original/Critical thinker or “DOC thinker” as I like to call it.  DOC thought. It’s something I feel I both achieve and fail at daily.   

Prior to the pandemic I was in probate court for 4 years.  My aunt coerced my grandmother to sign a document while she had dementia in an attempt to make her the sole trustee of the estate.  I was raised by my grandparents since I was 3 months old, grew up and became their caregiver and power of attorney.  I confronted my aunt about it in 2010 informing her that what she did was elder abuse and showed her what the penalty was for such crime.  Her response was “Oh!  Oh!  Okay!  Never mind!”  Three years later, as soon as my grandma died my aunt whipped out the document, used it to evict me and sell the house despite there being a living trust prohibiting it.  My attorney tried to get the unlawful detainer dismissed and take the case to probate but the judge went forward with the eviction.  My aunt had filed the right paperwork in the right court at the right time, before we could file a demurrer, so I became homeless.  I couch surfed.  I slept in my car.  I slept in a laundry room.  My German shepherd went to live in a kennel and I would visit her on the weekends.  When I went to work I would cry on my lunch break then go back to work holding it in. 

I was given a record with an eviction which caused my credit score to go from “very good” to “poor and below average” for a duration of 7 years.  The court garnished my wages to pay my aunt for back rent despite there never being a rental agreement.  Despite having 2 bachelor’s degrees and 1 master’s degree, my academic library job wasn’t enough; so to support myself and my legal fight I took a second job at night working for the caregiving industry and that money went to pay my attorney for probate.  For 4 years I fought to prove that my aunt was not the owner.  I kept my receipts for the mortgage, property tax, insurance, and maintenance bills that I paid for.  I kept my grandmother’s medical records showing that she was being treated for Alzheimer’s.  I compiled a list of witnesses from doctors, clergy, and neighbors in the community.  My aunt had nothing.  In the end I got my money back and proved that my aunt was not the trustee but it taught me how racist court was. 

After my first day of testifying before the judge, my attorney took me to one of the conference rooms inside Stanely Mosk Courthouse inside downtown Los Angeles.  This was the same courthouse that OJ Simpson, and Charles Manson had their cases at.  My attorney goes: 

“Larry, I have to be honest with you.  I’m a White guy, and the judge is a White guy, and you are Black.  And the way that you spoke today, you were calm, you were confident, and you were organized.  That blew him away.  I saw the look in his eyes.  That is going to be our ammo!”  

My attorney was charging me $300 an hour, which meant $75 for every 15 minutes.  I wasn’t going to waste time talking about race, so I changed the subject quick to save money.  But it hung over my head.  How being calm and confident and organized could blow a judge away.  Isn’t that what I was supposed to be?  I’m in court.  Hasn’t a “White guy” ever seen a “calm, confident, organized” “Black guy” before?  What about all those Black lawyers and judges?  What was so special about me?  I remember how difficult it was in the beginning to find an attorney to represent my case.  The consultations were brutal.  In one month, I talked to six different attorneys alone pitching my case.  I had older White attorneys talking down to me at the consultations.  Two attorneys yelled at me and talked over me as if I were their opposing counsel.  Afterwards I still had to pay them for their time—$50 here, $75 there, $100 all to be rejected.  It gave me the conclusion that lawyers are just as racist as cops, they just don’t beat you or shoot you in the back.  But they see you the same way.  A smudge.  Gum under their shoe.  Law goes beyond the gun and the badge.  And so I wanted to show that somehow in my sign. 

There are higher levels of racism.  The unnecessary “game” of probate court got me thinking about a video game “system”.  And what exactly is a system anyway?  A series of different parts working together for the whole.  The circulatory system in the human body consists of the blood, the blood vessels, and the heart and within those components you have a series of arteries, capillaries, veins, atriums, ventricles, and valves.  The cooling system in a car consists of a water pump, a thermostat, a radiator, a fan.  When one part is defective the whole system becomes out of balance.  And that’s America.  That’s the American legal system.  So while the streets were yelling “Defund the police!”, “Abolish the police!”, “Reform the police!” and essentially saying the same things I responded with the principles of D.O.C. thought. 

June 5, 2020 would have been Breonna Taylor’s 27th birthday.  She died by police gunfire on March 18th the same year.  On June 5th I went to a BLM rally outside the Hall of (In)Justice—as the protestors called it—for a birthday celebration in Breonna’s honor.  The event was called “The Rose that Grew from Concrete” named after the Tupac Shakur poem.  Protestors and those in attendance were encouraged to take a rose from a table and place a rose by the memorial.  Later that evening on my caregiving shift, while my client slept, I drew a blueprint for my protest sign at his kitchen table.  “The System is a Racist Video Game” I wrote.  That alone would have been my “sharpie on white” but being the librarian that I am I had to do it up infographic style.  

So, I went deeper.  As my client snored, I drew stick people on paper and made a list of racists up the racist ladder: police, lawyers, judges, jurors, politicians, business owners, neighborhood watch, ordinary people; but I still needed to make it all sing.  I was taking several poetry classes on Zoom led by the great scholar and poet Annie Finch.  Her lessons were all based on traditional poetic meter and the musicality of words.  So, I edited and categorized my list based on alliteration.  Police became Cops.  Lawyers and judges combined became Courts.  Politicians became Candidates.  Business owners became Corporations.  Ordinary people became Communities.  Cops, Courts, Candidates, Corporations, Communities = The tongue-twisting five Cs.   

The next day, Saturday, I skipped the protest and took the time to construct my sign.  Across from the library where I worked was the 99 Cent Store.  Originally, I went there looking for colorful posterboard paper to use as the actual sign itself.  I could place images on it.  But then I saw they were selling carboard trifolds.  The kind kids used for middle school science fair projects.  I found the trifold design was large enough to fit all of my ideas on, sturdier than posterboard paper, plus I could glue the posterboard paper on to it—the best of both worlds.  

The library was closed due to quarantine, but I had a key.  I used the conference table in the back room as my laboratory.  I literally became Dr. Frankenstein and was no longer making a protest sign but a creature.  

I Googled video game characters from my middle school days.  Super Mario Bros, the Legend of Zelda, Mega Man, Metroid, Mike Tyson’s Punch Out.  Since I love all things folklore, I see video games as a form of modern-day folklore.  I printed the characters out in color and embarked on the liberating process of cutting and gluing.  Kindergarten had prepared me for this day.

