#8 of 1
THEY CALLED ME CATCHY: The Inconsiderable Life of Catkin Key Age: 39.
Somewhere along the line there has to be some accountability. Some real ownership for the sins we exacted on one another in the name of…accountability.
The crowd gathered and took their seats for the last day of the weeklong set of ceremonies to honor, remember, pay homage to, The Fearless Five.
I’m not sure any of those fit.
To remember? We only pretend to remember.
To honor? It’s almost offensive after the fact but ok.
Pay homage to? This one makes the most sense for what we’re doing and the style in which we’re doing it but that only applies to Catchy.
I stepped up to the podium where I would be standing for at least two hours. Each of the 5 tributes had an afternoon dedicated to remembering their life. After they’re all fucking dead.
How gracious, right?
Seriously though what an honor, right?
It was not simply an afternoon ceremony. It was a week-long dedication, and the number one most influential person was given tribute on the final day.
I had really hoped the sun would come out. It’s been cloudy for days.
Good afternoon and thank you-all of you-for coming out. Umm, it’s just as surreal…the feeling that is, to be where we’re at now as it was when things were at their worst, at least for me…in a way.
The crowd was quiet and attentive.
Before I get started I wanna say that while it tames my angry heart and soul a bit that Catkin Key is not only being honored today but was determined to have been, and continues to be, the most influential figure in the Awakening. I regret that its posthumous, but I also regret that all the people we’ve honored this week were people we should’ve paid more attention to. In a perfect world, right? We’re in the midst of The Pause and the Awakening because these people lived.
If anyone should speak of his life it shouldn’t necessarily be me. It should be his kid brother. Unfortunately, that's not possible. And for too many reasons to get into it wasn't possible for other members of his family either. But together the five of us have put together something we believe is different and unique and very personal.
Especially if we’re remembering him in true form. I knew him well and loved him limitlessly as did countless others.
Before we go any further it should be noted that Catkin, as you all probably know by now, went by Catchy.
Despite his illness and troubles Catchy Key never needed to take a leap he just knew. Like a handful of others, he just knew. He knew to search and peel back the layers. And while he was special, like the others that we’ve honored these past few days, he was not alone.
But I bet they felt alone.
I know Catch did. They didn’t fail.
We…failed.
I think what’s being done today is long overdue and Catkin Calvin Key, only truly known as Catchy, deserves this as did the four others. We owe them a debt that can never be paid. We owe them courage, if only for the afternoon.
Catchy would not see it that way though.
Umm, anyways, there are a few obsessions you should know about before we jump in. Just to provide some context or insight. Call it what you’d like. There will be several stories told, or read I should say, that shed light on who Catchy was so some background information is in order, I think.
Catchy loved lots of things ordinary adults aren’t interested in never mind a teenager. From age nine or earlier Catchy became interested in philosophy and mathematics.
Seriously a nine-year-old.
I’m told it caught his mother off guard one morning when Catchy began asking his mother who was right, John Locke or Thomas Hobbes.
He also loved thinking and mapping out his thoughts. In journals, on napkins, on paper towels even, and he was truly fascinated by architecture and old buildings as well as windows and doorways.
Catchy kept a journal and his sketchbook but he would draw with chalk or pastels on any surface he deemed his canvas. Geometric shapes, the tetrahedron. Catchy once said it’s the stability and the fire. I told him he was the fire. He agreed, he said I am the fire
He loved considering things. Catchy had no love for himself or others in the typical way, which is hard to explain but maybe it’ll explain itself as we present these stories, like snapshots you could say, of his life.
Catchy was…well…he was a genius. He was also bi-polar and was in state of mania most of the time but as you’ll soon learn, if you don’t already know, it was different with Catchy. His laugh was magnetic. Frankly he was magnetic and most oblivious about that fact. People were drawn to Catchy. Even those who didn’t like him somehow liked him.
Anyway, Catchy loved the concept of ideas just as much as his other obsessions. How many ideas are brand new versus improved or reinvented, Catchy once asked to a crowd of followers listening to a midnight rant in college. He told them that ideas aren’t the same as experiences. Ideas have force he would say. Not an earthshattering revelation for a guy with an IQ of 180 but he made the case in a different kind of way. Perhaps only the way someone with his condition could. So, ideas have force and ideas come first.
