Water and Poison

It is a nice house. You would call it a cabin. In Honduras there are just too many critters to keep out. So, naturally, a sort of indifference develops. A tarantula under the couch, curled up and dead. Looked like an upside-down crab. Alright. Centipede crawls out of the drain. It's OK. Stray dog and softball-sized frog get in fight. Frog sits in puddle. Dog afraid of water. Dog barks at frog, then runs into my house. That's not good. How do you say bad dog? Come.

Gecko on the wall scurries a few inches and stops. Sits in one spot for twenty minutes then continues. The reptilian brain. Could smash it, but why? They eat the bugs. But then what eats the geckos? Well, why does anything have to eat the geckos? Your problem with geckos, not mine.

You must kill all the ants though. Because they are smart as shit. They will destroy your home. They walked right through the front door and into my room the other day. I followed them. Found them dissembling a Chiquita banana sticker I’d left in some pants pocket in the hamper. Must have had some banana still on there. The next time I just put the pants on. They all bite at once. That was the first time I could say, "I have ants in my pants."

So I asked Carlos, my boss, a father of two, a pious and respected man in town who is considered endearing to everyone he encounters, "How do you get rid of ants?"  He said: “Find where they are living. Dump boiling water. Then put poison."

I have dumped boiling water. Put the poison. But you can't poison rain. And it has rained twice on my bed.

Hustling out of the rain up to your front door. Fumbling with the keys. Almost there. Click. Yes. Into the still dryness. The wooden coat rack and worn dining room table. Pass the kitchen, the wires, open the bedroom door. Rain on both sides of the window. Raining on the bed. The cell phone, laptop, power strip. The oscillating fan shaking his head, sputtering like a a baby. We’ve got to get you unplugged. We’ve got to get you all unplugged. You stand there a moment and watch because it's incredible. And then get a bucket.

But then again, I get it.

I was making tuna sandwiches last night with a neighbor. She has a son. Good mother. Young. Kid was crying when we were leaving, so we stayed. Making tuna sandwiches. Then she turns to me, which is when I realize I had been staring at her hands. 
“You like lime?” she asks. “Taste good?” Very pretty.
I say yes. It would taste good. 
"Bring one," she says.  I look around the kitchen. On top of the refrigerator. 
"You don't have any."
“The tree,” she says. Then I remember there's a lime tree out front. “Get big one.” 
And I go in the dark and pull at the loaded branches and find many limes as big as apples.

This is Water

Couples sit and face the sun. Young people talk in a circle: a yellow one, a blue one, a green one, a brown one. The thing about epiphanies is that they’re nearly impossible to keep to yourself, and thereafter, they’re regarded at best as good ideas, at worst, common sense. Maybe the most important thing about having one is that you share it with the right person.

200 years before Christ, the Greek King, Heiro II, asked Archimedes, a mathematician, to see if his crown was pure gold or whether a dishonest blacksmith had mixed it with silver. To calculate the crown’s density it would have to be melted down—but Archimedes could not damage the crown. He was on a deadline and he had reached an impasse, so, worn out from puzzling, Archimedes sought refuge in the tub. But he was distracted and when he lowered himself in, the water spilled over the sides. He stood up, looked down and cried, “Eureka!” He had found the solution to the big problem by solving the smaller one. By dividing the mass of the crown by the volume of water displaced, he could figure its density—by weighing himself, teleologically speaking, he had weighed gold. That’s a golden idea. And he could have made a lot of it if he’d kept it to himself. But he did not even take time to dress before he took to the streets yelling, “Eureka! Eureka!” which translates to “I found it! I found it!”

I was wading in, bending over to toss the water with my hands. I wanted to see how other parts of me looked below the surface, but I could not see my feet through the moving water. And then I looked away and thought of the other things—the things one cannot help but think. And then I looked up at my mother’s bronze cheeks and her satisfied eyebrows and eyes that were savoring the flavor of the coffee in her mouth, and the nice summer weather, and the view from our street-side table at the cafe. I would like to take pleasure from such simple things. And then I looked down and I could see my feet and the rocks that stretched out underneath them. The solution to things, I think, is forgetting them for a while and then remembering.

