Blimp’s Burden, Chapter V

In the definitively matriarchal, mostly Germanic travel hub of Limon, Colorado, Barney, Barry, and Betty-Anne Blimp had begun the 1990s in a position to thrive. Barry, a Vietnam veteran with a chipped canine, an inherited family hog farm, and “crazy eyes” was headed down a new life avenue at forty-two in partial convenience store ownership with his best high school bud Tommy and a few of Tommy’s less-than-virtuous associates, which was — in such a prospective intersection of byways: the Kyle Railroad, Interstate 70, and proximity to the State’s two dominant metropolises — the bee’s knees. Marriage to his third wife, Betty-Anne had cemented his newfound potential satisfactorily enough to be granted a business loan from the lone regional banking chain the same week their first and only child was birthed, snipped, and dunked in Lutheran from-concentrate Holy Water.

Barney’s mother was an embodiment of this Brisk American Process — never doing anything without haste; denouncing even in middleage the necessity (or existence) of The Long Game. Despite her pace, she had found in Librarianism a place of belonging on her first go — graduating from the University of Denver with a Masters in Library Science at just 19 after testing in before she could legally drive thanks to the diligence (and yes, the speed) of her homeschooling. If the Limon Memorial Library could even remotely afford a memorial statue, a towering Betty-Anne would surely grace its grounds now, brass-in-motion with her youthful black curls as near as feasibly perpendicular in a trail behind her form, as the institution owed its entire existence to her ruthless wit and otherworldly, naturally-amphetamined energy. If one took it upon themselves to speculate, they might suggest that it was indeed her speed that grayed, then bleached her curls white within a single year; that the circumstances surrounding Barney’s creation were from most planes of analysis quite tardy, and that Barry — while perhaps the most appropriately quick match she could’ve made — was a bad decision; that mothering a child after one’s hair has entirely silvered was uncouth and unnatural — much less after it had wholly whitened. One is free to indulge these speculations, but Betty-Anne never traveled in an even remotely slow enough velocity to hear or ponder or engage with them, right up to her Judgment Day before her Maker, in fact, whom she no doubt found aggravatingly dull.

It’s largely forgotten by those who’ve traversed the class divide in the 21st century that childhood in Barney’s era had changed little since that of his parents’ in diet: afternoon cartoons, ketchup, macaroni, hotdogs, and the lot — albeit a bit more processed. There were still Marvel superheroes, arcades, billion-piece, tediously-assembled model cars & aeros, and Little League. The difference — according to the retrospective ponderings of the architectural Boomers themselves — was in the way Merit & Achievement were processed. They say it was the cushion of encouragement and their own elimination of Loss — as factor, variable, and fact of the reality which they crafted for their kin — that fucked up entirely their children’s potential ability to climb above it. In Barney Blimp’s case, however, the fucking was certainly of more nuanced origin, as “losing” was defined differently, with an even greater weight in his mind than his parents’ generation could have possibly imagined.

Barney never lost in track, baseball, football, or basketball because he never lowered himself to compete in such worldly things. He found most of his 200-odd graduating classmates lacking in luster, but in the blossoming neo-puritanical world of online gaming, Blimp had the pick of the globe, and from preadolescence onward he spent his time virtually among all manner of millennial punks learning how to challenge himself — in fact, learning above all to be competitive. The ideal gamer in the early days was a brotherly roughhouser who competed even in cooperation, regardless of their success, and the glorified Shithead persona sat well with the jaded group of five highschool friends who adopted and eventually socialized him.

East by any substantial distance from the geological consequences of the Rockies, the meat of Colorado is — as its nearest Easterly neighbor is so notoriously — fucking flat. In daylight, one’s field of vision — one’s entire world — is constricted by the limitations of Earth’s curvature, which dooms their horizon to fall away after just three miles, at eye level, confining the maximum possible diameter of Barney’s home planet to approximately six miles, in ideal conditions. Over years and decades of existing in such a small place throughout such a formative time, human beings like Blimp and his peers live with a profoundly specific spatial psyche, boundaried absolutely. In a town like Limon, it can be tempting — for a visitor — to sift through the longtime occupants according to how they choose (or — depending on one’s choice position within the nature/nurture argument — are predisposed) to respond to these boundaries. It is not unreasonable to say — timidly, anyway — that most find comfort within them, and — much less timidly — to say that they lead overwhelmingly more satisfied lives. Others — like Barney’s Limon Six — end up classically claustrophobic and tend to spend significant time and energy in their formation of abrasive relationships with both physical and psychological bounds. An integral compounding effect on this aspirational affliction could perhaps be attributed to their Boomer parents and their intermittent, vague insistences like you can be anything you want, you can do anything you set your mind to, and their infinite variations.

