“Her gender changes by the hour.”
“By the hour?”
“By the hour.”
“So should you be calling her ‘her,’ if, like, uh, the… gender… is changing?”
“Last time I saw her she was identifying as female, so I’m confident to say yes.”
“It’s confusing. How do you even know she’s transitioning? Does she announce it, hourly, on her social media or something?”
“No, she wears a different color wristband. Actually, she has 60 of them, for different genders.”
“60 genders? How do you remember them all?”
“I don’t. I call her a ‘they.’”
“A they?”
“’They’ is plural, though, correct?”
“It used to be. Now it’s singular, in certain circumstances, such as non-binary.”
“I don’t understand what non-binary is.”
“It’s when…”
“Nah, actually, don’t tell me. I think I want to remain in the dark on that one.”
“A lot of people are sort of non-binary. Fat people with their hair in a bun. The fat obscures the chest, torso, so you can’t tell if those are tits or just fat rolls.”
“Hey, you can’t say ‘fat’…”
“There’s been a lot more men, fat men, straight men, painting their nails and toes, in addition to man-bun hairdos, and there’s also a trend in Korea of men wearing make-up.”
“Everything you’re saying is problematic. First off, to call someone ‘fat’ is body-shaming. That’s a no-no these days. Second, don’t say ‘straight’ anymore, say
‘cisgender.’ And lastly, don’t say ‘Korean’ men are wearing make-up, because you’re being horribly racist toward Asians.”
“Okay, so I’m still calling people ‘fat.’ I’m not giving up that one. I’m not relenting, surrendering to the PC mobs. I’m also never saying ‘cisgender,’ aside from in jest.
And no, I did not say that ‘all Korean men’ wear make-up. But many, particularly younger ones, are. You can google it.”
“Just ‘google’ it. The solution to all life’s questions.”
“Google is the new God. IT lives in the sky, IT knows everything, IT has plans for everyone.”
“I think most prefer Google to God, these days.”
“Not in China. They ban both Google and God.”
“That explains a lot…”
“Google is the God we never wanted but always needed.”
“Is God non-binary? I’d think so.”
“I’m so sick of this identity politicking, new ‘vocabulary.’”
“I’m with you, in spirit, but times change. Language changes.”
“I understand that. And calling something stupid ‘gay’ always annoyed me. Racial slurs used as invective repulse me. But ‘fat?’ That’s not the same thing as a racial slur. Being fat is a choice. It’s not like we had any choice which skin color we’d have upon birth.”
“Erm, well, like your mother sorta had that choice. She could have been with a…”
“Oh, shut up!”
“Back to your friend. I’m looking at her IG. She’s changed genders into a unicorn sign with a rainbow atop it.”
“A rainbow sign?”
“So she’s a lesbian, maybe, for the next hour?”
“Other than prison, or college, is it possible to be gay for a short period of time?
Like it’s a phase?”
“Gay for the stay?”
“Why are you asking me?”
“Because you’re gay.”
“Does that mean I speak for all gay people?”
“I mean, doesn’t it? Kinda?”
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer
“I think you need sensitivity coaching.”
“What the fuck is sensitivity coaching?”
“It’s when someone teaches you to be more sensitive, take others’ feelings into account.”
“Is it a form of ‘life-coaching?’”
“No, it’s PC indoctrination.”
“It teaches you to…”
“I’m not interested.”
TERRORISTS ON MONKEY BARS
There was a loud bang.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer I spun around in my seat. I was on the morning train, riding to the office. Though I was wearing headphones, I still heard the sound clearly. It was a bang. A sound like a firework, a car engine backfiring… or a gunshot…
Alarmed, my pulse raced; my heart hammered in my chest. I instinctively scanned about the train carriage, searching for the source of the sound. To my surprise, I saw nothing. Furthermore, no one appeared to share my angst. The passengers sat still as statues, fixed to their newspapers, books or digital devices, and an elderly man with a head of Einstein hair silently stared out the window, gaping, eyes wide open, at the passing scenery of the city.
Hhhhhm Hhhhhhhm, I sniffed in a stack of air. Tried to mimic a bomb-sniffing dog.
Tried to smell for anything. Any sort of burning, a scent, an odor, a fire, plastic, a gas, anything that might trace the source. But I smelled nothing, aside from that public transit scent, that scent of cleaning fluids, metal, machinery, and huddled masses.
Then I tried to calm myself. Settled back into the cushion of my seat. Although the a/c was blasting in the train, I’d begun to sweat like I was sitting in a hot car with its windows up on a summer’s day, and I could feel my collared dress shirt stuck like foil to my back. I tried breathing deeply, to relax, but then a jolt of shock cleared my sinuses when I spotted a passenger, to my right, seated two rows up from me.
He was a young, maybe early 20ish, Arab man. He had a black beard that fell to his chest and wore a long sheet white robe with a matching white skull cap.
What’s more, he appeared nervous, terribly nervous. And was shifting, stirring in his seat, constantly adjusting and pulling at his collar.
Furthermore, this was 2011, near the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, so of course, my thoughts shifted to the worst. I couldn’t take my mind off the images I’d seen on the news. Those images of kamikaze planes torpedoing into the twin towers.
Those black and copper clouds of death. Those grainy photos of Bin Laden and those passport photos of the 9/11 hijackers.
Then I thought to the video montages of Al Qaeda terrorists on monkey bars.
Then I questioned what the terrorists were doing, exactly, on the monkey bars…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Then my nervousness increased. Tenfold. I imagined the passenger, that suspicious passenger, strapped with a suicide vest. Ready to detonate. The terrorist jumping to his feet, yelling out whatever, and yanking the chain, taking the whole train with him as he went to see the virgins.
And what could anyone do about that? Jump on him? That’s the same as jumping on a live hand grenade. Or could one politely ask him to stop? Try to talk him out of it? Just what was it that George W. Bush said about negotiating with terrorists?
As we slowed, inched into our next stop, the young man rose to his feet.
“Oh no, this is it. We’re all going to die!” I ruminated. He’s going to scream out whatever and yank the chain, blow us all to bits! My whole life started flashing before my eyes, and I thought of all the unachieved aspirations on my bucket list…
But his body seemed to slack as he stood, and his chest filled with air, and when he exhaled, his lips twisted to a wry smile. Then he patiently exited the train along with the other passengers.
THE GRASS IS GREENER BY THE GRAVEYARD
Not too many folks cared to live across the street from a graveyard.
But Tony didn’t mind. He appreciated his lifeless neighbors, their unbreaking quietude. And he enjoyed looking out his bay windows, gazing at the rows of gravestones, crypts and tombs lining the emerald field.
To Tony, his graveyard view was an affirmation of time’s impermanence. And hence its importance.
“Living on the cheap usually entails crime, roach infestation, noise pollution, but not here,” Tony told his sole companion, his Katy Perry lookalike sex doll. The doll bore a striking similarity to the singer. He’d customized it to appear exactly as the pop diva herself. Tits and all.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Tony’s closest neighbor, a shut-in, another Operation Iraqi Freedom vet, lived three doors down in the subdivision’s only other occupied house. The residential development had never taken off, never recovered from the Great Recession.
Next door to Tony, the ranch-style, single-family home resembled the carcass of a deer that’d been eaten alive by wolves. Its piping stripped. Its empty shell picked clean by thieves and vermin and transformed into a graffitied cenotaph, a monument to avaricious capitalism, currently only occupied by rats and raccoons…
Tony’s house, too, had been abandoned but hadn’t been ravaged by pests and thieves and he’d agreed to purchase the distressed property for mere pennies on the dollar.
“Not a lotta homebuyers wanna live by a graveyard,” admitted the seller, a rep from the local bank. The overweight fellow wore a rumpled, rat-gray suit and too much aftershave and seemed to glare at Tony with a perplexed look, maybe wondering if Tony were opening a meth lab or planning a crypto-scam…
“Why would anyone want to live on a bluff overlooking a graveyard?” Tony could read the thoughts, sense trepidation through the language of the agent’s shifty, small black eyes.
But there was good reason for Tony’s decision. As Tony aged, he’d developed phonophobia and misophonia, severe phobias of sound.
Random sounds, noises, even the mundane, such as coughing or sneezing were terrifying ordeals. And sudden loud sounds, especially, had transformed from mild annoyances into physically painful, excruciating ailments. Simple knocks on the door sent chills plaiting up and down Tony’s spine. Thumps from upstairs neighbors enraged him, got him grinding his teeth, gave him grating headaches, had him contemplating homicides…
Honking cars, loud car stereos, slamming doors, lawnmowers, leaf blowers, a creaky air conditioner, all of it increasing, every day, in tortuous intensity, arousal and anguish…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer And his last apartment… The place was alive. The walls and ceilings like malicious sentient beings… the place stirring… stabbing icepicks into his ears, the building animated by the cruelest, most violent sounds.
His last apartment had been a hated, horrible place, a hellhole with its thin walls, its voices... Its fucking tap dancer living upstairs…. Its footfalls and thumps of neighbors’ jabbering movements…. The miserable place’s ugly noises violent and destructive as a cage fighter’s fists to the face.
“Phonophobia and misophonia had been the diagnosis,” Tony told Katy. Admiring the lavish blush of color mantling her cheeks, and the golden flecks, the glittery eye shadow above Katy’s blue-green peepers, he began to appreciate what an excellent listener she’d become.
“But what we needed most was a change in perspective.”
Tony spent most of his time in the master bedroom. He’d prop Katy in bed, lay with her, and would carry her to the kitchen, eat with her seated across the table.
He’d even fix a plate for her.
Since moving next to the cemetery, Tony had never been happier. He finally had what he needed. He had Katy and fast internet and was still close enough to the city that he could have packages delivered.
Most of all, he loved the quiet. The purity, the cleanliness, the beautiful sound of silence.
Silence, to him… was bliss. Its solitude soft, warm as a loving embrace… The quiet a kind of luxury…
And it was this quiet he most desired. A quiet as quiet as the field of corpses in his window... A quiet as quiet as outer space. Quiet as death itself…
After cleaning Katy up and putting her down for an afternoon nap, Tony took a rest from screentime. Gazing out his kitchen window, he peeked up at the sun,
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer the humungous hoop of gold hanging in the clear blue sky, while a warm silence nestled in over the graveyard.
Sipping cinnamon tea, Tony then gazed at the symmetrical rows of tombstones.
He pondered that one day he’d be dead too. On the other side of the grass.
Then he thought that one day in the future, the sun, the humungous hoop of gold, would burn out, just like an old lightbulb. That everything would end. That humans and every other living creature were tourists, transients, hobos on a revolving rock, infinitesimal specks of matter hurtling through the cosmos. That Earth itself would one day be a big graveyard.
And a tranquility coursed through him as he considered just how quiet the day after the end of the world would be…
HUNTING THE MONSTER
The bus was rickety, bouncy, and probably not safe to drive. There were holes in the seats, some of the holes plastered over with duct tape.
Adorning the back of nearly every seat were curse words, lewd poems and crude drawings of genitals, scraggly graffiti, and globs of gum.
The bus stank too. Stank of that certain smell of school and children.
Behind the wheel sat the only adult aboard… A 40ish man about the size of a hippopotamus, his pockmarked face shaded by a red mesh Cincinnati Reds baseball cap…
On mornings when it was clear, or if only a light mist were curling from the green lake near the school, all the kids, the jocks, misfits, nerds, cheerleaders, all of them, would pop their heads up and crane their necks toward the water. It was
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer said there was a creature living in the lake. Something like a dinosaur. Something like the Loch Ness Monster.
Several townspeople claimed to have seen it. A few shadowy photos existed, but nothing conclusive. The town had hoped to style the local monster as a tourist attraction, eager to attract monster hunters, thrill seekers, adventurists, social media influencers, TV and movies, but for whatever reason, the local monster never garnered much attention.
There wasn’t a clear enough picture. There wasn’t enough of a compelling backstory about the monster, either. Basically, no one outside the town cared.
But inside the town, the monster was as alive as ever. People were terrified to walk near the lake at night. And throughout recent years, several pets in the township had turned up missing, were thought to have been eaten by the monster.
Every morning, conversation in the school bus would grind to an immediate halt.
