A Blog by Cornelius Bear: Téodor's Horrid Phone (Patreon)

Téodor jabbed his telephone at me, promising a peppery video clip which would score the rest of my afternoon with frolicsome melody. I know not what is the matter with him, for what he shared was a sickening bit of footage in which a holidaymaker slips during a dock-jump and knocks his noggin something awful on the lip. It must have concussed the poor chap terribly, and I pray his director of photography had the presence of mind to check on him once the bubbles ceased to rise. 

Before I could fling the offending handset back to my questionable young friend—with the earned interest of a household demerit and a scowl—a second video clip elbowed the first aside and ran unbidden. Security footage of two miscreants holding up a little bodega unspooled before me, the sort we have all seen prepended to the evening news. The hooded young men, apparently raised by Roman candles and cornered dogs, dashed every display pane in the place and pistol-whipped the clerk before filling their sacks with knockoff headphones and sunglasses. As they turned to leave, the clerk pulled a handgun of his own from a disguised compartment in the counter and emptied its magazine into their backs. They collapsed through the glass doorway and expired on the sidewalk. The miracle of four billion years unbroken, the winning lottery ticket of existence passed from parent to child in the most statistically unlikely feat ever run, was now over: all for a pile of worthless plastic rubbish.  

There was a time not so long ago when this sort of documented abomination was termed a "snuff film," and circulated only in the darkest corners of society, among distractingly sebaceous men whose haunted pallor and decovenanted cant spooked women and poets into crossing the street. Now it is passed off by endless fields of dark, monolithic microprocessor towers as prime-time mind-fodder for all and sundry, equal in its right to circulate with Buster the snowboarding dog, or the ravioli-ladling nonna. 

A wide and deep beaker of perchloric acid not standing by to receive it, I set the little goblin-brick face down on the cushion. A confusing juice of anxiety, anger, indignation, and a bit of the mob-mind flushed into my blood; my serenity hijacked, I struggled to right myself, but for many minutes could not. 

It was a fitful night in the rehearsal-shroud after that. I dreamed all of earth’s life was an illusion arisen from certain dispositions among the elements, our bodies stood up by a sticky luck of nanoscopic electromagnetic coupling, that “we” were just googols of repeated instances of this Lego behavior and its nested emergent phenomena, rising and falling like the unensouled cycles of precipitation or daylight, and that indeed the entire universe was actually without life, an infinite and eternal loneliness of energy stacking and unstacking itself. The greatest truth of life was to realize there was no such thing.