Stories We Think Up When We Are Bored

I woke up this morning to precipitating gray skies. I stood up from my bed – a mattress I had placed on the floor, underneath a window and parallel to my closest doors – and looked out of the window that had curtains partially drawn. If you were to stand next to me and look out, you would be gaze upon a canopy of tree branches and in the background are high-rise apartment complexes, reminiscent of housing projects, and they are all built from limestone and take on a dull beige color. Underneath the trees are walkways and yellow grass. The walkways lead from building to building and parking lot to parking lot. Along the paths are green light poles that seem as if they were around during the early twentieth century.

Right now I am sitting in front of the window, with me feet up on plastic bins, a chair placed where my bed had been on the ground. I took off the blankets and pillows so I could lean the mattress up against the wall, and sit as I am now, and tell you what is about to happen to me, any minute now. From where I sit, I can glance at the television screen void of any program; it reflects the space behind me, which will soon be filled with men, who will take me away.

It’s funny, because I’m looking at a stainless steel lamp right now, and it will remind me of the stainless steel lamp that I will be seeing in the near future. The only difference, I suspect, is that the light bulbs may be different. The one in my lamp is one of those new bulbs, the energy saving ones that is all twisty. It isn’t traditional at all. Not like theirs. They have an incandescent light bulb in theirs. They will shine their lamp, with the incandescent bulb, on me later, and it will make me perspire. Their light bulb is very inefficient because it emits heat. Perhaps I should suggest to them later that they could save some money by switching bulbs.

“It goes against the second law of thermodynamics!” I will say, which is true. Think about how many incandescent bulbs they must have – they must have many. But incandescent bulbs are scarier; imagine that you have a bag over your head, and you are dragged into a room – as I will be later – and you are forcibly put into a wooden chair that is moved a few inches from a wooden table, with a stainless steel lamp with an energy-saving light bulb in it. The darkness is removed, as they slip the bag off of your head, and your eyes burn, as the light penetrates your retinas.

“Is that, uh, is that,” you stammer, because you are surprised. “You used the twisty bulbs?”

“Yes, yes we did,” said the brute. “You see, the last guy in here educated us in energy-efficiency, and we realized that we are wasteful. We have been very wasteful, in fact, now that we have been educated, we have gotten rid of Styrofoam cups. Think of all the petroleum used to make those cups! And the vast quantity of cups that we use for our coffee – surely we could bring our own mugs, right? Am I right?”

“I suppose.”
“I even decided to get a hybrid car.”
“A hybrid? What a fantastic idea!”
“You think so? Well, would you sign this statement saying that you support hybrid cars?”
“Oh, I love the idea. Certainly.”

The brute grabs a telephone: “He just signed the confession. Bring in the executioner.”

“If only you weren’t just about to be interrupted by the agents at your door,” you say.

There was a knock on my door. I glanced up at my black slippers, because I had my feet on top of the plastic bins, and heard the knocking again. I slowly got up from chair, and sauntered over to the door.

“Hello?” I asked, but I wasn’t really wondering, because I already knew, and it was just a formality for the situation presented to me, which was someone knocking on my door.

“Are you John Smith?” the officer inquired – but really, John Smith? My name is John Smith? How generic can we fucking get – seriously. That could be a good thing, actually. John Smith. There must be dozens of John Smiths. No. Thousands, maybe millions, of John Smiths – I should ask him – a million John Smiths, eh? – Is that even a question? That’s not a question. Oh! Oh! I should ask him if he listens to the Smiths. How great would that be – we’ll be in the car, on the way to the building…because let’s face it – I don’t know where the fuck we are going. But we could listen to the Smiths! And he could tell his officer friends: Yeah, I listened to the Smiths while bringing John Smith in. The irony! The irony! (An allusion! Heart of Darkness, my friends – only as John Conrad could put it –

“Yes,” I say, responding to the officer’s question. He then shoved papers under my nose – and I had no time to examine them – and I was pushed up against the wall, two other officers held my arms, and one of their hands was pushed up against the square of my back. Right between my shoulder blades, and they grabbed my wrists and pushed them together, and bound them with zip-ties. I thought we might have walked to the elevator, but we didn’t. We took the stairs – it was dark now – and I was led into the back of a car, where a bag was put over my head.

I want to tell you what my life was like before they beat me. I had been a university student – fuck it. I’m trying to think about what I should tell you. I don’t know what I should tell you. How am I supposed to summarize my life, my entire life, previous to this point? What is important – my personality? Is that what you want to hear? But there is so much information. So much to tell. I want to give you a quality of seeing, and just like vision, you don’t see everything. You don’t – and how could you? There must be some sort of hierarchy, because you wouldn’t see anything if you could see everything. You would have no idea what is important. So it is subconscious. Your brain, as you look around, ignores certain images. There are things I can do, that will bring what I am saying into the forefront of your consciousness – LIKE THIS. They are not like the others – and should be scorned! Letters! Up there! You are not like the rest (aren’t I being hypocritical? Or am I) How dare you speak out. Isn’t that the beauty of it, though? The individual, who dares to be different, is different. But when others are different too, they don’t seem to be an individual, do they.

