Captive Audiences
You’re all monitoring the situation by force.
There is a fear, common in this current age, of infection. We are all trapped and subjected to a constant barrage of information we can do nothing with. Every struggle of the outside world, invisible to us via the naked eye, brings a sense of powerlessness, and with it, anxious tremors. We are no longer only affected by tangibility. It’s always the screen, making us sick.
This fear came to light in a dream, something akin to a vision. I was not a participant in it, only a witness to what was happening. There was a face. Who or what it belonged to, I cannot confirm. Dreams are always a little blurry after you wake up. But it was a face nonetheless. He was a program, a display on a monitor. He faded in and out of various positions, but he always maintained a contorted smile. The face’s main facet was the eyes. Red, bulging, staring.
When you looked at this face for long enough, and he looked at you, eventually, your eyes became his too. Then your smile. Your face embodied the image on the screen, in physical reality, fidgeting between fading positions of every muscle. What a person wearing his face was capable of was not information I was given, but I could feel it. It was something evil.
There was a man at a hospital. He sat in a chair. His eyes were red. He stared at another man until his eyes were red too. There was no moment of panic, no passing of symptoms. It simply happened without anyone fully understanding. And when these men, and everyone alongside them, walked into the streets, there was only fire.
Sometimes I have dreams that seem to mean something. I wonder what this one was trying to tell me.
The Teenth Of June
A few days ago was June 19, which also happens to be a federal holiday called “Juneteenth.” Unfortunately for everyone involved, that holiday is not real.
Don’t get me wrong, the nineteenth day of June itself is real,1 but the holiday isn’t. It’s “real” in the sense that it is recognized by the United States federal government, but in our hearts, it is fake.
I know of its falseness because of my excellent memory. Holidays were a big deal in school, and not once was this “Juneteeth” holiday ever brought up. Not in the textbooks, not in the calendars, not anywhere! You might say it’s because it’s in June, and school is out during the summer. Except: we learn about the 4th of July in school, don’t we? There’s no school during Christmas but every classroom still gets decorated to celebrate it! In fact, almost every holiday is a no-school day!
It is a paradoxical thing to be able to recall the non-existence of something. Attempting to envision a reality where a certain object is there in your memory, but it is not, and yet everyone around you acts like it is. People aren’t actually saying that Juneteenth has always been around, but the sudden Mandela Effect-esque insertion of it into the cultural sphere is strange and suspicious. There wasn’t any fanfare or debate, it just happened.
Nobody even really understands what the holiday is about!2 Slavery? I saw several posts about the holiday and none of them even mentioned it. And letting black people take over an entire day of Pride Month? Surely the calendar people see the semantic issue here!
It’s such a dumb name, too, “Juneteenth,” because it fails to signify anything related to what the holiday is actually about. Most other holidays have names that at least give away something. Christmas is about Christ, Thanksgiving is about giving thanks, Valentine’s Day is for “valentines,” Independence Day is about aliens invading Earth. Juneteenth doesn’t have anything except for a dumb combination of the month and day. It is meaningless.
Because of the SubStick’s regular refusal to engage in research, I am only going off of memory. The first mention of it probably showed up around 2020, a time of pandering and racial strife, in the end being proposed by President Donald Trump. Despite apparently being meant to celebrate liberation from work, I’ve never been given that day off while having a job.
Some holidays garner certain actions from you and the community around you. Buying and wrapping presents for Christmas, preparing and serving a lot of food on Thanksgiving, sending flowers to admirers or something for Valentine’s Day,3 setting off fireworks on Independence Day, dressing your children up or handing out candy on Halloween. Not every holiday is so tangible, but most of them have unique presentation. Juneteenth has nothing. It’s just… there. Maybe there’s a parade or something somewhere, but I’ve never seen one.
It’s not necessarily a bad idea to celebrate the end of slavery, but that’s not what Juneteenth is, really. If it were, leaders would have shown gratitude towards the individuals responsible. Maybe this “Freedom Day” could celebrate white people in theory, but the world is far past the point where the name of something has anything to do with its actual meaning. It’s been long enough since “anti-fascist” groups entered the picture that this kind of thing should be clear and people should stop playing into the frame of their enemies. There is no need to pretend anti-white things are not anti-white, and similarly there is no shame in admitting such.
