Category: comedy

SMALL MAN SYNDROME – CHAPTER 4

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

CONNOR

CW: ADULT CONTENT

Did it bug me? Of course. Am I happy for them? Absolutely, and not only for getting that dumb girl out of Shane’s life. What the hell was I going to do for Ashley? I only have so much to give, in every sense. She’s beautiful, not just outside but in her heart, in her spirit, and if we were still the same size I would have proposed to her by the end of the year. As it was, we couldn’t even kiss. A whisper and a bird’s peck on her cheek from me versus a pair of pinkish anacondas encircling a guillotine-filled abyss. An awful thing to say about the mouth of the woman you love, but be realistic: my eyes are the size of sesame seeds. I come up to Barbie’s chin. I can see the depth of the texture of the human tongue, and believe me, it’s a turn off. (Women of any age suffering from my condition–feel free to PM me. I am extremely open minded.)

And we still tried, me and Ash, for some kind of physical intimacy. We were drunk, as is so often the case when sex fails because you shouldn’t have even tried. We’d been coping with me for a few months and Shane had stopped sleeping on my couch, wasn’t even at Leah’s house but his own for a change.

We’d had dinner and some wine, and after he left Ash and I had some more, and we were talking like we hadn’t talked in months, since long before what happened. I love Ashley, but we were a few years into the relationship and had started taking each other for granted. The accident (what else could we call it?) had made us both understand what we valued in the other. We were stronger together. We hadn’t let the accident push us apart.

I had clothes by now, and a decent set-up in a nice wooden dollhouse. The Japanese make some really nice miniatures, and I had done the whole place in Danish mid-century, teeny-tiny Aames vases and a pair of Barcelona chairs, everything I could have never afforded in real scale. With a few cleverly staged Zoom calls I had got my boss to trial and then accept me working remotely. My parents lived on the other coast, and I’d bought time with them too. We were living as normally as we thought it could get.

But I missed Ashley, missed holding her, missed sleeping beside her, the morning sex where we didn’t even kiss because neither of us had brushed our teeth, the hug she always gave me whenever I did the dishes, carefully from behind, her cheek against my back. Now she carried me all the time, had to if we wanted to leave the house or even go into another room without me having to scamper across the floor.

We were still at the kitchen table, me at my own little table beside the salt and pepper, and I served myself another toy glass of wine from the eyedropper I use as a cask. At my size, every sip of liquid starts with a burst of surface tension, a visceral snap like popping a bubble of chewing gum, a totally different experience from yours. Stirring the wine with a tiny spoon Shane had found at an Indian grocers (sometime I’ll tell you what it’s really for and you’ll gag), I could see the shimmer of alcohol fumes dissipating from the cup, a necessary step if I didn’t want my eyes to water. Safety first, but I was still the drunkest I’d been since the accident. Ashley too, who in the last few weeks had emerged from her anxieties to really take charge, pulling her own life together as she protected mine. We deserved to enjoy ourselves.

“Do you ever wonder…” she said dreamily, her chin in her hand.

“What?”

“Hmm…forget it.” She sat back, face flushed. “It’s stupid.”

“Any stupider than our actual lives?”

This always made her laugh. “Maybe. It might make things worse.”

“Maybe not. Try me.”

She looked at me properly again, and she really was so beautiful, even more these days, some tension gone from her face. I would have done anything for her, the feeling stronger now that there was so little I could do. “Do you miss me?” she said at last. “I mean, do you miss being with me?”

“Of course. I try not to think about it too much.”

“Really?” She pouted, disappointed.

“Because there’s nothing we can do about it. No fun in thinking about how I’m never going to get to fuck you ever again.” She couldn’t say dirty words, but she didn’t mind me saying them. “The other night I thought jerking off would make me sleep better, but it just made me sad.”

“Sad?”

“To think that’s the best I’ll have from now on. Unless you think we ought to try…is that what you wonder? If there’s a way we can fuck?” She said nothing, but the crimson flush of her cheek, the sparkle of her eyes made the message clear. The logistics were staggering. “I don’t know how that can possibly work.”