In Calibri font size 72 I pasted “THE SYSTEM IS A RACIST VIDEO GAME!” 

Next to Doc and Little Mac from Mike Tyson’s Punch Out it read:

Level 1

Racist Cops

(Cops Are Just the Foot Soldiers.  Don’t Be Fooled!)

Next to Samus Aran from Metroid it read

Level 2

Racist Courts

(Lawyers, District Attorneys, Judges, Juries)

Next to Link from The Legend of Zelda it read

Level 3

Racist Candidates

(Mayors, Governors, Senators, Representatives, Presidents)

Next to Mega Man from Mega Man it read

Level 4

Racist Corporations

(Corporations Fund Politics; Corporations Run Sweat Shops; Corporations Control the Media)

And finally next to Fire Mario from Super Mario Bros it read

Level 5

Racist Communities

It’s We the People vs. They the People

I gave my creature a gender and made it a she.  I needed a yin to compliment my yang.  I named her Peggy after Peggy Carter, killer of Nazis, and Captain America’s dear heart.  Since Cap carried a shield, I noticed my creature was big enough to function as one.  A large trifold 24 inches tall and 18 inches long when closed, but when opened, possessed a 36 inch wingspan.  One hell of a protest shield.  The creature would protect me from projectiles thrown my way, protect me from the summer heat when used as a parasol, and be padding for my knees during demonstrations where we’d drop to a knee for 9 minutes in the middle of the street.

I Googled pictures of Peggy Carter and found two pictures of Hailey Atwell aiming guns at the viewer.  I taped them to the back of the trifold and then…“It’s alive!  It’s alive!”

One of my concerns was that my sign wasn’t “Black” enough.  After all, many of the marches were inspired by or led by Black Lives Matter activists.  And many of the signs had specific Black imagery or Black quotes.  There wasn’t a single Black person on my sign except Doc from Mike Tyson’s Punch Out.  And Doc was important because of the DOC thought and the pun associated with it.  I even named my creature after a White woman from a comic book.  My creature was more philosophical and conceptual than tangibly political. 

I always got called “Not Black enough” by folks growing up.  I wasn’t Black enough because I liked rock bands or because I liked mayonnaise on my sandwich, because I failed at games like spades, and sucked at the electric slide, or this: the great grand Uncle Tom of Uncle Tomisms I liked a White girl, or two.  Actually, on second thought, it was three—and none of them had curves.  But no matter what I liked I was always Black enough for the cops.  And getting screwed over by them was my racial rite of passage.  To heck with my preferences and that is the reason why I always say swagger is the new superstition. 

After some soul searching, and soul power searching I said fuck it and put my insecurities aside.  After all, it was the pandemic.  I’d be wearing a mask and dark glasses anyway.  Who would know me?  Not a single soul.  And it’s Los Angeles, everyone’s a little off.   

Sunday June 7, 2020 was Peggy’s first call to action and she responded effectively.  I kept her folded up on the train to downtown LA.  We got off at Union Station, walked past the homeless encampments at what used to be called Father Sera Park, crossed over the 101 freeway overpass and made it to Spring Street.  Helicopters circled overhead.  Some LAPD, some NBC News, some drones. 

In the early days of the 2020 LA protests, police on motorcycles would direct traffic so that we could do our demonstrations.  Thousands of us took over Spring Street.  It was more than a parade.  Peggy’s left and right wings opened, and the nerdy video game characters began speaking.  Rather than being the laughed at like Carrie at her pig-blood prom, Peggy was given the red carpet treatment.

“Hey, bro, let me see that sign.  Shit.  That’s a cold one.  That’s what’s up.”

“Excuse me.  Can I take a picture of your sign?”

“Oh shit.  C-5.  I gotta remember that.  Can I take a picture?”

“Did you make that?”

“When all of this is over with, I hope you laminate that sign.”

The streets had our approval, and it was enough to know that Peggy would be back.

Part Two: Axel F

“Stir it up, got to break it up now/
When I think about tomorrow…/
I don´t wanna take it anymore.” – Patti LaBelle, “Stir it Up”

The first R rated movie I saw as a kid was Beverly Hills Cop.  I saw it in the theater when I was 7 years old.  My mother and grandmother both took me to see it.  Two other R rated movies I saw latter on would be the purples.  Purple Rain on VHS and The Color Purple in the theater.  The purples traumatized me a bit.  What Prince did with Apollonia in the barn—Woah!  And then how the White mob circled Sophia prior to the cop bashing her eye with the gun handle—double woah!  I gave up on R for a while.  I stuck to Indiana Jones and the chilled monkey brains.  That was the 80s for me.  Watching how adults acted perplexed me.  I was a kid instructed by the adult world to be good but the adult world never practiced what it preached.  The adult world was too complicated for me.  Some would say no parent should ever take their kid to see such things.  But I’m glad they did, it helped me be a better teenager and an introspective writer at 15.

But Axel Foley outsmarting the cops and those in authority had a deep impact on me.  He was Br’er Rabbit in the flesh and did what Shaft did but in a comedic way.  Aside from Lucille Ball and the Three Stooges, Eddie Murphy was my introduction to comedy and especially the Black/White dynamic on screen.  

Though the streets of Beverly Hills had changed since ’84, the snobbery had not.  How Axel Foley insulted authority was still timely. When 2020 came, I got to be my own version of Axel Foley.  For months MAGA supporters had taken over Beverly Gardens holding rallies.  And week by week their numbers grew to thousands.  They had every right to gather, every right to express their patriotism.  They had every right to vote for Trump.  But these were not just Trump voters, these were Trump cultists.

 Signs that once read: “God and Country” now read “God Guns and Trump”.  There were signs that read “White Genocide is Real”.  On national television during the presidential debate Trump said: “Proud Boys stand back and stand by!”  And after that, very proudly the boys showed up to Beverly Hills.  Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, QAnon Followers, those attempting to resurrect the Tea Party.  Months later those same forces would storm the US Capital.  

 Together, Peggy and I, marched with 75 counter protestors from Roxbury Park to Beverly Gardens.  Google Maps had it at only 1.2 miles.  Roxbury Dr. was residential.  We passed houses chanting: “Out of your homes and into the streets!  While you’re sleeping, people are dying!  Out of your homes and into the streets!”

