The Playgrounds

Among us there was no first.  It appeared that humanity took a global blink, and the Event happened.  Video and data analysts were immediately assembled to examine timestamps, processing signatures, and footage.  They had narrowed the parameters of the Event down to an indisputable nanosecond, a moment of unregistered darkness from which, we presume, the Event came.  But whether it came or was planted or anything else, others viewed the nuances as inconsequential and cried resolutely that it was a long time coming.
         
      For purposes of simplicity, I am a Chief of Staff in one of the world’s more relevant countries.  In the flurry of phone conferences that followed the Event, the generals panicked among themselves that the government across the ocean or down the continent had perpetrated this “horrible, unforgivable act against our Nation and its inhabitants.”  The translators averted frothing chaos by relaying that the messages they were ordered to send closely matched the messages they were receiving.  The Event was worldwide. 
         
      I do not mean to be coy, for I am a busy man with many pressing matters so I’ll up and out with it.  The Event was categorized as purely biological and, at first, applied solely to our screens.  The screens on our heads sprouted out from behind the right temple, and the stalk of the screen was an extension of our skin: if Hibernian freckles or sun-swallowing tumors plagued you, they extended to your stalk as well.  From the stalk protruded the screen with the green bar, shining with that awful and relentless glow.  The overall size of the screen was always about the size of a small laptop for adults.  As people wheeled around in uncomprehending dismay, it was difficult for everyone not to notice that their green bars were not equal.  Bars were to the edge of the screen, bars were midway up the screen, and bars were barely visible.  Those with low bars felt a self-preserving instinct gnawing at them to take action, believing these unwieldy head appendages as bombs or human detonators.  They were frightened and rightly so. 
     
      The moneyed low bars ran to their surgeons and demanded operations to remove it all; tears and sweat mixed together in a wailing swirl as they blubbered through waiver forms.  Their bars ebbed lower, and the surgeons brought up tables to rest the appendage on.  Obviously, nothing like this had ever been done so they anesthetized as much of the patient as possible.  From the initial reports, it was made clear that the appendage was attached to the cerebellum and spinal cord but had tendrils that traveled to the front of the brain.  Once the appendage was removed, death was immediate.  I remember seeing a news conference held by one of the surgeons, likening the excising of the appendage to “uprooting a large tree with deep roots.” He explained that, “What we would do to the soil is what happens to the brain.  It becomes utterly shredded.”  He itched his stalk as he spoke.


      Unfortunately, this was not the only medical problem that the appendage caused.  Hospitals and clinics reported astronomically large increases of C-sections since the fetuses were as much a part of the Event as you or I.  Mothers experienced an added agony to childbirth when the child’s screen would press against the womb, and the pain was not controllable.  Especially in less developed countries, infants and pregnant women died in droves as complications of induced childbirth and total shock were frequent.  It was a great, stupid loss of life.
     
        If there was any gasp of relief to be extracted from the Event, I believe it was the speed with which we discovered what the bars actually meant.  With those people who went in for the removal operations, of course their bars were low and very nearly gone: they were getting their stalk and screen removed, and that was deadly.  The bar simply indicated how much time a person had left to live.  Our statisticians and scientists tried to gauge what each inch or centimeter of the bar corresponded to in terms of months and years, but their efforts were ultimately useless.  Dissections proved that the entire thing was mostly biological: the green bar, evidently, was phosphorous based.  If the screen ever got damaged or when desperates started to file them down, it would naturally grow back through an ugly, festering mold that was too unseemly for the effort.  The one fact unanimously agreed upon was that every bar had to shrink constantly, but we didn’t need screens to tell us that.
     
      However, all this science talk is of no relevance to me so I will discuss it no further.  Perhaps the difficulty of relating the Event lies in its inescapable totality.  Did anything avoid it or ignore it?  I don’t think that was possible. I suppose starting with the grand and lofty is the way to go.  Religion took it on the chin.  The evangelicals tumbled over each other with piteous supplications and apocalyptic “I told you so’s.”  They really didn’t know what to make of it all, but they were certain that the Event officially made them screeching harbingers.  The Catholic Church preferred to carry on like nothing happened.  I think the other big faiths regarded the Event as an overt punishment for the crimes of civilization.  I don’t claim to be an exp-excuse me, this damn cough won’t let up.  Anyway, I do know that a prominent theologian proposed that our calendars be changed to “B.E. & A.E.” for “Before the Event & After the Event”, and this was adopted by a large amount of people.
     