Where Did He Go?
People keep asking me where I am, where I ran off to. I’ve been in the same place I always have been. Right here.
Every time someone asks where I’ve been, I think to myself: I’m right here.
When another bemoans my absence, I yell out: I’m right here.
They miss me, but they do not call for me. They do not see me and I do not know why.
Even now, I wait, but I am getting a bit tired. How much longer do I have to sit?
I’m right here.
I’m right here.
So This Is How The World Ends
Recently I went to see a movie.4 It was pretty lame and its themes were very vapid. But there was something at the beginning of it that I felt was noteworthy.
In this story, the world is ending. California sinks into the ocean, the internet dies forever, wildfires ravage the Midwest and destroy food suppliers, sinkholes randomly open up in the street. On top of all that, characters note that the people around them are “ghosting.” Spouses are abandoning their families, employees aren’t coming in to work, patients are getting up and leaving the hospital no matter their condition. They’re never seen doing this. Instead, they’re around one day and the next… they’re gone.
Of course, later in this act, as the stars in the sky fizzle out and the entire universe implodes representing the mind of a man dying from cancer, the world does indeed end. One of the first signs of its inevitable expiration was the disappearance of people, the slow and drawn-out abandonment of ordinary existence by large swaths of the population.
Whether it is in response to worldwide disaster or a piece of the inconspicuous end times themselves, people don’t die off rapidly, or collapse in a dramatic scene on the street. They don’t even throw up their hands and yell out to the sky before storming off and going home. Instead, you just don’t see them around anymore. The only thing that happened to them was that they simply decided to stop. Whatever they were doing wasn’t worth it anymore. This is the competency crisis.
This problem which affects all of modern society is not just a representation of declining intelligence and dying tradition. One reason we no longer pass information on to the next generation is that we no longer feel it is necessary. Internet access has resulted in the mass outsourcing of human knowledge. This has a compounding effect; when people don’t feel like passing anything on, what happens when they don’t feel like doing anything at all?
When modernity becomes simultaneously comforting and purposeless, the drive to act and live in the world lessens. “Comforting” can mean anything like video games, junk food, or pornography, material cosmetic things that don’t actually boost quality of life. Someone can have all of this and still be poor, but content. So what motivates them to move up in the world? Whether it’s changing media landscapes or some other invisible chemical, maybe that traditional way of life is no longer seen as viable. The competency crisis is about more than a person’s ability to be competent; it’s about a person’s motivation to be competent.
If a man believes the world is ending, or more likely believes the future is bleak, that he’ll never be able to afford the life his parents attained, that he’ll never fall in love, that nothing he does will matter in the grand scheme of things, maybe it gets a bit harder to get up for work in the morning. The worse things get, the heavier your eyes feel when you wake up. The stars aren’t going out, California has yet to sink, the universe is still intact, but there’s one less person at their job today. Nothing happened to them. They simply “ghosted.”
The Rodeo Ending
What’s the deeeaaal with rodeos? You haven’t seen anything “rode” until it’s over! They should call them “ride-os!”
“Rodeo” is actually derived from Spanish, meaning something like “round up.”
They don’t really feel like sporting events but that’s essentially what they are. It’s just more… bite-sized. You aren’t watching one team the whole time. Instead it’s a marathon of smaller events with a lot more people. There aren’t that many sports that involve so many live animals. I don’t see much practical use in riding a bull. Tying up cattle or riding horses I can understand. How does maintaining balance on a bull for eight seconds help your homestead? Probably just an endurance test for the benefit of a viewing audience.
(Stick is unfamiliar with the farming lifestyle.)
I went to one a little bit ago, that’s why I wanted to mention it.
“A Crimson King Maple. I planted it myself in my backyard. This one's a lot bigger, though.”
as real as days on calendars can be
for the sake of this point, Stick did not look up what Juneteenth was about
I have no clue, really
Stick does this a lot