The Blimps traveled phenomenally often for a Limon family but never incurred the notion — as long as travel was within their wants and means — to leave North America. Nevertheless, young Barney’s primary preferences for any given road trip were simply for the exploration of altitude; by distant or traversed mountains — by far the most bewitching — and commercial flight, when it was afforded. Whether by backseat or Boeing, the perception of distance enabled by proximity to more diverse typography was nothing less than a treat and his own continent’s allotment seemed plenty. It was these higher experiences that provided him a penetrating catalyst of the sort of ethereal meditation comprehendible only by those who’ve yet to develop past a certain age; the sort which many seek in a plethora of desperations until they’re able to accept its loss. The edged flirtation of Earth with sky were the elemental constants he’d be forever doomed to seek. For the lucky Most, however, the altitudes are not so relentlessly haunting and the six-mile planet is rarely insufficient, but the curiouser of them are universally bound with the whole by their want for understanding that Other aspirational itch as the occupants of each pole are with one another, inevitably, regardless of how fervently they happen to reflect upon the decider.

The inevitable binding was also for the others of the Six — Leona, Leo, Liam, Lazarus, and Lexie — out of their collectively loosening grip on the special Magic in each, as many or most friendships are, and together they observed in themselves and one another the development of their internal compulsion to find a suitable replacement, and — when at their best — maintained an audit of its power. Most of the instances of need did not come when it felt feasible to fill them with literal wandering as they do not for all but those few with unlimited resources. Farming or service-funded families raise children who must smoke weed and/or drink cheap beer in bulk as their world darkens and squishes, and so The Limon Six of Limon Junior-Senior High School entered their stoner stage shortly after their original congregation, when Barney was fifteen and so wholeheartedly, insularly elitist that his preferred external self-projection was of generalized insanity — though of the least manageably interesting variety — in order to discourage any and all contact with as broad a portion of his peers as possible.

The fallibility of young Barney Blimp’s plan was his own innate desire for companionship, which 1) prevented the scheme from ever being truly wholehearted and 2) necessitated input from other perspectives, as the execution of any human intention will, thereby contradictorily arranging himself to fail. Lazarus, the Junior — the eldest of the lot — was predisposed to target Barney’s person at lunch hour as a thoroughly weird, but nevertheless compulsively social young man. It was only September when he one Wednesday sat down across from Blimp and immediately began discussing amateur radio operation and its untapped potential among American secret societies, unprompted.

“So if the Masons are not a secret society,” he began, “why is it that they specifically developed secret methods of identifying one another in public and — really — what even defines a ‘secret society’ if not its investment in the development of secret methodologies for its participants’ intra-identification, anyway?”

Barney stopped chewing with a mouthful of his daily one-dollar ham sandwich and bored his eyes into Lazarus’ resting thumbs. In response, they began vigorously twiddling straightaway.

“Of course, they made sure to place their symbology everywhere, which I would imagine is probably pretty fun. I wonder if they just screen National Treasure on repeat for regular meetings, these days. I would for sure put in for that.”

Cheeks still bulging, Barney Blimp conceded to full, unabridged eye contact with the weariness of ten millennia.

“Dude, I’m definitely going to become a Free Fucking Mason, but I’m going to modernize their whole shit. Ham radio, you know — probably the most equally-obscured community for the general populace, equally obsessed with ciphers, and certainly the only respective equals in socially anti-social activity for old white men with Asperger’s.”

A Freshman eyebrow was raised; the Freshman chewing, resumed, and the genius of The Junior Lazarus thought it would have a go at a bit of baity ignorance.

“I mean, if we all really wanted walkie talkies for our treehouse clubs in Elementary school, then it would only make sense to launch the Masons onto the UHF band, right?”

