I sit in darkness, but my ears pick up the sounds of rockets firing and shells exploding all around me. There is a noise like gunfire, and screams erupt from an unknown direction. Suddenly a flicker of light in front of me, a tiny flame, and then a huge jet of sparks propels itself into the sky, illuminating the mortar below. The explosion jerks my face into a contorted expression of surprise as my hands slam down beside me, and a red ball of fire goes hurtling upwards.
It's the 24th of May weekend and I'm in a lawn-chair in my family's backyard. From this corner by the gate, where I hide from my little sister and her maniacal friends, the yard seems to stretch for miles, even with the above-ground pool in the way; the size of my family's property makes me guilty. I started this year's celebration by lighting the burning schoolhouse, as per usual, much to the delight of the kids. I love doing that, watching the sparks, and the windows, and the bricks as they curl up and inwards, little Devil-tongues of fire licking the air and pushing loose of the pits of school-hell, only to be squashed back into their miserable realm as mere ashes, then dumped and drowned in a bucket to await the final judgement of garbage bins, trucks, and dumps: eternal rest in the earth they tried to escape.
My pithy thirst for flaming souls quenched, I can melt into a chair, or sink into the grass, and contemplate the universe. Thoughts seem to float in the air, and I make only half-hearted attempts to grasp them, watching the empty air around me fill with ideas and inventions all clamouring for attention. Thoughts jump out at me, thoughts like: what if Mad Cow Disease crossed with SARS and became a highly contagious little thing that could live for years in a victim before being discovered and could only be diagnosed upon death? Would we have to exterminate entire towns for fear of it spreading? How would we do it? What would we do with all the bodies? If Jerusalem was infected, would we use neutron bombs and then send in clean-up crews, or would we just nuke the place to hell along with valuable buildings and precious artifacts (all the bleeding-hearts would carry signs saying: "Please, think of the money! The poor money!")? What if the buildings were contaminated too? Oh, well; at least we could solve some of the overpopulation problems in Southern Africa by secretly planting one or two Mad Human Respiratory Syndrome-infected people there and using them as justification to nuke those guys to hell, too (and the bleeding-hearts wouldn't care, because just what's the difference between a Hutu and a Tutsi anyway? Do they have any culture? It's just the Heart of Bleeding Darkness, it's not like any real people live there).
Thoughts like: What if baby corn is really normal corn spliced with baby genes? What if the true religion is solipsism; whose imagination are we all figments of? Or is everyone a figment of everyone else's imagination? Is imagination real or imaginary? What time is it? And what's this up my nose?
Of course, since you read the newspapers diligently, you know what I'm talking about: The Congo Crisis. You've heard what's happening, right? Of course you have. Three million people dead in four and a half years? War? This sound familiar? Man, I can't believe you haven't heard about it, it's been happening since, like, forever! What's that? The newspapers haven't covered it? Why not? I thought that's what they went in for: death, people dying, dead people, that sort of thing. Huh... weird.
Oh well, it's no big deal, right? I mean, hey, relax, have some popcorn, watch the fireworks. It's got nothing to do with us. Tomorrow we'll go out and see the new Matrix film, or if you want we can drive down to Blockbuster and pick up Apocalypse Now. It's this great film about the Vietnam war and the futility of fighting for a cause you don't believe in, and also about the general fucked-up-ness of everything. You see, this guy Colonel Kurtz has gone insane, and so the army calls in this other guy whose name I can remember to take him out, and along the way he meets all these crazy people and they're like, surfing in the middle of the war, and slaughtering civilians, and it's like this stuff all happened, man! And noone did anything! What kind of world is this?
Click.
(This line is monitored. For security reasons, we have terminated this connection. We thank you for your cooperation.)