Almost as if God Herself had pressed a button. Total silence ensuing once the bus approached the lake. The kids stopping what they were doing or saying, to turn and gawk at the lake... Kids scanning the murky distance, searching the panorama.
Phones and tablets raised, pointed at the lake’s still green waters. The kids’ faces twisted in anticipation; their mouths parted slightly in hopes of snapping a photo of the ever-elusive dinosaur.
Finally, on one foggy late spring morning, in the back of the bus, two teens in backward baseball caps sneered at the lake, and bade it farewell.
WELCOMING THE JUNGLE
The sky had been overcast for days. Not that it’s anything unusual. During the monsoon season there’d often be days, maybe 5 or 6, consecutively, where barely a lumen of light peeks out of the milky sky.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer However, what was unusual was the hue of the sky. Instead of being cloudy, with clouds the color of cow’s milk, the heavens above were colored purple. A startling neon purple, in the daytime, that pumped an intense radiance, a glow, that was practically blinding. At nighttime, the purple darkened, to a spongy purple-black, appearing like the fur of a panther.
Local and national newscasters, scientists, meteorologists, social media, et al., no one could explain the purple sky. It was as if a purple dome had descended over the sprawling city, the purple sky trailing off into blue at the city’s outskirts.
It was at this time that the chemtrails began appearing.
The chemtrails would manifest themselves as vaporous, gray, or in various coruscating colors…
The chemtrails were soon accompanied by mysterious monkeys that looked like baboons. Though the baboons were as purple as the sky, light or dark purple, depending on the time of day, and once the chemtrails spread across the sky, the purple baboons, usually in packs of four or five, would be seen running through the city streets, chasing the chemtrails, the packs of monkeys in uniform motion, galloping, frantically, toward the chemtrails.
The purple monkeys were only seen in conjunction with the chemtrails, the monkeys steadfast in their pursuit. The creatures mesmerized and magnetized.
The creatures showing no concern for anything other than moving toward the chemtrails. If while in pursuit of a chemtrail, a monkey were run down by a city bus, the other monkeys would continue, leave the felled monkey behind.
The monkeys were singular in their focus.
But where the monkeys came from, where they went, remained a mystery.
Originally it was thought to be a prank, a crypto company stunt or internet influencers run amok. But the monkeys, chemtrails kept appearing, in greater numbers too…
It wouldn’t be long until similar packs of elephants, light and dark purple elephants, appeared chasing after the chemtrails, surging through the city streets.
Unlike the monkeys, though, the elephants were enormous, menacing and caused
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer massive destruction, destroying property, stomping on people, smashing them like bugs.
The police, overwhelmed and unable to contain the monkeys, and certainly feckless against the elephants’ onslaughts, were to be relieved by the army, but as the armed forces arrived at the city limits, they were obstructed by furious mobs, international squadrons of animal rights protestors demanding no harm befall the purple monkeys or elephants.
Explosive arguments overtook social media and cable news, and rival political factions blamed one another for the purple monkey, elephant attacks and unexplained chemtrails…
Panic overtook the city as more chemtrails popped up and increasingly belligerent packs of purple elephants and monkeys began to swarm the city, effectively claiming dominion, and panicked residents were fleeing in droves.
The chemtrails then took on a life of their own. The chemtrails touching down, like tornados. The chemtrails walking like legs. Their touch like lasers, the chemtrails incinerating infrastructure, turning steel and concrete to ashes. The chemtrails angling in different directions, blasting beams of light, lasering and searing, toppling buildings...
Eventually the disparate chemtrails coalesced. Formed into a wild, kaleidoscopic electric swirl that circled, covered the sky, like a blanket, the heavens awash in a violent smorgasbord of colors.
As the colors continued across the sky, over what was once morning, there began a horrible beeping, like on a plane about to crash into a mountain. The beeping sounding from every phone, speaker and electronic device… Louder and louder…
The beeping gaining in volume, rising above asperity. A siren’s call…
The city’s remaining residents emerged from their hiding spots. What had probably been fear coloring their faces had shifted to a severe placidity. The stone-faced urbanites doing “Buss Down” TikTok dances, shucking and jiving into the city streets, where they were joined by similar dour-faced dancing packs of purple elephants and monkeys.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer All the city’s creatures danced and swayed side by side. Their movements synchronized as the ticks of a clock. Their eyes illuminated in implicit understanding.
Then the beeping abruptly stopped. And the city streets dissolved into a dark green quicksand. Buildings, bridges, roads, vehicles, people, purple monkeys and elephants, everything all plunging below as if through the thin ice of a barely frozen pond. The city emptying into an endless green expanse… The skies clearing, back to blue… Welcoming the jungle…
LETTER TO A DEAD MAN
Dear _______ ,
You’ll probably never read this. You might even be dead. But I was just thinking about you. I was just thinking about how we used to be best friends.
But that was then. This is now. Now, I don’t even know you. I could pass by you on the street, or in a store, and not recognize you. How crazy is that? We grew up together and now I don’t even know what you look like!
Or maybe I would recognize you but wouldn’t say anything because I wouldn’t quite know what to say. What the hell do you say to someone you’ve not seen in 20 years? What is there to say? After all the nostalgia and backslaps, what is there to talk about? What would we have in common?
Let’s face it. We’re basically strangers. You’ve moved on. I’ve moved on. We’ve ventured down our respective paths. We’ve found our niches. We’ve made new friends, lives and lovers, and had two decades of successes and failures. Any me and any you, every me and every you, that we knew, is gone. That person is a ghost now, living on, spectrally, in the occasional haunting of a thought.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer That person has ceased to actively exist.
It’s okay. Really, it is. I’m not one for nostalgia. I see time as linear, progressing. At least it should be that way. I always pity those living in the past.
Remember ____ ? Oh, man, I saw him a few years back. All the drugs we took in high school, I think they’ve rotted his mind. Or maybe he’s just going crazy.
Wasn’t his uncle crazy? Didn’t his uncle OD and die? ______ is way gone, man. He won’t even pick up his phone. I messaged him on Facebook, like three years ago, and he still hasn’t replied.
But yeah, I bring him up because the last time I saw him he was rambling about a person from 25 years ago, 30 years ago, almost, now, and he was going on about it as if it all happened yesterday. He was fuming, I mean, really, fuming, and ruminating over an incident from 30 damn years ago. He was there, in that time.
He was crystallized in that time. He was a hostage to that time.
That’s not me. I’m not a hostage. I don’t have Stockholm Syndrome. I’m here. I’m in the here and now. Look, I live thousands of miles away, oceans and mountains away, from our old neighborhood. I’m miles away from those days, literally and figuratively. I’m not there. That time is history. It’s over. Its sun has set.
Not that we can’t remember it. Not that we can’t learn from it. I’m trying to learn from it. I’m trying to grow and learn from my mistakes. But I’m not occupied by my mistakes. Even the worst mistakes. Even the most tragic of mistakes, mistakes that might still fall under a statute of limitations. Even the people I irreparably hurt. Even the people who irreparably hurt me. I’m over it. I wouldn’t say I’m apathetic. I wouldn’t say I’m bitter. I’m just… Over it.
I really hope you’re the same way. I’m hoping you’re not a hostage to those memories. Like when we got robbed at gunpoint. Thinking back, that was scary!
What if those hoodies had squeezed the trigger? One or both of us wouldn’t be here. 26 years ago, we’d have been dead, lying like stick figures in pools of blood.
Lying cold and dead next to the crooked basketball hoop in your backyard.
And over what? A shitty bag of weed? Maybe it was karma since you packed it with seeds and stems to fatten its weight... What if we angered the Ganja Gods… I don’t know…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer But no, I’m not dwelling on anything. I’m not there. I’m not in that backyard, on that balmy summer night, watching fecklessly, mute and hot with defeat, that certain sort of sunken, victimized defeat that digs deep as your soul…
And those hoodies, I think one was South African, from his accent, yeah, I don’t know, and I wouldn’t wonder much about what became of them.
They could be in prison, like _____, that bully from middle school. Did you hear that he robbed a bank, shot a police dog, and is doing 20 years in prison? Maybe they’re all off in jail together… The bully, the South African hoodies…
Or those hoodies could be CEOs of multinational corporations. CEOs of corporate cannabis companies. Or they could be like _____, living in their parents’
basements, tormented by voices and ghosts.
Isn’t that what memories are? Ghosts?
Like I said, I don’t know you, but I hope you’re alive. I hope you’re okay.
I visited the old neighborhood not too long ago. Both of our houses had been torn down. They were both torn down, built over, made into gaudy McMansions. It is strange to think that neither of our old houses exist anymore. That someone is living there, new families living in our childhood homes.
There’s a yuppie right now living in the McMansion that arose over your old house. A Saab-driving yuppie. A yuppie and his family, and they probably named their kid “Augustus” or something pretentious like that.
And Augustus is playing on a swing set, right where we were robbed at gunpoint.
Augustus probably sleeps in a room built over the room where you lost your virginity. He’s there. Augustus is in the present. Augustus doesn’t know our ghosts.
Nor should he.
Just think of it, there’s a person, right now, wearing your old clothes, wearing my old clothes. There’s a person driving your old car. There’s a person living in your old apartment, and you’ll never know him or her and they’ll never know you, but you have a connection to them.
There’s an outdoor city market in Nigeria that sells “Dead White Man’s Clothes,”
clothes donated to charities, clothes eventually sold on the streets of Lagos.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Someone in Africa is probably wearing your father’s gray corduroy pants. Your father’s corduroy pants and a Buffalo Bills 1993 Super Bowl Champions shirt.
But that’s the cycle of life. It turns and moves and will until the universe expands into a void. It’s the cycle of creation and decimation. There’s material from the Big Bang in your DNA and mine! And once we’re dead, our molecules will return to the atmosphere, into space, into the cosmos... It’s all interconnected, we’re all interconnected, and there’s a beauty and a horror to that...
How an atom looks like a solar system, and so forth…
Like the strawberry you ate that was grown in human feces, human waste trucked in from New York City. And molecules of every dead poet were in your soy milk…
It’s the cycle of life. Like how Walt Whitman wrote about grass being the hair of the dead. It’s like that. It’s all interconnected.
Pretty much, this very letter is a communication from a ghost to a ghost.
But if I’m ever a ghost, like a real ghost, I would probably haunt our old neighborhood. Haunt the house built over my old house. I wouldn’t be a poltergeist, though. I wouldn’t bother anyone. I’d just be there. Watching. As a voyeur. I could see most ghosts being voyeurs. Silent spectators. Ghosts watching the living like the living watch Netflix.
Wherever you are, whoever you are, whatever you exists now, I hope you’re well.
I’ll write you again in ten years. Let’s try to talk every ten years.
Sincerely,
_________
MIGOS SONGS
“Type shit… type shit… type shit...”
It’s a song by the Migos. I’ve been listening to it nonstop. I find its melody enchanting, its beat hypnotic.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer When I first listened to it, it made my ears prick up, and caused me to lift from my chair.
The beat animated me. The bass controlled me. The sonic vibrations, coursing through every inch, every fiber of my being. My body possessed. The spirit, the groove inside me, in every bit of my DNA, every blood cell, every synapse.
Now, anytime I hear Migos, I begin to dance. My arms thrusting in arc movements, my legs kicking as if I were Irish river-dancing. The spirit pacing me through various aerobic gyrations.
My body forming into a pretzel shape, a yoga position I cannot contemplate, as I stretch and wonder, contemplate the lyrics… What exactly does get one trending… Aside from a celebrity, or politician, who’s frequently in the news, anyway, or a disaster, a seismic weather event, how does one trend? And how does that correspond to one’s bitch getting hit?
And who is this bitch being hit? Why would the thing that brings that attention, that trending, why does it also lead to a bitch being hit? Who is this bitch? Who is she? Why is she being hit?
Is this a hit involving a hand or a penis? Or both? And is she only a metaphorical bitch?
It’s always occurred to me that hitting bitches, ala Ray Rice, is wrong. It’s not a thing polite people do.
However, the Migos posit this in hypothetical fashion. The Prodigy song “Smack My Bitch Up” was about dancing, or masturbating, I think I heard, but I digress…
Another Migos song I like. “Get from ‘round…,” go the lyrics.