“I don’t know.”

“What?” she said. And her eyes thinned, and I could not answer, and then she was standing in a lake too.

“Come in! Come in!” my mother was yelling from the shore. It was during the heat wave of 1995. We’d left Chicago for the Indiana Dunes to relax, swim, and cool off. “Riptide! You’re too far out! Honey! Rip! Tide!” People stood on their beach blankets saluting while others ran along the water. The water was fresh and dark out by the rocks, slapping against the rocks, and I knew that I was afraid. My mother was wading in. We often camped near lakes. Mom likes the woods—I used to assume, because my father was like the woods, but now she likes it on her own and she likes to swim—much more than me, but she does not like it all at once. She likes to wade.

You know how it feels when you’re walking into a lake or an ocean? Sometimes I can’t help but do it, but it never feels good—with the waves deciding how to touch and when. It was torture to watch Mom feeling so cold for so long—and so needlessly—so I would prove how silly she was by running out to the point where the water took my legs, lower my head into the darkness and push out hard underneath with my legs and arms with my eyes open, staying below until it felt alright to have been swimming, and then come up, wipe water from my eyes, turn to the beach to get my bearings and then see how things were in the same place they were before, but also not where I thought they would be. It bothered me so much sometimes, watching her tremble and wade, that I’d raise an arm and slap the water. “Just get in!” I would yell and she would smile and say that she was. She was taking her time. So I would go back to the beach and lay down on a towel and shut my eyes. Sometimes I would splash her—I don’t know why, because it ruined the whole day for her. She would walk back out and sit on the beach, looking like a stubborn child, and I would stay in the water because it seemed like I had to. Floating in one place, guilty and angry that we’d switched places.

“Do you ever feel like you’re being torn apart?”

“In what way?” she said, and I realized that I had asked her a question. But she knew I was not really asking her, and that familiar anxiety I feel when I think about how things change without me came in, and I retreated into my well-worn thought: What would I be like if I’d had an insensitive parent. A drunk that beat me, abused me, or withheld kindness. What could be wrong with me then? I suppose I would not have much time to think of that.

“Forget about it,” I said. The day was passing on. People rose into the white reflecting light of the glass tables and floated from the cafe back into the street looking a little uncomfortable and off-balance until righted by the crowd that swallowed them. It was still a nice day, but it did not feel all-nice anymore. I had not meant to alarm her. It was nice out. The street was full of faces. I really did not mean to alarm her. I pointed to a little boy who was throwing a misshapen ball against the ground. He watched in amazement as it bounced from the sidewalk to the grass, against the fence, zigzagging unpredictably until it rolled to a stop along the curb. He ran after it. A voice caught him from behind and he stopped and dropped his head and his mother picked the ball up and asked him: "How many times have I told you to stay away from the street?"

Why do children collect things on the beach? Show mother a shell and she keeps it. Give father a stone and he casts it across the surface of the water. There are plenty of good rocks. Some are great, flat as pancakes, and smooth and cool against your palms, good to hold but better to throw. And then you know how good you are at skipping stones.

We were both looking at the spot where the boy had been when she said, “I remember when you were just a little guy. It seems like yesterday you were—” she was struggling for the words “—like this!” she said, and placed her palm face-down several feet from the ground and squinted at me and looked old and smiled. She lowered her coffee seriously. “I used to wonder what you would look like grown up. I had these dreams where this man would be walking toward me down the other side of the street and I would look closely and realize it was you. All grown up." 
"How did I look?"

“Well, you were just so cute as a kid. Then, you still are. You've always been very handsome.”

“But don’t all moms think that about their sons?”

“Well,” she said, and looked sort of school-girlishly up at the sky, squinting, weighing what she thought about her son, and what other mothers thought about their sons. “It doesn't mean you’re not.”
We were not talking about what I wanted to talk about. How does that happen? Right. The boy and his ball. Gone now. The ball pulling the boy along the shaded elms. 
Many fish probably think there are fish shaped like human feet that live in shallow water. Many fish probably think there are fish shaped like the-fish-shaped-like-human-feet that are bigger and have legs and live in deeper water. Many fish probably think that there are fish shaped like the-fish-bigger-than-the-fish-shaped-like-the-fish-shaped-like-human-feet that thrash against the ceiling of the water and then swim below, with heads and arms and faces just like people, far deeper than any fish.