 That 1.2 miles felt longer.  Rich liberals came out of their homes and clapped.  They threw up a rich liberal fist.  They knew where we were going but did not join us.  Why would they anyway?  They were rich.  And they were liberal.  As we marched on we wound up on their Instagrams.  If the revolution wasn’t going to be televised it would be tweeted.

We changed streets, turned right on Wilshire where there was more traffic.  The quarantine was lifted, people were out driving.  The noises returned but we made a bigger noise.  Supporters honked their horns.  They knew where we were going but did not join.  We looked like the crew who would put bananas in their tailpipes.  On Wilshire the chants were: “How do you spell raaa-cist?  B-H-P-D!  How do you spell raaa-cist?  B-H-P-D!” 

We made a left on Rodeo Dr.  The street I watched Axel Foley cruise to the Patti LaBelle “Stir it Up” track 35 years prior.  A different decade but same game and same rules.  We paused so the posh could see our black-clothed glory.

“Out of the stores and into the streets!  While you’re shopping people are dying!  Out of the stores and into the streets!”

  The power of attention was surreal.  The posh and the plastic withdrew from their stores for a moment to film us.

“Out of the stores and into the streets!  While you’re buying people are dying!  Out of the stores and into the streets!”

 The audacity Foley had to park a dented Nova next to a Mercedes.  Each one of us a blue Nova in black, our lives mattered.  Picking up the pace, we moved forward.  Patti LaBelle sang in my head but we chanted as we marched passed restaurants: 

“Out of the bars and into the streets!  While you’re drinking, people are dying!  Out of the bars and into the streets!”

“Out of the clubs and into the streets!  Join us!  Out of the clubs and into the streets!  Join us!”

No one did.  Who would anyway?  They watched, filmed us with their phones, and raised their spectator fists in rich liberal solidarity.  So we marched on alone until we turned right on Santa Monica Blvd and there was where we faced 2000+ Trump and MAGA supporters.  75 against 2000.

Beverly Hills was awkward.  The police seemed to let people fight, as long as it was one on one and not a mob attack, meaning if you squared off, they let it happen.  I saw it as their way of saying if you want us to be defunded then this is what you get. 

A White woman with a cell phone videoed a Proud Boy who then slapped the phone out of her hand.

“Did you see that, officer?”  She said. “Oh my God!  Did you see that?!”

The cop saw, said nothing, then looked away.  The Beverly Hills cops were there to stop a riot, they weren’t there to stop what would cause one.

Our signs read Black Lives Matter.

Our signs read No Justice No Peace.

Not a single sign of ours mentioned Joe Biden’s name or the Democratic Party.  For us it wasn’t about partisan politics, it was about something else.  It was about standing up to a political cult, which in a materialistic secular humanistic world is far more dangerous than a religious one.

It wasn’t supposed to be a fistfight.  It was supposed to be a chant off.  Our signs vs. their signs.  Our songs vs. their songs.  The purest purpose of counter protest, and we had a legal permit by the city to do this.  The Beverly Hills Police department formed a line to divide our motely crew from their MAGA crew.  The line was ineffective as folks crossed over from both crews. 

“Hey, Helmet Man!  Hey, Helmet Man!  Let’s go one on one!”  A Proud Boy called out to a member of our crew who wore a safety helmet, challenging him to a fight.  Helmet Man did nothing and walked away. 

“But you’re not Blaaack!  You’re not Blaaack!”  A MAGA supporter yelled to a Latina ally who was holding a Black Lives Matter sign.  

Peaceful protests are subjective.   For some people it means no blows thrown.  But even those types of protests may be void of the spirit of peace.  Nonviolence and peace are two different things when pondering the concept of inner peace.  Neither crews seemed to have had inner peace that day.

I held Peggy up.  She said nothing about defunding the police, nothing about BLM, and nothing that criticized Trump.  Peggy just called out the system for what it was.  And with that she shut up screams. 

“Hey, let me see that sign.” A Proud Boy asked.  I turned to him and let him read.  He gave it a long look, then walked away.  He didn’t debate me.  He didn’t say bullshit, he just quietly walked away. 

A right-wing media reporter kept trying to get a woman in our crew to talk.  “What’s your end goal?  Why are you here?  Tell us your end goal.”  His camera and microphone followed her every evasive move. 

Back at Roxbury Park we had all been instructed to not talk to right-wing media, so the woman stayed silent.  He was quite larger, and she was quite smaller.  Peggy was large enough to function as a wall, so I stepped in between the two of them which allowed the woman to slip away from the reporter. 

“The goal is to win the game,” I said to him.  The reporter then took the time to film my sign; and just like the Proud Boy he, too, walked away.  I was asked zero questions. 

Damn.  Peggy was a right-wing repellant it seemed.  For better or for worse. 

When I was kid reading those stories about Jesus, there was a tale of him stopping an angry mob from stoning a woman by saying: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”  But that wasn’t the weird thing that stopped them from stoning.  Jesus knelt and began writing in the sand and as he wrote people watched and one by one they walked away dropping their rocks.  No one knows what the hell he was writing.  Some say they know but the Bible never says specifically what it was.  Whatever he wrote it worked.

I held Peggy high with Christ in mind but eventually a fight did break.  An angry patriot with an American flag wrapped the banner around the pole, then used it as a baseball bat to knock one of our guys to the ground.  I watched the whole thing happen.  He then threw the American flag on the ground committing a sin worse than Kaepernick.  He climbed on top of our guy and started pounding him.  Helmet Man and the other security from our crew rushed in to pull the patriot off.  As they pulled him off the Proud Boys rushed in to fight and the melee followed.  Our guy was still on the ground.

The cops came with their Beverly Hill-billy clubs and began swinging them horizontally at everyone—mostly our crew. 

“Allies to the front,” someone shouted.

Brave White women and White-passing Latinas opened their umbrellas creating a Spartan-style phalanx wall and ran towards the cops.  When nightsticks battle umbrellas, nightsticks always win, but the black umbrellas served as snares snagging the batons once they tore into them.  A blinding net.  This allowed our fallen guy to finally get up and escape from being trampled, arrested or beaten. 

As the clouds parted, a voice arose either from Beverly Hill Heaven or a loudspeaker saying:

The Beverly Hills Police Department has declared this to be an unlawful assembly.  You are now ordered to disperse.  Failure to comply will result in arrest or other police action.  You have 4 minutes to disperse.

