SCABs

Cardboardness @lastwordstyped ‏

by Darius Rodrigues

You know when you’re watching bad acting when you have an acute recognition that you are not watching a real person, but a real person playing a fake person. At once the stage reveals its mechanics and gutter, now you don’t look into the eyes, but the straightness of a shirt that should have creased in community service that morning. We see the scar where they used to have an ear piercing. We see their divorce and anti- ageing cream. We see them impressing in their first ever acting class. We see their quiver and pause is scripted, their love and their hate well- rehearsed.

Depending on who you ask, me and you are real people. We’re sums, ongoing and ever-changing calculations. Dad needed money to live so, very logically, he worked with money to make money. He always had loads of paper on his desk + me always wanting to know what happens in Dads’
head = me turning into a writer. Me turning into a writer who refers to ourselves as sums.

But we’re fake too. And that’s fine. Hey man! Hi mate, how are you doing? Yeah, I’m, good, I’m good, been better, been worse. How you doing? Yeah all good mate, it’s good to see you. It’s good to see you. Humankind’s greatest fear should be Cardboardness. The big blue book and the black holes in our hands (on which we are sold like water) juice us full of cosmetic clutter until our skin is dry and our pupils dilated and even if we tried, we will never cry at something sad again. Wars begin through miscommunication and end in sans-serif and atomic typefaces.

If it ever existed, where is the station which emits the honest broadcast? Is it buried beneath the bonfire which burns old sponsored ads and top ten lists. Closed tabs wander the roads late at night.

Cardboardness is a condition which hijacks the natural fluidity of our thinking. It attacks our senses, and the triggers within them, by tricking those triggers with 2D representations of real things. This has the effect of sedating our responses to those real things, people included, as we then approach those real things as if they were 2D. It is also known to make people co-ordinate their real lives to seek gains in the economy of likes.

I was wrong earlier about greetings being a problem – greetings are the beginning of everything. There an opportunity to fill in each other’s gaps, and expand on each other. Clearly, onlineness is what I’m working on here. (If you swap the O for an L and scramble it up you get loneliness – maybe something here). Why go to Barcelona if you can hold the Sagrada Familia in your hands? Why ask questions if you have the answer in your hands?

The world is a stage, but tonight I don’t want to be in your play, that’s all. I love your wine-stained teeth.

P .S – Massive thank you and love to everyone at school for your support recently, you’re brilliant.

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