We were standing on the beach together when I was very young. Someone was taking our picture, and it is from the pictures that I remember that day. I don’t know who was taking the pictures. We were wearing jackets and long pants. Mom’s hair was permed and frizzy and we both looked ugly. We stood side by side and faced the camera. The sun behind the clouds made the look of grimaces on both our faces. It was a brisk fall day on the East Coast, the ocean behind us had whitecaps, shortly after my father died.

Have you heard the story of the three fish? It goes like this. Two young fish were swimming along when they came upon an old fish headed in the opposite direction. The old fish paused and said, “How’s the water? but he did not stop and the two young fish continued on their way. Then one of the young fish stopped and asked his friend “What the hell is water?”

I did not want to swim. It was a cold day and the water was grey and choppy, but Mom said she had to, at least, put her feet in. She looked at Gary and I and said, “We’re at the beach!” And we were. But it was fall and the whole surface of the water was wide. Repeating a cycle of grey, dark grey, and white. And the wind-whipped waves at the point of the sun on the horizon, the point where I often like to look (and maybe everyone does) did not seem distant from the place where my mother was walking. The waves crashing on the waves at the shore, and the seagulls above turning sideways, then righting as their bodies to go limp against the wind. I wanted to tell her to come back, to yell out, but the trees were yelling out, blowing toward the water, and I did not know how to say the words. “Oh boy,” Gary said, nervously, as she kicked off her sandals, “she’s going to be cold.” He did not know her well at all. And when I looked up, she dove in.

I wanted to apologize, for everything, but I looked down and found myself sitting where I wanted to be sitting, with everyone across from me smiling in the sunshine and enjoying themselves, so I did not say that I was sorry—because suddenly I did not know what I was sorry for after all; I did not wish for rain, or for time to speed up or to slow down. We would stay late together if we wanted, drink coffee, talk or sit in silence—one and then the other. The beach is pretty today. The wind is not hot or cold. And the air and the water where all the children are swimming is blue.

The Priest and the Professor

A priest asks the scientist how he can prove the existence of love. “Well,” the scientist replies, “evidence. With evidence that leads to an assumption.”

“Many people have this assumption, am I correct?”

“You've noticed.”

“I have. But love itself cannot be proven. Not even by a scientist.”

“Especially not by a scientist. For example, when I look at my wife, I do not look at her with the eye of a scientist. I leave all of that in the lab. When you get down to it, you have to admit that being in love is a little magical. I know my wife loves me. There are these hints...these glances and changes in her voice—the way our eyes and hands can talk with one another. The first time we met I felt like I'd known her my whole life. This is just evidence. There are some things we can't explain that we know are true."

“And that," said the priest, deeply satisfied, "is the same way I know my God.”

"Well—"

"Because he winks at me.”

"Ok."

The scientist nods—acknowledging the connection.

“Yes. I am married to the Church,” the priest continues, rising with his voice and holding onto his collar. "This is my wedding band!”

“Oh god!" says the scientist and the priest nods—misunderstanding disgust for revelation. "Does it keep you much warm at night? Do you get lonely?"

“Very much so. And no.” says the priest.

“Let me tell you flat-out Father. Pussy is better." The priest leans back in his chair.

"Well, I suppose nobody can weigh two things in the same hand."

(That was a nice image—even the scientist, Professor Blankman, had to recognize that. Father Maloney, the priest, took great pleasure in the subtle shift of atmosphere and allowed the scientist a moment to think—he was finding his answers unsatisfying. Yet he was sure of them. What was happening here? he wondered.

1. Father Maloney baits Professor Blankman into equivocating the unequal, into holding dearly-held intuitions—one for earthly love, one for heavenly—up to the same light, weighed in the same hand.
2. Professor Blankman's tools feel dull, but they have only been misused. Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's. Perversion in the highest degree! As such God's hand would be empty. Hoodwinked. Father’s intellect: retreat back to faith when the intellect becomes a burden. Know you truly own something when you can throw it away, I suppose. Men of the spirit always equivocating, finding spirit where they can. All caged up—there's a draft.)