“VHF,” said Barney through two-day-old pork and peeled-away cheddar. “UHF is for TVs, radar, and cellular phones; vee h eff is ham radio.”

Lazarus bowed his head, smiled, and faced forward his palms, and thus — in the chemically vomit-scented lunchroom of Limon Junior-Senior High School — the socialization of Barney Blimp began with a bid to modernize the American Freemasons which — if pursued — would’ve proved to be in vain, for by then, in 2003, almost all of the membership had Hotmail accounts. Liam Libel — a Freshman that year, like Barney and by a wide berth the dirtiest of the Six — did not, but he did proudly maintain a subscription to Reason Magazine and communicated exclusively in savagely relentless Libertarian shouts. After his particularly-troubled World History teacher developed a gasoline drinking habit and fell tremendously ill over Winter break, Liam’s class was absorbed into Blimp’s, which was not much trouble logistically for such a moderately-sized student body, but was from day 1 significant trouble for Barney and his surrounding peers.

The new, consolidated 10:33AM World History block totaled thirty-three students, who were doing their best to physically and spatially consolidate as the last remaining teacher of World History employed at Limon Junior-Senior High School introduced himself.

“Hello hello hello, welcome welcome,” cooed the diminutive man in that manner which only secondary educators do.

“New folks, I’m Mr. Drake — hello hello hello and welcome back… Yes, sorry about the space… It looks like everybody’s doing a great job… Good job managing… This is only for a few weeks, don’t worry… Yes, please do your best to settle in… Yes, hello hello hello, you’re in the right place! Welcome welcome welcome back… I’m Mr. Drake.

“Before we get started with the curriculum for this semester… It won’t be all that different from what it would’ve been if… And I promise you it won’t be further complicated if and when we move to new rooms, of course, so don’t worry about that… I just wanted to talk about a few policies specific to my class for the new folks… A brush up for the rest of you, of course, he he…”

Mr. Drake hobbled all around his desk, the projector, then to the door, which he unpropped with his right moccasin and began to close but reconsidered with an audible hm and shuffled awkwardly to open and prop again with a kick of his left moccasin, mumming hm again, hobbling his way to the thermostat, which he dramatically leaned back, then forwards, then back again to examine, adjusting his glasses and wedging his right hand flat against his kidney to form a tea kettle handle. He looked that way at it for a few seconds before he attempted to begin another thought, aloud.

“Aaaaaand we’re just going ta… mmhmm, so it looks like… It looks like… I’m going to keep this turned down just so ah… We’re going to keep the thermostat turned down for now… I think there are enough of us to keep it quite warm in here… Of co-… Ah… Of course, if anybody starts to get especially chilly… Chilly, just let me know.”

“So!” he said, turning to the squirming, now mildly claustrophobic class for the first time, folding his glasses again.

“I want to begin by talking about the future a little bit, if that’s okay with everybody… Our terrible future! In which we will all be ruled by these little things!” He produced a scuffed silver flipphone from the black leather holster on his belt.

“Even now, the common man is surrounded by so many things he just cannot understand. His cellular telephone, his car, his home computer… It’s hard not to wonder what exactly goes through mom and dad’s minds when they see them operate, huh? It must be reduced down to… Almost superstition, you know? Nothing Voodoo, mind you, but — in some way, deep in the mind of the average schmuck, his cellular telephone is quickly becoming his god.”

Mr. Drake returned the phone to its holster and looked behind him to retreat enough to sit on his rough, pockmarked, and splintery cherrywood desk as Mr. Libel himself huffed through the door with a pronounced, angsty furrow in his brow, his right arm holding the sling of his ratty tote over the right shoulder of his even rattier creamy brown leather jacket. Even faced with the density of desks and flustered teens, he did not pause even though one would assume it was surely necessary.

“Hello hello hello… Welcome, welcome,” said Mr. Drake more quickly, his head tracking Liam’s ungainly slotting upon a free, deskless chair against the farthest wall between twin spectacled boys with matching curly blonde afros, just behind Barney, followed by the careless thudding of his bag on the foot-worn carpet in front.

