Chapter Fifteen: The Static Age

(2247 words)

Why didn’t he listen? Why didn’t Tré ever listen to me? Why couldn’t he just listen to a fucking word that I fucking said every once in a fucking while?!

Those three question plagued my mind as I walked back to my old house on the outskirts of the suburban hell that was temporarily my home. I wanted to know, dammit, why he was so insistent on his opinion. Why he never listened to mine. Why he seemed to think less of me… well, not that really, but more like he didn’t trust me.

I couldn’t get why -- well, I sort of could, but it was an accident.

The whole damn riot was an accident, and Tré should’ve known that. Dumbass.

It was bad enough that the only thing television and radio could be good for was static. But, seriously, our relationship was built on static airwaves of communication too. It was getting insane, this static age of really shitty communication. (fucking hell, am I redundant or what?!)

Sighing, I sat down at my desk and opened up my 10 year old laptop. The screen fizzed slightly as I turned it on, before a greenish sign came up:

"Batteries required. Please plug in your laptop or charge the batteries."

Goddamn it, I thought, grumbling as I pulled out my laptop cord and plugged it into the old hole in the wall. Little blue electric sparks cascaded in there between the metal and the outlet. I smiled as my computer booted up, smiled as the first signs of lights flicked onto it. It was perfect. I loved being on my computer, because I could just get lost in pointless internet memes and weirdness in general. It was a lot of fun to read the really, really fucking strange news articles that came up once in a while... you know, like the weird cow ones. It was also fun to browse around on Amazon for the really strange products, like the weird Jesus Milk or whatever. You know, the stuff that was supposedly Really Good and cost a whole fuckin fortune for one gallon -- more or less a hundred buck a pop.

Totally not worth it for the milk, but totally worth it for the lulz.

Wait -- you don't know what LULZ are?! You must be crazy. Like, seriously crazy... and out of touch... and you must live in a hole. I mean, I have a fucking summer home in Narnia (I'm still mostly in the closet, bitches!) but even I know about teh lulz.

Lulz is the vocalized pronunciation of LOL -- as I explained in chapter nine, "laugh out loud." And so we got teh lulz from the lovely forum of 4-chan. Which is the asshole of the whole fucking internet, but still pretty damn funny to look at -- well, unless you're looking at /b/. /b/ is scary. Really scary.

Okay, well I can't hate on 4chan too much -- I mean, we get most of our memes from there. You know, so i herd u liek mudkipz, and O RLY (and YA RLY) and LOL cats (I Can Haz Cheezburger?) and stuff. Oh, yeah, and "all your base are belong to us." And Rickrolling. And I'm pretty sure that they introduced The Game (hahahahahahahahahahah you just lost it!!! -- well, I did too... fail) and epic fail, I think. And, you know, half of the rest of the internet funnies. Like Rickrolling.

You know, if you don't know what Rickrolling is, you need to like kill yourself. Or get online more. Either or, or one might as well lead to the other... people have died of starvation while playing World of Warcraft (seriously, your damn raids are not that fucking important). But really, Rickrolling is only the biggest funny lulz ever.

Basically, someone sends you an email with a YouTube link -- saying that it's the best video ever, right? You click on it and you get...

...


"Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley. The whole damn music video. It drives me batshit whenever I get one of these damn emails. Well, it's funny -- since I always make them lose the Game right afterward. It is kind of funny to watch them say "GODDAMMIT I should never Rickroll this dude ever ever again. I HATE LOSING THE GAME." And well, they better not try again... oh, yeah, don't you fucking dare steal my tactics -- I mean, they're not even mine. I got them from the author's mom... I'm not kidding. I got it from the author's mom... and so what, I'm kinda crazy... but this is supposed to get Suki to her word count today, right? Right. Back on schedule...

So, basically, the whole ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US thing came from a shittily translated Japanese video game. It was translated to fast that the fucking words got all screwed up. Resulting in a hilarious conversation including the famous (infamous?) line -- ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US.

By the way, all your soul are belong to us.

... back on schedule now, right?


And so, reflecting on the memes of the then current internet society -- everything from harmless things like "so i herd u liek mudkipz" all the way to painful, nightmare inducing screamer videos -- I watched as my computer turned on and glowed like a fucking orange sunset in my dark and crowded room. Oh, yes. I logged onto it -- username Gloria, password amereul-2013 -- and waited for it to load. Barely thinking, just going through the motions considering how distracted I was, I clicked the little Mozilla Firefox button and opened up my internet browser (well, everyone knows that Internet Explorer -- and Microsoft in general -- is awful) to Google.

Whoops, well, AT LEAST I FUCKING TRIED.

I came up with a "Page Not Found" blank tab thing. And looked in the corner of my computer to see the issue. Oh, great. My internet must have been shut down. Goddamn internet bills... goddamn no money... goddamn friendlessness. I barely let my friends cover my internet costs, but seriously here -- they wouldn't now since the riot. They flat out wouldn't. It stung -- and still stings a bit to this day -- how they just brushed me off like that and said "pshhh, screw you for being a fuckin' liar, Gloria. you're one smart dumbass. not." It wasn't funny. It hurt and made me sink further into my depression. I was so seriously broke and running out of minutes on my phone. Great... I'd need to get a job soon, I realized. Oh, yeah, not like anyone would hire me between the display at my graduation and the riot, and being Gloria. And I was definitely not going to the next town over just to get a goddamn job -- I mean, I was desperate, but not that goddamn fucking desperate. I wasn't crazy. Besides, they'd just turn me down, too.