Lightning cleaved the sky outside, first time I heard it, and it was as if the song were a message from God.
Get from ‘round! But where is the ‘round? Get away from around here. It’s been truncated. It’s trenchant, really, and easy to express disdain in this way.
I wonder who exactly the Migos were referring to, who is this person they have disdain for? What had he/she done? Like the bitch being hit, hypothetically, what was the purpose, the cause of this enmity?
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer
Altogether, the Migos’ songs are melodic, rhythmic, and fun experiences.
However, I was plunged into existential questioning. Wondering, who were the targets?
Admittedly, I was left with more questions than answers. Although I most enjoyed the musical stylings.
Note: This was written before the tragic events of November 1, 2022.
LOVE.
MOTORWAY TO BRISTOL
They’d been on the road for hours. The sky was soupy, overcast, a typical Bristolian morning.
“I just can’t get why the British drive on the wrong side of the road.”
“Maybe it’s you driving on the wrong side of the road? Ever think a’ that?”
“They say the sun never sets on the British Empire. So how come it never rises in England?”
“Oh, it rises sometimes. Like last year, once or twice. I think summer was on a Wednesday…”
“Right, we get a good stretch of sunshine. Maybe a whole day or two.”
“Is there a ‘bad’ sunshine?”
“Obviously you have never visited Las Vegas.”
“And I intend to keep it that way.”
There was a road sign they passed, for a place called “Black Boy Hill.”
“’Black Boy’ Hill? What the fuck? That is so racist.”
“Bristol was a slave trading capital.”
“Seriously? I didn’t know the British had slaves.”
“They didn’t teach us that in school.”
“Look, America was a British colony, founded by slaveowners. It’s deductive reasoning…”
“Fucking Paul Revere…”
“Benedict Arnold, the cunt. I bet he had like a whole cotton plantation.”
“Everyone had slaves at some point.”
“Everyone still has slaves. Do you have a mortgage, debt? A job you can’t afford to quit? If so, you’re a slave. A wage slave.”
“Fuck you! I’m not a slave.”
“You’re a slave to the man.”
“Who exactly is the man?”
“It varies, by context and place.”
“How so?”
“It’s whomever you want to blame for your problems.”
“The man is always responsible. The man is a scapegoat for your failures. It’s always the ‘man’ and not you. It’s always another person holding you back, another person in control. But at the end of the day, no one is really in control.”
“I remember a quote from Kurt Vonnegut, something like, ‘Hell is waking up one day to see your high school class is running the country.’”
“Everyone’s high school class is running a country, running the world…”
“But is it, actually, your high school class? Most governments are run by the elite.
Those are people who go to the best schools, are spawned by the richest families.
It’s the best of the best, the cream of the crop. They aren’t you and me. They aren’t everyday people.”
“Is that a bad thing? That elites run the country? Most people are fucking stupid.
Look at reality TV, comments online, the very existence of TikTok, or most popular entertainment. Would you want a random idiot from Twitter running the country?”
“I think that might have…”
“Oh, don’t start with that.”
“I’m a misanthrope.”
“You’re too pessimistic. Look, humans have only been around, what, 250,000
years, and the planet for four billion years? Look at the cavemen, monkey-men running around in ancient times, fuckin’ chased by sabretooth tigers, woolly mammoths and shit. There was a day and time that we literally had to hunt for our meals. Now you can press buttons and food will magically cook in a machine or be brought to your front door. Soon they’ll even have drones that fly food to you.”
“Think how George Washington woulda reacted if he’d seen popcorn popping in a microwave or been handed a smartphone…”
“How many people from today’s society would survive in ancient times? Like, the fat guy, the size of a milk cow, that we saw at the breakfast buffet today. Would he be able to start a fire? Run through the woods, kill, gut, and cook an animal? I
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer
mean, how many times have you eaten meat? But have you ever been hunting?
Have you ever killed and then gutted an animal?”
“I’m not Joe Rogan.”
“Exactly. But our ancestors were Joe Rogans. They were climbing trees, shooting arrows, strangling goats to death, fucking gutting goats and shit with nothing but their bare hands.”
“Nah, I’d be a vegetarian, I think, if I had to live in ancient times. I’d go eat flowers and grass. I’d be the original vegan.”
“Fucking hell, Joe Rogan got $200 million, and yet he still chokes animals to death with his bare hands.”
“Then can you say nothing’s progressed?”
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer HOW TO SPOT A DEAD TREE
Well, it’s not that easy. You might think the tree is dead. It’s withered, of course, the tree, it’s leaning forward, as if being pushed by a ghost.
But it might be alive. Because appearances are deceiving. It might be planted in blood. That’s right. Blood. There are regions of the world where witches converge, under the dark blanket of night, and they bring barrels of blood, then tip the barrels over, slowly and carefully, splashing and sprinkling the red liquid over the ground, around the exposed roots.
Why do they do this?
It’s unclear. There are folk tales of the witches trapping souls in the saggy trees…
The witches again arresting and imprisoning souls… That the soul inside the tree is fighting to break free, and that saps the tree of its sap, of its lifeforce.
Then there are tales of the blood, the captured soul revitalizing the tree, and that in ancient times, a goat or a useless person might be sacrificed for the good of the whole.
Then there was a folk tale I heard about an inspector from a township, a Swedish town, near the Arctic. There’d been many trees dying in the area. Trees unexpectedly dying, keeling over like a person in cardiac arrest. No one knew what was going on. So the local government dispatched an inspector, a learned man, a scientist, to gather evidence and inspect the trees.
It was when the inspector stepped in a puddle, and discovered blood on his boot, that’s when he saw a witch, hiding behind a tree. Her head poking through the branches like an angry bird, and the inspector noted the witch’s nose was long as a carrot.
The inspector shouted for the witch to halt, but the witch launched into the air, on a broomstick, and she stuck her tongue out at the inspector, wagged it like a naughty child, and then zipped off into the wild of the forest.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer However, in haste the witch had left behind a bucket of blood, and it was discovered the blood had been exhumed from a fresh corpse. That the witches were practicing a sacred, ancient ritual, gathering blood from corpses and watering the trees with the blood…
How many trees have blood roots? How many trees contain a captured soul? At this point, it’s uncertain. But it could be any apparently dead tree you see. So, please, if you’re going to fell a tree or cut a tree branch, be mindful… You might be sawing off someone’s arm…
DOOR DASH
The knock on my door jolted me awake. The knocking was loud. Police loud.
Groggily, I pushed myself out of the warm bed, and I was stung by the shock of my bedroom’s chill. Moving through my apartment, the cold weighed heavily on me… As if the cold itself were a living creature, an arctic octopus of sorts, clamping and coiling, burying its icy tentacles into my bones…
My teeth chattered. And I struggled to lift my hand to the front door handle.
But I prevailed. I pushed down the L-shaped handle, and yellow light from the hallway poured over me. The light was so bright that I squinted and experienced a headrush, a touch of vertigo. Then I staggered, my legs wobbly.
Regaining my composure, I slid my eyes open and gawked at what I saw. A box. A giant box, a giant hot pink box, had been left in front of my door. But there was no note, no invoice, and more curiously, no deliveryman in sight.
The box was tall, about six feet high, and wide, about three feet from end to end, but it appeared light, as it was made of cardboard. Stepping closer, to examine the box, I saw that my name was written in red ink on the front of the box, in neat cursive handwriting. Only my first name, though. No last name. And no address or phone number. Yet somehow the box had found me, had found my apartment.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Okay, I didn’t hear a ticking from the box, so I was confident it wasn’t a bomb. I’m also not politically active, nor do I have any diabolical enemies, so I doubted I was in mortal danger from the package.
I suspected it was a joke. Maybe a coworker playing a prank. So, guardedly, I took hold of the box.
While the box had initially appeared light, it was heavy as a boulder when I got my hands on it, and I was barely able to drag it inside. But I did. I felt like a coolie, or as if I were a sailor pulling in an anchor. But I persevered. And I brought the box into my apartment, flicked on the light, then popped my head out into the hallway, peered around in both directions, but again saw nothing.
Slamming the door shut, I cautiously inspected the box. It appeared more as a cube than a box and didn’t have tape on it. I couldn’t see any openings either.
Touching my finger to it, I confirmed it was cardboard, and not very thick, either.
So I knew what to do.
I ambled over to the kitchen, grabbed a boxcutter, and came back. Nervously I clicked open the blade, stabbed into the box at its left edge, and cut it open slowly, feeling like a first-time surgeon.
I had sliced open a flap. Now came the moment of truth. It was time to unveil whatever was inside the curious pink container…
My heart began thumping so hard I thought it might explode. My hands trembling like Michael J. Fox’s. But I steadied myself enough to tug the flap upwards and then to the right. As if a blindfold had been removed, my eyes bulged wide as I peered into the box and found something I never would have anticipated.
Another pink box. With exactly the same appearance. Only slightly smaller. So I cut into that as well. The temperature in the room suddenly plummeting lower, my breaths becoming puffs of mist, and I was feeling like a butcher in a freezer, slicing into slabs of meat.
Once I cut into the second box, I discovered there was another box, this one slightly smaller… So I chopped into that box and found another pink box, again with exactly the same appearance, and again only slightly smaller!
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Furiously, I cut into that box, and once more found the same thing. Another pink box, another spitting image, only slightly smaller!
So once more, I cut and cut, lifting out each box, my living room becoming an icy hot mess of empty pink boxes, the mangled, severed boxes strewn like felled pink soldiers on a battlefield.
My fingers felt like popsicles as I got down to a box that was about the size of a brick. Once I cut it open, I found that it didn’t contain any other box. It only contained a note, a simple, handwritten note, on a sheet of A4 printer paper, in the same neat cursive writing.
The note read: “Time is the more precious resource.”
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer
LOCAL GRAVESTONES BEGIN DISAPPEARING
I was hanging from the ceiling, watching a soap opera on my phone. A soap opera from another country. An Asian country. I’m not sure which one.
They were speaking a language that sounded full of peaks and rises, high tones, and guttural sounds, and not a single word I could comprehend.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer You know, I like watching soap operas from foreign countries, soap operas in foreign languages, languages I don’t speak. That way I can invent, imagine the dialogue. Soap operas are better that way, I think.
Walking across the ceiling, I decided to kick back, and I flipped and pirouetted, mid-air, then landed on my feet perfectly, like a gymnast. Then I stripped off my onesie, lay on the emptiness and depleted beauty of the oil-black dragonstone flooring.
A drone flew in through my only window, crashing through the portal-shaped circle; then a cold can of Belgian beer dropped from the drone’s belly. I caught the can with one hand. Then the robot performed an aerial U-turn, buzzed off back out the broken window, beeping twice upon its exit.
I cracked open the can and began sipping the beer. It was ice cold and refreshing.
I closed my eyes for a second, licked my lips and savored the fruity sweet flavor, felt thankful for the existence of Belgium, and then resumed watching my phone, which was propped up on my belly, right in the slope where my solar plexus meets my mountain of man.
Then there was a knock on my door. I was naked at the time, naked and drinking beer and somehow I thought the knock might be my houseplant playing tricks on me again.
Look, okay, yes, my houseplant says nice and terrible things. It says the apartment is crappy, but it’s mine, ours, and we like dumps. Dumps got soul. Dumps got personality and charm. This place doesn’t have a hole in the ceiling and no raccoons, either, unlike our last place, so, yeah…
I thought the knocking was a mistake, or were voices, sounds in my head. But then there was another knock on the door. This one louder. So I remained naked and set my beer onto the floor.
I barked like a dog, and crawled on my belly, toward the door. I kept hearing the knocks too. They were REAL! The knocks getting louder and musical, the knocks banging in a rhythm like a college football marching band. A drumline at an HBCU.
I rose to my feet and started dancing along to the beat, the sound emanating from the door. Shimmying, grooving and moving, doing old hip-hop dance moves,
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer like the Running Man, the Cabbage Patch, and one I invented that looked like epileptic sign language.
My houseplant told me to dress, so I bent down, scooped up a worn sock from the floor and slipped it over my manhood. Then I screamed like a heavy metal singer and very carefully pulled open my apartment’s door, which, in that moment, looked like a big blue block of rotted cheddar cheese.
