. . . claimed the NSA was listening in on him through his mobile device.
So, turn it off, I said.
"No, I got them right where I want them. They want to spy on me, that's just fine. I got a lot to say. About my favorite movies and actors and sports and NASCAR-hell, I decided to get deep into Pokémon, so I could sound off on that, too."
You really think the NSA cares about you?
"Maybe not. Maybe so. But they're going to have to sort through all the noise of trivia just to be certain, right? And because I chatter so often and so insistently, they're more likely to flag me up as a person of interest. Because I am interesting. Hell, you sit there listening to me for hours, doncha'?"
He had a point. Indeed, I would sit there spacing out while he yammered on and on about the early films of Johnny Depp or the symbolic linguistics inherent within each and every NASCAR crash-
"-here we see the symbolic dream flights that both plague and bless the innermost lives of depressed rednecks-"
And why did I sit there with my buddy and all of his nonsense?
At first, it was to luxuriate in a sensation of innate superiority to a dopey motherfucker.
But as the hours wore on, my buddy's verbal excrement became like the soothing, hypnotic flow of sickness or madness.
Like when I dropped bad acid, and was freaking the fuck out for the first hour but then capitulated to an impossible bending and stretching and fragmentation of my self that went beyond pain and unto bliss.
Or when I got that epic food poisoning from that Christian chicken shack franchise. At first, I was bummed that I wouldn't be getting laid that weekend because every orifice on my body was leaking or spraying or vomiting. But then it hit me: all I gotta do is grab towels and relocate operations into the bathtub. And the aftermath was nothing three bottles of bleach couldn't fix.
But in both of these experiences of abjection, I at first resisted and then gave in to complete loss of self.
And that loss of self . . . wasn't so bad.
No more concern for personal grooming and appearance.
No more money problems.
No more fear of rejection.
No more pressure to please, impress, or seduce.
No decisions to make-they've already been made by some bathtub chemist or the disgruntled teenager wiping his asscrack with a Christian chicken patty.
Or my buddy with his word salad exhalations volumetrically displacing all logic, all sense, all responsibility, all natural laws, all gravity, all time, all entropy, all waste, all want, all consciousness, all desire-
"-oh, I never turn my phone off. I confess every last notion. Right into the speaker. I take a stream of selfies with only the minutest differences. My YouTube channel is just an ever-expanding video scroll of incrementalist updates of various numbing tasks and chores of no consequence-not even to myself! I've pretty much given up on actual 'fun' or 'endeavors' to lead a completely inauthentic existence of decoy signs and signifiers-"
My self twists gently out of shape.
I am glazed with verbal ejaculation.
Soon enough, I mouth the words in perfect synchronization, which by this time have devolved into an insistent series of buzzy, nonsensical syllables that are no doubt already forming the basis of some new and terrifying form of marketing-speak.
My buddy and I soon enough no longer need sleep-our brains' rhythms and routines rewritten by our aborning language-and so we stagger forth into the dawn of the 9-to-5 frontier to glaze the Earth with our newly revealed gospel . . .
