By Fiore Amore
Here we stood in front of a flame-engulfed McDonald’s staring right at the inhuman face of our small-town business community. Gone was any pretense. Behold the mighty hog, a sight for the ages beyond belief.
From this point forward my memory fails me. Only glimpses and fragments remain. Flesh melting, screams echoing through the parking lot on that fateful day, our creative id ramming headfirst into a brick wall of the unreal. I could’ve sworn there were more of him (more of it?), a whole swarm of venal ungulates wreaking havoc on us all. My mind still sees glimpses from scenes of blood dripping from gnashing tusks.
Then came the sirens, cutting through the confused dusk. More blurs follow. Who is the ambulance? Is it?
. . .
I have no idea where my friends are, or if they are. I’m equally clueless as to my own whereabouts. It’s as if I’m floating gently down a stream of black, unbothered by whatever else might be.
As I lay engulfed in the Great Nothing, beyond time and corporeality, I have no choice but to reflect. It’s a futile exercise in self-importance, of course, but bear with me.
We clung to the last gasps of counterculture for dear life and it killed us. Marx called for a “ruthless criticism of everything that exists”—in following this advice we uncovered untold horrors we were unprepared to face. What lies beneath the surface? I still struggle to make sense of it.
We’re all actors in the grand performance known as Real Life, engaged in masquerades of the flesh. Naturally the prospect of vulnerability is more terrifying than any monster conjured by our subconscious or projected onto the big screen. So we dance, shuffling and shambling along hoping for not-bad and averting The Gaze which may one day threaten to unveil us to ourselves and others.
If the bosses are all-consuming Molochs consecrated in the figure of swine, blood money oiling the flesh-machinery of simultaneous creation and destruction, you and I are best represented by the slop on which pigs feed, fuel in the form of discarded bagels and apple cores. Use it and use it some more.
. . .
I don’t remember whether I lived or died that day. Was I gored by the physical embodiment of social-systemic forces I barely understood? Did those close to me all meet the same fate? How certain am I in what soon sat in front of my face again?
On our first night together, absolutely twisted in the alleyway, we were asked to choose between life and death. We made our decision, but I remain unsure of the outcome.
Ostensibly, in cliché and pretentious fashion, everything is back to normal now. No acknowledgement of what happened at McDonald’s, not a whiff of activity from the Yellow Brick Road Communist Organization, nothing. Eventually we all graduated, got out of a town we already hated with a passion and now dreaded thinking about.
I wish it’d been longer before we confronted the object of our loathing. When some of the darkest aspects of the world are made apparent to you suddenly, without warning, at a stage where you’re still figuring things out, it has a profound effect on you. I wonder how I’d be doing right now had I just stayed out of it, steered clear of any attempt to break the mold and gone about business as usual.
I’ll never know.
