Our Times

 

As everyone in 2006 knows, the secret to a successful online blog is frequent content. That is why I sometimes post as many as one or sometimes two posts in any given year. Considerations like consistency on matters of style, content or quality just don't matter. Just pump it all out in a hodgepodge fashion to a widly inconsistent timetable and you too can replicate my huge success as a blogger.

So I will post something I wrote recently simply to make my self write. It took me as long to to write it as it took to type it,but less time to think about it. It is a work of genius.

OUR TIMES: AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE MALAISE OF SUBURBIA IN THE ERA OF SMART TECHNOLOGY. A PLAY IN ONE ACT (IF BY ACT YOU MEAN VERY BRIEF SCENE).


SAMMY: (looking out the back door furtively): Huh.

FRANKIE: (inside) What are you doing?

SAMMY: The neighbours.

FRANKIE: What now?

SAMMY: One of them, I swear to God, is recording a TikTok.

FRANKIE: (sigh): This again.

SAMMY: They are! I can tell!

FRANKIE: How do you know?

SAMMY: Because someone always is! Somewhere there is always SOMEONE recording a TikTok! And someone, I am CERTAIN of it, is recording a TikTok ON THIS STREET!

FRANKIE: What does it matter? What is your problem with TikTok?

SAMMY: It makes me nervous.

FRANKIE: That’s it?

SAMMY: Yeah!

FRANKIE: Jesus christ, I thought maybe you had a geopolitical objection based on the role of the Chinese state in the company and the collection of data and I was GOING to point out that was a ridiculous and hypocritical thing to object to, seeing as all these multinational social media giants farm our data on a mass scale for profit, there is no space safe from the wholesale collection of our entire online identities and activities by these evil monstrosities that get us hooked on and entangled with their product then turn it against us with the force of a New York cop on a Jewish student who opposes Israeli genocide!

[Long pause]

SAMMY: GREAT! Now I’m terrified of EVERYTHING on my phone! (walks back inside) What should we have for dinner?

FRANKIE: I’ll check Uber Eats…

SAMMY: (lunging for the phone) NO!!!!!! (chucks the phone on the ground and starts stomping it) OK … now we’re safe. What were you thinking???

FRANKIE: (Immediately produces another phone) Luckily I have plenty of spares. I was thinking pho. (Starts to order).

SAMMY: (suspiciously): You haven’t been recording TikToks with these phones have you?

FRANKIE: Sammy, this whole thing is a TikTok! Smile (points to the corner where a phone is taped near the top of the wall) you are on camera!

SAMMY: (laughs) Oh Frankie, you and your tricks! (waves to the camera) That’s a good one, I hope it goes viral. (sticks head back out the back door). They are up to SOMETHING though.

THE END

"Kid's these days, don't leave the house now' This is a random song I've been listening too.

The Murder Of Carlo Sands By The Cad Leslie Richmond

Being dead is not so bad – said no dead person ever!

Death is unpleasant to experience and its aftermath has a catastrophic impact on your social life. I should know – I have been dead for years, ever since my MURDER by THE NOTORIOUS CAD* Leslie Richmond.

Leslie knows what he did and he has never apologised. 

His murder weapon? A facebook quiz from the late 2000s.

We were in a duel to the death. The cad had offended my honour in some Facebook comment in a manner I’ve long forgotten. Such concerns fade away once you’ve passed over to the Other Side. 

As a Gentleman, I immediately demanded satisfaction. Challenging the cad to a duel to the death, I insisted he choose his weapon. Without hesitating, the cad chose aging, commenting that he’d “seen the state of my liver” and was quite confident.

It was a bold statement. My liver had survived horrors inflicted on it that would fell the Greatest Monsters from the Myths of All Ages. It was bound to out-live some beret-wearing bastard from Adelaide. 

It never got the chance. 

It was early 2009 when I took the Facebook quiz “When Will You Die?” Such quizzes were all the rage in Facebook’s early days; a more innocent time when “mass data harvesting” was not a widely understood concept.

I received the shocking answer: October 21, 2008. I had been dead for several months!

It actually made a lot of sense. My hangovers had been getting drastically worse.

You might wonder why I didn’t challenge the quiz’s result. But at the time, I was in the habit of repeating loudly every time I did such a quiz that “Facebook does not lie!” Such was my first response to its terrible findings.

It was only when Leslie gleefully popped up to declare victory in the duel that the true significance of the moment dawned on me. I had lost a duel to a cad in Adelaide.

Having declared my faith in the quiz result, I could hardly now admit I was wrong. As anyone could tell you, admitting you are wrong on social media is a fate distinctly worse than death. 

I had to accept defeat. I had been murdered by a cad.

Now some may wish to play the “devil’s advocate” and equivocate over the claim of murder.

Surely, I can hear these apologists declare, it was the Facebook quiz rather than Leslie Richmond who consigned me to the After Life. 

Leslie merely got lucky, this “theory” goes, skating through to victory as the Steven Bradbury of duellists.

BUT WHO DO YOU THINK CREATED THAT FACEBOOK QUIZ?

Oh he’s covered his tracks. You’ll find no smoking gun or clear cyber trail leading back to his blood-stained hands. But the explanation I somehow just happened to stumble onto the quiz that ended my life – and delivered the cad his greatest victory – is far too convenient.

I would go further and suggest that Leslie Richmond may not just be responsible for that quiz but for Facebook itself – a crime almost as terrible for humanity as murdering me!

I would not be surprised if Mark Zuckerburg turned out to really be Leslie Richmond in a latex mask, and that the cad secretly enrolled in Havard in the mid-2000s as part of a long game to entrap me. 

Provoking me with his relentless slights on my honour on the very site he developed for its ease of trading public insults, he knew it was just a matter of time before I would say NO MORE and insist on a duel to the death. 

And then he struck!

This is the only believable explanation for the series of events that led to my current status of deceased.

It is not easy being dead. The world is almost entirely set up to serve the living. There is very little advice available for navigating life once you've formally departed it – with the honourable exception of America’s Greatest Living Philosopher who once wisely sung “Never drive a car when you’re dead”.

Wise words, Tom Waits. I never do. Not even with the current state of Sydney’s trains.

'Never trust a man in blue trench coat, never drive a car when your dead...'

* A cad, for those born after 1830, is "a man who behaves dishonourably" -- a complete bounder, in other words.