Ideas are beautiful. They can wither on the intellectual vine and rot out of fear of rejection or a hundred other reasons. An idea can seem to possess potential only to be dead on arrival. And sometimes an idea can be coaxed into existence and just hang around awhile, ripening. During this time, it may appear as if people could not possiblybe interested, inspired, or moved by the idea until the day comes when suddenly they are. There are reasons for this of course, Catchy would say, such as the timing and of course the person. He wrote that in his journal nearly 11 years ago.
As I stand here today, I realize Catchy would call this a version of hope.
Like the Lamb of God acting as a key so too is the person fit and perhaps even called upon to see an idea evolve and shape something new.
Ideas aren’t experiences, but they create the reality in which experiences are had. This was Catchy’s outlook. Or part of it. And it would grow with him. Pseudointellectuals with letters after their names liked to try to pick his logic apart. It was always amazing the way he would just turn they're ridiculous brain washed rhetoric up on its head.
You see he knew the value of information. Of ACTUAL information. Catchy considered information well worth its weight in gold. He’d rather know something useful then take a $100 bill just to forget.
As a little boy it was clear Catchy was highly intelligent. It was cute and exciting at first. But Catchy had a few specific ideas he began to investigate at an early age. At first tangentially and then with vigor and gusto and propelled by his mania, he would often be at it for DAYS.
It took him down a steep, winding road. Of course, he didn’t go alone. Even if he had wanted to it wouldn’t have mattered because people wanted to be near him. Especially as he got older. No matter the scenario or if you agreed with him, nobody made you feel the way Catchy made you feel.
If you had a hole in your life, Catchy filled it.
If you felt braindead from a banal existence, Catchy reminded you of life’s inherently wild character.
It’s hard to pin down the exact moment but if you were to ask his parents, they would probably tell you there were two defining events when Catchy was small, before I met him when we were 11, maybe he was 6 or 7 years old, that served to foreshadow what was to come.
Catchy wrote in journals most of his life and the end was no different. In fact, it was all he had. His thoughts and style should not go unnoticed. Fuck that, they absolutely cannot go unnoticed. When I die and turn to dust my ideas can go bump in the night and it won’t mean a thing and I’m ok with that because it makes sense. But not Catkin.
This here was all that was given to me to reference as far as Catchy’s final days, maybe even his final hour. It was given to me by a top dog who took a liking to Catchy during his time in that building right there.
As I thumbed through the pages, I couldn’t help but remember sitting with a friend, this was years and years ago before it all. When you could sit with friends as they lay dying in a hospital and hold their hand. When you could just sit with friends, or family, like people are meant to do.
She was dying from Leukemia. Or complications of Leukemia. Probably irrelevant right? Anyways I held her hand and choked back tears a bit when telling her how seeing her like this made me feel. I told her “its not right you should go like this. It’s unfair. Things were going good.”
She looked at me a moment before squeezing my hand and said “it’s perfectly right. Its superbly fair. Things were never going to be alright. And that is just fine with me.”
Catchy saw the future before it happened. He mapped it out. And even though everyone loved him-and I mean loved him insatiably-not enough people took his message to heart. Not until it was much too late. And there are reasons for that, too.
In hindsight they’re awful reasons, but still reasons. It seems most unfair that Catchy go down the road he did. But he’d say fairness was less important than understanding. It certainly doesn’t seem right what happened but again, Catchy would say the time to debate right or wrong has passed. That train left the station a long time ago he would likely say. The notion of right and wrong is a relic from an era gone for good.
But Catchy would agree that things could have been good. In fact, I think, and I cannot possibly be alone here, that was what Catchy was trying to do with every seemingly crazy thing he said or did. He was trying to show us the good below the surface while at the same time lifting the sheets to expose the monster under the bed. Perhaps hoping that once we all saw it, we would set aside our ridiculous nonsense and band together to slay the beast.
Anyways we decided to start with what we believe to be Catchy’s final journal entry just over 7 years ago.
**********
January 2023 (Exact Date-I don’t know)
I’m inconsiderable I know that. We all are to whatever force is responsible for all this.
I’m a little loose not cause I’m scared but because there’s no information.
I like information. Real information. The kind that makes your heart beat fast not the kind that hypnotizes you.
There’s not much left to figure out unfortunately which leaves me with nothing to cling to in this place. And the suspense is gone too. I mean each event seemed predictable enough that I know what happens from here but I’ve got it covered.