“Not…go all the way, but just…be intimate. I told you it was stupid. Forget I brought it up.”

“No, it’s fine. Let’s think about this for a minute.” A giantess, the biggest woman in the world, a throwback sci-fi sexploitation film: the first things that came to my mind. Ridiculous, but then my daily life is pretty damn ridiculous, so I had gotten used to thinking way outside the box. The scale was an issue. I was no bigger than my own cock once had been. Getting between a woman’s legs put me in real danger of suffocation. One big thrust from her and I’d literally drown in muff. Her clit would be the size of a basketball…  Outrageous, almost revolting, potentially amazing. I wanted to know. “Clearly, there’s no actual fucking going to happen. But I’m down for whatever.”

“You mean it?

“We’re going to find out pretty quick what doesn’t work.”

“Oh Connor…I miss you so much.”

“I know. We’ll see what happens. Right?”

She nodded, tears trembling on her lashes, but we were both used to crying by now, and I knew she was happy. I got up from my table as she reached out, and she lifted me to her chest, for me to press my lips to the pulse in the hollow of her throat, the closest we now came to a deep kiss. This was going to work, more or less. If it was at all possible, we would find a way.

She carried me straight to the bedroom. There she laid back on the bed, half propped on the pillows, with me sitting cross-legged on her stomach. “Any ideas?” she asked after a minute of us gawking at each other.

“You brought it up. Shouldn’t you go first?”

“Seriously?”

“Well…what did you like before? Don’t worry about how, just name something.”

“Oh.”

We had never talked like this, not once in years. Ash liked all kinds of sex but there was no point trying to get her to say what she wanted in advance. I had gotten good at reading her, and I sure didn’t censor my own words, something she had always said she liked about me. The sex had been the final clue that we belonged together, as everything else had already fit so well. Now nothing fit. We had to get creative.

“How about I go first,” I said. “Something I miss: the way you sound when you cum.”

“What?”

“For real. You make a lot of sexy sounds. Even when we’re kissing. Did you never notice?”

“Oh my god…”

“Sorry. Does that make you uncomfortable?”

“Kinda.”

“Well, you’re beautiful all the time, but I miss that. I miss your nipples.”

She laughed and shook me where I sat. “What do you mean?”

“They’re perfect. I love the colour. I love how they feel when I suck on them.”

“Me too,” she said, so softly only I could have heard it.

“Let’s start there.”

I moved so she could take off her shirt, her bra. She arranged the pillows then settled back again. I decided to get undressed. Her skin would keep me warm. Down to the teeny briefs I’d cut from a bigger doll’s swimsuit, I approached the rolling landscape of her body, her up-bent knees two distant mountains, her near breast a velvety boulder, the nipple at its summit a perky pink nub about the size of my hand amid the cocoa hue of her deeply puckered areola. Using her arm as a step, I climbed onto her stomach again, now shaking under me with her eager breath. On my knees I approached her breast, fascinated by the plump texture of her nipple, each rosy bulge the length of my finger, or tongue. I hoped she didn’t have very high expectations. My mouth was no match for that nipple. But nothing ventured…

She’d always said she wasn’t ticklish, and it had seemed to be true in the past, but I guess I just don’t weigh enough, as all I got was a shriek before her squirming threw me off her and onto the bed. There was no point taking it further. We cried a little, one more thing we’d lost forever. At least we could be close, and we lay in bed for a while, Ashley curled up with me against her chest, feeling her heartbeat against my spine. With her warmth behind me and my eyes closed, I almost felt like my old self.

To Be Continued…

SMALL MAN SYNDROME – CHAPTER 3

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

SHANE

Hell yeah I walked right into their mess. I attract messes. You know who I was dating. But I am a weak, weak man, and that girl was way into Pilates. Totally beside the point, which is Connor.

I could only have avoided it, avoided him for so long. I guess we’re best friends, but I hadn’t spent a lot of time analyzing it. It was just weird that afternoon when he hadn’t replied sooner. Am I insecure? Of course. Aren’t you?