“Right!” continued Mr. Drake from his perch. “And for you, it will become a god also, but one of a different sort… Many Godly persons desire their particular deity to do the work; to only interact with what’s on the surface, but you! You hold our newfound technological god as one to be known! And that is exactly how it should be… Not just for the sake of the knowledge, itself, but for the betterment of our lives… Now…”

He placed both palms on his desk and leaned forward.

“Before we again begin with our history, I want to tell you something very important… There’s a war on. And… You wanna know a secret?”

Speaking in a more whispery projection, he leaned his bald patch forward a bit more.

“There’s a war on… There’s a war on you!” He thrusted his pointer finger at the class — who maintained a collective stoicism — as he hopped again to his feet and began pacing, hands together behind him.

“It’s on everyone who thinks… Everyone young who learns! It’s on everyone with progress on their minds… It’s a war waged even on knowledge, itself… A war of ignorance.”

Mr. Drake paused, swiveling his gaze on his heels, gray eyes wide. In the rear, Liam scoffed loudly over the disinterested silence, slouched all the way back in his rigid chair and hoisting his legs to cross them on Barney’s left shoulder.

“Ay, YO TEECH,” he yelled in Mr. Drake’s general direction, glancing left and right. “YO TEECH, you blaze tron?”

Mr. Drake, frozen in the forward stoop he’d been glaring from, offered no reply. Barney brushed briskly at Liam’s Converses against his head as if they were a lost lunar moth.

“Yo teech, you just tell me if you want a little somun somun, you know what I mean,” Liam said, Ha Haing with his right hand eclipsed over his smile.

“Dude,” Barney complained. Libel sat up again and returned his feet to the floor, but didn’t otherwise acknowledge the protest. He threw his right arm into an arc over his head and made his hand into a vague pistol shape, pointed at Mr. Drake.

“Ay, YO TEECH… BET YOU NEVA HEARDA GOVENA RON PAUL… Ha ha! YOU AND THIS WHOLE COUNTRY… THIS COUNTRY GOIN TO SHIT, MAN.”

Mr. Drake self-consciously returned to standing upright, but his eyes looked miles beyond the far wall and his students — thirty-one of whom had yet to react at all.

“Why is it ALWAYS BOXES, man? What’s with the FUCKIN BOXES? YO TEECH, THIS SOME BULLSHIT.”

Barney set about gathering his things to escape the tirade, but Liam had begun to violently writhe about in his chair and appeared to be quickly descending into a fit, which exponentially slowed Blimp’s organization.

“DON’T DO THIS, TEECH. DON’T LABEL ME!”

His whole body was convulsing now and his magazines were bounding and bouncing toward serious altitudes on top of him like wheat chaff as it’s shaken free of the grain.

“AY YO TEECH… WHY YOU GOTTA PUT THESE CAGES ON US? LEMME BLOW YOUR MIND RIGHT QUICK.”

And with that, his chair failed him as he shook to the ground on his hands and knees — still hollering in bodily tumult.

“COME ONNNNNNNN TEECH, YOU KNOW I CAN’T FIT IN YOUR REPUBLICRAT BOX,” he spat at the rug.

Neither Mr. Drake nor his pupils had moved or expressed anything, save for Barney Blimp, who stepped over Liam Libel with his backpack and threaded his way strenuously through the desks and static legs, feet, and empty faces through the door. A hundred yards down the hallway, as he leaned against the exit, a final croaking throw came from behind him.

“Ron Pal!”

The creaking of the exit door — hinges wanting for a greasing — and the swooshing of its bottom seal against the muddy black shoemat yielded not for Barney Blimp the fresh Colorado air and lucid sunshine, but instead — through a haze of drug-numbed internal retching and destruction — the stagnantly sterile, ammonia’d atmosphere and lifeless colors of a meager hospital room. From the open hallway to his left came an ambiently echoing broadcast of unexpected contextual quality.

“Welcome, Frances Fujica Chamberlain, eleven pounds, six ounces,” said a theatrically raspy woman’s voice, followed by a pleasantly rhythmic rock sample.

“BLINDed by the light / revved up like a deuce / another roller in the night!”

Yet, it was the tiny wall-mounted television that captured Barney’s newly-awoken, moderately-medicated attention. From diagonally across his tall bed with its faded floral sheets and itchy medium blue comforter, the minuscule CRT blared a top-of-the-hour Good Morning America graphic.