Golden light flooded in from the hallway, and I smelled a noxious stench, as if hair were on fire.
Swiveling my gaze, panoramically, I couldn’t see a soul. But then I heard a cough, like someone clearing his/her throat.
Looking downward, I found a dwarf standing in my doorway. The dwarf was pudgy and androgynous. His face was a clenched fist. The dwarf was also naked, also with a crotch sock covering his genitals.
The dwarf’s hair was a tangled bush of fire, reminding me of an old Jane’s Addiction album cover, and the dwarf was holding a thin gray gravestone, hoisting it up in the air, like Moses with the Ten Commandments… This was probably the gravestone, I figured, that the dwarf had been using to drum on my door…
The dwarf coughed again, a hacking, throaty cough, and it concerned me that possibly the dwarf had the Wuhan Virus.
The dwarf’s eyes were narrowed, just two dark creases, and the dwarf’s nose was huge, took up half the dwarf’s face, looked like a small potato, and the dwarf’s mouth was so small it looked like the letter “o” in super small font.
After coughing again, the dwarf chortled and cried out, “Begin disappearing!”
Then the dwarf flung the gravestone, and the thin stone square landed at my feet, hitting the hallway floor with a thundering gong sound. The sound whapping me.
A massive wave cresting and crashing from the mistiest shadows… My heartrate rising, vomit pushing up to my throat… The sound then shedding its mass, molting into a low rumble, like a distant surge of the sea…
Fire quickly spread from the dwarf’s head. The bright orange flames washing over the dwarf’s tiny body, all three feet of it. The flames swirling to a lustrous glow.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Then the wave of flames practically erased the dwarf, as if they were an eraser wiping over a whiteboard.
In seconds, the dwarf and wave of flames were a pile of cinder, emerald ashes that lay in a triangular pile, like a pyramid… Maybe an Irish pyramid, if the Irish ever made pyramids…
And I wondered, this emerald, this green, did this mean… this was a leprechaun of some sort? And I wondered why he’d chosen to visit me. Then I remembered the news headline I’d seen, something about someone stealing gravestones. The dwarf must have been the perpetrator. Who else could it have been?
And why? WHY!?
Then I glanced at the inscription on the gravestone. It read, in large cursive lettering, “Local gravestones begin disappearing.”
JOB INTERVIEW WITH AN ASSHOLE
The office had a sharp chill to it. And it wasn’t just the frigid bite of the a/c. Nope.
There was more. Something in the air, something sinister. Walking into that office… The bad vibe was omnipotent, noticeable as a softball-sized coffee stain on a white shirt…
I had arrived for a job interview. A fledgling website was looking to add to its marketing staff…
This was before the explosion of smartphones and social media. This was Internet 1.0. The initial goldrush stage of the Net. The “Dotcom Boom.” When anything seemed possible. Where every day you could watch TV commercials featuring tow-truck drivers boasting of owning private islands and talking baby Internet millionaires.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer My own website wasn’t going anywhere, though, unfortunately, so I decided to gain experience by working for an established site, and I was hoping I could learn, make contacts, as I developed my ideas.
Hell, I’d only been out of college for a few months and had been temping, doing gopher work, answering phones and such, and I figured this job might be an excellent steppingstone.
But what I discovered certainly wasn’t what I had envisioned…
The awkwardness began when I entered the office. Like I mentioned, there was a cold, uncomfortable feeling just walking in there. Not that I’m one of those entitled pricks who expects smiles and red carpets, trumpets blaring upon my arrival, but the icy vibe I got from the receptionist at the front desk was discomfiting. The receptionist sat slouched in her chair, with a deathly pale, defeated look on her face. Upon introducing myself, she barely managed eye contact, and spoke in only timid, squeaky little bursts.
Walking through the office wasn’t much better. It was a big bright office, with sprawling floor-to-ceiling windows, sunlight spilling in from all angles. It was an open office too, with three rows of five or six desks, with no cubicles or dividers.
But instead of the conviviality you might expect in that open and effulgent a room, there existed only a gloomy silence.
Everyone, to a person, was solemn, and kept their heads down and their miserable faces pointed at their computers.
Walking through the office, I felt like I was at a funeral. The atmosphere was that morose.
When I stepped into the corner office, the boss was younger than I expected, not much older than me, maybe mid-20s. He appeared somewhat disheveled, thin, and his tangly mop of sandy brown hair had been pushed up into a frohawk, and his unshaven face was pulled into the puckered expression of someone biting into something bitter.
I might have expected him to rise, greet me, shake my hand, but he did none of those things. He remained throned behind a curiously tall desk. Sitting down to
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer the thinly padded chair facing his desk, it seemed more as if I were entering a courtroom than a job interview.
Gazing upwards, I screwed on my best smile and tried not to focus on the wrinkly appearance of his soda-red Von Dutch shirt. Perhaps he was one of those computer programmer types glued to a computer screen all day, the sort that didn’t care much about ironing his clothes. Or maybe he didn’t know how. Like, he could code, knew HTML but couldn’t figure out how to iron a shirt…
He’d also been neglecting his social skills, social proprieties. Not only did he neglect to formally greet me, he also didn’t even say hello or anything, just asked me plainly, with zero eye contact, “Why should I give you a job?”
I wasn’t prepared for that direct and pointed a question. I’d only recently finished school and had little interview experience.
But I rolled with the punches. I tugged my lips into a toothpaste ad of a smile and rattled off my part-time work experience, my internship, my current temping, plus I divulged that I was developing a website and had a passion for everything internet.
As I spoke, he appeared disinterested. He didn’t look at me and stared out the window or checked his computer. Nor did he ask any follow-up questions.
Then he again spoke plainly, asked, “What sort of salary do you think I should pay you?”
I began to answer that “I feel as though I deserve…”
Once I said the word “deserve,” his face went squirrely, then twisted into dismay.
His chest heaved. He appeared genuinely angry. He swung his gaze, curled his upper lip, and, for the first time, he made eye contact, shooting a pair of gray stink eyes right at me, lasering me with a look of utter contempt.
“Wait, stop,” he seethed, “’deserve…’ where is this coming from? Why do you
‘deserve’ anything?!” He really stretched out that second syllable in “deserve” too.
Again, I was dumbfounded. I was 22 years old. I had just stepped foot into the
“real world.” I’d been under the impression, my whole short life, that anyone who works, contributes to society, has a job, he/she should be paid for that. What was
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer wrong with the notion, the expectation that one should “deserve” to be paid for work rendered? What had I said that triggered him?
But, before I countered his insensitive remarks with any outburst, any execration, I had a moment of prescience, almost as if I turned the page in a book. I remembered something I’d read online the night before. That a job interview is as much about you, the potential employee, as it is about the company, the potential employer...
So, that being the case, if this tangly-haired man was such an ass in the interview, then what type of boss would he be? And those dreary folks in the office, that receptionist who looked like she’d just been threatened at gunpoint, it was painfully obvious this was a terrible, toxic work environment. A dark and evil place.
And I wanted no part of that.
I wasn’t going to waste any more of my time, or his, and so I took the high road. I lifted to my feet, thanked him for his time. I didn’t bother to shake his hand, and he extended no hand to me either. He didn’t even respond, at all, as I rose to leave. He just rolled his gray eyes, sneered, then returned to poking at his computer.
Walking again through the office, and its Auschwitz vibes, I passed the downtrodden receptionist on my way out, and said to her, jokingly, in passing,
“That guy is an asshole,” to which her face lit up and she covered her mouth with her palm and giggled.
As I left, of course I was disappointed it didn’t work out. But I also felt relieved.
Relieved that I didn’t take that job. Relieved that he was an asshole, from the start, and that I knew he was an asshole. Seriously, how much worse would it have been if I’d gotten the job and then discovered that?
(Besides, only a few months later, the website went bankrupt, died in the Nasdaq tech crash of ’02...)
From that experience, however, I learned an important lesson. I learned to appreciate people who let you know, in whatever way, who they are and where they stand. Even if they’re awful, at least I know and can operate accordingly.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer An asshole who lets you know he/she’s an asshole, is, in a counterintuitive, paradoxical way, actually a nice person.
A TALE OF TWO BROTHERS: THE LIBERAL AND THE CONSERVATIVE
For Sam Bankman-Fried
Stuart Monk hated family gatherings. Mostly because he couldn’t stand having to visit his brother.
Stuart’s younger brother, Sam, had gotten rich. Dirty, rotten, filthy stinking rich.
Not that Stuart was a slouch. He’d gone to Yale, had gone on to become a prominent figure at a conservative think tank. He’d even appeared on Fox News and wrote an op-ed piece for the Washington Times. But all that was dwarfed by his little brother, Sam, who, like their parents, was way on the other end of the political spectrum.
Of course part of Stuart was proud of his brother. How could he not be? Aside from politics, he rooted for his family.
In all honesty, however, it’d shocked him to see his brother become so wealthy.
His little brother had been something of a loser, had mostly stayed ensconced in their parents’ basement, sometimes working part-time, menial jobs but otherwise just playing video games, smoking pot and doing the stereotypical stoner thing.
But then Sam got lucky. Astronomically lucky. Lottery winner lucky. He’d been in a gaming chatroom and a buddy he’d met online had suggested Sam buy “Bitcoin,”
promising that the fledgling online currency was going to be huge.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Sam, admittedly high as the clouds in the sky, logged into his PayPal, bought $1000 worth of Bitcoin.
That $1000 initial investment eventually ballooned into 10 million dollars.
While money changes many for the worse, and heart-wrenching stories abound about lottery winners who lost everything, this dramatic shift in fortune actually changed Sam for the better. Radically so.
Suddenly Sam had confidence. He bought nice clothes and met new people. He reinvested and started a small private equity company quickly acquired by a larger private equity firm.
He got out of his parents’ basement and bought a series of luxury condos, all of which he flipped at a profit. Then Sam bought his 16-bedroom estate overlooking the sea.
For the first time in his young life, too, Sam was dating regularly. Very regularly.
He had striking beauties, aspiring models and actresses throwing themselves at him. His sprawling estate often looking like a modern-day Playboy mansion.
However, despite throwing parties to rival Puff Daddy’s, and shocking to anyone who’d known him as a teen, Sam had gone sober. And not “California” sober, either, but real sober. Stone-cold sober. Marc Maron sober… Wouldn’t even have a puff off a spliff or a sip of wine.
Money had become Sam’s new drug. And he’d become a prolific investor, too, maintaining his leadership role at his private equity firm and profiting immensely in green tech and progressive, civic-minded start-ups.
Stuart, after overcoming his initial shock and disbelief of his brother’s radical transformation, was eventually elated that he might have a potential ally. And a big potential donor.
Many liberals discovered themselves swinging far to the other end of the political spectrum once they got rich- once they saw how much lower their taxes could be under Republican administrations.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer But not Sam. To Stuart’s utter shock and consternation, Sam had gone the activist investor route and became more liberal, donated exclusively to leftist charities, and sent sardonic replies filled with goofy emojis to Stuart’s requests for donations to his conservative think tank and causes.
The situation had Stuart increasingly annoyed. Here were free market, laissez-faire, Milton Friedman-esque economics making his brother a multi-millionaire, and yet his brother was shoveling buckets of cash to these socialist, communist causes. Causes that would only cause taxes to increase, all the while grabbing away guns and infringing upon personal freedoms.
Stuart just couldn’t understand it, couldn’t understand how Sam, with all that newly acquired wealth, could stay a liberal.
Stuart, for the life of him, sincerely couldn’t understand why anyone (aside from those seeking welfare handouts) would ever want to be liberal. Particularly anyone rich.
Why? Just why? It’d keep Stuart up at night, twisting and turning…
Why would his brother throw money at crybaby, crybully leftist foundations, like charities set up to feed the homeless? As if the homeless couldn’t feed themselves? Stuart figured the homeless were just lazy and that they wanted to be homeless. Why hand those lazy, stinky slobs free money? Why reward them for being blights upon society, pissing and shitting in the streets like stray dogs?
And those pro-abortion groups? Hellbent on killing babies? As if condoms weren’t readily available? As if a life were a simple choice? To Stuart, it was revolting that Sam would act as their enabler.