But forget it, this is what happened when I got there. Ashley let me in. She almost lived there, and when she wasn’t over, he was at her place, which I thought was a waste of money, but I guess it made sense to them at the time. Over the intercom I couldn’t tell how she was feeling, but as soon as I saw her I knew something was up.

“What’s wrong? Where’s Connor?”

She didn’t answer, glancing up and down the corridor as if she was worried about me being seen. “Just come in. I have to show you something.” She hustled me in and shut the door quickly, then stayed leaning against it for a moment, her back to me, her head down, whispering to herself.

“Seriously, Ash, what’s going on?” No sign of Connor in the open concept unit, and she had her hand to her chest, was still leaned on the door. Of course I thought he was dead. “Tell me what’s going on. Where’s Connor?”

“He’s here,” she said. “Just…just look. I’m sorry.”

“What are you sorry ab–” She had turned around. She had something in her hand. She had Connor–

She had something in her hand. A tiny doll, I really hoped it was, and not my best friend.

She had Connor–

“Hi,” said Connor.

Then I was sitting down. Just like that. Standing in the foyer and looking at mini-Connor, but my brain could only do so many things at once, and standing lost, and I sort of fell back against the wall and slid down onto my ass. Connor…

Connor was standing comfortably in Ashley’s cupped hands, holding onto her thumb like a balcony rail. He was naked. Obviously they’d been coping with the situation for a while, as he looked more embarrassed than panicked. Even Ash, who fell apart on the regular, shrugged and came over and knelt down beside me.

“We don’t know what happened,” she said after a minute of me failing to get my shit together. “We were outside and then he just…changed into this.”

Breathe, Shane… I was panting like a dog, probably drooling like one too, the way my mouth was hanging open, but when I shut it my teeth started to chatter. He was shaking too, tiny and pale in her hands, and with a maternal murmur she lifted him and tucked him back inside her shirt, nestled into her cleavage. For warmth, because he was six inches tall and naked.

“Jesus, Ash…”

She shrugged again with a funny little smile, but then the whole situation was a joke. Of cosmic proportions, sure, but laughing would keep it from driving us crazy.

There’s still no explanation. It’s just a thing that happened. Then, we thought of it as temporary, solvable. Maybe even some kind of joint hallucination. The thing was to go with it, accept it as how things were for the time being. They were going to need help.

“You want me to make you a coffee?” I said.

She laughed. Connor made a tiny gasp and grabbed at her shirt edge as his seat bounced. Fuck, I was going to have to stare at Ashley’s tits all day if she kept him there. Carefully not leaning forward to spill him, she stood, and I hauled myself up after. Connor had good coffee. We had to take this one step at a time.

To Be Continued…

SMALL MAN SYNDROME

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

CHAPTER 1 (CONNOR)

There are plenty of theories about what happened to me. Most of them won’t even be open to discussion until I’m dead and they cut up my body. If I even die, because all bets are off at this point. I feel fragile enough. One strong wind and I’d be under the wheels of a bus. Maybe I’m so small I’d get stuck between the treads and they’ll spray me off with the pressure washer.

I wish I was joking. Most of the people who follow me online assume it’s a joke, a clever conceptual prank, a poke at conformity, at the idea of benchmarking people against some supposed ideal. They think the photos are artfully staged, plays on depth of field and the silhouettes of buildings and objects. Not true. All those pictures are real, are the real me, and I really am as big as I look. Which is not at all.

Short isn’t the word for it. Try mythic, legendary, apocryphal, bullshit, all of the above. It feels like bullshit. But it’s true. That’s me abseiling off a genuine fire hydrant. That’s me riding (really nervously) our friend Alix’s guinea pig. That’s me lost in a potted plant, and yes, insects are completely terrifying in extreme close up. You wouldn’t believe the sounds, the rattle of legs against a carapace, the thrum when a grasshopper takes flight. Nothing can record the way it sounds in person. These, things like this, things only I can experience: these are my consolation.