"You're right!" the scientist says. "I suppose you are absolutely right. Your analogy is balanced. You religious folks do this all too well. Balancing. You're lauded for your consternation and prudence on matters the people have arrived at already. You criticize with most vigor the things you don't understand. I suspect it's because your first allegiance is to your own organization. And what you have to offer? The law, the moral code of the cosmos and their penalties. Judge, jury, and executioner! To be a simple subject of a tyrant and work to change what you can with the tools you have—that's what I do. I know I am not powerful, but I know I am not powerless. Your boss created hell—

"And Heaven."

“Oh shut up!"

The priest crosses his legs patiently.

"You wouldn’t know your dick if it were sitting in your hand!”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes, you do. It is how religion wheedles into the mind of man and divorces it from reason—from thousands of years of collective work, our human inheritance devalued by your absurd medieval preoccupations. It's much bigger than you think, Father. Much bigger and made for a better use. You can build a tower to heaven by loving right here on earth. You...you abiogenic flagellant!" ”

“Nice.” The priest is reclining in his garb, finishing the last of a series of yawns.

“Thank you. Sorry. It’s just...I didn’t really like Sunday school.”

“No, that’s OK. I heard what you said, but Lord have mercy. I ask you your opinions on love and you get angry. Come to a Mass. It’s not so much as anything you said but families spending time together. It sounds to me like a scary world you’re living in. If you say I’m missing it, I say good.”

“Well, I don't believe you know what good actually means."

"I don't believe you know what good actually means," the priest replies.

"I don't believe you know what good actually means," the scientist replies.

"I don't believe you know what good actually means," the priest replies.

"I don't believe you know what good actually means," the scientist replies.

"I don't believe" they say simultaneously and erupted in an enormous laughter.

"Agree to disagree?"

"Of course. It was a good discourse."

"I'd shake your hand, but..."

"I forgive you."
"Oh, great."

They were tied and handcuffed to a support column in the basement parking lot of the Marriott Hotel in Dubai. Three men next to them had been dispatched by the throat by a man with a black mask. They lay slumped nearby. The man in the black mask was on a cellphone, soon to be God's witness. He would stand over the priest and the professor and explain their offenses to God in Arabic, a language they didn't speak or understand. It could have been worthwhile if they did.

Full House

Herb keeps an old face in every room of the house:

There’s an immigrant’s gate that lines the lot

And a garden planted by a woman in 1901.

The yard is small and rectangular.

Vines grow up the lattices.

The kitchen tells him to remember stories.

The living room teaches him how to tell them.

The porch is gray and even

With dust.

And even a neighbor joked that even

The wind stopped calling
Those green-framed screens

That oscillate between life and death.

Guilt stays in the bathroom below the stairs

And abstraction
Sits in a shuttered bedroom

With a face that’s dark as night.

And when the upstairs hallway floods with light

It’s for youth and distraction.

But the foyer he left just for her

Because it reminded him of birth and salvation.

He never goes there anymore—

A neighbor moved an armoire in the hallway

To shut it off.

But on Tuesday nights, when Herb sheds his gown
And shuffles out and into town

Down to Molly's Pub to down a few downers down by the water,
The whole house is turned around

And the pictures turn their faces
And blink
As the door turns into a shutter.

So they wait for him—holding
Smiles—until he comes home drunk,
Opens the door, and lays face-down
Before them on the floor.

He was just playing playing cards, he tells them.
Same old lies.
But they smile back now—every single face.

A Woman Talking about her Purse at a Cheap Restaurant

The waitresses’ teeth come. Face away. Back to conversations. When you feel that breeze. That is the rain. We're on the patio. I watch the couples. The temperaments changing. Friends and enemies. 

"I have many," she says, holding it up. A $600 purse. The man does not care about the purse. To each according to his. What is it? From each according to his will. No. To each according to his ability. That is not right. Anyhow, it does not work. See the hustle and bustle of the city. Bumping into a friend. Where are you going? Where are you going? To do my will: connecting trinkets below my ashy face. No. Wouldn't work. Have to be like animals sometimes I’m afraid. A fight it is. Don't let them say different. They might like it even. The shoves of arithmetic. The owl. How many strokes.