This message was only to our crew.  The MAGA rally continued.  So, dispersing is what we did.  $1,000 or 6 months in jail would be the penalty if we didn’t.  We turned around and marched our arses back to Roxbury Park with the BHPD’s Lenco BearCat, it’s armored SWAT vehicle, making sure we did.

We never stopped the cult from believing.

We never stopped the cult from storming the United States Capital building 68 days later.

We never stopped the cult from reelecting The Orange Man who would later have Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, by his side and in his ear.

We simply took a stand for a few minutes just to say no.  

In 2020 I attended 27 protests.  A small number compared to the full-time activists.

Today Peggy sits in my office.  I’ve never laminated or framed her.  I keep her as a conversation piece. 

I show her to younger people, older people, and people of all races.  With her, I tell my story of resistance. 

I start with her and work my way back to the first night I was stopped by the police.  

November 1998:

My grandmother in the driver’s seat and I in the passenger’s.

Her taillight was out.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff asked to see her identification then asked to see mine.  I was just a passenger.  

But he asked to see mine.

When he gave me my ID back after scanning it in his database, he looked at me and said: “It’s a good thing no one in this car is wanted for murder.”

What a random thing to say.

He gave my grandmother a correctible violation, also known as a fix-it ticket.

But the light was never out to begin with.

Let me repeat that.

I said the light was never out to begin with.

The post The Importance of Being Peggy appeared first on The New Absurdist.

The woman’s bulging glasses make her eyes look like over-inflated glass balloons, pointed  needles at their centres for pupils. I wonder how she can write whatever it is she’s writing. I  wonder how she can glance at her watch. I wonder how she can see me. 

“Which ear?” she asks. 

“The right one.” 

“Is it painful?” 

“No. But it itches.” 

The paper bedsheet crinkles under the bony protuberances of my buttocks. I dangle my legs  from the edge of the stretcher, looking at the woman’s feet as she examines me, her head tilted  slightly to compensate for the weight of her enormous eyes. I notice she’s wearing steel-toed  work boots. They look new, and I’m impressed by the way the light glosses over the perfect  curve of the toe-cap, like the polished bumper of a Cadillac.  

“Is that everything?” she asks. 

“Yes, I think so.” 

She retrieves an iPad from the counter nearby and tells me to fill out a few forms. I take it  from her eagerly. Form filling is a hidden delight of mine and I fly through these digital pages  with a wide grin, my teeth glowing bright. I put check marks over the handsomely bolded little  squares with as neat a print as I can manage. It is hardly distinguishable from the original  typeface. I fill out dates, names, signatures, time stamps, employee IDs, social security numbers,  blood types, genders, disabilities, pronouns, body fat percentages, sexual orientations, preferred  room temperatures… 

When I finish she takes the iPad back and tells me I may return to work, and I have to  suppress a disappointed sigh. I step through the door and start down the hallway. It’s a very long  hallway. There are exactly 32,000 cubicles in the hallway, stretching out for 40,000 kilometres  across the arctic tundra. This is where the best Companies have built their one-hallway  warehouses. It is a revolutionary system designed to limit the mental strain on employees by  making navigation as simple as possible. A perfect marriage of architectural prowess and  emotional productivity. There’s nothing simpler nor quite so peaceful as walking an arrow straight hallway. There are no diverting paths to confuse, no hideous posters promoting a holiday  you’ll never celebrate. I belong to cubicle number 26,356, and I know precisely how to get there,  right down to the last step. As I walk I like to imagine there is another person walking next to me  in the other warehouse belonging to the other Company, with nothing but two walls and a foot of  empty arctic air separating us. I listen to his steps and sometimes if I really strain my ears I can  hear the sounds of his shoes against the ground, echoing. 

But I have this thought in my mind and I’m beginning to grow anxious, for the truth is that I  did not tell the woman everything about my ear. Indeed it itches, that part was true, but it is much  more than just a tingle. It feels like something is living in there, crawling, nesting, egg-laying and  mate-eating in the valleys of my brain’s folds. A tunnelling insect washing its hands in my  cerebrospinal fluid, chewing on all the fat and the protein. I wish I had a woodpecker’s tongue so I could reach up there and swat it. I read once that woodpeckers can wrap their tongues around  their brains, securing them in place for their jackhammering. They hold onto their minds to avoid  losing them. I wonder if humans will ever evolve this ability, if only to relieve these phantom  itches of the mind. 

And yet there are times when I can hear a sound, a vocoded wrinkle through those tingles and  itches. I can hardly make it out unless I stand very still and hold my breath. It’s a voice. A throaty  song. Harmonious inflection and modulation, and it loops like a melody in a song. Four bars,  eight, curling through my brain like a snake biting its tail, or like a woodpecker’s tongue, and I  admit that image is profound, perhaps religious. I’m sure it means something. It must mean something. 

I am back at my desk. I watch a woman through my computer screen. She points to a  whiteboard behind her on which a chart has been sketched with black marker. I read the word  “postpartum,” written by who I assume was this same woman. 

“Individual,” comes a voice from behind. I stand up quickly, pushing away my black  synthetic leather office chair with the back of my knees. I see a balding head pop up from beyond  my cubicle’s wall, and then another and another and another and another one after that. I hear  them stand, 5,644 individuals in front of me, 26,355 individuals behind. 

I feel a tap on my shoulder and I turn to find a small-statured woman looking up at me. I am  frightened by her unblinking, incessant gaze, and how her eyes seem to roll in their sockets like  billiard balls. I wonder how she can see me at all. 

“Yes?” I say with a soft tone of polite expectation. 

I hear the rest of the individuals sit back down to resume their work. The sound is a cascade  of rustling cloth and mechanical clicks. 

“May I see your identification badge?” 

I hold out the rectangular plastic tied around my neck and she scans it with her iPad. “How  long have you been working here?” she asks. 

I check my watch and glance up and to the left. Up and to the left means you’re digging  through memories. It means you’re taking an innocent moment to pause and recall the truth.  There is nothing suspicious about looking up and to the left when asked a question. Up and to the  right, however, means you are making things up. It means you’re lying, and I have never lied. I  make sure to look up and to the left. I linger here a moment and I make sure she sees me doing  this. 

“About a year.” 

“One year?” 

“Eleven months. I started on the thirteenth of September last year.” 

She smiles, her lips like elastic bands stretched over the skin. “Thank you very much for your  hard work.” 