But I still don’t know how it happened. I know the result, and what came before, but there were no signs, at least none we could read. It happened with the suddenness of being struck by lightning when there’s not a cloud in the sky, a wave of pressure that rolled over me, around me, through me, a huge and immediate discomfort that left me blind and suffocating. A seizure: an undisclosed brain disorder that had picked this moment to become obvious, that was why I was on the ground, or maybe it was only the hot air balloon that seemed to have landed on top of me — not the basket but the deflated balloon. The endless fabric was too coarse, the fibers like rope, but nothing else made sense. No one imagines himself drowning in his own shirt.

It took a minute before I admitted I was naked. By now Ashley had reached me, or where I’d been moments ago, and she picked up my shirt. And me, part of the panicky handful of my vacant clothes. Shit, the balloon was caught in the wind, was sweeping me along with it, was going to suffocate me first. But she must have felt me squirming, as she screamed and dropped the shirt. Thankfully she didn’t try to stomp on the critter inside.

Dazed from the fall but not really hurt, I could see a bright light ahead and began to crawl towards it. Ashley was really starting to flip out, screaming my name, then breaking off for a sob or two, but my going faster made no difference, if anything made it harder to move, the coarse fibers scraping against my bare back, my hands and knees. The light was still so far off and the strange tunnel through which I was crawling was starting to narrow around me. But freedom beckoned, fresh air and a clear look at my surroundings, and I struggled on.

Pushing, pushing, crawling, groaning, honestly close to tears myself, I had to get free, had to help Ashley, let her know I was safe, that I was right there, that it made no sense that she couldn’t see me. Air, light, the end of the fucking tunnel, and I got over the last bristly barricade, through the final ridged bit, still nothing that made sense, but there was the air and the light.

Out: I was out of whatever had trapped me, and despite being completely naked I just laid flat on my back breathing, blinded by the sunshine. Ashley was starting to lose her voice, her shouts growing hoarse and increasingly desperate. But loud, as loud as the sun was bright, pouring down on me.

I sat up. I was on top of a mound of dark blue fabric, coarse and dry smelling, the stuff I had escaped. Farther away lay a blue plain or maybe a shallow lake, split by a forest of narrow trees. To my left was a weird statue I would have definitely noticed being erected on the front lawn of my building. The lake, too, though maybe it wasn’t a lake as the surface was perfectly still despite the steady breeze, the few waves frozen solid. Back to the statue, though it hardly made more sense, looking like nothing so much as a lovingly detailed tribute to a Converse high-top the size of a sedan. Then it moved.

Like, a lot, lifted into the air like being hoisted by helicopters, and I looked up. I knew then. Nothing made sense, but I understood. From the top of the shoe extended a massive pinkish cylinder that bent in the middle: her leg, Ashley’s leg, viewed from below, by someone much smaller. Me. Much smaller me.

I had to get her attention before she panicked. Poor Ash, of all people to have to deal with this, though it was only a dream. The real Ashley had lived through enough to break your heart, none of it my place to say. You can ask her but she generally doesn’t give interviews.

Then, I still assumed I was dreaming. The fact that I had shrunk to a twelfth of my actual size, was simply the reality of this particular dream, like being able to fly or reliving grade school. Fixing it didn’t matter, not yet, not when I couldn’t even get her to look down, no matter how hard I yelled. What if my voice was a gerbil’s squeak? My vocal chords were the size of dental floss right now.

A huge white something appeared in my peripheral view and I was knocked sideways by a dirty wind as a seagull landed nearby. Here I was, like a naked mole rat snack, but Ashley was already here to shoo away the horrifying thing. This was my chance, and I grabbed the end of the sleeve out of which I’d escaped and started waving it as best I could. It was like wrestling a king size bedspread but it worked. She looked down.