She says, again, how this one is in mint condition. He nods. Pleasant day. The rain’s coming. Yawn. Mouth, a pocket for the rain. Talking about her purses she is. Sell this one, she says, to buy another that matches my smart jacket, fur-laced boots, tights to walk in, black tights, with the garters' straps connecting the lacy black underthings. Cream and coffee like. Oh Christ. Let her have it! The free market makes her naughty. From each according to each! To cover your. Fight for you to have it, dear. And your purse. Dearest me. Purse your lips. 

Hunger

I have to be getting started. Right now.  8:27 p.m. (1:19 p.m. November 21, 2011: I was going to delete the period following the 'm' in 'p.m.' but realized it was good.  I am elsewhere now.) November 20, 2011.  I wiped my left eyebrow with my right hand.  Boy it’s hot in here.  I think this spaghetti will give me acne.  I just wiped my left eye with my left pointer finger.  I should take off my sweater.  I stripped last night.  Do you think I’m hot?  8:29 November 20, 2011.  Car engine starts outside.  I wipe my mouth with my left hand.  There’s nobody else home.  I should have said this earlier—just farted—but I’m listening to Eddie Vedder.  8:30 November 20, 2011: originally I didn’t—just farted—want to infect this writing with cultural associations.  Especially pop-culture ones.  I take another bite. (8:59 November 20, 2011: I deleted ‘ha,' and added 'actually,' right here): Actually I lied. I didn’t take a bite, but just looked at spaghetti then back at the computer.  I didn’t mean to lie, just did.  8:31 November 20, 2011.  My lower lip tastes really salty.  I have licked it 10-20 times.  It won’t go away.  I’m concerned.  

8:32 November 20, 2011.  I can’t seem to eat (9:01 November 20 2011: I’m deleting ‘to take a bite anymore’ and adding ‘to eat’, see? look up: it’s not there)  But I am hungry. I'll admit that I’m leaving a lot of things out: facts, emotions, things I see. What you’re reading—this "time thing"—was supposed to be like (8:40 November 20, 2011, now we’re in the editing stage. 9:03 November 20 2011: which, I realize, we already were, spatially speaking.) a diary or something.  Because 8:34 November 20, 2011 I want to be truly, truly honest.  But I’ve already told you that I lie. People have attempted this before...the constant recording of their thoughts. Some sort of pining for immortality. There is actually a man who writes in his diary every five minutes.  He’s somewhere in his forties, I think. Actually I don’t know how old he is, but he has like, millions of pages. 8:35 November 20, 2011. And nobody will ever read them (9:05 November 20, 2011: I’m changing ‘it’ to 'them' because that’s correct. "Nobody will ever read them." Right. 8:42: I deleted the word ‘all’ that was to come after the soon-to-be-deleted word ‘it’.  8:45. Burped and added the apostrophes to the aforementioned instance of the deleted word ‘all’. 9:07 November 20 2011: But you never saw ‘all’ at all, but there it was four times anyways) because they would take up your entire life.

8:36 November 20 2011.  I just ate more spaghetti.

(8:47 November 20, 2011: I remember taking a bite of spaghetti. That was around ten minutes ago.  I’ve since changed rooms; my computer was dying.  Here comes my roommate Dan at 8:48 November 20, 2011.  He’s wearing a shirt from Fat Harry's, which is a bar, and I suppose he's just finished his shift. [A day later, at 1:24 November 21, 2011, I still do not know where he was coming from. I'm at the university library and I just coughed on a public keyboard without covering my mouth. Nobody saw.])  

But isn’t it sad, in a way, that the truest documentation we’ll ever have of a man’s life will never be read in its entirety? The Diary Guy wrote and wrote, nearly every minute of every day, emptying himself, trying so hard just to exist. And he does, I suppose. People are talking.  But (8:55 November 20, 2011: I’m about to move "to truly know him," which once followed "But" to 147 words from now, because I think it looks better that way, and you may have forgotten where you were, or lost track of time) to truly know him you’d have to become the story and the person who wrote it and make the decision soon.

