Day 32: Barbecue Season(ing)

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Meanwhile, back inside the dream inside the frown

It was barbecue season, and the season was high. Rampaging away from the Pharaohs, the mindless creatures that even now all around me limped towards some unknown central location, I began to sense that I too wanted to enjoy barbecue season. It was at its HEIGHT! It only lasts a short while, i instinctively believed, and had to be cherished. I looked out over the city, and I saw in the distance the distinctive red flag that was raised to indicate to everyone that it was a long weekend. A double! Long Weekend? Barbecue season? How could i resist.

My feet felt like cobalt cubes, barely able to move. My gait evolved from a graceful slice-walking to a slow loping, like the others. It didn’t feel bad. My body, my old human body, now bereft of its last defenses against the saturation of blandness seeping out of every part of the society within the frown, was giving in. I was, i could feel, going on autopilot. But again, it didn’t feel bad. Even the blandness of my thoughts as i record them doesn’t irritate me. Why should i have ideas? Why? I’m not rewarded for them. No one is. It’s better just to go along than to stand apart.

Farther still I limed towards this destination, while those in Kensington Market converged outside a pleasant restaurant called “MacDonalds” at what the signs called Bathurst and Dundas. It seemed a staging area. I didnt’ concern myself with what was happening though, because if a whole crowd of people were doing it, it was undoubtedly safe, and undoubtedly would accommodate us all.

The hot cement glistened on the streetcar tracks that bled away like iron veins down Dundas. The rigidity of it emboldened me, reinforced my sense of modernity. This truly was the greatest age. An age when burgers came in a variety of levels to match one’s affluence or lack thereof, an age when video games no longer had any point, objectives, or goals, just to keep playing them endlessly without any reward, an age when fudge was 25% off right now at Loblaws, an age with gray haze on the horizon, and in the sky, an entire, unfragmented, undamaged moon.

A moon? It was the height of barbecue season, mid day, long weekend! Why should there be a moon?

No, don’t think about it. Look, people are getting on buses! Looks like they’ve chartered some nice buses for us to trundle off in. That looks like fun. Milling around outside the buses, everyone in their various states of dress, their shells indicating what they want you to think of them. Over there a man in a greasy teeshirt, indicating he wants you to think he deals meth, or if not deals, steals to buy it. Over there a woman in a shirt resembling a napkin, indicating that she wishes to be considered a blithering idiot with a large vagina. And then, over there a man with silver glasses, large things, resembling the eyes of a steel lizard. And in those eyes, the moon.

The moon!

Something about the moon… what was it… THE MOON!

I have to save the moon!

But even as I realized this, it seemed not worth the effort. What a lot of work that would be. And everyone was getting on these buses, if i didn’t’ get on, wouldn’t’ i be indicting them for their choices? Aren’t i OBLIGATED to get on the bus? One last time i looked at the Moon, old moon, moony old friend, and bid it farewell. “Let someone else save it,” i said, “i’m comfortable here, in barbecue season.”

But there was doubt, and somewhere, across the vast reaches of time and space itself, there was the Ixtx…

to be continued…