“Good morning, America. Breaking news, the FBI takes on Apple demanding the tech giant help with a terror investigation. Are critical clues to more plots hidden on the phone of the San Bernardino shooters? Why Apple’s CEO is refusing to help this morning. A battle that could affect everyone with a smartphone,” said the voice of the aging anchor from under a dyed black combover to whom the introduction transitioned along with a lower third graphic that said “JAKE JINGLES, ABC NEWS.”

Apparently, it is the morning, thought Barney Blimp.

“Good morning,” he whispered. Jake Jingles and his co-host Jaime Jangles then went on about the idiosyncrasies of the G.O.P., quoted and played back a clip of the current President saying I believe so and so will never be President, then a shorter clip of “BJ, a German Shorthaired Pointer” — clearly somewhere else in the studio, sitting obediently, cocking his head at the approaching camera lens — before finally returning to a wide-shot of Jingles and Jangles sitting abreast, smiling off screen at the dog.

“All right, and good morning, America. There he is, BJ, the winner of the Eastminster Kennel Club’s Best in Show Award. He’s just arriving here in Times Square. He took a walk there on our green carpet in case you missed it. We cannot wait to meet the top dog coming up. Hear what he has to say about his win. The biggest bone of all.”

“A great-looking dog.”

“He walks like a winner.”

“He is.”

“Absolutely.”

“Amazing,” said Barney Blimp, all at once noticing how uncomfortable his entire physical being had been left in its current, awfully-upright position against a mountain of pillows that looked promising, but disappointingly lacked fulfilling qualities one tends to hope for and enjoy in promising-looking pillows. He lifted his rear to scoot it down and felt an unsettling tremor of his out of kilter equilibrium atop faint whole-body pins and needles from — no doubt — remaining more or less stationary for hours?…days?

“…have more on that later. But right now lots of reaction coming in overnight to that emotional appearance in the White House briefing room from Chief of Staff Eggs White. The former general raw and red-eyed as he defended the President, attacked his critics, and remembered the death of his own son on the battlefield. Chief White House correspondent Geoffrey Gouge starts us off. Good morning, Geoff…”

Realizing the excess of the television’s current volume was insistently coercing the entirety of his attention, Barney looked about him — despite the dizziness — searching for the remote control. To his left, there was only empty space and the burst of brief, sickly draft from a cycle of the neighboring Intensive Care Unit airlock; to his right, a substantially loaded IV pole holding both black and translucent liquid bags, and a hang-over eating tray on castors which was — quite strangely — surfaced in a bright, neon-green neoprene, and contained a small-book-sized touch tablet. He reached for it, tapping the black screen with his right index finger’s plastic heart-rate monitor in an attempt to illicit life. After a few clumsy tries, he achieved a sort of success: an awkward, large-print menu faded into view with five haphazardly off-center options next to hopelessly-scaled stock graphics: DRUGS, MEDIA, BILLING, SCHEDULING, and SUPPORT. Barney tried MEDIA, but the subsequently displayed controls were muted somehow — left transparent. No amount of tapping yielded any change in the program, which had turned to a montage of B-roll: red-faced parents talking on mobile phones on the black asphalt — crowded to the point of insanity by neutral-colored SUVs outside a sprawling red brick building sprouting the tiniest trickle of gray smoke from the far wing.

“The driver, look at this, pulled over after he smelled smoke, and that’s when flames erupted. More than a dozen students from the Jacksonville area high school had to evacuate. One person was treated for smoke inhalation. The children were picked up by a different bus and taken home. No word on what caused this in the first place, but certainly glad everyone is okay this morning, Jake.”

“Thank goodness for that. And now to that big win overnight for the Los Angeles Dodgers, heading to their first World Series since 1988,” continued Jake Jingles as the slightest electronic pseudodance percussion was subtly faded behind his voice in the background — its 140 beat-per-minute high hats abnormally flattered by the bias of the pitiful speakers within the wall-mounted unit, furthering Blimp’s aggravation with the situation. He amplified his aggression toward the tablet, holding it just inches from his nose as he pounded his fingers on the glass. The original menu came briefly back into view before the DRUGS option was selected, swapping the theme entirely for microscopic, illegible text and alarmingly primary reds. The unassuming white plastic pump suspended in the middle of his IV pole suddenly clicked and began a drawling, whirred chugging. Panicking at the sound and the new movements of fluids he perceived, Barney vigorously attacked the big red X in the top-right corner with every ounce of available effort left in the stumps of his thumbs, and was — to his gracious relief — rewarded with the cessation of the horrors.