2:21 a.m. April 22 2013

It's been 1 year, 5 months, 3 days, 5 hours and 54 minutes since this began. During that time my grammar has improved, but I've made some big mistakes. I was called unlovable by someone who wasn't even trying to hurt me. That's honest. And I moved to a new home. When I started this post, for example someone else lived here, and I was elsewhere, like you are now. I wonder if one year, five months, three days, six hours and forty-eight minutes ago someone was in this room, sleeping behind me—pacing or looking out the window. I don't know how the furniture was arranged (I keep my bed by a window that faces south) or if this was a bedroom at all. Maybe the house was empty. And maybe if I turn around you'll be here with all my things looking placid at the window and waiting for me to stop whatever I'm doing and gobble you up. Though it’s no coincidence, it's worth nothing that I'm hungry again. Starving actually. Mainly I wish I still had some of that spaghetti, and wish I hadn't let so much go to waste. 

3:33 a.m. April 22 2013.

Writing

I just woke from this wonderful dream where I finally gave up writing. It happened like this:

I had this big suitcase full of all my writing: all my scribblings, all my poems and luggage. It was bulky and awkward to carry, so I left it outside and went to dine in an Indian restaurant alone. It would be safe, I thought, by the curb.

The meal was fine and exotic. The busboy was Mexican—and I made a mental note to write that down. But when I came outside, all my notebooks and pens, all my stories, all my luggage was gone.

A homeless man motioned toward the street. “It was just...," he began—and then I saw the culprit. A younger, more-attractive man sprinting through the park, handling the bag as if it were weightless.

There was some good stuff in that bag too, including all fifty two of my favorite story's revisions, an idea for a new character—a perfect one, to be placed in some story or other—and the fourth start of my first novel. All gone.

So I went back to school. I took a cab and when we pulled up out front I realized I didn't have money to pay the fare. The driver turned around and said it was OK. After all, my bag had just been stolen. And in a motherly way, she opened the door such that it seemed to open on its own.

I thanked her and walked up under the stony arches of University, cutting through the bright-eyed, babbling freshman in the dark museum halls where colorful banners for bands and sea turtles and marine biology programs hung from the rafters. I wondered why I hadn't studied marine biology, or turtles, or bands. Everyone seemed so happy.

Then as if by miracle, there she was—walking right beside me. We were in the bookstore where we'd first met. I glanced to my side and thought to ask if she hated me yet, but she was smiling, exploring—babbling about literary theory and psychology—adding more and more books to a wheelbarrow-borne stack that nearly touched the ceiling. 

I couldn't afford to buy them, and of course neither could she. But she didn’t seem to mind. I just gazed at the books as she floated there, speaking in quiet little cycles that reminded me of silence produced by a stream. Then she turned to me, cheerily, and exclaimed, “Me and you in the bookstore!”

I tried to return her toothy grin, but as I scanned the books she’d chosen I was stunned to find that I’d read every single one. I wanted to know if she remembered that it was I who first introduced her to John Irving, and if she knew that all his books were the same. I wanted to know why she’d never read Tolstoy, Melville or Dostoyevsky—and if she intended to read War and Peace, Moby-Dick, and The Brothers Karamazov, or just buy them.

And I wanted to point out that she should have said “’You and I in the bookstore’ not ‘Me and you,'" and moreover admonish her for lying—(I couldn't be ‘in the bookstore’, as she’d claimed, because I was obviously in my bed, dreaming). But then I stopped. 

Because I was in my bed dreaming. And really I'm most intrigued by the things I can't control.  

When Did the Chicken Cross the Road?

It’s January 1st, 1999. The Euro is established. A month later the U.S. Senate acquits Bill Clinton of impeachment charges. Then Star Wars Episode I, Napster, the Columbine High School massacre—and in an article entitled “Fragmented Future,” Darcy DiNucci states that, “The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are beginning to appear…”

That was fourteen years ago, and I don’t remember anything called Web 2.0. What I do remember are static web browsers, the screech of the dialup modem, mom yelling from the kitchen about the busy phone line, sister screaming from her bedroom about the computer, Hotmail, and AIM chat rooms — certainly not the Post-Internet suggested by DiNucci.