She saw me. Her eyes got very round, and she took a deep breath like she was going to scream again but didn’t, only stared at me, while I tried to think of something useful to say and couldn’t, the way it is in dreams, when your tongue won’t move no matter how much you want it to. I had to move though, so she knew I wasn’t a doll, wasn’t a piece of cardboard propped up as a cruel punch line. Shaking, a little cold even, with a hand covering my infinitesimal genitals, I let go of the sleeve. Now she could see all of me. It wasn’t much.

I waved. I didn’t know what else to do. Her eyes got even wider and she clapped her hand over her open mouth, and we stood there for a solid minute doing nothing but stare at each other. Ash was right on the edge, but she closed her eyes, drew a shaky breath, blew it out, looked down again. I certainly wasn’t dangerous. One swift kick would do. But she loved me, so she had said, and so she must have, because she knelt down on the grass instead of running away.

“Connor?” she said, her voice humongous.

“Y-y-yeah. H-hi.” By now I was definitely cold and starting to shiver, a problem I still face these days, on account of having so little body heat in my little body.

“Are you okay?”

“D-d-dunno.”

“I thought you were…I don’t know what I thought.”

“C-c-an we go ins-s-side to t-t-alk about it?”

“Oh my god. Oh my god, you’re freezing.” She reached out, then stopped. “But how do I…I mean I don’t want to squish you… Did I squish you? Before, I mean…”

“P-p-put your h-hand out f-f-flat.” At least she could hear me, and she turned her hand palm up and extended it again till it lay beside me like a fleshy sofa, my foot no longer than the end of her thumb. This was perhaps the hardest moment yet, climbing onto her hand, not because it was a challenge, but because to touch her made everything absolutely real, made her gasp and almost pull her hand away so that I stumbled and fell. Sitting down probably made more sense anyway, with the way her hand was shaking.

She didn’t pick me up as I huddled in the middle of her palm, instead bending down to bring her face close to me. Unreal, totally real, fascinating, terrifying: I could see my entire self reflected in the pools of her eyes, feel her breath like an open oven, could count every eyelash, every pore, every hair of the soft fuzz that I assure you covers every single human on earth no matter how much they depilate. I could have fit my fist up her nostril. Very, very, very good that I was already sitting down, but even looking became too much, and I had to rest my head on my up-bent knees.

What a dream, what a nightmare, unending and too real, time passing like normal and not jumping ahead, every detail perfect. In the gap between my own legs I could see the palm of Ashley’s hand. In real life her skin was butter soft, but now the lines on her hand felt like the hard creases of leather upholstery. I closed my eyes. I prayed for my alarm to go off.

To Be Continued…

The Rainbow Inevitable

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

I am catastrophically behind schedule on one of the most important books I’ve ever written so naturally instead of working on it today I wrote a semi-comedic essay about nothing specific that is somehow extremely relevant to modern life. [CW: events of World War II]

Nothing is true. All is permitted.

Hassan Sabbah ‘The Master of the Assassins’

You know if people are things around the house? Like someone’s a couch, someones’ a tv, someone’s a ninja blender.  I don’t mean what they do, like being the blender doesn’t mean you like to cook, it means you’re versatile but kind of noisy and high maintenance.  If you’re a tv you always know what’s going on, have all the tea and are prepared to spill it.  If you’re a couch you just chill and sometimes people find small change in you…

Me, I’m a mirror.  I do what you do.  This is different from being a people pleaser where you do what people tell you.  I think it has a lot to do with having moved a lot when I was growing, which meant I’ve been the new kid in class twelve times.

Think about that: I had to make new friends at school twelve fucking times.  And I had to, I couldn’t just retreat into books.  I’m not an introvert. I feed on the spiritual energy of the living, I mean of other people. Yeah, that’s what I meant.  And having to suss out new sources of not-shitness every fucking year was a lot of work.

So I mirror. I act like the people around me as much as possible until some of them accept me as one of their own.  Which meant my friend group at school usually looked like the cast of Napoleon Dynamite. 

Not now.  I have hot friends. Old, but hot.  Major dad bods. 