“…guy behind looked so concerned until the last second. Also right now a lot of reaction coming to that emotional moment in the White House press briefing room. Chief of Staff General White, defending the President’s calls to the families of fallen soldiers. Also took on the President’s critics and opened up about the loss of his own son on the battlefield…”

Barney Blimp sighed in extreme exasperation and threw the tablet down on the tray, sinking under the sheets until his feet felt the footboard and hung over it, both hands desperately gripping the comforter, pulling it over his nose so that only his eyes-up were exposed. A new wave of drowsiness gushed from his numb belly and washed over him like sleepy molasses, tinging his vision light blue as he tilted it with his head on the flat bed below the pillow mountain to focus on a single one of the ceiling tile’s dark red polka-dots. Spackled blood, he thought — the removed Observer of his consciousness noting how much less anxious he was in the moment than he should’ve rationally been, while knowing, of course, that his state was entirely the result of whatever drugs they had him on.

“Welcome, Leslie Désirée Lund, eight pounds four ounces… BLINDed by the light…”

Barney Blimp’s eyes drooped heavy as his Observer ceased short its attempt to recollect the sequence of events which led him there — wherever there was — it was a bed… a less-than-moderately comfortable bed… and instead considered the definition of “roller” in “another roller in the night.” Not roller as in “high roller,” no. Not “roller blades,” though it… he… they had always wanted to learn how to inline skate… Aggressive inlines. Speed skating was such an elegant, lost art. Why weren’t there more speed skaters swooping and sliding around, bent over with their hands behind their backs to cut through the air oh-so-beautifully… in all State and National parks… in cardigans… and purple sweatbands? What happened to them all?

“…and after the break, Jaime and I sit down with Theodore Pith, the young artificial intelligence pioneer and mogul, now author of a new book about cheese and the end of the world…”

R-o-l-l-e-r, roller. A flour-dusted light wood cylinder with matching old style handles, loose… Loose, but that’s how they were supposed to be… how they had to be or else it would not roll separately of them… Except it was huge, and growing! Gargantuan! And the hands! Covered in dark black hairs of a simply vulgar length and nearly as big… Bringing the overwhelming girth of the surface — the much too solid and threatening surface — to flatten his body! Rhythmically rolling and squishing and flattening Barney Blimp and his organs against this awful, foreign bed like fucking dough! He was more conscious now, but still unable to move — completely paralyzed… And the hellish utensil was on its way back again! Revved up like a deuce… The toes, he remembered! He and his Observer concentrated everything they had on wiggling their toes… really wiggling… and finally… they wiggled alive!

Liberated from his dream and waking paralysis, Barney shot up — sheets, comforter, tubes, cables, and all — inhaling massively only to see on the tiny wall television the pale, smiling face, flashing green eyes, and blood-red hair of his new boss sitting cross-legged in a purple chair astride the GMA watermark as the show returned from a commercial break. Opposite a table packed with granite-looking half-pipes full of steaming brown beans were the smooth faces of Jake Jingles and Jaime Jangles.

“Here with us in the studio this morning is Theodore Pith, author of the new, quite controversial but hot-selling book — especially here in New York, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse Are Varieties of Cheese: How Your Foodism Will End Everything,” said Jake Jingles with occasion.

Fuck, mouthed Barney Blimp.

“…and the new owner of the renamed Manhattan barbecue joints, Pith’s Chili Trough and Pith’s Chili Playpen. We’ve got what looks to be a… Ha ha, well… a miniature trough of chili right here in front of us. Wow! A lot to dive into, for sure, but first, Mr. Pith… Your book seems well… It seems to be in direct opposition to what I see and smell in front of me. That is cheese on that chili, right?”