So what was she seeing that I wasn’t? When she said, “The web we know now… is only an embryo of the Web to come,” did anybody stop to ask what she meant? Is the Internet of today even knit from the same fabric as that of 1999? Perhaps, but it takes benchmarks to notice the change. Here was my wake-up call: Chick-Fil-A.

Perennially targeted by LGBT advocacy groups for their stance on gay marriage, their endorsement of the "Biblical definition of the family unit," and heaping contributions toward ultra-conservative lobbyist groups, the conservative corporation now finds itself in hot water for creating a Facebook profile (a 14-year old girl named Abby Farle) and using it (her) to defend the CEO's decidedly old-fashioned beliefs. Abby Farle, the would-be Chick-Fil-A defender, ended her posts exclusively with “Derrr!” or "John 3:16” and was finally exposed for being non-existent after a lengthy battle on the company’s own FB page when a visitor adroitly pointed out that Abby had joined the social network only a day prior, and that her profile picture was drawn from a website that supplies publicly licensed stock photos for commercial use. 

Shortly thereafter, little redheaded Abby Farle fell silent.

What caught my attention wasn't that we have another example of corporate dishonesty, but just how depressingly fickle this entire story is. What’s more concerning than the fact that Chick-Fil-A (a quick-service chicken restaurant) is opposed to gay marriage is that we care that a quick-service chicken restaurant is opposed to gay marriage. Sure: they’re a 4 billion dollar (and growing) corporation, but they’re not shaping public policy...Are they?  

[1] (Following the 2008 recession, many formerly middle-of-the-road Americans acknowledged that corporations had huge incentive and opportunity to lie [and likely were] or listened to conservative talk radio.) [2]  (It's worth noting that the Tea Party [a loosely affiliated group of anti-immigration, anti-spending, anti-tax, anti-Obama, anti-government patriots] is not a political movement, an apolitical movement, or, really, anything at all. Evidence suggests that The Tea Party did not come to prominence from an organic, grass roots movement comprised of dissatisfied citizens. Instead, it was created by the Koch family as a means to launder and disperse politician-bound funds and lobby for tax breaks for the rich. The Koch brothers' namesake, Koch Industries, is the second-largest private company in the United Stated. It's referred to as The Biggest Company You've Never Heard Of. And that's the rub. 

With its roots in the golden age of oil—the time of the American tycoon—The Biggest Company You've Never Heard Of hasn't lost a step. Though the cultural sea change of the 60's and 70's may have been more impassioned than planned, the masses could no longer be ignored by their representatives; sweeping environmental reforms passed into law, the Environmental Protection Agency was founded. Teetering on the edge of revolution, the Government could not abide such wide-spread public disillusionment. A challenge with overt force could signal to moderates that the government had ceded its right to alter and/or define a free society, thereby absolving the contract from which their authority was derived. Many had already seen that moment pass, but not moderate Americans. So Koch-like corporations took a hit in the form of government regulation. 

With annual revenue in the hundreds of billions, Still enjoying the profits from a century-old stranglehold on the American tobacco market, and annual revenue in the hundreds of billions, Koch nevertheless found itself suffering from 'heavy' taxation. After Ron Paul's disastrous defeat in 2008 it was clear that tax breaks for the mega wealthy was not going to change. In order to maintain its market position and increase its God-slapping revenue in the face of regulation and economic downturn, Koch had to evolve, diversify. 

What follows is how Corporation killed Democracy, like Paper beating Rock. 

Because their money funds the killing of hundreds of thousands of Americans every year (many of them middle-of-the-road Americans who now comprise the Tea Party) the Koch brothers knew that they could not personally lead a tax revolt [it would take lots of work, and it might seem insensitive]. So, under cover of darkness, disguised as average Americans, they created  the Tea Party. None of this made any sense. Fox News was first on the scene, then it all made sense, for it is the world of words that creates the world of things, so it matters very little what the words mean (or what the chicken is made of). Defined by its volatile opposition to nearly everything and offering nothing in return, the Tea Party and its creation story serve as an  example of how tens of millions of dollars and the Word of mass media can make the unreal real, and create chicken-or-the-egg causality dilemmas, appropriately, out of thin air.)

