by Jose Moreno
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At 5:16pm, beams of light filtering through the grayish clouds were beginning to illuminate everything, and Barón was arriving at the park, where he was going to assemble with other members of the Proud Zeros Club. From the corner, he was able to see ahead the shiny green grass, the colorful flowers, and hear the sounds made by the birds. While he was walking on the ivory colored path that was in the middle of the gigantic park, he was moving his head from side to side in order to contemplate and enjoy the beauty of the artificial nature that was surrounding him—it was rare during the year 2054 to see trees on the sidewalks of South Truxes. Then, he crossed the small, brown, wooden bridge that helped people go across the small elongated and turbid lagoon, which was in the center of the park—many romantic words came to Barón’s mind, watching the white ducks bask in the sun, while he was crossing that “fairy tale” looking bridge. Once on he arrived to the other side of the lagoon, he looked at the concrete bench where they usually held their lively meetings and noticed that Carl, Mary, and Martin were already waiting for him sitting on it.
Martin noticed first that he was arriving and said, “Here comes the boss!” pointing with his index finger in the direction Barón was coming. Putting both hands around his mouth to do the megaphone effect, Martin said, “We were going to start without you!”
Barón chuckled and kept on striding without responding anything, thinking about a good excuse for being late; however, he could not think of any believable excuse. When he was close enough to the bench, he said truthfully, “I walked slowly for a few minutes because I was using my voice recorder.”
Because Mary often did the same, she responded to Barón, “You have my pardon!” Then, she giggled.
With a smile on his face, Martin said to Barón, “So…what is the agenda for today?”
Then, Barón, standing up in front of them, said from memory the agenda for discussion for that day while the other teen-agers were just sitting on the bench listening like obedient pets. The first thing that Barón brought to their attention was that they needed to find more possible members for their club. Martin seemed to be full of original ideas about it: He suggested finding a way to talk to parents that were suspicious about the identity of their youngsters instead of approaching doubtful teen-agers; Also, he mentioned that if the Proud Zeros Club could make a trip to the legislature chambers in order to push The “mighty” Federal Government of USA to extend the definition of sexual orientation so that the definition also means non-libidinal, the media would advertise their obscure club at no cost, and they could get a lot of attention around the world; Martin also said that they should organize pride parties at non-traditional churches in the community—Martin explained that, after all, non-libidinal orientation was not even theologically inconsistent with the most traditional church teachings. After Martin presented his witty ideas, nobody else dared to add anything to the brilliant suggestions that Martin mentioned because the others were not able to come up with ideas that surpassed his.
After nobody had anything else to say about the first point of discussion, they began to discuss the second item in Barón’s agenda. The next thing they had to do was to thoroughly share information about any interesting books, mildly related to their conception of the non-libidinal identity, written before last century—it was something that Barón passionately had asked them to research in their previous meeting. The first brave person that shared his research was Carl; in his phlegmatic tone of voice, he mentioned some esoteric books on stoic philosophy [12] and explained their relation with non-libidinous identity. They were all bored. After Carl finished expounding thoroughly on stoic philosophy, Mary expounded upon the well known Emmanuel Kant’s philosophy [13] and its connection with sexuality. Being an eloquent speaker, she made everyone open their brown eyes widely. She had awakened their dormant souls; it was not the content that brought up the magic but her presentation with simple words. Then, after Mary interpreted how reason, as an inevitable part of human identity, nullifies libido when making conscientious moral decisions [14], Martin briefly suggested that the New Testament from the bible, as he had implied in the previous point of discussion, could be interpreted as a pursuit of non-libidinal identity for those unfortunate humans that were born with an untamed libidinal identity.
Once everyone shared the titles and authors of those old books that they had meticulously researched, and the extravagant reasons why they believed the books belonged to the non-libidinal genre, Barón jubilantly wanted to share a scanty manuscript that he had been arduously writing for several months. It was typical of Barón to use entertaining stories instead of creating unfathomable arguments, valuing discussion with pleasant literary devices rather than “miserable” logical arguments; From Barón’s genius point of view, “enlightened creativity” could trigger critical thinking and analysis as much as grudging knowledge grown out of logic. In this way, Barón often avoided any sultry arguments whenever anyone from the group wanted to challenge his amazing perspective on things, resorting to tasteful fiction, in the form of poetry or allegorical stories, to move his audience to reflect. With the intension to make the teen-agers reflect about the shady sociology of gender, Barón said, “I am going to share a mini-fiction story that I wrote about a socially isolated boy whose life was manipulated by his parents since birth.”