“SON OF A FUCKING BITCH!” screamed Barney, hoarsely. His hands moved to fumble with the tablet again, mouth agape as Jake Jingles fumbled similarly in propping an obnoxiously-covered volume upright for the camera, on screen, struggling to obscure an apparently-obscene illustration of a nude woman covered in cheese — his right hand accomplishing the censorship of all but her cheese-strung feet behind the title text.

“Yes, that’s an understandable contrast to make, Jack,” Pith answered as the broadcast switched to his full-shot angle. He himself was deeply contrasted with the formal wear of everyone present — save for some of the studio audience, perhaps — with his pale, freckled arms sticking out of a plain white t-shirt which said on its front in a loud, large, simple sans-serif typeface TODAY IS SATURDAY, MARCH 10TH.

“First, I’d like to say how wonderful it is to be here above the beautiful Time Squared… Wow! You guys have a great audience. Hiya, folks! Love you guys! Don’t be shy — get your hands dirty! It’s Chili Day!”

Theodore Pith waved wildly and dumbly, gyrating both palms at the present audience, off screen, who whooped and cheered in response. Their audience camera was clumsily cut to a bit later than it should’ve been. Jake Jingles forced a chuckle.

“Well, there it is… You’ve got to love that humor! Was it part of promoting the book, buying these restaurants or was the timing just a coincidence?”

Jaime Jangles chimed in with an addendum, first two right fingers drumming on her chin.

“And has the tour got you jetlagged, or was your shirt part of the promotion, too? What kind of a shirt is that?” She gestured toward his torso, emptily smiling.

“First of all, yes that is true, free-range American cheese grated into your chili, there… I’m actually going to start digging in, if you don’t mind,” Theodore Pith said, shoving the provided logo-adorned bib under his right thigh.

“No, of course… I think I’ll join right in with ya,” replied Jake, who sat forward and looked helplessly at the massive task before him.

“I, myself, really don’t find the book’s argument in conflict with my love of- and affection for chili, particularly.” He threaded the provided (and also logo-adorned) garden trowel under a great yellow-brownish gop of beans and scooped it toward his maw, spilling a few ounces on the oversaturated rug. Jake Jingles was having one hell of a time shoving his own logo-adorned bib into the front of his shirt without rubbing his live lapel microphone unnecessarily.

“That argument being — as I understand having read as much as I could last night — that our obsession with food is… Well, sort of rampant and infecting our culture-”

“…and stealing attention from important efforts in humanitarian policy, charity, et cetera, yes, but when you do finish the book — and I really hope you do, George, really… — you’ll have been taken through my conclusion, which is, essentially, that it is by now our delicious, gluttonous, organic Rome’s time to fall, if you’re catching my drift.”

Barney Blimp was now a reddening, rigid live wire — his fury crossing a threshold in his heart monitor, setting off its alarm in triads. Beepbeepbeep.

Jake Jingles — now equipped properly with logo-adorned bib — looked across the table in building agitation at Theodore Pith, twirling his clean trowel. From beside him, Jaime Jangles — yet to be misnamed, and thus slightly less huffy — offered her intermediation.

“I have to say… I haven’t gotten to read the book yet, but I really love my Me Food — I happen to know that Jake, here, loves his even more, and it’s hurtful, the suggestion that my interest in good food is somehow wrong or dangerous-”

“…oh, James! Don’t look so bashful! Please, do eat your chili!”

There was a great, gaping, deadly live television pause filled with the swishing and swashing of the pale Pith’s rhythmic chewing over the 140 beat-per-minute electro beat, his otherwise quiet person in frame, t-shirt now covered in brown, eyes cast downward to the half-empty trough before him.

Jaime Jangles cleared her throat.

“I’m Jaime, actually…”

The eyes came up with a full mouth, from which hung a six-inch-long string of cheese.

“…oh shit, I’m so sorry! That’s really embarrassing…”

Theodore Pith looked to her, then to the camera and back. Behind the camera, the audience conveyed together both amused applause and inverbal admonishment.

“Jaime, please let me make it up to you… have some of my chili!”

Jingles and Jangles cringed, smiled, and managed chuckles with all the restraint in the world.

“Hey, now! There are families watching this live, Mr.- ”

“…gosh, I am so sorry.”

Theodore looked to the camera covered in chili as the shot cycled back to him.

