Exhibit DC
The snail, the elephant, and the death of quiet thought.
A gentle fog had descended on December. The benedictine monks were waiting for me to alight and I was looking forward to the monastic retreat, albeit with the consternation that often accompanies haphazard travel. The kaleidoscope of happenstance and choice turns chaotically until clarity clicks.
I had restarted a regime of regimented push-ups along with a running to-do list that encompassed my day-to-day work, nebulous creative projects, and the imponderably procrastinatable tasks that life thrusts upon those who have a difficult time with definitions and clarity in the first place.
As I scrolled, shamefully, on my infernal attention destroyer, I was hit with a barrage of ads for the types of consultants who help people with their “content” problems. Apparently, a fair number of content creators are not content with their content and thus contend with these content consults.
I rolled my eyes and peeled myself away from the carefully engineered attention drugs to continue my walk—one of the daily rituals that had not been added to my to-do list and was simply a matter of tradition. The cold fog wafted over my face in the unique way only a gentle December fog could.
I was just starting to notice how ill I felt. I attributed the sensation to the neglection of savoring the last vestiges of the saint agur and roquefort in my dwindling blue cheese collection. Those needed to be consumed before I left. I had instead heavily overdosed on the infectious blue light and anxiety.
My high-strung mind quickstepped around the stiff airy peaks of concern, which some of the more eminently procrastinatable tasks had whipped up in my consciousness. These were impressively solid testaments to the tribulatory effects of an overactive imagination—but still, mostly impregnated air.
The placid eye of calm lazily deflated some of the confectionary cream before musing, “I thought this event was the waltz.” You may ask how a quiet eye of calm can deflate whipped consciousness cream or critique intangible mental ballroom dancing—don’t worry about it.
Either way, it was good to be back out in the crisp opaque air. The Buck Mason I had turned into a makeshift worry chamber with the purchase of an espresso had become quite stuffy ever since the elephant had walked in and been promptly electrocuted to a soundtrack of Joan Baez’s best hits.
This horrendous and completely metaphorical literary device stirred a distant memory from my life from before things got so fuzzy. You see, I was once a golden boy like you, and I was summoned to the halls of US History class and I dined with epistemic certainties. Poor Topsy.
I first heard of Topsy in the context of the AC/DC wars between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse. In the retelling from the heavenly court, this bad elephant was to be executed for killing a bunch of people, and so Thomas Edison decided to wire it up and kill it with Alternating Current to negatively tinge the public opinion of the competition to his Direct Current.
This, apparently, is not true. Or at least, that’s what the infernal attention destroyers masquerading as omniscient lookup machines tell me nowadays. And besides, if elephants could write, they might have a very different narrative focusing on oppressive and media-hungry amusement park owners—with a penchant for morbid attractions—who scapegoated a poor innocent defenseless elephant.
Even back then, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was on a warpath—they were the reason that the amusement park opted for electrocution and a big fuckin’ dose of cyanide-laced carrots over hanging. Perhaps the guillotine would have been more humane.
A fake Edison and Marie hang together in the public imagination for a moment. Still no evidence on that whole Tylenol thing, but this exhibit (the second installment on the highway to hell) should speak for itself.
But much like Topsy, the elephant in the room was slowly dying.
Everyone was dying, in fact. Slowly in most cases. Quickly in a few. Most had a faint awareness of this elephant in the room, which occasionally provided clarity and spurred them to action. But the professional tormentors had found ways of obviating this clarity. With a real metaphorical elephant.
The lion in the room still hadn’t returned my phone call. My salt vendor still hadn’t returned my phone call. I didn’t have the witch’s phone number or email. So, I had been stuck with this fuckin’ elephant for a while. But as I picked up steam in the cold air (promptly returning it, like a responsible citizen, to the spa where it belonged), I found myself reinvigorated.
I did not know, then, that George had died. And I certainly did not know that consciousness had scattered into an uncountably large number of threads and was still weaving its way through the dimension of meaning. I did not know that Rob Jørgensen had, in a short encounter, made an indelible mark on the zeitgeist. I did not know that the man from Montana was planning his heroic return to Ittoqqortoormiit to finally vanquish the infernal attention destroyers. I did not know that my readers needed so much damn exposition to keep track of the fractured narrative.
Jason was in a terrible, no good, awful mood. The somber gray day seemed there to stay. The merciful mental fogginess that had obscured the cold bleak snailless morning had now given way to a hellish hangover from the two days of debauchery—physical, mental, and physical—that started in a first-class seat on a flight into Washington from what he had started calling New England.
Far away, deep in what I have started calling The South, cloistered in a coffee shop with a steady drip of the drugs, I meet a lovely illustration student who reads several of my exhibits, shows me some of her Lovecraftian artwork, and then humors me as first my ornithologist friend and then Jason call me.
The former is on his way from Washington to The South. The latter, from Washington to New England. Both excite hopes and dreams and both conjure wary pent-up energy.
Blake watches carefully as a derivative based on my soul flashes red on his terminal.