And while Stuart was trying to raise money for the Police Benevolent Association, Sam donated one million dollars to a Marxist Black Lives Matter group and another $500,000 to ANTIFA. Sam gifted money to those thugs! Just who did Sam think was protecting him?
As if BLM thugs or ANTIFA would stop a home invasion or a mass shooting or show up to fight a house fire. To Stuart, it was unbelievable, utter madness…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Then there was the matter of respect. It was tough for Stuart to really acknowledge Sam’s success. If anything, in Stuart’s eyes, the guy was basically a lottery winner. He’d gotten lucky. No one knew at the time that Bitcoin would balloon in value, eventually fetch $68K per “coin.”
Besides, Stuart had always been leery of crypto and likened it to the Dotcom or Tulip Bubbles of past decades and centuries. Moreover, Stuart detested Bitcoin’s use in funding terrorist groups, drug dealers, prostitution and online gambling sites.
But there was no denying how Sam had profited. And there was no denying Bitcoin had changed Sam’s life. What’s more, there was no denying that this was a success story of the Chicago, George Stigler School of Economics that Stuart had always championed.
And thus, Stuart stirred in a strange mixture of resentment, jealousy, and admiration for his younger brother. While Stuart had long envisioned himself as the one residing in that mansion, at least if it wasn’t him, it was his brother.
It was just too bad, though, that his brother was a liberal.
It was always a harrowing, humbling experience for Stuart, visiting his brother.
The drive up to his brother’s estate took about 70 minutes, 20 of that up a winding road to the peak of a high cliff. Atop the cliff sat the mansion.
Every time he entered the estate’s tall steel gates, Stuart felt nauseous passing through the electrified fence encircling the estate. Stuart found the fence terribly, terribly hypocritical due to Sam’s unyielding opposition to securing the US/Mexico border.
“Would ‘no human is illegal’ still apply to anyone climbing Sam’s gates?” Stuart had always wanted to ask…
Steering his Ford F-150 Raptor through the mansion’s grounds, Stuart would glance around and feel like he was getting gutted by a carving knife. Especially when he compared the mansion to his two-bedroom, 500-SQF condo.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Sam’s house was like something off the cover of Modern Homes magazine. The contemporary style, blue glass-plated mansion nearly the mass of Stuart’s entire condominium. The mansion’s size and sleek architecture lending it the appearance of a fancy modern office complex rather than a residence.
To the mansion’s side was a kidney-shaped pool and a circular hot tub. Neither of which Stuart would ever dip into. And in the estate’s garage were a brand-new Lamborghini and a Tesla… Then on the garage’s roof sat a green helipad…
To avoid traffic, or if he just didn’t feel like driving his Lambo or Tesla, Sam sometimes summoned a helicopter taxi.
Stuart, burning inside, would often imagine that. Sam literally flying over the congested highway. Sam zipping right over that parking lot-like, rage-inducing, bumper-to-bumper mess. Stuart loved his job at the think tank but hated the commute. Sitting in his steel box, inching forward, tapping his brake pedal, moving in slow motion.
Even if Stuart loved his pickup truck, still, it was no Lamborghini or Tesla. And was certainly no helicopter…
Sharp pangs of envy paining him, Stuart would confront these thoughts with mantras, reminding himself of his struggle, what he would one day accomplish.
Stuart had big dreams. One day he’d move on from the think tank and be starting his own conservative news network, websites, and hosting podcasts and conservative radio shows, like his idol Rush Limbaugh. And one day, that’d be him flying in a helicopter, him up above everyone else.
One day he’ll buy a mansion, too, he’d assure himself. A mansion atop a hill. And it’ll be a far bigger and better mansion than his brother’s.
RUNNING AWAY TO BHUTAN
The bus rattled along its morning route. The summer sun was already scorching, city streets hot as a frying pan.
Besides the interminable heatwave, the downtown, in summer, at least to ___, had always felt hotter. Something about being bordered by towering office buildings, skyscrapers trapping in, intensifying the heat.
The city bus jerked, then hung a left toward a busier intersection. Then the bus rattled again, axles squeaking… The bus’s a/c straining, hissing in fits and stops...
___ crinkled his nose and scoffed at the spicy body odor stuck to his neighboring passenger. Silently, ___ pressed his eyes shut and wished he had superhero powers. That he could end the never-ending heatwave. Snap his fingers and set the city’s temperature back to a perfect spring day… Or that he could at least make everyone else in the crowded bus just disappear…
Except for her of course. His secret crush. The petite blond in the aisle seat a few rows up. He’d been watching her for the last two months. But, lamentably, as usual, he lacked the courage to do anything about it.
In his mind he envisioned being a “Chad,” confidently strutting up to her with the perfect pickup line. And he meant to do this. Several times. But just as he’d get the impulse, his throat would constrict, his tongue turning to sandpaper, his heart fluttering. Then he’d shrink, sink silently back into his bus seat, unable to rise…
Again a prisoner to his perpetual paralysis of fear…
So he kept his head down. Literally. Like most everyone else, he remained attached to his phone, scrolling social media…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The bus’s a/c was getting loud as a lawnmower. Whilst lessening the heat, it was feckless against the humidity, and a fat bead of cold sweat trickled down the small of ___’s back as he struggled to shift his weight in his hard, narrow bus seat.
Then the bus shook again, harder, rocking the passengers back and forth, almost like a roller coaster. This bus route had several potholes. And today they seemed worse than ever. Steadying himself in his seat, ___ felt a stab of queasiness, then a rush of blood went straight to his head.
On IG, scrolling through so many perfect pictures, ___ wondered if IG influencers ever rode buses. He’d never seen an influencer in person and wondered if they really were their pictures… And he wondered what they looked like without make-up and beauty filters… Or if the influencers were just as fake as politics and professional wrestling… Or if the influencers were just AI, bots designed for the algorithms and imitations… If they even existed…
“Phones are like us, they get old and they die,” he could hear an elderly woman, a nun, saying to the young man seated beside her. The young man, in a black Raiders stocking cap, sat grimacing and shaking his phone violently.
The queasiness passed and ___ felt slightly better as he lifted his head up a notch to steal another glance… at her…
The blond entered his thoughts, daily, several times.
During the day he tried to guess everything about her. The sound of her voice…
Her favorite food, favorite movie, favorite song, favorite season of the year... He’d see her tying her curly blond locks into a ponytail with the same baby blue scrunchies, so he imagined baby blue to be her favorite color…
At night, he’d fantasize about lying with her in a bed the size of a room. The two kissing and spooning. His hands cupping her upthrust breasts. Then his hands running down, to the warmth of her waist, over her hips. Then his hands hovering down, further, to her…
Then other times she’d enter his dreams. Her unclothed body bathed in an iridescent glow that swirled around her form like fog. And she’d follow and float over him, like an angel, close enough to see but too far to touch…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer God, there were so many things he wanted to ask her and tell her. So many things.
She just had these huge, electric blue eyes that were illuminated by everything he couldn’t summon the courage to say.
Only two days ago, they’d sat next to each other. And he could smell the fruity scent of her shampoo. His knee had even lightly brushed up against her knee during the ride, and the friction had caused a jolt of electricity to surge through his body, made the hairs on the back of his neck prickle, gave him goosebumps.
That whole 20-minute ride, feeling her body heat next to him… had his thoughts racing, his heart leaping like a rabbit…
That whole 20-minute bus ride, he sweated. Clenched his balled fists. Ground his teeth... To ___, it was as if they were passengers aboard a small plane, flying through a violent thunderstorm.
Sitting beside her, that whole tortuous 20 minutes, he felt feckless. Trapped under ice. He wanted so badly to talk to her. He replayed all their imaginary conversations. He envisioned a hundred different things to say.
The recent heatwave, anything weather, that popular new show about autistic gay vampires. There were a thousand ways to break the ice.
But when the blond reached her stop, his dream girl lifted to her feet and slid by him, without any eye contact. And he just sat in his narrow bus seat with his lips in a tight line, his head hung low, his face to his phone.
Once again, he’d said nothing.
As usual, ____ watched the blond step off the bus at the stop before his. He knew she worked at the dentist’s office with that tacky neon logo on its storefront.
____’d thought of going there for a tooth cleaning just to have an excuse to talk to her. But that would be too stalker-ish, he thought. She’d know he was the guy from the bus.
Then he thought of doing the “secret admirer” thing. Sending a big bouquet of flowers, along with a poem, to the blond’s work. But he lamented that that would be even more stalker-ish…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Finally, the creaky old city bus arrived at ____’s stop. Through the grimy bus window, he glanced up at his office building. The colossal building, from afar, looked like a big silver fist thrust up at the blue sky.
A V of white swans was flying toward the egg-shaped lake in front of the office complex. The lake looked shallow and sickly and was bearded by unnaturally neon algae. ___ wasn’t sure if the lake was real or manmade. And he couldn’t understand why the swans were flocking there but he envied their freedom, ability to fly wherever, whenever.
Perhaps that’d be the superpower he’d choose. The ability to fly. ___ pondered that that could be even better than controlling the weather or making people disappear. The ability, the strength to lift into the air and soar, to fly whenever, wherever, like a swan…
Stepping off the bus was like walking into a wall of hot air. The strong sun setting upon him, with its wide orange crush…
His loafers heavy with heat, he padded forward, perspiring in the coiling cotton prison of his work attire. His every sweat gland screaming open. Then he shaded his eyes as a cloud of dust rose in the road ahead, whirling in the summer haze before it melted into shadows.
Then he let his arms hang at his sides, like broken wings. His dress shirt and slacks suddenly slicked. His reddening face wet with sweat.
Through the humidity he lurched and trudged on, walking at a faster pace than he should, shuffling toward another bus stop. This one for a shuttle up the hill, up to the silver fist. Then ___ stopped and stood under the misty shade of the bus stop canopy, hiding himself from the wrath of the buttery sun.
Then ___ thought more about the blond. How he might be in love with her. But he didn’t even know her name. Was that possible? he wondered. Love at first sight?
Maybe it was. Maybe she was his soulmate. The person he should die with… He pictured them on an exotic honeymoon together. Somewhere thousands of miles away. Somewhere cold, snowy and mountainous. Somewhere where no one
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer could ever find them. Somewhere in the Himalayas. Somewhere… Somewhere like Bhutan…
The ugly heat, stifling, even in the canopy’s shade, caused his skin to flush and creep and heavier beads of sweat broke out over his arms. Bigger beads of sweat then glistened, streaked down his forehead like raindrops along a window.
Lifting his gaze, he gaped at his reflection in the bus stop’s canopy. He was clean-shaven. His complexion was pinkish but clear, albeit slightly weathered. There was a childish, babyface charm to his dimples. Puffing his chest out, his whole spirit was possessed with a determination to do better, to be better, to take the initiative… to be a winner…
Then he compared himself to the others in the bus line, wishing he were at least a head taller than everyone else…
Maybe instead of flying, the power to instantly grow tall, tall as an NBA basketball player, or even taller than an office building, that might be the superpower he’d choose.
He pictured himself and the blond, both tall as the Eifel Tower. He and the blond quitting their jobs. The two trampling over this godforsaken, furnace-hot city. He and the blond, trashing the city like a rock star wrecks a hotel room.
Him and the blond… kicking over office buildings, kicking the silver fist like a football… Him and the blond throwing skyscrapers like a petulant kid throws toys… Him and the blond moving mountains… Him and the blond, running hand in hand… Him and the blond so tall they clear thousands of miles with each stride…
Him and the blond on their way to a honeymoon in Bhutan.
The employees moved in single file. Each with a look of dark emptiness as they trudged forward, lockstep in a pageantry of silent pain. The workers’ lips pursed as they streamed into the cool mouth of the silver fist.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Everything and everyone at _____ Corp. was serious. Everything highly regimented. Rules strictly enforced. One of ___’s former coworkers had joked that the company was similar to Singapore.
“And Singapore is Disneyland with the death penalty.”
The was a hierarchy of everything at the firm. Bathrooms, elevators, breakrooms, cafeterias assigned by departments, seniority. Upper-level executives and contract workers, like him, rarely met face to face.
The bosses, to ___, were like the IG influencers. They existed in another realm.
His loafers clicking on the linoleum floor, he shivered in the a/c’s powerful blast.