I smile and nod. It feels good to be commended. That is what I love about this Company:  they are always commending their employees. If they gave me a plaque I would hang it up above  my chair in my cubicle so that it can shield my mind like a dreamcatcher and make me smile in my dreams too. 

“When was the last time you had your Top-Up Training?” Her smile is gone now and she is  looking down at the iPad in her hands. I sneak a glance at the screen and see a cartoon clown  hopping up and down. It extends a gloved hand in a thumbs-down gesture, shakes its head and  frowns. 

“Pardon me?” I ask, somewhat more harshly than I intended. 

“Your Top-Up Training.” I can see mild alarm growing behind her giant eyes. “I don’t think I’ve been given Top-Up Training.” 

Mild alarm turns to intense distress. 

“I need you to come with me so we can do your Top-Up Training.” 

I follow her out of my cubicle and back up the hallway. To my right, the taps of my shadow’s  shoes follow us from behind the wall. 

I am led into a small beige room with a single plastic chair in the centre. It looks like the  nurse’s room I was just in but a plaque on the wall reads Top-Up Training Room, so I know it  must be a different room. The woman tells me to take a seat and then leaves. 

I sit. Fluorescent lights pillage the top of my bald head. I can feel the rays jackhammering my  skull. Surely this can’t be healthy. I remember reading how harmful fluorescent lights can be,  and I am sure they’ve been banned. I’m shocked to find them at this Company. I make a mental  note to file a complaint. 

There is a TV screen in front of me. It switches on, and all 70 inches suddenly alight in  images flashing on the screen, so clear that I could as well be looking through a pane of glass at  the real things behind it. There is an image of an ant lying dead in the corner where the black  rubber bases of two walls join together. Its soul rises up slowly from its corpse. The image  lingers here a moment before switching to a close-up of a woman walking in pearl-white socks.  She walks into the camera and the camera moves backwards with her feet. The audience can’t  see her face. There is no sound. I can’t even hear the buzzing of the fluorescents anymore and  now that I think about it I can’t recall there ever being a buzzing of the fluorescents. 

The image changes to a medium-closeup of an ant walking along the edge of a sidewalk in  what appears to be a city. I assume it’s New York but in truth I can’t see anything of the city that  would justify this assumption. There aren’t any cities in the arctic. Tires are hurdling past the  right of the ant and shoes and legs and the hems of people’s pants on the left. The ant is wearing  six socks over its six legs. I find this curious. Why wear socks if you won’t wear shoes? Wet  socks are a miserable experience. Surely any creature can appreciate that, big or small, self conscious or otherwise. But the ant doesn’t seem bothered. It walks with no clear destination in  sight, no mound of melting ice cream on the pavement, no puddle of spilled Gatorade, no half eaten Twix in its wrapper. The ant simply goes and the camera follows. I wonder if there is some  meaning being assembled here by these series of shots. There must be. No sane filmmaker would  stitch two shots together without there being some sort of rope to tie them together. Perhaps there  is something to be said about the insect-human-insect shots. The filmmaker (I guess at Fincher,  Bong Joon Ho, Gerwig) must be trying to illustrate a point, to paint a painting, to tell a story, to create an image. I adjust my position in the plastic chair. There’s a scrape of the leg on the tiled  floor and I flinch, unaware of how long it’s been since I’ve been subject to sound. I decide I do  not like sound and promptly attempt to slow my breathing so as to create as little of it as  possible. I hear a faint voice whisper into my ear and I stick my finger in to try and claw it out. 

The image changes. I see a paper bowl on a desk. Artifacts fill the screen around it—Kleenex  tissues, supplement bottles, a pouch of nail clippers and a nail file, two keyboards, water bottles,  headphones… The bowl is centred and I take a moment to appreciate the image. It is a beautiful  image, with bands of grainy sunlight from an off-camera window and a puddle of drifting dust in  the air, moving as if they too are feeling the laziness of the Sunday evening. The bowl is filled  with powder. It’s too fine to be soil or dirt; too light. It looks like ash, but it’s too brown to have  come from cigarettes; too fine and not quite flaky enough. This bowl is not an ashtray, at least  not in the traditional sense of the ashtray, as in a tray for the ash from one’s cigarette. It appears  to be an incense burner. I even spy a small cylinder of rolled-up printer paper taped to the rim of  the bowl where I presume the wooden end of the incense stick is to be inserted, and as it burns,  the bowl catches the falling ash. But there’s something else inside this bowl, something  glistening from within the mound of orange-brown powder. I squint and lean into the screen. I  blink. I remove my glasses and then put them back on again. There is definitely something else  in there, something not a by-product of the combustion of an incense stick. It is silvery and  metallic, and it reflects the sunlight like a mirror. I don’t know what it is and it makes me  anxious. I stand up and bring my nose up to the screen, nearly grazing it against the warm  quantum-dot LEDs. 

The image changes. There are the same socked feet as before, still this time, sitting close and  nearly touching as the woman they belong to sits in a subway car. I can’t see the woman’s face,  nor even anything above the shins of a pair of mahogany corduroys. The image lingers for  several minutes and I begin to feel uncomfortable. Like an ant watching from under the seats,  hiding behind a grimy bolt and a strewn candy wrapper. How long will this shot last? It’s been  years. I want to look at the incense bowl again, the one with the buried artifact. In there is hidden  the meaning of all this, I know it. I need only understand. The train’s brakes squeal and the  woman’s legs sway to the left of the frame. The train comes to a halt, the woman stands and the  socks walk out of the frame. I let out a breath of relief. I stand but my head hardly clears the top  of the mangled candy wrapper next to me. I glance at the goo of chocolate still inside, a growl  rising from my abdomen. Then the screen fades to black. Credits roll and I discover that David  Fincher was indeed the director. Charlie Kaufman was the screenwriter, the ant was played by  Rupert Grint and the woman was— 

No! How could I have missed the name? I must have gotten caught up with all the names  ahead of it that my eyes simply skipped over! 

Woman #1: An— 

I remember the first letters: An. 

My brain throbs and I feel very anxious. 

The screen is off and the room is silent. I stand like this for a while. I can’t hear any buzzing. 

I can’t hear anything. I stand and think about that thing buried in the bowl. I think about the  woman’s name. I think about David Fincher’s intentions with his choice of shots. I think about  Charlie Kaufman’s intentions with his choice of plot. What are they hiding from me? That ant in  socks, that buried object, that deliberate skipping over that woman’s name? Something is off,  like a puzzle piece in the wrong spot. I can feel it, and I intend to uncover it, the meaning of it.  Because I know it means something. 

