by McCloud, Wes
Flash forward a half our later, I’m sitting at the end of my drive in a folding lawn chair with Jeff right there beside me. Our homestead is tucked back off the road I’d say, 1/8th of a mile or so. We have this long-ass driveway that was the bane of my existence everyday I had to walk to the end of it in winter to wait for the school bus. And what was I waiting on today? The newspaper. The good old ad rag that was delivered everyday without fail. I never did cancel the subscription. It was my grandfather’s thing. Everyday he’d walk down and get the thing and read it like it was his job. I remember the last ten years of that man’s life he mainly would flip right to the obits to see who had died that he knew. Like it was some game of “who goes last” that he was determined to win. Apparently we all have something to look forward to when we retire.
So I’m sitting there with a bottle of lighter fluid at my feet, legs crossed, sucking in the sunshine and I hear it, like two counties away, I hear the paper guy’s car. A ninety-eighty-something Tercel that’s missing every inch of its exhaust pipe. He tops the hill and slows a bit when he sees me and the dog. An odd look grazes his face as he chucks the paper out the window and keeps on going with a slight nod to my smile and wave. Not sure if that look was because I was a guy just sitting there in a chair with my dog, presumably waiting with bated breath on the paper, or the fact that I was still in my underwear from the previous night. It’s still up for debate. Hey, I had already made up my mind that I wasn’t putting on pants that day. Don’t worry, they were boxer briefs, not tighty-whities. But I guess a bulge was a bulge to the frightened eyes of the passerby. Not that I had much of one.
With a song in my heart, I stand up and douse that paper with lighter fluid and set it ablaze right there in the gravel. I sat there and watched it burn and eventually what was left of it blew away in the breeze as I nodded my head and grinned, looking just like that Jack Nicholson GIF. Yeah, I was happy with myself. The news had died on my phone and my TV, so I sure as hell wasn’t letting the printed version of it anywhere near my house. I just didn’t give a flying shit what was happening in the world, mainly because most of it was all hyped up garbage. The news media was becoming an outlet hellbent on latching onto the most controversial topic they could find and running with it till everyone in the country was ready to slit each others proverbial throats…And it was all in the name of selling ads. Yes, oh yes, to sell ad space by drawing you onto their comment boards so you could tell Brad in Wisconsin that he was a bigot. Or Susan in L.A. that she was a snowflake. Wow, the world needs more heroes like you. And it’s gold for the news outlets, because the more traffic they have on their site, the more they can show companies that running their ads on their platform will reach more people. Just look at those numbers! I feel the journalism of olden days is long dead. But hey, I get it, we all have bills to pay. Speaking of which, it was a Friday and I was supposed to be at work over three hours ago, but for today, eating pancakes and burning papers was of far more importance. Though I did have to wonder what sort of mumblings were going around the office. I was a phone monkey for a large insurance company. I was the guy you called to scream in the ear of when things weren’t going your way. The soul you called every demeaning name in the book because you got a lowly Honda for a rental car instead of a BMW. Or the person you screamed at because you needed that insurance settlement check NOW to pay your rent. Sorry about that, it was totally my fault that you didn’t pay your rent and you somehow wrecked your car just in time to get a check that you were using to stay in your apartment for one more month. I know, sir, I AM a piece of shit. You have a lovely day. I’ll be here from 8-4 every weekday if you need a human punching bag when your life isn’t going well. Yep, your typical, clock-punching, thankless, corporate American job where you’re brainwashed daily into thinking you should be eternally grateful for being able to sit your ass in that chair and be belittled by faceless monsters who care more about their possessions than the people that are trying to help them. Soon, every morning a gun in your mouth seems more like the breakfast of champions than the cereal in your bowl. But you never do it…Why? Well, there’s always that one call that makes the bastards of the world melt away. That sweet old lady in Kentucky that makes you feel like family and forgives you when the company legitimately screws something up. There’s ten times more good people out there than bad. It’s just human nature to focus on the bad. But yeah, I didn’t go to work, and I wasn’t planning on going back on Monday either, or Tuesday, or any day. The hilarious scenario in my head was the fact that they could call me, text me, and even email me trying to figure out where the hell I was, but I’d never see or hear any of it because all my electronics were a pile of smoldering ash in my backyard. In a sense, I no longer existed. What was my plan? I didn’t have one. And it was the most liberating feeling ever.
Jeff and I sat there for over an hour. He kept looking up at me like “I love hanging, but what are we doing exactly?” I was just enjoying the breeze. You ever listen to it? Like really listen to it? I doubt it. Barely anyone does. But yeah, enjoying the breeze and thinking about literally nothing. Not sure what Jeff was thinking about. I would say he was thinking about peeing on poop and pooping on pee.
At some point I nod off and I’m awakened by the sound of Jeff whining and footsteps approaching. I jerk awake like some startled bird, and for the next three seconds I’m staring at my neighbor, Ted Simmons, like he’s an alien lifeform. It’s okay though, he was doing the same thing to me. He’s smiling, but he’s not. You know what I mean? There’s an obvious look of concern he’s failing at covering up behind his shit-eating, obligatory grin. Like “Hey there buddy, great to see you, but why are you in your underwear holding a lighter in one hand and lighter fluid in the other?” Finally one of us speaks, unfortunately it’s him,
“Sorry, Will, didn’t mean to scare you there…you waiting for something?” He says.