“Kids, you should know that profanity is nothing by the byproduct of laziness. True eloquence is-”

“…let’s just try and get back to the book, alright?”

“Sure, sure… It’s really exciting to see it finally going off the shelves after all these weeks, you know. Writing something like this is grueling stuff.”

The triplets of the Barney Blimp alarm had finally summoned a disheveled young orderly, who bussed immediately around the dismal bed to cease it in a blur of dark purple and Chanel №5.

“Good, good! It’s good to see you up… Barney-“

“Please turn off the television,” he said.

“… I’m sorry?”

“TURN OFF… the television. Turn off the TV, please.”

The orderly looked up from the tablet on her forearm to the screen, where Jaime Jangles was hesitantly playing with her little shovel.

“Wow, yes, I can’t even visualize… How long did the process take, do you know?”

“At least three… Yeah, three weeks or so, last November I think it was,” to wows from Jangles, Jingles, and the audience.

“For God’s sake, turn… it… OFF!”

“That’s actually… really no time at all,” said Jake.

“Really quick,” nodded Jaime.

“OFF!” screamed Barney Blimp, in a single, swift motion picking up the tablet and hurling it — inches from the nurse’s nose — to a perfectly placed impact on the little TV, cracking its screen and inducing a brief blip of white noise blinds, yet neither the horrid appliance nor his visitor flinched a bit. The later calmly returned her attention to her own tablet, then to the IV pole’s machinery.

“Mr. Blimp, please try to control yourself.”

Jake Jingles again stiffly manipulated the bright-orange volume, turning it in profile and then over, very deliberately assuring that the cheesy woman be excluded from the shot.

“It’s nearly five-hundred pages, right? And this is your first book?”

“First published book under my own name, you know. I’ve written a few other things, here and there, but that’s a subject for another time.”

Aw, said the audience.

“Sure, we’ve got to have you back some time,” said Jake Jingles with visible grit in his smile.

“Jesus,” said Barney Blimp.

“But, this apocalypse… Is it happening now? Soon? A hundred years in the future? Or…?”

“All three, really. We are here eating scrumptious, fifty-dollar chili while unprecedented numbers of people are starving, all over the world…”

“Motherfucker.”

“…in Haiti, Namibia, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Detroit… And yet, we demand only the cleanest last few decimals of a percentage from the food on our own tables.”

Up went the young woman’s eyebrows as she tapped her tablet, unpainted fingernails clacking.

“Look, I’m sorry about the TV, but could you please just turn it off for me?”

“A striking thought,” said Jake Jingles.

“I’m sorry,” she replied, making eye contact for the first time, eyebrows erect with no minimum of patronization. “I can’t do that, Barney, but I can have something to eat brought up for you, if you’d like.”

“…another roller in the night!”

“Quite. And that was the idea, but it’s also important to note — not to give too much away, I hope — that Rome’s decline is inevitable, despite what hope we all love to swaddle ourselves in, and thus we might as well enjoy what we have so far achieved, yes?”

“Well, I’m glad you brought this chili with you… It is quite an achievement,” said Jaime Jangles, having eaten half a trowel’s worth.

“How does that sound, huh…? It’s Chili Day!”

Barney Blimp gripped the handles straddling his bed-bound prison so ferociously that he soon blacked out.

⌬⌬⌬

Dr. Gravel, it is with great haste and discretion that I write you regarding a patient who was received in the care of St. Nicholas’ ICU on Thursday afternoon (the 8th) — Barney Barry Blimp, age 30 — with a few requests in the interest of his particular and quite consequential needs on behalf of his very long-time friend and employer, Mr. Theodore Pith, who is deeply distraught and regrets that he is unable contact you personally at this time. He is, however, willing, wanting, and able to allocate any and all necessary resources to ensure the fulfillment of these needs, including a prospective donation to the Kare 4 Kids fund and/or support of other/equivalent programs at St. Nicholas. Please contact me directly as soon as you are able so that we may further the discussion (the numbers for both my cell and personal extension at the Institute can be found at the end of this message.) Until then, it would be to Mr. Pith’s tremendous satisfaction and appreciation if you were to promptly act in your best ability to ensure the alterations to Mr. Blimp’s stay as follows…