I pulled a
random book off my shelf: Choke by
Chuck Palahniuk
I used a random
number generator to choose the sentence starting on the 24th line of the 29th
page.
I wrote for ten minutes and this
is the story I got.
Then I say, “Then how about the village
idiot?”
The placement
program, which takes the form of a young woman’s face on my computer, asks, “Are
you sure that would be the logical choice, Mark?”
I examine the
list of possible career opportunities available in Colony Six. More accurately, it’s a list of career
opportunities available to me after the program scanned my blood sample. I have no interest in being a sewage
engineer or dishing out nutrition pills at the colony penitentiary. There is only one choice that seems the
least bit interesting.
“Village idiot! That’s what I want to be.”
Colony Six’s
placement program responds, “Village idiot, is a position that was mistakenly
placed on this list. It is a title
left over from more savage times.”
“I thought that
the mainframe didn’t make mistakes.”
“We do not. Error is impossible.”
“Then this can’t
be a mistake. Make me the
village idiot!”
The computer
sighed. “Your professional
materials are being prepared now.”
The slot to the
left of me opened. Inside, I found
a baseball cap, a bottle on a paper bag and a T-Shirt with the message , “I am with stupid.”
There was an arrow pointing up at the wearer’s head.
The computer stated,
“Baseball cap must be worn backwards at all times.”
I immediately
began a five-week seminar entitled, “So You Want to be The Village Idiot?” For twelve hours a day I took lessons
in passing out in the gutter, getting beaten up by local ruffians and screaming
at the top of my lungs at random pedestrians. The system gave me top marks.
The night before my first day on the job, I stayed up
drinking something called “Al-co-hol” and the next morning I
was found lying flat on my backside outside a daycare screaming, “The world’s
gone to ruins since the war! In
what kind of fucking society do we…. This fascist shit state run by robots telling us what to do with our lives and making us eat food pill.”
One of the robot
soldiers almost liquefied me but I flashed it my “Village Idiot” badge and it
let me go on my way.
Before long a
crowd had gathered to watch me stumble along the sidewalks
screaming, “And there’s advertising everywhere! Art and literature is dead! We just want to plug into monitors and
forgot about reality! And cops can
shoot whoever they want and get away with it…. What kind of world is that?”
Mothers escorted
their children away. Men
sneered and muttered. Teenagers threw trash at me.
I was a raving
success.
No comments:
Post a Comment