      Speaking of adoption, children had it quite rough.  Or the parents, depending on whom you talk to.  The orphanages were bursting with girls and boys born with low bars.  Parents gave woeful, pained faces to the orphanage officials as they dropped their child off; the orphanages’ disappointment in the parents was negligible when compared to the disappointment of the parents.  Playgrounds saw new taunts and exclusions arise when children with relatively lower bars heard “looooow glow, looooow glow.”  How could their parents console them?  Whatever assurance the parents gave the kids fell into pointless dust once the kids looked in a mirror.  Instead of addressing the low bar, the parents usually reverted to name calling, comforting the sobbing offspring with, “Paul and Jane are just mean, ugly kids-they don’t know anything.”
     
      At the club, I’ve frequently heard accounts of the supposed ravages brought about by the Event; this referred to the denigration of ladies.  Debutante balls were now hard to stomach since it was unbearable for any mlle. to be accompanied into the ballroom by, “that revolting thing”.  If you can imagine, the older women made it a habit to dip their stalks and screens into cauldrons of semi-solid makeup.  Women chose not to wear wedding veils anymore.  In order to allow the appendage to peek through the veil, a sufficiently large hole would have been needed, and this defeated the purpose of the veil all together.
There’s no question that the Event altered our sexual habits.  Dating services added the sadly important category of:
Bar Length:  Relevant   Irrelevant
Great numbers of people were unconscionably forced to have more sex with their spouses and partners.  After all, with that damn thing glowing in the dark all the time and darkening sleeves feeling too uncomfortable, the best way to avoid the light was to exhaust yourself with sex.  I don’t know if this helped the divorce rate or not, but some piddling sociologist should get on the case and find out.  It is fortunate that the Event didn’t cause the apparatus to occupy the left side of our heads; I’m fairly certain that would have been the end of intimate, lean-in-close dancing as we know it.  In case you were wondering, the Event did not change our basic mechanics.
     
      Even with such alterations of our lives, I’m not sure if anything was made more pitiable than sports.  Baseball contorted into an awkward abomination of its former self.  Since the screen was on the right side, right handed batters had to drastically modify their stances in a way reminiscent of Shoeless Joe Jackson, leaning bat and body nearly parallel to the plate.  Right handed pitchers couldn’t bring their windup forward or else they’d smash into their screen; they too had to change their motions to older, side-armed techniques.  Throwing high or at the screen was dangerous and often a bench clearing act.  Indeed, it was a royal screw job for righties in general.  Soccer had the blatant obstacle of what to do about headers, but players worked around it.  And the gymnasts!  Years of regiments to obtain perfect, unwavering balance gone completely to waste.  I’ve seen war zones more pleasing to the eye than the human wrecks of the first gymnasts to try the bars or horse after the Event.  Smush, crunch, and crack were common sounds on the mats.  What about football, you ask?  It dropped into the realm of the docile when the league couldn’t clamp down on players intentionally stepping on the screens of fallen opponents.  Many new rules were added, not to mention the need for specialized helmets.
     
        It is hard to survey culture as a whole; mistakes or inconsistencies are bound to happen and culture is not my “thing” regardless.  The catwalks of Paris underwent a hiccup when fashion had to reevaluate how it would proceed.  It’s hard enough to take the millionaire bulimic models seriously in the first place, but not even the passion of the fashionistas could overcome the screens on parade.  Allure is hard to maintain if you can see that the model from Gucci is going to konk out soon.  They managed, though, and gaudiness survived.  A nephew of mine, a real dunce of a boy, was a pioneer with the Event.  He was one of the first and last people to try to get their screen pierced.  Yes, they took the fact that the screen was spider webbed network of nerves as an irrelevant, advisory piece of information.  The piercing salon employees must have gotten a kick out of seeing the kids, crying and smearing their darkened eye makeup, call their parents.  I’m sure you can assume what did happen, however.  Marketing agencies saw a brilliant opportunity in the screens (intradepartmental memos called them “P.A.D.’s”, as in Personal Advertising Devices).  Companies paid thousands of dollars for men and women to get the skin on the back of their screens tattooed with a company logo or slogan.  It was often a sure way of knowing who was poor.           
     