There’s no window in here. I love windows. Who doesn’t? For days I didn’t care because not all windows are created equal.
But now I want a window. Any kind will do just fine.
I remember the beautiful windows in an office I was in a couple times in college. And the old ceiling to floor windows in my childhood home. I loved the crank windows that were designed for escape in a fire. Me and my kid brother Jhames escaped in the small hours of the morning to get into mischief on too many summer nights to count.
I’m glad we did.
They always said I was like a beautiful cartoon. Wild and crazy and bouncing off walls and people loved to watch.
I didn’t resent them for it then and I don’t resent them now, either.
And so much was good. In some ways knowing you’re gunna end up in a room like this makes life even more exciting.
Some of it was better than good.
Better than sex type good. Some of it was next level type shit.
All I can do is remember stuff now though.
Time is like a monster taunting me into delirium.
The Time Monster teases me because it has information I don’t and it is not about to discuss time as a construct with me just to comfort me.
No, the Time Monster is all in. The Time Monster is dead set on fuckin me raw but I’ve got a few arrows in my quiver.
There is Space between the events that mark our passage through this wild shit. I say Space because it upsets the Time Monster.
For example, I can say unequivocally that the space, or the distance between the side yard with the climbing tree, or the half pipe under White Hollow road where we would often chill, or the courtyard where people wouldn’t stop looking at me drawing, now seems immeasurable.
All that notwithstanding I knew I would end up here. It was written into the cosmic DNA or something and the warning signs were fucking obvious. As obvious as street signs.
Anyway, its evening now.
That’s all I know.
An arrow from my quiver to put TM back in his place.
Focus on where I’m at now. The air I’m breathing now.
There’s a mirror with smudges on it mounted on the olive-green brick wall.
The floor is concrete and waxed. Like industrial grade. It shines and looks cleaner than anything else in here, me included.
The bed is small and uncomfortable, but it serves its purpose.
The room is clean enough and contains: A small dresser with three empty drawers; a metal toilet; a metal sink; and a nightstand by my bed upon which sits a food tray with an empty paper bowl and used spoon.
I hate the fluorescent lighting.
I always have.
I like orange light.
In addition to the TM now I have one of the rods is flickering. It makes me see things I’m not seeing.
There was just a knock on the metal door. I put my journal down carefully. After all it’s the only thing I’m allowed to have. Two pencils and my journal. I pray the graphite doesn’t break otherwise I’m fucked. Or if I fill all the pages up. That’ll leave me fucked too.
“Your tray please,” A man demanded. It was one of the soldiers. Not Officer Harmon, the top dog, but someone else.
And so I hopped off the bed, grabbed the tray and brought it to the door.
There’s a slot that opens three times daily.
Three trays a day come in and three trays a day go out.
A daily ration of toiletries come with the tray at breakfast:
- a small cup with a dab of toothpaste,
- a tiny bar of soap
- a clean rag
- A swab kit for testing
- a small roll of toilet paper, and instructions for what to return when they come to collect the supper tray.
Yet again I tried to get information. Who doesn’t want information? I tried not to push. I shouldn’t even need to ask because I know the answers. That’s what the backup plan is for.
“Scuse me sir,” I held onto the tray “sorry to bother you, I mean-
“Let go of the tray!” the soldier ordered. He was about all business, but he didn’t yell. The soldier yesterday yelled.
“I just wanted to know if there’s an update on my case and when, like, I mean when can I know something. Anything,”
I get short of breath when they knock.
I was hoping he would say something. He knows the big dawg likes me. He’s been as good as one could expect I guess, I heard him take a deep breath before exhaling.
“Your HSW will update you,” he said flatly.
“Ok, do you know when?”
I tried to play it cool.
Like it didn’t matter when.
Like I’m not loose in my head and on my way to getting looser.
Like I understand this is for my own good and not only forgive them but praise them.
But as fast as he had come, he was gone even faster.
I had stood there and stared at the doorknob for a moment. No point. I already went through that stage and it got me nowhere. No cell phone or laptop. No communication whatsoever with my people, or the world.
Like I ever really had people.
I haven’t even met my HSW yet.
There’s no chair. Just the bed.
There’s an outlet with a nightlight by the toilet.