It’s funny, I get so much motivation from seeing the bodies of fit young trans men, and for a while I thought they were so fit because they were men but no it’s because they’re young. I’m old, at least on the internet.  Not write Facebook comments in all caps and sign off with best wishes, Will  old, but I grew up without computers having more than an occasional role in my education. And I went to some expensive fucking schools among that dozen I attended.  In fact, and if you know you know and perhaps this goes a long way to explaining my personality, I went to Montessori. 

Not just for preschool but for another four years after that.  Like a lot of alternative education Montessori gets a lot of stick for being a bubble of privilege that renders children unfit for the harsh realities of modern life.   And there is that, but also there’s also the bit where modern life fucking sucks, and you shouldn’t try and fit to it.  You should want to dismantle parts of it to render it safer and kinder. 

You see, none of our choices are inevitable.  Nothing we are doing now in this world of ours is inevitable.  The legislative branch of government, the middle managers of government—congress, senate, the people who craft these violent bureaucracies—would have us believe that whatever their program is, it’s inevitable. 

To quote my late friend Mike, the cabbie from Yonkers, get the fuck outta here

Despite what they say, we can in fact do anything we want.  We’re choosing to tear the earth apart and then fuck the pieces.  Our actions are choices, not fate. The entire planet cannot be held hostage by revelationists and the billionaires who mouth their rhetoric because it keeps us stupid and starved. Like what the fuck is this shit?

So I’m really enjoying the current trend towards unionization. For three decades I’ve sat and watched liars destroy the reputation of trade unions.  More exhausting bullshit, more rhetoric in service to mammon.  But the people united will never be divided, at least not in a permanent sense.

This is why I don’t believe in dystopias.  Other than the one we’re living in, but dystopia assumes a totality of control that no leaders have ever successfully maintained.  People will want to say Russia but a) they keep losing and b) even if we collate a thousand years of Asian history, it’s a fucking eye-blink to the fifty thousand years since humans invented culture.  

And that’s why dystopias never last.  Invention.  We are the most pernicious, curious, don’t-press-this-button button pressers to have ever crawled out of the primordial ooze. Terry Pratchett had a bit about the button that ends the world, that you could hide it in the deepest cave guarded by dragons with a sign over reading DO NOT TOUCH and before the paint was even dry someone would push the fucking button.  

We are pernicious.  It means we wear down all defenses, break boundaries by devious intent. Like Oskar Schindler.  No one should have resisted the Nazis, yet there were dozens of people like Schindler, not just the famous ones. Hundreds, thousands of people lying to the cops, lying to the SS, protecting their friends, in some cases protecting complete strangers. Dying to protect them. Dying to save them, even though the Nazi machine must have looked unstoppable.  Yet everywhere, wrenches in the works.  I’ve heard a possibly apocryphal tale that some of the scientists employed by the Nazis to beat the Americans to the invention of the bomb maybe weren’t trying as hard as they could have been, a high-water mark for quiet quitting. Escape after escape. The French Resistance movement. People who looked the most wicked form of totalitarianism in the face and then kicked it in the balls.

Nothing is inevitable.  Except I think our freedom is.  All of us together.  I don’t want to destroy anyone.  I want the tinfoil hat crew to put down their tiki torches and leave their mama’s basement and come out into the light with us. 

The rainbow? It’s made of light.  Don’t think of the beam that enters the prism as white.  It’s simply light, too bright for our mortal eyes, which is why we have rainbows.  If there were no colours, no difference, there would be nothing to see.  But we see rainbows.   

I don’t want to destroy the far right. I want them to notice the harm they’re doing to their own souls and then stop doing it.  I want everyone to feel safe and honoured.  If we resist you, refuse you, it’s because our safety matters more than your cringe reaction, your hurt feelings. What I truly want is for you to look at those feelings, find the hurt that’s keeping you from being fully alive, and let it go.  It’s not us that’s making you sad. It’s not the queer people around you living their lives that hurt you (at least I goddamn hope not.)  Something happened, and I know you’re scared to look at the damage, but being alive is a fucking gift.  You might not get another chance.  You’re can’t spend it turning your wounds inside out and rubbing the filth on everyone else.

