The Viewers

Narrative junkies. The accumulated history of the world had produce virtually unlimited things to watch. Throughout time, the narrative has not changed--cliff hangers--what will happen? The urge to see how things unfold. It takes many years until you begin to see the flaws in the narrative, that it is not real. It's not like a methadone program, it's not like the Matrix where bodies provide energy, it's maybe a third option. People are allocated small rooms with a cheap but functional screen with unlimited streaming of shows. They will quite happily it there all day. You can store thousand and thousands of them in their blocks.

The program started not because of the viewers--people who have renounced life to view life. It was started because of their parents. Like the family gets tired of the elderly and puts them in a home, there were programs like Willowbrook to warehouse the problematic.

Many people were against the program. They felt that work was inherently good, to be a viewer was to be discouraged. But the workers who didn't want viewers in their houses, they had a political coup, and got blocks and blocks of these units. 

They are quiet neighborhoods. The "pods" are soundproof, so you don't have to bang the walls. You can jack up the TV as loud as you like. A couch, a viewer, and the pablum pipe, that has nutritious smoothies that provide bare sustenance. There is a pull out toilet. 

Sometimes the people leave their pods for short periods of time. Turns out you get what you want, and you want something different. That's what the social engineers counted on. Sneaky therapist lurk on the street and engage the viewers in conversation. The average time of viewing lifestyle has been cut down to 12 years. After that time, the average person begins to yearn for more, even more than all the wonderful programming. The viewers tend to good at anticipating scenarios, and tend to do well, after their viewing period.

But that's a fraction of the people. Many of them atrophy and develop health problems. The medical social workers find dead person every once in a while. The shut in problem with the elderly is the same problem here. Because of the isolation people die frequently. Along with the CO2 and smoke detectors, which never go off because nobody cooks, is also a death detector. If there was a fire or a carbon dioxide leak, thousands would die, so they still need the detectors even though they're never used. There is the occasional electric fire. Conditions in the pods are not always that great. Society doesn't want it to be first class pods. It's more of a containment thing, and the viewers are not politically active. But their parents occasionally can be shamed into agitating for better conditions. The Pod lobby in Washington is only second to the NFL lobby which keeps the violent game of football from being banned, because it's "American". The third largest lobby is the anti-pod people.

Plus the drug companies like the pods. The Viewers tend to like stims so they can stay up late and catch the late night shows.

There are even reality TV shows about Viewers who are forced into playing football. They earn viewing time by training and winning.

Then there are the Viewers murderers. Every once in a while while there are people like the mercy nurses, people who aligned with the anti-viewers, who are like the nurses they find every few years who has been secretly killing people who just won't die in the nursing homes. They are very righteous people who can also care for others. They have a line in their head, and when someone crosses it, they feel free to eliminate them.

Former views have become famous and powerful, and also support the community like the Jews in New York City support Israel. They don't want to live there, but they like the idea of it. An option. And yet there are so many forces against it.

The holly wars of inaction and action would never be resolve because they both fight in the wrong way.

Snuff Video

I was bored because I’d watched all the things I thought would be interesting on Netflix, and so I went over to my friend’s house. He was always doing something interesting.

He had on a video, someone was running with a  video camera on their hat. You could hear the grunts and the breath, and feel the jiggle of the camera and the fellow ran along tracks and rocks out somewhere.

Where is that?

Minnesota.

Who’s that running?

I don’t know.

Where’d you get the video?

Someone gave it to me.

My friend and I used to run together, but now we were middle aged, and I’d stopped running because I prefered to drink and watch Netflix, and he was obsessed with his artwork. Every week or so he was on some new process. One week he was just pounding on metal trying to make it do what he wanted. Another week he was doing these elaborate pipe cleaner sculptures. There were a few months where he was doing this lego things. They all seemed kind of neat, and he explored the potentials of the materials, and always had something new in his studio. His studio was an apartment, but besides the bed, and the kitchen counter, it was really a studio. My friend painted and sculpted, he did video projects, and he even clacked away on a typewriter obscure impressionistic poetry.

The guy was running in the background. I could tell it was a guy because of his masculine grunts.

My friend was on one of his pet themes

The man pug you into Netflix today?

No, I’m pretty sure it was me who watched the last season of Arrested Development.

Isn’t it funny that they don’t even hide the label of what the show is doing to you?!

I think it’s about the show, not what it’s supposedly doing to you, and do you think I have arrested development?

We all do. As an artist I regress to the state of a child so that I can do my art. It takes it’s toll, sometimes I have a hard time getting out of the child position.

So why are you busting my nuts?

I’m trying to wake you up. Don’t you want to be awoken?

You’re the great awaker?

Call me what you want, that’s your box, not mine.

The video of a man running continued.

I told my friend about my new girlfriend. I was trying to figure out of she was too needy or if I was too selfish to give her what she wants. My friend would call that my pet theme. The woman I was with had it all going for her, but she had chronic fatigue syndrome. Which meant she didn’t have much energy. She had energy for work, she had energy for me to take her out. But beyond that she wasn’t really present. She slept a lot. I was trying to work out if I wanted a woman who was more awake. My friend, who has all kind of theories, said he didn’t believe in chronic fatigue syndrome, and called it lazy-excuse-to-sleep-a-lot-syndrome. He said he got some of his best ideas when he was really tired, and had been working hard, and let his guard down. He had cycles, where he’s stay up for a few days and then sleep for like a day. He wouldn’t take his bipolar medication to make his sleep cycles conform to the norm. “Who cares, I’m an artist, I like it when everyone is asleep. Nobody to bother me when I’m working. But mostly nobody bothers me except you, and really I can keep working while you’re here, so you don’t really bother me. I need some human contact.”

The runner kept running.

He had a few friends, and his art dealer, and every once in a while he’d go to a bar and sometimes pick up a one night stand. He was too into his art to care about someone else, and the women figured that out, and would leave in the morning. I think he made a point of ignoring them so that they got the picture.

The runner seemed to be getting tired. There were gaps. He stopped a few times and then groaned, and started up again.

My friend made some coffee. He would often quit coffee, because he said he was just using a maintenance dose, and that’s addiction. He’d had trouble with drugs, but was past that. The biggest thing he used now was coffee, and every other time I went he’d serve me tea. Today we were back on coffee. My friend liked to talk about future trips he was going to take when he drank coffee. He’d traveled the world whenever he had a big jackpot of money from his art. Every once in a while he was hot, and he’d use the money to take a break from art and travel the world. He’d pay a few months of rent up front and go away for a few months. He’d come back broke, and that would be part of his hungry artist process. He traveled cheap mostly. Sometimes he’s “slurg” on a hotel room to take a shower and catch up on sleep.

The guy on the video fell down. He twitched a few times and then the camera was still, with the world tilted to the side. Then you couldn’t hear the breathing, it just stopped. Just the wind blowing the grass and trees in the distance.