      You know, the more I think about the Event, the more it becomes clear that the Event’s minor inconveniences were as irritating as the grand ones.  I try to visualize a simplified version of the Event, if it had happened on the back of our heads or on the left side.  The great automotive bastion of Detroit, proudly standard-bearing for all those industrial years, sat on its hands while its drivers made the roads unsafe. A driver’s inability to check the main rear view mirror, newly blocked by the screen, caused car accidents in numbers previously unthinkable.  Despite the statistics rounding off eventually, it was an unavoidable liability so any newly manufactured vehicles featured the steering wheel on the passenger side.  Aviation was not spared from its share of the absurd.  The plane magnates met and decided that they didn’t want to deal with the billions of dollars needed to gut the planes to better accommodate the passengers.  They figured that if passengers leaned their seats back into the reclining position, the screens could fit.
     
        Something I forgot to mention: Darwinism is dead.  Pardon the sensationalist tone, but my statement is more or less true.  It fell out of the limelight and was relegated to academic, philosophical circles, much like Heidegger’s cave or Socrates’ ego.  America was at the forefront of this movement, although how intentionally they took this position is debatable.  Smith vs. Massachusetts Board of Education was the bale of straw that broke the camel’s back.  A lunatic mother was suing the school board for allowing her child’s high school teacher to discourse about the Event.  She threatened to take her child out of school if they would not relent, the school board warned it would call child services, and the mother sued; everyone was dumbfounded that the case rose to the U.S. Supreme Court.  Observers were electrified by the proceedings as the suit challenged what rights schools had to teach the Event.  Here was an article written about it: 
October 20, 5 A.E.
WASHINGTON, DC (Reuters)- Plaintiff Melanie Smith brought her case before the United States Supreme Court earlier this morning.  Thousands of Ms. Smith’s supporters and protesters gathered outside the courthouse, and a strong police presence was required to maintain the barricades.
Inside the courthouse Ms. Smith sat quietly and fidgeted with her “Not My Child!” button while her attorney, Garrett Hennebery, began the oral argument in front of the judges.
The crux of the lawsuit has been Ms. Smith’s objection to the school’s teaching a specific viewpoint on the Event in its philosophy and history classes; she has gone on record and said that her religious beliefs have nothing to do with the matter.  The Massachusetts Board of Education has maintained its stance that the right of its teachers to conjecture on whatever they please is well within the boundaries of free speech.
Attorneys representing the Massachusetts School Board followed with their oral argument; Justice Benson interrupted several times and asked for a clarification on the teacher’s involvement with Event related websites.
Upon leaving the courtroom, Ms. Smith exchanged barbs with the defendants and had to be escorted out by guards.  Ms. Smith held a press conference on the Supreme Court steps, and incited the crowds further.  Four people sustained injuries and thirty-one gatherers were arrested.  More on this story as it develops…
     
      Other legal battles were pursued in unheard of proportions.  Universities and companies had to start including non-discrimination clauses for low bars.  This stemmed from the case of an extremely prestigious university that refused admission to a medical researcher, nobly doing work on the Schweitzberg virus, because he had a low bar.  It was all very wrong, but the researcher died in a car crash before the case got to trial.  Most of our legal troubles dealt with how the Event changed policies regarding health insurance.  Insurance was no longer precautionary or even a game of chance, and this was as ethically precarious as it was financially sound.  All other considerations for insurance were rendered secondary; insurers wanted to know if you were a low bar, and all they had to do to find out was to ask the client to come in for an interview.  Low bars tried to collectivize and establish credit unions, but they were not entirely successful.
     
      There’s so much more to this, to the Event, than what I’ve recorded.  We had game shows where the contestant had to guess which panel member had the low bar.  In athletics the concept of breaking world records in timed events was an ideal of antiquity.  It’s possible to blather on, but I’ll cut to the chase.
     
        I won’t tell you the exact date that it happened since you might erroneously attribute a profound symbolism; when it occurred is of no consequence.  It was an early evening-I was out walking our Corgi at the time.  Something that can only be described as a bright, white light saturated the Earth for about two seconds, after which the stalks and screens were gone.  People everywhere broke down crying with happiness, smothering bystanders and strangers with torrid kisses.  We know that what transpired lasted longer than the Event, and it scrambled all of our orbiting satellites-to this day we are still conducting investigations into the matter.  I, too, was relieved by the removal of the stalk and screen, but I am restless.  You see, before the apparatus disappeared, I had been noticing that my bar was getting fairly low.  I thought that maybe my eyes were playing tricks on me, but I knew I was right when my wife assured me that I should “not worry so much.” I am making an effort not to think about it, but this damn cough just won’t go away.