It must mean something. 

I hear the sound again and it’s haunting. It’s the uncanny valley of human noises. A synthetic  voice. A manufactured cry. I can’t place it. I resist the urge to itch and instead stand still and  observe it. I can’t place the gender, I can’t place the age. It’s simply a voice. The voice. The  amalgamative voice of every human who’s ever lived. I arrive at this conclusion after what  seems like hours and am promptly exhausted. The voice has been looping in my head for the last  week. Upwards inflection, vibrato, pause, upwards inflection, downwards inflection—a vein  nearly bursts in my temple. 

The door opens behind me and the woman with the billiard eyes steps back inside. She hands  me an iPad and tells me to take a survey about my Top-Up Training experience. I nod and take  the iPad, excited again. It asks me to rate the training experience on a scale of disappointing to extraordinary. I tap meagre, three above disappointing, two below extraordinary, and just above  unsatisfactory. The iPad then asks me to explain in at least 3200 words why I selected merely  meagre. It is phrased in a somewhat passive-aggressive way and I wonder if I’ve offended  someone in some way. I explain that I missed the name of the actress playing the role of Woman  #1 and that I believe this to have been a deliberate slight by David Fincher and Charlie Kaufman.  I explain how the writing was pretentious, the shots nonsensical, moving from insect-woman insect to incense-woman while never resolving back to the incense in a proper 3-act structure.  There was no explanation as to why these transitions were made, why the shots were cut in such  a way as they were, and why the actress playing Woman #1 never even had her face revealed let  alone named in the credits. I finish with 4,406 words and hit next. The screen buffers. I hope it’s  another essay. 

It’s not. The iPad flashes the words, “Thanks. I’ll be sure to forward that to HR,” and then  proceeds to rate me as merely meagre. I am outraged. I am seething. This is reprehensible,  disgraceful, detestable… 

The woman leads me out of the room and I walk back to my office and take a seat back down  at my desk. I resume the video playing on my computer screen. A woman points to a chart  behind her with the word postpartum written. 

I used to dream of my father when I slept, but as of late my naps have been dreamless. My  ear tingles. I can feel the ant digging through my brain, erasing my memories of him. He killed  himself with a panini grill and a bathtub. The grill, if my memory serves, had the slogan “So  good you’d grill your socks!” printed on its box. It was a repulsive attempt at marketing but it  just so happened that my father’s body was still wearing socks when I found it in the bathtub, and I will never understand why. Until the day of my own death, I will have this one fact about  my father hanging over me. I ponder it every day. Sometimes it takes up the space of a single  thought, sometimes it is a train of them, but I can always count on it to make an appearance. I  used to see it in my dreams, but not anymore and I think that is perhaps a good thing. Some  people need to pinch themselves or recite an affirmation to awaken from a bad dream. I need  only observe my thoughts. If I am not dreaming, then I am real.

A man will electrocute himself in  his bathtub with his socks still on. Do not ask why. I know you want to, but you can’t. You have  to accept it, and that is the tragedy of the world. You could sprout hairs in your eyes and the  doctors will name a new disease. You could find a cat mangled in your dryer, fur singed and  limbs shattered. It could blink and hop out, trodding on grotesque anatomy, but you are not  dreaming. You can pinch your arms and recite your affirmations, but you have to believe it  because it is happening. You could awaken prematurely in the operating room and find a band of  clowns dancing around you in silence. You could fly over a mountain range and see the land  flicker like a dying fluorescent lightbulb. You must believe it. You must believe all the absurdity  you see. Catch it in your arms and let it nuzzle at your elbow. Let it grow on you. Let it fester. 

I awaken with my finger in my ear and a savage itch just beyond its reach. Something is  moving around in there. I scream and pound the side of my head but the itch doesn’t go away. I  grab the water at my desk and pour it into my ear. I remain still for several minutes, my breath  held, my eyes open and bursting from my skull. 

“Individual.”  

I stand up quickly. My bald head drips water onto the carpet. 

“You’re over your sleep limit,” says the woman. 

“No,” I reply. 

“You get thirty minutes every two hours. You’re thirty-two minutes over.” I check at my watch. “Oh.” 

She tells me I must go into the Late-Employee-Form-Filling Room and fill out the Late  Employee Form. I obey and start down the hallway. My wet shoes squeak against the floor, and  through the wall on my right I can hear the mysterious man walking with me. I laugh because I  can hear his shoes are wet too, reverberating little squishes. 

I find myself back inside the beige room, fluorescent lights irradiating my brain. The room is  empty save for the chair and the giant TV. I don’t see any forms or iPads. I peer into the hallway  outside and see nothing but rows of cubicles fading into a distant point. Maybe the form is  online. I reach into my pocket but my iPhone isn’t there. I start to panic, tearing out my pockets,  spilling coins and mints, my Gucci wallet, the keys to my P.O. box. My ear erupts in a terrible  spasm of itches, more shards than tingles, and I scream not from pain but from the knowledge  that I can do nothing about it. I start to develop a wheeze, violent arrhythmias in my chest that  feel like the walls of my heart collapsing on themselves. I think about calling 911 and then  remember I don’t have my iPhone. I burst into the hallway, sweeping the pale green walls for any  landlines. I begin to speed-walk down the hall, mindless in my misery. My wheezing echoes  ahead of me and I am reminded briefly of my companion on the other side. I hope he isn’t suffering like I am. I hear the voice all around me and I beg for a different sound, anything but  this, these incessant scratchings inside my ear. They have never been so loud. I am weak, I am  sick, I must report it, I must warn somebody, I must… 

I peer into every cubicle I pass. Most are empty, but every few thousand cubicles I see a Van  Gogh gallery within the four fabric walls, or a man on all fours, bent like a desk. I see a thin  humanoid creature feeding cat food to a dog; a woman rearranging the organs in her abdomen,  watching herself through a vanity mirror across the room. I see a cubicle flipped upside down, a  man sitting in a chair stuck to the ceiling watching a woman point to a word on a whiteboard.  Cubicle number 12,846 contains a rainforest. Cubicle number 9,812 contains two seconds of a  pornographic scene playing in an infinite loop. 290 is a void of white—I don’t linger here. When  I reach the end of the hall I find a blank wall. The cubicle at the end states that it is number 1,  and it is empty. The itch grows worse as I turn and make my way back down the hallway, faintly  aware of my companion hurrying with me from behind the wall. I wonder if he’s also got an itch  in his ear, and I wonder if he’s also punctured his tympana trying to claw it out. 