I like to sit on the concrete floor by the toilet with my knees to my chest and my hood over my head writing in this journal and trying to think of something else. Like that dude in Shawshank Redemption who avoided going insane during isolation in prison by playing classical music in his mind. I don’t remember who, but it was like entire symphonies.
I have only my memories. Don’t get it twisted there’s some good ones. But some Bach or one of those dudes would bring me more peace.
Thinking about all the philosophers, thinking about the triangles, thinking about the drawings and all the times I tried only makes being in this room, even though I knew I would end up here, more difficult to bear.
Anyways 1998 is a year I favor in my memory.
My childhood house was small but safe.
Echoes of doors slamming and a woman crying down the hall.
We had a big yard with two towering maple trees in the front, a small pond, and Forsythia bushes that ran the length each side of the yard. All this provided privacy during the Spring and Summer. The Forsythias would start yellow in the Spring. An electrifying yellow with a pleasant smell, like honey, but not as sweet as honey suckles.
By mid-Summer they would be green.
Everything was green. The bushes, the trees, and the abundant plant life circling the pond.
At night the tree frogs would chirp like wild and when combined with the hum of my window fan and the croaking of the bullfrogs the result was an orchestra that had God as the composer and the conductor and I would be lulled into a deep, purifying sleep.
Every sound was accounted for. When my parents would head to sleep, we could hear the clicking of the lamps, the sound of the recliners going upright, their joints cracking-toes, knees-and the sound of our black lab’s paws on the tiles as she followed my parents to their bedroom, but not before checking on us kids.
I’m looking at the glossy cement to avoid the flickering light.
I control almost nothing.
The piss and shit that comes out of my body, a handful of other things and most important my own thoughts. For now.
Remember.
It was the Autumn in 1998.
My mom was working late and my dad was making pasta. Always vermicelli with red sauce. Italian bread on the side. He would eat out of the same beige, oval plastic bowl that had been melted a little on one side. I think that was my fault, but I can’t properly recall.
My father had his routines just like anyone. On a weeknight his routine was simple: make pasta, lay on his side on the couch and watch the PBS Newshour with the dog perched by his side waiting on a handout.
Years later he would say “Back when it was actual news,” adding “not the Marxists shit their peddling now.”
That night I stood leaning on the doorframe in the kitchen as he stirred his pasta. I was rereading Brave New World for AP English for about the 10th time. The other times I read it because I had to in order to make a puzzle piece. Same thing with the letter from Hux to Orwell.
I was into the book and rethinking some things but I was distracted because I was waiting for the phone to ring. The evening had a lot of potential.
“Dad,” I held the book down and looked at him as he prepped the colander to drain his pasta.
“hmm?” he replied, looking my way briefly.
“When will we have a Brave New World? I mean how long until they get us there?” I asked him to kill time, but I also wanted his take. My father considered all those things we weren’t all that different.
“Catchy…we’re in it now. Right now. You already know that so stop burning time,” he replied while draining his pasta. His words were crisp and decisive. Like it was a done deal and I recall I felt a bit smaller as my father drained his pasta.
Lights go off in every room at 9pm. Now it’s dark and all I’m left with is a plug-in nightlight by the toilet and I prefer this. Someone is screaming down the hall. I can hear the squeaking of his shoes on the concrete because he’s being dragged. With my hood still over my head I play with the cigarette burn on the left cuff. I always do when I’m nervous. I remember the night I made that burn hole. I was nervous then, too, but it was a good nervous.
The new ones don’t always scream but this one is hysterical.
I wish he would shut the fuck up.
Screaming won’t save any of us, only the people outside of here pretending things are normal can save us. They could save us in the next 20 minutes if they had a notion to. They don’t though. They don’t know what they don’t know. That’s one reason I knew I’d be in a room like this one and that nobody would come for me.
He’s begging.
He’s pleading.
That had not been me but not because I wasn’t scared or angry. I just knew it was coming so I braced myself. Like when you know you’re about to get hit.
I wish I could tell him he’ll get used to the not knowing. The fear.
Even when you know the ending the ride can still be wild. Looking back, it feels like it happened in a rapid succession of events. But it wasn’t like that. It was perfectly executed and only a select few with a conventional education could ever know why. They might sense it over the course of their life. An itch they can never seem to scratch.
It was a slow burn for a long time.
Countless pieces scattered far and wide.
A puzzle with a million pieces when you only have 9.