What else could cause this commercial behemoth to resort to such childish techniques? Is this what DiNucci was talking about?

FB and Twitter may be ushering us toward an unexpected conclusion: that objective truth never existed, and only a lack of alternative viewpoints could create the illusion that there was one. It’s not that people are more apt to mislead—that we’re an especially rabid generation of liars—but that there are just far more voices for the truth to contend with.

Even the article that broke the Chik-Fil-A story seems strangely suspect. Published on Gizmodo.com under the title “Did Chick-fil-A Pretend to Be a Teenage Girl on Facebook?” the story’s hard evidence consisted of no more than a screenshot. And whoever took the screenshot (presumably someone from Gizmodo or one of the belligerents) had only one friend on their FB chat—and, at any given time, who only has one friend online? Was this a case of a fake person exposing another fake person? Is this Web 2.0?

Maybe it doesn’t matter—when a chicken company cares about public opinion enough to create fake [3] (Arranging these words in this order is, for some reason, not troubling.) advocates to support an ideology that’s unrelated to their product (i.e. lie, which isn’t very Christian) something is wrong—and it’s not just Chick-Fil-A. It’s us.

If social media has come to serve as the hammer and anvil of truth and transparency (see Wikileaks, Tahrir Square, Syria) and our voices are to be the liberalizing agent, what’s to be done when a conservative voice like S. Truett Cathy (Chick-Fil-A CEO) starts chirping? Mr. Cathy doesn’t appear to be affecting my life, so why can’t an asshole be an asshole in peace?

While a democratic society provides a somewhat-perfect nest for social media, let’s not forget that society and democracy are only somewhat perfect. They are only as good as we are—and the same applies to even the most public and most inclusive forums on the Internet.

FB seems rather in-line with the everyone-matters, everyone-has-a-voice, everyone-gets-a-fair-shot underpinning of the middle-of-the-road American psyche, and maybe that's what makes it so addicting. There’s a face I can control; there I’m always smiling; there I am, before X,Y, or Z bankrupt, left, or forgot me; there’s my idealized life. I’m still skinny, married, tan. So has FB made for us the illusion of a second life?  

Is this 2.0? Is it real? If this internal/external, personal/communal relationship doesn’t constitute a second life—or if having one isn't that important—why was Abby Farle conjured up in the first place? What could she hope to accomplish? And what are we to do with our dead friends who (now) never really die? Should FB bury its dead?

As we grow with FB, our enthusiasm dwindles. Of late, a cynical (albeit more addicted) lethargy toward the social network seems to be prevailing. Maybe this is due to the realization that corporations have also embarked on their own second lives—following us through the wormhole. Or maybe it's the widening, (probably) unsubstantiated fears that Facebook will allow local, state, or federal government agencies to access our online identities, messages, and secrets—which (presumably) would point to offline identities, our interpersonal relationships, and our geographic locations.

I wonder if these possibilities strike anyone else as so completely ironic that the irony is itself difficult to discern. Despite the volumes of our lives we put on FB, there’s no life within it. Even the mildly devoted user must know that they will never truly meet someone on the Internet. Is it not obvious that the Internet seems to present us, really, with more of a social buffer than a conduit? I wonder. 

And it's getting bigger every day. It expands, and its growth appears increasingly organic. In many ways, it is. So, perhaps we need to acknowledge that this new mode of communication may actually alter what it means to “meet” someone (in the same way that KFC [the vanguard of chicken producing conspirators] altered our understanding of “meat”[4] {Life, nature, God, and science} by genetically modifying their birds.

Maybe, in 1999, everyone knew that the web was going to change—and maybe when Darcy DiNucci said “Web,” she really meant us, our human condition. Or maybe she was just more prophetic than she intended. [5] (Otherwise known as luck.)  Either way, what “Fragmented Future” reminded me to do was look back and remember how things were just a very short time ago, and then to ask whether this instrument—with its capacity for beauty and creativity, complete good and evil—is the signal or the noise of human progress. 

Go smell a flower.