Everything in cubicle 13,001 has been turned inside out, including the man sitting in his  office chair. He watches me with the back of his eyeballs as I pass. In 16,046 there is a thin  humanoid creature feeding dog food to a cat. In 29,049 there is a man without a mouth standing  on his desk. 30,108 is filled with a thousand boxes of vegan Q-Tips. 31,474 contains a clown  without makeup. 31,832 is an abyss that drops into an infinitesimally small point, at the end of  which I think I can make out a Coca-Cola billboard flickering in the distance. In cubicle number  32,000 there is a bright red landline bolted into the fabric of the wall. I pick it up and dial 911.  The line rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and

I notice the door at the end of the hall just ahead. There is a bright red neon EXIT sign above  it, as well as some text on the door warning that an alarm will sound if it’s opened. I can hear the  symphony of the wind outside; the ice blowing in frigid tycoons. I’ve never heard it roar so loud.  I drop the receiver and step toward the door, place a hand on its cold metal panic bar, and push gently. The alarm blares behind me as I step outside. The world is dark, lit only by the white light  spilling from the hallway behind me. I can feel my skin shrivelling up against the frigid air. The  ground is soft under my feet. I look down at the snow, the fine white powder blowing over my  shoes like dust. Spells of it blast my face. I can vaguely hear the sound of crashing water in the  distance, massive chunks of ice breaking and splitting against a glacial tide. I look to my right  and see an array of hallways like the one I just came out of, extending out into the dark air like a  mirror in a mirror, only their doors are shut. To my left are more of the same hallways, except  there’s a door ajar, the one belonging to the hallway immediately next to mine. A giant ant stands  in the swirling snow, pearl-white socks stretched over its six legs, staring at me with pinpoints  for eyes. 

Sometimes I wonder where everyone went. There are thirty-two billion people on this planet  and I haven’t seen a soul. I don’t see anyone in the streets. I stroll in deserted supermarkets  listening to nothing but my tiny feet against the linoleum floors. I feel as if my skin is in a constant state of being torn. As if my brain is one giant spool of sinew and is being stretched and  knotted, pulled apart and then crushed back together. The world is so infinitely complex. It’s too  much for me to bear. I have so many desires, whims, things I was chasing thirty-two minutes ago that I no longer care about now. I have not seen another face in decades. I’ve forgotten how  mouths see, how eyes talk. I hallucinate these things, these humanoid features over the slates of  flesh I see sagging over the fronts of people’s heads, melting off their skulls like cheese. I think I  imagine the features correctly but there’s no way to be sure. At times I think I’ve made the eyes  too big, the lips too puckered, too downturned, too melancholy. I’ll cry when I step on an ant. I’ll  nurse it back to life, perform CPR, give it three pairs of white knitted socks and send it back on  its way so I may recognize it if I see it again. The world only exists because I dream it. Because I  picture it and mold it into what it is. I don’t even know what my own face looks like. That too I  model and form with the tips of my nail-bitten fingers. My head is throbbing. I feel tremendous  anxiety. I wish I was dead, and yet I am a grain of sand in the Sahara desert. I am a hydrogen  atom in a collapsing star. I am a dead ant’s soul rising from its corpse. I am a puddle of meat  dissolved by light, my ego dissected from my solid form. I am the naked brain of a dead man. 

I find myself standing in the light of the hallway behind me, listening to the sound in my ear,  the voice that has never plagued me so loud as it does now. I hear the distant echoes of a  woman’s voice on the intercom piercing through the blaring alarms, telling us that it is now time  for our stretches. I do not obey and they will be here soon to ask me why. They will tell me of all  the benefits of stretches. They will prescribe me only the most effective antidepressants. They  will remind me how grateful I should be for having been born after all the wars and the famines  and the poverty. They will show me photographs of skeletal children. They will tell me we are all in this together. 

As I wait for them to come I reach down and grab a fistful of snow from a mound at my feet,  but it’s too powdery to be snow, too light and too dusty. I see a glimmer of silver inside it. Ants  crawl in and out of an opening near the crest of the mound, flecks of black blinking over a  glimmering object. I reach in and dig it out, the insects swarming over my fingers. I don’t know  what I’m holding. Something mechanical, electronic. Something that was once used to listen to  music, or tie a shoe, or deliver a baby. Whatever it is there is no doubt that this is the source of  the sound. I put it up to my ear and listen, and there is no doubt that it is a voice, one spoken  from the mouth of somebody long dead. It loops. I wonder if it is a remnant of this person’s life,  like permanent shadows from atomic bombs. Voices still in echo, neurons still reacting. 

The woman tells us to move on to lumbar rotations. I cross my six socked arms around my  abdomen and rotate. I listen to the countdown. My head doesn’t hurt anymore. I do not feel  anxiety. I wonder about the silver thing in my hands. About the sounds it makes, the faint ticking  of some mechanism inside, bleeding through a veil woven with the voice of everything I’ve ever  been. I know it means something. 

It must mean something. 

The post An Ant In Socks appeared first on The New Absurdist.

Then there’s the snake. Rock Python. Four feet long. Tame and gentle—if warm, fed, and  left alone. Eats rats. One every three weeks. Must be live rat. Won’t touch frozen. Ethical  thing. 

Buy this rat. Big white one. Healthy, happy. Almost pretty. Oh well—into the cage he goes. Snake not hungry yet. Thinks about it. Meditates. Watches. 

An hour passes. Rat gets impatient. Launches. Lands on snake’s back like a bull rider, bites  him once behind the head—snake dies. Dead as hell. Just like that. 

So now I got this rat. White one. Alive and well. Eats rock pythons. Must be live pythons.  Won’t touch dead. 

Dog still eats cellophane, paper clips, dust balls—just not near the snake/rat cage. Won’t  go near that. Ever. 

Me? I stand in the kitchen, staring. Wondering if I call animal control, a priest… or National  Geographic. 

Got this rat. Eats snakes. Must be live snakes…

The post Got This Rat Problem. . . appeared first on The New Absurdist.