Excited, Martin responded, “Oh! That is a good story. Read it!”
Carl, finding whatever Barón extemporaneously did acceptable, said, “Let’s hear it.”
“It sounds scary…read it,” Mary said, convinced that the story that Barón was going to read was going to make a lasting impression on her.
With a tone of excitement, observing how willing all of them were to listen to him, Barón unfolded the neatly folded paper and proceeded to read.
The fictitious story was about a boy whose life was monitored everyday and every night by functiomatons to make sure he did not touch himself in any way; His life was part of a secret scientific experiment where the boy was the only one that did not know that everything around him was a deliberate set up. Barón told them that the boy grew up in an island where only his dad, mom, and two older siblings lived. Then, when the boy became a teen-ager, their parents tried to explain to him what was happening to his body without encouraging him to form fantasies about his body. In this way, his parents only taught him biology and not “reproduction education”—His parents deliberately tried to reduce biology to chemistry and physics as much as possible in order to avoid discussing biological functions too much. Once the boy became twenty one, he was sent to the city of Truxes where he was going to meet with a twenty one year old boy and girl that also was twenty one years, who were going to be his guides through the city. As his guides, they were going to explain to him what adults do with other adults intimately and encourage him to do the same.
Barón paused, looked at them, and asked, “Ok. What do you think is going to happened?”
Mary immediately said, “Oh! I think that he is going be a non-libidinal person”
Carl, being scientifically oriented, said, “That is a good hypothesis. However, a real sociological experiment requires a large sample of individuals in order to arrive to a conclusion”
Martin, agreeing with Carl, said, “Yeah. I think that if we carry out the experiment with many boys and girls we would find out that a great majority of them are going to become non-libidinous…” and Martin continued intensely expounding with daunting statistical language the way to quantify the clever thought experiment suggested by Barón’s story and the results from it. After speaking with somber statistical language, Martin expounded upon his theory about how libidinous identity is developed with the intension to contrast his theory with the thought experiment. In this way, Martin effectively transformed Barón’s vague imagination into science.
After they orderly finished discussing Barón’s story, it was time for making random announcements. Carl stood up and said with the tone of voi
ce of a preacher, “I would like to announce that my birthday will be next week. You are all invited to my house”
Gladly, they all thanked Carl and promptly confirmed that they were going to his celebratory party.
Then, Barón said, “anyone else? No? Ok. We can all go now”
Carl and Mary stood up hastily from the uncomfortable bench, stretched, and walked together side by side towards the little bridge that allowed them to go across the park’s lagoon as a yellow band on the horizon indicated that the sun was setting. Martin, unexplainably, remained comfortably seated on the hard bench while Barón was pretending to look at Carl and Mary walk away, noticing something strange. Then, Martin suspiciously stood up, walked towards Barón and gave his hand in order to say good bye. When Barón lifted his hand to reciprocate the action, he noticed that there was a small folded piece of old fashion paper between Martin’s fingers,—paper was not used as much—which Barón unhesitatingly pulled to his hand with dexterity when he held Martin’s hand with discretion, in order to make the action look like a simple hand shake. Unexpectedly, Martin hugged Barón with his other hand, pulled him so that he was closer, and whispered in his ear, “read the information in that paper. It is top secret” Then, quickly, Martin walked away. Barón just put the cryptic paper discretely in his termosuit bag in order to make sure the omniscient ODFs that were all over the park did not catch the transaction. Barón waited until Martin was out of sight in order to start rushing towards home. Once Martin was gone, he dashed off the park in order to get home and figure out there by reading the little enigmatic paper the secret that Martin had mentioned.
Once Barón was at home, he walked straight to his room in order to find out what the folded paper was all about—fortunately, his dad had not arrived yet from work. Once in the “privacy” of his room—there were no ODFs supervising anything during that time—he sat down, inserted his hand into his TRS bag, and pulled the folded paper. He unfolded the mysterious paper with desperation and noticed that it was an artful pamphlet. The pamphlet said,
“Join us human warriors against the machine! It is time to let humans be reborn again.
Do not let a functiomaton run your life.
It is time to free of ourselves from the technology prison we have built for ourselves.
If you are interested, join us at the old Jazz corner at 6:20 pm.”
Astonished, Barón remained with his mouth opened for 3 minutes trying to process what he had read. Then, he realized that it was amazing. It was unheard in the United States. Amazingly, it was just what Barón wanted.
Then, he looked at the clock; it was 6:09 pm. He figured that if he ran, he could be there on time. Immediately, he inserted the paper in the TRS bag again and ran outside heading towards the Old Jazz Corner.
***