Tough love here, but grow the fuck up.  Own your wounds.  Sorry, but you’re going to have to feel your stupid fucking emotions.  Start by letting go of the idea that people who feel deeply do it for fun.  We do it because we can’t help it. 

I sometimes hate how much I feel. It’s hard to talk to my loved ones about difficult shit because I feel not just my pain but theirs, and my goddamn people pleasing (there, I admit I do that too) means I’ll do anything to stop them feeling bad, including apologizing even when I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong. I cry a lot not because I’m weak but because it makes me feel better to have it out. 

If you still feel too manly to cry, consider that if you cry hard enough it feels like you’re puking. If you’ve ever really cried, over someone’s death, over your dog’s, anytime the tears are the least of it and you can’t even tell if you’re screaming?  That beats you up from the inside.  Dealing with that takes strength, dude.  Really feeing your vulnerable emotions is like skydiving—you just gotta go with it, bro. It’s scary but you’re going to feel better about yourself for gritting your teeth and taking the leap.

Feel the feels. Take the ride.  Grow as a fucking person, because the world owes you nothing.  You have to give to get.  Or god/dess help your soul.

A sort of prayer

the sun rises from the pink horizon into the clear blue sky behind a lattice of the branches of spiny desert plants
~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Our Lady who art Chaos

Give us a fucking break

Thy Queendom comes

Whether we want it to or not

Give us no more than we can survive

At least for now

Because I got a lot of shit to do

Deliver my packages on time

And protect me from porch thieves

For this is the life we each have

Use it or lose it

We don’t have forever

Amen (or whatever)

(June 2023)

Sentient Glitter

a black sphere streaks across a black background, trailing a purple and blue aurora like a comet streaking through deep space
~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

“The thing is, none of that shit is real.  Nothing is real, and I can prove it.  Pick any molecule in existence.  If that molecule was a solar system, that is, if some atom in a molecule in a mitochondrion in a cell in your body was the size of the sun, its electrons are somewhere out past Pluto. Most of you is empty space. 

Wait, it gets worse.  I can prove you don’t exist.  Science is fantastic.  I mean, I get why people think they’re just making stuff up, because quantum physics is bonkers.

Because if you get down that small, if you’re looking at electrons, first of all you’re using the most advanced science we’ve ever scienced, machines the size of cities, billions of dollars of infrastructure.  And it still barely works.  You’re trying to catch ghosts.  Really you are because the only way you see quantum particles is smashing them into each other and taking a photo.

I’m not kidding.  This is science.  That’s what they do at the CERN super-collider, which is why they call it a collider.

But think about that.  They’re seeking the building blocks of all we know, and you’d think it would be obvious.  I mean, we’re made of atoms, everything is made of atoms, but atoms don’t really seem to be made of anything at all.

You can know where a quantum particle was, or you can know where it’s going.  You cannot, cannot by the fundamental structure of the universe, know both.  They’re like cockroaches: if you turn on the light they disappear under the cabinets. I mean it, if you locate a quantum particle, the act of looking at it makes it change direction.

Imagine you’re at a baseball game and you’re looking at something else.  Like there’s someone on the jumbotron who doesn’t know her nip has slipped or whatever is distracting you.  And you hear the crack as the batter hits the ball and so you look and you looking makes that sweet long drive to the unguarded right field suddenly in midair veer to the left and land in the midfielder’s glove.

That’s what doing quantum physics is like.  At a million bucks a throw.

Here’s the even worse bit:  in the end the odds of finding any one particle in any one given state or location are just that, odds.  There is no certainty at the bottom of reality.  Just chance.  Your particles come and go, fluctuate in and out of being, are at best potentialities that walk and talk and wear pants and think they’re in charge of some shit when you don’t even really exist. You are seafoam on an ever-cresting wave sweeping through time and space, sentient glitter that winks in and out of existence faster than you or I can imagine.

So why the fuck does it matter which bathroom I use?”