They liked flying, actually. Cramped over the meditative throat-singing of the 747’s turbines, they indulged in the vapid shadows of deep space, blue aisle lights framing the edges of their ice solid feet, unfeeling ass, brittle shoulders, fuzzy throat. A pleasing sight the flight tracker was. They caressed the pixelated plane with their eyes, following its bright tail over the lapis of this rendition of Earth. You couldn’t tell by looking, but, by watching, they observed the tail stretch longer and longer. Their limbs stale and content. No need for binoculars for this type of birdwatching. What a thrill! 

A sudden white light flashed to their right. According to the plastic cage holding this most-watched bird, the time of origin was 05:32. Sour morning breath. Thoughts with all their carbonation lost. And yet, the white of a freshly opened laptop screen polluted the view. They blinked. Would asking their seatmate to shut their laptop be worth cracking away the crisp posture they’ve set themselves in? At least glassy eyeballs slid around easily; their seatmate clicked around a scant paragraph displayed on the screen as if scratching around would reveal the vocabulary they were looking for. 

“It’s a eulogy.” 

They pondered if their pudding was setting by gelatin. Agar agar is a common vegetarian option, although it produces a sharper jelly texture. They preferred konjac-based puddings, wondering if mallard ducks or, maybe, tufted titmice liked… 

“…huh?” 

“It’s a eulogy.” The window-seater rubbed the cord of their hoodie. They removed their other hand from their chin, resting it back onto the keyboard. “The hell am I supposed to even say,” they mumbled. Their chin rested back into their palm. “I barely even knew them.” 

The hours of building up crust in their joints tumbled away as they turned towards this eulogy-less seat partner and observed their document with a closer eye. 

“You’ve been staring. Looked like you wanted to know.” 

Look again. Maybe this person hasn’t ever had a whole steamed fish before. Just quinoa salads and diet soda, sans eyeballs. “I don’t know how helpful I’d be though.” 

“Hm.” They clicked around the document. “I would appreciate an outside opinion.” 

“I’m afraid I’m no expert on funerals. I’ve never died before.” 

“Huh. Me neither.” They looked up from their bright rectangle. “It looks like we have some common ground.” 

Why did they taste a bit of earnestness from them both? 

“When’s the uh, the funeral?” 

Their seatmate finished blinking away the afterimage. “It’s tomorrow. Or, actually, I guess tomorrow is today. It’s today.” 

Pudding doesn’t set completely when disturbed. A total bummer. No one likes a runny, unexciting custard soup. Not even a rock pigeon. “I’m sorry, you said you’re not close with them?” 

“Mmm.” 

“So why are you the one writing it?” 

“Parents passed. No siblings. No spouse. Didn’t really speak with anyone at work. Just me, but it’s not like they could’ve given their reports to no one.” 

They decided to also rest their chin onto their palm. Perhaps sitting the same way would spark some ideas about this stranger’s lonely life. 

“I don’t know if I can even say nice things about their work. They were always late-always needed extensions. Their slides were garbage. But they were the only one who knew how to refill our printer toner. They worked at that printer company before it went down, and none of the original documents were saved. Big boss never got us a new one. Or a new printer.” Their seatmate turned their neck and gazed out into the darkness punctured occasionally by a red light on the tip of the wing, this portal shallower than the abysmal document on their screen. 

“I’m pressured to feel a bit of grief, but I can only lie about them so much before my conscience corrects. They’ll always be my employee. A child to a couple. A refiller of printer toner. But…” They watched the wing’s lights flutter. 

“…it’s all relative to something else. Always dependent on another. I’m trying to speak about them as an individual, but I’m finding that no form of their person exists without the presence of another. Just a possession by syntactical possessiveness. No matter how I describe them, it must be tied to a person, a setting, a role. Even in the act of falsely describing them as a hard-worker, it implies that they are more hard-working than the persons around them. Such a simple adjective like ‘polite’ requires that a set of the impolite to exist. They cannot be independent despite living such a separated life because their mere existence requires relative existing entities to be judged against. I cannot even describe them as dead without acknowledging the living, or the definition holds no meaning. 

“We can only live to exist relative to the other. We can only exist, in life or death, in relation to that which exists pre- and post-self. For something to exist at all, it must exist within the bounds of another’s existence. We live to be something to another, and them to us. To exist, even, defines the binary of not existing. We live a life deprived of a mutual exclusivity in our autonomy. Is life just about how you live in comparison to others?” 

They couldn’t express their gratitude without disturbing the newly setting pudding forming at their brow bone. This one felt particularly promising, like the red and green cubes neighboring cantaloupe and honeydew at the buffet. Before shifting from their palm back into their seat, they waited for the bright tail to stretch another pixel or two. 

And waited. 

Even after blinking another coat of sticky sweet glaze over their eyes, the tail remained the same length. 

“I can even make an example out of us now. We are occupying these seats strictly because the other ones are empty.” 

“What?” 

“We can’t describe ourselves as seat-occupiers without acknowledging that the others are vacant.” Their seatmate, unmoving, continued to suffocate themselves in the black sky. 

“What do you mean they’re-” Their words caught at the sight of the untouched seatbelts and smooth, pleather seats to their right. Their seatbelt dug into their thighs when they whipped up. Not a single head populated the layers of seats in front of them. Not a single face greeted theirs at full turn of their neck. “What?” Touching their temple left a sticky residue on their fingertips. Red and green syrup dripped down their jaw and trailed onto their neck. 

They fumbled their seat belt open and stumbled forwards up the aisle. “I’m sorry, but, what?” Their tailbone, legs, heels, and toes buzzed angrily with static. No attendants in sight either. Row after row of screens greeted no one with “Welcome. Bienvenidos. Bienvenue. 迎。 

Not one body in first class either. Syrup dribbled onto their collar bone. They tried the cockpit door handle, frightened by how it swung open with ease. 

Empty. 

“Living just to be dependent. Living just to have others depend on you.” Their voice rang clear through the darkness the plane pierced through. 

They turned back around and streaked past the first-class curtain. They were sitting exactly as they had been, face engulfed in the ink beyond. 

Their voice seeped from the syrup, and their skin greedily sponged it up. “You can only describe me as alive because I can describe you as dead. Isn’t that right?” 

Their skin crystallized at the riverbanks and tides of the syrup that crashed over their body. Each sandy wrinkle eroded to dust, filling the plane as it shifted around folded tray tables and overhead bins. Powder hugged glazed walls. 

“In loving memory of one of my best employees, it would be a grave understatement to say I wouldn’t be here today without them.” 

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