Oh, sweet, sweet rejection and loneliness and heartbreak.

Sighing to myself, I stood up and walked into the so called living room, where Mom normally hung out, somewhat drunk and mostly catatonic. It was crazy how dysfunctional my family was, even though we never talked. As far as I knew, as far as I was told, my dad had died -- or killed himself, maybe -- right after he's left, when I was ten.

It was seven years ago at the time, but that coming September (September of 2013, smart people) it would be eight years.

I could almost taste the twenty year anniversary of his death, when I would be 38. Assuming, you know, I'd live to be 38... again, much more likely that I'd die at 37 than live to see 100. The drugs, the fucking up my body in general, not to mention me possible killing myself before then, or actually on then. It was crazy, but with Tré it was an escape -- I almost believed that we'd grow fairly old together, throwing hand grenades and exploding sporks at retirement homes.

Just thinking of Tré and our former, our beautiful, romance made me choke up, so I forced myself to sit down and so I laid back on the small, tattered loveseat. Oh the fuckin' irony. I was moping on the loveseat of all damn seats. Loveseats... Tré never sat there with me -- hell, he'd only been to my place once, right before the riot -- but still. Just thinking about the word loveseat -- well, love, really -- made me want to die. Or cry. Something tingly and sad that rhymed with those to words. I also wanted to throw Tré off a cliff then, but I couldn't. For one, there were no cliffs in that city. For second, he was somewhere -- somewhere I didn't know where the hell my ex-boyfriend was. And third, he was much stronger than me, and much heavier (oh, trust me, I knew by then exactly how mush pressure his weight put on me). I'd be more likely to fall off the cliff than to throw him off it.

But still. It was fun to mentally maim him for all he'd done to me.

So, trying to distract myself with news that would infuriate me in a totally different and hopefully more healthy way, I turned on the television. You see, there wasn't very much normal programming -- mostly news. Well, propaganda. Evil, evil propaganda infiltrating the faith fanatics and turning them against honest people -- you know, like me. Compared to them, I was a fucking saint.

So what, I used to be called the Patron Saint of the Denial (with an angel face and a taste for suicidal). The so called Saint Jimmy was never a real saint anyway.

I meditated on this as I watched the TV flicker on, watching as the images came into focus.

A low pitched, whining beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep sounded from the TV and I plugged my ears immediately. The noise still penetrated, reverberating in my skull, as the automated woman's voice announced that this was just a signal test. In case a riot like, you know, the one that made me lose like everything, ever happened again. To be completely honest, I'd rather have killed myself than to relive that humiliation. I hated what happened... I hated what I'd, what Gloria'd, become in the eyes of the public. In the eyes of my friends. In the eyes of my ex-boyfriend.

Of course, Mom didn't care. I was glad, because otherwise, I don't know what could have happened to me following the riot. I'd probably be forced to feel the pain of the hundreds. You know -- also known as she'd kill me. Or she'd make me kill myself. I shuddered just thinking of that. I wanted to live my life for as long as I could, because I knew that I had much shorter a time than everyone else who existed... you know, the normal people who never did Novacaine, who didn't dabble in every drug imaginable, who never threw a hand grenade or had tried to change something as drastically as I had. It was all kinds of insane, my life, and it was crazy just thinking "hey world, I lived through it all."

The TV's image was a rainbow of flickering, epileptic seizure inducing static. Rainbow static. Beautiful static in this fucking static age, where consumerism was emphasized. Where you were judged on how you looked, how much money you had -- which went hand in hand, as you could buy fancy schmancy three thousand dollar dresses with all your fucking money.

Remind me again on why I was so pissed off all the time about the state of people -- oh yeah! -- because they were materialistic bitches and judged so harshly based on how you acted, appeared, loved, looked, where you were born. They did it in the name of their gods, sometimes -- but I never got it, because weren't they taught that only the fucking Lord could judge, and that those who judged would go to Hell? Oh, wait, same God that said if you believe in him, you'd get a one way ticket to Heaven, even if you were a fucking, I dunno, serial murderer child rapist who was convicted and pleaded guilty to countless crimes that were also again common morality (and, supposedly, the Bible).

Oh, yeah, that's why I was so damn pissed off at the world. The static and the damn people.

I sighed and walked back to my room, laying down on my bed and flipping open my cell phone that was switched off. I turned it on, pressing the red hang up button till I saw images on the screen.

Low battery, read the little graphic in the corner. Yep, just like my laptop.

I sighed once more and flipped it closed, closing my eyes and. --

Being shocked back awake by an all too familiar ringtone. Tré. Dammit, why the hell would he be texting me at two ante meridian? I guessed that he'd mistyped the number, or something. It couldn't be him.

So I opened it... and it was definitely for me.
Oh shit, I thought. Oh shit. No way in fucking hell...

I groaned, and flipping of my phone, I fell asleep once more, severely pissed off and feeling like an overly hormonal girl.