Cold shock proteins pulsated through his system, and he watched his feet fall forward, one after the other, and imagined his bosses, the corporate bodies, in their fancy suits.
He imagined the bosses as alternate lifeforms, or as parasites, mosquito-men, shape-shifting vampires, plastic straws for fangs… Aging men and women bathing in blood-filled bathtubs.
He saw the boardroom full of vampires sipping intravenous blood bags. Then more vampires in smoky chiaroscuro backrooms, their black blazers billowing like sails...
He saw the boss beasts giving rise to chemical reactions. The boss beast vampires in hidden tunnels, repairing to secret hideaways, cloud-shrouded volcanos in violent seas.
To ___, the bosses were the truest ___, for they cloistered in coffin-like cigarette boats, and hung neatly in catacombs. For they repaired to small land-like masses sticking up above dark waves… They simply didn’t exist until they did… Just like death to most…
Waiting on the designated elevator, invisible ropes of an intense chill coiled around him, and a chemical smell crept into ___’s nostrils. ___ felt touched by watery tentacles, tendrils of an unknown force. His mouth snapped shut. Then he started to sense his calm silence careening toward a screaming panic.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer But as __ realized his reflection in the steel, he relaxed as he saw the tranquility of his poker face. He knew his hands were steady, holding his briefcase. Then he thought of the blond, again, and felt better.
SCENE ON A TRAIN
The train was inching in toward the station.
In the carriage, there was a hum, a mechanical whir. A light buzz, not unlike an insect nearby, and a light din of chatter.
The carriage was full. It was first class, so there were men in business attire. There were the well-to-do of society, pink-faced middle-aged ladies in pricey clothes, and diplomats, and the indeterminate, those who could afford to travel luxuriously.
The normalcy was interrupted by a sudden pop, like a balloon bursting. The train grinding to a screeching halt.
A sweaty beige man in a black velvet jumpsuit jumped up from his reclined seat.
His face was oily. He had what was left of his hair plastered to his head, which was oddly shaped. His skull pointy and slanted to the left, almost as if a chunk of it had been hacked off.
The man trembled and shouted “homo technicus! ” and then began screaming, passionately, in a language that no one could comprehend. Then he pried open the window next to his seat and attempted to debouch from the train, but in the process got stuck in the window, bisected at the solar plexus, his upper body hanging outside the carriage, his thick arms dangling and flailing, spittle dribbling from his open mouth as he bellowed his acidic bursts of incomprehensible babble.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer No one attempted to pull him back in. The train service workers, the ticket checkers, the attendants, simply stood and watched, transfixed, as he threw around his limbs, roared and pitched a fit.
A couple of minutes later, once the train started moving again, the flailing man suddenly went limp, his floppy body then sliding out the window, landing like a bag of rocks in the verdure.
PLAYING TAG WITH THE GHOST OF DWAYNE HASKINS
I knew there were more than vultures. I’d eaten bruised fruits. I’d long tangled with invisible barriers and punched my wall and kicked my door, argued with God more times than not.
It was again morning, and my hair was a hornet’s nest, and I puckered, felt like an ass…
Yes, it was again morning. And it was a cold morning in Miami. The sunrise had thrown a pinkish hue over the horizon, and in the big beautiful clear sky flew a little man in a bird suit. Under his bird suit, I knew he was naked, and I wondered if he was the medicine man on IG who’d been kidnapping housecats for Hoodoo rituals. Or was he the stuttering prank-caller from YouTube…
The little person looked sketchy. Under his bird suit, I knew he had gashes, cuts along his stomach. There was a glint in his eyes that rubbed me the wrong way, though I envied his ability to fly. Think of the time, the cash he must save on plane tickets...
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The little man in the bird suit crash-landed, bellyflopped on the highway. Then he was walking behind me, backwards... I’d also been walking backwards alongside the highway after playing tag with the ghost of Dwayne Haskins. I was en route to the beach to hit golf balls into the ocean.
I kicked off my flip-flops and spun to meet the birdman.
His face was uglier than Beetlejuice. His eyes were like two deep pools of septic tank sludge, giving every hint to what dwelled in his soul. This was Florida, after all, and he might be about to eat my face like a bath-salt snorting zombie.
But no. The birdman just said, “I am the show!” and flapped his wings and levitated, zipped away into the air, in an arc, a rainbow over the highway. I was overtaken with jealousy, enraged that everyone was flying but me.
It was then that memories of cocaine beaches rushed back to me. The hills to climb... I figured a cocaine mountain, tall as K2, was where the birdman lived.
I wanted to go there, find the mountain. I’d always appreciated the smell of cocaine…
I pulled out my penis, to hitchhike, then rode on the hood of an empty Tesla that’d been driving recklessly and had burst into fire shortly after it’d abruptly braked and rolled me off its hood, tumbling me into a mess of garbage bags bunched on a street corner.
Lifting to my feet, I plucked a fish spine from my mohawk, flicked it at the sky and began to run backwards. I was sunburnt, red as blood, and drenched in sweat. I was ready to relax. But instead of the laidback atmosphere I’d anticipated, the beach, the boardwalk were bedlam.
Enraged packs of obese social justice warriors were everywhere and were wheezing, trying to run. In between heaving breaths, they stopped and swung dead cats like nunchucks while screaming at the sky, threatening no one in particular.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Looking to my left, window washers were scaling a 100-foot gold penis that’d just erupted from the Atlantic Ocean, like a leviathan. The window washers themselves painted pure gold. The window washers were yelling at birdmen standing atop the penis’s tip. The birdmen launching like fighter jets, flying off into the pink horizon.
Again, I was outraged. I couldn’t find my golf club or my golf balls anywhere. And why was everyone flying but me?
Then I figured that if I snorted enough cocaine or bath salts, eventually I’d understand.
After all, this was Florida.
RHAPSODIZING THOUGHTS
GO ON! The thoughts were impaling me. Each thought sharp as a knife. Each thought taking on its own life, swirling and forming a pattern. Then each thought blended into the next. A sequence of patterns. An equation of imagination.
But it was then I realized my thoughts are mine. It was then I reined the critters in, gave them names, proper classification. Particular attention. A Catalogue. And I organized the arc of their direction.
The thoughts, traveling down my synapses. They break, open, yell and fade.
Before I fought them. But now I’ve embraced them. I’ve learned their tilt. I’ve oracy to draw for the sides. I learned to love the short stick in the pudding.
It’s this. It’s how and when I let go. It’s how I talk to myself. When I have a discussion with myself, I find my edge. I’ve learned to live inside the falling moments. And I’ve learned to exercise the nothing.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer SLOW-MOVING HORROR SHOW
It’s a slog. A slow-moving horror show. I think that’s the best description I’ve heard yet. A slow-moving horror show. It’s horrible, but it’s not, like, plane crash horrible. It’s not a wild, spectacular explosion like a plane crash.
It’s slow. A creeping death. A crawling, unseen menace. Perhaps because of its invisibility, many deny it. Many require visual proof, evidence, smack dab in front of their eyes. If they don’t have that, they simply won’t believe it’s real.
Those who can, without a doubt, affirm that it’s real. They know it’s real. They see it firsthand. They know what it is.
Just why do people have such a hard time accepting it? I can’t understand. But I can understand. It’s that invisibility. And anger, insults, threats and affirmations fail to register. Some people simply won’t believe anything until it happens to them…
I pondered that today, passing by a man on the street. He appeared around 40
something. He wore no shirt. He was morbidly obese, his blubbery belly flopping and spilling over the stretched waist of his elephant pants. In another situation, he might be heading for an afternoon on the beach.
But no. He was walking down the street. A crowded city street. He was holding plastic bags in both hands. Both bags full of packaged foods. Potato chips, soda, and of course, Bud Light beer.
These days, sure, people are highly combustible. Nerves are frayed. But not him.
His Zen of potato chips and Bud Light shouldn’t be an instruction. But there’s still a lesson.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer SHANIA TWAIN HILLBILLY NIGHTMARE
Ever since the Floods, Irene’s nightmares were worse than ever…
Shadowy figures on the horizon. Chasing her. Knifing through trellised shadows, craggy mountain tops, cold forests…
Irene didn’t know exactly who the figures were. She just knew they were after her.
The offenders she styled as hillbillies, country hicks. Rednecks. Some had skulls visible under their skin. Some were shadows. The offenders often emerging from afar, from dark air, running roughshod, like wolves, through the forest…
Her menacing hicks in grease-stained overalls… Others berobed. In robes of red.
Cold trickles and bloody noses peering from underneath the dark corona of their cowls…
… hicks lying in wait with crossed eyes, gaping mouths, cracked, dirty lips. Hicks whistlin’ Dixie in the darkness…
But the hicks generally wouldn’t scream or speak to Irene, aside from yeehawing.
Most of the hicks only hissed like striking vipers… venomous silvery sparks leaping with their spit as the hicks’ red robes went snapping with the wind.
The heaviest hicks stalking Irene under skies the color of a corpse...
… Hicks’ breath fogging, blood streaking down the bumpkins’ faces as the aggrieved hurdled toward her… running as bulls escaping the rodeo… the hicks’
pulling penis petting-zoos like pits of snakes… outstretched hands clawing up from the ground…
The hicks’ cold fingers crawling up and over Irene’s limbs like cockroaches...
In these dreams she’d run. Barefoot. Through the forest. A hunted animal. Irene in Daisy Duke hotpants and a Hulkamania T-shirt. Freezing winds stealing her screams.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Her feet frozen, Irene ran wheezing, her wild bursts of breath becoming clouds of crystals sparkling silver-blue in the white wilderness… The forest floor opening in front of her as a treacherous carpet of rotting leaves. An icy surface crackling, crunching. A minefield.
In these dreams, the Shania Twain song “I’m Gonna Getcha Good” was often following Irene, playing from somewhere above. The twangy guitar melody, bass pounding in deep booms. The song maddening her as she panted and ran on dumb feet; menacing hicks’ hisses sounding from all around, the cacophony of noise ever louder.
The hillbillies closing in.
Cold touching her skin, in these dreams Irene shook tremulously, puke caught in her throat… In these dreams, whichever way she ran, the rednecks were there, in blood-colored robes, filthy overalls soiled as used toilet paper; their whiskery, leathery faces like ghouls.
But the hicks then burnished into the back of Irene’s eyes as she’d scream awake to silence. Her jaw then clenched with such force her teeth might shatter…
Tangled in her blankets, twisting this way and that, Irene would then clutch at her sheets like a parachute, waiting for lines of light, for night to melt into morning.
… waiting for her cornbread, for her hillbillies to hide like cockroaches from the sun.
Then there was the recent spate of truck dreams. Clattering along a crescent-shaped road in snow-capped mountains… Moonlit hills… Hoary peaks... Colossal cauliflower trees growing taller. A pale white haze deepening the distance.
The vehicle, a Ford F-150 pickup, was covered in Confederate flags, MAGA stickers and was driving itself, forcing on, fast as a demon. “I’m Gonna Getcha Good”
again blaring… An Irene’s hands handcuffed to the wheel... Disdain stirring, tremors of rage overtaking her as she gritted her teeth. But she let the vehicle fall forward. Kept quiet as a painting.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer After all, politeness was her pedigree. Even in nightmares, Irene would remain a smiling woman. Wouldn’t let the cracks show.
Even in nightmares, she knew a smile would be the perfect panacea. That a perfect smile could keep her teeth from falling out...
♪… Just like I should… ♪
… drew in a draft of wet air, felt her front teeth loosen along with the muscle spasms, then let the wheels rock on…
♪ … if I can have you for life… ♪
The pickup shaking, rattling. A human shriek, then a “yeehaw!” coming from under the wheels... Irene would worry the truck’s wheels might pop off and she’d be stranded in the cold mountains, alone. Alone and handcuffed to a heap of iron.
Or chased into eternity by fat hicks piggybacking smaller hicks, mountain lions ridden by hillbillies… Hunted like a pig by Forrest Gump in a Bigfoot costume...
An Irene vanishing… a suicidal snowman jumping into a sweet tea jacuzzi.
As a city person, Irene had long been terrified of wide-open spaces, rural areas.