The fireworks come at the end not in the middle. Sure, there were firecrackers here and there. Maybe a mortar or something colorful. But it wasn’t the finale.
If you recognized the dominos you could see them going up, one-by-one. You could see that your neighbors, friends, and family were helping to arrange these huge things. Each massive domino had its place and purpose and you would wonder why they would help to set them up when they knew they would eventually come down, crushing everything in their path.
Some spoke out and seemed surprised when their efforts failed.
I never understood this. I knew I’d fail from the get-go. Knowing that in advance doesn't make you weak it gives you something to work with. It impels you to keep going, I think.
So, I did what I did and now I have my memories.
It’s in my memories I find some peace.
In my memories I stay correct.
So, under the dim white light I remember, and I write.
“Hello?” I snatched the phone off the hook.
“Catchy you comin over or what? We’re waiting on yer ass so stop reading whatever 10 pound book yer into and get over here,” Adam sounded rushed, like I was late. Had I missed something?
“Yeah yeah man yer house?” I wanted to see Kristen.
“Nah the pipe under White Hollow Road. We’re meeting Dips and Manny there first then we’ll go to my house. Yer brother should come too.”
I’m the second youngest of 7 kids. They named me Catkin. My full name is Catkin Calvin Key. But when I was a toddler, I couldn’t say it correctly because I talked so fast. I had a tendency to blend my first and last name together. The result was Catchy.
Soon they called me Catchy. My parents and their friends. My siblings and our neighbors. All of my friends and every single one of my teachers.
So, when the day finally came and the Contact Tracers kicked down my door, dressed in military-style hazmat suits, wielding M-4s and screaming at me to provide my ID and tell them my name, even though I had been expecting such a scene, I was still caught off guard. I said, frozen and feeling like I would vomit, “they called me Catchy.” I said “called” because right then I knew my life was past tense.
Set them to the wind, like Immanuel said more than once.
As it was meant to be.
Catkin and Catchy feel like two different guys. If only they could have taken just one.
Five months earlier during The Easing I was driving home after having brunch with my friend and saw an ad I had not seen until then for the soon-to-be thugs on a billboard that said “Need a job? Want to help your community during the Pandemic? Apply to be a Contact Tracer or a Health Service Worker today at www.coa.gov.”
Things held steady. A new normal set in. They said the miracle vaccine was in the works. Each State had different rules but mostly things were open with certain restrictions.
Across the world other nations dropped a much heavier hammer much faster.
The rules in other supposedly free countries were even crazier and protests were erupting. Some countries literally sealed off their borders and started sealing people off in their homes.
Restrictions got tighter.
People grew frantic.
A person was either rebellious or obedient. Translation: a person was either anti-science or normal.
People mostly policed each other. Even when they started playing head games with us-like one step back closer to what it was, and two steps forward into a hellscape beyond the ability of all those we warned to grasp. The hardest part for them I think was the realization that they built it, and in a way, it’s always been there.
I can hear him screaming and pounding on his door. It won’t do him any good.
Me and Jhames met Dips, Immanuel, and Adam under the street in the pipe. A huge pipe that was dry most of the time. Dips had a hollowed-out cigarette filled with weed.
I remember chiding him for wasting a cigarette. To which he reasoned, clearly concluding he was ever so clever “So if anyone comes they jus think it’s a cigarette.” He shrugged like it was as obviously stroke of genius. I didn’t waste another breath pointing out how stupid he was.
It had to have been the look on my face because Adam teased me. He knew I was thinking about Kristen.
“Scared Catch? Trust me this will help cause Kristen says she’s ready tonight,” Adam smiled, nodding. “And Catch just be cool man,” Adam put his arm around me while Immanuel and Jhames looked on. Immanuel looking serious and Jhames laughing, “don’t worry about her windows or her colonial style house. Forget about geometry and that philosopher named after the cartoon in the Sunday papers and jus focus on her.”
I wanted to tell Adam I could make Kristen interested in windows and that Hobbes isn’t Hobbes from the funnies, not really, but I didn’t.
Immanuel stood apart sullen and solo with his hood over his head and his hands in his pockets and he spit as Adam was clearly saying Kristen wanted to fuck tonight.
I had butterflies in my stomach and smoked with them. Jhames did too. We all looked up each time we heard a car go over our heads. When we emerged it was dark, cool, windy and smelled like weed and firewood.