By now I’m starting to come out of the daze and I’m blinking feverishly, hoping he disappears behind my eyelids like a daydream, but no such luck. Don’t get me wrong, Ted is a nice guy. His wife is even nicer. She makes white-chip macadamia cookies that I’d fart in the face of the pope to get one bite of. They’d lived across from my grandparents since I was like nineteen, and would do any damn thing for you, but for some reason I just wasn’t in the mood to explain away my half-nakedness and the incendiary devices I possessed.
“Yeah, I was waiting on the paper.”
He looks confused as he is holding his copy of today’s paper and I’m not.
“Oh…well, they already delivered it. You not get one?”
“Yep, I got it.”
“Okay, then…so, vacation day, huh?”
The fact that the man knows my work schedule is slightly unsettling, but I play along.
“You could say that.”
Silence comes again. Even the dog is getting uncomfortable at this point.
Ted looks to the skies.
“This weather, huh?”
“Yep. Gorgeous.”
And with the bullshit small talk out of the way, he starts in…
“Hey, you see on Facebook where those people are going nuts over that T-shirt at Wal-Mart? Saying its racist because….” Somewhere mid-story his words sort of just turn into a blurring sludge as I’m thinking, “Jesus Christ, this is exactly why I burned all my shit.” But now, apparently, I have a human smartphone standing in front of me, updating me on everything I missed for the past twelve hours. I almost laughed out loud, or LOL’d if you will. If this was online I would’ve angry faced this conversation and unfollowed his ass, but no, this was the real world and since I couldn’t set him on fire like my phone, I just said,
“Ted! Stop!” It just fell out of me. It wasn’t even visceral or mean. It was just monotone and loud. And he did stop. He stopped and was speechless, like no one had ever said that to him before. Maybe they hadn’t. And guess what I said then? Nothing. I just got up, folded my chair, and started walking back home with Jef
f in tow. Who knows what was going on inside his head as he watched my underweared-ass disappear into the horizon, but I’m sure it was nothing nice. “Wow. What an asshole…” “What was that about?” The list probably went on and on. Despite all that, I walked away instantly knowing a cold hard truth, just because I had set my digital world on fire, didn’t mean it was dead. It lived on through everyone around me that had a phone or computer. I have to admit that was a hard pill to swallow.
The weekend went pretty normal, well not normal according to the standards of my life before the mass, digital homicide I’d committed. But yeah, it was just me and the dog, walking around the property, fishing in the pond, doing our now daily, ritual paper burning, and sitting in the grass just listening to the sound of time itself. But I had to admit something was creeping. Something was clawing at the back of my brain. An itch I couldn’t scratch. I found myself in the backyard several times, staring down into the fire pit at the distorted pile of melted plastic that was “my life”. And every time I did that, the itch would get worse…Like a rash spreading inside my skull. Holy shit, was I going through withdrawal? And I was…I felt panic kick in multiple times. I found myself reaching for my phone ALL the time. I remember sitting down on the toilet for the first time after it was gone. It felt weird. I actually went to grab it off the counter top where I’d often place it while dropping drawer. I felt like the living embodiment of that meme where Dr. Manhattan is sitting on the surface of Mars all by himself, isolated from everything and everyone. When had taking a shit without your phone become so bizarre? I don’t even remember when that transition took place. For god’s sake I’d dropped deuces many a day without that thing, yet here I sat, alone, almost despondent. What did humans do before this? Before the age of the smartphone gave you a digital window to the outside world? As I sat there, I quickly remembered. I counted the tile on the floor. I looked for the shapes in the wood of the doorway. The grain there, it looked like a pterodactyl. A psychedelic one, but a flying dinosaur nonetheless. And that pterodactyl, he had buddy, a Siamese twin that got the raw end of the genetic stick. He was mashed off to the side. Yeah, that’s what humans did before the phones, we used our imaginations. We found faces in the woodwork and in the loom of the rug. We used our brains. And we also would get off the crapper in less than five minutes instead of letting our own shit dry on our backsides while we answered 100 questions to find out what type of cheese we were. Jesus…what did I do?! I need to go to the store and get all new stuff! Go back to the way things were! Right?!