I AM AN INDIVIDUAL.

I AM ALSO AN INDIVIDUAL.

ABKJWHD:USJK:DBB!

Is there a monopoly on individualism? At what point are you desensitized. Each letter in the alphabet is unique, yet they come together to make words. You no longer see each individual letter, but you see the word. Words then fill this page. I give you my army, of words, and they are not like the others.

Can I for certain, say that?

What is this? Do you know what is going on? The narrative has effectively broken down, and has produced some sort of anomaly. But don’t be fooled. Don’t let this fool you.

You are not a fool to be fooled, but only then you are fooled (but really, you aren’t a fool, and I will not fool you). I am telling you a story, of events that have happened, and I want you to know, what I have learned; what I want you to know.

I was in the room, with the stainless steel lamp, with the incandescent light bulb. The bag was drawn off my head, and the light seared into my eyes, and burned my retinas.

“Put your hand out,” said a man I could not see. I complied, and held out my hand. A pen was placed on my palm: “sign this statement. I guarantee that it will save you, and me, a lot of time.”

Quite frankly, I wasn’t very enthusiastic about signing a document that I had not read the contents of. This country has a way of making sure that people carried out the terms of their contracts. That’s why I’ve always been skeptical.

“Read the fine print,” my father would say. I always read the fine print.

“This is a blank sheet of paper,” the light had been adjusted so I could examine the document, that wasn’t actually a document at all. I should eat it. What? I wonder what would happen if I took the document and inserted it into my mouth. I wonder if anyone has done that before – what an act of defiance! Or maybe I should pretend to – oh yes, what a great idea! I will sarcastically look, at it, and then, pretend to mull over the situation – like I have options! Well, I think I’m going to have to go with the second, no, no, the third – fuck no, I was right the first time: I’ll definitely go with option number two–

“Sign it, and be done with it,” the man said.
“But it’s blank,” I said.
“Yes, and you are a smart man. Only an idiot would choose not to sign.”

I looked down at my shoes for a second.

“Don’t be an idiot.”

I was led down a corridor, entirely made of cement, with naked incandescent bulbs dangling from electrical wire that was attached to the ceiling. They weren’t very bright, and you could see the filament inside the glass – it was illuminated. I had thoughts of making them sway. I would reach my arm out to them, and nudge them so they would swing ever so gently, back and forth. However, I would not attempt such a thing.

My memory seems to have evaded me, because I forgot to mention an important detail, as I was lying in the corridor on the cement ground:

“You disgust me,” the guard spat on my face, moments after he threw me into the side of the corridor. My anxiety spiked. I started to lose feeling in my head, as my pulse quickened, and my hands and feet grew cold. I wasn’t sure if my hands were damp, due to my own perspiration, or the scum ridden ground. I had managed to make it to my knees, my elbows still on the cement, when a steel toe was driven right into my tailbone. I went into shock. I crawled forth, to where the guard was standing, and he had nudged the incandescent light bulb, so it swayed from the ceiling. It swung back and forth, the light, and visually, it was disorienting as I made my way towards him. I couldn’t control the rapid closure of my eyes.

I found myself in a cell, that was what I would describe to be three feet by five feet, with a wooden bench in the right-hand corner, towards the back of the cell. The cement was cold as I sat on the bench, with my back to the wall. The only thing to do is think – about something, or other –

Try to imagine for a second, that when you open a history book, everything you read in it is entirely bullshit. What if you found out that the color yellow is actually the color red?

Well that is bullshit, right? Yellow is yellow, not red. Now tell me this: there is a lecture hall with 250 students in it, all of which are in a single class together. In this class, there is a professor, standing in front of all the students, giving a lecture about journalism. A man enters the lecture hall through a side door, and finds a vacant seat, somewhere near the middle of the lecture hall. As he approaches the seat, he begins shouting at the professor. After about 10 to fifteen seconds, the man runs away. Now, the professor had scheduled this to happen. He told his students to write an article about what had just occurred – describing everything about the incident – and to turn it in before five o’clock. After all the students turned in their articles, the professor began to read through them – some of the students reported the man to be wearing a red t-shirt; others reported the man to be wearing a yellow t-shirt. In all, almost every single article contained one contradictory claim about the incident – but they had all witnessed the same thing with their own eyes.

So who is right? Which student’s article was true, and who’s was false – or were they all true? What about the stories you read – the textbooks your teachers have given you: have they been tampered with? Would you recognize a subtle change in a name from a newspaper article 20 years ago? Could it be possible for someone to go through government records, and alter them, ever so slightly –

What if red used to be yellow, but over time, someone made you believe otherwise.