Reason

With the rope around my neck and the chair moments away from being kicked out from beneath my feet, my neighbor knocks at my door. Naturally, I do not answer. If I were going to be alive tomorrow, it could create awkwardness between us. But I am not. He may ask me where I’d be the previous afternoon. He’d seen my car was still in the driveway so I couldn’t have gone far - as if I don’t have friends who may have picked me up in their car! Of course, when he asked me, I would have my brain working to figure out the unspoken communication. Was he asking me these things out of genuine curiosity or was he asking me these things simply as a way to break the ice and bring up what he had initially come to talk about this afternoon or… was he asking me to see if he could catch me in a lie? Was he asking these things knowing that I had been home and simply hadn’t answered the door when he’d knocked because I am an anti-social asshole? Was he the bigger asshole for passive aggressively confronting me or am I the bigger asshole for forcing him into the position where he would be able to catch me in a lie? But what does catching me in a lie do to benefit him? He gets to feel good about himself because he would never - and he is also smarter than the asshole who would?

There is no reason he should need to know where I was this afternoon, it’s not his business. All he needs to know is that I didn’t answer the door when he knocked thus he did not communicate what he wanted to communicate to me. Was I home or was I out is irrelevant. What is relevant is whether or not I was in the doorway while he was on my porch and we interacted. Have you ever had your doorbell ring while you are on the toilet? What’s the protocol there? Yes, of course I am home, but I should finish shitting and if I am finished shitting I should properly wipe my ass and wash my hands. I should not rush to the door with a half-wiped ass and filthy hands like a nuclear alert just went off.

My neighbor, I see him trying to look in through the window. What’s that about? If he sees me inside, then what? I didn’t answer the door, that’s all he needs to know. Oh, I’m inside? And I’m not answering the door? Great, now what, dickhead? But I can see him trying to look inside with his hands cupped around his eyes to block out light causing reflections to get in the way of him looking through the glass. I don’t think he can see me. But that’s exactly what a person who hopes they aren’t being seen tells themselves. He’s popping his head into a few different window frames, trying to get the right angle I guess. I’m not sure if he intends to view my entire house this way.

Now he’s back at the front door. I hear him banging. Hard. He hasn’t used the doorbell at all. I don’t know why. Maybe he thinks it is broken. Maybe he comes from somewhere or he is of a culture that doesn’t have doorbells. But it is there. He has to have seen one in a movie or something. I don’t know. He’s knocking very loudly. It’s probably louder than the doorbell, but the doorbell is simple and the knocking sounds like it would hurt his knuckles. They’re his knuckles, but it just seems ridiculous to hurt your knuckles when the doorbell is right there.

I hear him shouting something. It’s kind of muffled. I am hearing it through a door. I don’t know what his deal is or why he’s pounding on my door and shouting like that. It’s like his house is on fire or something. Maybe he locked himself out of his house, that would explain why he’s still out there instead of going home. But you would be a little more calm about being locked out. You would accept the person isn’t home and you have to wait. It’s like his family has been murdered or something. Like I said, it’s like his house is on fire. But there are other people. On the street. In the world. If his house is on fire, there has to be someone else’s phone he could use if he is at my door because he wants to use my phone. I can’t help him if his house is on fire. I would wait for the firefighters so all he could come to me for is if he needed to call 911 or have me call 911. I am not going to put out the fire.

“Crow and bird"

“Cowabunga”

“Crowded bar”

“Die in crowded bar”

“Knew rabid crowbar”

What the fuck is he talking about?

Then… it’s like when you ask someone to repeat themselves and as you are asking them, your brain processes their unintelligibility through context clues and you know.

“New David Cronenberg”

I take the rope from around my neck. I pick up my smartphone and go to my Google News Alerts for David Cronenberg. It looks like filming will start in Greece soon. This rope will still be here in a few years.

Participate

I refuse to participate. The world is rigged and you all started this before I could agree to the terms. Once I was born, I was never formally approached and I suppose you all thought that everything should just be grandfathered in. And I suppose that you believed if you stayed in motion, the years would pass before I figured out the scam. But here I am. It may have taken a few decades. Perhaps I should have called your bluff when everything became obvious. I am not sure why I waited. In an odd yin to your yang, I did not formally approach anyone about my decision. I just quit and thought the years might pass and soon you all would have waited too long to notice I wasn’t taking part. But the thing about an unstoppable force and an unmovable object is that if they don’t actually meet the force keeps going and the object being unmovable doesn’t mean much.

Hollow Man

When your Amazon package finally arrives, the thrill of the wait is over. You could check your phone a couple times a day to see if there were updates on the tracking. Maybe it would get ahead of schedule or it might fall behind if an unexpected event came up. They removed a lot of that with their two day shipping option. You can still track the package, but there’s not as much time for it to get delivered faster than expected and there’s a shorter period of time that it’s traveling for you to check for updates on the status. You could check the status after it arrives, but the status doesn’t change and you know it isn’t going to change so it loses its luster. Plus, you have the package which is what you really wanted anyway. You order whatever you ordered because you wanted the item, not to simply track it. But now the package has arrived and you aren’t looking forward to it anymore. It’s here. Maybe it’s a new piece of clothing and you can look forward to wearing it out in public for the first time and then when no one comments on it, you can put it into your closet and sometimes put it on again, but it’s not new clothes anymore. Maybe it’s a CD if you’re one of those people who still buy those or a vinyl record and you can listen to the album and hopefully you haven’t hyped the album up too much in your head so that it lives up to your expectations. But you probably checked it out on Spotify first to make sure you weren’t wasting your money on the physical album. So you already know what it sounds like. So the record arrived and you could listen to it and dive into your inner audiophile and talk about the warm sound of the vinyl itself - but you already heard the album so it has arrived and the thrill of the record coming is over. Or you might have bought something ornamental and you get to hang a piece of art on a wall or you have something to put on the mantel. Hanging art is surprisingly a lot of work, but once its up, you get to look at it. You can only really look at it for so long, but now that’s there. Maybe when someone comes over they’ll comment on it. Hopefully they say more than “new art?” because that kind of sounds like what someone would say to acknowledge art they don’t like. But your package arrived, the wait and anticipation is over and now you have the thing that you felt like you needed when you didn’t have it yet.

Mask Off America

The streets aren’t paved with gold

They’re lined with rubber-coated lead

Mask off, America

The tears of George Stinney weren’t enough to quench our thirst

Everything we own is dripping with blood

Everything we’ve earned was pried from another’s grip

And now we spend the rest of our waking life

Fending off those who might try to take it

Is freedom supposed to feel like choking

On the stress of hoarding the most objects?

And the pain in my gut when I start to wonder if this is all there really is won’t go away

But this empty feeling is still better than the despair of those who still dream that someday, if they work very hard, they too will have countless unsatisfying things