3-Minute Fiction
Already in my youth I have been through a black hole and lived to tell about it.
It begins, as with all things, with clarity and a monotony of details: gliding through the city downhill, the street lights and lit windows like galaxies and distant solar systems, solar winds and the cosmos swirling around me, until soon I find myself in the Mexican-influenced district at a karaoke bar. As I participate in the night life the material quality of the night begins to wear, becomes porous and thin at parts, tattered edges appear where conversations take place amongst friends, strands of thread appear where the night was once whole.
A disembodied voice appears at my side: “Karaoke is the performative symbol of our generation.” As I turn it takes shape and adopts a figure; he is my guide into the night, my introduction to the karaoke bar.
“How so?” I inquire.
“The depersonalization of pop music. The détournement of lyrics into a quotidian context. In every karaoke song sung, we have taken from corporations what is rightfully ours.”
I take a sip of whiskey as though to digest what my guide has said.
“Look before you,” he gestures to the small crowd gathered around the singer of the moment, “this is the proletariat seizing their rights, taking us back to a time when songs were written by ‘traditional.’ This is music made folk again.”
As he spoke the singer shimmied and trilled into the chorus, and the crowd followed suit raising their glasses to the star-lit night. I turned in my seat at the bar and ordered another shot of whiskey, feeling the spirit of the crowd which is drunkenness, the individual pieces forming a massive puzzle, folly, and losing myself I fuse into the people raising their voices to the heavens and enacting what has taken place in every solstice, anniversary and mourning. I am celebration.
Until finally I cannot find myself any more. Until the present becomes something remembered, something forgotten and that which lies outside of either category. Only the following serves to signal that something actually did occur.
The memory is one quick moment, the meeting between my face and the pavement, a jolt so sudden and distinct that it stands out in my mind alone; the night has swallowed it whole with no air gaps, no liquid between the memory and the tissue of its trachea, the way a snake’s body seems to fit snuggly around its prey’s corpse. This is the black hole I have read about in science text books, have seen depictions of in sci-fi television shows, the slowing of time, the tearing apart of atoms, mass reducing temperature to the point of no existence, I reach through this space or this no space and on the other side find myself in bed at 7 in the morning: the vestiges of the black hole four scars on my wrist and one beside my left eye.
It begins, as with all things, with clarity and a monotony of details: gliding through the city downhill, the street lights and lit windows like galaxies and distant solar systems, solar winds and the cosmos swirling around me, until soon I find myself in the Mexican-influenced district at a karaoke bar. As I participate in the night life the material quality of the night begins to wear, becomes porous and thin at parts, tattered edges appear where conversations take place amongst friends, strands of thread appear where the night was once whole.
A disembodied voice appears at my side: “Karaoke is the performative symbol of our generation.” As I turn it takes shape and adopts a figure; he is my guide into the night, my introduction to the karaoke bar.
“How so?” I inquire.
“The depersonalization of pop music. The détournement of lyrics into a quotidian context. In every karaoke song sung, we have taken from corporations what is rightfully ours.”
I take a sip of whiskey as though to digest what my guide has said.
“Look before you,” he gestures to the small crowd gathered around the singer of the moment, “this is the proletariat seizing their rights, taking us back to a time when songs were written by ‘traditional.’ This is music made folk again.”
As he spoke the singer shimmied and trilled into the chorus, and the crowd followed suit raising their glasses to the star-lit night. I turned in my seat at the bar and ordered another shot of whiskey, feeling the spirit of the crowd which is drunkenness, the individual pieces forming a massive puzzle, folly, and losing myself I fuse into the people raising their voices to the heavens and enacting what has taken place in every solstice, anniversary and mourning. I am celebration.
Until finally I cannot find myself any more. Until the present becomes something remembered, something forgotten and that which lies outside of either category. Only the following serves to signal that something actually did occur.
The memory is one quick moment, the meeting between my face and the pavement, a jolt so sudden and distinct that it stands out in my mind alone; the night has swallowed it whole with no air gaps, no liquid between the memory and the tissue of its trachea, the way a snake’s body seems to fit snuggly around its prey’s corpse. This is the black hole I have read about in science text books, have seen depictions of in sci-fi television shows, the slowing of time, the tearing apart of atoms, mass reducing temperature to the point of no existence, I reach through this space or this no space and on the other side find myself in bed at 7 in the morning: the vestiges of the black hole four scars on my wrist and one beside my left eye.