Especially mountains. Mountains scared her most of all. The altitude. The dense thickets of trees, scrub, bushes. The invisibility. The likelihood of avalanches, forest fires, flash floods… The inevitability of hicks, hillbilly sightings…
Just what were mountains anyway? Chunks of the inner earth jutting up. The Earth’s ugliest teeth… The Earth’s vaginal dentata…
Mountain people especially horrified her. Scared her worse than circus clowns.
Even before she watched the film Deliverance, but after that…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer She pictured country folk as meth addicts, doomsday preppers, rapists, freaks who fucked their family members, tall obese men with scruffy ponytails, oil-stained overalls, mouthfuls of missing teeth. Mullet-headed monsters who smelled of body odor, ate roadkill, and watched NASCAR. People who belonged to hate groups. People who drove monster trucks with those big garish tires tall as boulders.
The sort of people who thought professional wrestling was real…
The news coverage of the Floods’ devastation was unavoidable, and Irene’s dreams kept sliding, becoming darker... In her darkest dreams, be they alone in the woods, or in a bumpy truck, she could feel the creep of a colder emptying...
And the hillbillies were her culprits. Even if millions of hicks were amassed underwater, in watery graves… or be they running toward the tornado in the trailer park…
Her hicks were privy, collecting Irene’s debts. Her every breath fueling their fury.
Burning their Bibles. Her antagonists malicious, colder than shirtless men on Cops.
Irene’s scariest dreams had come to feature hillbillies’ tongues, their salivating, sloppy wet tongues licking over her naked body. The hillbillies airborne. In flight.
Flying by her. Kamikaze. Fast as fruit bats. Hicks themselves slack-jawed and singing twisted, falsetto karaoke versions of Shania Twain songs to the sounds of distant farts and burps. The hillbillies aloft, tongues jutting out like madmen. The hillbillies licking Irene’s face and neck as they flew past before repairing to bare, snowy branches… in distant trees, like the hands of skeletons clawing at the sky…
The rednecks hiding in tree branches, slapping their bellies, screaming snow off the mountaintop. The flying hicks barking like angry dogs yet remaining patient as vultures.
… or Irene alone, naked, lost in the woods. Freezing in blue skin. Seeing no hillbillies, but sensing and suspecting the mountain folk hunting, walking on all fours, peering from tunnels, abandoned mines. The hillbillies wiring banjo-bombs, setting beartraps, spitting watermelon seeds in her general direction.
“Not giving a fiddler’s fuck.”
In these dreams, smells were stronger, and Irene could smell alcohol, like a rubbing alcohol, and sense the hicks, in their hovels, sipping moonshine. She’d sense rednecks constructing outhouses with bed-of-nails toilet seats, torture chambers for urbanites...
Then there were her recent dreams of hillbilly sister-wives, daughter-wives, the hillbilly witches... Irene was terrified of them too… The vile, fat, bubble figures pointing at her from afar, hitchhiking via middle finger… The witches creeping and crawling on the side of the road, slow as the tides…
Irene hated the witches’ round faces, their sickly ashen hues, their ragged clothes.
The witches dressed in tattered robes of red. She knew the hillbilly witches were onto her, floating like ghosts up in the mountains… Woods witches uglier than Marjorie Taylor Greene… … with broken teeth and blotched faces, close-set eyes and weak chins… Cunts stealing the cotton from clouds…
Irene knew the hillbilly witches as total fucking terrorists, feeding on shadows.
The redneck witches omnipotent as her every fear.
♪ … Don’t try to run…♪
Irene was sleeping fitfully and waking at 3:30 a.m., pretty much every night, her mouth dry with dread. Then she’d jump out of bed, pad over to the bathroom, her slippers whispering across the marble floors as she squinted her eyes.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer In the pink of her bathroom, she’d open the lights to spot her reflection, and she’d see her face puffy with sleep, her hair like a bird’s nest, her age showing, her frown lines deepening, crow’s feet digging into her face like claws.
Irene wanted to blame the light. And she knew that she should stop watching the news, the Floods, the live feeds. But she just couldn’t stop.
… Irene sometimes wished she could hear her father and mother’s voices. She wanted to remember what they sounded like, as she heard them, not as she remembered them, not as they sounded on tape…
… Her fleeting images…. Father and his gayness… Her gay father and his manicured hands, his Audemars wristwatch… His anthrax evenings, glory hole at the ballet…
Her mother, the couch creature believing in Coca-Cola, commemorative plates, spoons from each state… Her mother never ever stressing the initial syllable in
“insurance” or “guitar.”
… Her mother’s trembling phobia of elevators... Her mother walking up and down 15 flights of stairs…
The family once cloistered under a chandelier that looked like a billion bits of broken glass…
So much of Irene’s life was spent in the air. In the sky. In her high-rise apartment.
At her job. In a spiraling office tower, with its silver trim and gold-tinted, glass-plated windows. Its ergonomic furniture and sweeping city, park views.
Sitting in the office, under butter-soft fluorescent lights, she’d gaze out at the window washers dangling from adjacent skyscrapers. The window washers held
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer by harnesses and ropes, the men and women pushing their squeegees, sweeping scrubbers over windows.
And she’d watch them as they descended in their boxes, as they were hanging outside her window. And she’d wonder what that would be like, to be a window washer. To be in a dangling box, high in the sky, scrubbing muck off a window.
“Scrubbing a toilet is a human experience… But scrubbing a window? Even at the Burj Khalifa?”
Most of the window washers kept their eyes focused on their work. But one, a youngish, handsome man, with gold-colored skin, wavy, slicked-back black hair and a cute, crooked smile would sometimes glance at her, his wry smirk growing rounder.
Their eyes would meet like lasers. But coyly she’d look away. Then he’d look away, return to his work, and she’d resume watching him, watching his rippling biceps, his strong jawline as he’d push his brush, misting her windows with suds.
Despite his being so handsome, there seemed a desperate fury to him, a saturnine tilt to his big brown eyes, she sensed, as if his eyes were two bottomless pits of pain. Yet his boyish face retained a certain purity, an innocence, like a puppy dog’s…
“Hit’s a’ hunger,” a hillbilly witch in the passenger seat whispered. It was a terrible telepathy. The woods witch, with a face like a pile of shit, was opening the Ford pickup’s door as the truck sped up a twisting, snow-carpeted mountain road. The witch then sprang from the moving vehicle, and her whole wide body shattered like a glass bottle as she bellyflopped onto the road, then disintegrated, white as ice, molting in with the snow.
The Shania Twain song, “Man! I Feel Like A Woman!” started playing loudly, the bass bumping, blood dribbling from an Irene’s ears…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Then another pickup truck dream. And Irene was the truck. Her hands and feet were wheels. A cell phone shoved up her ass. And Irene was on all fours, like a mechanical dog, careening downhill, on a curvy dirt road where she passed by another hillbilly witch as the Shania Twain song “Up!” sounded from Irene’s ass.
The witch was by the side of the mountain road, the road leading down to a diorama of a cookout at Capitol Hill… The redneck witch in a Shania Twain mask, the redneck witch pointing a big black dildo, carjacking an ambulance driven by Theo Von… The ambulance’s sirens silently flashing blue and red…
♪… I’m goin’ up… ♪
Then Irene was not a truck. She was outside of any truck, in another white wilderness, under a night like a veil of dark silk… An Irene in a chicken suit, standing opposite a chunky, naked hillbilly witch, atop a frozen hilltop.
The witch’s teeth were black as bugs, and there was a curious gray misting creeping forth as banjo music in the background was battling the hiss of an icy wind.
Then the mist changed colors and became a great green fire that licked over and swallowed the naked witch, then floated like a spongey fog. The mist funneling, eating into Irene’s mouth, burning like a scalding hot tea down her throat before squeezing her lungs as if they were balloons to be popped.
Gasping for air, Irene awoke to a pool of sweat, and lay comatose, awake but asleep until sunrise, wet and heavy under her slicked sheets.
The handsome young window washer began to appear in Irene’s dreams. The window washer and she in the Ford F-150. The pickup truck on autopilot, driving itself, as she and the window washer set their feet on the dashboard, played and poked at their bare hands, pretending they had phones, pretending they were palm readers.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Whenever the window washer was in the truck, it was peaceful and holy. She’d feel a comfort, a warmth, like being wrapped in a heavy blanket on a cold winter night. “From This Moment On” would be playing from the pickup’s speakers…
But there were other occasions when the window washer was air, and another man would appear in the vehicle. Another berobed hick. A bear of a man. A man with a shaved head and a long beard, a beard as long as a Taliban fighter’s. But this bear’s beard was red, fiery red, as if a burning bush were floating over his face.
Once the bearded bear would appear in the car, “That Don’t Impress Me Much”
would start playing… Irene’s front teeth loosening... The truck turning cold as a freezer. Irene drugged with pain and misery; her tongue heavy as a brick. Irene gasping for air as if choking on a chunk of ice.
The pickup then speeding up and driving off a mountainside... Plunging into a lake of blood… The music abruptly stopping, the needle scratching off the record as walls of dark red water cracked open the pickup truck’s windows, flooded the vehicle. The red bear swinging his head toward her, crying out through his huge beard, “YEEHAW!!” as all the life in Irene’s body froze in her veins…
Irene’s next series of dreams were soundless and centered around heights.
Jumping off tall buildings. Jumping off mountains. Jumping off bridges.
The jump. Then the falling. Feeling the purity of gravity. The pull, the suction of the force. But, every time, she’d wake up right before hitting the ground or water or pavement. Right before impact, she’d jolt awake, her mouth bone dry, her throat clenched. Sweat sopping the sheets…
Enough was enough. So Irene decided not to sleep anymore. Sleep had gone from a burden to a torture. The truck dreams, the flying hicks, the jumping dreams, the
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer bearded bear in the car, the woods witches, the hillbillies building torture chambers. There would be no more of this.
No more Flood feeds either. She was done with it all.
Once again, an Irene had flown in a squirrel suit to work, listening to Shania Twain’s “You’re Still the One,” on repeat, via telepathy.
It was a hideous morning. The wind heavy and wet, pregnant with frosty rain. The sky sloped, covered in sinking clouds, gray as a rat.
Outside the towering office building’s front entrance, it was a mob scene. A window washer had fallen to his death. His body, facedown, was in a starfish pose, the fresh corpse lying in a spreading pool of purply blood…
As Irene descended, she ignored the jumbotron displaying the latest Flood devastation. And Irene didn’t want to recognize the body, yet she shivered as a wave of sorrow washed over her. Then she noticed the medics, one of them unusually tall, the other with golden skin.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer
KANYE AND Q AT BROKEN CONDOM BEACH
Broken Condom Beach… A tropical paradise...
For a second, I awed at the island’s scenery. The sky above was like a big box of blue. The crystal-clear sea appeared calm, free of sharks. The whole place was perfect and pretty as a postcard.
Then I pushed forward. The sun bathing me in its golden rays. Swaying coconut palms powering my mojo. The afternoon was hot and the air soupy but not
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer stifling. Then a pleasant scent of campfire in the distance began tickling at my nose.
“Left, right, left. Left, right, left,” cried out Kanye.
For four months, on my fortune teller’s advice, I’d been following Kanye from 7-Eleven to 7-Eleven. For four months, I’d been fecklessly hunting for the QR code to disarm the ticking timebomb in my chest.
But today would be different. And boisterously, I flung my feet forth, in my sandals, digging my toes into the soft, warm white sands.
Kanye grunted, ran 10 paces, like a cricket bowler, got right up to the end of the sea and flung his phone into the water as we arrived at the rocks.
Here the beach had hardened, and the sand had petered out. Here the sands ended in a long path of large rock formations. Some of the rockery jagged. Some circular and smooth.
It was so unlike Stonehenge.
“Can’t get blood from a stone, see,” chortled Q. Q’s squawky voice reminded me of a 1930s movie gangster, and his face was like a lightbulb, his tunic the color of money… The same color as Kanye’s wrestler’s singlet…
We began to climb the rocks. One was shaped like a penis, another as a vagina.
The two unique rock formations in close proximity to one another.
“Oumuamua! Yes…” called out Q as he patted the penis rock.
The rocks remained mostly the same height and were tall enough to climb, jump between. Kanye was skipping between them, with a breezy ease, like hopscotch.
Here and there treacherous gaps cut between the rocks.