I tried to explain the path and the destination for my own sanity especially as things started moving more quickly.
Everything started to crack.
People seemed to be waking up just as places to share the message vanished or became stigmatized to the point that nobody would find you in that corner of the infoverse anyway.
Websites vanished. Once prominent doctors became conspiracy theorists. Eventually they went as far as to label them national security threats.
Then they rolled out the vaccine. Everything was steady at first. But we seem incapable of seeing what’s directly in front of us. So, they missed it.
Some places were transformed into complete prisons on the news for the world to see and the voices of those describing the bars bellowed loudly and with great futility.
Israel went first, then Canada and New Zealand. Various US States began enacting measures that people accepted initially only to attempt to reject them with some initial successes, then it was too late.
I know they sit in rooms like this in those places wondering the things I’m wondering. Or perhaps they’re past that stage.
Its not terribly relevant to me anyway. Like I said acceptance early on is the key. It's still disappointing but a lot less disappointing when you already know the outcome.
When you already know what you can expect of people.
When you already know just how weak we can be. Just how weak we truly are. Just how weak I am, to allow myself to end up in a room like this when I knew I was going to end up in a room like this.
People like me were mocked and eventually relegated to a group called The Disrupters.
They blamed it all on us. Just as I knew they would.
So much in the world we don’t know and yet so much is pragmatic and predictable.
People just don’t appreciate how exquisitely fine-tuned the laws of the universe and of nature truly are.
Even when you see something coming. You know it’s inevitable. You know there is no way to alter the trajectory from where you are, it’s still a strange feeling.
All of my youth and young adulthood people were with me. But maybe they were just near me instead.
At first the stock market surged as they discussed the phases of distribution. The divide grew between those who would take it and those who refused. So strange it was that this divide was scarcely recognizable to those at the mercy of the Knowers who sit proudly at the Demanding Heights knowing things only they could know and people listened like it was gospel and went only to the places they were told they could go. In every sense.
I refused to comply with vaccination or testing.
Most of my friends did as well.
At first.
Most of my family did as well.
At first.
They fell like dominos. Especially those with kids.
It became almost impossible not to in all fairness to them.
The prizes, lotteries, and inducements to go and get vaccinated were simply too overwhelming and tempting to ignore but worse than that was the fact that it became impossible, despite posturing politicians, to participate in society at all. To get a job that you loved. To go to the places you used to go. To hang out with the people you used to hang out with.
No more bookstores.
No more road trips.
No more coffee shops.
No more countless other things.
Adam, Jhames and Dips all pushed me to go to her house which was just down the street.
I glanced at Immanuel’s damp eyes.
Immanuel distracted me, he affected me. He still does.
In my memories I stay correct.
“She’s too shy to tell you herself but here’s the note she passed me in Mr. Shuler’s class today,” Adam lit a real cigarette and handed me the note.
The note confused me, and Immanuel could tell. He came up behind me to read it and laughed and said “Catch I know if you wrote the note it would just say ‘lets read some brainy shit then try sex’ but girls are more low key then that. Actually, most people are. She likes you and wants you bro,” he patted my back and stepped back. I felt his hand even after he was several feet away again.
He left me with something.
We all stood under a streetlight at the corner under the giant maple tree amidst falling leaves.
The note smelled of her body spray.
I bummed another cigarette and headed for her house, the boys cheering me on in the distance. I turned around to see Immanuel take his hood off as I pulled my hood over my head to look cooler for Kristen and when she answered the door her face said it all.
Initially they said if you didn’t get the vaccine you couldn’t go to concerts.
No big deal.
Then it was restaurants.
Who cares have it delivered.
Then the supermarket.
Only curbside.
Then it could only be delivered to your home.
They said companies had the right to do what they wanted to and so there were no jobs.
And it doesn't take a genius to figure out the requirements for collecting government help. That's right eventually they required those who wanted financial help to do what they were told. But by that point it really didn't matter for me and I knew it wouldn't which is why I didn't worry too much about all of that.
Eventually those of us who held out were holed up in our homes and every measure you can imagine was employed to exert pressure.
Fines.
Loss of jobs.
Frozen credit cards and bank accounts.
Lowing the credit scores of family and friends who were otherwise compliant.
Then they curtailed services like internet and cell phone coverage.
Eliminated.