I woke up Sunday night in a cold sweat. I could swear I heard the voices of the slaughtered electronics screaming a haunted symphony through the panes of my window. Calling out to me to remind me of things that used to be. At 4 a.m. I found myself outside, digging a deep hole in nothing but my underwear ( no, I still hadn’t put on pants ) and burying the remnants of the fire pit. As if the dirt itself was going to once and for all erase everything from my anxiety-ridden brain. After I patted down the dirt of the digital grave, Jeff and I slept in the grass in the backyard. Not sure why I did that, but it did feel amazing. I felt grounded to the earth. Like it was the most natural place a person could ever sleep, with the mother of us all kissing your back as you drifted off with the sight of the stars still burning behind your eyes. God, I was losing it…
I gotta tell you I wasn’t loving mother nature quite as much when I awoke the next morning. My ass was riddled with mosquito bites and my back felt like someone had taken a baseball bat to it. Top that with Jeff taking a fresh shit not but three feet away from me and you had yourself a Grade A morning. I stumble into the kitchen and it’s ten after nine. It’s Monday morning. Yeah, I was supposed to be at work ten minutes ago. I can only imagine the talk going on around the padded prison cells they call cubicles. “Where’s Will? He wasn’t here Friday either.” Or hell, maybe they didn’t even notice. Sadly that was a possibility. I’d been at that company for fourteen years…no wait, fifteen years, and I hadn’t exactly made what I would call “work friends”. I was quiet. Always had been. I was there to do my job and get the hell out. I was convinced most of my coworkers figured me to be that ticking timebomb that eventually shot up the whole office while in my underwear. Well, maybe they had the underwear part right. I’d be lying if I said the idea of never going back to work wasn’t unsettling to me. Sadly, working becomes as much a part of life as breathing at some point. When you strip it away, a part of your identity falls away with it. Isn’t that just a little bit sad? I think it is. Sometimes I think that’s why some people die not long after they retire. It’s like, their career was all that kept them stitched together and they didn’t even realize it. They pretend they’re happy when they cut that retirement cake. But are they?
It’s now 9:30 a.m. I’ve somehow managed to stare into absolute nothingness for a whole twenty minutes in a glum, regretful reflection of some kind. A feeling that’s finally chased away by a firm paw placed to the side of my bare leg. It’s Jeff. He wants pancakes again. So do I, buddy. So do I.
Pancakes aside, today is a different day. A thought arises. A plan. Or something like it. For the first time in three days, I finally put on pants, a shirt, and shoes. I walk out and stare at that brand new car I thought I had to have sitting in the garage. An Audi A6. A four door sedan with all the bells and whistles. What the hell did I need a four door car for? I didn’t have a family. Hell, I didn’t even have friends. Well, I did, but life sort of drifted us apart. I had no wife and no kids and well, they did. We barely saw each other but once a month, if that. It’s no one’s fault. Life happens. But back to this car…When I bought it I saw…I don’t know what the hell I saw. I guess we all get into this mindset that we need nice things to be seen as nice people. The old “keeping up with Joneses” adage. When I bought this car I saw me catching the eye of some woman or being seen as a person who was making money. Basically it was a prop to give the illusion that I was happy and successful. Isn’t that what a car is in America? A rolling representation of how well you’re doing? And the higher the price tag, the more features, the faster it goes, the higher you rank in the hierarchy of society. Let’s call it what it is, to most of us, it’s a piece to show off to others in the sick hopes of evoking jealousy. What I now saw in my garage was a outrageous and unnecessary monthly bill. One of the corner stones of the American Dream, and I was about to yank that bitch right out from under the foundation. I tossed my bicycle in the trunk and strapped it down. Then I let Jeff, dirty paws and all, jump in the passenger seat; a thing that I would’ve cringed at before. But that was the old me. Together, in silence, we drive into town. No radio, no nothing, just the sound of the road underneath us. I turned off the AC and rolled down the windows. Jeff was digging that. And who wouldn’t? It was air, fresh air, REAL air. Not stagnation. It was funny how the vast majority of us were basically becoming bubble children in this day and age and didn’t even know it. We live in a house with all the windows shut, we walk to the car and we drive somewhere, with all the windows shut. We go into work where, you guessed it, all the windows are shut. All in the name of being comfortable. It’s no damn wonder most of us are allergic to the trees and the grass. Hell we never expose ourselves to them. We live ninety percent of our lives cooped up in the confines of plaster, metal, wood, and glass. We were basically condiments with anxiety. I think I was mayonnaise.
Fifteen minutes later, I’m walking into the bank and Jeff is right beside me. I instantly get flack from one of the tellers.
“Hey, you can’t bring a dog in here.”
“It’s okay, he thinks he’s a person,” I say as I belly up to the counter and ask for every last penny to be drawn from every account I have. The amount is somewhere in the tune of twelve thousand dollars, so of course the lady is fumbling about and stuttering. I love how banks go into freak-out mode when you try and draw anything out over a couple grand in cash. It’s probably because they barely have it. Just imagine if everyone you knew went into the bank a
nd asked to cash out. You think the money would be there? Nope.
As I suspected would happen, this teller is trying to round up the money, and in the meantime, one of the managers comes up to me and starts asking why I was withdrawing all my money. Is everything okay? Was I going to a different bank? Blah, Blah, Blah. It’s her job, I get it. I stop her mid-sentence and say the only thing I can,
“Paula,” That’s what her nametag said, “I need this money for my sexual reassignment surgery.” Yeah, Yeah, maybe that was wrong, but it accomplished exactly what I knew it would. It shut her up. The split second it left my mouth I caught her glimpse at my crotch. It was brief, but I saw it. I would’ve done the same thing.