When I meet girls, it’s difficult for me to explain to them how exactly I constitute a real person in the real world doing real people things. It’s necessary for me to circumvent certain perilous topics of conversation: poetry, my source of income, employment, the date I graduated, my major, what exactly I do everyday.
Years will pass—centuries even. The sheer volume of videos I’ve produced will flabbergast my descendents in the distant future. In the videos, I will say things like, “In my day, we listened to music on matchbox-sized devices we kept in our pockets. We didn’t have microchips implanted in our brains that spontaneously generated the most neurologically stimulating music for that precise moment.”
I took two more pills in the morning, and to help with nutrient absorption, I ate three scrambled eggs with a can of green tea. Again, I had a surge of restless anxiety without any clear cause. I considered the possibility that maybe a lifetime of vitamin deficiency had spared me from my real self, my anxious restless self; that I simply hadn’t had enough nutrients to sustain the level of neurosis my brain yearned for on a neurochemical level.
At this point, cats begin campaigning for their civil rights as self-aware, cognitively commensurate American citizens. New studies reveal that cats can stand on two legs indefinitely, produce vocalizations roughly equivalent to humans, and actually enjoy wearing clothes, particularly Italian knit sweater vests…
I’m at the point now where I can guzzle two cans of Rockstar Punched (Rockstar’s fruit punch flavored beverage), and then promptly head off to bed. Of course, the sleep I experience is a fitful experience punctuated by episodes of coming awake, violent death dreams, and confusing dreams with reality. Often, I find myself walking around my neighborhood at 4 AM in a mental fog.
I sometimes wonder how many cool people I’ve deprived myself of meeting by erecting a cold impenetrable veneer, how many important friendships and contacts and girlfriends I’ve avoided over the years, but mostly I just think about cute cats, Spider-Man, and cake, and then I take a nap.
Last acts are defining moments in a person’s life, the moment when you decide to let the women and children board the life raft first or instead you shove her out the way. The moment you tell your family you love them or you try and drag Bruce Willis’s wife down with you before falling off a skyscraper.
Here in Texas, the Sun has turned into a morally bankrupt psychopath, and it wants to kill us and our families. All the cities around me are breaking records for 100-degree consecutive days. Wichita Falls is up to 52 days (previous record of 42), Tyler’s up to 47 days (previous record of 20 days), and Waco has 43 days (previous record of 42)…
The teacher was an obese middle aged lady who spent the days checking and rechecking her e-mails. A boom box on her desk played relaxing Enyafied covers of the Lord of the Rings soundtrack. When she spoke, she used a soft comforting voice like a preschool teacher, as if a single harsh enunciation might trigger an eruption of the old ultraviolence.
People often say to me, “Brad, I am racked with existential despair. How can I redirect attention from my stark reality to images of cats?” Well, I’ve developed a few easy methods to maximize the time spent looking at cats and minimize the time spent looking at things that are not cats.