“Just one slip, and a leg, an ankle could snap. Easy as stepping on a twig,” warned Q, bringing a brief sense of solemnity. But the uncomfortable moment quickly passed, and we were again off jumping and scampering like a pack of happy squirrels.
Kanye was leading the way. He was in his element. There were no stops in his progress. Q and I went slower, were feeling like tortoises. “Slow and steady,”
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer whimpered Q, his bulbous brow slicked with sweat. Then a cottony cloud disintegrated and the sun bore down.
“The greatest heat lamp ever,” murmured Q. His face becoming gray with fatigue.
Then he stopped in his tracks and squatted and hung his head over the lip of a low incline-shaped rocky mass. Peering below, he wowed at the translucence of the sea, saying how it was clear as coconut water. Then he cringed at the seaweed, scattered formations of algae-covered rocks lining the seafloor.
“This sea’s an open mouth. A mouth missing most of its teeth,” muttered Q, ruefully.
The sea couldn’t have been more than a meter deep, but the coastline had risen into a high cliff hanging overhead, nothing but jungle behind it. Then I looked to my right and then to my left and could see only rocks. Massive clumps of cable car-sized rocks. Infinite, uneven piles of purply, gray, brown and black rocks. The rocks stretching out as far as the eye could see.
That distant scent of campfire was gone, too, replaced by only an omnipresence of salty sea air. There was no easy way back. Or forward. And not a single 7-Eleven was in sight.
But Kanye wasn’t fazed.
“It’s a small titty-shaped island. Eventually we’ll find our way,” was his reasoning.
But the Q-ster wasn’t convinced. He had the look of a man who’d just found out his wife was cheating on him. Still though, he wouldn’t be a crybully and he pressed forward, stringing behind us, wheezing and panting in shuddery breaths.
Further on we went. Q, stuttering and gasping, kept pleading to turn back, but Kayne kept surging forward, jumping and moving like Super Mario.
Despite his display of an almost inconceivable agility, eventually Kanye’s movements started slowing. A large scrape on his left leg was oozing blood. The side of his singlet torn. But he pressed on, flung himself forward.
Q was really slowing down by this point. His tunic hung in shreds off his shoulders; one of his sandals was missing; and both his knees were grazed, blood streaking down his shins. His hands had been bruised and bloodied, the flesh ripped. Yet his face retained a certain synthetic innocence.
“Another case study in false flags, crisis acting!” bellowed Q, in a strained voice.
The coherence of his syllabication was lessening. And he stopped again and stood rooted to the top of a silver rock that was shaped like an uneven capital O.
Kanye and I both knew it. Q wanted to slam the door and hide in his bedroom.
Click his heels and be back in Kansas. But the rocks were inanimate. And the sea had its own hunger, priorities and prerogatives.
Shadows puddled at his heels and collected under Q as he stood silent and sour.
In his sulking, he began blanching, giving him the appearance of a pasty ghost.
“So you’re just going to stand there and be miserable?! Quit like a coward? You’ll never break the internet!” shouted Kanye, his voice edged with annoyance, his eyes aflame with antipathy.
Q remained frozen in his halo of sullen insolence. He was choking back sobs and snorts and was ranting about Taylor Swift armed with a weed whacker chasing the dwarf from Game of Thrones through Central Park. Then about Anthony Weiner, in a bearskin, doing push-ups after chewing on Hillary Clinton’s toes…
My forehead was flayed; my skin peeling in the sun’s yellowy blast. The timebomb in my chest ticked faster. There was no consensus. We were lost. No GPS. No 7-Eleven. No nothing. The scene was turning into a horror show. Kanye, sensing the mood, pressed his palms together, dropped to his knees and cried out to God…
Then I spotted a canoe in the distance. In it sat a Hindu god, with 8 arms, the god holding multiple phones, snapping several selfies. Then I noticed that the canoe was near a small alcove, an inlet of beach bisecting the craggy coast.
In the inlet sat a 7-Eleven. Its exterior yellow and flare shaped. The building looking perfect as plastic.
Unfortunately, though, the rocks had grown taller, too tall to climb. The only way to the 7-Eleven would be to dive into the sea, swim around the rocks and crawl onto the beach.
I shot Q a tilted head, curious-puppy look, but in my heart, I knew he was a goner.
“Just go! Go on without me! Save yourselves!” Q screamed, his voice cracking.
Then he started emitting shrill breathless sounds as he squatted and hunched
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer forward. Then he began rhythmically slapping at the rock like a tribesman beating a drum…
“Imma let you finish,” said Kanye, deadpan. As he rose to his feet his mouth started curling at the corners, slowly grew into a psychopath’s smile.
In the lingering radiance of the tropical sun I could see diamonds of spit sparkling on his teeth.
Then my lower jaw fell to my chest as Kanye hissed like an angry cat and leapt off the rocks, plunging and piledriving into the water, and I shrieked and clapped my hands to my cheeks as Kanye snapped a leg on a jagged rock.
Ribbons of blood curled up and pooled into a dark red puddle encircling Kanye as he flailed and splashed. It was almost as if he were being eaten alive and pulled underwater by piranhas, sharks or cannibal mermaids as the last of his outstretched arm sank below the surface of the sea...
The sun suddenly felt 10 degrees hotter. The salty air balmier. Beads of sweat slid into my eyes; my skin scorching and stinging like I’d been set upon by a swarm of bees.
“Huh-huh, that sea is scarier than Lawrence Taylor. Better put some respect on it.”
I heard Stephen A. Smith shout. Swinging my gaze, I saw Stephen A perched atop a nearby coconut palm. Faint streaks of sunlit clouds gleaming behind him. The sportscaster bug-eyed, laughing hysterically and puffing on a penis-shaped pot pipe, his left arm in a sling.
Then Stephen A grew dragon’s wings and flew up and off into the luminous sky.
The sportscaster, in a blaze of weed smoke, coughing and cackling in his perfectly creased three-piece suit, the suit the color of money...
I swung my gaze back to Q and saw him standing atop a rock. Q was in a Jesus Christ pose, aging in reverse, quickly shapeshifting from a middle-aged man to a young man, to a boy, to a baby, and then to a broken condom.
Looking back to the sea, I saw no trace of Kanye, no blood, no bloated body floating in the water.
“Habeas Corpus,” I imagined Q would say…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer So it’d come to this. Sink or swim. But I wasn’t prepared to swim. I had a ticking timebomb in my chest. I was wearing a Bluetooth headset. I was listening to the Stephen A. Smith podcast. I was terrified of sharks. And I’d recently learned that both Kanye and my fortune teller had blocked me on Twitter.
But I knew what I had to do. I had to get to that 7-Eleven as soon as I could. I knew no one was coming. I knew my chest would explode or a rainstorm or high tides or breaking waves might wash me out to sea. I knew what I had to do.
Cautiously, I crab-walked and crept down the rocks. My hands scraped along the rocks’ rough, sandpaper-like surfaces and my palms and fingers became torn, bleeding and numb. Then my back began to throb. But I pushed forward, and I slid myself down further, carefully, stepping into the salty seawater like a crane.
Fortunately I found the sea only chest deep. The water warm and calm as an evening bath.
Walking in slow motion through the sea made me feel so unlike Jesus. Then the sharp edges of the stony seafloor stabbed my feet, sliced through my sandals. My feet felt like slashed tires, but I kept muscling forward, kept pushing on.
My hands were bleeding heavily, leaving red trails in the clear waters. My whole body felt like fish food. Then my back seized up as I doggy-paddled as every part of my body started screaming, screaming, SCREAMING!!!
I tried to yell for help to the Hindu god in the canoe but all that came out was a pathetic whistle of air. My mouth was so full of salt.
Swimming like Old Yeller, I set my narrowed eyes on that short stretch of white sands. And I marveled at the almost supernatural image of the yellow, plasticine 7-Eleven standing in its center. The 7-Eleven appearing like an oasis in the desert.
I would find gravity. I would survive. I would swim to that shore. I would find a new fortune teller. I would walk into that 7-Eleven. Even if soaking wet.
I would find the QR code. I would disarm the bomb in my chest. Heck, I might even drink a coconut water.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer
FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK
Mark and I had been coworkers in the same department for over a year. We'd sit at the same tables during lunch, and once or twice, we went with other office workers for happy hour beers.
But we remained acquaintances. The sort you'd see on the street or hallway and nod to or wave at, but not the type you'd stop to talk with…
I'm not even sure who added who, but once we became friends on Facebook, I started learning way more about him.
I guess our algorithms overlapped…
Soon enough my feed was featuring his daily posts, and I learned his favorite food was pepperoni pizza. Then I discovered his favorite band was Arcade Fire.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Then I found out his taste in film. His penchant for 1980s flicks. And I'd initially chuckled as he declared, unironically, too, it appeared, that Police Academy was a cinematic masterpiece.
But upon further thought, I silently concurred.
Then, as time went on, I got to see Mark's different moods on different days and was impressed by his ability to not let trivial annoyances like the broken copier or slow Wi-Fi affect him. How he'd use humor, funny memes to counteract office chaos…
Am I a voyeur? Perhaps I am. But not intentionally. I'd never set out to follow him or wondered what he was doing or checked his page.
It was just… day after day… his posts kept magically popping up in my feed, and, for whatever reason, I kept reading them.
Perhaps it was due to his posts' refreshing banality. Or his easygoing, Midwestern manner. He never once posted obnoxious stuff. He never ranted in ALL CAPS
about Trump. He wasn't spamming or selling anything. And he was only posting once, perhaps twice a day.
So I kept passively reading. Even after he left the company.
Normally I never bother to block or delete anyone without reason, like spam or too much finger-pointing politics, but sometimes I'll notice former coworkers delete me.
One former coworker had said that he prefers keeping his social media friends circle small, only people he has regular contact with, and when we lost touch after he left the firm, then subsequently deleted me, I understood.
But Mark never deleted me, and almost as if I were a regular, semi-interested watcher of a reality TV show, I kept seeing these random snapshots of his life.
Sometimes I'd see his posts daily. Sometimes once or twice a week. And I went on seeing them… For the next five years…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer
I saw him marry his girlfriend. Saw his new car. His new house. His new job. Then his next new job.
I saw pictures of his newborn daughter. Then saw his daughter take her first steps.
I never commented on a single post he'd made. Yet I kept receiving his posts in my feed. Right up to until his daughter's first day in kindergarten.
It was around this time that his father died.
I'd known Mark was quite close to his Pops. He'd posted pictures of them together, always out fishing, and he'd shared his dad's silly aphorisms.
I knew he'd take his father's death hard, and part of me wanted to reach out, send condolences. But we'd not spoken in almost six years. And we had never really known each other well. So what could I even say?
His next few posts came at longer and longer intervals. And he'd look rough, too, dark circles under his eyes, his face looking puffy, his skin terrible, oily and reddish.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The posts were of him faking a smile, snapping a selfie in the same, white-walled breakroom at his firm. The posts didn't contain a word of text, only his unsettling, strained smiles.
Then the posts stopped. I checked to see if he'd deleted me, but he hadn't.
Legitimately, I started to worry. Worried he'd gone too ham on the alcohol. I did recall him once saying that he limited his alcohol intake because he didn't want to
"wind up like his brother," whatever that meant, and I recalled too that he'd never posted any pictures of his brother.
Another month went by. Still, no posts. Not that I knew him well enough to be seriously, drastically concerned, but it was nagging at me. I had to know, just, something…
So I approached another guy in our department, a shifty-eyed fellow, who was rumored to be ex-CIA… He was a musclebound type with a shaved head and a cauliflower ear. The type who didn't talk to a lot of people…
Someone had told me he was a Libertarian… He was one of the few who'd been at the firm longer than me…
Mark had sat in the cubicle next to the Libertarian, and they'd been chatting when we were out for beers, so I figured it was worth asking about.
So I went sauntering by the Libertarian's cubicle, after lunch, and popped my head in and asked if he remembered or had heard from Mark. The Libertarian then swiveled in his seat, but kept his eyes on his desktop and said, softly, "He's gone."
"Gone?" I asked, straightening my tie.
"Gone, man," and he'd said this louder but without a trace of emotion.
And I think I knew exactly what he meant.
DEFUND THE POLICE!!!