It’s hard to explain now but it was so easy to see before it all happened. They’re pragmatists you see. Those who sit at the Demanding Heights.
Living the puzzle pieces in the exact order was an unfortunate thrill.
In early 2022 they declared a mandatory stay at home order for The Nation. There had been ebbs and flows but this was the big one.
It was the one that made it clear that anything that had already happened was a scrimmage.
Just practice.
Prototyping.
A love tap, as my dad used to say.
Then came “The Edicts.”
All firsts that were reinvented firsts with the added help of technology.
The blockchains. I remember thinking of computerized chains in the late 90s and early 2000s when I was in high school, then college.
The devil is in the details I told them again and again those three dirty ass days in the courtyard as a young buck.
But denial is chicken soup for the sick, sick soul.
These developments were scary but we all still had each other.
For a time I could talk to my family and friends.
Until the day that I couldn’t.
We were in her room. I pulled back her curtain and looked out the window, over the driveway. I wanted to talk about the window design, but I could hear Immanuel’s words in my head. Adam’s too but his were less important
“My parents aren’t coming home Catch. Don’t worry,” she said sweetly, softly and clearly clueless.
We sat on her bed, knees touching, Metallica’s Nothing Else Matters playing. I caressed her cheek as she blushed and looked away, then back at me and I moved in for the kiss.
Pulsating waves of warmth and pleasure moved through me. She looked at my sleeve and said, softly, “you burned a hole with that cigarette.”
The shirts came off.
Then her bra. In that moment the grand plan, the master puzzle, all took a backseat to Kristen. And her fantastically perfect breasts. Like silver dollar pancakes and I love pancakes.
Pancake breasts smiled when she looked at the bulging below my belt.
We laughed awkwardly.
Anxiously.
Consumed with the rapturous joy of the new experience that was technically forbidden but understood to be inevitable.
After The Edicts the QR became so much a part of routine life it was as if it ran in the background like things we don’t even think on unless they stop working. Running water, electricity, stop lights and an endless list of other things.
They limited cell phone use to certain times, then only to call certain people or places.
Not to worry, the QR had levels of permission and it was fast and easy. It wouldn’t fail you. It would always tell you where you stood.
Honestly, hand of God, I have no idea how long I’ve been here. Today I scoured the room for whatever I could find per my longstanding plan.
A small, stripped screw. It’s not much but I watched MacGyver when I was a kid so…It’ll do. I have enough experience in this area to make it work.
Near the toilet there is a rough patch of concrete. For hours I rubbed the tip of the screw back and forth with a steady rhythm, slowly shaping the tip into small, silvery, razor sharp tip. I rubbed that screw back and forth until it sounded like a strange animal in my head. Almost like a distorted chirp from the tree frogs.
Nobody will ever read this but that’s hardly the point.
We make our last stand against whatever or whoever seeks to destroy us with whatever tools we’re given I suppose.
Immanuel where are you now amigo?
Are you looking for me?
Do you wonder?
Do you think Kristen remembers I was her first? I’m sorry for that Immanuel. But you know that.
I can’t get that old Beatles song out of my head.
Something about 8 days a week.
Its funny that my life feels like it spanned an 8-day week and little else.
A simple breakdown would look something like this:
8. Yesterday I was watching the timeline play out and fantasized we might wake up use the balance wisely.
7. The day before that things were weird, but I was having brunch with friends.
6. The day before that people looked on as I drew the puzzle in college before leaving myself for dead-twice. I wound up in rooms that felt a lot like this one to explain myself but obviously the conditions were fundamentally different. Even as I sat in the big brown chair, I knew I would end up here someday. I knew there would be no arched 19th century windows or a giant leather chair. Immanuel you remember that one. Where are you?
5. The day prior I helped build a bonfire in the woods one mild winter evening in 2000.
4. And day before that I was in a giant pipe under White Hollow Road, then with Kristen, my first, on a crisp Autumn evening in 1998 while my clique and kid brother cheered me on. Immanuel I never said it, but I know I fucked up. I’m not heartless. Just off kilter and in my head.
3 & 2. The first days I remember the wind in my hair and gasping for air as my mom stood over me. As if looking at her face from just below the surface of water she was blurry before coming into full view. Saving me and making everything as it was supposed to be.
1.But today…today this is where I am.
Where the fuck are YOU?